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More "Loneliness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... desert—Heaven itself overclouded—and death all the while standing at such a weary distance that there is no refuge within the horizon of endurance? Be these things right or wrong, they are: and while they are, will the woman who loves, unrequited, feel desperate on the discovery of her loneliness—and, the more pure and proud, innocent ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... mother did not seem to fancy there was any danger, till, all at once, she was pounced upon by the animal, and dragged away, and I never saw her more. Then I crept back into the nest, and lay half-dead with fright, moaning and crying at times for very loneliness; but she never came. And even now, Master Herbert—would you believe it?—I keep thinking of that dreadful time, and I have to shriek out for some relief to my feelings. You often ask me what I am crying ...
— The Cockatoo's Story • Mrs. George Cupples
... lazily floating far overhead gave deeper background to the slender strip of over-arching blue. It all combined to form a nature picture of primeval peace, rendered peculiarly solemn by those vast ranges of overshadowing mountains, and more deeply impressive by the grim silence and loneliness, the seemingly total ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... state of rebellion. It was Gowan's presence she was resenting, not Dolly's. To tell the truth, she was rather glad to see Dolly. She had begun to feel the loneliness of her position, and it had half intimidated her. But the sight of Gowan roused her spirit. What right had he to come and interfere with her, since he did not care for her and thought she was nothing but a child? It made her feel like a child. She turned her back to him openly as she ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... God! Men! Men! Bring lights and let me see the face Of human beings 'round about!" So cried My cousin Mark not half an hour agone, As one on whom the mirth of loneliness Falls all ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... exhausted alike in mind and body, I threw myself upon my bed, but not to sleep. A sense of my utter desolation and loneliness came over me, blended with a feeling of bitter and unmerited wrong. I recollected the many manifestations of affection which I had received from her who had that day given herself, in the presence of Heaven, to another; and I called to mind the thousand sacrifices I had made to ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... footstep, and not a very stealthy one, approaching the house, and the dog bounded forward to the full length of his chain, but he was beaten down with a blow that stunned him. The men were too strong in numbers, and too secure in the extreme loneliness of the dwelling, to care about taking many precautions. Miss Anne and Stephen heard Mr. Wyley cross the floor of his room above, and open his window; but there was silence again, and the chime of the house clock striking eleven was the only sound that broke ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... but rock, rock, rock! It is as if we were passing where the foot of man had never trod before, so solemn is the stillness here in the midst of the "everlasting hills." To see one solitary bird flitting fitfully from point to point only makes the loneliness seem greater, and it is absolutely touching to find in a place like this the lovely little Ranunculus alpestris and Ranunculus glacialis forcing a way between the shingly stones and opening their delicate white petals to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... world and five years afterwards found herself be-Gedged out of existence. They were struggling people in those days, and before her death my wife used to employ her, when she could, for household sewing and whatnot. And tiny Phyllis, in a childless home, became a petted darling. When my great loneliness came upon me, it was a solace to have the little dainty prattling thing to spend an occasional hour in my company. Gedge, an excellent workman, set up as a contractor. He took my modest home under his charge. A leaky tap, ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... think! You remember all kinds of things you've never thought of for years and years. I used to talk to myself at last, and make believe it was another man. I was out seven days: and he was only out one night. But I think it's the loneliness that got hold of him. Man, those stars are awful; and that stillness that comes toward morning!" He stood up. "It's a great pity, because he's as good a fellow as ever was. But perhaps he'll come ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... lamp-light The prairies were brown and forbidding, the sky often a mere gray pall. The monotony of the life began to seem terrible. Sometimes her ears ached for a sound. For a time in the summer so many had seemed to need her that she had been happy in spite of her poverty and her loneliness. Now, suddenly, no one wanted her. She could find no source of inspiration. She wondered how she was going to live through the winter, and keep her patience and ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... which the limitations of the frontier permitted. Generally sharing the one-room cabin, like any member of the family, he soon learned that he was a welcome guest rather than a stranger in their midst. The loneliness of the frontier stimulated ...
— The Fair Play Settlers of the West Branch Valley, 1769-1784 - A Study of Frontier Ethnography • George D. Wolf
... laughed, a bit hysterically, because laughter is, after all, akin to tears. And the little green car shot off with a whir as I turned to enter my new world of loneliness. ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... Queen of Love, from Earth had flown, With her love fled, and left all nature prone; From Earth all peace with love then fled amain. In loneliness the bull stalked o'er the plain, And tossed his drooping crest toward the sky, In sadness lay upon the green to die; On the far kine looked weary and bereaved, And turned toward the gods, and wondering grieved. The troubled kine then gravely chewed their cud, And hungerless in ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... about seeing; how his position prevented him from accepting of civilities, because he had no home where he could return them; in short, he seemed about as miserable a being as is to be found anywhere,—lonely, and with sensitiveness to feel his loneliness, and capacities, now withered, to have enjoyed the sweets of life. I suppose he is comfortable enough when busied in his duties at the Custom-House; for when I spoke to him at my entrance, he was too much absorbed to hear me at first. ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... should die! Oh, Hannah! it is common enough to talk of being willing to die for one we love! It is easy to die—much easier sometimes than to live: the last is often very hard! I will do more than die for my love: I will live for him! live through long years of dreary loneliness, taking my consolation in rearing his son, if you will give me the boy, and hoping in some distant future for his return, when I can present his boy to him, and say to him: 'If you cannot love me for my own sake, try to love me a little ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... I coax her to the top of the water? The Splash had been father and mother to me, and I loved her. In my loneliness I wanted her companionship. It did not look like an easy task to raise her; and yet the most difficult things become easy when we hit upon the right method of doing them. The Splash was ballasted with ten fifty-sixes, each with a ...
— Breaking Away - or The Fortunes of a Student • Oliver Optic
... said Cologne, with a smile, "pathetic accounts of prisoners, who in extreme loneliness carved their names over and over again on stone as hard as the jailer's heart, but your Highness seems rather to have enjoyed yourself while so cruelly interned. May I further beg of you to enlighten us concerning ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... settlement; but a more lonely spot cannot be imagined. More than thirty years ago, Fitzroy had sailed up this bay, partially surveyed it, and marked this harbor on his chart. If any vessel has broken the loneliness of its waters since, no record of any such event has been kept. Of the presence of man, there was no sign. Yet the few days passed there were among the pleasantest of the voyage to Agassiz. The work of the dredge and ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... the multitudinous stars—which, to my mind, never betray their immeasurable distance so clearly as when one is in mid-ocean—with the sough and moan of the night wind and the soft, seething hiss of the sea whispering in one's ears, the feeling of loneliness becomes almost an obsession, the sense of all-pervading mystery persistently obtrudes itself, and one quickly falls into a condition of readiness to believe the most incredible of the countless weird stories that sailors love ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood
... know what gave him this horrible attack of "the blues," but the truth is he took out his handkerchief and cried like a baby from very loneliness ...
— The Master Key - An Electrical Fairy Tale • L. Frank Baum
... sobs and tears. "Heaven give me strength," he sighed, "that I may retain her sweet face in my memory." This was indeed a misfortune that seemed to shut the past from his thoughts, and to increase his sufferings as the future appeared to him in all its loneliness. And when he had partially recovered from this shock of grief, the good woman brought him food, for he was hungry; and also procured him a change of raiment from one of the neighbors, there not being a shred of his own in the house. And when he had satisfied his ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... was, it was bound to be wholly! With women there could be no half-measures. He could not imagine a fellow half-trusting a woman in that intimate relation to himself, and in those particular circumstances of conquest and loneliness where no confidences could appear dangerous since, apparently, there could be no one she could give him away to. Moreover, in nine cases out of ten the woman would be trusted. But, trusted or mistrusted, was her presence a favourable or unfavourable condition ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... heart-broken at this bitter separation. She felt the loneliness of the castle deeply, she longed for his happy presence and the sound of his voice. She could never speak to Golo as to the friend to whose care her husband had recommended her. Her pure eyes shrank from the passionate look which gleamed in ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... expectations. It was she who had encouraged him to leave his ship, in the hope of securing a friend and defender for the girls. The wife of old Giorgio was aware of her precarious health, and was haunted by the fear of her aged husband's loneliness and the unprotected state of the children. She had wanted to annex that apparently quiet and steady young man, affectionate and pliable, an orphan from his tenderest age, as he had told her, with no ties in Italy except an uncle, owner ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... his private secretaryship—one can imagine the twinkle in the Governor's eye, when he first came across my father building his own hut on his section outside Wellington! The offer was gratefully refused. But another year of New Zealand life brought reconsideration. The exile begins to speak of "loneliness" in his letters home, to realize that it is "collision" with other kindred minds that "kindles the spark of thought," and presently, after a striking account of a solitary walk across unexplored country in New Zealand, he confesses ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he was traveling through the green hills, regretting that he had left his child behind him at the instance of a strange woman! Even now he was doubtless deploring that he should have been moved to consider another's loneliness ...
— A Prairie Infanta • Eva Wilder Brodhead
... did my wife, and we thought it might relieve your loneliness a little to spend a few days here ...
— Elsie at Home • Martha Finley
... was opened. A burst of merriment smote across the loneliness. A head appeared. The ...
— The Desire of the Moth; and The Come On • Eugene Manlove Rhodes
... Florimond, that her loyalty to him was no more than her loyalty to her father's wishes. Nevertheless, he thought, what manner of hurt must not her pride receive when she learned that Florimond had brought him home a wife? Garnache was full of pity for her and for the loneliness that must be hers hereafter, mistress of a vast estate in Dauphiny, alone and friendless. And he was a little sorry for himself and the loneliness which, he felt, would be his hereafter; but that was ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... loneliness of the ruins, with the silence only intensified by the sounds of fluttering wings in the tops of the towers, we in imagination sweep away the haystacks and reinstate the former grandeur of the fortress in the days ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... attacked Miss Callista once again in regard to it. She gave me a quick smile, for she was always amiable, but shook her head and introduced another topic. But one night when the wind was howling in the chimneys and the sense of loneliness was even greater than usual in the great house, we drew together on the rug in front of my bedroom fire, and, as the embers burned down to ashes before us, Miss ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... removed the poor young Prince's condition became even worse. His horrible loneliness induced an apathetic stupor to which any suffering would have been preferable. "He passed his days without any kind of occupation; they did not allow him light in the evening. His keepers never approached him but to give him food;" and on the rare occasions when they took him to the platform ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... vastness of its sameness lends A fascination which it else had not; And here my sense of solitude transcends What I have felt on any other spot: Of solitude, yet not of loneliness, For God seems present, and ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... Loneliness ached in her heart—spoke to her from the future. And five miles away Oliver, too, was lonely—and in pain. Pain!—the thought of it, as of something embodied and devilish, clutching and tearing at a man already ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... surges ever through the great highway of the homeless. They shine upon long rows of lodging-houses, in which hundreds of young men, cast helpless upon the reef of the strange city, are learning their first lessons of utter loneliness; for what desolation is there like that of the careless crowd when all the world rejoices? They shine upon the tempter setting his snares there, and upon the missionary and the Salvation Army lass, disputing his catch with him; upon the police detective going ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... waned. The happy wives of young engineers, who had been tented along the line during the summer, watched the wildflowers fade with a feeling of loneliness and deep longing for their stout-hearted, strong-limbed husbands, who were away up in the cloud-veiled hills; and they longed, too, for other loved ones in the lowlands of their childhood. Foy's blasters and builders buttoned their coats and buckled down to keep warm. Below, they could ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... etc.—to say nothing of shoes and clothing, out of her earnings. Clara Morris and the Bradshaws solved the problem in the only possible way by rooming together in a large top-floor room, where they lived with a comparative degree of comfort, and with less loneliness for Clara than ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... of wood were roaring and crackling in the broad fireplace, and throwing a cheerful glow and warmth through the room. The tallow candle on the mantel had not been lit, for there was no need of it, and, despite the loneliness and poverty of the sad-faced woman, there was an air of neatness and comfort about her home which would have tempted any one who could look through the narrow window ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... lessening the isolation of farm life and making it brighter and more attractive. In the immediate past the lack of just such facilities as these has driven many of the more active and restless young men and women from the farms to the cities; for they rebelled at loneliness and lack of mental companionship. It is unhealthy and undesirable for the cities to grow at the expense of the country; and rural free delivery is not only a good thing in itself, but is good because it ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Boswell's touch that summoned me from my divan. My family were on the eve of departure for a month's rest from care and play in the mountains, and I was looking forward to a period of very great loneliness. But as Boswell materialized and began his work upon the machine, the great idea flashed across my mind, and I resolved to "play it" for ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs
... of intense loneliness swept over her—the loneliness of the man who has been cast on a desert island, only returning to his fellows after many weary months of absence. She felt she could not endure to waste another moment ...
— The Lamp of Fate • Margaret Pedler
... his home in Missouri in the spring of 1822, and started for the heart of the Rocky Mountains, with a single packhorse to carry his camp equipage, and a single riding-horse. He trapped by himself for more than two years. In a short time that terrible loneliness which comes to all men, for man is a gregarious animal, was experienced in all its horrors by this isolated trapper. Like all men of his class at that time, he was exceedingly superstitious. He wanted somebody to talk to, and in the absence of a possibility ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... bitterer your loneliness, the more you are like Him who cried upon the cross, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" He knows what that grief, too, is like. He feels for thee at least. Though all forsake thee, He is with thee ...
— Out of the Deep - Words for the Sorrowful • Charles Kingsley
... moments his irritation was manifested in a sullen reserve. To himself he could give no explanation of his state of mind; he knew merely that he retreated day by day farther into the shadow of his loneliness, and that, while in his heart he still craved human sympathy, an expression of it even from those he loved was, above all, the thing he most bitterly resented. A light flashed in the kitchen, and he went on slowly toward the house. As he reached the back porch he saw that Lila was sitting at the ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... the helpless living, and bombed the tombs of the helpless dead; who wrenched families apart in the night, taking their boys to slavery and their girls to wholesale violation, leaving the old people to wander in loneliness and die; who in her raids upon England slaughtered three hundred and forty-two women, and killed or injured seven hundred and fifty-seven children, and made in all a list of four thousand five hundred and sixty-eight, bombed by her airmen; whose trained nurses ...
— A Straight Deal - or The Ancient Grudge • Owen Wister
... to her conduct. Once or twice he mentioned health-food and dieting, and was pooh-poohed into a corner. As for the women attendants, who had been sent along that they might be the companions of the Princess during the long hours of loneliness and seclusion, they were trained to act as hair-dressers and French maids ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... branches of a pine, her white hands clasped upon her knees, he saw a woman sitting alone. If a hamadryad had suddenly thrust her head around the bole of a tree and looked him full in the face, he would not have been more astonished, so absolute was his sense of utter loneliness; but when he saw that the figure was that of Miss Wycliffe, he stood like one transfixed and deprived of the power of speech. This was like a wild freak of his fancy, and he could scarcely believe the vision real. The surprise ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... tale that follows could happen only as a result of the fearful loneliness and, more especially, the maddening heat of such a place as is described in these opening paragraphs. The setting in this story causes and determines ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... after fruition falls May well too high be rated ere enjoyed— In plain words,—if she looks an angel now, you will be better mated than you expected, when you find her—a woman. For flesh and blood she is, and that young blood,—whom her childish misusage and your brotherly love; her loneliness and your protection; her springing fancy and (for I may speak to you as a son) your beauty and knightly grace, have so bewitched, and as some say, degraded, that briefly, she loves you, and briefly, better, her few friends fear, ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... white sand; in the frowning outlines of the determined rocks that like fortresses defied their enemy the ocean; in the roll of crisp pasturage that in unbroken swells covered the long backbone of the cape; in the few giant old trees, and, more than all, in its character of freedom, loneliness, and isolation, there was a savage charm and dignity that the thrift and cultivation, the usefulness and comfort of civilisation's ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... surely synonymous terms. And then, suddenly, a feeling of intense loneliness broke over her like a wave. She felt like a bit of driftwood, cast up upon a summer shore where flowers and verdure smiled on every side and all was peace; but at the next tide, once more the waters would engulf her and drag her back to the sparkling, ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... worshipped by the heathen tribes of Eastern Europe. But he was the descendant of men who had worshipped in those groves; and the glamour of them was upon him still. He peopled the wild forest with demons and fairies: but that did not surely prevent his feeling its ennobling grandeur, its chastening loneliness. His ancestors had held the oaks for trees of God, even as the Jews held the Cedar, and the Hindoos likewise; for the Deodara pine is not only, botanists tell us, the same as the Cedar of Lebanon: but its very name—the Deodara—signifies nought else but "The ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... hear him. Her ears were attuned to voices floating to her across the desert. Of course she was beginning to wander in her mind. She knew that. There could be no other human beings in this sea of loneliness. They were alone; just they two, the degenerate ruffian and his victim. Still, it was strange. She certainly had imagined the murmur of people talking. It must be the beginning ...
— A Texas Ranger • William MacLeod Raine
... most familiar objects put on strange and unreal forms, the most familiar sounds become loud and alarming. Annie slept for about an hour soundly; then she awoke, trembling with cold in every limb, startled, and almost terrified by the oppressive loneliness of the night, sure that the insect life which surrounded her, and which would keep up successions of chirps, and croaks, and buzzes, was something mysterious and terrifying. Annie was a brave child, but even brave little girls may be allowed to possess nerves ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... faint, faraway pictures of mother and father, which she had dreamt over so often that they were always fair and tender like the hazy distance of an autumn landscape. Dimly, too, she could recollect the time of loss and loneliness and half-understood grief when she cried herself to sleep at night for want of the familiar kisses, and she had hazy remembrances of strange faces and changes, and a time when the cottage by Oakfield Common was a new home, and Cousin Amelia Crayshaw, ...
— Two Maiden Aunts • Mary H. Debenham
... Then loneliness, like a black midnight, overwhelmed her, swiftly wasting her strength, disintegrating her pride in its horrid flood. She glanced about for support, as a woman in the open street who feels she is going ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the only place for me! I cannot go among entire strangers. I am such a coward. I am afraid in my loneliness: I should be driven to despair or to insanity, or worse than all, to the unpardonable sin of suicide! I dare not go among strangers, nor dare I go among people who know me as the Duchess of Hereward, or knew me as Valerie ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... fortune of between L200 and L300 a year, which she had tied up so that nobody can touch it. That was about a year ago. I wrote to tell my father of her death, and received a pitiful letter; indeed, I have had several of them. He implored me to come out to him and not to leave him to die in his loneliness, as he soon would do of a broken heart, if I did not. He said that he had long ago given up drinking, which was the cause of the ruin of his life, and sent a certificate signed by a magistrate and a doctor ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... unseeing upward through the stalks, like the absurd and ghastly contrast of a horrible dream. But among them were the stricken living in as varied an agony, of raw wounds stung by gnats, of pain cutting deep to vitality, of thirst, of the broiling sun, of a buzzing fly, or of an intolerable loneliness there with death. Groans rose over the plain, and guided the searchers. Driscoll had already found many of his men in this way. Once he heard his own name. The voice was weak, but there was something ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the comforts and refinements of a civilized country, and came as pilgrims to a hard soil, a cold clime, and a heathen shore. They were continually forced to encounter danger, privations, sickness, loneliness, and death; and all these their religion taught them to meet with calmness, fortitude, and submission. And thus it became the custom and habit of the whole mass, to repress rather than to ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... who gazed wistfully towards the pier was one who made no farewell signal, and received no parting wave. Philosopher Jack had concealed his intention of going to sea from all his college chums, and a bitter feeling of loneliness oppressed his heart as he thought of his old father and mother, and the lowly cottage on the Border hills. He had not, indeed, acted in direct opposition to the wishes of his parents, but he had disobeyed ...
— Philosopher Jack • R.M. Ballantyne
... bigness of it, which had expanded her spirit an hour ago, began to frighten her. It spread out so; it went on so uncontrollably; she could never know it. Kennicott was closeted in his detective story. With the loneliness which comes most depressingly in the midst of many people she tried to forget problems, to look at the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... of feeling such as this. "If I could avoid it, I wouldn't hurt you for anything in the world. I'm sorry, Dad, awfully sorry——" He hesitated, then his voice rang out clearly. There was in his tone, when he spoke again, a recognition of that loneliness which is the curse and the crown ...
— Within the Law - From the Play of Bayard Veiller • Marvin Dana
... like thoughts! One of the many sad things about being the "last leaf upon the tree" is having to watch the other leaves shrivel and drop off and to be left at last in utter loneliness. ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... the old generation were silent. Of the women who had made the social life of the century so powerful and so famous, many were quietly asleep before the storm broke; many were languishing in prison cells, with no outlook but the scaffold; some were pining in the loneliness of exile; and a few were buried in a seclusion ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... when Jeanne first attracted attention, she was about eighteen years of age. She was naturally of a susceptible disposition, which diligent attention to the legends of saints and tales of fairies, aided by the dreamy loneliness of her life while tending her father's flocks, had made peculiarly prone to enthusiastic fervor. At the same time, she was eminent for piety and purity of soul, and for her compassionate gentleness to the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... glance followed his, hers grew warm and kindly. Sandford, by chance meeting the look, smiled back across the room. This little by-play filled Hillard with a sense of envy and loneliness. At three-and-thirty a bachelor realizes that there is something else in life ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... man; he thinks he is a scientist, he rather prides himself upon being cold-blooded; yet a cunning woman could twist him round her finger. He had an unhappy love-affair when he was young, so he confided to me; and now, in his need and loneliness, a beautiful woman is transformed into something supernatural in his imagination—she is like a shimmering soap-bubble, that he blows with his own breath. I know that I could never get him to see the real ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... course the outlay had been heavier than he had intended it to be, and these cares made him rather anxious. Being very good friends, we had formerly received confidences from him about the dissatisfaction created by the loneliness of his home and the want of a strong affection—in spite of his success in society and the flattering smiles and speeches of renowned beauties. In answer to my suggestion that marriage would perhaps give him what he wanted, he had answered: "No doubt; ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... down in this great church. I was thinking more of other Sabbath mornings at home, with my wife and baby, than anything else. A hymn was announced. I stood up mechanically, but there was no song in my throat. There was a great lump of loneliness only. But suddenly I listened to the words they were singing. Had they selected that hymn just for me? It seemed so. It so answered the loneliness in my heart with comfort and quiet. ...
— Soldier Silhouettes on our Front • William L. Stidger
... them and to have seen noble purposes by their own self-confidence become the very means of ignoble ends, if it do not wholly depress, may kindle a passion of regret deepening the song which dares not tell the reason of its sorrow. The grand loneliness of Milton in his latter years, while it makes him the most impressive figure in our literary history, is reflected also in his maturer poems by a sublime independence of human sympathy like that with which mountains fascinate and rebuff us. But it ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... such rides. Healthy, and fearing nothing, he was a stranger to a feeling of loneliness. Alternately singing an old air, and then whistling with notes as clear and musical as a flute, he at last came in sight of the creek which had been so tranquil when he crossed it in the morning. There ...
— Aunt Phillis's Cabin - Or, Southern Life As It Is • Mary H. Eastman
... know. That's what makes it feel so bad. I guess it's the silence, the sense of all that loneliness out beyond there that upsets me. It feels almost as if there were some living presence off over the alkali that ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... Pecos was heard, as it flowed by on his right, and now and then the gentlest possible breath of night-wind disturbed the branches overhead; but nothing else caught his notice. To prevent the feeling of utter loneliness from gaining possession of him, Fred occasionally emitted a low, soft, tremulous whistle, which was instantly responded to from the direction of Mickey. It was the old familiar signal which they had ...
— In the Pecos Country • Edward Sylvester Ellis (AKA Lieutenant R.H. Jayne)
... profoundest desolation of mind and soul, in forced companionship with all that is unlovely and uncongenial—men, persevering nobly, live on, and live through all. The mind, like water, passes through all states, till it shall be united to what it is ever seeking. The very loneliness of man here is the greatest proof, to ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal - Volume XVII., No 423, New Series. February 7th, 1852 • Various
... until they gave him a vague feeling of discomfort and loneliness. He turned away and looked down into the bottom of the mountain's cup. The lake lay darkling there, hooded with shadows like a nun, the snow banks at the edge indicating the band of white ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... narrow street. All round the horizon there is this same line of sinuous wave-like hills; the scoops into which they fall only revealing other hills beyond, of similar colour and shape, crowned with wild, bleak moors—grand, from the ideas of solitude and loneliness which they suggest, or oppressive from the feeling which they give of being pent-up by some monotonous and illimitable barrier, according to the mood of mind in which ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... fiercely. 'Cast here, in this awful loneliness—' I saw him look around on sea and cliff ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... sentiments. But for duty's requirements, she would have yielded to the evident wish of Oswald Langdon. Her conduct seemed less restrained, and there was an absence of that preoccupied air so puzzling to Oswald. Realizing that their lives would drift apart, Esther felt a sense of loneliness. Her smiles were wistful ...
— Oswald Langdon - or, Pierre and Paul Lanier. A Romance of 1894-1898 • Carson Jay Lee
... weak and complaining despair, he composed one of his sturdiest works, "Kampf und Sieg." He settled in Munich, and continued to correspond with Caroline, writing her the most minute descriptions of his life and his lodgings, and begging her to write him with equal fulness. His loneliness, however, at length told upon his spirits, and ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... move him deeply, dangerously. He began to understand how she had turned to Clarke for companionship, not merely because he was a clergyman, but because he was a young man of more than usual culture and attainment, whose sympathy and counsel promised aid and comfort in her loneliness. "She does not love him; she merely admires certain sides of his character; she fears to marry him, and quite properly. His morbid ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... dragged their length for Miss Lady, months of heartache and rebellion, of loneliness and tears. Then came a day when, without apparent reason, the shadows lifted. She was tramping across the river flats, with Mike at her heels, when once again she heard the world singing, and before she knew it an answering song sprang ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... the loneliness of his water-girt home, made his way to the meeting-house, more for the sake of a gossip with some of the neighbors than for the day's preaching, and it was there that he first heard the startling news of the unaccountable ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... "It's the loneliness of death that is terrible," said Mrs. Belmont. "If we and those whom we loved all passed over simultaneously, we should think no more of it than of changing ...
— A Desert Drama - Being The Tragedy Of The "Korosko" • A. Conan Doyle
... her, the queen of the scene—more reasons, I say, for the ineffable thrill of pleasure that coursed, a rapid, intoxicating stream, through her veins, than grateful affection for the author of all these goods. With a Sybarite's dread of pain and loneliness, she seldom trusted herself to look at the dark curtain in the background, against which her latter-day glories shone the more dazzlingly. But to-night she felt safe upon her throne—sat, the lady of kingdoms, ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... the three. "He rose up from His prayer," and turned from the spot moistened by the drops of His agony. With the traces of them upon His brow, "He came unto the disciples." How much of pathos in the simple record, "He found them sleeping." Without heavenly or earthly companionship, His loneliness is complete. ...
— A Life of St. John for the Young • George Ludington Weed
... and we'll walk straight down to the post office and mail it so that it will go on to-night's train." Tears were far from Keineth's eyes as she walked by Barbara's side down the white road between the fields of daisies and buttercups. The little cloud of loneliness that had for a brief time threatened her sky had disappeared and she was again a light-hearted little girl, eagerly awaiting the happy things that each new day at Overlook seemed to ...
— Keineth • Jane D. Abbott
... that for home was for the loneliness of Janey Fricker, left with Miss Foster in the Rue St. Jean. She wished for Janey to walk with her in the rough sea-wind, to bathe with her, and talk with her. One morning when the sun was glorious on the dancing waves, she cried out her longing for her little friend. ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... be saved and | come to the knowledge of the truth; Prosper, we pray thee, our | brethren who labour in distant lands, [especially those for whom | our prayers are desired]. Protect them in all perils by land and | sea; support them in loneliness and in the hour of trial; give | them grace to bear faithful witness unto thee; and endue them with | burning zeal and love, that they may turn many to righteousness, | and finally obtain a crown of glory; through Jesus Christ our | Lord. Amen. | | For Home Missions. ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... clime! where ceaseless summer smiles Benignant o'er those blessed isles, Which, seen from far Colonna's height, Make glad the heart that hails the sight, And give to loneliness delight. There shine the bright abodes ye seek, Like dimples upon Ocean's cheek,— So smiling round the waters lave These Edens of the eastern wave. Or if, at times, the transient breeze Break the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... remunerative; but that master has accumulated (by means of industrious application to his work and his friends) the sum of $20, which he will cheerfully pay to the man, woman, or child who will bring Jessie back again. For he is a weak human creature, is Jessie's master, in his loneliness, without his faithful, admiring ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... little roadside station shut in by the pine bush of Ontario. There was a wooden hotel beside the track, and one or two stores; but that was all, and the fact that nobody except the station-agent had appeared to watch the train come in testified to the industry, or, more probably, the loneliness of the district. While Weston stood looking about him a man came out of the office, and he was somewhat astonished to find himself face to face with ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... youth is so happy, so gay—and as for me, ever since I was a child, I have had nothing but weariness. All that travelling about, that banishment from one's own country—ill tempers, discontent, narrow ways, hard lessons—straps and backboards because I was not strong—loneliness, not a friend of my own age—and then this horrible Paris—and things that might have happened there, if my father had not saved me—" She stopped, with a little catch in her breath, and Angelot understood, remembering ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... solemn moment for all. Outside the ice drifted slowly about, thick fog settled over us, the ship's whistle sounded, and night came on. The loneliness increased. ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... more compliments than visits," she writes. "I had made everybody ill. All those who did not dare send me word that they feared to embroil themselves with the court pretended that some malady or accident had befallen them." By degrees, however, she adapted herself to her situation, and in her loneliness and disappointment betook herself to pursuits which offered a strong contrast to the dazzling succession of magnificent fetes and military episodes which had given variety and excitement to her life at the Tuileries. When she grew tired of her parrots, her dogs, her ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... Richmond with anger in his voice. "I wonder how many people there are nowadays who have passed through this last experience of ineffectual invocation, this appeal to the fading shadow of a vanished God. In the night. In utter loneliness. Answer me! Speak to me! Does he answer? In the silence you hear the little blood vessels whisper in your ears. You see a faint glow of colour on ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells
... will share my life's plans, and the needful studies of my soul." The money was found at once, and a royal hint given. The demon blood of the Angevins, which frightened most men, and kept Henry in loneliness, had no terrors for Hugh; and Henry could hardly express the pleasure he felt in a rare friendship which began here. He loved and honoured no other man so much, for he had found a man who sympathised with him ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... shade of the linden Elsa thought of all this, and pitied her own loneliness in that no brother or friend stood at her side to help her. Then the sweet singing of birds seemed to comfort her, and she dropped into a gentle sleep. As she dreamed it seemed to her that a young knight stepped out of the depths of ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... gloom and solitude of the shortened day make one readily understand why travelers of old halted at this north entrance to the Highlands, rather than run the chance of being overtaken by the dark in the depths of its loneliness. Cooper could hardly have hit on a more fitting place for the adventures of the Spy than ...
— The New York and Albany Post Road • Charles Gilbert Hine
... By a virtue of forgiveness which I admire and thank you for, you write telling me of the literary work you are engaged upon. If I had thought before writing the letter I am now apologizing for, I could not have failed to see that you write to me because you would relieve my loneliness as far as you are able. But I did not think: I yielded to my mood, and see now that my letters are disgracefully egotistical, and very often absurd; for have I not begged of you to remember that since ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... doors. In a dark night, and especially in a night both dark and stormy, I feel myself one of the most wretched beings in existence. Imagine a vessel lost in the wide ocean, and without a compass, and you will have some faint idea of my perplexity, discouragement, and loneliness at such a time. I have a strange propensity for shooting off into the gutter, or for shouldering the fences, under the impression that I am pursuing a straight course. I go quite out of my way to trip over chance stones, or to pick ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... everything—understood that all was finished and finished forever. With the intuition of a woman, she felt that Jean's love for my sister was real and deep, she bowed her head to circumstances and she departed, accepting, without a murmur, the loneliness that Jean's action brought upon her. She carried her fidelity to the end, for she would have slain herself sooner than become [hesitating out of respect for Mme. de Ronchard] a courtesan. ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... heart audacious, Weeping, lifts up in bodeful stress, What if my native land forget me In my sad exile's loneliness? ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... They have known joys and sorrows, failures and successes. They have hoped and feared. All that Beethoven poured into this music from his experience of poverty, of conflict with physical weakness and the cruel limitations of Fate, of baffled desire, of loneliness, of strong resolution, of immortal courage and faith, these players in their measure and ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke
... has its place in this ideal; every irksome job, every wearisome responsibility. The fact that we are not always aware of it in no way annuls the other fact that it is so. Boredom, monotony, drudgery, bereavement, loneliness, all the clamour of unsatisfied ambitions and aching sensibilities, have their share in this divine yearning of the spirit to grasp what as yet is beyond its reach. All of that hacking of the man to fit the job ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... Geoff, starting up. "When I think what this place is going to seem like after you've gone, and what the ranch will be with all the heart taken from it, and the loneliness made twice as lonely by comparison, I grow desperate, and feel as if I could not let you go without at least risking the question. But Clover,—let me call you so this once,—no woman could consent to such a life unless she cared very much for a ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... Browning told her all this shortly after, but before he told, she had divined his thought. For solitude and loneliness and heart-hunger had given her the power of an astral being; she was in communication with all the finer forces that pervade our ether. He would love her back to life and light—he told ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... accustomed to solitude; but, when the Scud had actually disappeared, he was almost overcome with a sense of his loneliness. Never before had he been conscious of his isolated condition in the world; for his feelings had gradually been accustoming themselves to the blandishments and wants of social life; particularly as the last were connected with the domestic affections. Now, all had vanished, as it ...
— The Pathfinder - The Inland Sea • James Fenimore Cooper
... hate it, I think, Miss Norah," he said, "when the loneliness of it comes over me, and all the queer sounds of it bother me and keep me awake. Then I realise that I'm really a good way from anywhere, and I get what are familiarly called the blues. However, that's not at all times, and indeed mostly I ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... down off the high plateau, with its cold and snow, and camped in a sunny sward near a splendid ranch where lambs were at play on the green grass. Blackbirds were calling, and we heard our first crane bugling high in the sky. From the loneliness and desolation of the high country, with its sparse road houses, we were now surrounded by sunny fields ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... the spiritual life, for such an interruption would hardly harmonize with their curriculum of regular progress towards enlightenment. But mystic poetry testifies that in Asia as in Europe this feeling of desertion and loneliness is a frequent experience in the struggles and adventures of the soul. It is apparently not necessary, just as the incidental joys and triumphs of the soul—strains of heavenly music, aerial flights, and visions ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... then it was always quiet; and perhaps I noticed the obtrusive air of solitude and sleepiness even more than usual, because I had just returned from Salisbury. All things are comparative. After the lost loneliness of Klaas's farm, even brand-new Salisbury ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... a man lost in the woods and dying of famine and exhaustion at the foot of a tree, whose loneliness was relieved by the grotesque visions with which, owing to bodily weakness, his diseased imagination surrounded him, and which he believed to be real. So also, owing to bodily and mental health and strength, we may be continually cheered by a like but more normal and natural society, and come ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... chimes! that in the loneliness of night Salute the passing hour, and in the dark And silent chambers of the household mark The movements of the myriad orbs ...
— Bay State Monthly, Volume I, No. 2, February, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... new-born lamb nursing under her flank. Here was his new realm peopled at once. Here were followers of his own kind. He stepped briskly down from his hillock and graciously accepted the homage of the ewe, who snuggled up against him as if afraid at the loneliness and the coming on of night. All night he slept beside the mother and her young, in the sheltered hollow, and kept no watch because he feared no foe. But the ewe kept watch, knowing well what perils might steal ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... work to us all the way. When I think of the tons of candy and the mountains of flowers and the wagonloads of latest books that we lavished, and of the hard feelings it made in other quarters, and of our loneliness amid all this gayety, and of our frantic efforts to make the prom a success, with ten couples dancing and the rest decorating the walls, I sometimes wonder whether the college was worth our great love ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... quite light now, and she crept to her husband's room. She had not seen him during the previous day. He had been out the whole of it. She felt drawn towards him by calamity, by the loneliness of her misery. ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... their collapsing bunks, shivered incessantly, and kept on groaning even as we went about our work. But they all worked. That crew of Liverpool hard cases had in them the right stuff. It's my experience they always have. It is the sea that gives it—the vastness, the loneliness surrounding their dark stolid souls. Ah! Well! we stumbled, we crept, we fell, we barked our shins on the wreckage, we hauled. The masts stood, but we did not know how much they might be charred down below. It was nearly calm, but a long swell ran from ...
— Youth • Joseph Conrad
... a woman who had wrought the undoing of a square man. She presented completely then the pathetic spectacle of a baited, cowering, wild creature at bay. She was bitterly alone among them. Even Crowley of the city was against her. In her agony of loneliness the thought of her kin in the big house on the hill came to her mind. But to her, in spite of her passionate efforts to aid, must be ascribed the defection of Latisan—the breaking of her grandfather's ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day
... too comfortable with Mrs. Bobby. In fact I wished to be just a little miserable in Belvern, so that I could paint with a frenzy. Sometimes, when I have been in a state of almost despairing loneliness and gloom, the colours have glowed on my canvas and the lines have shaped themselves under my hand independent of my own volition. Now, tucked away in a corner of my consciousness is the knowledge that I need never be lonely again unless I choose. When I yield myself fully ...
— Penelope's English Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... servants and lights when they returned from an evening's pleasure in the Piazza. It seemed scarcely just; but then, those Giustiniani were dead, and we were alive, and that was one advantage; and, besides, the loneliness and desolation of the palace had a peculiar charm, and were at any rate cheaper than its former splendor could have been. I am afraid that people who live abroad in the palaces of extinct nobles do not keep ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... of religion nor of chivalry. Dowers were more thought of than devotion in convents as elsewhere. Whitby being one of the oldest and grandest foundations was sure to be inaccessible to a high-born but unportioned girl, and Grisell in her sense of loneliness saw nothing before her but to become an anchoress, that is to say, a female hermit, such as generally lived in strict seclusion under shelter of ...
— Grisly Grisell • Charlotte M. Yonge
... many years believed that he must have some personal wrongs to brood over,—wrongs, probably, to which were to be attributed his loneliness and exile; but of such Duncan had never spoken, uttering no maledictions except against the real or imagined foes ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... ten. The loneliness of the place somewhat depressed her. She took up a book and threw it down again. Then she examined with curiosity some knick-knacks upon a small round table by her side. Amongst them was a revolver. She handled ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to the head of the house, who represented it, could not understand that he might have wronged his own good sense and hurt the interests of all. Nevertheless, he was sad. Few days went by when he did not cry in secret, for his wife, and although loneliness began to weigh on him, he was more afraid of entering into a new marriage than desirous of finding a support in his sorrow. He had a vague idea that love might have consoled him by coming to him of a sudden, for this is the only way love can console. We never find it when ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... a companion on Adam met the wishes of man, who had been overcome by a feeling of isolation when the animals came to him in pairs to be named.[39] To banish his loneliness, Lilith was first given to Adam as wife. Like him she had been created out of the dust of the ground. But she remained with him only a short time, because she insisted upon enjoying full equality with her husband. ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... were induced to risk their money upon such representations?* Oh, the dreariness, the loneliness, of that first night at anchor in the Bay of Biscay! The misgivings that filled my heart! Who was right? What should I find over there? Surely these statesmen, capitalists, journalists, legislators, should ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... risen, and Ruth, gazing into the starry vault of the sky and exchanging no speech with Martin, experienced a sudden feeling of loneliness. She glanced at him. A puff of wind was heeling the boat over till the deck was awash, and he, one hand on tiller and the other on main-sheet, was luffing slightly, at the same time peering ahead to make out the near-lying ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... true that "loneliness tends to save the Seer from becoming a charlatan and to make of him a true Reformer." But it is not that peculiar loneliness of the Seer that the medical trade unions afford the reforming physician. That is inevitably ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... consuming desire impelled him to spend two years in Italy (1786-1788). The rest of his years Goethe spent in Weimar, his life enriched above all else by his friendship with Schiller. In this second Weimar period Goethe reached the acme of his powers. Even his declining years, although marked by loneliness and bringing him a full measure of grief (his wife, Christiane Vulpius, whom he had met shortly after his return from Italy, died in 1816, followed in 1830 by his only son), exemplified that earnest striving ...
— A Book Of German Lyrics • Various
... effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many winters, while he had been conscious of an ebbing physical life, and as widening spiritual loneliness, all his passionate desire had concentrated itself in the yearning for some young ear into which he could pour his mind as a testament, some soul kindred enough to accept the spiritual product of his own brief, ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... heard that the train-service had stopped; that he could not persuade her to wait till daylight or to listen for a moment to what he had to say of the danger and terrors awaiting her in the darkness, and the awful loneliness of the hills. She didn't fear nature even at its worst, and she knew these hills better than many who had lived among them for years. She was bound to go, and ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... he appreciated the full extent of his loneliness; his utter lack of resource in a crisis like this. Most men, however solitary, lay by material things for themselves, build homes and surround themselves with personal possessions from which, or amid which, they can gain some ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... volition. There is something deeper in man than his esthetic desire or his active practise, something deeper beneath us all than anything that finds expression, certainly than anything that finds satisfaction. There is the self; there is myself, yourself; there is that strange, mysterious life of loneliness which stands, and thinks, and judges, and appraises. When, by divine grace, we escape from the voice of the crowd, and from the cry of custom, from the delirium of desire, that poor lonely self within us pleads to us in a cry like the call of the starveling ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... this song? Because, all at once, as she thought of Jigger lying there in the dark room, she had a vision of her own child lying near to death in the grasp of pneumonia five years ago; and the misery of that time swept over her—its rebellion, its hideous fear, its bitter loneliness. She recalled how a woman, once a great singer, now grown old in years as in sorrow, had sung this very song to her then, in the hour of her direst apprehension. She sang it now to her own dead child, and to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... silk watch-pocket, a parting present from a kind-hearted, sentimental German governess with flaxen curls and little blue eyes; and sometimes an old friend from Moscow would come out to you and throw you into ecstasies with new poetry, often even with his own. But, oh, the loneliness, the insufferable slavery of a tutor's lot! the impossibility of escape, the endless autumns and winters, the ever-advancing disease!... ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... the world is there ever utter solitude? The vanity of man supposes that loneliness is his absence! Who shall say what millions of spiritual beings glide invisibly among scenes apparently the most deserted? Or what know we of our own mechanism, that we should deny the possibility of life and motion to things ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... distribution of the dead mother's estate, had fallen all that they deemed of value—the mocking-bird. They could be divided, but it could not, so it was carried away into the strange country, and the world of William knew it no more forever. Yet still through the aftertime of his loneliness its song filled all the dream, and seemed always sounding in his ear and in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... Thrace, making her way among equally passionate worshipers, to the foot of the rude altar, and there casting herself into the arms of the man she was to marry.(6) So did thousands of forest women in those seasons when their communion with a mystic loneliness was confessed, when they gave tongue as simply as wild creatures to the nameless stirrings and promptings of that secret woodland where Pan was still the lord. And the day following the revival, they were again the silent, expressionless, much enduring, long-suffering forest ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... was a lump in her throat. Across a bright, familiar veranda she could hear a clear, sharp voice answer, "American goose!" She saw a lean tanned face burn red with anger. A wave of loneliness went through her. The irony of it was pitiless. How right ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... he had made to shield him, this was Lionel's return. Were all the world against him he still must have believed Lionel true to him, and in that belief must have been enheartened a little. And now...His sense of loneliness, of utter destitution overwhelmed him. Then slowly of his sorrow resentment was begotten, and being begotten it grew rapidly until it filled his mind and whelmed in its turn all else. He threw back his great head, and his bloodshot, gleaming ...
— The Sea-Hawk • Raphael Sabatini
... her most violent storms in its well-established houses, to bridle her torrents and make them light its streets, to tunnel her mountains and plough her seas, the inhabitants of St. Faith's will not willingly venture into the forest after dark. For in spite of the silence and loneliness of the hooded night it seems that a man is not sure in what company he may suddenly find himself, and though it is difficult to get from these villagers any very clear story of occult appearances, the feeling is widespread. One story indeed I have heard with some definiteness, the tale ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... time, being free from the body, she knew no physical pain, and she shrank from returning before she need, knowing well the anguish of suffering that awaited her. The desolation and loneliness made her unhappy in a vague and not very comprehensible fashion, but she did not suffer actively. That would come later when return became imperative. Till then she flitted to and fro, intangible as gossamer, elusive as the snow. ...
— Greatheart • Ethel M. Dell
... circumstances. Nor even, in the case of exemption from the worst ills of life, can we be happy without some positive agreeables—family, general society, amusements, and gratifications. There is a certain degree of loneliness, seclusion, dulness, that destroys happiness without sapping health, or miming us into ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... arms looked up in his face and smiled, stretching out its rosy hands to grasp at the winged circle of gold on his breast. His heart warmed to the touch. It seemed like a greeting of love and trust to one who had journeyed long in loneliness and perplexity, fighting with his own doubts and fears, and following a light that ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... from Stanley Pool and far away beyond, draws with it, like a moving dream, the pictures of the roaring rapids and the silent pools, the swamps filled with darkness of vegetation and murderous life; the unutterable loneliness of vast forests. The water brook of the hartbeest and antelope, it brings with it their quiet reflections, just as it brings the awful horn and the pig-like face of the rhinoceros. What things have not slaked their thirst in this quiet water ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... friendly light gleamed at night from the lattice, a beacon to the wayfarer or a message of cheer to the disheartened, since the little house was alone. The secret spinners had hung a drapery of cobwebs before the desolate windows, as though to veil the loneliness from passers-by. No fire warmed the solitary hearth, no gay and careless laughter betrayed the sleeping echoes into answer. Within the house were only dreams, which never ...
— A Spinner in the Sun • Myrtle Reed
... disheartened me, and I flung it aside. Even my love for the sea had vanished, and I had begun to hate it. During the first few years of my ministry I spent hours by the cliffs and shores, or out on the heaving waters. Then the loneliness of the desert and barren wastes repelled me, and I had begun to loathe it. Altogether I was soured and discontented, and I had a dread consciousness that my life was a failure. All its possibilities had passed without being seized and utilized. ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... leverage of pushing only wedged it faster in the orifice. The inconstant ladder swayed from it as a fulcrum. Again and again by art and endeavor and angle of push he essayed, and the ladder made sport of it. It was deadly sport, that swing and seesaw on the slippery rungs in the immeasurable loneliness of the silent, shrouded cabin. It was no rush of air, sending life tingling in the blood made brilliant with carmine of oxidation, but the dense, mephitic sough of the thick wool of water. He descended ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... happy at whiles with the thought, accounted providential, that he stood alone, with no one to distract him, to impose burdens on him and to claim a right to make inroads on his precious hours. He loved the loneliness in which he sank when he stepped out of the lecture-room and the amphitheatre. He had not felt the need, which others confessed, of some one with whom to share griefs, debate enigmas and communicate projects. Since he saw Rebecca, he had, ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... voice, wherein we fain Wouldst have Thee hear no lightest sob of pain— No murmur of distress, Nor moan of loneliness, Nor drip of tears, ...
— Songs of Friendship • James Whitcomb Riley
... convent, abode by her thenceforth. Should she ever find herself atoning in like wise for her sorceries,—harmless as they had been; for her ambitions,—just as they had been; for her crimes? But she had committed none. No, she had sinned in many things: but she was not as Richilda. And yet in the loneliness and sadness of the forest, she could not put Richilda from before the eyes of ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley
... escape out of a fifty-mile prairie, and days bring death. Hunger and thirst soon gain strength and agony—the sooner that you know you have not the wherewith to satisfy the one, nor quench the other. Besides, there is in your very loneliness a feeling of bewilderment, painful to an extreme degree, and from which only the oldest prairie-men are free. Your senses lose half their power, your energy is diminished, and your resolves become weak and vacillating. You feel ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... the yards, dipping, crutching and such like, or going off on jaunts to neighbouring stations or distant townships. It was a life where there was opportunity for the whole of a man's skill and wit, and where monotony and loneliness were not. After the day's work he and Charley took turns in cooking the dinner, while the other went for the mail. The several-day-old paper lost nothing by its age. The meal finished, they smoked and read the news, had a game of cards, perhaps, with some one who had ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... of sorrow and the water of affliction, the visions and the Voices soon returned. It was quite natural that they should do so, for that kind of disease is much aggravated by fasting, loneliness, and anxiety of mind. It was not only got out of Joan that she considered herself inspired again, but, she was taken in a man's dress, which had been left—to entrap her—in her prison, and which she put on, in her solitude; perhaps, in remembrance ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... married woman who comes to New York, or any other large city, often passes years of loneliness before she has made her acquaintances. She is properly introduced, we will say by her mother-in-law or some other friend, and then, after a round of visits in which she has but, perhaps, imperfectly apprehended the positions and names of her new acquaintances, she has a long ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... story badly, Paul," she said, in a bitter tone. "You forgot me, forgot my affliction, my loneliness, my wrongs, and the natural desire of a child to clear her mother's honor and claim her father's name. I am Sir Richard's eldest daughter. I can prove my birth, and I demand my right with his own ...
— The Mysterious Key And What It Opened • Louisa May Alcott
... were weary of the circumstances surrounding him. David thought him cool and cross, and was pained by the mood; but Maggie knew the meaning of the worried, slightly haughty manner; for in one quick glance, he had made her understand how bitter it was to leave her in her worse than loneliness; and how painful in his present temper was the vulgar effusiveness of Janet Caird's ...
— A Daughter of Fife • Amelia Edith Barr
... to his friend's invitation. A heavy mood had come over him; he was standing by the outer wall, looking out. Jim went and stood beside him, his hand on his shoulder, and together they gazed through the cherry-crystal wall of their prison ship out on the loneliness of the immeasurable miles outside. For them, space was red, instead of the deep black they knew they would see through colorless glass. Brilliant pinpoints of light, millions of them, in all sizes, made up the infinite space that was the ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... long Her absent Lord to see; And still in loneliness she waits, A friendless stranger she. Age after age has gone, Sun after sun has set, And still, in weeds of widowhood, She weeps, a ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... vicinity. Until the evening of the first day I was not sensible of her absence. It was then, and at the customary hour of our reunion, that, for the first time, I experienced, with alarm, a sense of loneliness and desertion—that I became tremblingly conscious of the secret growth of an affection that had waited only for the time and circumstance to make its presence and its power known and dreaded. In the daily enjoyment ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... rock, from which a wild, wooded ravine of the hills stretched out before her eyes. The sides were so bold, the sweep of them so extended, the woods so luxuriantly rich, the scene so desolate in its loneliness and wildness, that she sat down to dream in a trance of enjoyment. Not a sound now but the plash of the water, the scream of a wild bird, and the rustle of leaves. Not a human creature in sight, or the trace of one. Wych might imagine the times ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... now he is dead, the worst of him seemeth to come out of him, and he is not easily dealt with, save by one who hath some share of his wisdom. Thou thyself couldst see by my kinsman, the Sea- eagle, how much of ill blood and churlish malice there may be in our kindred when they wax old, and loneliness and dreariness taketh hold of them. For I must tell thee that I have oft heard my father say that his father the Sea-eagle was in his youth and his prime blithe and buxom, a great lover of women, and a very friendly ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... indulge itself in some sentimental compassion for the poor orphan, had the boy shown any disposition to accept these advances kindly and with proper gratitude; but for years Jim had been reasoning things out in a direct, childish way, and in his loneliness he was filled with an inveterate hatred. He chose to live on as he had lived, accepting no concessions, disguising nothing, and Chisley quite conscientiously discovered in his sullen exclusiveness and his vicious dislike of worthy men the workings of homicidal ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... screws. With a good wrench it gave way, and I found myself in a dark side-hall between two rooms. Three steps brought me to the main hall, and I recognized it for the same through which I had felt my way in the darkness of the night. It was not improved by the daylight, and a strange loneliness about it was an oppression to the spirits. There were six or eight rooms on the floor, and the doors glowered threateningly on me, as though they were conscious that I was an intruder ...
— Blindfolded • Earle Ashley Walcott
... the blessings which my life has known, I value most, and most praise God for three: Want, Loneliness, ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... to hear again the rich and playful tones of the voice of the old hospitality. Yet a moment more, and all the scene took on the aspect of one great monument, inscribed with his name, and sacred to his memory. And such it shall be in all the future of America! The sensation of desolateness, and loneliness, and darkness, with which you see it now, will pass away; the sharp grief of love and friendship will become soothed; men will repair thither as they are wont to commemorate the great days of history; the same glance shall take in, and same emotions shall greet and bless, the Harbor of the Pilgrims ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... sooner gone than loneliness began to fill Slimakowa's heart. She went outside the gate and watched them; her husband, with his hands in his pockets, was strolling along the road, Jendrek on his right and Stasiek on his left. Presently Jendrek boxed Stasiek's ears and as a result he was walking on the left and Stasiek on ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... eyes, as she thought of the nights she had wept herself to sleep from sheer homesickness and a feeling of utter desolation. "But," she continued more brightly, and winking rapidly to keep the tell-tale drops from falling. "I can bear loneliness, or almost anything else, for ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... suppose you'd like them much. They are nothing like Rose. I married an Australian, you know, and the girls are like her. They have had very little schooling. They are good girls, very good girls, but just a little hard," he sighed a little, and Marcella felt a quick pang of regret for his loneliness. Obvious though it was that he did not want her, she wished, for a moment, she could have gone with him ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... great owl cried his loneliness and sorrows to the night. It was a tremendous note, mournful, uncanny and ferocious, and it seemed to Henry that it must go miles through the clear air, until it came back in a dying echo, more sinister than its full strength had been. The Indian cast was bringing into the net more than Wyatt ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... conditions ever so just, reasonable, and adequate, and she consents by giving up those undue privileges which marriage, as the basis of civil society, alone can bestow, she must to a certain extent lose her honour and lead a life of loneliness; since human nature makes us dependent on the opinion of others in a way that is completely out of proportion to its value. While, if the woman does not consent, she runs the risk of being compelled to marry a man she dislikes, or of shrivelling up into an old ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... dead mother's estate, had fallen all that they deemed of value—the mocking-bird. They could be divided, but it could not, so it was carried away into the strange country, and the world of William knew it no more forever. Yet still through the aftertime of his loneliness its song filled all the dream, and seemed always sounding in his ear and in ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Vol. II: In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians • Ambrose Bierce
... journey—terrible in its loneliness as well as in its real and imaginary dangers; for there was a good deal of fancied dread towards the latter part of the time, when Bart had reached a point where the Apaches gave up their chase, civilisation being too near at hand for them ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn
... torrent foam. Sounds, too, beneath the mist are more strange. The torrent seems to have a hoarser voice and grinds the stones more passionately against its boulders. The cry of shepherds through the fog suggests the loneliness and danger of the hills. The bleating of penned sheep or goats, and the tinkling of the cowbells, are mysteriously distant and yet distinct in the dull dead air. Then, again, how immeasurably high above our heads appear the domes and peaks of snow revealed through chasms ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... lines shall be mouldering in dust, and the friends of thy youth who journeyed with thee along the pathway of life, and who cheered thee with the music of their voices and the light of their smiles have, perchance, one by one passed away, and left thee to journey on in loneliness of heart, when the light of thine own eye shall have become dimmed, and thy sunny hair whitened by the frosts of age—when thy voice, which was wont to gush forth in melody and song, entrancing the ear and cheering the heart of the listener, has become ...
— Withered Leaves from Memory's Garland • Abigail Stanley Hanna
... everybody, must have been thinking much of our poor desolate Queen. Her anguish, her loneliness of heart on that pinnacle of human greatness, must weigh on all who have known how happy she was; but to us who have often seen that lost happiness, it is almost like a grief of our own. I don't believe I have ever seen her take his arm without the thought crossing my mind: "There is the real ...
— Lady John Russell • Desmond MacCarthy and Agatha Russell
... time between the tops of the trees I saw the figure of the grey stone woman who sits on the top of Ghost Mountain, and shaped my course towards her knees. My heart beat as I travelled through the forest in dark and loneliness like that of the night, and ever I looked round searching for the eyes of the Amatongo. But I saw no spirits, though at times great spotted snakes crept from before my feet, and perhaps these were the Amatongo. At times, also, I caught glimpses ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... touch cold. From the grasses to the branches there is nothing any one would like to handle, and I stand apart even from the bush that keeps away the rain. The green plovers are the only things of life that save the earth from utter loneliness. Heavily as the rain may fall, cold as the saturated wind may blow, the plovers remind us of the beauty of shape, colour, and animation. They seem too slender to withstand the blast—they should have gone with the swallows—too delicate ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies
... as she read that something gripped at her heart. It was Anne's presence which had kept her from the black despair of loneliness. Sulie was good and true, but she had no power to fill the void made by Richard's absence. If Anne went away, they would be two old women, gazing blankly into ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... Wonderful, isn't it? Sometimes I'm almost glad I went through it all. After—after—years of darkness and loneliness, to emerge suddenly into the light! To have a mother, and ...
— "The Pomp of Yesterday" • Joseph Hocking
... I sat consuming with little appetite my solitary supper, there fell on me a sudden sense of loneliness. The desire that I had hitherto felt to be alone with my own miserable reflections gave place to a yearning for human companionship. That, indeed, which I craved for most was forbidden, and I must abide by my lady's ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... they see the sail Increase upon the sunset, hasten down, Hands out and eyes elated; for they see Head over head, crowding from bow to stern, Repeopling their long loneliness with smiles, The faces of their friends; and such go forth Content upon the ebb ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... brighter. Then it seemed that he had lost a wife to whom he was attached, and the child who remained to him, although he loved her and clung to her, he did not altogether understand. So it came about, perhaps, that he had fallen under the curses of loneliness and continual apprehension; and in this shadow where he was doomed to walk, flourished forebodings and regrets, drawing their strength from his starved nature like fungi from a tree outgrown ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... time, with few friends, in poor health, out of favour with the Queen, who had disregarded his existence; and now his afflictions were rendered more heavy than ever by the blindness that was creeping over him. The Archbishop, too, in his loneliness and sorrow, was drawn closer to his young officer than ever before; and gradually got to rely upon him in many little ways. He would often walk with Anthony in the gardens at Lambeth, leaning upon his arm, talking to him of his beloved ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... open sky with its mysterious interstellar spaces, the flow of the black devouring clouds, the reemergence of the immortal Pleiades, remote, inhuman, unaware, brought no tranquillity but only a forlorn human loneliness. ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... after twenty years of most intimate and most brotherly friendship with him, I little knew how much I loved him, until I found that I had lost him." As he spoke the concluding words, which plaintively told his sense of loneliness, the tears that can become a manly man came thick and fast, and all who were in the House wept with him. There have been cases in which the House of Commons has adjourned in honor of deceased members; but perhaps never before has it showed its emotions in generous tears. Did I say ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... and the young lord did naught save talk with his betrothed bride both in the vulgar and in the Latin tongue, I did better—namely, went up the mountain to pray, wherein, moreover, I followed my child's example, and clomb up upon the pile, there in loneliness to offer up my whole heart to the Lord as an offering of thanksgiving, seeing that with this sacrifice He is well pleased, as in Ps. li. 19, "The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... only too glad of the opportunity. She did want to see what the bush was like, for she has never been out of Auckland yet, except a trip to the hot lakes, or so. In fact, her school-days are scarcely over yet. And then she is so sorry for her friend's loneliness. It must be dreadful to be isolated in the bush like that. She will certainly come and ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... nodded wearily and went on. "For all of ten days I had been alone, except for the cattlemen camping a mile away and an old Indian helper who slept in his tepee within call. Loneliness makes you weak when there's something tearing at the heart. So I let M'sieu' Marchand talk to me. At last he told me that there was a woman at Yargo—that Dennis did not go there for business, but to ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... she came, and, counting the days and weeks, the children had made themselves ready for the third great Saturday. Carefully washed and brushed, they sat in their separate day-rooms, and waited. Two o'clock struck, but no message came. All the afternoon they waited, sick with disappointment and loneliness. At last, seeing the matron go by, Alfred said: "Please, mum, my ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... love; it has grown in favor with God and man, and answered to its half doubting, half hoping parents of the church and state, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?" and now is it driven away into the wilderness of poverty and hard toil, of loneliness and mortification, to ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... existence there had become boring. His one attempt to leave Spaceman's Row had nearly met with disaster. Running into a squad of Solar Guard MP's, he had made a hurried escape into a near-by jet taxi. Back on the Row, Roger had lounged around the cafes, feeling the loneliness that haunts men wanted by the law. And only because he was so lonely he had agreed to talk to the little man who sat and stared at him from across ...
— Danger in Deep Space • Carey Rockwell
... women. These marriages were entered on the books of the Company, and were considered as valid as if bound by clergy. Sometimes they led to unhappy results. When men returned from the service, the Indian wife, transplanted to England, lived in wretched loneliness; and the children—'les petits,' as they are entered in the books—were still less at home amid English civilization. Gradually it became customary to leave the Indian women in their native land and to support them with a pension deducted from the wages ...
— The "Adventurers of England" on Hudson Bay - A Chronicle of the Fur Trade in the North (Volume 18 of the Chronicles of Canada) • Agnes C. (Agnes Christina) Laut
... Shirley had brushed past her in their mad rush. Standing motionless and speechless, a slender hand on either side of the doorframe, she watched her sisters claim the mother's first kiss. Then, as the beautiful eyes were raised to hers, she made an effort to speak. All the love and longing and loneliness of the past year, not fully felt till now, rushed to her voice. She took ...
— Rosemary • Josephine Lawrence
... a shiver as she glanced around the gloomy room. The bare loneliness of the place was accentuated by the depressing furniture, which belonged to the black walnut and haircloth period. On the marble-topped table, in the exact centre of the room, was a red plush album, flanked on one side by a hideous china vase, and on the other by ...
— At the Sign of the Jack O'Lantern • Myrtle Reed
... my story. For half an hour after that last good-bye Charlie leaned back in the corner of his carriage and gave himself up to his loneliness, and I could feel his chest heaving to keep down the tears that would every now and then rise ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... and on, gray-green with sagebrush, the gaunt mountain spurs, the far-away real mountains, blue and snow-furrowed, the great, clear sky over all! It must be wonderful at night with countless stars and a moon looking down upon the loneliness of everything. There was something about it all that, in some strange way, pulled out one's very soul—that made one want to be big in thought, ...
— Virginia of Elk Creek Valley • Mary Ellen Chase
... attempted even the most timid suggestions as to her conduct. Once or twice he mentioned health-food and dieting, and was pooh-poohed into a corner. As for the women attendants, who had been sent along that they might be the companions of the Princess during the long hours of loneliness and seclusion, they were trained to act as hair-dressers and French maids ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... Father Francis gave her a kindly, approving glance, even for this. She turned away from him with a weary sigh. Oh, what trouble and mockery everything was? What a dreary, wretched piece of business life was altogether! The sense of loneliness and desolation weighed on her heart, this dull December ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... was heart-broken at this bitter separation. She felt the loneliness of the castle deeply, she longed for his happy presence and the sound of his voice. She could never speak to Golo as to the friend to whose care her husband had recommended her. Her pure eyes shrank from ...
— Legends of the Rhine • Wilhelm Ruland
... his head, perhaps one would carry his arm in a sling; perhaps one—maybe more than one—would be left behind, never to return again, and soon forgotten by all excepting some poor woman who would weep silently in the loneliness of her daily work. ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... noteworthy. Accustomed hitherto to a domestic circle, at Kingsmill he found himself isolated, and it was not easy for him to surrender all at once the comforts of home. For a time he felt as though his ambition were a delinquency which entailed the punishment of loneliness. Nor did his relations with Sir Job Whitelaw tend to mitigate this feeling. In his first interview with the Baronet, Godwin showed to little advantage. A deadly bashfulness forbade him to be natural either in attitude or speech. He felt his dependence in a way he had not foreseen; the ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... of the colony required it and there was the threat of punishment if absence from church was reported to the grand jury. But there was another reason also, even though men and women were compelled to walk five or six miles to attend. That other reason was the loneliness of farm life in the early days of colonial Virginia. The churchyard on a Sunday morning was then the meeting-place of the whole community, and the only place where all could meet on the same level. The only other meetings were when elections ...
— Religious Life of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century - The Faith of Our Fathers • George MacLaren Brydon
... phases of the soul,—the shock and surprise of grief in the face of the world made desolate. Loneliness and despair for a space, and then, like stars in the night, the new births of the spirit, the wonderful outcoming from sorrow: the mild light of patience at first; hope and faith kindled afresh in the very jaws of evil; the new meaning and worth of life beyond sorrow, ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... Those things we shall ask of her and she, in her wonderful tenderness, will give them to us again—in dreams, waking or sleeping, in the sunlit silence of lonely places, in soft nights when the southern sea is still, in the greater loneliness of the storm, when brave faces are set as stone and freezing hands grasp frozen ropes, and the shadow of death rises from the waves and stands between every man and his fellows. We shall ask, and we shall receive. Out of noon-day shadow, out of the starlit dusk, out of the driving spray of the ...
— The Children of the King • F. Marion Crawford
... before, taking up a claim of land left by a near relative who had died. Both were young, and the husband had thought to improve his condition by turning farmer rather than by remaining a clerk in one of the Philadelphia shops. But the loneliness of the life was something neither had counted on, and both were glad enough to talk to a ...
— On the Trail of Pontiac • Edward Stratemeyer
... people, the dogs drawing little carts of merchandise, the river with its bridges, the floating basin with many tall ships, the quays thronged with sailors and lightermen, filled me not only with wonder, but with a sense of loneliness and insignificance. ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... when he reached a small building by the side of the road that he stopped. Pushing open the door, he entered. All was dark and silent within. The strange loneliness of the place would have smitten any one else with the feeling of dread. But the old man never seemed to mind it. Fumbling in his vest pocket, he found a match. This he struck and lighted a tallow dip which was stuck into a rude candle-stick upon a bare wooden table. ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... thoughts of marriage to distract him from his chosen work. And since that fatal day, although his old enthusiasm, his old belief in himself and his capabilities, had long ago receded into the dim background, he had never consciously thought of any amelioration of the loneliness, the bitter, regretful solitude in which he ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... newspapers. "And thus, somehow or other, my views toward newspapers were entirely recast," while he held loyal to his profession as a newspaper man. This is the critical sentence in Stanley's telling of the story: "As seen in my loneliness, there was this difference between the Bible and the newspapers. The one reminded me that apart from God my life was but a bubble of air, and it made me remember my Creator; the other fostered arrogance and worldliness."[1] ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... JOSEPHINE is leaning forward intently for the music has begun again. This time the figure is doing a strange dance of loneliness and search for his departed partner, his mask lies upon the ground, but he shields himself with his cloak. Occasionally in the wildness of his dance it slips a little, permitting glimpses ...
— Clair de Lune - A Play in Two Acts and Six Scenes • Michael Strange
... concluded, she began to play and sing softly. As the sweet melody flowed out through the room the little group became silent and thoughtful. Again it was that same weird lament which the girl had sung long before in the Elwin school to voice the emotions which surged up in her during her loneliness in the great city. In it her auditors heard again that night the echoing sighs of the passive Indians, enslaved by the Christian Spaniards. Hitt's head sank upon his breast as he listened. Haynerd tried to ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... he could not sleep long at night. His sense of loneliness penetrated his dreams. Sometimes he would chuckle and gurgle in an ecstacy, as he had done when riding on his father's back, romping through the stately rooms. He would throw his arm about the neck of the doorkeeper or lifeguard ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... said Dr. May. "She has been used to loneliness; and to thrust companionship on her would be ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... reduced by the buzz of insect life upon the night air. The steady hum of the mosquito—the night song of the grasshoppers and frogs—the ticking, spasmodic call of the invisible beetles—all these things help to intensify the loneliness and magnitude of the wild surroundings. Nor does the smoldering camp-fire lessen the loneliness. Its very light deepens the surrounding dark, and its only use, after the evening meal is cooked, is merely to dispel the savage attack of the voracious mosquito and put the fear of man into the ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... been jilted "three or four times." What a quaint notion by the way that of his: "I think an Inn is a good sort of place to propose to a single woman in, Mr. Pickwick. She is more likely to feel the loneliness of her situation in travelling, perhaps than ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... be very economical, even about candle ends, and almost liked such economy for a change; but he got sick of his loneliness, beyond expression—he was a ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... answer to every step, until at length Diamond thought he should like to say something out loud, and see what the church would answer. But he found he was afraid to speak. He could not utter a word for fear of the loneliness. Perhaps it was as well that he did not, for the sound of a spoken word would have made him feel the place yet more deserted and empty. But he thought he could sing. He was fond of singing, and at home he used ...
— At the Back of the North Wind • George MacDonald
... between L200 and L300 a year, which she had tied up so that nobody can touch it. That was about a year ago. I wrote to tell my father of her death, and received a pitiful letter; indeed, I have had several of them. He implored me to come out to him and not to leave him to die in his loneliness, as he soon would do of a broken heart, if I did not. He said that he had long ago given up drinking, which was the cause of the ruin of his life, and sent a certificate signed by a magistrate and a doctor to that effect. Well, in the end, although all my cousins ...
— Benita, An African Romance • H. Rider Haggard
... of the Slav soul: we are neither alone in this world nor destined for it. Whether I wander in the streets of London or stand in the green fields outside, I have always the same feeling of human loneliness and helplessness on one side, and the company of some overwhelming and invisible powers on the other. I say the feeling and not thought, because I feel they touch me and I am unhappy because I cannot touch them. They seem to be like shadows, and still I am sure they ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... you take pity on me and relieve my loneliness? Here I am, in a house that would make the ordinary hotel look like a bandbox, and since Sherry has gone to France with the Engineers it's simply ghastly. For various reasons I do not wish to leave the house, but I shall surely go into a decline if I have to stay here ...
— The Camp Fire Girls Do Their Bit - Or, Over the Top with the Winnebagos • Hildegard G. Frey
... there was not even enough liquor on the Ella to revive poor Burns. He spent his days devising, with bits of wire, a ring puzzle that he intended should make his fortune. And I believe he contrived, finally, a clever enough bit of foolery. He was anxious to talk, and complained bitterly of loneliness, using every excuse to hold Tom, the cook, when he carried him his meals. He had asked for a Bible, too, and read it now ...
— The After House • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... a Canadian village that I parted with this gentlemanly and generous New-Englander. When I left him, I was not penniless, but a bitter sense of my loneliness was upon me, and a consciousness of the uncandid and cruel turn I had done my father brought me almost to the verge of suicide. On Sunday morning I entered a church in Toronto, and tears flowed down my face as I heard the minister read the parable of the Prodigal Son. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... common with those who lived in the other countries of Great Britain and in Europe, dreaded the coming of winter not only on account of the cold and loneliness, but because they believed that at this time the powers of evil were abroad and ascendant. This belief harked back to the old idea that the sun had been vanquished by his enemies in the late autumn. It was to forget the fearful influences ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... sunset the gloom quickly deepened. The sun sank early into banks of leaden clouds, and the Karluk slid on through the seething seas in a scene of strange loneliness, save for the suspended albatross that never varied its position by an inch or by a flirt ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... fears and woes, and win their way back again into the bosom of God. He was the simple, heart-whole believer, the poor little man lost in the shambles, shaken and wounded by the "terrible doubt of appearances" and by the cruelty of things, yearning to cry his despair and loneliness and grief to the ears of the God of his childhood, and battling through long vigils for trust and belief and reconciliation. Again and again his music re-echoes the cry, "I will not let Thee go unless Thou bless me." Of modern composers Bruckner alone had affair so steadily with the heights, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... Thomas Grayson lay on his bunk and sobbed in an agony of loneliness. The letter from his mother was crumpled in his hand: "—prouder than words can tell of your appointment to the Academy. Darling, I hardly knew my grandfather but I know that you will serve as brilliantly as he did, to the eternal credit ...
— The Adventurer • Cyril M. Kornbluth
... out melodiously or melted to a mellow music that woke a sympathetic thrill in those who listened. Rose glowed with pride as she accompanied her friend, for Phebe was in her own world now a lovely world where no depressing memory of poorhouse or kitchen, ignorance or loneliness, came to trouble her, a happy world where she could be herself and rule others by the magic of ...
— Rose in Bloom - A Sequel to "Eight Cousins" • Louisa May Alcott
... aware of some new movement within him. Loneliness comes with it, for he would share his mind with his friend, and he cannot; he is ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... shut out All but the distant sky,— I've felt the loneliness of night, When the dark winds pass'd by. My pulse has quicken'd with its awe, My lip has gasp'd for breath; But what were they to such as ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... commonplace story imaginable; but to me it meant the most terrible pain. For some years I had thought of nothing but my child, and how to make a man of him; then, when my son was growing up and about to leave me, I grew afraid of my loneliness. Love was a necessity of my existence; this need for affection had never been satisfied, and only grew stronger with years. I was in every way capable of a real attachment; I had been tried and proved. I knew all that a steadfast love means, the love that delights to find a pleasure in self-sacrifice; ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... Italy offered. Standing alone in a field by the roadside was a small, dark grey donkey, tethered to a stone; and no other living being was in sight. The creature was not eating; it was only thinking; and it looked at us with an eye that seemed to speak of loneliness and the desire for human fellowship. "The very thing for you!" cried Molly; and the long-sought-for treasure, finding itself observed, flicked one ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... judge it so entirely as a work of art that I should not take note of its deep gloom, of its hopeless melancholy. But nothing was lost upon me now. I read it in every line,—he suffered; something failed him,—perhaps he knew not what, perhaps he knew. A terrible loneliness was in his heart,—and I had given him all I ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... the dark of the cave, saying to herself, "Presently he will come, my husband, he will surely come; the Slayers are slain—he does not but tarry to bind his wounds; a scratch, perchance, here and there. Yes, he will come, and it is well, for I am weary of my loneliness, and this place is ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... I would just arrive about nine, allowing myself to saunter on at the rate of two miles and half per hour. My sensations, indeed, as I went along, were singular; and as I took a solitary road that went across the mountains, the loneliness of the walk, the deep gloom of the valleys, the towering height of the dark hills, and the pale silvery-light of a sleeping lake, shining dimly in the distance below, gave me such a distinct notion of the sublime and beautiful, as I have seldom since ...
— The Station; The Party Fight And Funeral; The Lough Derg Pilgrim • William Carleton
... downcast and desperate. Since the capture of Lew Flapp, he had been without a companion in whom to confide, and the peculiar loneliness among utter strangers was beginning to tell on him. This was one reason why he had told Sack Todd so much of ...
— The Rover Boys on the Plains - The Mystery of Red Rock Ranch • Arthur Winfield
... their safe arrival if before three. I read your poetry[5] all over, but did I begin to remark on it here I would exceed the limits which a narration of facts has left me. It has afforded me much pleasure in the loneliness, which, of course, I feel a little at first. However, I cannot say it makes me at all sad. There is something independent and free in the idea that none of the vast multitude you are among cares more for your life or welfare than the breeze that passes. I begin my studies to-morrow, and ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... and the pink and white chestnut blossoms, dashed to pieces by the rain but yielding up their lives with sweetness. The streets, in that single hour between the hurrying homewards of the belated reveller and the stolid tramp of the early worker, were curiously empty and seemed to gain in their loneliness a new dignity. Trafalgar Square, with the National Gallery in the background, became almost classical; Whitehall ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... had been the least part of what he owed. There were other long-standing accounts which he had paid in full during these three years, paid in the restless weariness and disappointment that underlay his life, in the loneliness in which he lived, in his contempt for all his former pursuits, which had left him at first devoid of any pursuits ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... house and grounds like a bright bird, whose nest is high up in some sheltered spot where the storms never come, was some compensation for what he had done; but when she was gone there came over him such a sense of loneliness and desolation that at times he feared lest he should become crazier than his brother, who really appeared to be improving, although the strange forgetfulness of past events still clung to and increased upon him. He did not now remember ever to have ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes
... dwelling-house and the chapel are situated on a high promontory, almost surrounded by the sea. A range of tall hills in the rear cuts off the view of the island, giving to the missionary station an air of loneliness and seclusion truly impressive. In this sequestered spot, the found Mr. and Mrs. M. living alone. They informed us that they rarely have white visiters, but their house is the constant resort of the negroes, who gather there after the toil of the day to 'speak' about their souls. Mr. and ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... her religious promptings, Dot had lately developed a great sympathy for her father. Standing a little aside from the conflict between him and Henry, she was able to divine something of the feelings of both; and she had now and again caught a look of loneliness on her father's face that made her ready to do almost ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... will think they lead it. They will be self-deceived. Moving picture nausea is already taking hold of numberless people, even when they are in the purely pagan mood. Forced by their limited purses, their inability to buy a Ford car, and the like, they go in their loneliness to film after film till the whole world seems to turn on a reel. When they are again at home, they see in the dark an imaginary screen with tremendous pictures, whirling by at a horribly accelerated pace, a photoplay ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay
... among them she found the satisfactions of her life. He had long ceased to be her companion. As an associate, friend, lover, she had given him up, and, burying in her heart all her griefs and all her loneliness, had determined to make the best of her life, and to bring her children to believe that their father was a man of honor, of whom they had no reason to be ashamed. If she was proud, hers was an amiable pride, and to Mr. Belcher's credit let it ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... oppressive nor his sense of loneliness greater. Yet the boom of the ocean was distinct to the ear, and human presence no farther away than the terrace where Arthur Strange could be seen smoking out his cigar in solitude. The silence and the loneliness were in Roger's own soul; and, in face of ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... the same all the following morning; and the same loneliness, and the same melancholy, seemed to reign at Hartfield—but in the afternoon it cleared; the wind changed into a softer quarter; the clouds were carried off; the sun appeared; it was summer again. With all the eagerness which such a transition gives, Emma resolved ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... went home, lapsed into a solitude relieved only by the daily letters that Suzette sent him. He shrank from the offers of friendly kindness on the part of people at the hotel, who pitied his loneliness; and he began to live in a dream of his home again. He had relinquished that notion of attempting a new business life, which had briefly revived in his mind; the same causes that had operated against it in the beginning, controlled and defeated it now. He felt himself too old to begin life ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... had like thoughts! One of the many sad things about being the "last leaf upon the tree" is having to watch the other leaves shrivel and drop off and to be left at last in utter loneliness. ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... fence-rails. Yes, the winter was over, and Ivory was glad, for it had meant no coasting and skating and sleighing for him, but long walks in deep snow or slush; long evenings, good for study, but short days, and greater loneliness for his mother. He could see her now as he neared the house, standing in the open doorway, her hand shading her eyes, watching, always watching, for some one ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... resentment, of opposition to unjust social conditions which had made my other books an offense to my readers were almost entirely absent in my studies of the mountaineers. My pity was less challenged in their case. Lonely as their lives were, it was not a sordid loneliness. The cattle rancher was at least not a drudge. Careless, slovenly and wasteful as I knew him to be, he was not mean. He had something of the Centaur in his bearing. Marvelous horsemanship dignified his lean figure and lent a notable ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... expect you to comprehend my exceeding loneliness at that time, because your life has never been empty, and you have now your beautiful child. When first I met you I had nothing. When I say nothing, I do not mean to infer that I was destitute of worldly means. I had ...
— Peak's Island - A Romance of Buccaneer Days • Ford Paul
... began to understand that this was but an intimate and solitary joy. She had grown so used to spreading her banquets for one alone that she was frightened at the sight of other cups upon the board; for although loneliness begins in pain, by and by, perhaps, it creates its own species of sad ...
— Tiverton Tales • Alice Brown
... enough, but Annie discovered that she too missed her. Now loneliness had her fairly in its grip. She had a telephone installed, and gave her orders over that. Sometimes the sound of a human voice made her emotional to tears. Besides the voices over the telephone, Annie had nobody, for Benny returned to college ...
— The Copy-Cat and Other Stories • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... realized that it was the Colonel. He was standing with folded arms before the picture, his eyes, gleaming from under beetling brows, were devouring it hungrily, line by line. His face was set rigidly with a look—whether of sorrow or loneliness or remorse, I do not know; but I do know that it was the saddest expression I have ever seen on any human face. It was as if, in a single illuminating flash, he had looked into his own soul, and seen the ruin that his ungoverned pride and passion ...
— The Four Pools Mystery • Jean Webster
... way through the thick fringe of trees beyond. Behind these ran a wire fence, guarding a stretch of meadow, the high, uncut grass waving in the wind. Nothing was in sight except this ripening field of clover sweeping upward to the summit of an encircling ridge. The silence was profound; the loneliness absolute. ...
— The Case and The Girl • Randall Parrish
... Another and magical land awakes in the dark, full of a living restlessness; sleepless as the ever-moving sea. Everywhere through the night-shrouded woods, the shadowy trees seem to interrupt their secret whispers till you are gone past. There is no sense of loneliness anywhere, but rather a host of teeming lives on every hand, palpable though hidden, remote from us though touching our lives, calling to us through the gloom with wordless voices, inviting us to enter and share with them the mystical ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... Simon was removed the poor young Prince's condition became even worse. His horrible loneliness induced an apathetic stupor to which any suffering would have been preferable. "He passed his days without any kind of occupation; they did not allow him light in the evening. His keepers never approached him but to give ...
— Memoirs Of The Court Of Marie Antoinette, Queen Of France, Complete • Madame Campan
... Around it, in the distance, rise silver crested peaks whose melting snow descends to it in ice-cold streams. Still nearer, we behold a girdle of gigantic forests, rarely, if ever, trodden by the foot of man. Oh, the loneliness of this great lake! For eight long months scarcely a human eye beholds it. The wintry storms that sweep its surface find no boats on which to vent their fury. Lake Yellowstone has never mirrored in itself even the frail canoes of painted savages. The only keels ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... phantom. When I had well lost the last gleam of the high road a curious and definite feeling came upon me. Now I suddenly felt something much more practical and extraordinary—the absence of humanity: inhuman loneliness. Of course, there was nothing really lost in my state; but the mood may hit one anywhere. I wanted men—any men; and I felt our awful alliance over all the globe. And at last, when I had walked for what seemed a long time, I saw a ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... WILDERNESS. Loneliness; doubt; darkness. Spon- taneity of thought and idea; the vestibule in which a 597:18 material sense of things disappears, and spiritual sense unfolds the ...
— Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures • Mary Baker Eddy
... the conversation, and seemed determined to drive the malady that was devouring her to a head. He continued to speak of the motive of the love call, how it is interwoven with the hunting fanfare; when the fanfare dies in the twilight, how it is then heard in the dark loneliness of the garden. She heard him speak of the handkerchief motive, of thirty violins playing three notes in ever precipitated rhythm, until we feel that the world reels behind the woman, that only one thing exists for her—Tristan. ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... Sunnyside, Georgia, amid the loneliness of abandoned farms, the glory of cornfields, and the mysterious beauty of forest, he wrote "Corn," the first of his poems to attract the attention of the country. It was published in Lippincott's in 1875. Charlotte Cushman was so charmed by it that she sought out the author ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... still more a long martyrdom was the necessity for bearing his cross in utter loneliness. He could not tell his griefs. He could not talk of them even with those who knew their secret spring. His minister had the unsympathetic nature which is common in the meaner sort of devotees,—persons ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... thinks only of the day; which, looking out on nature, is blind to the pain and agony, the horror and the death, which are as real parts of it as brightness and beauty, love and life. Every little valley that lies in lovely loneliness has its scenes of desolation, and tempest has broken over the fairest scenes. Every river has drowned its man. Over every inch of blue sky the thunder cloud has rolled. Every summer has its winter, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... twelve-thirty, taking with her a replenished purse, and a stock of tremluous emotions. One was of dreadful solitude, a fear of loneliness, spineless and enervating; another of defiance; another of excitement; another of bravado; another almost ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... on Death's fingers flash up from the tomb And rays o'er its loneliness shed; As flowerets in early Spring tremblingly bloom Ere Winter's cold ice-breath has fled; So Love, rainbow-like, smiles through sadness and tears, Bridging up from the earth to the sky; The grave 'neath its glance a bright blossom-robe wears, As the ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
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