"Brooding" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... can hardly see von Bissing pass in his automobile, as it is, without wishing I had a bomb. But there it is. It is no business of mine. As I can't get away, as you won't let us go out of the country—Switzerland, Holland—and as I don't want to go mad by brooding, find something for me to do that will occupy my thoughts: and yet not implicate me with the Germans. Can't I go and help every day in your hospitals? If you'll continue your kindness to mother—and believe me"—she broke off—"I do appreciate what you have done ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... table, still silent and morose; and though he fell with right good will upon the viands, he scarce opened his lips the while, and we in our turn grew silent, for we feared that he had heard the news of some disaster to the French arms, which he was brooding over in ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green
... was one not easily to be forgotten. It led us through a sublime waste, a wilderness of mountains and pine forests, over which the spirit of loneliness and silence seemed brooding. Above and below little could be seen but the same dark green foliage. It overspread the valleys, and the mountains were clothed with it from the black rocks that crowned their summits to the impetuous streams that circled round their base. Scenery like this, it might seem, could have ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... this debate with Cox to show how local prejudices obscured the problem then involved. The people of Ohio were divided on parallel lines, for Cox and I agreed on Kansas, but he was for Douglas and I for Lincoln, while the south was brooding over secession, if either Lincoln ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... turned and glanced at Mallett, who was re-reading Brent's election address with brooding ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... the lovely, peaceful, healing days passed, that bitter and contracted heart had to expand somewhat. Gradually the ferocity faded, leaving in its room an anxious and brooding wonder. God knows what thoughts passed through that somber mind in those long hours, when, concentrated upon himself, he must have faced the problem of his future and, like one before an impassable stone wall, had to fall back, baffled. He could be sure of only one thing: that never again ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... them to redeem themselves from captivity by the payment of heavy fines, and before long gave them back their lands. The king's victory was so complete that neither of the earls could forgive it. In 1295, Gloucester died, without opportunity of revenge; but Hereford lived on, brooding over his wrongs, and in later years signally avenged the trial at Abergavenny. Meanwhile the conqueror of the principality had shown unmistakably that the liberties of the march were an anachronism, since the marchers ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... subject, but usually sheered off before he had gone far. Of shrugs and winks he offered plenty, enough to keep the youngster tantalized almost beyond endurance. Nor was it possible to force his confidence, for he was of a surly, taciturn disposition, given to brooding suspicions. ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... to reach the most revolting conclusions on the everlasting theme, that even for the stone wall you are yourself somehow to blame, though again it is as clear as day you are not to blame in the least, and therefore grinding your teeth in silent impotence to sink into luxurious inertia, brooding on the fact that there is no one even for you to feel vindictive against, that you have not, and perhaps never will have, an object for your spite, that it is a sleight of hand, a bit of juggling, a card-sharper's ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... caught from the brooding rocks, and moulded in the substance of the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by the winds, the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous transports of the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or despairs, to the newer wonder, the numbered cadences of poetry, the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... great house, darkened the lights, and everything sank into silence, broken only now and then by the call of a night bird in the shrubbery, or the whistle of a far-away locomotive. The full moon sailed high in the deep blue heaven, brooding over the sleeping world in its mystery, its beauty, its joy ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... at which a woman with a small boy in a sailor suit had seated themselves. The woman was engrossed with the bill of fare, but the child's attention seemed riveted upon the Sausage Chappie. He was drinking him in with wide eyes. He seemed to be brooding on him. ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... putting him again in a strong emotional mood. For many weeks he lived alone at Astura, on the edge of the Pomptine marshes, out of reach of all friends, forbidding even his young wife and her mother to come near him; brooding, as it would seem, on the survival of the godlike element in his daughter. These sad meditations took a practical form which at first astonishes us, but is not hard to understand when we have to come to know Cicero well, and to follow the tendencies ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... that brooding stillness, Napoleon entered upon the last phase of his greatness, his brief ...
— The Letter-Bag of Lady Elizabeth Spencer-Stanhope v. I. • A. M. W. Stirling (compiler)
... ask the boys to dance. At another a crowd of girls were lined up wearing different ribbons, and the boys marched along until each one found the girl wearing a ribbon to match the one he wore. That was his partner. It was interesting to see the eager, mischievous, brooding eyes of these girls as they watched and waited. Just as interesting was it to see this boy's face when he found his partner was ugly, and that boy swell with pride when he found he had picked a "winner." It was all adventure for both boys and girls. But ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... tendencies appear consecutively, not simultaneously, in exact accordance with her impulses. For Mary Stuart was never quiet an instant: even in her prison she shared in the movement of the world; her brain never ceased working; she was brooding over her circumstances, her distress and her hope, how to escape the one and realise the other: sometimes indeed there came a moment of resignation, but only soon to pass away again. She throws all her thoughts into her letters which, even if ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... in the desert ways, and we won them fair and square; We built so well as the swift years fled that life was a laughing thing; And the joys that come as the crowns of life, the joys that are sweet and fair, Build close their nests by the brooding eaves where the rose-vines ...
— Oklahoma Sunshine • Freeman E. (Freeman Edwin) Miller
... equal in power and splendour? Who would not wish to share his good fortune, as consort to tarry beside him, whom the greatest of heroes so devotedly serves?" Isolde, but half heeding, has fallen again to her miserable brooding. Brangaene's last words find their way to her brain and produce an image there which she stares at with gloomy and tragic eyes. As before, unconscious in her perturbation that she is doing it, she voices her inmost thoughts audibly, ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... Brooding, he forgot the cold. Suddenly the wave wetted his feet—the tide was flowing; a gust passed through his hair—the north wind was rising. He shivered. There came over him, from head to foot, the ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... too—the wood so damp and still and so secret, in the remote morning air. Morning, with rain in the sky, and the forest subtly brooding, and me feeling no bigger than a pea-bug between the roots of my fir. The trees seem so much bigger than me, so much stronger in life, prowling silent around. I seem to feel them moving and thinking and prowling, and they overwhelm me. Ah, ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... glad to win an angel apiece so easily. He sent them out, and instantly dismissing the subject with contempt, sat brooding ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... there on the Wolfsberg, it seemed to me that I could distinguish a muttering as of voices full of hate, like men talking low on their beds the secret things of evil and treason. I discerned discontent and rebellion rumbling and brooding over the city that clear, keen night ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... increase with his opposition, he thought it necessary to strengthen himself by new devices. He extorted hostages and a new oath of fidelity from his barons. He raised a great army, to divert the thoughts of his subjects from brooding too much on their distracted condition. This army he transported into Ireland; and as it happened to his father in a similar dispute with the Pope, whilst he was dubious of his hereditary kingdom, he subdued Ireland. At this time he is said to have established the English ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... trees, For storied rose, and sweet poetic morn, For sound of bird, and brook, and murmuring bees, For luckless fancies of illusion born, What time in dark we dwelt and framed our lore? Woe, woe, if then regretful we should mourn "What wisdom left we on that human shore!" For brooding kindness can a charm beget, Not duly won, and from Heaven's parapet These terrene colours shine with starry gleam— But this is all a fable and a dream; A fable, for this axiom it brings, Immortal loves must love immortal things; Dream is it, for uncurbed it ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... and brooding away in the city." The lad's bright, clear eyes looked frankly into the captain's as he continued. "I have been making a fool of myself, Captain. Got into some mischief with a crowd of fellows at school. Of course, I got ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... its figure is sculptured, and the many old legends in which it plays a conspicuous part? What else was the belief of our pagan fathers, that within a dark cave in the bowels of the earth there sat a great scaly dragon, brooding on gold? What else was the fabled garden of the Hesperides, where the trees, guarded by a fierce and formidable serpent, bore apples of gold? What else was the tragic story of a father and his sons dying by the bites ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... Christian, whose life has been dark with brooding cares that would not lift themselves, and on whom chilling rains of sorrow have fallen at intervals through all his years, death is but the clearing-up shower; and just behind it are the songs of angels, and the ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... thoroughly trained set of children. If a hawk, or even a big robin, went sailing over head, how quickly they scampered, and hid themselves at their mother's note of warning! and how meekly they all trotted roost-ward at the first sound of her brooding-call! I wish all little folks were as ready to go to bed at the ...
— The Nursery, March 1873, Vol. XIII. - A Monthly Magazine for Youngest People • Various
... of the Storm Country," with the same wild background, with its half-gypsy life of the squatters—tempestuous, passionate, brooding. Tess learns the "secret" of her birth and finds happiness and love through her boundless faith ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres
... to him, 'Go ahead and do it,' could I? As it was he went off, shaking his head. And what idea he kept brooding over, after that, who knows? One can't see inside of another man's brain. But sometimes, when I heard ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... was now brooding over the Susquehanna, and the autumn leaves were being tinged with red. The struggle of the year 1778 seemed over and Brant decided to spend the winter at Niagara. Accordingly he set out with a band of warriors from his entrenched position at Unadilla and ...
— The War Chief of the Six Nations - A Chronicle of Joseph Brant - Volume 16 (of 32) in the series Chronicles of Canada • Louis Aubrey Wood
... Mother went on. "And you've been brooding and brooding till it seems far worse than ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... fame, upon the whole, rests on a different basis. The lovely dreamy mind of Novalis was cut off in the full promise of its spring; it only just awoke from the blissful visions of its childhood, to breathe forth a few lyrical murmurs about the mysteries it had been brooding over, and then fell asleep again. Upon Tieck, therefore, the character of German poetry in the age following those of Goethe and Schiller will mainly depend: and never did Norwegian or Icelandic spring burst forth more suddenly than the youth of Ludwig Tieck. I know not in the whole history of literature, ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey, Vol. 2 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... two from each nest, and to always leave more than half, as we have already begged them to do, the mother-bird will not suffer. If we could believe for a moment that our little friends would be so cruel as to disturb the brooding mother, and rob her nest of all its eggs, we would never publish another letter requesting an exchange of these pretty natural curiosities. The nesting season is now over in all the Northern States, but when it returns, we trust the young egg ...
— Harper's Young People, October 19, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... silence! O'er the brooding hill The last faint whisper of the zephyr dies; Meadows and trees and lanes are hushed and still, A shroud of mist on the slow river lies; And the tall sentry poplars silent keep Their lonely vigil ...
— Punch, Volume 101, September 19, 1891 • Francis Burnand
... lighted his lamp, but the flaring name illuminated only a little space in the brooding, hovering blackness ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller
... sultry night. A storm was brooding between heaven and earth. The moon was not yet up, and it was so dark that they had to feel their way along the wall, glad of the protection of a fence of thick ivy on the outer side. Looking down into ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... here and there Tossed their splinters in the air; The very trees were stripped and bare; The barns that once held yellow grain Were heaped with harvests of the slain; The cattle bellowed on the plain, The turkeys screamed with might and main, And brooding barn-fowl left their rest With strange shells bursting in ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... paradises of inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers, fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder vale hidden among ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... kept that post until his provisions failed. Then, as the Hermione would not come out to him, he determined to go into the Hermione. Hamilton was a silent, much-meditating man, not apt to share his counsels with anybody. In the cells of his brooding and solitary brain he prepared, down to the minutest details, his plan for a dash at the Hermione—a ship, it must be remembered, not only more than double his own in strength, but lying moored head and stern in a strongly fortified port, under the fire of batteries mounting nearly 200 guns, and ...
— Deeds that Won the Empire - Historic Battle Scenes • W. H. Fitchett
... climbed up into the loft and put down a rackful of hay; I let the cows out into the pasture and set up the bars. And then I stood by the gate and looked up into the clear June sky. No man, I think, can remain long silent under the stars, with the brooding, mysterious night around about him, without feeling, poignantly, how little he understands anything, how inconsequential his actions are, ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... in a primitive country, had brought plenty of wool, which the women spun into cloth from which to make garments. At that time there were no readymade clothes. Everything had to be made at home. This kept the women busy almost all day, and kept them from brooding over their trials ...
— Three Young Pioneers - A Story of the Early Settlement of Our Country • John Theodore Mueller
... married some one else for money, but had married him for love, he and she would have been happy (which they wouldn't have been), and that she has a tenderness for him still (whereas her toughness is a proverb). Brooding over the fire, with his dried little head in his dried little hands, and his dried little elbows on his dried little knees, Twemlow is melancholy. 'No Adorable to bear me company here!' thinks he. 'No Adorable at the club! A waste, a waste, a waste, my Twemlow!' And so drops asleep, and ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... in every sorrow when it rejects sympathy. Purdee, always taciturn, grave, uncommunicative, was, invested with an austere aloofness, and was hardly to be approached as he sat, silent and absent, brooding over the fire at his own home. When roused by some circumstance of the domestic routine, and it became apparent that his mood was not sullenness or anger, but simple and complete introversion, it added a dignity ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... evening after Michael's departure, she was seated in his room, brooding, when suddenly she heard a peculiar knocking ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... exhilarating was the silence and loneliness, the feeling that ourselves only, of all the world, were in that beautiful mysterious place. Had I had prayers to say, I should have said them, sure that some sort of a God was brooding on the waters and suspicious perhaps, at the back of my mind, that where the black cliffs upreared themselves, there ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... made nest, With the fond trust of brooding bird, I find no all-embracing word To say how deeply I ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... darken, until, by the time that the boats had turned, the whole scene had become involved in a murky twilight, through the gloom of which the brig, still with every stitch of canvas set, could with difficulty be made out. Still, although it seemed to me that the brooding squall might burst upon us at any moment, the atmosphere maintained its ominous condition of stagnation until the boats had reached within some four cables' lengths—or somewhat less than half-a-mile—of us; when, as I was intently watching their progress, ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... Still, Rhodocleia, brooding on the dead, Still singing of the meads of asphodel, Lands desolate of delight? Say, hast thou dreamed of, or remembered, The shores where shadows dwell, Nor know the sun, nor ...
— Grass of Parnassus • Andrew Lang
... Mrs. Gammit that there was also an abundance of bears. From the garden, at length, he had ventured to the yard and the barn. In a half-barrel, in a corner of the shed, he had stumbled upon the ill-fated white top-knot hen, faithfully brooding her eggs. Undeterred by her heroic scolding, and by the trifling annoyance of her feathers sticking in his teeth, he had made a very pleasant meal of her. And still he had heard nothing from Mrs. Gammit, who, for all her indignation, could not depart from her custom of sound sleeping. ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... come. My distress deepened to despair when on the following day Cardillac talked about nothing else but the magnificent ornaments which he had seen before his eyes during the night. I could only interpret that as having reference to your jewellery, and I was certain that he was brooding over some fresh murderous onslaught which he had assuredly determined to put into execution during the coming night. I must save you, even if it cost Cardillac's own life. So soon as he had locked himself in his own room after evening prayers, according to his wont, I climbed out of a ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the Cabbage Patch, and it was nearing Christmas again. The void left in Mrs. Wiggs's heart by Jim's death could never be filled, but time was beginning to soften her grief, and the necessity for steady employment kept her from brooding over her trouble. ...
— Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch • Alice Caldwell Hegan
... heavens. The ruddy daylight was deepening to that warmth of color which belongs to day's old age. The forest shadows appeared to deepen, those dark forests so far below him in the valleys. Here, where he was racing along at a high level, all was bright, the air was joyous. Below him lay the brooding stillness where lurked a hundred unknown dangers. There were only about fifteen more miles of this broken solitude, and beyond that stretched a world of waving, gracious grassland right on to the prairie ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... brooding brown eyes the poor cripple had! Not many years ago he would have sat down with the two poor souls and made a hearty meal of it: he had no heart for ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... conclusion of Jacob Jones, who made himself quite unhappy for some weeks, brooding over the matter. He never once dreamed of the real cause of his not having had an equal share in his young friend's good fortune. He had not the most distant idea that his employer felt nearly as much regard for him as for his nephew, and would have promoted his interests as quickly, ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... sat brooding, his eyes looking out into space. Muller respected his suffering and sat in equal silence, until Graumann raised his eyes to his again. "Then came the evening of ...
— The Case of the Registered Letter • Augusta Groner
... knew Montfort? If she had not known Montfort, what would she have been even at this present? She recalled the hours of anguish, the long days of bitter mortification, the dull, the wearisome, the cheerless, hopeless, uneventful hours that were her lot when lying on her solitary sofa at Pisa, brooding over the romance of Armine and all its passion; the catastrophe of Ducie, and all its baseness. And now there was not a moment without kindness, without sympathy, without considerate attention and innocent ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... was, and earnest as he felt to become different to what he had been in olden time, he could not shake off from his mind the sad memory of the past. His mind was continually brooding upon poor little Dobbin's death, and upon the share which he had in it. For now he knew all the truth. He had seen old Leonard, and sat with him for many hours; and at his earnest request the old ...
— The One Moss-Rose • P. B. Power
... here I lie all huddled and hidden, (Oh, the eternity it seems!) Brooding desolate and bed-ridden, Living ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... men was comparatively a trifle; pikes, bullets, and conflagrations are comparatively a trifle. Their real tyranny was the tyranny of aggressive reason over the cowed and demoralised human spirit. Their brooding and raving can be forgiven, can in truth be loved and reverenced, for it is humanity on fire; hatred can be genial, madness can be homely. The Puritans fell, not because they were fanatics, ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... creates a new thought-form; but if a thought-form of the same nature is already hovering round the thinker, under certain circumstances a new thought on the same subject, instead of creating a new form, coalesces with and strengthens, the old one, so that by long brooding over the same subject a man may sometimes create a thought-form of tremendous power. If the thought be a wicked one, such a thought-form may become a veritable evil influence, lasting perhaps for many years, and having for a time all the appearance ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... in fact, been brooding over some affair of the heart. A day in advance he therefore gave proper injunctions to Pei Ming. "As I shall be going out of doors to-morrow at daybreak," he said, "you'd better get ready two horses and wait at the back door! No one else need follow as an ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... black background of the cloud. It really seemed as if Nature held her breath in anticipating terror. Higher and higher rose the cloud—fiercer and fiercer flashed the lightning, sterner and sterner came the peals of the solemn thunder. Still Nature held her breath, still fear deep and brooding reigned. The wild tint still was spread over all things—the pines and hemlocks near at hand seeming blanched with affright beneath it. Suddenly a darkness smote the air—a mighty rush was heard—the trees seemed ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... rousing up from his brooding, and he saw Wunpost turning guiltily away. "Ah, I knew it!" he burst out; "I misdoubted it all the time, but you thought you could keep it from me. But when I came down from Panamint, to see where the waterspout had struck, and found it tearing in from Woodpecker Canyon, ...
— Wunpost • Dane Coolidge
... That day Roger Hapgood got no farther than the bar-room at the front of the house. There he sat in one of the rickety chairs, brooding, sullen, and silent, smoking cigarettes, drinking high-balls, and cursing the whole God-forsaken West. And ...
— Under Handicap - A Novel • Jackson Gregory
... time I felt a thrill of anticipation shoot through my veins. Why, I could not say. Her tone was peculiar, and she spoke in a sort of brooding way as though she were weighing something in her own mind; but then her manner had been peculiar throughout. Whatever it was that aroused my suspicion, I determined henceforth to keep a very sharp eye upon her ladyship. ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... Thornfield, the seat of her wealthy neighbour, Mr. Rochester, how shall your Catherine's trembling pen unfold the mysteries by which she finds herself surrounded! No sooner had I entered this battlemented mansion than a cold chill struck through me, as with a sense of some brooding terror. All, indeed, was elegance, all splendour! The arches were hung with Tyrian-dyed curtains. The ornaments on the pale Parian mantelpiece were of red Bohemian glass. Everywhere were crimson couches and sofas. The ...
— Old Friends - Essays in Epistolary Parody • Andrew Lang
... applies to myself, for I am certain I would not have recuperated so soon had it not been that I was relieved from a great deal of care and worry by my confidence in him, while I have had enough to employ my mind to keep me from brooding sorrow. I am now confident the doctor gave me the best possible advice when he said, 'You had better not give ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... Black are the brooding clouds and troubled the deep waters, when the Sea of Thought, first heaving from a calm, gives up its Dead. Monsters uncouth and wild, arise in premature, imperfect resurrection; the several parts and shapes of different ...
— The Chimes • Charles Dickens
... a watchful hen-mother was apparently seeing nothing, and yet all the time was tenderly brooding over the little chick whom she hoped was soon about to take flight from the parent nest, saw at a glance that her chick looked nothing at all beside that superior chicken of Mrs. Meadowsweet's. For Matty's little nose was sadly burnt, and one lock of her thin limp hair was flying not too picturesquely ...
— The Honorable Miss - A Story of an Old-Fashioned Town • L. T. Meade
... the attitude of Napoleon, the same which he retained throughout the whole of this retreat. It was grave, silent, and resigned; suffering much less in body than others, but much more in mind, and brooding over his misfortunes. At that moment General Charpentier sent him from Smolensk a convoy of provisions. Bessieres wished to take possession of them, but the Emperor instantly had them forwarded ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... abandoned all that. She began to be absorbed in dress, and that, too, she gave up. She did, for a time, undertake her daughter's education, but she got tired of that too, and handed her over to a governess. She ended by spending her whole time in sentimental brooding and tender melancholy. The birth of Elena Nikolaevna had ruined her health, and she could never have another child. Nikolai Artemyevitch used to hint at this fact in justification of his intimacy with Augustina Christianovna. Her husband's ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... sold his outfit except the few belongings he cherished, and boarded a west-bound stage. Once on the way he recovered from his brooding mood and gradually awakened to the fact that he was riding to a new country, a new adventure—the biggest of his life—in which he must make amends to his mother, and to Lucy. Quite naturally he included Lucy in the ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... during his absence they had been regulating their lives by his minute instructions, and depending upon him for guidance after he should return. But what if he should never return? And why hadn't he come already? These thoughts were too much for them. Judie sat in her corner brooding over her trouble, and crying a little now and then. Joe was simply frightened, and his eyes grew bigger and rounder than ever. Tom was sustained in part by the thought that the burden of responsibility was now on him, and so he suppressed all manifestations ...
— The Big Brother - A Story of Indian War • George Cary Eggleston
... of him. Her eyes were deep pools of sapphire. She was smiling gently and brooding above something which nestled in her arms. He called to her softly; she paid him no attention. Far below the ridge, in obedience to his commands, the animals were still shouting. Was it because of them that ...
— Christmas Outside of Eden • Coningsby Dawson
... let it go at that—'her mere presence'—" rejoined Bundy. But Solon protested, defending the lady's activities. He became sensitive to any mention of her name, and fell to brooding. He believed her to be a model woman, and little Roscoe ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... story only made the place more interesting. But now I said to myself that I wished I had never spoken so lightly. Perhaps the ghost had brought me bad luck. I felt as if the murder must have happened on just such a still, brooding, damp night as this. Maybe it was the anniversary, if ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... embittered every moment. His love increasing with the passage of time rendered his position hateful in the extreme. The feeling within that he had talent which only required opportunity stung him like a scorpion. The days went by, and everything remained the same. Continual brooding and bitterness of spirit went near to drive ...
— After London - Wild England • Richard Jefferies
... that she took a lively interest in this bit of Shanghai but a step out of the Occident, for her face had lost its heavy brooding and she asked him many questions. It was an hour before Masters' name was mentioned, and then ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton
... she held it eagerly to her breast,—to the right side. We could see her eyes bright with a surprising tenderness and joy, bending over this bundle of clothes. She held it as a woman holds her sucking child; opening out her night-gown impatiently, and holding it close, and brooding over it, and murmuring foolish little words, as over one whom his mother comforteth, and who sucks and is satisfied. It was pitiful and strange to see her wasted dying look, keen and ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... daughter's presence distressed and irritated her, and by the doctor's advice Nesta had gone to her as little as possible, while taking every care to guard her and see to her comfort. All day long she sat brooding—and only Esther Mawson, now for some time in her full confidence, knew that her brooding was rapidly developing into a monomania. Mrs. Mallathorpe, indeed, had but one thought in her mind—the eventual circumventing of Pratt, and the ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... Tom gathered a tolerably clear notion of the poor poet's state of body and mind; as a self-indulgent, unmethodical person, whose ill-temper was owing partly to perpetual brooding over his own thoughts, and partly to dyspepsia, brought on by his own effeminacy—in both cases, not a thing to be pitied or excused by the hearty and valiant Doctor. And Tom's original contempt for Vavasour took a darker form, perhaps ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... I'm really uncertain, yet, as to the best attitude." Imogen was listening to this with some gravity of gaze. "Do take that last position we decided upon, Imogen. And do you, Mary, take the place of the faltering old Oedipus for a moment. Look down, Imogen; yes, a strong, brooding ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... afford steering way, swept majestically down stream, borne by the force of the current, which veered from bank to bank. We were moving scarcely swifter than from eight to ten miles an hour, and the monotonous voice of the man casting the lead line arose continuous through the brooding silence. The only other perceptible sounds were the exhaust of the steam pipes and the splash of running water. Thockmorton had told me we were already approaching the mouth of the Illinois, and I lingered against the rail, straining my eyes ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... over each other in a quiet ecstasy of harmony; mellow as the song of the hermit-thrush, but much softer, as if he feared lest any should hear but her to whom he sang. Those who know the music of the rose-breasted grosbeak (not his robin-like song of spring, but the exquisitely soft warble to his brooding mate) may multiply its sweetness indefinitely, and so form an idea of what the pine-grosbeak's song ...
— Ways of Wood Folk • William J. Long
... with some hesitation and difficulty, "you will probably wish to get away for a change. I therefore advise you to go up for the winter examination at the Staff College. There is no doubt about your getting through. The work will prevent you from brooding over your thoughts, and afterwards there will be Berlin and entire change of surroundings. All that ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... continued employment of some kind, will make a man cheerful; but sitting at home, brooding and thinking, or doing little, will bring gloom. The reaction of this feeling is wonderful. It arises from a sense of duty done, and it also enables us to do ...
— The Evolution of Expression Vol. I • Charles Wesley Emerson
... opportunity was his. For a moment he even thought of Mr. Jarvis at the music-hall alone, the welcoming lights, the pleasant warmth, the music, the cheerful throngs of people. Better anything, he told himself, than this brooding! A sudden almost reckless impulse called him back again into the streets, only to pass away the same moment with the vision of Ruth's pale face by his side, her eyes alternately gazing down the lighted way and seeking his, her fingers ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... open-minded excitement of the scientist. The others were alert and preoccupied in turn, but there was an element of reserve in their attitude. Their eyes kept going off into space, fixing there until their look became one brooding question. They avoided conversation. They avoided ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... arts and sciences and accomplishments; and the King loved him with exceeding love and cherished him by reason of his proficiency in eloquence and rhetoric and the art of government and for that which Allah had given him of compassion and brooding care[FN58] with his lieges for he was a King just in his Kingship and a protector of his peoples, constant in beneficence to great and small and giving them that which befitted them of good governance and bounty and protection and security and a lightener ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... the Negro has been interested rather in expression than in action; interested in life itself rather than in its reconstruction or reformation. The Negro is, by natural disposition, neither an intellectual nor an idealist like the Jew, nor a brooding introspective like the East Indian, nor a pioneer and frontiersman like the Anglo-Saxon. He is primarily an artist, loving life for its own sake. His metier is expression rather than action. The Negro is, so to speak, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 4, 1919 • Various
... 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 living a second time. The world was transfigured; they were aware of measureless rapture brooding close about them in the twilight of which they were a part—a rapture, a sense of enchantment, that people are only conscious of as children or when they are ...
— Four Days - The Story of a War Marriage • Hetty Hemenway
... set me brooding o'er the desert drear, Where broodeth darkness as the deepest night. From many a mosque there comes the call to prayer; I hear no voice that calls on Christ for light. But still I wait For the messenger of Christ, ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... to the work at hand, but should rather increase it. Upon leaving his office, the brain worker should cultivate the habit of forgetting all about his business, except in so far as he believes that some particular point needs special attention out of office hours. The habit of brooding over business is detrimental to efficiency and is also suicidal to ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Austrian Kaiser lived a little while longer, the prolongation of his life would have been most disastrous both for Austria and Hungary. I believe after the death of Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and after a year of war the German Emperor and autocracy were brooding over a plan according to which, on the death of Francis Joseph, the successor should be allowed to rule only as King or Grand-Duke of Austria, the title of Emperor of Austria to disappear and German Princes to be placed upon the thrones of Hungary and of a new kingdom of Bohemia. ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... Dickerson came out with eulogy for any man his status was settled for good and all. Margaret plunged once more into her treasures of early schooldays. Floss and Elinor made merry over some verses Margaret had handed up with a blush. Helen apparently lapsed into a brooding abstraction. And presently Dorothy excused herself, and kissing Margaret good-bye, ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... in the gloomy room in Lincoln's Inn, and in spite of heart-sickness he worked on stolidly and well. The evenings were his worst time, when he went back to the empty house at Cheyne Walk and sat on the balcony brooding over his troubles, until the light faded and an eerie darkness crept ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... I am! (She goes to the wide seat, and sits down, brooding. The Gypsy steals in, and crouches on the dais beside the wide seat.) A good queen, and ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... irresponsibility: it is youth that can delight in its own excess of shade, and can even dispense with sunshine—hugging to its heart the memory of its own often self-created distresses and conjuring up and, with self-satisfaction, brooding over the pain and imagined horrors of a lifetime. Maturity and age kindly bring their own relief—rendering this kind of ministry to itself no longer desirable, even were it possible. The Master of Ballantrae indeed marks the crisis. It shows, and effectively shows, the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... a man to be remembered for a long time, that major. I can see him now, in my mind's eye, sitting there, brooding, staring out toward Lens and the German lines. And I think that if I were choosing a figure for some great sculptor to immortalize, to typify and represent the superb, the majestic imperturbability of the British Empire in time of stress ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... this, the minister himself drew up a chair and sat down. The question was daring, but the whole way and manner of the man were so quiet and gentle, so sympathizing and firm at once, that it would have lured a bird off its nest; much more the brooding reserve from a heart it is not nursing but killing. Diana looked at him, met the wise, kind, grave eye she had learned long ago to trust,—and broke down. All of a sudden; she had not dreamed she was in any ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... fix, and I'm going to give you one more chance to get us out of it. Don't try to think with your head, let your feet think for you, and maybe they'll carry you to the right gulch. If they don't—" Folsom scanned the brooding heavens and his lips compressed. "We're in for a storm and—we'll never weather it. Take one look while there's light to see by, then turn your feet loose and pray that they lead you right, for if they don't, by God, ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... Aware that the sentences were poison, she summoned her constitutional antagonism to the mad step proposed, so far nullifying the virus as to make her shrink from the madness. Even then her soul cried out to her husband, Who drives me to read? or rather, to brood upon what she read. The brooding ensued, was the thirst of her malady. The best antidote she could hit on was the writer's face. Yet it expressed him, his fire and his courage—gifts she respected in him, found wanting in herself. Read by Lord Ormont, this letter would mean ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... generally less interesting objects than the women; their countenances and hues were very varied, according to the part of the African coast from which they came; some were soot-black, having a certain ferocity of aspect that indicated strong and fierce passions, like men who were darkly brooding over some deep-felt wrongs, and meditating revenge. When any one was ordered, he came forward with a sullen indifference, threw his arms over his head, stamped with his feet, shouted to show the soundness of his lungs, ran up and down the room, and was treated exactly like a horse put through ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... shoulder and thrust her from the hut, tumbling her over the ledge. Marie rose, groaning with pain, being severely bruised. The cup of her indignation, which had long been full, was now overflowing. She slowly returned to her home in Guayave, brooding over schemes of revenge, and formed the determination to betray her husband into the hands of justice. She called upon Dr. Duncan, a rich planter and a magistrate, and offered to guide him to the spot where Jack Shadow, the daring ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... his race, he contemplates revenge. All his idle hours are spent brooding over plans to frustrate the designs of his rival—in short, to put him out of ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... weep. Over and over again she told herself that nothing should part her from the boys, that she would devote her life to repair as far as possible the injury she had done them. And Ada, would she also suffer for her (Katherine's) sins? But while brooding constantly on these miserable thoughts she kept a brave front, quiet and steady, though Miss Payne saw that her composure hid a ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander
... had the good sense to restrain criticism within strict limits, and corrected style rather than matter. He was a writer, an essayist with no slight leaven of the poet, and had learnt early that the everyday world held naught in common with the brooding of the soul. ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... hardly commit a worse sacrilege, and that some time he would surely be called to account for it. But here he checked himself suddenly, not daring to go further. One would have no peace of mind left if one went on brooding over such things in this fashion. He realized the enormity of what he had done. He had tried to be sorry for it. It was perhaps the worst thing he had ever done, but now he had reached the lowest point. He would take ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... of the day he spoke little; and I could tell from his expression and general air of dejection that he was still brooding over the incident. The following morning—we stayed the night in a wayside inn—Kniaz informed me that the route we had intended taking to Skaravoski—the town I meant to make the head quarters for my daily excursions—was ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... again was restless. Social life had no appeal for her. There was something much more genuine in Russia or even in Europe—something much more alive, much less artificial. Her aunt Martha Wadsworth tried to interest her in other things, take her mind off the brooding dissatisfaction ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... suppose you can't understand how a fellow falls so deep in love on such short acquaintance, but I have been brooding over this for months—there's nothing hasty or ill-considered about it, I can assure you. I am terribly hard hit, sir; it means ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... was leaning forward, her eyes brooding over the black outlines, her ears sensuously absorbing the gurgle of the currents. A big market boat from Palestrina winged past them, sliding over the oily water. Several silent figures were standing in ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick
... find so useful where laundries are but a name. Again Lone stopped and bent to examine it as Swan spread it out in his hands. A few tiny grains of sandstone rattled out, and in the centre was a small blood spot. Swan looked up straight into Lone's dark, brooding eyes. ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... the climax of trouble that had been brooding sullenly for a week. In annual town-meeting Smyrna and Vienna had voted to change over the inter-urban highway so that it would skirt Rattledown Hill instead of climbing straight over it, as the fathers had laid it out in the old days for the sake of directness; forgetting ...
— The Skipper and the Skipped - Being the Shore Log of Cap'n Aaron Sproul • Holman Day
... no more! Glegg, take a flag of truce, And bear to Hull this summons to surrender. Tell him Tecumseh and his force are here— A host of warriors brooding on their wrongs, Who, should resistance flush them to revenge, Would burst from my control like wind-borne fire, And match on earth the miseries of hell. But, should he yield, his safety is assured. Tell him Tecumseh's word is pledged to this, Who, ...
— Tecumseh: A Drama • Charles Mair
... page boy, whose passion for the lady who has just become Mrs. Garnet has for many months been a byword in the servants' hall). Huh! (To himself bitterly.) Tike care, tike care, lest some day you drive me too far. [Is left brooding darkly. ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... at the shed. He was a brooding, unsociable sort of man, and it didn't make any difference to the chaps whether he had a union ticket or not. It was pretty well known in the shed—there were three or four chaps from the district he was reared in—that he'd done five years hard for burglary. ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... Martindale,' said Percy, reading a second time the lines to which she alluded. 'They do recall the evening scene; Mount Vesuvius and its brooding cloud, and the trails of phosphoric light upon the sea. I mark these for approval. But have you anything to say for ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he. Indeed, he always felt that Government stood alone and desperate, with its back to the wall. He was too quixotic to have ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... the want of hope in the old man's face as he moved about brooding over his troubles. Odysseus was uncertain whether he should throw his arms about his father's neck and clasp him to his heart and kiss him, or whether it were better to ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer
... checked his rage, and Reginald sat brooding in sullen anger on the ground. At last he started up and left the room, saying to Louis, "It's all your fault, then—you've no spirit, and you don't want me to ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... also herself, the best of her sisters, is driven Out of her native land; but her own misfortunes forgetting, Others she seeks to console, and, though helpless, is also most helpful. Great are the woes and distress which over the earth's face are brooding, But may happiness not be evoked from out of this sorrow? May not I, in the arms of my bride, the wife I have chosen, Even rejoice at the war, as ...
— The Poems of Goethe • Goethe
... was not born the heir to the rank he obtained. He was but a distant relation to the head of the house which he afterwards represented. Brought up in an Italian university, he was distinguished for his learning and his eccentricities. There, too, I suppose, brooding over old wives' tales about freedom, and so forth, he contracted his carbonaro, chimerical notions for the independence of Italy. Suddenly, by three deaths, he was elevated, while yet young, to a station and ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... won't," she said, more than half to herself. She sat brooding for a moment; then suddenly her mood changed. She sprang up, shook her skirts free, and seated herself at the piano. To Orde, who had also arisen, she made a quaint ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... of the pearly gateways of Paradise. On the other side rose the contorted lava mountains, their bleak heads knocking against the solid sky and stained of an inky blackness, which changed into a still more lurid tint where the local reds struggled up through the shadow that lay brooding over the desolate scene. If within the domain of nature such another region is to be found, it can only be in the heart of those awful solitudes which science has unveiled to us amid the untrodden fastnesses ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... without suspicion by the children not as a nurse, but as a playmate. Weeks passed. The four played together with a greater harmony than the three had ever attained. Day after day the Reverend Orme sat waiting in his study and brooding. The dreaded call never came. He began ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... This indicates a confusion in the minds of the Egyptian dragomans with the two brooding birds of Osiris, Isis and Nephthys, considered as Zarait, that is to say, as two birds of a different species, according to the different traditions ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... treachery, and treason. But what reward had it for the lonely, embittered, stricken man whose genius and courage had gained for it the great Northwest territory? What reward had the Republic for him who sat brooding in his house above ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... care nor pain; But now, like that same tender tree, When once rude hands its fruit profane, Ill-omen'd birds and shapes of ill Troop to its branches, crowding still,— And sorrows never known till now Have cast their shadows on my brow: A ruin is my heart become Where brooding sadness finds a home; See—those bright leaves fall, one by one, And I—my latest ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... especially at Strasburg that travellers are reminded of another "marvellous boy," who, if he did not "perish in his pride," certainly shortened his days by overreaching ambition and the brooding ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... rich prize to escape her. Her own lover, it was true, irritated her more than any man she had ever met, but at least he would afford her refuge from the bread of charity. Jessica Dearwood, an orphan, had been brought up by a distant relative. She had not been the child to win affection. Of silent, brooding nature, every thoughtless incivility had been to her an insult, a wrong. Acceptance of young Camelford seemed her only escape from a life that had become to her a martyrdom. At forty-one he would wish he had remained a bachelor; but at ...
— The Philosopher's Joke • Jerome K. Jerome
... the Carrier sat brooding on his hearth, now cold and dark, other and fiercer thoughts began to rise within him, as an angry wind comes rising in the night. The Stranger was beneath his outraged roof. Three steps would take him to his chamber-door. ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... was easy and generous, but he had never been in the habit of thinking much, and thinking, especially as it led to brooding, was not good for him. From the first, of course, he had been hurt that the office should have thought it necessary to send Bannon to supersede him, but so long as he had plenty to do and was in Bannon's company every hour of the day, he had ...
— Calumet 'K' • Samuel Merwin
... the churches, processions and promises. We saw the gray showers sail around the horizon, heard their far-off thunders, saw the lightning zigzag down through the slanting torrents, and almost saw the hills grow green under them. The only tempests we had were those we saw brooding on the brows of scowling contadini. They talked openly of a republic, they were sick of the devouring taxes, they regretted the papacy: there was certainly danger of some "scompiglio," my padrone di ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... Tussaud's; everything else to be sold for the foundation of an Asylum for Old Jokes. A knock at the door. Heaven help me!—two Interviewers! "Come in," I said, with the conventional "cheery voice." Anticipated the worst, but worse than I anticipated. HORNBLOWER and HACKING are brooding over me; assert they have been sent by the LORD MAYOR. "Thought Transference" again! Well, I should have committed suicide, and now I can be released without crime. It won't last long. If I might suggest my obsequies, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various
... But the captain refused to allow them off the vessel, as they had been placed in his charge by Mr. Runciman, and so they had to content themselves with gazing at Table Mountain from the deck of the ship, or rather at the tablecloth, as the brooding cloud was called, which hid the ...
— The Adventurous Seven - Their Hazardous Undertaking • Bessie Marchant
... an edict. There is a touch of the Teacher in this, I think. He has given Rome Peace; he is master of the world, and now has grown old. He enjoys no regal splendor, no pomp or retinue; his life is as that of any other senator, but simpler than most. And his mind is ever brooding over Rome, watchful for the ideas that may purify Roman life and raise it to ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... earn a cent, and then, If he refused to marry her . . . well, what? She saw him laughing, making a foolish joke, His grey eyes turning quickly; and the words Fled from her tongue . . . She saw him sitting silent, Brooding over his morning coffee, maybe, And tried again . . . she bit her lips, and trembled, And looked away, and said . . . 'Say Paul, boy,—listen— There's something I must tell you . . . ' There she stopped, Wondering what he'd say . . . What would he ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... in the rue de Sontay then, and the telephone was in my workroom. One night late, as I sat brooding there, the bell startled me; and ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... sudden change in the deputy's language, the King, no longer smiling, threw himself violently upon his chair of state, where he remained, brooding with a gloomy countenance upon the language which had been addressed to him. It was evident, said an eye-witness, that he was deeply offended. He changed color frequently, so that all present "could remark, from the working of his face, how much ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... with them; and after a long brooding over her ill-temper, it began to wear out, not to be conquered, but to depart of itself; she thought she might as well learn her lesson and have done with it; so by way of getting rid of the task, not of ...
— The Pigeon Pie • Charlotte M. Yonge
... them again, and again caressed them, parted their hair with his fingers. And as Annette would open her eyes and gaze in his, with an air of sweetest acknowledgment, his thoughts seemed contending with something fearful. He was in trouble; he saw the enemy brooding over the future; he heaved a sigh, a convulsive motion followed, a tear stealing down his cheek told ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... thing he did on finding himself alone in the fast falling night was to tiptoe to Slightly's tree, and make sure that it provided him with a passage. Then for long he remained brooding; his hat of ill omen on the sward, so that a gentle breeze which had arisen might play refreshingly through his hair. Dark as were his thoughts his blue eyes were as soft as the periwinkle. Intently he listened ...
— Peter and Wendy • James Matthew Barrie
... drink—which with industry they could easily do. All this might not make them cheerful; but they would certainly be less a prey to melancholy while engaged in some active industry, than if they remained brooding over their fate. ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... Now it so happens that what he would cure her of is incurable, being, in fact, eternal, divine—simple human love. So, to his pious and cynical admonitions she answers with strange inconsistency. Long brooding over his taunts will sometimes make her, to whom he is always the divinity, actually believe, despite her reiteration, that she had sinned out of obedience to him, that she really is a polluted creature, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... he has lived with his brother, and spends his time in brooding over his grievances and bewailing his shattered illusions. He has lost none of that fluency which gained him an ephemeral literary reputation, and can speak by the hour on political and social questions to any one who will listen to him. It is extremely difficult, however, to follow ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... ............Of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born In Stygian cave forlorn ............'Mongst horrid shapes, and shrieks, and sights unholy! Find out some uncouth cell, ............Where brooding Darkness spreads his jealous wings, And the night-raven sings; ............There, under ebon shades and low-browed rocks, As ragged as thy locks, ............In dark Cimmerian desert ever dwell. But come, thou Goddess fair and free, In heaven yclept Euphrosyne, And by men heart-easing ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton
... himself as he supped alone in the parlour. The bewilderment had passed; the courage and spirit of Mary had infected his own, and the stirring strange life of the palace had distracted him from that dreadful brooding into which he had at ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... did, Craig could see nothing, for there was no light in the huge vault outside. For minutes the brooding silence was not broken, save by an occasional scraping sound made by one of the searching line of men. There was no hint of the girl who waited beside the hideous figure of the god, nor of the network that gradually closed ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... swearing, if you like. There's a tendency in our time to excess of humanitarianism—I mean a sort of lachrymose habit which really does no good. You represent it in some degree, I'm afraid—eh? Well, well, you've lived too much alone—you've got into the way of brooding; the habit of social ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing
... presently followed a mental calm that expelled all this confusion. The goal waxed and waned as he gazed down the great avenue with its precise rows of lamps. Far away he could discern the outline of the brooding Louvre. ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... comments, answering them as best she could. She had waited patiently until Sir Dugald's barbarous eleven o'clock supper was over, and then she had gone to her room, stirred the fire, and dropped down upon the hearth-rug to think it over. She thought over it for a long time, her handsome eyes brooding over the red coals, but after about half an hour she spoke out aloud to the silence ...
— Theo - A Sprightly Love Story • Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett
... end, have you seen Gerard Van Derwater recently? I heard that he joined the diplomatic service at Washington after leaving college. I often think of him with his strange pallor, but suggestion of brooding strength. Did it ever strike you that every one respected him, and yet he really never had a close friend? It always seemed to me that he carried about with him a sense of impending tragedy. Find out what he is doing, ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... coming judgment or the coming eternity. Yet she reaps rather than sows. It lies with another to gather the money which purchaseth all things, and with her to taste the fruits of the purchase. It is the father who sows. It is he who sits in busy and brooding anxiety over his speculations, wrinkled, perhaps, by care, and sobered by years into an utter distaste for the splendors and insignificancies of fashionable life." The father sows, and he reaps in ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Dwight Moody
... represent may have been the gods of Homer, but they were the Homeric gods transformed by the creative imagination of a more reflective age, and purified by a poetic, if not a philosophic, idealism. But while AEschylus suggests "a deeply brooding mind, tinged with mysticism, grappling with dark problems of life and fate,"[2] and so was, in some ways, remote from the clarity and definition of sculptural form, Sophocles "invests the conceptions of popular religion ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner
... had he been conscious of so overpowering a feeling of repulsion as now. The cannibal atrocities of these human beasts, the glowering heads stuck all over the stockade,—the latest addition thereto being those of the slain Ba-gcatya,—the all-pervading influence of death brooding over this demoniacal haunt, even as the ever-present circlings of carrion birds high in mid-air—all this weighed upon his mind until he could have blown out his own brains for sheer horror ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... the election Harboro came home and found a letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He found also a disquieted Sylvia, who looked at him with brooding and a question ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... with these two, that when they were together, Keawe's heart was stilled; but so soon as he was alone he fell into a brooding horror, and heard the flames crackle, and saw the red fire burn in the bottomless pit. The girl, indeed, had come to him wholly; her heart leapt in her side at sight of him, her hand clung to his; and she was so fashioned from the hair upon her head to the nails ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the battle which had opened the campaign, and there had been no further movement on the part of the enemy. Smith was puzzled. A strange quiet seemed to be brooding over the other camp. He could not believe that a single defeat had crushed the foe, but it was hard to think ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... undisturbed; and the moonlit camp, with its anxious generals, its weary soldiers, its fearful machinery of destruction, all strewn along the bank of the great river, remained plunged in silence, as if brooding over the chances of the morrow and the failures of the past. And hardly four miles away another army—twice as numerous, equally confident, equally brave—were waiting impatiently for the morning and the final settlement of the ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... darkness did not come to restore the drooping world. As the shades begin to gather around us, our primeval instincts are aroused, and we steal forth from our lairs, like the inhabitants of the jungle, in search of those silent and brooding thoughts which are the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... germinated in the brain of Cortes the idea of conquest. One revelation was confirmed by another, and, as the evidence of Aztec wealth multiplied the proofs of internal disaffection throughout the {136} empire stimulated the confidence of the brooding conqueror. Disloyalty among the Totonacs, treachery that only waited an opportunity in Texcoco, an ancient tradition of hate in Tlascala, and the superstition that obscured the judgment and paralyzed the action of the despotic ...
— South American Fights and Fighters - And Other Tales of Adventure • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... been reassuring enough at the time. But that was six months ago. And now here was the Tessie who sat on the back porch, evenings, surveying the sunset. A listless, lackadaisical, brooding Tessie. Little point to going downtown Saturday nights now. There was no familiar, beloved figure to follow you swiftly as you turned off Elm Street, homeward bound. If she went downtown now, she saw only those Saturday-night ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber |
