"Retrospection" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breathe to mock you. Slow, indeed, is such a mind to credit that the never-failing resource can at least be wanting. But so it is. Like a dried-up fountain, the perennial flow and bright fertility have ceased, and ceased for ever. Then comes the madness of retrospection. ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... divide them into two groups, of three each. The first to include (1) Progressive retrospection, viz., a gradually acquired power to look backward in time towards the origin of things; (2) Progressive foresight, or power of prophecy; (3) Gradual extinction of desires ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... I say of this fourteen years' experience as a public advocate of the cause of my enslaved brothers and sisters? The time is but as a speck, yet large enough to justify a pause for retrospection—and a pause ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... may have been coloured by retrospection in later years, says that before the success of the first Discourse, Rousseau concealed his pride under the external forms of a politeness that was timid even to obsequiousness; in his uneasy glance ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... man's extraordinary tissue of retrospection was increasing, and I felt that I must not doubt nor deny; to do so would be to break the ...
— The Vizier of the Two-Horned Alexander • Frank R. Stockton
... thought, she recalled the key-word, and the rule that he whispered to her—also the squeeze he gave her hand, and the kiss with the eyes. The Count had fine eyes—he could look much, very much.... She smiled in retrospection.... Yet how did she drop that bit of paper—and where?... Or did she drop it?... All the rest were there. It was very peculiar.... She had referred to the De Neviers slip on last Saturday—and she distinctly remembered that the Count's was there at that time. Consequently she must have dropped ...
— The Cab of the Sleeping Horse • John Reed Scott
... a fragrant retrospection, for the loving thoughts that start Into being are like perfumes from the blossom of the heart; And to dream the old dreams over is a luxury divine— When my truant fancies wander with ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... chilled. He loved, admired, almost worshipped the beautiful girl from whom consent had been extorted, and her quiet, cold manner, troubled his sorely. Glimpses of the real truth dawned into his mind. He let his thoughts go back, and went over again, in retrospection, every particular of their intercourse—dwelling minutely upon her words, looks, manner and emotions at the time he first pressed his suit upon her. The result was far from satisfactory. She had not met his advances as he had hoped; but rather fled from him—and he had gained ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... as he recalled Sheeta's great rage, his frantic efforts to free himself from the entangling strands, his uncanny screams that were part hate, part anger, part terror. He smiled in retrospection at the discomfiture of his enemy, and in anticipation of another day as he added an extra ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Life Prayer In the Long Run As you go through Life Two Sunsets Unrest Artist's life Nothing but Stones Inevitable The Ocean of Song "It might have been" Momus, God of Laughter I Dream The Sonnet The Past A Dream Uselessness Will Winter Rain Life Burdened Let them go Five Kisses Retrospection Helena Nothing Remains Comrades What Gain? To the West The Land of Content Warning After the Battles are over And they are dumb Night All for me Into Space Through Dim Eyes The Punished Half Fledged The Year The Unattained ...
— Poems of Cheer • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... done. He was now an old man of eighty-two summers and his feeble body was racked by a painful malady. Yet he kept his face towards the morning. About a hundred of his letters, written after this time, have been preserved. These letters show no retrospection, no looking backward. They never mention "the good old times." As long as he lived, Franklin looked forward. His interest in the mechanical arts and in scientific progress seems never to have abated. He writes in October, 1787, to a friend in France, describing his ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... This retrospection, as we shall have occasion later on to recur to the subject of devotion to the dead in England, must necessarily be both brief and cursory. But even the merest outlines are of interest, for they prove that prayer ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... the flight. I remember well that I dashed up the Strand, and dashed down a singular little shed, from which emanated the steam of tea, and a sharp, querulous scream of "All hot—all hot! a penny a pint." I see, now, by the dim light of retrospection, a vision of an old woman in the kennel, and a pewter pot of mysterious ingredients precipitated into a greengrocer's shop, "te virides inter lauros," as Vincent would have said. On we went, faster and faster, as the rattle rung in our ears, and the tramp of the enemy ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... riot and wine. Who cared? But the desire burnt itself out between two puffs of his cigar. Ten years ago, perhaps, this particular brand of amusement might have urged him successfully. But not now; he was done with tomfool nights. Indeed, his dissipations had been whimsical rather than banal; and retrospection never aroused a furtive sense ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... the futility of all artistic and intellectual effort when disconnected from the ultimate test of the conduct it inspired. The serene and soothing touch of history also aroused old enthusiasms, although some of their manifestations were such as one smiles over more easily in retrospection than at the moment. I fancy that it was no smiling matter to several people in our party, whom I induced to walk for three miles in the hot sunshine beating down upon the Roman Campagna, that we might enter the Eternal City on foot through the Porta del Popolo, as pilgrims had done for centuries. ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... same reason, I have confined my statements of theory as to method, to those which reflect my own experience; my "rules" were drawn from introspection and retrospection, at the urging of others, long after the instinctive method ...
— How to Tell Stories to Children - And Some Stories to Tell • Sara Cone Bryant
... which is beyond my reach." 'Tis often a true thing that when we sit within our dark and dismal chamber without comfort, hope or happy retrospection, there stands upon the threshold a joyous phenomenon of which we have never so much as dreamt as being in existence; and this had come to Constance. If the Duke loved her, what would it matter if Cedric did love Katherine? She could not compel him ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... ideas and antipathies symbolized by the battered scabbard before him, his course of love would run smoothly. It was just at this point that the trouble between them arose. She was looking back; he, forward. He could not enter into her sad and bitter retrospection, feeling that this was morbid and worse than useless. Remembering how cruelly she and her kindred had suffered, he made great allowances for her, and had often tried to soften the bitterness in her heart by reminding her that he, too, had lost kindred and property. ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe
... changes taking place within our own souls are deeper and likely to surprise us more in the end. Everything has been found untenable. Theories and systems are shaken by the great upheaval. Civilization has become a question instead of a postulate. All human thought is undergoing a process of retrospection, drawn by a desire to find a new and stable beginning. Take down Spencer and Comte or Lecky and Kidd from your bookshelf and try to settle down to a contented contemplation of the sociological tenets of the past. You will fail, for you will feel that this is a new ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... late, we are told, for retrospection. We have no choice between giving way and a sanguinary war. Surely it is rather too much that the country should be required to take the measure of the threatened evil from a Cabinet which by its being divided against itself, which by its ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... mind-consciousness of the night is a form of retrospection, or else it is a form of impulsive exclamation, direct from the blood, and unbalanced. Because the active physical consciousness of the night is the blood-consciousness, the most elemental form of consciousness. Vision is perhaps our highest form of dynamic upper consciousness. But our deepest ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... which this ardour of criticism has naturally given occasion, none is more obscure in itself, or more worthy of rational curiosity, than a retrospection of the progress of this mighty genius, in the construction of his work; a view of the fabrick gradually rising, perhaps, from small beginnings, till its foundation rests in the centre, and its turrets sparkle in the skies; to trace back the structure, through all its varieties, to the simplicity ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... hast a brace, To my lady once be kind; Give her half thy face behind. God of Time, if you be wise, Look not with your future eyes; What imports thy forward sight? Well, if you could lose it quite. Can you take delight in viewing This poor Isle's[2] approaching ruin, When thy retrospection vast Sees the glorious ages past? Happy nation, were we blind, Or had only eyes behind! Drown your morals, madam cries, I'll have none but forward eyes; Prudes decay'd about may tack, Strain their necks with looking back. Give me time when coming on; Who regards him ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... it developed. And "Do you remember——?" she in turn was asking later. It was to seem to him in retrospection that neither for the next half-hour began a sentence without this formula. It was as if they sought to use it as a master-word wherewith to reanimate the happinesses and sorrows of their common past, and as if they found the charm was potent ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... the vices of his own youthful days with shame and sorrow; and which, instead of conceding to young people to be wild and thoughtless, as a privilege belonging to their age and circumstances, prompts him to warn them against what had proved to himself matter of such bitter retrospection! Thus, throughout the whole of life, some means or other are devised for stifling the voice of conscience. "We cry peace while there is no peace;" and both to ourselves and others that complacency is furnished, which ought only to proceed from a consciousness ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... that of solitary confinement is probably the most cruel—the mind feeding on itself with the rapacity of a cormorant, when the conscience quickens its activity and feeds its longings. Happily for Adrienne, she had too many positive cares, to be enabled to waste many minutes either in retrospection, or in endeavors to conjecture the future. Far—far more happily for herself, her conscience was clear, for never had a purer mind, or a gentler spirit dwelt in female breast. Still she could blame her own oversight, and it was days before her self-upbraidings, for thus trifling with what she conceived ...
— Autobiography of a Pocket-Hankerchief • James Fenimore Cooper
... her family sorrow; she was not one at any time to dwell upon her feelings, nor to indulge in morbid retrospection, but it was true that the loss of that dearly loved son and brother had clouded the bright home atmosphere. Mrs. Lambert had borne her trouble meekly, and had striven to comfort her husband who had broken down under the sudden blow. She spoke little, even to her daughters, of ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... which surround yon rustic cot, While yet I linger here, Adieu! you are not now forgot, To retrospection dear. Streamlet[5] along whose rippling surge, My youthful limbs were wont to urge At noontide heat their pliant course; Plunging with ardour from the shore, Thy springs will lave these limbs no ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XX. No. 556., Saturday, July 7, 1832 • Various
... I cannot inform the reader, nor is it, perhaps, of much consequence. My father was a man who invariably looked forward, and hated anything like retrospection: he never mentioned either his father or his mother; perhaps he was not personally acquainted with them. All I could collect from him at intervals was, that he served in a collier from South Shields, and that a few months after his apprenticeship ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... and the blacksmith exchanged looks on hearing the old soldier give utterance to this singular retrospection ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... cannot count on raveled threads of age Whereof to weave a fabric. We must use The warp and woof the ready present yields And toil while daylight lasts. When I bethink How brief the past, the future still more brief, Calls on to action, action! Not for me Is time for retrospection or for dreams, Not time for self-laudation or remorse. Have I done nobly? Then I must not let Dead yesterday unborn to-morrow shame. Have I done wrong? Well, let the bitter taste Of fruit that turned to ashes on my lip Be my reminder ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... been a fool to give way to retrospection. He was no exception to the general rule; most men mismanaged their careers—more or less. Still, he was bound to confess that he had done so rather more than less. Oh well, he would settle down to his fate. As for that other girl ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... been sincere and efficacious. This one damning sin obscured all his good actions; and he felt if he died unconfessed, and with the weight of guilt upon his soul, he should perish everlastingly. Again he fled from the torment of retrospection, and again heard ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... straight as I did with Anna to what we thought the inevitable. I based no calculation on all Mrs. Harbottle had gone back to, just as I had based no calculation on her ten years' companionship in arms when I kept her from the three o'clock train. This last was a retrospection in which Anna naturally could not join me; she never knew, poor dear, how fortunate as to its moment was the campaign she deplored, and nothing to this day can have disturbed her conviction that the bond she was at such magnificent ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... wrote; "You ask many questions about our sufferings at Ava, but how can I answer them now? There would be some pleasure in reviewing those scenes if she were alive; now I can not. The only reflection that assuages the anguish of retrospection is, that she now rests far away, where no spotted-faced executioner can fill her heart with terror; where no unfeeling magistrate can extort the scanty pittance which she had preserved through every risk to sustain her fettered husband and famishing ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... was he sullying the pure soul? But there was no time for retrospection, the minutes were fleeting rapidly by, he had to return to his breakfast with his father, who would expect his last hours to ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... old gentleman, with an air of retrospection, "I don't recall nothin' of the sort in Wolfville. We're too much in a huddle, anyway; thar ain't room for no sech fracas, no how. Now the nearest we-alls comes to anythin' of the kind is when the new dance- hall starts ...
— Wolfville • Alfred Henry Lewis
... terminated my infantine serenity; from that moment I ceased to enjoy a pure unadulterated happiness, and on a retrospection of the pleasure of my childhood, I yet feel they ended here. We continue at Bossey some months after this event, but were like our first parents in the Garden of Eden after they had lost their innocence; in appearance ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... grass extending up to the trees of the Lawler domain. Brookfield was therefore without pretensions—it could hardly be called 'a place'—but, manifolded in dreams past and present, it extended indefinitely before Alice's eyes, and, absorbed by the sad sweetness of retrospection, she lingered while Olive ran through the rosary from the stables and back again, calling to her sister, making the sunlight ring with her light laughter. She refrained, therefore, from reminding her that it was here they used to play with Nell, ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... nothing, Which a contemplating vagabond would not have come to steal. Long and often had they figured for a larger valuation, But the size of their addition was the balance of a doubt: There were gentlemen of leisure in the Valley of the Shadow, Not allured by retrospection, disenchanted, ...
— The Three Taverns • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... a strain, covered so much ground in the last twenty-four hours, that he wanted to think how it had all come about. Lulled by the sound of the wind, the warm air, and the cool fragrance of the flowers, he sank into deep, drowsy retrospection. ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... brain. The flowers were coloured brighter, scents and music and the sunlight had a living value—were no longer mere reminders of past enjoyment. There was something now to live for which stirred him continually to anticipation. He lived in that, not in retrospection; the difference is considerable to any so old as he. The pleasures of the table, never of much consequence to one naturally abstemious, had lost all value. He ate little, without knowing what he ate; and every day grew thinner and more worn ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... since I entered public life, I have experienced many exciting hours under the influence of reformer, orator and actor, but, in this mood of retrospection, I do not know that I have ever passed through a more thrilling, terrible, and yet hopeful experience than last evening, while I listened to your interpretation of Eugene ...
— Damaged Goods - A novelization of the play "Les Avaries" • Upton Sinclair
... away the proud flesh of a wound, that is not yet so thoroughly digested, as to bear a painful application, and requires balsam and a gentler treatment. But when we were at Bath, I remember what you said once of the benefit of retrospection: and you charged me, whenever a proper opportunity offered, to remind you, by that one word, retrospection, of the charming conversation we had there, on our ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... antiquity [study of the past] paleontology, paleography, paleology[obs3]; paleozoology; palaetiology[obs3], archaeology; paleogeography; paleoecology; paleobotany; paleoclimatoogy; archaism, antiquarianism, medievalism, Pre-Raphaelitism; paleography. retrospect, retrospection, looking back, memory &c. 505. <— originally - preterition; priority &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... to give him her full attention. She had a feeling that she had seen the man somewhere before, but where and under what circumstances she could not recall. It was no moment for retrospection and the ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... to review my entire past life, my good 15 deeds, of which there were few that I could recall at the moment, and my misdeeds, of which there were many. I pondered if they would miss me at the office. I thought of other offices and other fellows and the nature of their retrospection, fellows who had been in positions similar 20 to mine—and I knew where they were, or rather, where they ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... annoyed—my dearest pleasure when free. I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them: they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... wondered afterward in dreary retrospection how he had survived that first troublous year after his daughter's elopement, when he was so lonely, so heavy-hearted at home, so harried and angered abroad. His comforts, it is true, were amply insured: a widowed sister had come to preside ...
— His "Day In Court" - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... pathos—a kind of tender retrospection in Anne Valery's manner as she touched the brown curls and smoothed the neat dress, which—riding hat and skirt having been laid aside or tucked up—made a pretty mountain-maiden out of Nathanael's wife. Agatha never could understand the peculiar fondness ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... let out his beast, But kept, through all the seasons' round, Silence unbroken and profound. No Prophecy, with ear applied To key-hole of the future, tried Successfully to catch a hint Of what he'd do nor when begin 't; As sternly did his past defy Mild Retrospection's backward eye. Though all admired his silent ways, The women loudest were in praise: For ladies love those men the most Who never, never, never boast— Who ne'er disclose their aims and ends To naughty, ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... the next morning, or rather late in the next day, after his night's work, he was no longer able to tell himself that the world was all right with him. Who does not know that sudden thoughtfulness at waking, that first matutinal retrospection, and prospection, into things as they have been and are to be; and the lowness of heart, the blankness of hope which follows the first remembrance of some folly lately done, some word ill-spoken, some money misspent,—or perhaps a cigar too much, or a glass of brandy and soda-water ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... know it wasn't, and I'm sure you'll say I'm right If ever it has been your wont to train around at night; How sweet is retrospection when one's heart is bathed in wine, And before its balmy breath how do the ills of life decline! How the gracious juices drown what griefs would vex a mortal breast, And float the flattered soul into the ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... them, was improved and elevated at every new epoch; but it had no memory, never looked backward, and was an ever rolling sphere, complete in itself, leaving no trail behind. Human life, under the discipline of letters and common schools, is not thus Hegelian, but advances under the boundless retrospection of literature. And yet this is probably divine philosophy. It is probable that the faculty of memory belongs to man only in an immature state of development, and that in some future and happier epoch the past will be known to us only as ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... attracted him: a riding master and a trio of brokers who were verging on embonpoint, and were desperate and looked it. They stood in a fair way of losing several pounds that morning. A good rider always smiles at the sight of a poor one, when a little retrospection should make him rather pitying. Hillard went on. The park was not lovely; the trees were barren, the grass yellow and sodden, and here and there were grimy cakes of ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... pathways that are the world to-day. The figure that one discerns in the compositions beginning with the "Dwarf Suite," Opus 16, is one that we all have known intimately a space. These pieces are not youth seen through the golden haze of retrospection. They are the expression of groping, fumbling youth as it feels and as it feels, itself to be. They are music young in all its excess, its violence, its sharp griefs and sharper joys, its unreflecting, trembling strength. The spring comes ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... whether my friends imagine me to be the same man whom they knew as Gilbert Pollingray a month back? I see the change, I feel the change; but I have no retrospection, no remorse, no looking forward, no feeling: none for others, very little, for myself. I am told that I am losing fluency as a dinner-table talker. There is now more savour to me in a silvery laugh than in a spiced wit. And this is the man who knows women, and is far too modest to give a decided ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... use to which the Passover anniversary can be put than to retrospection? "And when your children shall say unto you, What mean you by this service? ye shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's passover, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses." So the old story is told ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... of composition that may be denominated local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particular landscape, to be poetically described with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by historical retrospection, or incidental meditation. ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... fond of indulging, beyond a hope of sympathy, in such retrospection, may be the symptom of some sickly idiosyncrasy. Or is it owing to another cause; simply, that being without wife or family, I have not learned to project myself enough out of myself; and having no offspring of my own to dally with, I turn back upon memory and adopt my own early idea, as my ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... observations on such subjects are superfluous and unavailing, I leave the dead to their rest, and return to the dull business of life, which however presents nothing very pleasant to me either in prospect or retrospection. ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... Bourbon, Duchess de, no longer guided by La Rochefoucauld, she loses herself in aimless projects and compromises herself in intrigues without result, 3; the most ill-treated of all the political women of the Fronde, 36; a retrospection of her career during the Fronde, 36; though no longer the brilliant Bellona of Stenay, she does not dream of separating her fate from that of Conde, 38; her conversion to be dated from her sojourn in the convent at Moulins, 38; she implores pardon of her husband, 39; she is taken ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... to merge the adjourned meeting in the one held at Chicago, because I saw no advantage, but great disadvantage, in one student's opinions or modus oper- [15] andi becoming the basis for others: read "Retrospection" on this subject. Science is absolute, and best under- stood through the study of my works and the daily Chris- tian demonstration thereof. It is their materiality that clogs the progress of students, and "this kind ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... 'Tis a fragrant retrospection—for the loving thoughts that start Into being are like perfume from the blossom of the heart; And to dream the old dreams over is a luxury divine— When my truant fancy wanders with that old ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... reading over the pages of this diary for the year just coming to a close. This has led me to some retrospection, looking yet farther back, and comparing the present with the last century. The 19th century was proud of itself; and we of the 20th have hardly gained all that we should in true humility. Both centuries have had their great events and great advances; and both, their ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... transfigured landscape in transfiguring words. He is the captain of our dreams. Others have lighted a candle in England, he lit a sun. Through him our daily suns, and also the backward and historic suns long since set, which he did not sing, are magnified; and he bestows upon us an exalted retrospection. Through him Napoleon's sun of Austerlitz rises, for us, with a more brilliant menace upon arms and the plain; through him Fielding's "most melancholy sun" lights the dying man to the setting-forth on that last voyage of his with such an immortal ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... a far-away look in his eyes betokening an effort of retrospection, withdrew the key from the lock and entered the garage, Gatton and I following. There was a sky window to light the place, so that when Bolton reclosed the door we could see well enough. His movements were as follows: Relocking the door from the inside, he walked slowly along to a smaller ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... to a co-educational boarding school. Here for the first time I became happy. A girl of my own age, of fine character and noticeable refinement, fell in love with me and caused me to reciprocate. On retrospection I believe this to have been a genuine and beautiful love on both sides. After a few months, however, our relation, at my initiative and against my friend's will, became a physical one. We expressed our affection ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... quoted the count. "Come, Colonel; do not waste time in useless retrospection. He stumbles who looks back. I have been thinking of your daughter. I ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... desk," returned the duke, the anger in his eyes giving place to gloomy retrospection. "Arnsberg, my boyhood playmate, the man I loved and trusted and advanced to the highest office in my power. Is that not the way? Do we ever trust any one fully without being in the end deceived? Well, dead or alive," the duke continued, his ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... the risks to which he may have exposed his country, is a great man. Complete unity of aims throughout, power given to carry them out, a wonderful absence of very serious mistakes, and finally a life sufficiently prolonged to admit of retrospection; in each of these respects the career of Bismarck ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... endeared to humanity, is in itself an infinite marvel, which vindicates, as a beautiful wonder, the statuary's art from the more Protean rivalry of pictorial skill. If we call to mind even a few of the sculptured creations which are "a joy forever," even to retrospection,—haunting by their pure individuality the temple of memory, permanently enshrined in heartfelt admiration as illustrations of what is noble in man and woman, significant in history, powerful in expression, or irresistible in grace,—we feel what a world of varied interest is hinted by the very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... were of great solemnity and calm. He lived in retrospection, and dwelt much upon the unseen world. The deep spirituality of his nature was shown in all his later life. He was absorbed, as it were, in thoughts of God, and of the ultimate destiny of man. All worldly interests ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... retrospection, as vividly as painted on a canvas, a phantasmagoric procession of past events, and of those to come in the travail of the Negro; commencing with the sailing of the first "Slaver's Ship" for the shores of the "New World", jammed fore and aft, from deck to hold, with its cargo of human ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... merely to kill time for a fortnight. The noblest estate, and the finest chateaux soon pall on those who possess nothing but the sight of them. The beauties of nature seem rather squalid compared to the representation of them at the opera. Paris, by retrospection, shines from all its facets. Unless some particular interest attaches us, as it did in Blondet's case, to scenes honored by the steps and lighted by the eyes of a certain person, one would envy the birds their wings and long to get back to the endless, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... lighted match Mrs. Pettengill's eyes sparkled with a kind of savage retrospection. She shrugged ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... drain from their veins the very life blood she gave to them. To drive you and them mad with the expected horror of such visitations—to make your nights hideous—your days but so many hours of melancholy retrospection. Oh, you know not the world of terror, on the awful brink of which you stand, when you talk of making Flora ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the genesis of Waverley. These introductions, written before the final inroad had been made on his powers by the united strength of physical and moral misfortune, animated at once by the last glow of those powers, and by the indefinable charm of a fond retrospection, displaying every faculty in autumn luxuriance, are so delightful that they sometimes seem to be the very cream and essence of his literary work in prose. Indeed, I have always wondered why they have not been published separately ...
— Sir Walter Scott - Famous Scots Series • George Saintsbury
... general questions, which may help you in your retrospection. Have my meditations been pure and acceptable to God through this day? Have I not spoken one idle word? Am I as thankful to God for blessings as I should be? Has there been any feeling of pride in my heart? Has there been any feeling of impatience ...
— The Gospel Day • Charles Ebert Orr
... been painful to me, in many ways, to recall the dreary years I passed in bondage. I would gladly forget them if I could. Yet the retrospection is not altogether without solace; for with those gloomy recollections come tender memories of my good old grandmother, like light, fleecy clouds floating over a dark ...
— Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Written by Herself • Harriet Jacobs (AKA Linda Brent)
... design to "make money" by them, or with any expectation that they would be known to any other person than Mr. Hilliker, Mr. Tappan, and a few others at Bellevue; but when there was no anticipation that her life would be prolonged, and when agonized with the most dreadful retrospection ...
— Awful Disclosures - Containing, Also, Many Incidents Never before Published • Maria Monk
... bodily exertion, I had known the exalted destiny of creation in the effort to be useful. Like an exile turning to take a last glance at the blue outlines of his native land, I, too, have lingered to look back; yet the pleasant retrospection of three happy months is at an end; and I now dream of its delight as one who feels that, in the swift transition of existence, such peace of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... power, and make the treasury the controlling lever of public affairs, the chief of which, with almost autocratic puissance, might direct everything to suit his own political views. With this impression, retrospection made him angry and resentful. He regarded the manner in which Hamilton had procured his aid in effecting the measure of assumption as a snare by which he had been entrapped, and he characterized the measure itself as a fiscal ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... to forget. When such persons are brought to that proper state of mind, to return good for evil, without either boasting of their lenity, or enumerating their wrongs, the best way of inducing an oblivion of the past, is to avoid such intercourse as may revive painful retrospection. It is impossible for those who have minds capable of appreciating the delicacies of friendship, to re-unite the bonds of esteem and confidence, when they have been violently rent asunder by cunning or treachery. Beside, Barton admitted that he saw in the ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... and gaze back. How few are the scenes, which memory's kaleidoscope presents in their pristine bright colours, of that journey, performed so slowly, as it once appeared, but which, to the eye of retrospection, seems to have hurried to its end with the rapid ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... not think that retrospection has coloured my view too darkly when I say that my brief experience in Fleet Street made me feel that the Daily Gazette party, the supporters of "The Destroyers" (as naval folk had named the Government of the day) consisted of a mass of smugly hypocritical self-seekers; and ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... occasions in the lives of men which they are not inclined to dwell upon or even to speak about; which they preserve jealously, as secrets in their own hearts, selfishly indisposed to acquaint others with them lest some of the magic of the actual moment, reinduced by retrospection, may be lost in the telling. But I could not recite the history of my experiences in St. Petersburg at that time without uncovering my innermost soul, as it was affected and influenced by Zara de Echeveria, whose charm of manner, whose redundant beauty and powers of fascination, ...
— Princess Zara • Ross Beeckman
... plain good sense of Marion. Col. Watson had orders to burn houses, but did not however appear to wish to carry them rigourously into effect. It is believed he burnt but two; one was the house of Lieut. Dickson, who was with Marion; the other belonged to Nathaniel Dwight, of Waccamaw neck. Upon a retrospection, Col. Watson's character appears in a favourable point of view; and, as far as was consistent with orders, his humanity ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... they? Each little tribe is a book unread before, and full to the brim of fascination. When they are confronted with the picture of an elephant in a current magazine, they are all excitement. The book is carried eagerly to the old man sunning himself down in the anchored oomiak. Animation, retrospection, agitation chase from his seamed face all traces of drowsiness. "We used to know it." "Our fathers have told us." "This land-whale with its tail in front once lived in the land of the Innuit." We are now ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... Jerusha than of any other being of her sex, and as there was not another frock, sun-bonnet, or apron within the radius of a mile, I promised myself a month of that negative bliss which comes from retrospection, solitude, and the pleasure of following the men about the harvest-field. Sitting quietly under some shadowing tree, with my line cast into the still pool of a little babbling trout-brook, where it was held ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... Pride of the Village, the mild satire of the Art of Book-Making, the rather obvious reflections in Westminster Abbey are not exactly to the taste of this generation. They are the literature of leisure and retrospection; and already Irving's gentle elaboration, the refined and slightly artificial beauty of his style, and his persistently genial and sympathetic attitude have begun to pall upon readers who demand a more nervous and accentuated kind of writing. It is felt that a little roughness, ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... evolution will then appear to us in its true light, as phases of gradual maturation, rounded at intervals by crises of creative discovery. Continuity and discontinuity will thus admit possibility of reconciliation, the one as an aspect of ascent towards the future, the other as an aspect of retrospection after the event. And we shall see that the same key will in addition disclose to us ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... of the new illusion we wake to is seen in the exclamation that so often follows retrospection: "Oh, what a fool I was!" As a rule, nothing can be more conceited than this use of the past tense. A few people, perhaps, can look back complacently upon "a well-spent life" (wherein all the years have been ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... poetry. He had never touched so high a strain before, but he reached it often after that, and always with an ever-increasing mastery and confidence. In Venice, in Rome, in Athens, through the Holy Land, his retrospection becomes a stately epic symphony, a processional crescendo that swings ever higher until it reaches that sublime strain, the ageless contemplation of the Sphinx. We cannot forego a paragraph ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... for the time in the mental circumstances of the other. Nay, so complete at times was the communication, that I even doubted her testimony as to some strange correspondence in our past history on this very ground, suspecting that, my memory being open to her retrospection, she saw my story, and took it for her own. It was, therefore, easy for me to account for Dr. Ruthwell's scientific bewilderment at the ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... reached this latter point of retrospection Mama Cachama's eyes were closed and, to Harry's chagrin, she appeared to have fallen into a deep sleep. Before, however, his disappointment had found time to express itself in words the old Indian woman began to speak in a low ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... which material has been most freely drawn are as follows: Bernard's "Retrospection of the Stage"; Dr. Burney's various histories of music; Chorley's "Thirty Years' Musical Recollections"; Dibdin's "Complete History of the English Stage"; Ebers's "Seven Years of the King's Theatre"; Fetis's "Biographie des Musiciens"; Hogarth's "Musical Drama"; Sutherland Edwards's ...
— Great Singers, First Series - Faustina Bordoni To Henrietta Sontag • George T. Ferris
... old letters, among which she found the other day a miniature of her boy, Henry, the sailor who died, which she had forgotten that she possessed; and she comes down from this most trying task of retrospection in a state of nerves so lamentable that no ingenuity of affection, or utmost desire to cheer and relieve her, can suggest a sufficiently soothing process for that purpose. She cannot be amused at all now by anything that does not excite her, and if she is, over-excited she suffers ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... willows, with which, after many attempts, we at length made a fire. It was not sufficient, however, to warm the whole party, much less to thaw our shoes; and the weather not permitting the gathering of tripe de roche, we had nothing to cook. The painful retrospection of the melancholy events of the day banished sleep, and we shuddered as we contemplated the dreadful effects of this bitterly cold night on our two companions, if still living. Some faint hopes were entertained of Credit's surviving the storm, as he was provided ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 2 • John Franklin
... A retrospection of this sort rarely brings much subject of exultation, when made with the rigid sincerity of secret impartiality: so much stronger is our reason than our virtue, so much higher our sense of duty ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... our dear cottage and its environs! and seems to say, "I brought all this to bear," and to feel happy in the noble trust he placed in our self-belief that he might venture to show that kind courage without which we could never have been united. All this retrospection is expressed by his penetrating eyes it every visit. He rarely alights ; but I frequently enter the phaeton, and take a conversation in an airing. And when he comes without his precious Amelia, he indulges my Alex ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... that certainly there did not seem to be any meaning, there did not and what was the result, any one asking any one is not asking any one that, any one asking any one is asking any one why is there no retrospection, why is there more furniture than there was when the houses were empty, why is silence so anxious to please and so distressing, why is it all so changed and so simple, why is there such a long shadow. Any one asking any other one nothing is enjoying ...
— Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein - With Two Shorter Stories • Gertrude Stein
... Mail Service. This young man was Theodore N. Vail. His energy and enterprise so impressed Hubbard that he immediately asked Vail to become General Manager of the company which he was then forming to exploit the telephone. Viewed from the retrospection of forty years this offer certainly looks like one of the greatest prizes in American business. What it signified at that time, however, is apparent from the fact that the office paid a salary of $3500 a year and that for the first ten years Vail did not ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... to the causes of God's renewed anger and their own perplexities. On the second day Cromwell proposed, as the best method of inquiry among themselves, that they should all simultaneously engage in silent retrospection, both upon their own past "ways particularly as private Christians," and also upon their "public actions as an Army." If they should each and all be led, in such retrospection, to fasten on some one precise point of time ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... always had objective points, as it were, in her life, and she always would have, no matter how long she lived. She came to places where she stopped mentally, for retrospection and forethought, wherefrom she could seem to obtain a view of that which lay behind, and of the path which was set for her feet in advance. She saw the tracked and the trackless. Once, going with Abby Atkins and Floretta in search of early spring ...
— The Portion of Labor • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Eileen had imposed upon her and was selfish with her, but Eileen's impositions were so skillfully maneuvered, her selfishness was so adorably taken for granted that Marian in retrospection felt that perhaps she was responsible for at least a small part of it. She never had been able to see the inner workings of Eileen's heart. She was not capable of understanding that when John Gilman was poor and struggling Eileen had ignored him. It had not occurred to Marian ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... forsaken woman. You may easily imagine that a double interest was attached by her to the ways and companionships of those with whom she had been acquainted in the days which, when present, she had considered hardly-worked and monotonous, but which now in retrospection seemed so happy and unclouded. Accordingly, she had, as we have seen, known where to meet with John Barton on that unfortunate night, which had only produced irritation in him, and a month's imprisonment to her. She had also observed that he was still intimate ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell
... beautiful child of his heart and his brain over to the trials and sorrows that must come to all, sooner or later, that abide in the earth, and how the pathetic story culminates in that apostrophe—so wild, so regretful, so full of mournful retrospection. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... every phase of harmless folly! Oh, blissful nights, whose fierce delights Defied gaunt-featured Melancholy! Gone are they all beyond recall, And I—a shade, a mere reflection— Am forced to feed my spirit's greed Upon the husks of retrospection! ...
— A Little Book of Western Verse • Eugene Field
... watched lengthening tree-shadows creep across the reddish-brown carpeting of straw, and in the long nights when sleeplessness betrayed her into the clutches of torturing retrospection, she waited and longed for the pearly lustre that paved the east for the rosy feet of dawn; listened to the beating of Nature's heart in the solemn roar of the Falls two miles away, in the strophe and anti-strophe of winds quivering through pine tops, the startled cry of birds dozing in cedar ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... provincial magistrate is the sole law of the people. The total relaxation of the Vizier's authority, his inattention and dislike to business, leave the aumils in possession of this dangerous power, unawed, uncontrolled by any apprehension of retrospection, or the interference of justice. I can hardly quote an instance, since the Vizier's accession to the musnud, of an aumil having been punished for oppression, though the complaints of the people and the state of the country are notorious proofs of the violences ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... last paragraphs of a book, and for a book's people only, to look back upon an ordered and proportionate progression to what one has become; in life the thing arrives with scantier dignity; and one appears, in retrospection, less to have marched toward any goal than always to have jumped and scrambled from one stepping-stone to another because, however momentarily, "just this or that poor impulse seemed the sole ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... a lessening of sound and a dimming of light,—that was the way of Ridgley's festivity. Finally the members of the school made their way back to the white dormitories; the great day was over; the pleasure that remained was the pleasure of retrospection, of thinking over each detail of the victory, of re-living the struggle and of reading the accounts of the game in the newspapers. In those papers the sons of Ridgley were destined to find not only the glowing account of the game, which they knew ...
— The Mark of the Knife • Clayton H. Ernst
... of travelling not to be overlooked is that of retrospection: picture after picture and memory after memory rises to the mind, and one could go on for ever rebuilding in fancy all that has pleased and interested. With all my heart I can echo Dickens' words—"I find it difficult to separate ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... slips from my reflection; Whatever follows ne'ertheless may be As a propos of hope or retrospection, As though the lurking thought had follow'd free. All present life is but an interjection, An 'Oh!' or 'Ah!' of joy or misery, Or a 'Ha! ha!' or 'Bah!'—a yawn, or 'Pooh!' Of which perhaps the ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron |
