"Yearnings" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wharf lay two trading-vessels; the one with the harp of Ireland waving on her flag; the other with the union-jack flying at her mast. I felt vehemently stirred to hail the beloved symbol; but, upon reflection, forbore outward demonstrations of the affectionate yearnings of my heart towards the flag of England, and so we boiled by them into this vast volume of turbid waters, whose noble width, and rapid rolling current, seem appropriately called by that most euphonious and sonorous of Indian names, the Alatamaha, which, in the common mode of speaking it, gains ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... tall forest creature with yearnings, which interfered with her appetite for sand-dabs. He might unobtrusively have stayed, she thought, and put himself at her service. Not the most clinging Old Man of the Sea could continue to cling ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... sir, for even as love is long enduring so is my song, it being of an hundred and seventy and eight cantos in all, dealing somewhat of the woes and ills of a heart sore smitten (which heart is mine own also). Within my song is much matter of hearts (in truth) and darts, of flames and shames, of yearnings and burnings, the which this poor heart must needs endure since it doth constant ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... sister's accident had crushed her youth. There was thenceforth a bond between her and Lady Temple that gave the young widow the strong-hearted, sympathizing, sisterly friend she had looked for in Rachel, and that filled up those yearnings of the affection that had at first made Alison feel that Colin's return made the world dreary to her. Her life had a purpose, though that purpose was not Ermine! But where were Edward and ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... might be eight, assorted babies; in short, a lady of vast influence. After all, then, she had come to him! If only he could please her, he regarded his succession to his predecessor as definitely established and his fortune made. No person in Hanbridge with any yearnings for style would dream, he trusted, of going to any other dentist than the dentist ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... Their songs combining Yield to thee their highest praise, Round thy brows of beauty twining, Fadeless garlands of their lays;— Lays whose light our gloom has rifted, And our yearnings heavenward lifted, As we soar with them, the ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... was not at hand, and I could have bit my finger for representing it so ill. After then wearying and fatiguing myself with grasping shadows, whilst that most sensible part of me disdained to content itself with less than realities, the strong yearnings, the urgent struggles of nature towards the melting relief, and the extreme self-agitations I had used to come at it, had wearied and thrown me into a kind of unquiet sleep: for, if I tossed and threw about my ...
— Memoirs Of Fanny Hill - A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749) • John Cleland
... to him. He talked to me of the yearnings of his heart and he looked at me with alarming tenderness. And from time to time he gazed, with sighs, at the portrait of the Duc d'Orleans. I said to him: 'Monsieur Garain, you are making a mistake. It is my sister-in-law who is an Orleanist. I am not.' At this moment Monsieur Le Menil came ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... who speak slightingly of boyhood and its feelings, scoffing at the early yearnings of the heart, and finding only food for jest in those innocent and childish raptures and regrets. We do not envy such. That man's heart must be made of doubtful stuff, who jeers at the fresh dreams of youth; or rather, he must have no heart at all—above all, no sweet and affecting recollections. ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... Cain! Nay, do not whisper o'er our son Such melancholy yearnings o'er the past: Why wilt thou always mourn for Paradise? Can we ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... not to her thinking a sufficient meeting of her problem. Her own fastidiousness and cleanness of character would have made that less a duty to her husband than to herself. The more difficult requirement was to close, and keep closed the port of her thoughts against those dreams and yearnings that stole in like blockade-runners, but these buccaneer thoughts came insistently and impertinently invested with a colorful ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... acrimonious; its effect upon the country was to strengthen the public prejudice against the anti-reformers. The Hon. Mr. Stanley, secretary for Ireland, made his reply to Sir Robert effective by illustrations drawn from the condition and wants of Ireland, its yearnings for freedom, and the restrictions which were laid upon the franchise. Mr. Croker made one of those speeches which proved nothing but the impolicy of the speaker. The bill was supported by Lords Dudley Stuart ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... happened the night before, he found himself checked with a jerk. He did not like it, for it made him conscious again of his master's suspicions. So he turned a sour gaze upon his unrestricted companions until, forced to it by inner yearnings amounting to acuteness now, he himself lowered his head and fell ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... and souls have quailed and fallen in their struggles with the mysteries of God. But ever and anon some bright flower of the race has gained the spiritual victory. A Messianic soul has responded to aspirations of a great-hearted, great-souled woman, pregnant with spiritual yearnings beyond her race, and she has unconsciously blessed her kind for the generations yet to come with that incarnated mystery—THE SON OF GOD. Blessed, O Woman, is thy patient mission on the earth, and transcendent are the holy mysteries of thy maternity. Every human birth is a Divine ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne
... the western plains of the United States of America we are told: "At twelve or thirteen these yearnings can no longer be suppressed; and, banded together, the youths of from twelve to sixteen years roam over the country; and some of the most cold-blooded atrocities, daring attacks, and desperate combats have been made by these children in ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... from a letter to his friend and neighbor, George William Fairfax, then in England, in which he lays the blame of this "deplorable affair" on the ministry and their military agents; and concludes with the following words, in which the yearnings of the patriot give affecting solemnity to the implied resolve of the soldier: "Unhappy it is to reflect that a brother's sword has been sheathed in a brother's breast; and that the once happy and peaceful plains ...
— The Life of George Washington, Volume I • Washington Irving
... his withered hopes Thou knowest, The baffled yearnings of his heart to snatch From paths unhallowed childhood's tottering feet, And lay a rosy smile on little lips With homeless hunger pale, to curses trained, Whereon no kiss hath left a ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... that my selfishness was even stronger than his—it was only a suffering selfishness instead of an enjoying one. But then, again, my exasperating insight into Alfred's self-complacent soul, his freedom from all the doubts and fears, the unsatisfied yearnings, the exquisite tortures of sensitiveness, that had made the web of my life, seemed to absolve me from all bonds towards him. This man needed no pity, no love; those fine influences would have been as little felt by him as the delicate white mist is felt by the rock it caresses. There ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... whether under cowl, cap, or crown—was a Liberal at heart, I had not wanted counsel; but when I had told him all my yearnings and aspirations, had bared to him the throbbings of my very thought, and he had replied in that one blessed word, I hastened away. There were none to whom I should say farewell; I was alone in the world. This wild blood of my veins ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... with no special ability but that of wasting other people's earnings, should have means inexhaustible while other poor fellows with fair ability should have to toil all their days for the means of subsistence and never have the wherewith to relieve their suffering fellow mortals or follow the yearnings of their impassionate hearts! ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... of their forefathers had declined among educated people, and the humane principles of Stoic philosophy were instilling a new regard for the less fortunate classes of mankind. Strange foreign devotions were satisfying some of the yearnings which found no nourishment in the hard old Roman paganism. Men who took no interest in Jupiter were attracted by Mithras, the Eastern god of the light. Women who could obtain no entrance into the exclusive sisterhood of the Vestal Virgins, could find occupation in the worship of the Egyptian Isis. ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... and simple, Who have faith in God and Nature, Who believe that in all ages Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings For the good they comprehend not, That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in that darkness And are lifted up and strengthened;— Listen to this simple story, To this ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... outlined against the pale sky. The cheerful windows sparkle with warmth and light, welcoming me, fresh from the chilly air, out of the homeless fields. With such array of cheerful usages I beguile my wondering heart, and chase away the wild insistent thoughts, the deep yearnings that thrill me. Thus am I bidden to desire and to be unsatisfied, to rest and marvel not, to stay, on this unsubstantial show of peace and security, the ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... prayer. The overwhelming majesty of such praying impressed Joan much; as, indeed, it impresses all who come adult thereto and do not associate it with their childhood, with weary hours dragging interminably out, with sleepy buzz of voices, with sore knees or a breaking back, with yearnings stifled, with devices for passing time, with the longed-for sunshine stealing inch by inch eastward on the ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... these yearnings, vague and wild, I often kneel by our dear child, In still, dark nights (you are asleep), And hold his ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... humanity; that its authority does not repose alone on the peculiar and supernatural events which transpired in Palestine, but also on the still broader foundations of the ideas and laws of the reason, and the common wants and instinctive yearnings of the human heart. It is his conviction that the course and constitution of nature, the whole current of history, and the entire development of human thought in the ages anterior to the advent of the Redeemer centre in, and can only be interpreted by, the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of it! I cannot see beyond the next step. All my life I have tried to keep my yearnings within bounds; now I—just follow. It's very, very wonderful. Some day I am going back to the In-Place. I shall find you both sitting by Master Farwell's beautiful fire, I am sure. It will be the still morning ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... heavy, I am sure, that was far from being light before!—To tell you truth, I am enjoined not to receive any thing of her's, from any hand, without leave. Should I therefore gratify my yearnings after her, so far as to receive privately the letter you mention, what would the case be, but to torment myself, without being able to do her good?—And were it to be known—Mr. Harlowe is so passionate—And should it throw his gout ...
— Clarissa, Volume 7 • Samuel Richardson
... obstinate scrutiny, sweeping them with my eyes, and searching them forever, after one angelic face, that might perhaps have permission to reveal itself for a moment. The faculty of shaping images in the distance, out of slight elements, and grouping them after the yearnings of the heart, grew upon me at this time. And I recall at the present moment one instance of that sort, which may show how merely shadows, or a gleam of brightness, or nothing at all, could furnish a sufficient basis for this creative faculty. On Sunday mornings ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... back from the last publisher. Betton, taking it up indifferently, had sat riveted till daylight. When he ended, the impression was so strong that he said to himself: "I'll tell Apthorn about it—I'll go and see him to-morrow." His own secret literary yearnings gave him a passionate desire to champion Vyse, to see him triumph over the ignorance and timidity of the publishers. Apthorn was the youngest of the guild, still capable of opinions and the courage of them, a personal ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... an armchair, near the fireplace, indulging in a revery. Although her lover was not there, she was still under the charm of this consuming as well as intellectual passion, which responded to the yearnings of her heart, the delicacy of her tastes, and the activity of her imagination. At this moment, she was happy to live; there was not a sad thought that these words, "He loves ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... excitement of the next day carried her over qualms and yearnings—the beating of the rainbow pinions was again ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner
... life, when the quick impulse of emotion achieves an unconscious beauty that defies the ordinary standards of critical appreciation. It is that little instant that is the torch to light a lover's worship or a poet's verses—to send strange yearnings into a young man's breast and set an old man's memory philandering ...
— The Parts Men Play • Arthur Beverley Baxter
... calm and serene, as it was after the great storm of the preceding one. Troubled and tempest-tost was each heart as it awakened scared by its own dreams, through which ran wild visions of the beloved faces, perhaps never more to be seen. Yearnings after the homes we had so thoughtlessly left, the scenes we might never more behold, the voices perchance we should never hear again. Every thing we loved and valued and had left! seemed on this memorable night to come vividly before us. Was it therefore to be wondered that with subdued and chastened ...
— Yr Ynys Unyg - The Lonely Island • Julia de Winton
... Magyar, and how, through music and probably in many other ways, he has influenced them. As the Spaniard perfectly understands the objective vagabond side of the Gitano, so the Southeastern European understands the musical and wild-forest yearnings of the Tsigane. Both to gypsy and Slavonian there is that which makes them dream so that even debauchery has for them at times an unearthly inspiration; and as smoking was inexpressibly sacred to the red Indians of old, so that ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... happily of the dead, for they are happy, and in a way you can not understand. If you love them truly, rejoice that they have gone, for what you call their death is but their birth, with powers transcending those of their former state, as light transcends the darkness. Disturb them not with idle yearnings, lest your thought unsettle the serenity of their lives. Let the ignorance which has ruined me be a warning. Some day I shall complete my term of loneliness, and begin life anew. We will know each other ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... woman, gifted, noble, and wealthy, with such great yearnings in her soul, whose heart was so bound up in her children, was thus robbed not only of her own rights, but also of theirs. Men! we can not trust you! You have deceived us too long! Since this movement ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... sharp-tempered governess. But now it seemed the only possible name for a girl to have, the only label that could even remotely suggest those feminine charms which he found in this girl beside him. There was poetry in every syllable of it. It was like one of those deep chords which fill the hearer with vague yearnings for strange and beautiful things. He asked for nothing better than to stand here ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... those enjoyments which do not betray. It is vast and sonorous; let it be stirred ever so little, and from it go forth deep vibrations which render the sound of the infinite. Augustin, before his conversion, had the apprehensions of our Romantics, the causeless melancholy and sadness, the immense yearnings for "anywhere but here," which overwhelmed our fathers. He is really very close ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... first. I want the employers to understand the hopes and yearnings of the workers, and I want the wage earners to understand the burdens and anxieties of the wage payers, and all of them must understand their obligations to the people and to the republic. Out of this understanding will come social ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... applicant offered to come for three pounds—thought six pounds too much. She expressed her willingness to sleep in the back kitchen: a shakedown under the sink was all she wanted. She likewise had yearnings ...
— Novel Notes • Jerome K. Jerome
... memory of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she was called upon to face this tangle of difficulties, but she reviewed the situation candidly. The house had served its time at the shrine of idealism; vague, distressing, unsatisfied yearnings had brought it low enough. Her mother, thirty years before, had eloped and left Germany with her music teacher, to give herself over to lifelong, drudging bondage at the kitchen range. Ever since Caroline could remember, the law in the house had been ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... worshipped for untold ages is true, and if that is so, whatever its origin, this also to us is a sacred spot, hallowed by the thousands of poor souls who, knowing not the light, yet have come here with yearnings towards the light and to the ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... do not say so unless you have good cause; you little know the yearnings of a mother's heart; the very suggestion of such a hope has thrown me into a state of agitation and nervousness of which you can form no conception. I have been reconciled to the Divine will; let me not return to a state ...
— The Settlers in Canada • Frederick Marryat
... the slender stems of the birches, and now and then sent up a great glare of light among the foliage, which shone with a ghostly grayish green. The majestic repose of this scene sank deeply into Fern's mind; dim yearnings awoke in him, and a strange sense of kinship with these mountains, fjords, and glaciers rose from some unknown depth of his soul. He seemed suddenly to love them. Whenever he thought of Norway in ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... with any recognised religious community, but the members of it had belonged to many—to the Church, the Baptists, the Independents, the Methodists. They were mostly mill-hands or small tradesmen, penetrated on the one side with the fervour, the yearnings, the strong formless poetry of English evangelical faith, and repelled on the other by various features in the different sects from which they came—by the hierarchical strictness of the Wesleyan organisation, or the looseness of the Congregationalists, or the ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that I am not blest As Thou would'st have me be Till all the peace and joy of faith Possess my soul in thee; And still I seek 'mid many fears, With yearnings unexpressed, The comfort of thy strengthening ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... content, love, to live here; In my own native land to be my own? Oh Bertha, all the yearnings of my soul For this great world and its tumultuous strife, What were they, but a yearning after thee? In glory's path I sought for thee alone, And all my thirst of fame was only love. But if in this ...
— Wilhelm Tell - Title: William Tell • Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller
... sentiments to be cultivated in the human breast; and that no act was more worthy than to kill a foe, or a feeling more delightful than to witness his suffering under torture. Yet the heart of young Laurence was not hardened, nor altogether debased. Occasionally yearnings for a different life to that he led rose in his bosom. Whence they came he could not tell. Still he could not help thinking that there might be a brighter and better state of existence in those far-off lands away beyond where ...
— The Trapper's Son • W.H.G. Kingston
... Bohemia, Poland, and all Czecho-Slav and Jugo-Slav peoples to rise. The United States Government, in full sympathy with their yearnings, had received their representatives at Washington, had furnished funds as well as moral support to their provisional governments, had supported an independent Czecho-Slav army in Russia with American reinforcements, with clothing, arms, munitions, and supplies, and now, at exactly the right ...
— America's War for Humanity • Thomas Herbert Russell
... every step of the way upward, her little shoes, and her little bonnets, and her little dresses, and her corals and her ribbons, are constantly being discussed in her presence, as the one all-important object of life. Aunt Maria thinks mamma is dreadful, because she has maternal yearnings over our toilet successes and fortunes; and we secretly think she is rather soured by old age, and has forgotten how ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Montaigne fears nothing more than any strivings after transcendentalism. Such yearnings terrify him like inaccessible heights. In the life of Sokrates, of that sage for whom he felt a special preference, the 'ecstasies and daimons' greatly repel him. Nevertheless, Montaigne, the mystic, attributes ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... my mind from painful associations by hopeful anticipations of "something turning up" on the morrow. The morrow came, sure enough; but no good luck:—my fortunes got darker and darker, as time went on; while my home yearnings ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... degradation and helpless misery of the poor Stockingers of my native town, wandering gaunt and hunger-stricken through the streets droning out their melancholy ditties, crowding the Union or toiling like galley slaves on relief works for a bare subsistence kindled in my heart yearnings to help the poor which have continued to this day and which have had a powerful influence on my whole life. A last I may be going to see my longings to help the workless realised. I think ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... accompany me as my wife. You have long placed implicit confidence in my honour. We have now known each other till affection has lost the gloss of novelty; and instead of depending on hope and imagination, it assumes the fixed character of experience. If I perceived the germ of avarice, or lurking yearnings after aggrandizement in your heart, I would point to stalls and mitres; for such endowments have originated from fortunate alliances. But I will only say to the Christian pastor who is content with feeding his few sheep in a wilderness, that I came ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... past, and Honor went away, with a heavy load of thwarted hopes and baffled yearning at her heart—yearnings which could be stilled only in ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her by the stove, and she looked up into his face with these yearnings in her eyes. Yes, she would have thrown herself on her knees, if she could. But she could not. Perhaps he would abandon that struggle. Perhaps—perhaps his heart was broken. And could a man with a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the true-hearted girl who loved him, forgetful of his own generous instincts, forgetful of the future that his fine abilities promised, was still dangling after this alien woman, and Sheila was left at home, with her troubles and piteous yearnings and fancies as her only companions? Once upon a time Ingram could have gone straight up to him and admonished him, and driven him to amend his ways. But now that ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... without abating in the least their eternal joys; nay, that they would find in it increasing motives to praise and adoration. Could it be so? Would the last act of the great Bridegroom of the Church be to strike from the heart of his purified Bride those yearnings of self-devoting love which His whole example had taught her, and in which she reflected, as in a glass, His own nature? If not, is there not some provision by which those roots of deathless love which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... well-intentioned efforts will be futile, and they will present a spectacle fit only to set Olympus laughing. I have gone through an exhibition of Japanese art, got up for the poor of Whitechapel with the idea of elevating them, of begetting in them yearnings for the Beautiful and True and Good. Granting (what is not so) that the poor folk are thus taught to know and yearn after the Beautiful and True and Good, the foul facts of their existence and the social law that dooms one in three to a public-charity ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... Lombardy—how the words had run in my dreams! Surely some ancestor of mine had wandered northwards from that gracious plain. On one side of me, at least, I was sib to the vineyards and the chestnut groves. For strange yearnings thrilled me as I beheld white-garlanded cities strung across the plain, the blue lakes grey in the haze, like eyes that look ...
— Bog-Myrtle and Peat - Tales Chiefly Of Galloway Gathered From The Years 1889 To 1895 • S.R. Crockett
... the 5th of January, full of aspirations after a blue sky, Moore was struck with the tone of melancholy pervading it; and, knowing that it was Lord Byron's habit when under the pressure of sorrow and uneasiness, to seek relief in expressing his yearnings after freedom and after other climes, he wrote to ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... ring out clanging now in wild crescendo, then whispering dread secrets of the ocean's depths. Oh, ye mighty bells, tell me from your learned lore of the hopes of mankind! Tell me what fruit he beareth from his strivings and yearnings; know not ye? Why ring ye now so joyful, so hopeful; then toll your dismal prophecies of ...
— Violets and Other Tales • Alice Ruth Moore
... enriched a gentle home—as a brother, less disciplined, had carved his unruly tempers into the grotesque figures of the reading desks. But for Fra Paolo the great library of the convent held no unsatisfied yearnings—only an infinite content and power ...
— A Golden Book of Venice • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... Western Reserve and also in Western Pennsylvania. His voice and manner were always imposing. He was regarded as an eloquent man at all times, and now he seemed fully aroused. He said he had not been satisfied in his religious yearnings until now. At night he had often been unable to sleep, walking and praying for more light and comfort in his religion. While in the midst of this agony he heard of the revelation of Joe Smith, which Brother Cowdery had explained: under this his soul suddenly found peace. It filled all his aspirations. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... standard, there was nothing but poverty. The satisfying physical and economic condition which we describe by the name of comfort did not exist. The Italian historian Ferrero, in one of his essays, recommends those who have romantic yearnings after the good old times to spend one night on what our forefathers called a bed. Mr. Coulton, in his books on the Middle Ages, has used some very plain language on the same text. And Professor Smart, ...
— Progress and History • Various
... demands. But this demand for perfection becomes at the same time the nucleus of our observation; from every side a quick affinity draws what is beautiful together and stores it in the mind, giving body there to the blind yearnings of our nature. Many imperfect things crystallize into a single perfection. The mind is thus peopled by general ideas in which beauty is the chief quality; and these ideas are at the same time the types of things. The type is still a natural resultant of particular ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... point, some momentary halting-place, where speech and thought even lay outside, and the need of the spirit was merely to exist and be conscious of its existence. Sometimes for a moment his past life with its self-repression, its mute yearnings, its chrysalis stirrings, formed a mist that dispersed again, sometimes for a moment in wonder at what the future held, what joys and troubles, what achings, perhaps, and anguishes, the unknown knocked ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... glowing missionary meeting of the seminary with which I have the honor to be connected than when the reports of this meeting shall be carried back to the brethren. The prayers of the class-rooms, the prayers of the missionary meetings, the yearnings of the hearts of the men who are preparing to follow in the footsteps of those who have heroically led the way, are the wires for these unseen and yet never unused electric currents which unite the North with the South, the frontier ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various
... on his part she drew tighter the reins on her mules. He sprang down over the wheel. The sun and the dust had their way again; the monotony of life, its drab discontent, its yearnings and its sense of failure once more resumed sway in part or all of the morose caravan. They all sought new fortunes, each of these. One day each must learn that, travel far as he likes, a man takes himself with him ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... my heart swelled with vague aspiring yearnings toward what lay beyond, while my eyes ranged over that same smiling scene, from the Domain, Lady Macquarie's Chair, and the purlieus of Circular Quay! (There were no trams there then.) Here one saw the ships that carried folk to and from—what? To and from Home, was always my thought; ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... and weird-looking. The greater number of visitors, especially in the poor quarter of the dead city, were women. Such is always the case, whether it be that the female mind is more generally accessible to gentle thoughts of and yearnings over their lost ones, or whether the explanation be simply that, as is especially the case here, women, having less to occupy their leisure either in the way of business or amusement, are more eager to seek any emotion or occasion which may serve ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... have adored his purity; but of that tender compassion which calls up the deepest and most pleasurable emotions in the soul, they could have known absolutely nothing. They might have witnessed his love to sinless beings; but they could never have seen that love in its omnipotent yearnings over the ruined and the lost. The attribute of mercy or compassion would have been forever locked up and concealed in the deep recesses of the Divine Mind; and the blessing, and honour, and glory, and dominion, which shall ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... to Him confine the prayer, When kindred thoughts and yearnings bear On the frail heart the purest share With all that live?— The best of what we do and are, 65 ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... horizon; that the dear fatherland, nothing lost, much gained, was to rise up in unexampled honor among the nations of the earth—these thoughts, and that undistinguishable throng of fancies, and hopes, and desires, and yearnings, that filled the soul with tremblings like the heated air of midsummer days—all these kindled up such a surge of joy as no ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... me. Those lustrous, violet eyes, And my heart with passionate yearnings To meet her ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... We do not enjoy all the things that we have; and this is either because they do not afford us delight, or because they are not the ultimate goal of our desires, and so are incapable of satisfying our yearnings or affording us repose. But these three things the Blessed have in God: for they see Him, and seeing Him they hold Him ever present to them, for they have it in their power always to see Him; and holding Him, they enjoy Him, ...
— On Prayer and The Contemplative Life • St. Thomas Aquinas
... O Mary, years on years, From child-birth to the cross, Wast filled with yearnings, filled with fears, Keen sense ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... method of investigation. The psychological studies of religion in recent years have greatly enriched our knowledge of the range and scope and power of man's psychic nature and functions, of his instincts, desires, valuations, needs, yearnings, beliefs, and modes of activity and behaviour, and particularly of the important influence which the social group has exercised and still exercises in the furtherance of religious attitudes and ideals. But the psychological method has ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... abounds. You must keep the ardor of love glowing in your heart. Allow not the world nor aught else to extinguish the tender flame. Everything that has a tendency to suppress love, to cool its ardor, to dilute its sweetness in your soul, to lessen the yearnings of your heart for more of God, to deprive you of the sweet realization of constantly leaning on his breast,—consider all such things your bitter foes and rout them at ...
— Food for the Lambs; or, Helps for Young Christians • Charles Ebert Orr
... happiness. It opened the way to the performance of great actions, which would bring honor to his father's name; and although he had been, hitherto, prepared to settle down to the life of a cultivator of the soil, he had had his yearnings for one of more excitement and adventure; and these were now likely to be gratified, ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty
... parent, all the endearing hopes I have cherished, now pass in review before me, embittering the circumstances of my inexpressible woe; and I consider myself as a solitary outcast from all the comforts of society. But, enough of these unmanly complaints; the yearnings of nature ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... have tried it long enough to speak with absolute certainty. For years I practiced these senseless mummeries, and if there were any virtue, in them, I should, most certainly have discovered it. But I know full well, and my reader knows that they cannot satisfy the restless yearnings of the immortal mind. They may delude the vulgar, but they cannot dispel the darkness of the tomb, they cannot lead ...
— Life in the Grey Nunnery at Montreal • Sarah J Richardson
... had no vague yearnings after the fame of a Milton, no inner consciousness that he had been born to stamp out the footprints of Shakespeare on the sands of time, no unhealthy hungering after the gloomy grandeur of Byron. He had been brought up amongst people who treated literature as a ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... greet thee, Love, and with thee scale the height, That cloudless height where winged spirits rest: Where the deep yearnings of the mortal breast, From mortal bin set free, reveal to sight That living Presence, that Eternal Light In which enwrapt ...
— Sonnets • Nizam-ud-din-Ahmad, (Nawab Nizamat Jung Bahadur)
... accumulated changes of progress in blessedness, and the withdrawal of all external causes of disquiet and weariness and weeping, still the heart would hunger and be empty of its true possession unless God Himself had flowed into it. It were but a poor advancement and the gain of a loss, if yearnings were made immortal, and the aching vacuity, which haunts every soul that is parted from God, were cursed with immortality. It would be so, if it be not true that the inheritance is nothing less than the fuller possession of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... place, dejected and dismayed, Shrinking from view, his wasting form he laid, Or to the restless sea and roaring wind Gave the strong yearnings of a ruined mind; On the broad beach, the silent summer day, Stretched on some wreck, he wore his life away; Or where the river mingles with the sea, Or on the mud-bank by the elder tree, Or by the bounding marsh-dyke, there ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... all impossible, hopeless, but to love and lose were better than to live in ignorance of life's strongest passion. To dally with the impossible were sheer madness, he knew that. But what was to be done but obey the yearnings of his heart, though it ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... can love her only child,—as only a mother can love who has no hope of joy in the world, but what is founded on her child. But the other passion had become so strong in her bosom that it almost conquered her mother's yearnings. Was she to fight for long years that she might be beaten at last when the prize was so near her,—when the cup was almost at her lips? Were the girl now to be taken to her grave, there would be an end at any rate of the fear which now most heavily oppressed her. But the three ...
— Lady Anna • Anthony Trollope
... seasoned with plenty of Noraway pitch; All dried and split for that jubilee day, The day of the holocaust of a witch. The prickers are chosen—hang-daddy and brother— And fixed were the fees of their work of love; To prick an old woman who was a mother, And felt still the yearnings of motherly love For she had a son, a noble young fellow, Who sailed in a ship of his own the sea, And who was away on the distant billow For a cargo of wine to this bonnie Dundee. Some said she was bonnie when she was a lassie, Ah! ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... and sorrow have maddened heart and brain. Passion hath made me restless and longing consumes my soul And tears discover the secret that else concealed had lain. I know of no way to ease me of sickness and care and woe, Nor can my weak endeavour reknit love's severed skein. The fire of my heart with yearnings and longing grief is fed And for its heat, the lover to live in hell is fain. O thou that thinkest to blame me for what betides me, enough; God knows I suffer with patience whate'er He doth ordain. I swear I shall ne'er find solace nor be consoled for love, The oath of the children of passion, whose ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... has sensed the very soul of mankind and understands and explains its yearnings for what Drummond names "the greatest thing in the world, LOVE." ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... and left, and Sheila was alone with her husband, and still holding his hand. She looked up at him timidly, wondering, perhaps, in her simple way, as to whether she should not now pour out her heart to him, and tell him all her griefs and fears and yearnings. He had obviously been deeply moved by the story he had told so roughly: surely now was a good opportunity of appealing to him, and begging ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... when the giant in us wakes and broods, Filled with home-yearnings, drowsily he flings From his deep heart high dreams and mystic moods. Mixed with the memory of the loved earth things: Clothing the vast with a familiar face; Reaching his right hand forth to ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Katharine Ogden and her kind! Unless he met their demands, he could mean nothing to them. How far had time and discussion influenced Janet? Might she not fear to try the larger life with him; she who had, without a quiver, discarded Devant with his claims and yearnings? ...
— Janet of the Dunes • Harriet T. Comstock
... the mountains And the wind is yodling to me Yearnings of the glaciers To flow to summer lands. I'm treading up the valleys With no wanting to undo me— For to-day I'm goalless ...
— Many Gods • Cale Young Rice
... gentle dignity as his; and the proud, contemplative, yet kindly soul is oftenest captivated by simplicity like hers. But while they spoke softly, and he was watching the happy sadness, the lightsome shadows, the shy yearnings of a maiden's nature, the wind through the Notch took a deeper and drearier sound. It seemed, as the fanciful stranger said, like the choral strain of the spirits of the blast, who in old Indian times had their dwelling among these mountains, and made their heights and recesses ...
— The Great Stone Face - And Other Tales Of The White Mountains • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... A sickening feeling of hollowness within him was crying aloud to be appeased by either food or drink, and his shaking body begged for a place to rest itself into tranquillity; but still for a while he stood there, fighting off these yearnings while he gathered his far-strayed wits. Now and then he weakly attempted to catch the other's eye, but as Mike studiously refused to be caught, Cassidy could only blink owlishly and fumble again with the tangled ends of the skein. Finally, abandoning it all as useless, he ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 31, No. 1, May 1908 • Various
... as she plodded through the mire of the streets, getting splashed by passing vehicles and being dazzled by the magnificence of the window displays, she felt longings that tortured her like hunger pangs, yearnings for better clothes, for eating in restaurants, for going to the theatre, for a room of her own with nice furniture. Right at those moments, it never failed that her old gentleman would come up to whisper something in her ear. ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... each other. With the spirit forever in bondage, it is the same whether housed in golden cages with every want supplied, or wandering in the dreary deserts of life, friendless and forsaken. Long ago we of America heard the deep yearnings of the souls of women in foreign lands for freedom responsive to our own. Mary Wollstonecraft, Madame de Stael, Madam Roland, George Sand, Frederica Bremer, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Frances Wright and George Eliot alike ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... and a banking-account can write out cheques for charitable institutions. But to accomplish anything personal, imaginative, adventurous, anything with a touch of distinction, is a less easy matter. You wake up in the morning with the altruistic yearnings of a St. Francois de Sales, and yet somehow you go to bed in the evening with the craving unsatisfied. You have really had so few opportunities; and when an occasion does arise it is hedged around with such difficulties as to baffle all but the most persistent. Have you ever ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... within, to see all changed without, Is a blank lot and hard to bear, no doubt. Yet why at others' wanings should'st thou fret? Then only might'st thou feel a just regret, Hadst thou withheld thy love or hid thy light 5 In selfish forethought of neglect and slight. O wiselier then, from feeble yearnings freed, While, and on whom, thou may'st—shine on! nor heed Whether the object by reflected light Return thy radiance or absorb it quite: 10 And though thou notest from thy safe recess Old Friends burn dim, like lamps in noisome air, Love them for ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... with you?—he said, after a pause. A little before he would have said, Shall I pray for you?—The Christian religion, as taught by its Founder, is full of sentiment. So we must not blame the divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings of human sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the Master than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has been the stumbling-block of all ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... white, my heart is rent in two. When in autumn the hedges thin, and gardens waste, all trace of you is gone. When the moon waxeth cold, and the dew pure, my dreams then know something of you. With constant yearnings my heart follows you as far as wild geese homeward fly. Lonesome I sit and lend an ear, till a late hour to the sound of the block! For you, ye yellow flowers, I've grown haggard and worn, but who doth pity me, And breathe one word of ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... the needs of the colored women and girls of the South, you must bear in mind their past condition, present status and future prospects, together with the forces that have contributed to each, before you can know and feel the heart yearnings and ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... these two professions that of a trade in diamonds and jewels. He was a man always aspiring higher than his abilities allowed, and a restless speculator, who incessantly destroyed his modest fortune in his efforts to extend it in proportion to his ambitious yearnings. He adored his daughter, and could not, for her sake, content himself with the perspective of the workshop. He gave her an education of the highest degree, and nature had conferred upon her a heart for the most elevated destinies. ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... at girls, their games, their curls, Their wastefulness, their waist, Their yearnings to hook Dukes and Earls, Their matrimonial haste, Are the crude chat of cubs and churls, And in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, September 17, 1892 • Various
... her son at the call of the Church to the perils of a Missionary life, in a land of cannibals, she never revoked the gift, neither grudged the sacrifice. Her maternal yearnings were often excited by the narration of his sufferings and privations; but they were never suffered to rise in mutinous rebellion against the Divine will. For nearly twenty-two years she not only submitted to his absence with ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth
... were to be found in that pastoral world—the girl who rung her father's knell; the unborn infant feeling about its mother's heart; the instinctive touches of children; the sorrows of the wild creatures, even—their home-sickness, their strange yearnings; the tales of passionate regret that hang by a ruined farm-building, a heap of stones, a deserted sheepfold; that gay, false, adventurous, outer world, which breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflower these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... to this Indian Legend. Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple, Who have faith in God and nature, Who believe that in all ages Every human heart is human, That in even savage bosoms There are longings, yearnings, strivings, For the good they comprehend not, That the feeble hands and helpless, Groping blindly in the darkness, Touch God's right hand in that darkness, And are lifted up and strengthened,— Listen to this simple story. Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles Through the green lanes ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... was all fire and dew. The physical scarcely entered into it, for such seemed profanation. The ultimate physical facts of their relation were something which they never considered. Yet the immediate physical facts they knew, the immediate yearnings and raptures of the flesh—the touch of finger tips on hand or arm, the momentary pressure of a hand-clasp, the rare lip-caress of a kiss, the tingling thrill of her hair upon his cheek, of her hand lightly thrusting back the locks from above his eyes. All this they knew, but also, ...
— The Game • Jack London
... one to speak to about her fear and loathing of Crothers. Besides, she had entered upon her career and dared not turn back. She did not understand herself, nor the man who was her employer; she did not understand conditions nor the yearnings that possessed her; she only knew that she must fight against becoming a poor white, and learn to overcome the limitations of her birth, and Crothers seemed her only chance. On the long rides to and from the factory she thought often of her poor mother and wondered ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... evidently her associations and education removed her far from him, yet he had an instinctive sympathy with her. After all, I suppose every young fellow is attracted by a young pretty face, wild, longing eyes, and beautiful features suggestive of romance and poetry and unsatisfied yearnings. ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... affections could be excited towards any but those of her own race was a circumstance so impossible, and moreover a sin so fearful, that it never entered Manuel's mind: he knew not woman's nature, dreamed not of its quick impulses, its passionate yearnings, its susceptibility towards all gentle emotions, or he could not have so trustingly believed in the power of her peculiar faith and creed to guard her from the danger. Even his dearest desire that she should become the wife of her cousin she knew not; for the father shrunk ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... came to the missionary desiring that they might be allowed to serve so good a Master. They never seemed tired of receiving instruction in the new doctrine, and I was struck with its wonderful adaptability to unsophisticated man, and its power of satisfying his heart yearnings, from the avidity with which they seized each point as ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... a refuge for hearts that loved too well, and memories all too faithful. God help such!—for this is no place to forget. And it may be, that after years of painful self-control and depressing experience, some here have gradually attained the conviction that their efforts are vain, their yearnings not here to be fulfilled—what, then, must solitude be to them but an enduring sorrow? It is too late to retrieve the past—the fatal vows have been spoken—those frowning walls are impassable—and ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... man. After a pause he went on, "Miss Drayton, I make bold to ask a favour. Perhaps it may be a last one. Those hymns I have heard you sing come strangely home to my own heart. They awaken yearnings I never felt, and reveal truths I never saw before. May I take the liberty of asking the loan of your hymn-book? Even my mother, with her horror of dissent, would not object to the writings of so staunch a Churchman ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... on a crescent sea-beach When the moon is new and thin, Into our hearts high yearnings Come welling and surging in— Come from the mystic ocean whose rim no foot has trod. Some of us call it longing And others call ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... to be so pleasant, has become a sad meal to me. I drink it mechanically and set down my cup, remembering only that the dear little hand which used to minister to my wants is near me no more. My child! my child! words are poor to express the heart's yearnings; my spirit is near you all ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... third book, "Niels Lyhne," we have again the story of a Danish Rudin—a nature with a multitude of scattered aspirations, squandering itself in brilliant talk and fantastic yearnings. It is the same coquetting with the "advanced" ideas of the age, the same lack of mental stamina, the same wretched surrender and failure. It is the complexion of a period which the author is here attempting to give, and he takes pains to emphasize ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... He had spoken rather than thought, for he thought little, and he was not used to keeping secrets. Moreover, despite his courageous disbelief in his coming fate, he must have had some yearnings for sympathy; the iron of his exile surely entered his soul at times. The girl, so delicately framed, so flower-like of face, seemed alien to her rude surroundings and the burly, heavy, matter-of-fact folk about her. ...
— The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories • Charles Egbert Craddock
... sight, and wondered if the souls inside of those bodies were as angular as their covering. I did not believe it—I do not believe it. I have no doubt that underneath those straight waistcoats hearts have throbbed at the sight of woman and child, and longed for home and family life, with yearnings that could not be uttered. Those straightlaced sensibilities have been thrilled by beauty, and bathed in the grace and glory of the life around them. Trees have whispered to them, flowers have looked up and rebuked them, ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... Diana like a spark to dry leaves. Her whole nature flamed to it, and there were moments when she walked visibly transfigured in the glow of it. Her mind was rich, moreover, in the delicate, inchoate lovers, the half-poetic, half-intellectual passions, the mystical yearnings and aspirations, which haunt a pure expanding youth. Such human beings, Mrs. Colwood reflected, are not generally made for happiness. But there were also in Diana signs both of practical ability and of a rare common-sense. Would this last avail to protect her from ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not the only man with yearnings for a different state of affairs. Private Patrick McLaughlan, of the Inniskilling Fusiliers, occupying the bed on my right, has his. He often tells us his ideal of happiness, a "pub" corner with half-a-dozen pint pots containing ambrosial "four 'arf" before him, and a well-seasoned ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... behalf. I have bethought me of all thy love and care—of all thy devotion to my age and sufferings. When thou wert a child, Jacopo, tenderness for thee tempted me to acts of weakness: I trembled lest thy manhood might bring upon me pain and repentance. Thou hast not known the yearnings of a parent for his offspring, but thou hast well requited them. Kneel, Jacopo, that I may ask of God, once more, ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... known what it is to live with a heart inflamed by love for thy fellow-creatures which thou couldst manifest neither by word nor deed? To pine with fruitless longings for good? and to consume with vain yearnings for usefulness? To be misjudged and haply reviled by thy fellows for failing to do what it is not given thee to do? If so, thou wilt pity poor Mithridata, whose nature was most ardent, expansive, and affectionate, but ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... homesickness, but he sturdily kept his post, in spite of grievous yearnings for family and flock. The pestilence slowly abated, till at length the burying-parties that passed the Maurepas Gate counted only three or four a day. At the end of January five hundred and sixty-one ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman
... name and an honorable career, in the attainment of his cherished end—the society of friends, the little luxuries of a frugal table, the modest though comfortable room in which he had hitherto lived and toiled. Poor Gerald! he had yet to learn when his most ambitious yearnings had been fully realized, that worldly honors do not satisfy the cravings of a Christian heart, that the most imperishable coronal of true success is woven of deeds little, lowly, and seemingly contemptible, ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 1, January 1886 • Various
... experienced an inexpressible sadness; for it seemed to me—I know not whether equally so to others—that the eloquence to which I had been listening had sprung from a depth where lay turbid dregs of disappointment—where moved troubling impulses of insatiate yearnings and disquieting aspirations. I was sure St. John Rivers—pure-lived, conscientious, zealous as he was—had not yet found that peace of God which passeth all understanding: he had no more found it, I thought, than had I with my concealed ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... forums, sometimes noted in the papers, those innocuous gatherings, it was possible to hold in that very room other meetings, not open and not innocuous, where practical plans took the place of discontented yearnings, and where the talk was more often of fighting than ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... sweep away all the sad memories of her longings and yearnings. Never again would she feel that she was an orphan, really belonging to nobody. Her father, her very own, had come to her at last. How good ...
— Hunter's Marjory - A Story for Girls • Margaret Bruce Clarke
... heavens, whirled into life and being by the power of my love, has drawn the light of a myriad stars into itself, and incarnated itself in a form of flesh and blood. And in that form, what aeons of thought and striving, untold yearnings of limitless skies, the countless ...
— The King of the Dark Chamber • Rabindranath Tagore (trans.)
... Tulliver, she would have accepted the society of the 'Mill on the Floss' with perfect contentment, respected all the family of aunts and uncles, and never repined against the tyranny of her brother Tom. She would have been conscious of no vague imaginative yearnings, nor have beaten herself against the narrow bars of stolid custom. She would have laid up a vast store of linen, and walked thankfully in the path chalked out for her. Certainly she would never have run away with Mr. Stephen Guest without tyranny of a much more tangible kind than ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... evening star she was! And how her very presence filled all hearts with a livelier sense of happiness and hope, and sweet pure yearnings for wedded calm and bridal love! But she—innocent young Eva—little knew of the sensation she had caused by the rare beauty of her blossoming womanhood. Her whole heart was in the act of worship, except when ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... have never been spiritually gifted. We are neither meditative and reflective like the Hindus nor individualistic like the Anglo-Saxons. Nevertheless, like all mankind we have spiritual yearnings. They will be best stirred by ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... crowned with a saintly aureole remains a glorified marabout—an intellectual dissolvent; the importer of that oriental introspectiveness which culminated in the idly-splendid yearnings of Plato, paved the way for the quaint Alexandrian tutti-frutti known as Christianity, and tainted the well-springs of honest research for two thousand years. By their works ye shall known them. It was the Pythagoreans ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... months that it would be a great privilege for any woman to become the wife of a clergyman. Like many other girls who have a good deal of time for thought,—thought about themselves, their surroundings, and the world in general,—she had certain yearnings after a career. But she had lived all her life in Philistia, and considered it to be very well adapted as a place of abode for a proper-minded young woman; in fact, she could not imagine any proper-minded young woman living under any other form of government than ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves.' Nash addressed to him many affectionately phrased sonnets. The prolific sonnetteer Barnabe Barnes and the miscellaneous literary practitioner Gervase Markham confessed, respectively in 1593 and 1595, yearnings for Southampton's countenance in sonnets which glow hardly less ardently than Shakespeare's with admiration for his personal charm. Similarly John Florio, the Earl's Italian tutor, who is traditionally reckoned ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... I did not ask from thee, Though that were much—oh, more than earth hath given; None live to bear that gentle name for me, Though one may lisp it now, perchance, in Heaven. I know not even, for I never felt, The quiet yearnings of such love as this; Thou should'st have known a deeper feeling dwelt In the rapt ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... strongly to any exception to the rule. I think he misses the mental ozone which he found in Louise. I often wonder if men who have loved superior women and married average ones do not have occasional wonderings and yearnings over ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... and don't care to repeat. Take it, briefly, that for a few days I was painfully oppressed by so mighty a change; but it is becoming daily more natural to me. I went and sat among 'em all at my old thirty-three-years' desk yester-morning; and, deuce take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads,—at leaving them in the lurch, fag, fag, fag! The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... this the language of a priest? I, trained to horrid carnage in the field, The stern executor of royal vengeance, Must I to the unhappy lend my voice! And you, who owe to him a father's yearnings, You, minister of peace in time of wrath, Now, covering your resentment with false zeal, Are of opinion blood too lightly flows! You have commanded me to speak to you Without concealment, Madam: What is then This mighty cause of fear? A dream, a child Devoid of power, that ...
— Athaliah • J. Donkersley
... one-and-twenty has buried all the higher part of life, who has, of her own act, for ever deprived herself of joys that nothing else can bring her. Love, true love, is almost the only expression, of which we women are capable, of all the nobler instincts and vague yearnings after what is higher and better than the things we see and feel around us. When we love most, and love happily, then we are at our topmost bent, and soar further above the earth than anything else can carry us. Consequently, ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... a stout lady of mature years, sentimental, amiable, and lazy. She wrote verses copiously, and had vague yearnings and graspings after the unknown, which led her to believe herself fitted for a higher sphere than any ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... indeed marked between that time and this, when Shelley societies are found in various parts of the world, when enthusiasts write from the most remote regions and form friendships in his name, when, churches, including Westminster Abbey, have rung in praise of his ideal yearnings, and when, not least, some have certainly tried to lead pure unselfish lives in memory of the godlike part of the man in him; but he now left his native shores, never to return, with Claire and Allegra, and his own two little children, and certainly ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... Griswold—as the reader, of course, knows—has placed me at a fair elevation among our minor minstrelsy, on the strength of my pretty little volume, published ten years ago. As regards human progress (in spite of my irrepressible yearnings over the Blithedale reminiscences), let them believe in it who can, and aid in it who choose. If I could earnestly do either, it might be all the better for my comfort. As Hollingsworth once told me, I lack a purpose. How strange! He was ruined, morally, by an overplus of the very ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... answer, the stranger seemed surprised; he looked darkly at the youth, who remained silent. They seemed to communicate by an unspeakable effusion of the spirit, hearing each other's yearnings in the teeming silence, and going forth side by side, like two doves sweeping the air on equal wing, till the boat, touching the strand of the island, roused them from ...
— The Exiles • Honore de Balzac
... shakes his sword at his victim, unwonted yearnings come over the human heart. To die alone, removed from home and friends, when strange faces are beside us, is a fate which we all fervently pray may not be ours. Yet, when these strangers are enemies, and our death is at their hands—when every ...
— The Ranger - or The Fugitives of the Border • Edward S. Ellis
... friends had forgotten, became significant again for Helena's benefit. She had some aptitude, and more ambition—would indeed, but for the war, have been a South Kensington student, and had long cherished yearnings for the Slade. He set her work to do during the week, and corrected it with professional ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward |
