"Yearnings" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dead, she took him to the prophet's chamber, and laying him on his bed, shut the door and departed. The only reason of this proceeding probably was, its being the most retired part of the house, and therefore the best suited to such a melancholy occasion. But who can express the yearnings of her maternal tenderness, when she left behind her this precious, but now insensible clay! That tongue which had so often pleased her by its ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... disappointments, it had its satisfactions too. "I have all the honours that can be given, and I am, politically speaking, very solidly established." But there were other things besides politics, there were romantic yearnings in his heart. "The only longing I still have is for the Orient, where I perhaps shall once end my life, rising in the west and setting in the east." As for his devotion to his niece, that could never end. "I never press my services on you, nor my ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... so, in every step of the way upward, her little shoes, and her little bonnets, and her little dresses, and her corals and her ribbons, are constantly being discussed in her presence, as the one all-important object of life. Aunt Maria thinks mamma is dreadful, because she has maternal yearnings over our toilet successes and fortunes; and we secretly think she is rather soured by old age, and has ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... content, love, to live here, In my own native land to be my own? Oh, Bertha, all the yearnings of my soul For this great world and its tumultuous strife, What were they, but a yearning after thee? In glory's path I sought for thee alone And all my thirst of fame was only love. But if in this calm vale thou canst abide With me, and bid earth's ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... help realise this, their well-intentioned efforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to set Olympus laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good. Granting (what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of their existence and the social law that dooms ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... Japanese have never been spiritually gifted. We are neither meditative and reflective like the Hindus nor individualistic like the Anglo-Saxons. Nevertheless, like all mankind we have spiritual yearnings. They will be best ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... learn what it was they were feeding upon so eagerly. But, as had happened the night before, he found himself checked with a jerk. He did not like it, for it made him conscious again of his master's suspicions. So he turned a sour gaze upon his unrestricted companions until, forced to it by inner yearnings amounting to acuteness now, he himself lowered his head and ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... thinking passionately, defiantly of her art, yet indignant with herself for these vague yearnings and languors that had to be so often ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... white, my heart is rent in two. When in autumn the hedges thin, and gardens waste, all trace of you is gone. When the moon waxeth cold, and the dew pure, my dreams then know something of you. With constant yearnings my heart follows you as far as wild geese homeward fly. Lonesome I sit and lend an ear, till a late hour to the sound of the block! For you, ye yellow flowers, I've grown haggard and worn, but who doth pity me, And breathe one word of cheer that in ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... an active and deeply needed educative force. It brings the most powerful influence to the great groups of the neglected in our land, giving them visions of bettered physical conditions, yearnings after higher spiritual purposes, and determinations for a fuller realization of life in all its meaning, with the ...
— Home Missions In Action • Edith H. Allen
... near she began to hover about Sir Charles in his study, like an anxious hen. The maternal yearnings were awakened in her by marriage, and she had no child; so her Charles in trouble was ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade
... her husband, and the irregularity of tidings, for they came at uncertain as well as wide intervals, her yearnings after her vanished Molly, which had become more patient, returned with all their early vehemence, and she began to brood on the meeting beyond the grave of which her religion waked her hope. Nor was this all: ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald
... thirsts to "do something" or "be somebody" but really what he craves is to figure potently in the minds of others, to be greatly loved, admired, or feared. To reap a success which no one .................. does not satisfy the yearnings of the ...
— Stanford Achievement Test, Ed. 1922 - Advanced Examination, Form A, for Grades 4-8 • Truman L. Kelley
... at least upon the supernatural world, had decayed, and unless this painful void were filled up by some supplementary bond in the same direction, a condition of practical atheism must take place, such as could not but starve and impoverish in human nature those yearnings after the infinite which are the pledges of all internal grandeur. But this dependency could not be replaced by one of the same vicious nature. Into any new dependency a new element must be introduced. The sense of insufficiency would be renewed in triple ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... pause. A little before he would have said, Shall I pray for you?—The Christian religion, as taught by its Founder, is full of sentiment. So we must not blame the divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings of human sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the Master than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has been the ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... I was shaken back and forth in myself with pity for thee; and I said: "I will return to my chela, lest he miss the Way." Upon this my Soul, which is the Soul of Teshoo Lama, withdrew itself from the Great Soul with strivings and yearnings and retchings and agonies not to be told. As the egg from the fish, as the fish from the water, as the water from the cloud, as the cloud from the thick air, so put forth, so leaped out, so drew away, so fumed up the Soul of Teshoo Lama from the Great Soul. Then a voice cried: "The ...
— Kim • Rudyard Kipling
... initiations, Sun and Nature festivals, eucharistic and orgiastic communions and celebrations, mystery-plays, dramatic representations, myths and legends, etc., which I have touched upon in the preceding chapters—together with all the emotions, the desires, the fears, the yearnings and the wonderment which they represented—have practically sprung from the same root: a root deep and necessary in the psychology of Man. Presently I hope to show that they will all practically converge again in the end to one meaning, and prepare the way for ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... mighty-souled, In wild lament his sorrow told, Faint with the load that on him lay, The hours of darkness passed away. As thus the prince, impelled by zeal For his loved brother, prompt to feel Strong yearnings for the people's weal, His words of truth outspake, King Guha grieved to see his woe, Heart-stricken, gave his tears to flow, Tormented by the common blow, Sad, as ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... poetry, learning, art, refinement, had all come to him through her; and though he had a soul that dreamt and soared in the lonely grandeur of the mountain heights, it craved further aliment for its yearnings for completeness and perfection. Long ago had Friedel come to the verge of such attainments as he could work out of his present materials, and keen had been his ardour for the means of progress, though only the mountain ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... loyalty. Of her weekly parcel of dainty food, which had arrived that morning. Of the joy of Phineas and the disappointment of the unsophisticated Mo over the pate de foie gras. But his mind wandered back to his Doggie self and its humiliations and its needs and its yearnings. He welcomed enemy flares and star-shells and excursions and alarms. They kept him from thinking, enabled him to pass the time. But in the dead, lonely, silent dark, the hours were like centuries. He ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... not enjoy all the things that we have; and this is either because they do not afford us delight, or because they are not the ultimate goal of our desires, and so are incapable of satisfying our yearnings or affording us repose. But these three things the Blessed have in God: for they see Him, and seeing Him they hold Him ever present to them, for they have it in their power always to see Him; and holding Him, they enjoy Him, satisfying their yearnings with ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... scowling enmities were sinking like storms beneath the horizon; that the dear fatherland, nothing lost, much gained, was to rise up in unexampled honor among the nations of the earth—these thoughts, and that undistinguishable throng of fancies, and hopes, and desires, and yearnings, that filled the soul with tremblings like the heated air of midsummer days—all these kindled up such a surge of joy as no ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... afternoon they rode up on top of a Fifth Avenue motor 'bus to 90th Street, and Godmother pointed out the houses of many multi-millionaires. She knew things about many of them, too—sweet, human, heart-touching things about their disappointments and unsatisfied yearnings—which made one feel rather sorry for them than envious ...
— Everybody's Lonesome - A True Fairy Story • Clara E. Laughlin
... look around them. They must purify themselves. They must give the people some tangible evidence of their own yearnings after purity. They looked around them for a sacrifice to lay upon the altar of municipal reform. Their eyes fell upon Mr. Bingo. No, he was not big enough. His blood was too scant to wash away the political ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the stranger seemed surprised; he looked darkly at the youth, who remained silent. They seemed to communicate by an unspeakable effusion of the spirit, hearing each other's yearnings in the teeming silence, and going forth side by side, like two doves sweeping the air on equal wing, till the boat, touching the strand of the island, roused them from ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... her lap with pleasures of her own; Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And, even with something of a Mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, 80 The homely Nurse doth all she can To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man, Forget the glories he hath known, And that ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... kisses past, and Honor went away, with a heavy load of thwarted hopes and baffled yearning at her heart—yearnings which could be stilled only in ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... own, and his own received him not." A few individuals recognized him and accepted his love; but the great masses of the people paid him no heed, saw no beauty in him, rejected the blessings he bore and proffered to all, and let his love waste itself in unavailing yearnings and beseechings. Then one cruel day they nailed him on a cross, thinking to quench the affection ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... earth, that soonest pass away. The rose that lives its little hour Is prized beyond the sculptured flower. Even love, long tried and cherished long, Becomes more tender and more strong At thought of that insatiate grave From which its yearnings cannot save. ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... the physical eye to preserve its clearness and strength in the constant presence of physical darkness. Curious questions come up there, undoubtedly, of a deep, strange interest, and often, too, of a deep and strange fascination. But it is not Nature's generous impulses, its tender yearnings, its noble aspirations, that the stricken conscience pours into the confessor's ear. The strugglings and writhings of the soul, the convulsive efforts to cast off an insupportable burden, to escape from an insufferable anguish, to find rest for itself in its weariness, ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... forgotten the peril of my companions, and indulged only in the ecstasy of a selfish love. But not with her—that strange being with whom chance had brought me into such close companionship. For her I had no love-yearnings. Even under the entwining of that beautiful arm, my sense was as cold, as if I had been in the embrace of a statue. My thoughts were ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... consequences of this with the rising generation. I delight in Adonais. It is the most Delphic poetry I have seen a long while; full of those embodyings of the most subtle and airy imaginations,—those arrestings and explanations of the most shadowy yearnings of our being—which are the most difficult of all things to put into words, and the most delightful when put. I do not know whether you are aware how fond I am of your song on the Skylark; but you ought, ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... one of the men on the place, which happened ere long, I seemed to have the whole station bothering me; but I would have nothing to do with any of them. Mr. Phillips gave more credit than any of the folk I had ever seen to my yearnings after Bessie's orphans, and my resolutions to live single for their sake; but he never could see that they would be such a drawback to any decent man that liked me; but I knew there were few men so taken up ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... autumn day, and luncheon at Wayne Hall was eaten rapidly. Everyone was eager to give an opinion regarding the basketball try out, and with one or two exceptions each girl cherished the secret hope of making the team. Anne was one of the exceptions. She had no basketball yearnings. She was ready and willing to be an enthusiastic and loyal fan, but aside from walking and dancing she had no desire to take an active part in college sports. She was extremely proud of Miriam's and Grace's fine playing, however, and never doubted for an instant that both girls would make ...
— Grace Harlowe's First Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... smitten with homesickness, but he sturdily kept his post, in spite of grievous yearnings for family and flock. The pestilence slowly abated, till at length the burying-parties that passed the Maurepas Gate counted only three or four a day. At the end of January five hundred and sixty-one men had died, eleven hundred were on the sick list, and about one thousand fit for duty. [Footnote: ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... With his yearnings for some one more advanced in years full upon him, the visitor now inquired for the business manager of the new magazine, only to find a man of twenty-six. His next introduction was to the head of the out-of-town ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... The yearnings with which she filled my soul were very different from those inspired by the memory of Giuliana. That other sinful longing, she entirely effaced at last, thereby achieving something that had been ...
— The Strolling Saint • Raphael Sabatini
... hunger of men whose liberalism came from their being made liberally. Large and capacious souls of mighty yearnings are they. They stand in contrast with the puny critics who assert that the Bible fails to feed them, because they have ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... share of the income of the estate wholly at her disposal. And so, in spite of her mother's horrified protest, they were married, and not long afterward, her mother, who was still a year or two on the sunny side of fifty, gratified her aristocratic yearnings by marrying ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... come," she whispered. "If I have failed in obeying thy commands, I ask forgiveness, for I am but a woman. A woman with instincts and yearnings, born of the mother I never knew. Thy very treasures that were to appease me put the yearning more strongly in my brain. Thy teachings showed me a world of beasts and savagery; thy treasures gave me dreams ...
— The Pirate Woman • Aylward Edward Dingle
... to bear, no doubt. Yet why at others' wanings should'st thou fret? Then only might'st thou feel a just regret, Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light In selfish forethought of neglect and slight. O wiselier then, from feeble yearnings freed, While, and on whom, thou may'st—shine on! nor heed Whether the object by reflected light Return thy radiance or absorb it quite: And though thou notest from thy safe recess Old friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air, Love them for what they are; ...
— Poems of Coleridge • Coleridge, ed Arthur Symons
... what depth of meaning lies in that little word for our brave fellows, what intensity of hopes and fears and well-nigh intolerable yearnings it awakens beneath the cheery insouciance of their exteriors; no one, that is, except me. They tell me about it as they pass back, privates and generals, war-hardened veterans and boys of nineteen with the youth in their eyes not yet drowned by the ever-increasing encroachments of the war-devil; ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Nov. 14, 1917 • Various
... final stage where it is Thy will that I should remain fixed? But then my life has no further meaning! It is purposeless, built and overthrown with the shifting of sands. To what end, if this be the case, are these monastic yearnings, these calls to another life, this all but conviction that I have stopped at a station, and am not yet at the place whither I am ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... spoken;— 85 Listen to this Indian Legend, To this Song of Hiawatha! Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in God and Nature, Who believe that in all ages 90 Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings For the good they comprehend not, That the feeble hands and helpless, 95 Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in that darkness, And are lifted up and strengthened;— Listen to this simple ...
— The Song of Hiawatha - An Epic Poem • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... transcendentalism which we discussed under the name of Mysticism, in which the soul becomes of greater interest than the body, and a strange yearning possesses the mind to speculate on the nature of the soul, its existence before this life, and its lot in another world. These imaginative yearnings were not native to the Roman, who had never had any very definite idea of a future life, nor had ever troubled himself about a previous one; they filtered through the Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy into that type of later Stoicism which attracted him. They were hardly treated in Roman society ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... lest his voice betray the emotions aroused by her kindly sympathy. All his yearnings were fanned to flame by the cadence of her voice and the softness of her eyes. Mechanically he resumed his place on the pipe, and she seated herself by his side, half-facing him. Her slender foot, booted, braced against the ground, and almost touching his heavy miner's boot, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... in early life, but happier in its closing scenes, will set up our rest again among our boyish haunts, and going home with no hope realised, that had its growth in manhood—carrying back nothing that we brought away, but our old yearnings to each other—saving no fragment from the wreck of life, but that which first endeared it—may be, indeed, but children as at first. And even,' he added in an altered voice, 'even if what I dread to name has come to pass—even if that be ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... she understand, She, with her calm cool hand? She never felt such yearnings? And, beside, It's clear I can't be tied For ever to my ...
— The Verse-Book Of A Homely Woman • Elizabeth Rebecca Ward, AKA Fay Inchfawn
... father's glory in more competent hands, placidly lapsed into needlework and fiction, and their niece stepped into immediate prominence as the chief "authority" on the great man. Historians who were "getting up" the period wrote to consult her and to borrow documents; ladies with inexplicable yearnings begged for an interpretation of phrases which had "influenced" them, but which they had not quite understood; critics applied to her to verify some doubtful citation or to decide some disputed point in chronology; and the great tide of thought and ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton
... was excessively agreeable to him. He talked to me of the yearnings of his heart and he looked at me with alarming tenderness. And from time to time he gazed, with sighs, at the portrait of the Duc d'Orleans. I said to him: 'Monsieur Garain, you are making a mistake. It is my sister-in-law who is an Orleanist. I am not.' At this moment Monsieur ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... of life, who has, of her own act, for ever deprived herself of joys that nothing else can bring her. Love, true love, is almost the only expression, of which we women are capable, of all the nobler instincts and vague yearnings after what is higher and better than the things we see and feel around us. When we love most, and love happily, then we are at our topmost bent, and soar further above the earth than anything else can carry us. ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... God bade me stay: I would have worked; God bade me rest. He broke my will from day to day, He read my yearnings unexpressed ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... herself, with a truthfulness which she felt to be almost brazen, that her uppermost yearnings were of a wholly ...
— The Transfiguration of Miss Philura • Florence Morse Kingsley
... to this Indian Legend. Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in God and nature, Who believe that in all ages Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings, For the good they comprehend not, That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in that darkness, And are lifted up and strengthened,— Listen to this simple story. Ye, ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... possession beyond the reach of sickness and death! O that she were that rectified, self-contained, pure, strong spirit, that he was! — The utmost of passionate wish was in the tears that wept out these yearnings of heart — petitions they half were, — for her mind in giving them form, had a half look to the only possible power that could give them fruition. But it was with only the refreshment of tears and exhaustion that she laid herself on her couch ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... the old woman's heart were all the denied and suppressed yearnings of a love that had escaped fulfilment—a love that had entered in after her marriage to a man utterly without sympathy with her, but which had been rigidly ignored because of the stern moral fibre that marked her. After the death of all those who had been ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock
... in a state fairly evenly divided between pleasure and fury, Mrs. Jobling departed with the money. Wild yearnings for courage that would enable her to spend the money differently, and confront the dismayed Mr. Jobling in a new hat and jacket, possessed her on the way; but they were only yearnings, twenty-five years' experience of her husband's temper being ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... only a child of earth, whence came this deep desire which was not of the earth? Had she been wrong, had she a soul—something that could love with the body and through the body and beyond the body—something of which the body with its yearnings was but the envelope, the hand or instrument? Oh, now it seemed to Beatrice that this was so, and that called into being by her love she and her soul stood face to face acknowledging their unity. Once she had held that it was phantasy: that such spiritual hopes were but exhalations ...
— Beatrice • H. Rider Haggard
... gave place to bitter ones. His own townfolk, of all people, were his readiest enemies, and his loneliness clutched him tighter, until the air itself seemed thick and difficult to breathe. For the time Derwent Conniston was utterly submerged in the overwhelming yearnings of John Keith. ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... day. As for poetry, I have given it up, notwithstanding that Dr. Griswold—as the reader, of course, knows—has placed me at a fair elevation among our minor minstrelsy, on the strength of my pretty little volume, published ten years ago. As regards human progress (in spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences), let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose. If I could earnestly do either, it might be all the better for my comfort. As Hollingsworth once told me, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... hurried out with daybreak, for I was wretched, and resumed my inquiries; but night came, and I again returned equally successful. The yearnings of my child were now terrible, and the streaming eyes of his fond mother, as she pressed his head with her cold hand upon her lap, alone distinguished her from death. The pains of hunger in myself were becoming insupportable; ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, XXII • various
... was to satisfy their material needs, their intellectual capacities, and their spiritual yearnings. The alchemists of the nobler sort always made the first of these objects subsidiary to the other two; they gave as their reason for desiring to make gold, the hope that gold might become so common that it ...
— The Story of Alchemy and the Beginnings of Chemistry • M. M. Pattison Muir
... innkeeper, while not without its joys and opportunities to love one's fellowman, is somewhat prosaic, and our guests oftentimes remarked an absent, far-away expression in the eyes of Landlord Cody. He was thinking of the plains. Louise also remarked that expression, and the sympathy she felt for his yearnings was accentuated by an examination of the books of the hostelry at the close of the first six months' business. Half smiling, half tearful, she consented to his return to ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... want of sympathy with the changed surroundings, the pursuits and the aspirations of the younger generation. It seems as if there were no bond left between the two. But a day of trial comes; parent or offspring is threatened by a stranger; and then it is seen that the old instinct and yearnings are not dead, but only latent. The mother country had hitherto not been forgetful of its natural obligations ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... she turns upon me. Those lustrous, violet eyes, And my heart with passionate yearnings To meet ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... Berenger's unfailing good-humour could have endured it. Even a wolf-hunt did not stir him. He only said he hated outlandish beasts, and that it was not like chasing the hare in Dorset. His calf-love for Madame de Selinville had entirely faded away in his yearnings after home. She was only one of the tediously recurring sights of his captivity, and was loathed like all the rest. The regulation rides with the Chevalier were more detestable than ever, and by and by they caused such fatigue that Berenger perceived that his strength ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Eva herself drew the curtains before the window, and sleep soon ended her thoughts and yearnings, ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... a passionate intensity; but he also had yearnings for the unknown world beyond the horizon. "I remember," says he, "as distinctly as if it were yesterday the first time this passion was gratified. Looking out of the garret window, on a bright May morning, I discovered a row of slats which had been nailed over the shingles for the convenience ...
— Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, • Sherwin Cody
... by its repeated cry, "I can't get out! I can't get out!" cured Yorick of his sentimental yearnings for imprisonment in the Bastille. See Sterne's Sentimental Journey, ed. ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... feeling, fiery and spirited in the defence of freedom and national dignity. The new tendency which manifested itself so vividly in our country was reflected by their impetuous and susceptible natures with all its noble yearnings, its virtues and excesses exaggerated. The frivolous pastimes, the senseless or dissolute amusements that were so fashionable in those days were abandoned for serious reading, gathering of information and investigation of current events. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... mind's eye. It was all impossible, hopeless, but to love and lose were better than to live in ignorance of life's strongest passion. To dally with the impossible were sheer madness, he knew that. But what was to be done but obey the yearnings of his heart, though it ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... merely in the joy of family reunion. He does not ignore that feature of eternity, but he does not stress it, because temperamentally he is moved less by sentiment of family and ties of friendship than by his curiosity for knowledge, by his yearnings to behold Eternal Wisdom. Only once does he mention Heaven as the state of reunion of families and friends, and that is when he comments upon the action of the twenty-three spirits in the Heaven of the Sun, in expressing their agreement ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... them were rich," laughed Haines; "they were written by loving swains to their girls. There were others written to wives and mothers, which almost brought tears to our eyes, they were so full of yearnings ...
— Raiding with Morgan • Byron A. Dunn
... going into battle with the assurance of His help was gone for ever. If that softened mood had lasted, how different his future might have been! If we modestly and boldly show the power of faith in our lives, we may kindle yearnings in some gloomy hearts, that would lead them to peace, if ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Christian soul into his works, but its infinite depth was unattainable. As his many unfinished works prove, he always felt some great overwhelming meaning in his inmost soul, which all his passionate artistic yearnings were inadequate to express. Raphael tried to bring realism into religion through painting, and to give us the scenes of our Lord's and the Apostles' lives in such a humanized aspect, that we should feel ourselves of his nature. ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... like this, there is something ineffably beautiful,—it is essentially the poetry of passion. Desire grows hallowed by fear, and, scarce permitted to indulge its vent in the common channel of the senses, breaks forth into those vague yearnings, those lofty aspirations, which pine for the Bright, the Far, the Unattained. It is "the desire of the moth for the star;" it is the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... absorption in the blank reality, this enthusiasm for the ultimate thought, are mere human passions like the rest; that they endure them as they might a fever and that the animal instincts are patent on which those spiritual yearnings repose. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... shouldst die; Albeit I ask no fairer life than this, Whose numbering-clock is still thy gentle kiss, While Time and Peace with hands enlocked fly; Yet care I not where in Eternity We live and love, well knowing that there is No backward step for those who feel the bliss Of Faith as their most lofty yearnings high: Love hath so purified my being's core, Meseems I scarcely should be startled even, To find, some morn, that thou hadst gone before; Since, with thy love, this knowledge too was given, Which each calm day doth strengthen ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Goethe, himself disappointed with book-learning, eager for life, and beset by vague yearnings for mystic insight into the nature of things, saw in Faust a symbol of his own experience? But as soon as he began to identify himself with his hero it was all up with Faust's utter damnableness: a young poet does not plan to send his own soul to perdition. At the same ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... his manner is abstracted and bespeaks affliction of soul: he seldom has his hair cut, and often talks about being an outcast and wanting a kindred spirit; from which, as well as from many general observations in which he is wont to indulge, concerning mysterious impulses, and yearnings of the heart, and the supremacy of intellect gilding all earthly things with the glowing magic of immortal verse, it is clear to all his friends that ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... evening star she was! And how her very presence filled all hearts with a livelier sense of happiness and hope, and sweet pure yearnings for wedded calm and bridal love! But she—innocent young Eva—little knew of the sensation she had caused by the rare beauty of her blossoming womanhood. Her whole heart was in the act of worship, except when it wandered for a moment to her poor sick Eddy, whom they had left alone, or ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... they were, these glimpses brought in their train sensations that were too powerful ever to have troubled his child-mind in its present body. They stirred in him the strong emotions, the ecstasies, the terrors, the yearnings of a much more distant past; whispering to him, could he but have understood, of an infinitely deeper layer of memories and experiences which, now released from the burden of the immediate years, strove to awaken into ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... some months that it would be a great privilege for any woman to become the wife of a clergyman. Like many other girls who have a good deal of time for thought,—thought about themselves, their surroundings, and the world in general,—she had certain yearnings after a career. But she had lived all her life in Philistia, and considered it to be very well adapted as a place of abode for a proper-minded young woman; in fact, she could not imagine any proper-minded young woman living under ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... was his ordination completed, than the long suppressed yearnings after his home and kindred came upon his spirit with a power that could not be restrained. He took leave of his friends with a beating heart, and set out on a delightful summer morning to revisit all that had been, ...
— The Poor Scholar - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... still looked on clear seas and smooth sailing as possible for lovers' barks. In her plans for Sylvie there was a fine, manly, generous husband; a love so sweet and entire that the girl should forget her restless yearnings; baby hands to cling to her, baby lips to press, young lives to mould, and a future ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... without. Occasionally the outer world came to the little village. Assize courts were held twice a year, and more rarely assemblees contradictoires were held in which fiery politicians roundly denounced each other. The appeal was strong to the boys of keener mind and political yearnings; and well disciplined as he usually was, young Laurier more than once broke bounds to hear the eloquence of advocate or candidate, well content to bear the punishment that followed. {9} Though reserved, he was ...
— The Day of Sir Wilfrid Laurier - A Chronicle of Our Own Time • Oscar D. Skelton
... Braes, and once again celebrate May-day. There we all sat at the long table, and both parents did their best to look cheerful during the feast. Indeed, all that had once been harsh and forbidding in the old man's looks and manners, was now softened down by the perpetual yearnings at his heart towards "the distant far and absent long," nor less towards him that peaceful and pious child, whom every hour he saw, or thought he saw, awaiting a call from the eternal voice. Although sometimes sadness fell across us like a shadow, yet the hours ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... forgotten, crushed, and left behind, were to Plato supreme manifestations of the one desire. One desired in others what one desired in God; the sense of admiration, the longing for sympathy, the desire that no close embrace, no passionate glance could satisfy, these were but deep yearnings after the perfect sympathy, the perfect understanding of God. And thus when Plato appeared most to be trifling with a subject, to be turning it over and over as a man may turn about a crystal in his hands, watching the lights blend and flash and separate on the polished facets, he was ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... this unbelief is a revolt from a caricature of God. These mechanical ideas about the universe are the outcome of a mechanical theology which has lost sight of the Fatherhood of God. There is much honest unbelief. In these yearnings of humanity, in its clubs, brotherhoods, and orders, in their readiness to share all things with their brothers, I see unconscious prophecies of the brotherhood of all men as the children of one ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... process. First, one human being on the earth, surrounded with beasts and birds that could give him no intelligent companionship and no fellow-feeling. Then the beautiful being created to meet these awakening yearnings of his nature; then the first outflow and interchange of human love. The narrative brings us to the next stage of the sentiment. Sin and sorrow afflict, but unite, both hearts in the saddest experience of humanity. They are driven out of the Eden of their first condition, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... her lap with pleasures of her own: Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind, And e'en with something of a mother's mind, And no unworthy aim, The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate, Man Forget the glories he hath known And that imperial palace whence ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge
... pleasure too long: as long as I had any hope of settling you as I wished 'twas a sufficient excuse to myself; but now I have none left—I must part with you: and so, by the blessing, God helping me to conquer my selfishness, and the yearnings of my heart towards you, I will. I mean," continued he, "to send you far from me—to banish you for your good from the Black Islands entirely. Nay, don't you interrupt me, nor say a word; for if you do, I shall be too soft to have the heart to do you justice. ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... the heavens unchanging on which we wrote all our humble yearnings and all the humble things we did or dreamed of doing. When I was a Son of the Bull, I remember me a lifetime I spent at star- gazing. And, later and earlier, there were other lives in which I sang with the priests ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... be the case, his great admiration for fasting having arisen from the circumstance of his frequently seeing the process of manufacturing the pauper gruel, which sight filled him with most intense yearnings to hit upon some plan by which, as far as he was concerned, he might for ever avoid any ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... ways—by praise sometimes, but much more often by envy—to remain unconscious of her charms. She was scornful of her beauty, inclined to undervalue the gift as compared with the blessings of other girls—a prosperous home, the world's respect, the means to gratify the natural yearnings of youth—but she knew that she was beautiful. And now it seemed to her all at once that beauty was a much more valuable gift than she had supposed hitherto—indeed, a kind of talisman or Aladdin's lamp, which could win ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... Annapolis, delightful in any weather and at any time of year, gives one a satisfaction almost ecstatic after a cold, windy automobile ride such as we had suffered. To ache for the shelter of almost any town, or any sort of building, and, with such yearnings, to arrive in this dreamy city, whose mild air seems to be compounded from fresh winds off a glittering blue sea, arrested by the barricade of ancient hospitable-looking houses, warmed by the glow of their sun-baked red brick, ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... make we moan For loss that doth enrich us yet With upward yearnings of regret? Bleaker than unmossed stone Our lives were but for this immortal gain Of unstilled longing and inspiring pain! As thrills of long-hushed tone Live in the viol, so our souls grow fine With keen vibrations from the touch divine ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... over her by the stove, and she looked up into his face with these yearnings in her eyes. Yes, she would have thrown herself on her knees, if she could. But she could not. Perhaps he would abandon that struggle. Perhaps—perhaps his heart was broken. And could a man with a broken ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... causes of disquiet and weariness and weeping, still the heart would hunger and be empty of its true possession unless God Himself had flowed into it. It were but a poor advancement and the gain of a loss, if yearnings were made immortal, and the aching vacuity, which haunts every soul that is parted from God, were cursed with immortality. It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... fourfold space. As yellow morn Runs on the slippery waves of the spread sea, Thy feet are on the griefs and joys of men That sheen to be thy causey. Out of tears Indeed, and blitheness, murder and lust and love, Whatever has been passionate in clay, Thy flesh was tempered. Behold in thy body The yearnings of all men measured and told, Insatiate endless agonies of desire Given thy flesh, the meaning of thy shape! What beauty is there, but thou makest it? How is earth good to look on, woods and fields, The season's garden, and the courageous hills, All this green raft of earth moored in the ...
— Modern British Poetry • Various
... tones heeding, From their chains of sin are freed; All the mind's unrest is soothed, Sinful yearnings ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... relics; and goes about the country, half in earnest, and half in sport of fancy, in quest of the old family mansion. He makes singular discoveries, all of which bring the book to an end unexpected by everybody, and not satisfactory to the natural yearnings of novel readers. In the traditions that he brought over, there was a key to some family secrets that were still unsolved, and that controlled the descent of estates and titles. His influence upon these matters involves [him] in divers strange and perilous adventures; and at last it turns ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fallow for awhile, something might show itself. Robina, speaking for herself, held that a period of quiet usefulness, away from the society of other silly girls and sillier boys, would result in her becoming a sensible woman. It is not often that Robina's yearnings take this direction: to thwart them, when they did, ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... on the old well-worn path to the paradise of its childhood," and contrasting the gloom that overhangs the present with the radiance that shone on the morning lands. In every crisis of terror or disaster it turns with unutterable yearnings to the tradition of the happy age. Or, if it does look forward to the future, it always pictures "the restoration of the old Saturnian reign"; it has no standard of future excellence or future blessedness to attain to, and no yearnings for consummation and perfection hereafter. The very name ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... of investigation. The psychological studies of religion in recent years have greatly enriched our knowledge of the range and scope and power of man's psychic nature and functions, of his instincts, desires, valuations, needs, yearnings, beliefs, and modes of activity and behaviour, and particularly of the important influence which the social group has exercised and still exercises in the furtherance of religious attitudes and ideals. But the psychological method has obvious and inherent limitations. Like any ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... 1871[70]. The Bible gathers wonderful interest from the circumstances in which it is read. In Livingstone's circumstances it was more the Bible to him than ever. All his loneliness and sorrow, the sickness of hope deferred, the yearnings for home that could neither be repressed nor gratified, threw a new light on the Word. How clearly it was intended for such as him, and how sweetly it came home to him! How faithful, too, were its pictures ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... such times. He is homesick for the hale rough weather; for the tracery of the frost upon his window-panes at morning, the reluctant descent of the first flakes, and the white roofs relieved against the sombre sky. And yet the stuff of which these yearnings are made is one of the flimsiest: if but the thermometer fall a little below its ordinary Mediterranean level, or a wind come down from the snow-clad Alps behind, the spirit of his fancies changes upon the instant, and many a doleful vignette ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... afar. At the earlier part of the evening she had felt relieved by his prudent reserve; but since she had learnt the secret of the two others she wished for something—she knew not what—some display of affection, or at least interest, on his part. Her breast was stirred with confused yearnings, and every imaginable evil thought. Did he no longer care for her, that he remained so indifferent to her presence? Oh! if she could have told him everything! If she could apprise him of the unworthiness of the woman who bore his name! Then, while some short, merry ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... returned from the Continent. "And here," I said, "he stood when the Angelus rang, and, taking off his hat, reverentially said it; and I counted the silver in his hair. And do you think, you little infidel, that our great Father has not numbered the hairs of his head also—ay, and the deep yearnings of his heart?" ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... fellow smiled wanly. Vague yearnings had led him sometimes, in the past, to wander into chapels or stop and listen to street preachers, and orthodox platitudes ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... wanton surge;" I ask not much; grant but an "eery drone," Some "wilding frondage" and a "bosky dirge;" Grant me but these, and add a regal flush Of "sundered hearts upreared upon a byre;" Throw in some yearnings and a "darksome hush," And—asking nothing more—I'll smite ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... to enter. The Bible has been found a Spiritual World, spiritual and yet at the same time outward and common to all. You in one place, I in another, all men somewhere or at some time, meet with an assurance that the hopes and fears, the thoughts and yearnings that proceed from, or tend to, a right spirit in us, are not dreams or fleeting singularities, no voices heard in sleep, or spectres which the eye suffers but not perceives. As if on some dark night a pilgrim, suddenly beholding a bright star moving before him, should stop in fear and ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... to their brief desires so grave a word, but those others had been "ninnies"—young men who had nothing to do, old men who could find nobody better. And she had often "loved," too, but only so far as the facts of sex demanded: mere yearnings for the masculine, to be dismissed for what they were worth, with a smile. Never before had her personality been touched. She was not young or very rich, and it amazed her that a man of any standing should take ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... that her mother spoke the truth, but she never dreamed what it cost that mother to speak cheerily as she did about her only girl's going—in fact, almost persuading her to go. For that wise mother had heard the yearnings in Polly's voice the day she spoke so daringly of all her ambitions and of her future. And she understood that this transitory spell of regret was merely the contagion of Mr. Brewster's ...
— Polly and Eleanor • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... it! Is life but a disillusion, then, and are the flowers of our garden faded away? I have wept—I have prayed—I have passed sleepless hours—I have shed bitter, bitter tears over your letter! To you I bring the gushing poesy of my being—the yearnings of the soul that longs to be loved—that pines for love, love, love, beyond all!—that flings itself at your feet, and cries, Love me, Arthur! Your heart beats no quicker at the kneeling appeal of my love!—your proud ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... The great deeds of the heathen world were all done by early Greeks and Romans before yet the last gleams of purer light had faded out of their belief, and while their moral sense still nerved them to energy; or else by such later Greeks as had embraced the deeper and more earnest yearnings of the minds that had ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thousand appliances of vice, confronting the church with brazen defiance, or with devilish ingenuity and secresy sapping the foundations of manly honor and integrity, call to us, deal gently with the young man. Fathers and mothers, the yearnings of whose hearts you read full easily in your love for your own sons, whose happiness, whose very lives are bound up in the honor and prosperity of these sons and brothers, call to us from their distant homes in quiet villages, ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... consciousness seemed to be something already perfected in a pre-existing state, and, in the myth of metempsychosis, we trace the yearnings and gropings of the soul after the source whence its own consciousness was derived, counting its dreams and hallucinations as gleams of memory, recording acts which had taken place in a former state ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... high hall Haereth's daughter, winsome to warriors, wine-cup bore to the hands of the heroes. Hygelac then his comrade fairly with question plied in the lofty hall, sore longing to know what manner of sojourn the Sea-Geats made. "What came of thy quest, my kinsman Beowulf, when thy yearnings suddenly swept thee yonder battle to seek o'er the briny sea, combat in Heorot? Hrothgar couldst thou aid at all, the honored chief, in his wide-known woes? With waves of care my sad heart seethed; I sore mistrusted my loved one's venture: long I begged ...
— Beowulf • Anonymous
... the way I used to feel, that's just the way I used to feel," they kept repeating, over and over again. The sweet, misty memories of their happy, happy lives, came gliding back into consciousness. The thoughts and yearnings, the smells, the sights and sounds, all the serenity of the immaculate, long childhood days. Walking side by side in the reverent dimness, intensely conscious of each other, they had that mysterious sensation of having done this before, of ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... contagious emotion. When we are told that the Franciscan Berthold of Ratisbon frequently preached to crowds of sixty thousand souls, we realize what power was lodged in the hands of those who could reach masses so easily swayed and so full of blind yearnings to escape from the ignoble life to which they were condemned. How the slumbering souls were awakened is shown by the successive waves of excitement which swept over one portion of Europe after another about ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... rubbish the better. It is the indulgence they have given to such feelings that has made all the religions such a curse to the world. I don't believe, to begin with, that they are universal. I never experienced any such cravings and yearnings except when I was out of sorts; and I never met a thoroughly happy or healthy person who did. If people keep their bodies in good order and their minds well employed, they have no time for yearnings. It was bad enough when there ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... "Niels Lyhne," we have again the story of a Danish Rudin—a nature with a multitude of scattered aspirations, squandering itself in brilliant talk and fantastic yearnings. It is the same coquetting with the "advanced" ideas of the age, the same lack of mental stamina, the same wretched surrender and failure. It is the complexion of a period which the author is here attempting to give, and he takes pains to emphasize its typical character. One is almost ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... excitement. They preceded their mother, the smallest boy in the lead. For him this must have been both a dreadful and a wonderful experience, for he seemed to be pushed forward by his sister and brother and mother, and driven by yearnings of his own. "There now, Lee. Say, 'Uncle Jean, what did you fetch us?' The lad hesitated for a shy, frightened look at Jean, and then, gaining something from his scrutiny of his uncle, he toddled forward and bravely delivered the question ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... possible lover and husband, but always with a false sense of shame. The really serious business of a woman's life was the one thing to which she made no attempt to apply practical consideration. But her parents had had positive ideas on that subject, even if they were not openly expressed. Her yearnings after a useful "career" were skilfully discouraged,—by her mother because that worthy lady thought it was "scarcely the thing, Stella dear, and so unnecessary"; by her father because, as he bluntly put it, it would only ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... music and probably in many other ways, he has influenced them. As the Spaniard perfectly understands the objective vagabond side of the Gitano, so the Southeastern European understands the musical and wild-forest yearnings of the Tsigane. Both to gypsy and Slavonian there is that which makes them dream so that even debauchery has for them at times an unearthly inspiration; and as smoking was inexpressibly sacred to the red Indians of old, so that when the Guatemalan Christ harried hell, the demons offered him cigars; ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... indifferently, had sat riveted till daylight. When he ended, the impression was so strong that he said to himself: "I'll tell Apthorn about it—I'll go and see him to-morrow." His own secret literary yearnings gave him a passionate desire to champion Vyse, to see him triumph over the ignorance and timidity of the publishers. Apthorn was the youngest of the guild, still capable of opinions and the courage of them, a personal friend of Betton's, ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... the midst of the vilest and most abandoned community of desperate and devilish men and, sooner or later, you will hear a cry coming from the depths of sin and shame, bitter cries of repentance and yearnings after God; and by and by that community will be transformed, men will no longer be demon filled, but possessed with a spirit of truth and love; and God will be found to reign and ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... accompany me as my wife. You have long placed implicit confidence in my honour. We have now known each other till affection has lost the gloss of novelty; and instead of depending on hope and imagination, it assumes the fixed character of experience. If I perceived the germ of avarice, or lurking yearnings after aggrandizement in your heart, I would point to stalls and mitres; for such endowments have originated from fortunate alliances. But I will only say to the Christian pastor who is content with feeding his few sheep in a wilderness, that I came not as a ravenous wolf to steal his favourite ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... dear to the friends of the London Missionary Society; and not to them only, but to all the supporters of Foreign Missions. It is the child of their affection; the object of their most tender compassion, their yearnings, and their prayers. Its long trial of suffering, the grace given to its scattered members, their patience, their fidelity, have drawn to its churches the love, the confidence, the reverence of all christian hearts. Its history is a very simple one. Founded in 1818, it was between ...
— Fruits of Toil in the London Missionary Society • Various
... attempt to struggle against nature's yearnings; her longing to clasp to her heart this long-pined-for first-born must ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... to Him confine the prayer, When kindred thoughts and yearnings bear On the frail heart the purest share With all that live?— The best of what we do and are, 65 ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... honour), Fano, Pesaro, Rimini to Ravenna, back again over the Apennines from Forli. A 'bel giro,' wasn't it? Ravenna, where Robert positively wanted to go to live once, has itself put an end to those yearnings. The churches are wonderful: holding an atmosphere of purple glory, and if one could live just in them, or in Dante's tomb—well, otherwise keep me from Ravenna. The very antiquity of the houses is whitewashed, and the marshes on all sides send up stenches ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... case existed; if from his lips I could have heard the injunction to forsake all and follow Jesus, and he had added, "Do this and be forgiven," it might have changed my fate. But, as it was, my penitence spent itself in unavailing tears, and my yearnings towards a better course ended in the same bewildering and oft-repeated question, which I could not, dared not, answer to myself, or for myself: "Where lies the path of duty through the intricate maze in which guilt, misfortune, and weakness have ...
— Ellen Middleton—A Tale • Georgiana Fullerton
... such and such books are necessary to perfect culture, when we know all the while that, even if they went without sleep, they could hardly cover such an immense range of study? Many men and women yearn after the higher mental life and are eager for guidance; but their yearnings are apt to be frozen into the stupor of despair if we raise before them a standard which is hopelessly unattainable by them. I should not dream of approving the saying of Lord Beaconsfield: "Books are fatal; they ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... telling her, Arthur had written in a manner tending to satisfy even her friendly feelings towards him. Emmeline joined not in the conversation. Her father did not offer to show her the letter, and she stilled the yearnings of her young and loving heart. From that hour the name of Arthur Myrvin was never heard in the halls of Oakwood. There was no appearance of effort in the avoidance, but still it was not spoken; not even ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... look through! O that the darkling Cloud-piles were riven! Starlight is sparkling, Purer is heaven, Holier sunshine Softens the blue. Graces, adorning Sons of the morning— Shadowy wavings— Float along over; Yearnings and cravings After them hover. Garments ethereal, Tresses aerial, Float o'er the flowers, Float o'er the bowers, Where, with deep feeling, Thoughtful and tender, Lovers, embracing, Life-vows are sealing. Bowers ...
— Faust • Goethe
... spoken of probable war, and Royson wanted to be there. He had dreamed of doing some work for the press, and was a reader and writer in his spare time, while he kept his muscles fit by gymnastics. But those past yearnings were merged in his new calling. He was a sailor now, a filibuster of sorts. The bo's'n's whistle would take the place of the bugle-call. Would that have pleased his mother? Well, poor soul, she had never imagined that her son would ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... upon that homely couch when Liz was slumbering quietly, and the child's soft regular breathing was the only sound to be heard in the darkened room. Amid the sordid cares and humiliations of Joan's rough life, there had arisen new ones. She had secret struggles—secret yearnings,—and added to these, a secret terror. When she lay awake thinking, she was listening for her father's step. There was not a night in which she did not long for, and dread to hear it. If he stayed out all night, she went down ...
— That Lass O' Lowrie's - 1877 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... preoccupied and surcharged with inner yearnings. There were plenty of things—important things, too, they were—that I should have been doing; but I couldn't seem to fix my mind upon any subject except food. The stroke of midday found me briskly walking into a certain restaurant on the ...
— Eating in Two or Three Languages • Irvin S. Cobb
... your heart. Allow not the world nor aught else to extinguish the tender flame. Everything that has a tendency to suppress love, to cool its ardor, to dilute its sweetness in your soul, to lessen the yearnings of your heart for more of God, to deprive you of the sweet realization of constantly leaning on his breast,—consider all such things your bitter foes and ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... truth. Your mother watched day and night by your father's bedside until the end. At nightfall he ceased to breathe, and she was alone in the desolate camp, where she performed the last sad ministrations, and then her duty in the mountains was accomplished. All the smothered yearnings of maternal love now burst forth with full power. Out into the darkness and night she rushed, without waiting for the morning. "My children, ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... feeling, since the subject first was broached, that something in her heart would snap. But she worked on, her emotions, yearnings, and fears all rigorously knitted into ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... unwholesome longing, he is not weary of work, he indulges in no hysterical raptures of desire. What an eloquent simplicity is in that quiet 'very far better!' It goes straight to one's heart, and says more than paragraphs of falsetto yearnings. There is nothing in such a wish to die, based on such a reason, that the most manly and wholesome piety need be ashamed of. It is a ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... know not whether equally so to others—that the eloquence to which I had been listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs of disappointment—where moved troubling impulses of insatiate yearnings and disquieting aspirations. I was sure St. John Rivers—pure-lived, conscientious, zealous as he was—had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all understanding: he had no more found it, I thought, ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... hand. Flora, dear Flora, let me retain it in mine; for at the last hour, and when I am about to leave this fair and beauteous earth, I feel an ardent longing to love those who walk upon its face, and to be loved by them in return. But, alas, alas!" she added, somewhat bitterly, "reflections and yearnings of this nature come too late! O Flora! the picture of life is spread before you—while from me it is rapidly receding, and dissolving into the past. Like our own fair city of palaces and flowers, when seen from a distance beneath the glorious lights of ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... voice as if in comment on her prayer, "Oh! no, he is too pure-hearted," and I knew that the prayer was for my protection from the temptations of that world of which she only knew the terrors and dangers from her Bible, and that she was so wrapt in her spiritual yearnings that she had quite forgotten my presence. Poor mother! I never deserved the great trust she had in me, but the memory of that moment has served me in many devious moments to keep me in the path. But ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... evidence of the careful upbringing and artistic yearnings of the young man who "blended" for the eminent firm of Messrs. Worrows, By Appointment to the King of Smyrna, His Majesty the Emperor —— (the blank stands for an exalted name which had been painted out by the patriotic management of ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace
... are only gleams, impassioned hopes, yearnings of the unsatisfied soul in its search for some solution of the great mystery of life. To him, therefore, it was of more moment than it was to us, to make the most of the present, and to stimulate his relish for what it has to give by contrasting it with a phantasmal ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... being, the subject of man's dreams, of yearnings, of philosophies. In ancient eidetic memory, the unbroken thread persisted: If I could only grasp this elusive thing, always just barely beyond my reach, I would not need the ox, the wagon, the train, the plane, the spaceship ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... May-time flew for men;[14] The morning rose ungreeted From ocean's joyless breast; Unhail'd the evening fleeted To ocean's joyless breast— Wild through the tangled shade, By clouded moons they stray'd, The iron race of Men! Sources of mystic tears, Yearnings for starry spheres, No ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... the stains of the spirit When sundered at last from the clay, Or keep we thereafter till judgment, Desires that on earth had their way? Bereft of the strength which was given To use for our good or our bane, Shall yearnings vain, impotent, endless, Be ours with ...
— Memories of Canada and Scotland - Speeches and Verses • John Douglas Sutherland Campbell
... kneel down at the head of it. Her withered hands were clasped, as if in prayer; but I could perceive, by a feeble rocking of the body, and a convulsive motion of the lips, that she was gazing on the last relics of her son with the yearnings of ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... majesty of such praying impressed Joan much; as, indeed, it impresses all who come adult thereto and do not associate it with their childhood, with weary hours dragging interminably out, with sleepy buzz of voices, with sore knees or a breaking back, with yearnings stifled, with devices for passing time, with the longed-for sunshine stealing inch by inch eastward on ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... a born raconteur, told the unvarnished tale of the Northland Lochinvar. More than one rough adventurer of the North felt his heartstrings draw closer and experienced vague yearnings for the sunnier pastures of the Southland, where life promised something more than a barren struggle ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... he hesitated. He had spoken rather than thought, for he thought little, and he was not used to keeping secrets. Moreover, despite his courageous disbelief in his coming fate, he must have had some yearnings for sympathy; the iron of his exile surely entered his soul at times. The girl, so delicately framed, so flower-like of face, seemed alien to her rude surroundings and the burly, heavy, matter-of-fact folk about her. Her spirituelle presence did away in a measure with the realization of her ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... briefly, that for a few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change; but it is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among 'em all at my old thirty-three-years' desk yester-morning; and, deuce take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads,—at leaving them in the lurch, fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... come as a treasure accidentally stumbled upon, not being looked for, but now valued as very precious.[173] To others it will come as the thing they have been eagerly seeking for, and which satisfies the deepest yearnings.[174] One who has had any touch with the pathetic yearning of years found in non-Christian lands can better appreciate the results of this kind ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... trouble. Poor fellow! That touch of melancholy came from quite another source, but how was he to know? We look at the one little woman's face we love as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings. It was impossible for Adam not to feel that what had happened in the last week had brought the prospect of marriage nearer to him. Hitherto he had felt keenly the danger that some other man might step in and get possession of Hetty's heart and hand, while ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... sounds were still to him as the language of his gods, which filled him with a fearful rapture, and inspired him, in the terrible degradation of his being, as with a new soul. He listened and listened yet. Fragments of wild fancies—the vain yearnings of the disinherited mind to recover its divine birthright of boundless thought—now thrilled through him, and held him still and speechless where ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins |
