"Solitary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... particular watchdogs, but to strip the sea of those isolated vessels, that in time of peace rise in irregular but frequent succession above the horizon, covering the face of the deep with a network of tracks. These solitary wayfarers were now to be found only as rare exceptions to the general rule, until the port of destination was approached. There the homing impulse overbore the bonds of regulation; and the convoys tended to the conduct noted by Nelson as a captain, "behaving ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... had brought this expedition to a successful issue next turned their attention to a small country house occupied by a widow, whom I had often begged to take refuge with us. But, secure in her insignificance, she had always declined our offers, preferring to live solitary and retired in her own home. But the freebooters sought her out, burst in her doors, drove her away with blows and insults, destroyed her house and burnt her furniture. They then proceeded to the vault in which lay the remains of her family, dragged them out of ...
— Massacres Of The South (1551-1815) - Celebrated Crimes • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... I dare say, uncertain in its upper notes; but it fetched M. Benest right-about-face again. He perceived that it came from the garden of a solitary cottage up the road, a gunshot and more beyond his signpost. But a tall hedge interrupted his view, and, though he stared long and earnestly, all he could see that day was a pea-stick ...
— The Westcotes • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... chosen for this hymn by a committee preparing the Appendix to Hymns Ancient and Modern. Dr. Dykes' statement that the tune came into his head while walking through the Strand in London "presents a striking contrast with the solitary origin ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... tells me, but two hours' journey from the hills whence we may look down upon the gulf dividing Bruttium from Sicily. The lower slopes of these hills are, he says, closely cultivated. There are many small villages some distance up on their sides, and solitary farms well nigh up to the crest. It seems to me that we should use one of these farmers as our agent. He must be a man with a wife and family, and these would be hostages. If we told him that if he did our bidding he would be well rewarded, while if unfaithful we would destroy ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... as the next illustration, it will be remembered by all students of GOLDSMITH'S Animated Nature, that this amiable quadruped invariably exercises his risibles when he is crunching the bones of some other less truculent quadruped. It is "solitary, cruel, and untamable, digs its food out of graves," cachinnating the while like a thousand or fifteen hundred of brick. There are other ravenous beasts in the world; but this one is peculiar in that he laughs over his work, which ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... months, or months weeks. They could have been years in space—or only days. All they knew was the unending monotony which dragged upon a man until he either lapsed into a dreamy rejection of his surroundings, as had Hamp and Floy, or flew into murderous rages, such as kept Morris in solitary confinement at present. And no foreseeable end to ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... launched on his uncertain voyage across the "sea of darkness," in three little caravels, no larger than the modern yacht, and far less seaworthy. Watch his devoted and anxious look, his solitary self-communings, his all-night vigils under the silent stars. See his motley crew, picked up at random in Palos streets, ignorant, superstitious, and full of fears, dreading every added mile of the voyage, and alarmed at ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... a scorpion is in its tail. Mavis stooped down and picked up the little photo which had fallen from the envelope on to the floor. Clive had used his Brownie camera at Chagmouth and had promised to post them the results, but had forgotten. This solitary print represented Bevis—there was no mistaking Bevis—but Mavis bent over it with puzzled eyes, for clasped tightly in his arms with her head laid upon his shoulder was a girl. Merle, who snatched the photo away to look at it, decided her identity ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... at the loathsome and still glittering creature, then pushed on fearful lest we should stumble upon more of its kind. I suppose that it must have been solitary, a kind of serpent rogue, as Jana was an elephant rogue, for we met none and, if the information which I obtained afterwards may be believed, there was no species at all resembling it in the country. ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... give them in the order they are usually visited, is that of St. Catharine, situated in a deep and solitary vale: it however commands a most extensive and pleasing prospect, at noon-day, to the East and West. The buildings, garden, &c. are confined within small limits, being fixed in a most picturesque and secure recess under the foot ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, 1777 - Volume 1 (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... island of Lemnos was a subject for the most beautiful of all the Greek tragedies, what shall we say to Robinson Crusoe in his? Take the speech of the Greek hero on leaving his cave, beautiful as it is, and compare it with the reflections of the English adventurer in his solitary place of confinement. The thoughts of home, and of all from which he is for ever cut off, swell and press against his bosom, as the heaving ocean rolls its ceaseless tide against the rocky shore, and the very beatings of his heart become audible in the eternal silence that surrounds ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... end of this valley was another, called the Valley of the Shadow of Death, and Christian must needs go through it, because the way to the Celestial City lay through the midst of it. Now, this valley is a very solitary place. The prophet Jeremiah thus describes it: "A wilderness, a land of deserts and of pits, a land of drought, and of the shadow of death, a land that no man" (but a Christian) "passed through, and where ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... drawback. I did not know of it, but my wife believed I did. We were both most cruelly deceived, it does not matter now. She is condemned to a loveless, joyless life; so am I. With a wife beautiful loving, young, I must lead a most solitary existence—I must see my name die out for want of heirs—I must see my race almost extinct, my life passed in repining and misery, my heart broken, my days without sunshine. I repeat that it is ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... on his back was almost empty, and he carried a stick in his hand, cut from one of the high, thick box hedges that surround most of the farms in Lower Normandy. As the solitary wayfarer came into Carentan, the gleaming moonlit outlines of its towers stood out for a moment with ghostly effect against the sky. He met no one in the silent streets that rang with the echoes ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... the longest possible way round. In the after-warmth of the hot July day I made my way across the darkened Heath. Suddenly I was startled by a hand laid lightly on my shoulder. I turned to see the figure of a solitary woman, with a colourless youthful face, dressed from head to foot ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the Beetle wheels his droning Flight, And drowsy Tinklings lull the distant Folds. Save that from yonder Ivy-mantled Tow'r The mopeing Owl does to the Moon complain Of such, as wand'ring near her sacred Bow'r, Molest her ancient solitary Reign. Beneath those rugged Elms, that Yew-Tree's Shade, Where heaves the Turf in many a mould'ring Heap, Each in his narrow Cell for ever laid, The rude Forefathers of the Hamlet sleep. The breezy Call of Incense-breathing ...
— An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript • Thomas Gray
... small lake on the southern margin of the wild and mountainous country, called the Lake of Menteith. In this lake was an island named Inchmahome, the word inch being the name for island in the language spoken by the Highlanders. This island, which was situated in a very secluded and solitary region, was selected as Mary's place of residence. She was about four years old when they sent her to this place. Several persons went with her to take care of her, and to teach her. In fact, every thing was provided for her which could secure her improvement ...
— Mary Queen of Scots, Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... rendered the little ones, and they were cosily 'tucked in,' then came 'father's turn,' which consisted of his sitting by their bedside—Owen and Geoffrey on one hand, and little queen Phyllis, maidenlike in solitary cot, on the other—and crooning to them a little evening song. In the dark, too, I should say, for it was one of his wise provisions that they should be saved from ever fearing that; and that, whenever they awoke to find it round them in the middle of the night, it should bring ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... stubbly upland pasture. Everywhere, in road and pasture too, thronged milkweed, odorous haunt of the bee and those frailest butterflies of the year, born of one family with drifting blossoms; and straightly tall, the solitary mullein, dust-covered but crowned with a gold softer and more to be desired than the pride of kings. Perhaps the carriage folk from the outer world, who sometimes penetrate Tiverton's leafy quiet, may wonder at ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... House; but as the situation of the palace was low, and the concourse of people about the court was necessarily attended with noise, which might disturb him in his present infirm state of health, these reasons were assigned for fitting up an apartment for him in a solitary house at some distance, called the Kirk of Field. Mary here gave him marks of kindness and attachment; she conversed cordially with him; and she lay some nights in a room below his; but on the ninth of February, she told him that she would pass that night in the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... of London" introduces us to two scenes of a dismal and terrible character in the etching entitled Xit Wedded to the Scavenger's Daughter, the artist carries us to a gloomy torture chamber, dimly lighted by a solitary lantern. On the framework of the rack sits the dwarf Xit, his limbs compressed in the grip of the frightful instrument called the "Scavenger's daughter," while Simon Renard, scarcely able to repress a smile, interrogates ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... are the terror of the whole country. No man's cattle, goods, nor even life, are safe from them; and the only reason why these two old hags, who hold sovereign sway over the others, have 'scaped justice so long, is because every one is afraid to go near them. Their solitary habitations are more strongly guarded than fortresses. Not believe in witches! Why I should as soon ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... and deed, is of the nature of immortality. The solitary thought of a great thinker will dwell in the minds of men for centuries until at length it works itself into their daily life and practice. It lives on through the ages, speaking as a voice from the dead, ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... which they become connected in their descent. Just as those who penetrate into the holy retreats of sacred mysteries, are first purified and then divest themselves of their garments, until someone by such a process, having dismissed everything foreign from the God, by himself alone, beholds the solitary principle of the universe, sincere, simple and pure, from which all things depend, and to whose transcendent perfections the eyes of all intelligent natures are directed, as the proper cause of being, life and intelligence. ...
— An Essay on the Beautiful - From the Greek of Plotinus • Plotinus
... calving, or just after the birth of its young. The fashion of keeping flocks of animals taken from the desert died out between the XIIth and XVIIIth dynasties. At the time of the new empire, they had only one or two solitary animals as pets for women or children, the mummies of which were sometimes buried by the side of ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... number one the car was halted, apparently much to the surprise of the solitary passenger, who leaned indolently forward and exchanged some words ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys as Sergeants - or, Handling Their First Real Commands • H. Irving Hancock
... climbing the hill, and here, on the top of the rising ground, we had our first glimpse of the outposts of the war. A cottage had been posted on the highest point of the hill; now all that remained of it was a sheet of iron, crumpled like paper, propped in the centre by a black and solitary post, trailing thence on the ground amongst tumbled bricks and refuse. This sheet of iron was silver in the moonlight and stood out with its solitary black support against the night sky, which was now breaking ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... empty until we came to the gateway to the spaceport area. There was a single medium combat car there, on contragravity halfway to the ceiling, with a pair of 50-mm guns and a rocket launcher pointed at us, and under it, on the roadway, a solitary man ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... witness explained, was Lucy Brent, the betrothed of the deceased. The poor girl had been telegraphed for, and had started for England. The witness stated that the outburst of despondency in this letter was almost a solitary one, most of the letters in his possession being bright, buoyant and hopeful. Even this letter ended with a humorous statement of the writer's manifold plans and projects for the new year. The deceased was ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... Sallow!" he cried softly to his hounds; "is this your civility? Indeed, sir," he continued to me, "it was all I could do to dissuade the creatures from giving tongue when you first appeared on the terrace of my solitary gardens. I heard too the water-sprite: she only sings when footsteps stray upon the banks." He smiled wanly, and his nose seemed even sharper in his pale face, and his yellow hair leaner about his ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... who will tell me where He found thee at that dead and silent hour? What hallowed solitary ground did bear So rare a flower, Within whose sacred leaves did lie The fulness of ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... softly-lighted little room at home where Jack Rupert had come to her, and Isabel's suffused, desperate face as she snatched the letter from its owner. And as a pendant picture she saw the bleak, solitary railway station in the gray December morning, where Gerard, ill and reft of his splendid strength, had waited alone for the girl ...
— From the Car Behind • Eleanor M. Ingram
... enjoy the prospect that the aged, discrowned, solitary emperor, almost as dim a figure among sovereigns as the mystic Libuscha herself, was gazing from the ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... hat and coat. Patrick banged the carriage door behind her and mounted the box beside the driver, and they drove away. It was the first time she had driven out in solitary splendor, and Theodora felt very dignified and luxurious as she leaned back on the cushions and idly watched the passing show which had grown so familiar to her during the past two weeks. When they came to ...
— Teddy: Her Book - A Story of Sweet Sixteen • Anna Chapin Ray
... strange and useless device. An obelisk resembles nothing so much as the fanciful figures of a dream. It is a tall square pillar of a peculiar form, often carved with hieroglyphics, and commemorating the name and exploits of its founder. These solitary pillars of stone, sometimes more than a hundred feet in height, are formed of one block or piece, and must have been cut in the quarry with incessant labor. They abound in Egypt, and were a common decoration of its immense temples. Later, several of them were transported on ...
— Harper's Young People, October 5, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Lord Radstock to the Millbank Penitentiary, where by appointment we were met by Mr. Wilbraham Bootle. We had the pleasure of taking with us Alicia and Captain Beaufort. Solitary confinement for the worst offences: solitary confinement in darkness at first. There are many young offenders; the governors say they are horrid plagues, for they are not allowed to flog them, and they are little influenced by darkness ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... give much; a gift prevails When deep persuading oratory fails, By this, Leander, being near the land, Cast down his weary feet, and felt the sand. Breathless albeit he were, he rested not Till to the solitary tower he got; 230 And knocked and called: at which celestial noise The longing heart of Hero much more joys, Than nymphs and shepherds when the timbrel rings, Or crooked dolphin when the sailor sings. She stayed not for her robes, but straight arose, And, drunk with gladness, ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... this room in solitary confinement until you do, though it should be all summer," he said firmly, went out, locked the door on the outside, and put the ...
— Grandmother Elsie • Martha Finley
... said the cowled man. "A little preparation of my own. It destroys the hardest known substance—with the solitary exception of a certain clay—in the same way that nitric acid would destroy tissue paper. You see I might have aspired to ...
— The Golden Scorpion • Sax Rohmer
... brother's soul come down to me;[24] But then at last away it flew, And then 'twas mortal well I knew, 290 For he would never thus have flown— And left me twice so doubly lone,— Lone—as the corse within its shroud, Lone—as a solitary cloud,[25] A single cloud on a sunny day, While all the rest of heaven is clear, A frown upon the atmosphere, That hath no business to appear[26] When skies are blue, and earth ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... one lupus. After Jack Dudley had expelled the prowling buck, the intruder took good care to remain away. Neither he nor any of his companions troubled the campers further. The presumption, therefore, was that this solitary specimen was a "dog Indian," or vagrant, wandering over the country on his own account. Such fellows, as already explained, claim no kinship with any tribe, but are, like the tramps of civilized society, ...
— Two Boys in Wyoming - A Tale of Adventure (Northwest Series, No. 3) • Edward S. Ellis
... himself when he had fancied that a man might make a cell of a solitary room in silent surroundings; the religious jog-trot in a provincial atmosphere had no resemblance to the life of a monastery. There was no illusion or suggestion ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... horse-cars, and I waited for you, coming home late together—or resting and chatting at the Market, corner 7th street and the Avenue, and eating those nice musk or watermelons? Or during my tedious sickness and first paralysis ('73) how you used to come to my solitary garret-room and make up my bed, and enliven me, and chat for an hour or so—or perhaps go out and get the medicines Dr. Drinkard had order'd for me—before you went on duty?... Give my love to dear Mrs. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... "Here is a solitary swine lounging homeward by himself. He has only one ear, having parted with the other to vagrant dogs in the course of his city rambles. But he gets on very well without it, and leads a roving, gentlemanly, vagabond life, somewhat answering ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... deep breaths of delight at the magnificence of his outlook—its vastness, its spaciousness, its wholesome amplitude and loneliness. He felt like a new man born solitary ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... might be expected from their environment. Without an aristocracy, without anything that can be called a plutocracy, without a solitary millionaire, New Zealand is also virtually without that hopeless thing, the hereditary pauper and begetter of paupers. It may be doubted whether she has a dozen citizens with more than L10,000 a year apiece. On the ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... also that the father will be sitting in the room to my right— sitting at his solitary meal, for his digestion is queer, and he prefers to dine alone: a strange, small, purblind man, full of sorrow and strong will. He is a clergyman, but carries a revolver always in his pocket by day, and by night sleeps with it under his pillow. He has done so ever ...
— Noughts and Crosses • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... do? How would GAMBLE do? Not a solitary soul-capture was sure. He played for a possible thirty-three-hundred-per-cent profit. It was GAMBLING—with his family for "chips." However let us see how the game came out. Maybe we can get on the track of the secret original impulse, the REAL impulse, that moved him to so nobly self-sacrifice ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... course of specious reasoning, but is based on the teaching of the past. By the exertion of such force, and by the maintenance of such laws, and by these means only, Great Britain, in the beginning of this century, when she was the solitary power of the seas, saved herself from destruction, and powerfully modified for the better the course ...
— The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future • A. T. Mahan
... just beginning to show, and very proud of them; lanky, scraggy old-maid elephants, with their hollow anxious faces, and trunks like rough bark; savage old bull elephants, scarred from shoulder to flank with great weals and cuts of bygone fights, and the caked dirt of their solitary mud baths dropping from their shoulders; and there was one with a broken tusk and the marks of the full-stroke, the terrible drawing scrape, of a ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... day, Beorn. We have nothing of any value to offer for it. They searched us too closely for anything to escape them. We dare not go into any town or village until we are quite sure that we are beyond the count's territories, but we might enter some solitary hut and pray for a piece of bread for charity, or we can walk all day, by which time we shall surely be well beyond the Count of Ponthieu's territory, and could boldly go into a town. If we are seized, we can demand to be sent to Rouen, saying we are ...
— Wulf the Saxon - A Story of the Norman Conquest • G. A. Henty
... track in their youth, maturity, or incipient age, till, hardly knowing, how it had all happened, he found himself tottering onward with an infant's small fingers in his nerveless grasp. So mistily did his dead progeny come and go in the patriarch's decayed recollection, that this solitary child represented for him the successive babyhoods of the many that had gone before. The emotions of his early paternity came back to him. She seemed the baby of a past age oftener than she seemed Pansie. A whole family of grand-aunts (one of whom had perished in her cradle, never so ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Forty-sixth, whom she was conveying to Balaklava, had happily been landed. Thirty of our transports, as well as the French warship Henri IV., were wrecked. A thousand men were lost, and many more escaped drowning, only to fall into the hands of the Cossacks and be carried to Sebastopol. One solitary source of consolation could be found in the circumstance that the tempest did not occur at an earlier period, when six hundred vessels, heavily laden and dangerously crowded together, were making their way from Varna to ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... chips, and scattered about were the skeletons of martens of last winter's catch. One had to stoop a good deal to get in at the narrow doorway. It was dark, and not now an attractive-looking place, yet as thought flew back to the white wilderness of a few months before, the trapper and his long, solitary journeys in the relentless cold, with at last the wolfish night closing round him, it made all different, and one realised a little how welcome must have seemed the thought and the sight of ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... the arrival of a ship at Monterey, with dispatches of great importance from Mazatlan. We accordingly turned our horses back to Sutter's Fort. Crossing the Sacramento again by swimming our horses, and ferrying their loads in that solitary canoe, we took our back track as far as the Napa, and then turned to Benicia, on Carquinez Straits. We found there a solitary adobe-house, occupied by Mr. Hastings and his family, embracing Dr. Semple, the proprietor of the ferry. This ferry was a ship's-boat, with a latteen-sail, which could carry ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... beneath the dignity of historical narrative, more particularly to expose their dishonest practices, of which I was well apprised. I feel, however, that in making such a charge, some proof thereof is incumbent on me, I will therefore in conclusion simply adduce a solitary instance of those practices, so damning, that, unless supported by irrefutable testimony, I might well be deemed a malicious libeller for making ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 1 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... is so happy as to fall. By the sacrifice of himself the hero becomes a saint. Eyewitnesses of his labors, noble enough to admire him, able enough to support him, but not strong enough to take his place, guard with loving hearts his memory and his words; the solitary staff for a race, which had the desire, but not the requisite maturity, to take into itself the entire spirit of the illustrious dead. More and more was the letter now anxiously guarded, and in it the living, creative ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger
... the beach, which was not far from the hotel. He saw a solitary figure pacing up and down, and from the fact that the man stopped, every now and then, and gazed seaward through a large telescope, the lad concluded it was the captain for whom he was in search. He approached, his footsteps making no sound on the sand. The man was ...
— Tom Swift and his Submarine Boat - or, Under the Ocean for Sunken Treasure • Victor Appleton
... last twenty years, society in America has reached its goal, has 'arrived,' and is creating no new types. On the contrary, it is obliterating some of the best which were clearly marked, and is becoming more and more one rich, dead level of mediocrity, broken here and there by solitary eminences, some of which are genuine, some only false peaks ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts—a grace before Milton—a grace before Shakspeare—a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading the Fairy Queen?—but, the received ritual having prescribed these forms to the solitary ceremony of manducation, I shall confine my observations to the experience which I have had of the grace, properly so called; commending my new scheme for extension to a niche in the grand philosophical, poetical, and perchance in part heretical, liturgy, now ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... be true and candid, in these pages. I shall not seek to conceal one of my numerous faults which I acknowledge and deplore; and, if I imagine that I possess one solitary merit, I shall not be backward in making that merit known. Those who know me personally, will never accuse me of entertaining one single atom of that despicable quality, self-conceit; those who do not know me, are at liberty ...
— My Life: or the Adventures of Geo. Thompson - Being the Auto-Biography of an Author. Written by Himself. • George Thompson
... think so; they have been more alone together lately, for I am sure this could never have happened when Caroline was in the schoolroom. And her making a friend of Clara was no wonder, so forlorn and solitary as she must have been." And Marian sighed with fellow-feeling ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... rock, the mountain, and the forest; a preference, therefore, of the country to the town, and of the simpler to the more complex forms of social life. But what is the true value of this sentiment? The unfortunate Solitary in the 'Excursion' is beset by three Wordsworths; for the Wanderer and the Pastor are little more (as Wordsworth indeed intimates) than reflections of himself, seen in different mirrors. The Solitary ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... me, and presently rose and went on by herself. There was something lonely and solitary about her great determined shape. She might have been Antigone alone on the Theban plain. It is not often given in a noisy world to come to the places of great grief and silence. An absolute, archaic grief possessed this countrywoman; ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... or to invite poets to spend their holidays with us. I was quite willing to fall in with this plan, but I determined, privately, only to become acquainted with poets of a peaceable kind who wrote pastorals or elegies and went out for long, solitary walks to commune with nature. In my eagerness to please Lalage I went so far as to write to Selby-Harrison, asking him to make out for me a list of the leading poets of the meditative and mystical schools. I also gave ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... went to his rest with his hand on his breast; The devil will be upon his knee. He was born one day in the county of Clay And came from a solitary race. ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... eastern horizon a thin, fleecy scarf of clouds was silvered by the rising moon, the west was a huge shrine of beryl whereon burned ruby flakes of vapor, watched by a solitary vestal star; and the sapphire arch overhead was beautiful and mellow as any that ever vaulted above the sculptured marbles of ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... to be made, are a good insurance against that. I write because of the countless acres as good as mine, in this great, dear America, which might now be giving their owners all the healthful pastime, private solace, or solitary or social delights which this one yields, yet which are only "waste lands" or "holes in the ground" because unavailable for ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... of his mission without perpetrating, as he thought, any disastrous blunder, Mr. Sapp brought the interview to a close with a few commonplace remarks, and hurried away to enjoy in solitary self-communion the thick-crowding visions ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... information regarding their coming and going, but knowledge on many of the points involved is incomplete. It is only of recent years that the nest of the Solitary Sandpiper has been found, and yet this is a very common bird in the eastern United States in certain seasons. Where is the scientist who can yet tell us in what country the common Chimney Swift {63} passes the winter, or over what stretches of sea and land the Arctic ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... afterward a solitary man was descried coming across the wide flat from the sea, and the women and children poured out upon him in a body. It was Ounenk, naked, winded, and wounded. The blood still trickled down his face from a gash on the forehead. His ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... this himself, yet, with an imperious curtness in marked contrast to his usual pleasant manner to this worthy servant, he hoarsely commanded him to bring Chello to him early the next morning, and then again relapsed into his solitary meditations. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... you from your kind," said Querida. "The solitary fasters are never personally pleasant; hermits are the world's public admiration and private abomination. Oh, the good world dearly loves to rub elbows with a talented sinner and patronise him and sentimentalise over him—one whose miracles don't hurt ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... repent, my good friend.' He saw I was too much moved for jesting, then he took it more seriously, but still kindly, assuring me that I had done him real service; it is always of service, he said, to be necessitated to take time for quiet reflection, of which he had had sufficient in his hours of solitary confinement—this little adversity had left ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... void in the heart of a lone widow, or teach an anxious father how to manage a troublesome boy. There was an old lady near us at this meeting,—a good soul in a bonnet four fashions old,—who sat and cried for joy, as the brethren carried on their talk. She had come in alone from her solitary room, and enjoyed all the evening long a blended moral and literary rapture. It was a banquet of delight to her, the recollection of which would brighten all her week, and it cost her no more than air and sunlight. To the happy, the strong, the victorious, Shakespeare and ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... last, when the angel of death obeys his call of anguish, whither will go his condemned soul? Not to the fair forests, where his brave fathers are. Oh! never will Powhatan clasp the dear ones who have gone before him. His exiled, solitary spirit will forever houl on the barren heath where the wings of darkness rest. No ray of hope shall visit him; eternal will ...
— The Indian Princess - La Belle Sauvage • James Nelson Barker
... remoulded the life of France, who laid broad and deep the foundations of a new life in Italy, Switzerland, and Germany, who rolled the West in on the East in the greatest movement known since the Crusades and finally drew the yearning thoughts of myriads to that solitary rock in the South Atlantic, must ever stand in the very forefront of the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... presumable parents. Not rarely a bud of Adam's laburnum assumed all the qualities of the common laburnum, its larger leaves, richer flowered racemes, large and brightly yellow flowers and its complete fertility. Other buds on the same tree reverted to the purple parent, with its solitary small flowers, its dense shrublike branches and very small leaves. These too are fertile, though not producing their seeds as abundantly as the C. Laburnum reversions. Many a botanist has sown the seeds ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... old ones as they decay; and the greatest possible security is felt in the tenure by which they are held by the planter, or his descendants, though they hold no written lease, or deed of gift; and have neither written law nor court of justice to secure it to them. Groves and solitary mango, semul, tamarind, mhowa and other trees, whose leaves and branches are not required for the food of elephants and camels, are more secure in Oude than in our own territories; and the country is, in consequence, much better provided with them. While they give beauty to ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... no other individuals whatever. No one else is bound to take, for the protection of all other people, whatever pains or trouble he takes for his own security—to watch, for instance, as vigilantly that his neighbour's house as that his own is not broken into. And while the one solitary claim of any plausibility to universal equality of treatment requires to be largely qualified before it can be conceded, there is no other claim of the kind which does not carry with it its own refutation; there is no other which does not partake ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... the Bois de Boulogne that I looked for my principal recreation. There I took my solitary walk, morning and evening; or, mounted on a little mouse-colored donkey, paced demurely along the woodland pathway. I had a favorite seat beneath the shadow of a venerable oak, one of the few hoary patriarchs of ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... hour later Maggie Oliphant arrived. She was also in white, but without any ornament, except a solitary diamond star which blazed in the rich coils of her hair. The beautiful Miss Oliphant was received with enthusiasm. Until her arrival Rose had been the undoubted belle of the evening, but beside Maggie the petite charms which Rose possessed sank out of sight. Maggie herself never ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... old friends and made no new ones. The world seemed to be passing him while he stood still. He wondered how others could laugh when his own heart was so heavy, and he preferred to go his own way, solitary and unnoticed, taking an increasing pleasure in his isolation. He continued to write to Bridgeport, for there were a few old friends whom he could not disregard altogether, though he made his letters as infrequent as he could and as short. In return ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne
... ultimatum, it has rushed forward in its terrors: verily to some purpose. How many Royalist Plots and Projects, one after another, cunningly-devised, that were to explode like powder-mines and thunderclaps; not one solitary Plot of which has issued otherwise! Powder-mine of a Seance Royale on the Twenty-third of June 1789, which exploded as we then said, 'through the touchhole;' which next, your wargod Broglie having reloaded it, brought a Bastille about your ears. Then ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... occupy the extremity of one of the islands. They contain the only trees I have seen at Venice:—a few rows of dwarfish unhappy-looking shrubs, parched by the sea breezes, and are little frequented. We found here a solitary gentleman, who was sauntering up and down with his hands in his pockets, and a look at once stupid and disconsolate. Sometimes he paused, looked vacantly over the waters, whistled, yawned, and turned away to resume ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... business it was, and infinitely solitary; away above, the sun was in the high tree-tops; the lianas noosed and sought to hang me; the saplings struggled, and came up with that sob of death that one gets to know so well; great, soft, sappy trees fell at a lick of the cutlass, little tough switches laughed at and dared my best endeavour. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... on the yacht after Peter left. At two o'clock Varney went down to a solitary luncheon. At quarter past, followed by the reproachful gaze of McTosh, he came out again. In the pit of his stomach reposed a great emptiness, but it was not hunger. He felt restless, high-strung, all made of nerves. He wanted to do something of a violent, physical sort, the more grueling the ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... one of the most solitary birds of our forests, and is strangely tame and quiet, appearing equally untouched by joy or grief, fear or anger. Something remote seems ever weighing upon his mind. His note or call is as of one lost or wandering, and to the ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... omelettes, chupa, cakes, chocolate, grapes, and melons, around which half a dozen attendants stood gravely in waiting. The size of the room, which to Ezekiel's eyes looked as large as the church at North Liberty, the profusion of the viands, the six attendants for the host and solitary guest, deeply impressed him. Morally rebelling against this feudal display and extravagance, he, who had disdained to even assist the Blandfords' servant-in-waiting at table and had always made his solitary meal on the kitchen dresser, ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... solitary place shall be glad for them, the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, even with joy and singing." This was the promise to those who responded to their Master's call. The wildernesses of the earth, the sad ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... religious hate, generating the lurid fires which glare in the battailous canticles of his prose pamphlets. The three great poems, Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes, are the utterance of his final period of solitary and Promethean grandeur, when, blind, destitute, friendless, he testified of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, alone ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... be back where the American flag is a familiar sight and not a curiosity. We saw thousands and thousands of merchant ships, but except in Manila and Honolulu we never saw a solitary American ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... my uncle? I could easily imagine him tearing along some solitary road, gesticulating, talking to himself, cutting the air with his cane, and still thinking of the absurd bit of hieroglyphics. Would he hit upon some clue? Would he come home in better humor? While these thoughts were passing through my brain, I mechanically took up the execrable ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... clean hospitable columns to this day. At the urgent request of Mr. Henry C. Bowen I began to write for his "Independent," and sent to its columns over six hundred articles; but of all my associate contributors in those days, not a solitary one survives. In May, 1860, My first article appeared in the New York Evangelist, and during these forty-two years I have tested the patience of its readers by imposing on them more than eighteen hundred of my lubrications. As I was preparing one of my earliest ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... to be a thousand miles away. Only in the northwest did mountains loom. They had never before had such an impression of the immensity of space. It seemed as though the whole expanse had been created for them, and them alone. For many miles they saw no human figure except that of a solitary cowboy, who passed them at a gallop on his way to the town. The country was slightly rolling and richly grassed, affording pasturage for thousands of cattle that roamed over it at will, almost ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... reconciliation between their wives which did not bar family intercourse. At least her husband made no suggestion that she should call on Mrs. Williams, and Flossy's cards did not appear. Beyond making the acquaintance of a few more wives and daughters in the hotel, who seemed as solitary as herself, Selma received no overtures from her own sex. She knew no one, and no one sought her out or paid her attention. She still saw fit to believe that if she were to establish herself in Washington and devote ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... falling dew, While glow the heavens with the last steps of day, Far through their rosy depths dost thou pursue Thy solitary way? ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck
... of the red coral, the hard skeleton belongs to the interior of the stem and branches only; but in the commoner white corals, each polype has a complete skeleton of its own. These polypes ate sometimes solitary, in which case the whole skeleton is represented by a single cup, with partitions radiating from its centre to its circumference. When the polypes formed by budding or division remain associated, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... step when he started back with horror. There was little enough light entered within this solitary abode, but yet there was quite enough to enable him to see curled up together upon a bed of leaves a number of snakes of different kinds. His first impulse was to rush out and escape, but bethinking himself of the defenceless position of ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... handmaid or prophet to various propaganda; when the majority of writers are trying to prove something, or acting as venders of some new-fangled social nostrums; when the insistent drums of the Great God Reclame are bruising human tympani, the figure of Joseph Conrad stands solitary among English novelists as the very ideal of a pure and disinterested artist. Amid the clamour of the market-place a book of his is a sea-shell which pressed to the ear echoes the far-away murmur of the ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... to suggest that she was not making the most of her time. Or perhaps he did not want to be left in solitary contemplation of that fleeting August morning. He lay silent for a little, and presently requested permission to smoke ...
— The Rocks of Valpre • Ethel May Dell
... solitary in my habits, for I dreaded meeting a human being. For a time my health suffered to a serious degree. My tribulations increased to such an extent that I seriously contemplated suicide. I am convinced that this period left ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... this detail of her part against her will; she began by making a curious attempt, due to her ignorance. She fancied, as children do, that being imprisoned meant the same thing as solitary confinement. But this is the superlative degree of imprisonment, and that superlative is the ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... in any way unsympathetic as to church work and benighted savages and such matters; but when half a dozen women get together and discuss a few heathen and a great many hats and similar things, the solitary man in the house ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... leave," Arthur firmly replied, though his eyes glittered with tears as he gazed upwards into the midnight sky, from which one solitary star, the glorious 'Vega,' blazed out in fitful splendour through the driving clouds. "She was like that star to me— bright, beautiful, and pure, but out ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... each other down in a pen too small to hold them! Ah, to show them the gate—the wide-open gate—to make them lie down in green pastures, to lead them beside the still waters!... Better for me, if I cannot lead, to leave them; to go away and dwell alone! to seek in solitary places, as others have done, some wild bitter root to heal their distemper; to come back with something in my hands;... to consider by what symbols to address them; to send them from time to time a message, to be scoffed at by most and ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... A solitary hut, dismal, rectangular, stands on the north bank of the White River. Decay has long been at work upon it, yet it is still weather-proof. It was built long before planks were used in the Bad Lands of Dakota. It was built by hands that aimed only at strength ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... came this man from Leavenworth, fresh from litigious soil, bearing with him in his faded blue army overcoat germs of civilization, seeds of discontent. He wailed aloud that the pride of the community, meaning this pig, which he had brought solitary in a box at the tail of the wagon when he moved in, was now departed; that there was naught left to distinguish this community from any other camp in the mountains; that the pig had been the light of his home, the apple of his eye, the pride of the community; that ...
— Heart's Desire • Emerson Hough
... it a fiend that to a stake Of fire his desperate self is tethering? Or stubborn spirit doomed to yell In solitary ward or cell, Ten thousand miles from ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... was needed for the plowing, and so Samuel walked the six miles to the village, and from there the mail stage took him out to the solitary railroad station. He had three hours to wait here for the train, and so he decided that he would save fifteen cents by walking on to the next station. Distance was nothing ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... they arrived there and had entered by the wooden gate, the semicircular carriage-drive, lit by two solitary lamps, and the front of the house itself, half-hidden among the black trees, seemed somewhat sombre and repellent at this silent hour of the morning; but they found a more cheerful radiance streaming out from the hall-door, which had been left open for them; and when they went into ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... having come back to the world of its former abode, had been borne across the parting waters and landed on the shore of the immortals. There was the ghostlike harbor of the spirit-land, the water gleaming betwixt its dark walls, one solitary boat motionless upon it, the men moving about like shadows in the star twilight. Here stood three women and a man on the shore, and save the stars no light shone, and from the land came no sound of life. Was it the dead of the night or a day that had ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various |
