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More "Retrospect" Quotes from Famous Books



... through which one looked across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells

... commend to you The Mask (METHUEN) as a craftsmanlike essay in imaginative realism; ruthlessly candid and self-revealing, but free from that tiresome obsession of the ultra-realists that everything that has ever happened is equally important in retrospect. The narrator, Vanya Gombarov, a Russian Jew, discourses reflectively and detachedly, as it were from behind a mask, to an English artist friend about his early childhood in his own land and the dismal adventures of the Gombarov family in that underworld ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various

... looms up on the retrospect of my memory as Number 3 was as unlike the Kentuckian, as the latter was to Thompson. He was a disciple of Esculapius—not thin and pale, as these usually are, but fat, red, and jolly. I think he was originally a "Yankee," ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid

... dear brother, who know my strong attachment to my friends, and how much pleasure I have hitherto experienced from retrospect, can judge from the above circumstances, how intense were my sufferings. But the point, the acme of my distresses, consisted in the awful uncertainty of our final fate. My prevailing opinion was, that my husband would ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox

... laughed outright at her enthusiasm. Many times during her eager conversation with Baldos she had almost betrayed the fact that she was not the princess. Some of her expressions were distinctly unregal and some of her slips were hopeless, as she viewed them in retrospect. ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... or if sometimes he bestows a reflection on its original aspect, the mind seems to be carried back to a period of time much more remote than it really is. One advantage at least results from having lived in a state of society ever on the change and always for the better, that it doubles the retrospect of life. With me at any rate it has had that effect. Did not the definite number of my years teach me to the contrary, I should think myself at least one hundred years old instead of fifty. The case is ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... youth is going, and I have nothing to show for it but ten years of dressmaking. The best of my life is over, and when I look back on it, it is only a blank." It was as if the interview with the great man she had just left had completed the desolating retrospect of a lifetime. Was there nothing but disenchantment ahead of her? Was life merely the dropping of illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first touch from a flower that is beginning to fade? "Yes, nothing has ever happened to me that was worth while," she repeated, forgetting ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... Dvorak's, both in advance and in retrospect, is Henry Schoenefeld, who wrote a characteristic suite (op. 15) before the Dvorakian invasion, and an overture, "In the Sunny South," afterward. The suite, which has been played frequently abroad, winning the praises of Hanslick, Nicode, and Rubinstein, is scored for string orchestra. It ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... it is further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the course of man's development from a savage and barbaric condition all manner of ills—bloodshed, slavery, etc.—have been necessary stages; may not, then, sin be claimed ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... by the simple sympathy of common suffering, came hurrying across my memory; for each face before me was associated with some adventure or some peril, reminded me of some triumph or of some loss. What a wild, weird retrospect it was,—that mind's flash over the troubled past! so like ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... girl laughed again, nodded, and disappeared. The consul, amused yet somewhat perplexed over the naive brusqueness of the interview, waited patiently. Presently she returned, a little out of breath, but apparently still enjoying some facetious retrospect, and said, "Maw will be down soon." After a pause, fixing her bright eyes mischievously ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... RHEIMS, Dec. 5.—Eating a ham sandwich while squinting through an artillery telescope at the cathedral and hearing the man who fired the famous shots tell all about it was the unique combination I experienced today, and in retrospect the ham sandwich stands out as the most important feature, for it symbolizes the morale ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... after eleven days inside, that seemed in the retrospect almost as many months. He flattened himself against the wall, and stood there for a minute or two, looking and listening. He thought he might hear Crockett again inside, but evidently the Tennesseean had gone back at once. In front of him was only ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler

... profitable only as a legitimate topic of contrition. How much wiser and more profitable to anticipate the serious judgment which sooner or later we must pass upon our actions, and so to shape our conduct in advance, that the retrospect, when it comes, may be a source of joy and congratulation, rather than of shame and repentance. How much wiser to direct our bark to some definite and well selected channel, than to float at random along the current of events, the sport of every idle wave. ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... overwhelming numbers. They wellnigh blocked the entrance of the Corso when we got back to it, and the cafe where we had agreed to have tea was so packed that our gay escapade began to look rather gloomy in the retrospect. But suddenly a table was vacated; a waiter was caught, in the vain attempt to ignore us, and given such a comprehensive order that we could see respect kindling in his eyes, and before we could reasonably have hoped it be spread before us tea and bread and ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells

... years gild our retrospect. It was in 1903 that Martin Culpepper, a man in his seventies, collected and published "The Complete Poetical and Philosophical Works of Watts McHurdie, together with Notes and a Biographical Appreciation by Martin F. Culpepper." One of the earlier chapters, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... Actually given or only meditated, the whole of these twenty Readings—meaning the entire collection of the identical marked copies used by the Novelist himself on both sides of the Atlantic—have, for the verification of this retrospect, been placed for the time being in the writer's possession. Selecting from among them those merely which are familiar to the public, from their having been actually produced, he here proposes cursorily to glance one by one through ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... disappeared in disgrace; and there I sat by my Wife's side, endeavouring to form a retrospect of the year 1999 and of the possibilities of the year 2000; but not quite able to shake of the thoughts suggested by the prattle of my bright little Hexagon. Only a few sands now remained in the half-hour glass. Rousing myself ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott

... he continued. "In the retrospect, nothing. It seems to me already as but an infinitesimal point. Things that engrossed me, and seemed of such moment, that overshadowed the duty of obeying my conscience—what were they, and where? Ah, where? They endured but a moment. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... not know a house apparently more commodiously arranged than this, which was planned and built with utmost precipitation, and in the very heyday of a most tempestuous youth. In one thing only, upon a retrospect at this day of the whole case, there may appear to have been some imprudence, viz. that timber being then at a most unprecedented high price, it is probable that the building cost seven or eight hundred pounds more than it would have done a few years later. Allowing ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... relish the "cold soup of retrospect" and persist in picking the "bones of regret," without any appetite for the present or promises of the future. Beside one of these I would place a happy-hearted soul, who laughs through the window of the eye and on whose face ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain

... grammar school I had as good teaching as I had had in the primary. It seems to me in retrospect that it was as good, on the whole, as the public school ideals of the time made possible. When I recall how I was taught geography, I see, indeed, that there was room for improvement occasionally both in the substance and in the method of instruction. But I know of ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin

... Reginald bring his retrospect; his other friends come up, and they all return homeward. Here, too, ends the story of this canto; but not without warranting some surmise of what will furnish out the next. There is evidence of observation ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various

... backward to Marathon, and that their future existence seems to have been suspended on the contingency, whether the Persian or the Greek banner should wave victorious in the beams of that day's setting sun. And as his imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to the interesting moment, he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts, his interest for the result overwhelms him; he trembles, as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick

... In retrospect, the Great Rebellion seems the mightiest battle and the most glorious victory in the annals of time. The battle-field was a thousand miles in length; the combatants numbered two million men; the struggle was protracted over four years; the hillsides of the ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... The instrument known by the name of Hartley's Quadrant, now universally in use and generally attributed to Dr. Hartley, was invented by Thomas Godfrey of Philadelphia. See Jefferson's Notes on Virginia; likewise Miller's Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, in which the original documents relative to Godfrey's invention are ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... administered the Holy Communion to the settlers at Rangihoua. The service was held in a "shed," but "the solemnity of the occasion did not fail to excite in our breasts sensations and feelings corresponding with the peculiar situation in which we were. We had retrospect to the period when this holy ordinance was first instituted in Jerusalem in the presence of our Lord's disciples, and adverted to the peculiar circumstances under which it was now administered at the very ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas

... for fear of being thought odd, for fear of the opinion of worldly companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again you have run away. The things that seemed important when they were present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry

... a strange land and recalling a glorious past, should have indulged in a bit of exaggeration in his sorrowful retrospect, is not more than natural; and that his picture on the whole is true is proved by similar schools which existed in Russia till recently. The descriptions of these institutions by Smolenskin as well as writers of ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin

... understand the insurrection at Genoa in April 1849, in the quelling of which H.M.S. Vengeance and its captain, the Earl of Hardwicke, took so notable a part, it is necessary to take a short retrospect ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury

... Press-yard," is too curious to be omitted. "That while they [the prisoners] flattered themselves with hopes of life, which they were made to believe were the necessary consequences of a surrender at discretion, they did, without any retrospect to the crimes they were committed for, live in so profuse a manner, and fared so voluptuously, through the means of daily visitants and helps from abroad, that money circulated very plentifully; and while it was difficult to change ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson

... of the later date at which they were dictated by Jeremiah—in fact only a probable reference to Egypt's invasion of Palestine in 608, Ch. II. 16, and part, if not all, of Ch. III. 6-18. The general theme is a historical retrospect—Israel's early loyalty to her God, and her subsequent declension to the worship of other gods, figured as adultery; along with a profession of penitence by the people, to which God responds by a stern call to a deeper repentance and thorough reform; failing this, her doom, though vaguely described ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... this in retrospect it seems that the blind musician stood in some peculiar and significant relation to the more ordinary life about him. But for him, I should probably have omitted to describe my night among the Turks. He made the coffee-house ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... of pain and take on the poignancy of beauty. The memory of suffering endured is often the last thing from which we would be parted, while humdrum happiness we are quite willing to forget. Because we realize completely only in retrospect, it may well be that the present exists chiefly for the sake of the future. Then let the days come with veiled faces, accept their gifts whose value we are so little able to appraise! There is a profound and practical truth in Christ's saying, "Resist not ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon

... Dawkins answered. He looked toward his two companions as if for confirmation. He looked at the three crewmen, at Cal, all sprawled or crouched there beneath the tree at the edge of the clearing. "We thought it was the end of everything," he said in retrospect, "but we found out quick that ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... of my diffidences, and the like, I appeal to your own heart, if it be possible for you to make my case your own for one moment, and to retrospect some parts of your behaviour, words, and actions, whether I am not rather to be justified than censured: and whether, of all the men in the world, avowing what you avow, you ought not to think so. If you do not, let me admonish you, Sir, from the very great mismatch that then ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... of vol. iv. (that is to say, part ii. vol. ii.) we return, though still in retrospect, to the direct fate of Mandane. Nitocris is dead, Philidaspes has succeeded to the crown of Assyria, and has carried Mandane off to his own dominions. The situation with so robustious a person as this prince may seem awkward, and indeed, as is observed in a later part of the book, the heroine's ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... solitude, heroic execution of it in action; intrepidity and coolness in storms, fearlessness of death in civil strife; confidence in the destiny—not of an individual, but of the human race; a life risked without hesitation or retrospect in venturing into the unknown and phantom-peopled ocean, 1,500 leagues across, and on which the first step no more allowed of second thoughts than Caesar's passage of the Rubicon; untiring study, knowledge as extensive as the science of his day, skillful but honorable management ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various

... the human organism is a natural timepiece in which the ticks are conscious sensations. The greater the number of sensations which occupy the foreground of consciousness during the day, the longer the day seems in the retrospect. But the various groups of sensations which accompany our daily work tend to become automatic from continual repetition, and to sink into the background of consciousness; and in a very complex and busied life ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... opened the situation of poet-laureate. These two offices, with a salary of L200 paid quarterly, and the celebrated annual butt of canary, were conferred upon Dryden 18th August 1670.[29] The grant bore a retrospect to the term after Davenant's demise, and is declared to be to "John Dryden, master of arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his great skill and elegant style, both in ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... return of a man to the haunts of his youth, after he has acquired fame and a recognised position in the world, which is of itself sufficient to arrest attention. We are interested in the retrospect and the contrast, the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the hopes of early years, the memory of the struggles and contests of manhood, the repose of victory. A man may differ as much as he pleases from the doctrines of Mr. Carlyle, he may reject his historical teachings, ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle

... thinking of Alice. His brain, playing double, calculated with lightning swiftness the chances and movements of that whirlwind rush of fight, while at the same time it swept through a retrospect of all the years since Alice came into his life. How he had watched her grow and bloom; how he had taught her, trained her mind and soul and body to high things, loved her with a fatherly passion unbounded, guarded her from the coarse and lawless influences of her surroundings. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson

... which did for him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season; only, with tints more musically blent ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute indolence—but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it. Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the aesthetic and moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt's ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... adverse conditions; a battle against pests, frosts, soil, weather, and weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... matter. I am coming to the very instant of actuality, to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have brought my paper down to mention if it had been accepted." He drew a long breath, and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: "It is all of a charming unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization. When I go to a variety show, and drop my ticket into the chopping-box at the door, and fastidiously choose my unreserved seat ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... pleasant were they, two weeks later, at the retrospect of many an unsuccessful chase from which they had returned—when, after twelve days spent in "jaging" the elephant, they had added only a single pair of tusks to the collection, and these the tusks of a cow elephant, scarce two feet in ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... of retrospect Stuart began to wonder at his host's strange behavior until of idle speculation suspicion was born, but as to that circumstance ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... detail, and with the tranquillity of closet retrospect, thoughts that follow one another with the rapidity of lightning flashes. To say that I reflected coolly, would not be true: I was at that moment too much under the influence of fear for tranquil reflection. I perceived ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid

... have dealt with the retrospect of English ethnology. The chief questions in the prospect are the one just indicated and the effects of change of area in ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this century's history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process. And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in land locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin this forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history of the addition of steam travel to ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... the others, they were on the far side of the hill, whence the paths are smooth and gentle and the prospect is peacefulness and the retrospect is dimly rosal. They dressed as they had done those ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath

... the retrospect of the past. There we are on perfectly firm ground—ground which we have traversed carefully already, and which we may survey in ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury

... self she had hated. And always, when the dark memory impinged upon peace, she fought and fought until she seemed to be fighting hatred itself. Scorn of scorn and hate of hate! Yet even her battles grew to be dreams. For when the inevitable retrospect brought back Jean Isbel and his love and her cowardly falsehood she would shudder a little and put an unconscious hand to her breast and utterly fail in her fight and drift off down to vague and wistful dreams. The clean and healing forest, with its whispering ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... contempt, was now become a hated enemy, but of her father, and she mourned for him with profounder feeling than when her tears flowed over his new-made grave. But for headstrong folly, incredible in the retrospect, that father would have been her dear and honoured companion, her friend in every best sense of the word, her guide and protector. Many and many a time had he invited her affection, her trust. For long years it was in her ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing

... his brother, of the 29th of May, just after his return to Munich, gives a retrospect of the Viennese visit, including the personal details which he had hesitated to write to his father. They are important as showing the position he already, at twenty-three years of age, held among scientific men. "Everything," he says, "was open to me as a foreigner, and to my great ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... national progress and decay. The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, for the most important part of his task is to explain the long course of events that prepared and produced the catastrophe; while a writer who treats of more normal times will do well to ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... now as absolutely to belong to a bygone order of things, as if they had wrangled before the Dikasts of Athens, or pleaded before the Praetor at Rome. Mr. Phillips seems to feel this, and, as the gay days of his sanguine youth flit by his memory, the retrospect brings, as it will ever bring, melancholy, and even sadness, with it. Yielding himself up to the dominion of feeling, in place of keeping his reason predominant, he mourns over the past, as if, in comparison ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... failing. In fact she was altogether a failure, so far as her housekeeping was concerned. She could cook, after a fashion, but the fashion was so limited that even the bill of fare at the perfect boarding house looked tempting in retrospect. ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln

... show that only heroic measures could now save the American cause. Fortunately Washington was surrounded by a little knot of officers of approved fidelity, whose spirit no reverses could subdue. And though a calm retrospect of so many disasters, with all the jealousies, the defections, and the terror which had followed in their wake, might well have carried discouragement to the stoutest hearts, this little band of heroes now closed up around their ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake

... all as in a dream, for her mind had no time for reverie or retrospect; it was set on one ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... begin my story on that winter morning when I came into the world and bleated my protest against living at all, but I pass by those years when I was only a slip of humanity taking root on earth and come to that May day which is the first to rise distinctly on my inward vision when I turn to retrospect. Even now I mark it as a day of great adventure. Since then I have battled with salmon in northern waters, I have felt my line strain under the tarpon's despair, I have heard my reel sing with the rushes of the bass, yet I do ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd

... feel toward him, as he felt under his instructress in the art. Some nature, however, is required for every piece of art. Wilfrid knew that he had been brutal in his representation of the part, and the retrospect of his conduct at Brookfield did not satisfy his remorseless critical judgement. In consequence, when he again saw Lady Charlotte, his admiration of that one prized characteristic of hers paralyzed him. She looked, and moved, and spoke, as if the earth ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a quarter of a century has unfolded its events for us to lay blame and grow wise in retrospect. It is easy to say that what happened was foredoomed to happen; and yet here was a man, walking up and down the curved verandahs that Mrs. Nesbit had added to the house at odd times, walking up and down, and speaking to a girl in the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... unfriendly sky, it kept me at home. I am sorry now, as for many another omission on my wanderings, when lack of energy or a passing mood of dullness has caused me to miss what would be so pleasant in the retrospect. ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... rag-dolls representing Anarchy and Discord; Cleobis and Biton dragging their revered parents through the streets; bonnets rouges, banderolles, ca iras, carmagnoles, fraternisations, accolades; the properties, as well as the text of the plays, borrowed from Ancient Greece or Rome. What a bewildering retrospect! A period well summed up by Emerson:—"To-day, pasteboard and filigree; to-morrow, madness and murder." Tigre-singe, Voltaire's epigrammatic definition, describes his countrymen of the Reign ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various

... enter into the particulars of this adventure, let us take a retrospect of the amours of his Royal Highness, prior to the declaration of his marriage, and particularly of what immediately preceded this declaration. It is allowable sometimes to drop the thread of a narrative, when real facts, not generally known, give ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... high-class work; but among ourselves it is painful to contemplate the decline, not of power, but of encouragement, and the unhealthy tendency to a style of illustration which will not probably be very creditable to the country in retrospect. A collection of modern illustrated works of mixed origin may well dispense, except by way of sample and contrast, with much of the fantastic and preposterous creations of ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt

... to the people was entrusted the sovereign power of choosing their chief magistrate. It is our glory, in the retrospect of more than a century, that none other than patriots —statesmen well equipped for the discharge of its timeless duties —have ever been chosen to the Presidency. May we not believe that the past is the earnest of the future, and that during the rolling years and ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... confess that the spectator gets from it at first chiefly an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this composition are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of Venice to specify one's happiest hours, though as one looks backward certain ineffaceable moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness to-morrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock

... in search of sacred and profane knowledge. Yet Gedaliah made up in style for his lack of historical method. The "Chain of Tradition" is a picturesque and enthralling book, it is a warm and cheery retrospect, and even deserves to be called a prose epic. Besides, many of his statements that were wont to be treated as altogether unauthentic have been vindicated by later research. Azariah di Rossi, on the other hand, is immortalized by his spirit ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... for her, and then walking to the window, stood looking down into the garden in an attitude of thoughtfulness and dejection. She was mentally taking a review of the manner in which she had spent the day, as was her custom before retiring. The retrospect had seldom been so painful to the little girl. She had a very tender conscience, and it told her now that she had more than once during the day indulged in wrong feelings toward her father; that she had also allowed another to speak ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley

... edition of 'Paracelsus' was affixed a preface, now long discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect of the author's completed work; for it lays down the constant principle of dramatic creation by which that work was to be inspired. It also anticipates probable criticism of the artistic form which on this, and so many subsequent occasions, he ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... indeed a melancholy night in which the youths had been summoned to watch the passing away of her gentle spirit for ever from their love. Isabella De Haldimar had, from her earliest infancy, been remarkable for her quiet and contemplative character; and, bred amid scenes that brought at every retrospect, recollections of some acted horror, it is not surprising that the bias given by nature, should have been developed and strengthened by the events that had surrounded her. Not dissimilar in disposition, as she was not unlike in form, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson

... There was an implied crime-partnership in her glance which revolted him. Dick Langdon must have talked in his own home. Crane's conscience—well, he hardly had one perhaps, at least it was always subevident; to put it in another way, the retrospect of his manipulated diplomacy never bothered him; but this gratuitous sharing in his evil triumph was disquieting. The malicious glitter of the girl's small black eyes contrasted strongly with the honest, ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser

... drowning man lives his life again before the last; but my own fight with the sea provided me with no such moments of vivid and rapid retrospect as those during which I stood breathless outside the lighted windows of Kirby Hall. I landed again. I was dogged day and night. I set it down to nerves and notoriety; but took refuge in a private hotel. One followed me, engaged the next room, set a watch on all ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung

... the fiction in which there was a Flora to set against its predecessor's Dora, both derived from the same original. The fancy had a comic humor in it he found it impossible to resist, but it was kindly and pleasant to the last;[6] and if the later picture showed him plenty to laugh at in this retrospect of his youth, there was nothing he thought of more tenderly than the earlier, as long as he was conscious ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... her reminiscent, and when she was reminiscent she invariably exaggerated—in retrospect she saw everything as she would have liked it to have been. "When he first came here what a man he was! And this, what a neighbourhood then, an elegant residential district. I had a position then, I could recommend him; everybody knew Miss Houston of Houston ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein

... whispered Carry, with a vague retrospect of their recent conversation. "Don't ky. I fink I SHOULD like a new papa, if he loved you ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte

... brief retrospect, conscious that while nothing had happened, since the croaking printer's remark, that I would care to print in the paper, experiences had occurred that touched me closer than would the news that all the Malays of Asia were running amuck. I felt as if thrown back on to my old life ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe

... Fielding follows his retrospect of this strenuous attack on the law with a declaration that, henceforth, he intends to forsake the pursuit of that 'foolscap' literary fame, and the company of the 'infamous' nine Muses; a decision based partly on the insubstantial nature of the rewards achieved, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... never come from Hanover, the Whartons would now probably be great people and Britain a great nation. But the Evil One had been allowed to prevail, and everything had gone astray, and Sir Alured now had nothing of this world to console him but a hazy retrospect of past glories, and a delight in the beauty of his own river, his own park, and his own house. Sir Alured, with all his foibles and with all his faults, was a pure-minded, simple gentleman, who could not tell a lie, who could not do a wrong, and who was earnest in his desire to make those who ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... of the period, we very considerably enlarge our first estimate of the duration. And this leads to great discrepancies in the appreciation of the relative magnitudes of past sections of time. Thus, as Wundt observes, though in retrospect both a month and a year seem too short, the latter is relatively much more shortened than ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully

... went on Fritz, enjoying the retrospect, "one could see that quite well. He was putting on my boots for me all the time, and was willing to pay a good deal more for the accommodation than he had expected ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... thus, within my "heart of hearts," Doth this returning day, Another golden zone complete, Another circle lay; And when unto the shadowy past In retrospect I flee, I numerate the fleeting years By ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford

... himself to give over so soon the unusual pleasure of blowing up his only son. It was so long since Lord Kilcullen had been regularly in his power, and it might never occur again. So he returned from consideration of the future to a further retrospect on ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope

... It was a melancholy retrospect. Mrs. Nesbit might be said to have perfectly succeeded in the object of her life. She had formed her beloved niece, like the fabled image of snow, moulded by the enchanter and animated by no will but his, and had seen ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge

... band of miserable diseased hungry fugitives than to the two triumphant figures on the other side of me, overwhelmed and defeated me. I bent my head; I felt a shame, a degradation as though I should have crept into some shadow and hidden.... I would not mention this were it not that afterwards, in retrospect, the moment seemed to me an omen. After all, life is ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... of desire and human pleasure,—worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious,—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? (The best of Prophets of the future is the Past.) Why is this? or these?—I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron

... foremost objects of interest and concern. Such additions, whether literary or social, are the best kind of refreshment that travel supplies. She published two books on America: one of them abstract and quasi-scientific, Society in America; the other, A Retrospect of Western Travel, of a lighter and more purely descriptive quality. Their success with the public was moderate, and in after years she condemned them in very plain language, the first of them especially as 'full of affectations and preachments.' Their only service, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley

... certain strong impressions inaccessible to reason: I cannot share those impressions, and you have withdrawn all trust from me in consequence. You have changed towards me; it has followed that I have changed towards you. It is useless to take any retrospect. We have simply to adapt ourselves ...
— Romola • George Eliot

... mature judgment led him to reject it. [46] Like Milton, he seems to have revolved for many years the different themes that came to him, and, like him, to have at last chosen one which by mounting back into the distant past enabled him to indulge historical retrospect, and gather into one focus the entire subsequent development. As to his aptitude for epic poetry opinions differ. Niebuhr expresses the view of many great critics when he says, "Virgil is a remarkable instance of a man mistaking his vocation; his real calling was lyric poetry; his small lyric ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell

... wholly without struggle, is frequently not less decisive. Great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical character is seen only in retrospect. It is only the historian who can say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot

... given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and whom she had never thought of since, though she had then promised herself to do something for him. She had then even given him some vague hints of a prospective hospitality, and she confessed her sin of omission in a swift but graphic retrospect to one of her brave girls, while Jeff stood blocking out a space for his stalwart bulk amid the alien elegance just within the doorway, and the host was making his way toward him, with an outstretched hand of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... the city of Alexandria was intense and universal when the Roman army entered it to reinstate Cleopatra's father upon his throne. A very large portion of the inhabitants were pleased with having the former king restored. In fact, it appears, by a retrospect of the history of kings that when a legitimate hereditary sovereign or dynasty is deposed and expelled by a rebellious population, no matter how intolerable may have been the tyranny, or how atrocious ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott

... and its life perpetual. But it was not the state alone which thus took detriment from her connection with the Church; the latter paid a full price for the temporal advantages she received in admitting civil intervention in her affairs. After a retrospect of a thousand years, the pious Fratricelli loudly proclaimed their conviction that the fatal gift of a Christian emperor had been the doom of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper

... so thickly is it studed and storied with objects and recollections. Altogether, we have rarely seen a topographical panorama of such diversified character: it has reminiscences of history and poetry to lead us through the retrospect of chivalrous ages, princely contests for crowns that rarely sat lightly on their wearers, and the last flickering hopes of defeated ambition and ill-starred fortune. Yet, how powerfully, not to say painfully, are these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various

... the talk was far more manifest in the retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a disgraceful display of levity ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... torpedoed. Our procession seemed to pass through a painted and tapestried corridor, so pink and purple and azure and gold were the rocks that lined our way, with millions of delicate wild flowers. And oh, the retrospect view! It was wonderful, too, crossing by ferry, and looking back. Albertson's ferry we chose, and one car at a time rolled sedately on to a flatboat to be rowed to the opposite side of the river by a very young Charon in ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... his lips against hers, his body strained to hers. She had listened to his heartbeats; with her own abundant strength she had shielded him, fought for him, drawn him, by very force of her will, back to life; the anguish she had suffered during those long hours became, in retrospect, a poignant pleasure. ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach

... of opinion in our delegation. Final meeting of the Conference. Remarks of the leading representative of a Catholic power, on the correspondence between the Vatican and the Netherlands Government which had been presented to the Conference. Retrospect of the Conference. Summary of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... days that they had spent in tender acquaintance on the romantic slopes above the Neckar were stretched out in retrospect to the length and importance of years; made to form a canvas for infinite fancies, idle dreams, luxurious melancholies, and sweet, alluring assertions which could neither be proved nor disproved. Grace was never mentioned between them, but a rumor of his proposed ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... despair have subsided, and sorrow has softened into melancholy, she amuses with a retrospect of innocent pleasures, and inspires that noble confidence which results from the consciousness of having acted well. When sleep has suspended the organs of sense from their office, she not only supplies ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers

... road had reminded me where that boy was celebrating whatever peace he knew. His father was not communicative; and what could I say? He sat, answering me distantly and austerely, and he might have been a bearded sage seeing in retrospect a world he had long known, and who at last had made up his mind about it, though he would not tell me what that was. Outside we could hear revellers approaching. They paused at our door; their feet began to shuffle, and ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... luggage, if not precisely pinned openly upon his sleeve, Blount had brought with him from the scholastic banks of the Charles a choice assortment of ideals, which are things precious only as they can be preserved inviolate. But for weeks, endless weeks as they seemed to him in the retrospect, he had been rubbing shoulders with a crude world which appeared to care little for ideals and less for the man who upheld them. Inevitably, as he had admitted to Gantry, the change was wrought, or working; the exclamation springing ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... of our war which will live and be read as long as Americans read their history. It moved my blood, in the reading, tonight, as it did in those days—which seem already some centuries old, so do events crowd the retrospect—when we were all reading it in the pages of the "Atlantic." In the unfinished story of "Brightly's Orphan" there is a Jew boy from Chatham Street, an original of the first water, who, though scarce fairly introduced, will, I am sure, make a place for himself and for his author ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... the tremendous question thus raised, we have need of a retrospect. Property in man is older than history and has been nearly universal. It cannot be doubted that in an early stage of human development slavery is a means of furthering civilization. Negro slavery originated in Africa, spread to ...
— History of the United States, Volume 3 (of 6) • E. Benjamin Andrews

... nodded, and disappeared. The consul, amused yet somewhat perplexed over the naive brusqueness of the interview, waited patiently. Presently she returned, a little out of breath, but apparently still enjoying some facetious retrospect, and said, "Maw will be down soon." After a pause, fixing her bright eyes mischievously on ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... of the ruby, and with which he was become the inseparable companion of the archangal Gabriel, in his volitations through the regions of eternal bliss. Hence, in the catalogue of the martyrs, he has been denominated Jauffer teyaur, the winged Jauffer. Price, Chronological Retrospect of Mohammedan ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon

... and manner which are alike rare, of the more constant and the higher judgment of his people. It is plainer still that he embodied the resolute purpose which underlay the fluctuations upon the surface of their political life. The English military historians, Wood and Edmonds, in their retrospect over the course of the war, well sum up its dramatic aspect when they say: "Against the great military genius of certain of the Southern leaders fate opposed the unbroken resolution and passionate devotion to the Union, which he worshipped, of the great Northern President. As long as he ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood

... in which she swung her petticoats. I may err in the belief that she practically lived on him, for though it was not in him to follow adequately Mrs. Highmore's counsel there were exasperated confessions he never made, scanty domestic curtains he rattled on their rings. I may exaggerate in the retrospect his apparent anxieties, for these after all were the years when his talent was freshest and when as a writer he most laid down his line. It wasn't of Mrs. Stannace nor even as time went on of Mrs. Limbert that we mainly talked when ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James

... power. What a wanton waste of talent is that for a civilized nation! Wiley is another case of the creative mind harassed by the routineers. Judge Lindsey is another—a fine, constructive children's judge compelled to be a politician. And of our misuse of the Rockefellers and Carnegies—the retrospect is appalling. Here was industrial genius unquestionably beyond the ordinary. What did this nation do with it? It found no public use for talent. It left that to operate in darkness—then opinion rose in an empty fury, made ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann

... Dome, one of the great granite mountains, began to dominate the world; but though the cascades were in his kingdom they could not be governed by him, because spirits are not ruled by earthly kings. There was Vernal Fall, gentle in majesty; and Nevada, a wild and untamed water spirit; and retrospect glimpses of the ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... filibusterism elsewhere. These were the formidable elements of misrule with which the Executive had to cope. How well he met, and how entirely he for the time overcame these enemies of the peace of the republic, we leave the historian to relate; but our retrospect would be incomplete and disingenuous, did we not accord the meed of praise justly due to high moral excellence and intellectual and administrative honesty and talent, as developed in ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... death of Davenant opened the situation of poet-laureate. These two offices, with a salary of L200 paid quarterly, and the celebrated annual butt of canary, were conferred upon Dryden 18th August 1670.[29] The grant bore a retrospect to the term after Davenant's demise, and is declared to be to "John Dryden, master of arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... most other countries where the art has been cultivated and esteemed. In order, therefore, to acquire an accurate knowledge of the state of musical taste and science which now prevails among us, it will be necessary to take a brief retrospect; and as much of the music still popular was composed during the earliest period of the art in England, we shall rapidly trace its history from the times of those early masters, whose names are still held in remembrance and repute, down to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... have read the book of fate, and have seen the forty years' fearful afflictions that were to follow, I certainly should not have rejoiced at this my escape from Glatz. One year's patience might have appeased the irritated monarch, and, taking a retrospect of all that has passed, I now find it would have been a fortunate circumstance, had the good and faithful Schell and I never met, since he also fell into a train of misfortunes, which I shall hereafter relate, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck

... will not close this paper without recording my conviction that the great acts, and the great forbearances, which immediately followed the close of the Civil War form a group which will ever be a noble object, in his political retrospect, to the impartial historian; and that, proceeding as they did from the free choice and conviction of the people, and founded as they were on the very principles of which the multitude is supposed to be least tolerant, they have, in doing honor to the United States, also rendered a ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph

... historical, that is etymological, character in so far as I tried to find out why any words should now mean exactly what, according to our definition, they ought to mean. For instance, in examining such words as Vernunft or Verstand, a little historical retrospect showed that their distinction as reason and understanding was quite modern, and chiefly due to a scientific definition given and maintained by the Kantian school of philosophy. Of course every generation has a right to define its philosophical terms, but from an historical point of view ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller

... night, like a reward for his pity, a dream of that place came to Florian, a dream which did for him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season; only, with tints more ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock

... nationality, but because we revealed so plainly, to all the world military, our non-military antecedents. We bore the hallmark of fifty years of neutral aloofness, of fifty years of indifference to the business of national defense. What makes the situation amusing as a retrospect is the fact that we were traveling on third-class military passes, as befitted our rank as eleve-pilotes and soldiers ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... passage in one of BLAIR'S essays: 'Life is short: the poor pittance of seventy years is worth being a villain for. What matters it if your neighbor lies in a splendid tomb? Sleep you with innocence! Look behind you through the track of time; a vast desert lies open in the retrospect; through this desert have your fathers journeyed on, until wearied with years and sorrows, they sunk from the walks of men. You must leave them where they fell, and you are to go a little farther, where you will find eternal rest. Whatever you ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, June 1844 - Volume 23, Number 6 • Various

... heaviest burden that men can lay upon us, is not that they persecute us with their hatred and scorn, but that they thus plant hatred and scorn in our souls. That is what does not let us breathe freely or see clearly." Retrospect softened the odiousness of his Jewish persecutors; they were but children of a persecuting age, and it was indeed hard for a community of refugees from Spain and Portugal to have that faith doubted for which ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... consciousness of guilt is sorrowful and dejected. Lame—because it is a remedy to which men recur late, and with reluctance. And slant-eyed—either because, in that state of humiliation they fear to lift their eyes to heaven, or are employed in taking a retrospect of ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... to their guidance give the maid. 425 But be themselves my witnesses before The blessed Gods, before mankind, before The ruthless king, should want of me be felt To save the host from havoc[25]—Oh, his thoughts Are madness all; intelligence or skill, 430 Forecast or retrospect, how best the camp May be secured from inroad, none hath he. He ended, nor Patroclus disobey'd, But leading beautiful Briseis forth Into their guidance gave her; loth she went 435 From whom she loved, and looking oft behind. Then wept Achilles, and apart from ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer

... he gets home that a meditative man really makes such a trip. All the unpleasant features are strained out or transformed. In retrospect it is all enjoyable, even the discomforts. I am aware that I was often irritable and ungracious, but my companions were tolerant, and gave little heed to the flitting moods of an octogenarian. Now, at this distance, and sitting beside my open fire at Slabsides, ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... foresight of domestic needs. It is sufficient to say that I do not know a house apparently more commodiously arranged than this, which was planned and built with utmost precipitation, and in the very heyday of a most tempestuous youth. In one thing only, upon a retrospect at this day of the whole case, there may appear to have been some imprudence, viz. that timber being then at a most unprecedented high price, it is probable that the building cost seven or eight hundred ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... the end of this brief retrospect, and determined, when once it was proved that Mr. Wyse had arrived, to ask him to tea on Tuesday. That would mean lunch with him on Thursday, and it was unnecessary to ask anybody else unless Mr. ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... have never before been so free from vexations and calamities, or possessed of so great a share of content and health as at this period. Looking back on some delightful and happy events of my life, and on many misfortunes so truly overwhelming that the appalling retrospect makes me wonder how I have reached this age in vigour and prosperity, through God's goodness I have resolved to publish an account of my life; and ... I must, in commencing my narrative, satisfy the public ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... however, pleased him well, and here he resolved to set up his staff, if means could be found to make it grow. From the higher fells he could behold (whenever the weather encouraged him) the dromedary humps of certain hills, at the tail whereof he had been at school—a charming mist of retrospect. And he felt, though it might have been hard to make him own it, a deeply seated joy that here he should be long lengths out of reach of the most highly illuminated working-man. This was an inconsistent thing, but consistent forever ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... had learnt above all others is that which he teaches above all others—love. I think, brothers, we can picture the old white-haired Bishop of Ephesus, borne day after day upon a litter into his church, and ever saying the same tender words, "little children, love one another." What a retrospect there was for S. John to look back along that stretch of years! What memories must have filled the old man's heart of those days when he was a sunny-haired stripling, working with his brothers in the fishing boat, and casting ...
— The Life of Duty, v. 2 - A year's plain sermons on the Gospels or Epistles • H. J. Wilmot-Buxton

... substances, and more especially anaesthetics, might be made to localize, intensify, and perpetuate their action upon the peripheral nerves. The simple problem in physiology and mechanics involved in this question I was fortunate enough to solve quite a long time ago; and I must confess that in the retrospect these undertakings in themselves do not seem to me of great magnitude, though in their practical application their significance appears more considerable. Herein lies, it may be, the explanation of the interest which ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various

... but it seems incredible even today to us elated oldsters. Although we were always his staunchest admirers, in retrospect we can see now that no one believed more than we that he did it strictly for the dollar. It is likely there was always a small corps of starry-eyed adolescents who found the whole improbable saga entirely believable, or at least half believed ...
— It's a Small Solar System • Allan Howard

... intelligent city of New York; absolutely, a return to open voting is considered insufficient to reach the vitals of the evil which secrecy has brought about. Here we have proposed as a remedy the compulsory register of political sentiments; and to prove that things are not mending, in the "Retrospect of the year 1852," which forms a leading article in the same journal at the commencement of 1853, after a lengthy panegyric upon the state of America, &c., during 1852, he winds up with these most serious drawbacks ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray

... high and fell about his ears, if the dinner was burned or the tent blew down in a driving storm at night, he met these mishaps as though they were the very things he had come north to get, as though without them the trip would have lacked its spice. This is an easy philosophy in retrospect but hard when the wet canvas falls across you and the rain beats in. A—— laughed at the very moment of disaster as another man will laugh later in an easy chair. I see him now swinging his axe for firewood to dry ourselves when we were spilled in a rapids; and again, while ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... that interval he had learned about hyenas at first hand, through the plight of Beatrice Hichens and the children; also his servant Bhanah had come to him, and the Great Dane, Nels; still it had been a vague stretch of days, in retrospect. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

... same content which had flushed his waking revery. The plaudits of last night's mass-meeting still rang harmoniously in his ears, and the praise of Ruth Temple and Mrs. Hilliard was sweeter in retrospect than it had been in reality. This happy serenity bore him company through the bare echoing corridors of the hotel to the office, to be heightened by the gratulations of the landlord and the help, who seemed to feel that a vicarious honor had been done the house, ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... servants of William II." Was imprisoned for six weeks. The occasion that called forth the protest was an enforced levy for some public works of no advantage whatever to the inhabitants. Sad indeed is the retrospect, sadder still the looking forward, with which we quit French friends in the portions of territory now known as Alsace-Lorraine. And when we say "Adieu" the word has additional meaning. Epistolary intercourse, no more than ...
— East of Paris - Sketches in the Gatinais, Bourbonnais, and Champagne • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... endure this terrible retrospect, Paslew strove to bend his thoughts on other things. The choir was singing the "Dies Irae," and their ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... In a historical retrospect greater and more revolutionary changes are seen to have occurred during the nineteenth century than in any century preceding. In these changes no department of thought and activity has failed to share, and theological thought has been quite as much affected ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... of this in retrospect it seems that the blind musician stood in some peculiar and significant relation to the more ordinary life about him. But for him, I should probably have omitted to describe my night among the Turks. He made the coffee-house ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... Therefore, in retrospect, exiles, prisoners, martyrs, who have believed in God seem fortunate. The endungeoned heroes often seem the children of careful good fortune and happiness. The saints, walking through the fire, stand forth as those who are dear ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various

... my coronation, odd to pass through, to the highest degree illuminating in retrospect. I did not live to bastinado Krak; nor would I now had I the power. What they did was perhaps a little cruel, a little Styrian, as Victoria and I used covertly to say of such harsh measures; but how valuable a lesson on the state and fortune of kings! The King is one, the ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope

... though upheld by the captain, decided to quit the Pennsylvania at New Orleans and to come up the river by another boat. The Brown episode has no special bearing on the main tragedy, though now in retrospect it seems closely related to it. Samuel Clemens, coming up the river on the A. T. Lacey, two days behind the Pennsylvania, heard a voice shout as they ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... Republic, and was everywhere received with an enthusiastic welcome. Returning to England in 1836, she recorded her impressions of American society, and her views of American institutions in her "Society in America" and her "Retrospect of Western Travel." These are discriminative and thoughtful, while sufficiently cordial in their praise to satisfy even the most exacting American; and at the time of their appearance these books unquestionably did much to soothe the ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... you. He has sent his hirelings among you with this false report, to put you off your guard, that you may fall an easy prey. Then look to your liberties, your property, the chastity of your wives and daughters. Take a retrospect of the conduct of the British army at Hampton, and other places where it entered our country, and every bosom which glows with patriotism and virtue, will be inspired with indignation, and pant for the arrival of the hour when we shall meet and revenge ...
— The Battle of New Orleans • Zachary F. Smith

... thousands of years roll on, the length of the day increases second by second, and the distance of the moon increases mile by mile. A million years ago the day, probably, contained some minutes less than our present day of twenty-four hours. Our retrospect does not halt here; we at once project our view back to an incredibly remote epoch which was a crisis in the history of our system. It must have been at least 50,000,000 years ago. It may have been very much earlier. This crisis was the interesting occasion when ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... is past," said the preacher; "its sins and sorrows are irrevocably over; why dwell upon it now? Do not waste the present, with all its opportunities, in a hopeless and helpless retrospect. The worst of us need not despair, much less those who may have been betrayed into sudden error by some moment of unguarded passion. There lies the future before you; onwards then, and forwards! it is yet an ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... revolt, condemn Louis, armed Girondins in, power of, removes to Tuileries, besieged, June 2nd, 1793, extinction of Girondins, Jacobins and, on forfeited property, Carmagnole, Goddess of Reason, Representatives, at Feast of Etre Supreme, end of Robespierre, retrospect of, Feraud, Germinal, Prairial, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... politics to a broader view of the people's essential interests. It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence as the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time, rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... spotted with lamps. Each globe a sphere of pinkish yellow, they stretched before him in a line that marched into a distance of mingled lights and more accentuated shadows. He looked along them as if they were bearing his thoughts back over the past, every globe a station in the retrospect, stage by stage advancing him toward a final point ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... parent when the dear boy of his heart has been for a short time missing, and remembers the pangs of doubt, the apprehension, the painful forebodings, nay, the despair itself into which an absence protracted beyond custom, and not to be accounted for, has thrown him, will be able, from a retrospect of his reflections on such an occasion, to imagine what must have been the danger of this boy, and what the courage he must have had to encounter it—and will, while pondering with admiration upon his fortitude and manliness, tremble for his ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various

... domain, where she was the sovereign power; there she was helper, sustainer, director, the dear dispenser of favors. The woman's kingdom, queen of the home. Gradually the words led her down long lanes of retrospect, led by the rose-leaf touch of the baby's fingers; they kept her strong. What kingdom had she ever made her own? She, poor, bedraggled, complaining suppliant, a beggar where she should have been a queen! Home and the heart of her husband—there lay her woman's kingdom, her realm, her God-given ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various

... Calm retrospect shows that the Confederacy's commissioners were, from first to last, only played with by the skilled sophists of Europe. And, ere the end came, that absolute conviction penetrated the blockade; convincing the South that her policy would remain ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon

... pleasures of the world has been often recommended as useful to repentance. This at least is evident, that every one retires, whenever ratiocination and recollection are required on other occasions; and surely the retrospect of life, the disentanglement of actions complicated with innumerable circumstances, and diffused in various relations, the discovery of the primary movements of the heart, and the extirpation of lusts and appetites ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... tent door hour on hour, feeling himself, with the passage of each day, more completely isolated from the world, he seemed forced to a clear appreciation of the inner truth of his own retrospect; and, so far as any exercise of will was concerned, he found it a record of folly and weakness. There had been hours of high good fortune there, but they had been barely of his seeking, and of his own actual making not at all. Folly and weakness had stung him many and many a time, ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray

... of the pamphlet is perhaps more knotty and powerful than the first. Milton's well-known retrospect of what he had seen in Italy, with his reminiscence of Galileo, occurs here. But his drift has now been made sufficiently apparent; and we shall best discharge what remains of our duty by presenting certain pieces of autobiographical information ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson

... time in my life found myself under the dominion of a superior. When I remember, how even those bowed down before him, who had been to him in the place of parents,—accomplished and experienced minds,—I cease to wonder in the retrospect, that he riveted me in such a bondage. Henceforth I began to ask: what will he say to this and that? In his reply I always expected to find a higher portion of God's Spirit, than in any I could frame for myself. In order to learn divine truth, ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... Thought takes the retrospect of years just fled, And, conjuring up the spirits of the dead, Whispers each dear and venerated name Of the last victims ere the blessing came, Worthies, who through the lands that gave them birth Breath'd the strong evidence ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield

... not," said Lyra flatteringly. "Well, Annie, what do you think of our little evening at Mrs. Munger's in the dim retrospect? Poor Ralph! What did the doctor say about him?" She listened with so keen a relish for the report of Putney's sayings that Annie felt as if she had been turning the affair into comedy for Lyra's amusement. "Oh dear, I wish I could hear him! I thought ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... question—impulse and possession had flowed for him with a rhythmic regularity of movement—and yet in glancing back he could place his finger upon no past events and say of them "this brought me happiness—and this—and this." In retrospect his pleasures showed cheap and threadbare—woven of perishable colours, of lost illusions—and he felt suddenly that he had been cheated into a false valuation of life, that he had been deluded into ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow

... reversed the attainder of Tresilian and the other judges; and, with the approbation of the present judges, declared the answers for which these magistrates had been impeached to be just and legal:[****] and they carried so far their retrospect as to reverse, on the petition of Lord Spenser, earl of Glocester, the attainder pronounced against the two Spensers in the reign of Edward II.[*****] The ancient history of England is nothing but a catalogue ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the homeliest babe seem in the retrospect "heavenly the three last days of his life." But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been children more than usually engaging; a record was preserved a long while in the family of their remarks and "little innocent and interesting stories," and the blow and the blank were ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... with all my old haunts, the illusion had gone. I strolled into Saint Sauveur's, wandered a while through its dim, dusky aisles, and then sat down near the high altar, where the air was heaviest with stale incense, and indulged in retrospect. I was there for more than an hour. I doubt whether it was quite wise. At my time of life one had best keep out of cathedrals; they are vault-like places, pregnant with rheumatism—at best they are full of ghosts. And a good many revenants visited me during that hour of meditation. Afterwards ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al

... against pests, frosts, soil, weather, and weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... might have grown to be so loyal to the King, that, when the Revolution came, he would have been found in command of one of the King's men-of-war, ordered to put down the Rebels in Boston, or in New York. Thus Fate suggests amazing alternatives to us in the retrospect, but in the actual living, Fate makes it clear that the only course which could have happened was that which ...
— George Washington • William Roscoe Thayer

... and beloved companion, and with her, retired to his native parish of St. John's, where, amidst the benedictions of his countrymen, and the caresses of numerous friends, he spent the short remnant of his days, participating every rural sweet with the dear woman of his choice, feasting on the happy retrospect of a life passed in fighting for THE RIGHTS OF MAN, and fondly cherishing the hopes of ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems

... means in the acquisition of books and in making journeys in search of sacred and profane knowledge. Yet Gedaliah made up in style for his lack of historical method. The "Chain of Tradition" is a picturesque and enthralling book, it is a warm and cheery retrospect, and even deserves to be called a prose epic. Besides, many of his statements that were wont to be treated as altogether unauthentic have been vindicated by later research. Azariah di Rossi, on the other hand, is immortalized by his spirit ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams

... not his habitual patience; and he saw that they were little likely to attain it; but they daily manifested qualities and powers—enterprise, forecast, and aspiration of various kinds, adorning their youth with a promise which made their father sigh at the retrospect of his own. He was amused, at the same time, to see in them symptoms of a boyish vanity, to which he had either not been prone, or which he had early extinguished. He detected in each the secret eagerness with which they looked forward to displaying their military ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau

... retrospect of my six years as a Member of the House of Representatives, I can see, and will freely admit, that my chief fault was my intense partisanship. This grew out of a conscientious feeling that the repeal of the Missouri Compromise was an act of dishonor, committed ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... "gross and vulgar conceptions of life which are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism." Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic," coming from a "fever-cloud generated first in Italy and then blown westward," sucking ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... the Shakespeares weighed their desire to have back the land, which they probably then wished, with their growing family, to farm themselves. Nothing seems then to have been settled, and they were too poor to risk the perils of a great law-suit. Doubtless, with sad hearts and bitter retrospect, they regretted their unlucky purchases in 1575, which seemed to have pinched them so, and wished at least they had been contented with the half, with the one tenement in Henley Street that formed part of their residence. For, had they only spent L20 then ...
— Shakespeare's Family • Mrs. C. C. Stopes

... having been left alone in the quiet enjoyment of No. 4, had examined the little apartment with an interest not altogether unmingled with painful reflections. There are few persons, however fortunate, who can look back to eight years of their life, and not feel somewhat of disappointment in the retrospect; few persons, whose fortunes the world envy, to whom the token of past time suddenly obtruded on their remembrance does not awaken hopes destroyed and wishes deceived which that world has never known. We tell our triumphs to the crowd, but our own hearts are the sole ...
— The Disowned, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... above a whisper in the railway-carriage; amazing that we had not to scrutinize carefully every corner to be sure no spies lurked there, and most delightful of all to know that we had got beyond the reach of the Demon of the Burg-Strasse. Egotistically enough we went over in retrospect our anxieties, disappointments and miseries. Should we ever get rid of that evil shadow, we wondered, which had darkened so cruelly two weary months ...
— A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes • Harriet Julia Jephson

... strings,—and yet be no more to us than the constrained and uneasy acquaintances of yesterday. Friends they may become to-morrow, the day after,—perhaps "hunc in annum et plures" But for the time being they have neither part nor lot in our past of retrospect and suggestion. Of what we were, of what we like or liked, they know nothing; and we—if that be possible—know even less of them. Whether familiarity will breed contempt, or whether they will come home to ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... time or space, the number of illustrations, the number of questions asked on a given point, the force of language—these are all means of bringing out the relative importance of constituent topics or principles. In retrospect, a well-organized lesson presents an appearance similar to a contour map; each part stands out in distinctive color according to ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... pier until I could bear to stay no longer, and then returned sorrowfully to my quarters, and soon repaired to the little retired lodging we had engaged for me in the country, where I spent a few days in learning French, &c. In taking a retrospect of our long journey I feel a large degree of peaceful satisfaction in having been desirous to fulfil (though very imperfectly) a religious duty; and these feelings of gratitude excited a wish that the remainder ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley

... its original aspect, the mind seems to be carried back to a period of time much more remote than it really is. One advantage at least results from having lived in a state of society ever on the change and always for the better, that it doubles the retrospect of life. With me at any rate it has had that effect. Did not the definite number of my years teach me to the contrary, I should think myself at least one hundred years old instead of fifty. The case is said to be widely different with those who have passed their lives in cities or ancient ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... time to dwell upon the thoughts that spring from these words. Take them in the barest outline. No man that makes the worse choice of earth instead of God, ever, in the retrospect, said: 'I have a goodly heritage.' One of the later Roman Emperors, who was among the best of them, said, when he was dying: 'I have been everything, and it profits me nothing.' No creature can satisfy your whole nature. Portions of it may be fed ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... falls,' said Mrs Wilfer, 'shall I say into a reverie, or shall I say into a retrospect? on ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... neighborhood. While thus, therefore, my life passed on equably and tranquilly, many mouths glided over, and I found myself already a year at home, without it appearing more than a few weeks. Nothing seems so short in retrospect as monotony; the number, the variety, the interest of the events which occupy us, making our hours pass glibly and flowingly, will still suggest to the mind the impressions of a longer period than when the daily routine of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... determines to move to the country. Such changes in one's way of life are not decided as casually as trading in the old car for a model of the current year. Usually the decision to pioneer backward is reached so gradually that those who take the step can hardly tell in retrospect just when the die was cast. A vacation or summer in the country may have put it in mind. Then a period of vague indecision follows when city and country appear about equally attractive. Suddenly some ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley

... perfect experience. To ask and to be refused leave to stay till Monday would destroy for him the value of what he had already experienced in three days' residence; even to ask and to be granted the privilege would spoil it in retrospect. He went down the stairs from his room and stood in the little quadrangle, telling himself that at any rate he might postpone his departure until twilight and walk the seven miles from Shipcot to Wych-on-the-Wold. ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie

... Mr. Pryme and Miss Miller came to be found in the parish of Tripton at nine o'clock in the morning, standing together under a wet hedge-row, it will be necessary to take a slight retrospect of what had taken place in the history of these two people since the time when the young barrister had spent that memorable ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

... subway train, and, choosing a seat alone near the centre of the car, which at that hour of night in the downtown district was almost deserted, took the crushed letter from his pocket. For a moment he made no attempt to read it, his dark eyes, now that he was free from observation, full of troubled retrospect, fixed on the window at his side. It was not a pleasant thought that it had cost a man his life, nor yet that that life was also the price of his own freedom. True, if there were two men in the city ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... a grievous error, nevertheless the war that was waged by the Federal Government was a crime against the constitution, humanity, and God. But now, as we view the present and retrospect the past, who may say that all has not turned out for the best? We find consolation in the belief that the Lord's hand has shaped our destiny, and we meekly submit ...
— Reminiscences of a Rebel • Wayland Fuller Dunaway

... direct his thoughts upon the past, certain vague souvenirs began to shape themselves in his memory. They were only dim shadows, resembling the retrospect of a dream, and yet he was impressed with the belief that they had once been realities. He was the more confirmed in this idea, because such visions had occurred to him before—especially upon the night when he sat by the death-bed ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... wistful regret that Jan recalled in these days the daily round of his life, after the fight with Bill, as Jean's lead dog. The swift, positive, and ordered evolutions of those smoothly running days seemed merely miraculous in retrospect as Jan compared his memory of them with the wretched muddle of Beeching's wasteful scramble across the country: They carried no trade goods, nothing save the necessary dog-food and creature-comforts for the two men; yet their sled—an ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson

... critiques have no appreciable bearing on our argument and we cite them rather for historical interest and retrospect.[13] [Sidenote: Festus] [Sidenote: Brix] While Festus[14] makes a painful effort to explain the location of the mythical "Portus Persicus" mentioned in the Amph.,[15] Brix[16] in modern times shows that there is no historical ground for the elaborate ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke

... movement, it is to be noted in retrospect, originated as an effort to restore order in the war-stricken Southern States. The secrecy of its methods appealed to the imagination and caused its rapid expansion, and this secrecy was inevitable because ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... many children, who were born [Footnote: It may be interesting to a mother to know the average weight of new born infants. There is a paper on the subject in the Medical Circular (April 10, 1861) and which has been abridged in Braithwaite's Retrospect of Medicine (July and December 1861). The following are extracts—"Dr. E. von Siebold presents a table of the weights of 3000 infants (1586 male and 1414 female) weighed immediately after birth. From this table (for which we have not ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse

... however, that this was written by a personal friend; for a year later the same magazine, in its semi-annual retrospect of British literature, expressed somewhat altered opinions. This time it says: "It is not for us to vindicate Mary Godwin from the charge of multiplied immorality which is brought against her by the candid as well as the censorious, by the sagacious ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell

... sovereignty convert the wish into claim and positive right, and an incompliance with it into crime and treason;—these facts, these passions, these moral verities, on which the whole tragedy is founded, are all prepared for, and will to the retrospect be found implied, in these first four or five lines of the play. They let us know that the trial is but a trick; and that the grossness of the old king's rage is in part the natural result of a silly trick suddenly and most ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... structure on the site of the historic wigwam, obliterating, in its ruthless, intrusive, advent, that lingering relic of the picturesque aspect of Indian life—a relic that, with its emblems and inner garniture of war, bids a scion of the race indulge a prideful retrospect of his sometime grandeur, and pristine might; that has power to invoke stirring recollections of a momentous and a thrilling past; to re-animate and summon before him the shadowy figures of his redoubtable sires, and re-enact their lofty deeds: in view of ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... another retrospect. Did she know any people who put these together; who made a real, earnest, constant study of the Bible as school girls studied their Latin grammars, and who were really eager to save souls because they had the love of Christ in their ...
— Four Girls at Chautauqua • Pansy

... did not flare with transient enthusiasm but glowed with unquenchable devotion to a cause! "The ever favorite object of my heart"—how quietly, how simply he discloses the source and origin of a sublime consecration, a lifelong heroism! Thus speaks the victor in calm retrospect of the long battle. But if you would know the depth and the intensity of the divine fire that burned within his breast you must go back to the dark and icy days of Valley Forge, and hear him cry in passion unrestrained: "If I know my own mind, I could offer myself a living sacrifice ...
— The Americanism of Washington • Henry Van Dyke

... legitimate topic of contrition. How much wiser and more profitable to anticipate the serious judgment which sooner or later we must pass upon our actions, and so to shape our conduct in advance, that the retrospect, when it comes, may be a source of joy and congratulation, rather than of shame and repentance. How much wiser to direct our bark to some definite and well selected channel, than to float at random along the current of events, the sport of every idle wave. Men are divided into two ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... Mr. Perth taught the Bible-class. He was an enthusiastic man, reminding her somewhat of Arthur. They were studying, that day, the approach of the Israelites to Canaan, and as Mr. Perth grew more earnest, Beth's face wore a brighter look of interest. Soon he laid aside historical retrospect, and talked of the heavenly Canaan toward which Christ's people were journeying, a bright land shining in the sunlight of God's love, joy in abundance, joy overflowing! He looked so happy as he talked of that Divine love, changeless ...
— Beth Woodburn • Maud Petitt

... neutralized, equivocal, colorless, confused report, in which the blame was to be impartially divided between the sufferer and the oppressor, and in which, according to the standing manners of Bengal, he would recommend oblivion as the best remedy, and would end by remarking, that retrospect could have no advantage, and could serve only to irritate and keep alive animosities; and by this kind of equitable, candid, and judge-like proceeding, they hoped the whole complaint would calmly fade away, the sufferers ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... who is taken becomes canonised, and the looks of the homeliest babe seem in the retrospect 'heavenly the three last days of his life.' But it appears that James and Mary had indeed been children more than usually engaging; a record was preserved a long while in the family of their remarks and 'little innocent ...
— Records of a Family of Engineers • Robert Louis Stevenson

... more to be dwelt on the next day, on the ramparts; when the balmy air, the sparkling sea, and your sweet looks and conversation were altogether in the most delicious harmony, and afforded sensations which are to raise ecstasy even in retrospect. This, as well as I understand, is to be the substance of my information. He makes me write, but I do not know what else is to be communicated, except this said visit to Portsmouth, and these two said walks, ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen

... undertaking to attempt here to probe to the bottom an origin so complex; but, whether the sympathies of the reader be for or against the standpoint of the Irish Loyalists, the actual events which make up what may be called the Ulster Movement would be wholly unintelligible without some introductory retrospect. Indeed, to those who set out to judge Irish political conditions without troubling themselves about anything more ancient than their own memory can recall, the most fundamental factor of all—the line of cleavage between Ulster and the rest of the island—- is more than unintelligible. ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... laid in for my last journey in the wilderness and through Jordan, is selected by the influence of the Holy Ghost. He takes of the things of Christ and shows them unto me; and while he keeps upon my mind my meanness, my vileness, wrings my heart with the retrospect of my backslidings and highly aggravated transgressions, he opens at the same time the leaves of the New Testament and shows me my deliverance from punishment, the redemption of my soul, and my translation into the kingdom of God's dear Son: ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham

... music in the world, Breathing a beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man. So we inherit that sweet purity For which we struggled, failed, and agonized With widening retrospect that bred despair. Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, A vicious parent shaming still its child, Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved; Its discords quenched by meeting harmonies, Die in the large and charitable air. And all our rarer, better, truer self, That sobbed religiously in ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... assuredly, no thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems to him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood. And so men grow by having responsibility laid upon them, the burden ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... the week. From government or the friends of government I not only never received remuneration, nor ever expected it; but I was never honoured with a single acknowledgment, or expression of satisfaction. Yet the retrospect is far from painful or matter of regret. I am not indeed silly enough to take as any thing more than a violent hyperbole of party debate, Mr. Fox's assertion that the late war (I trust that the ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... world of Tswana language readership. But today Plaatje is regarded as a South African literary pioneer, as a not insignificant political actor in his time, and as a cogent commentator on his times. He was an explorer in a fascinating world of cultural and linguistic interaction, who was in retrospect ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... 'If I live, the retrospect of this most solemn time will, I hope, be very useful. I wonder if I ever went through such acute mental suffering, and yet, mind! I feel perfectly hardened at times—quite devoid ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge

... day an occasion to be remembered, to be considered wistfully in retrospect during the troubled hours so soon to come to each one of the four of them. While Elmer and Florrie gathered fire-wood, Norton showed Virginia how simple a matter it was here in this seldom-visited mountain-stream to take a ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory

... Time enough had not passed since my elopement from school to win for me, in minds so fresh from that remembrance, a station of purification and assoilment. Oxford might avail to assoil me, and to throw into a distant retrospect my boyish trespasses; but as yet Oxford had not arrived. I committed, besides, a great fault in taking often a tone of mock seriousness, when the detection of the playful extravagance was left to the discernment ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... into sweet eyes and talked of Italian airs, when his future appeared all a succession of bright scenery and joyous acts, without any provision for a drop-curtain. And as my ear listened, and my mind wandered in this happy retrospect, my every faculty seemed exalted, and, without any thought upon the matter, I ground points upon my pins so fine, so regular and smooth, that they would have pierced with ease the leather of a boot, ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... the convention should look back and punish all judiciary assassinations, abuses of authority, massacres, and arbitrary acts committed since the 1st of Sept. 1792. The convention passes to the order of the day, saying, that such retrospect would involve half of France. All the members of the revolutionary committee of Brest are delivered over to the tribunals. The Vendeans have further successes. Fresh massacres are committed at Macon. A section of Paris demands of the convention that it should efface the inscriptions on ...
— Historical Epochs of the French Revolution • H. Goudemetz

... Fisher, in his historical retrospect, shows us how bitter experience convinced successive generations of English statesmen of the dangers that lay in an independent Ireland. One of the very earliest conflicts between the two countries was caused by the action of the Irish Parliament in recognising and crowning a Pretender in Dublin ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... this point in her retrospect did she perceive how near she had gone to the dividing line which separates honor from faithlessness and truth from falsehood. She had said, "There is no one to whom my love is pledged." Was that true? Which is stronger ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... sad, too much Of retrospect have I; And well for me, that I, sometimes, Can put those ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... goes back to the history of Denmark. All the events hitherto related in Bk. III, after the first paragraph, are a digression in retrospect. (2) M. conjectures that this was a certain Harald, the bastard son of Erik the Good, and a wild and dissolute man, who died in 1135, not long before the probable date of Saxo's birth. (3) Shakespere's tragedy, "Hamlet", ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")

... the Old Man had forgotten that there were such things in the world as Home Rule, Obstruction, Newmarket Lowther, and Brummagem Joe. And all the time here were we, who could be his sons, grinding our hearts in despair—in futile anger—in melancholy retrospect. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... answered. He looked toward his two companions as if for confirmation. He looked at the three crewmen, at Cal, all sprawled or crouched there beneath the tree at the edge of the clearing. "We thought it was the end of everything," he said in retrospect, "but we found out quick that ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton

... inspection. Here a British canoe was discovered in the last century; it may be seen in the Lewes Museum. Across the river, and only to be approached by a detour past Amberley Station, is Houghton. From the bridge over the Arun is a very beautiful retrospect of the valley towards Arundel with the hills falling in graceful curves to the river. The church is Early English of a severe type; here is a fifteenth century brass but nothing more of ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes

... self-indulgence blinds the other. Observe now how I speak in the high moral tone of a reformed offender, which is the way of reformed offenders and other reformers the world over. We are always most virtuous in retrospect, as the fact of the crime recedes. Moreover, he who has not erred has but ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb

... him take it off directly he heard of it," grinned Gordon. "Moses! But didn't Squeers blaspheme!" And the adjutant threw his head back and laughed joyously over the retrospect. "Yes, there's that curly pate of Billy's at the tent door now. Reckon he was expectin' 'em. There they are, ole Prime, too. Don't ...
— Found in the Philippines - The Story of a Woman's Letters • Charles King

... windfall pure and simple. The years of petty pickering suddenly seemed more horrid to her in retrospect than she had ever realized they were in the living. It was hateful to have reckoned in car fares and to so often have appeared to do the niggardly thing before the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst

... not do this through family pride, or with any boastful intention, but simply from sheer morbidity. She was always scoring down grievances in the present by looking back on the past. With her, it was all repining and retrospect. When her poor father, the earl, was alive, she was never slighted in this way. Had her dear papa but now existed, Mistress So-and-So would have returned her call, and not insulted her by her palpable neglect. It ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson

... unpleasant, are scarcely noticed in the whirl and confusion of events. Personally at the time, in traversing this battlefield, I was slightly horrified at first, but chiefly conscious only of the frightful odour of mortality. It is on thinking the thing over in retrospect and with cold blood that the real sense of horror begins to creep into one's soul. Such is the so-called "ennobling influence of war"! As I went over this grim battlefield, with all its tragic sights, I reflected bitterly on the triumph of ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... in particular, it had come; and should never dream thereby (though much would she suffer from that!) of how interesting he might have been. She had, in a finer sense, no manners, and to be concerned with her in any retrospect was—since their discourse was of losses—to feel the dignity of history incur the very gravest. It was true that such fantasies, or that any shade of inward irony, would be Greek to Mrs. Folliott. It was also true, however, and not much more strange, ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... but this very imperfection it is which urges us to arise and seek for the Isles of the Immortals. What we lack recalls the fulness. The soul has seen a brighter day than this and a sun which never sets. Hence the retrospect: "Thou has been in Eden the garden of God; every precious stone was thy covering, the sardius, topaz and the diamond, the beryl, the onyx, the jasper, the sapphire, emerald .... Thou was upon the holy mountain of God; thou hast walked up and down in the midst ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell

... congratulating all who were present to do honour to the great man who presided from his pedestal on the occasion of this great anniversary. Then there came a retrospect, comparing the old state of England with the present. Fifty years ago, the speaker said, poverty was still a disgrace, now it was so no longer. It was in the causes that led to poverty that the disgrace ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... growing larger and larger. As thousands of years roll on, the length of the day increases second by second, and the distance of the moon increases mile by mile. A million years ago the day, probably, contained some minutes less than our present day of twenty-four hours. Our retrospect does not halt here; we at once project our view back to an incredibly remote epoch which was a crisis in the history of our system. It must have been at least 50,000,000 years ago. It may have been very much earlier. This crisis was the interesting occasion when the moon was born. The length ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various

... Nation and its partners built new institutions, new mechanisms of mutual support and cooperation. Today, as then, we face an historic opportunity. If we act imaginatively and boldly, as we acted then, this period will in retrospect be seen as one of the great creative moments of our Nation's history. The whole world is watching to see ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... original aspect, the mind seems to be carried back to a period of time much more remote than it really is. One advantage at least results from having lived in a state of society ever on the change and always for the better, that it doubles the retrospect of life. With me at any rate it has had that effect. Did not the definite number of my years teach me to the contrary, I should think myself at least one hundred years old instead of fifty. The case is said to be widely different with those who have passed their lives ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott

... a stormy course Then followed. [b] Oh! it is a pang that calls For utterance, to think what easy change Of circumstances might to thee have spared A world of pain, ripened a thousand hopes, 285 For ever withered. Through this retrospect Of my collegiate life I still have had Thy after-sojourn in the self-same place Present before my eyes, have played with times And accidents as children do with cards, 290 Or as a man, who, when his house is built, A frame locked up in wood and stone, doth still, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... lamps. Each globe a sphere of pinkish yellow, they stretched before him in a line that marched into a distance of mingled lights and more accentuated shadows. He looked along them as if they were bearing his thoughts back over the past, every globe a station in the retrospect, stage by stage advancing him toward a final ...
— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... past," said the preacher; "its sins and sorrows are irrevocably over; why dwell upon it now? Do not waste the present, with all its opportunities, in a hopeless and helpless retrospect. The worst of us need not despair, much less those who may have been betrayed into sudden error by some moment of unguarded passion. There lies the future before you; onwards then, and forwards! it is yet an innocent, it may be a happy, future. Take it with prayerful thankfulness, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... anticipate the revolutionary ideal which again sought to inflame industrial unionism. After the decadence of the older type of the industrial union several conditions manifested themselves which now, in retrospect, appear to have encouraged the violent militants who call themselves the Industrial Workers ...
— The Armies of Labor - Volume 40 in The Chronicles Of America Series • Samuel P. Orth

... in the one train of thought. At his age when dabbling in politics roughly some score of years previously when he had been a quasi aspirant to parliamentary honours in the Buckshot Foster days he too recollected in retrospect (which was a source of keen satisfaction in itself) he had a sneaking regard for those same ultra ideas. For instance when the evicted tenants question, then at its first inception, bulked largely in people's mind though, it goes without saying, not contributing a copper ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... in your last number (No. 1232, dated the 20th instant, page 269), under the head of 'Twenty-one Years' Retrospect of the Railway System,' that the greatest speed of Trevithick's engine was five miles an hour, I think it due to the memory of that extraordinary man to declare that about the year 1808 he laid down a circular railway in a field adjoining the New Road, ...
— Railway Adventures and Anecdotes - extending over more than fifty years • Various

... On the contrary, I grew positively low-spirited when, after three more days, the lamentations began to diminish in volume. They were sweet music to my ears, at the time. They are sweeter by far, in retrospect. If only one could extract the same amount of innocent and durable pleasure out of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this composition are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of Venice to specify one's happiest hours, though as one looks backward certain ineffaceable moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they may have been, and the great work of ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... these echoless silences, dust-covered but intrepid. They must now make the ascent of abrupt and massive bluffs. The summit attained, they pause for rest and retrospect. The trail has been obliterated. Every hoof-print in the sands has been erased. The trackless, yellow expanse now assumes alluring miles of colour; the royal purple of the shadows seems like tinted bands ...
— The Vanishing Race • Dr. Joseph Kossuth Dixon

... Roderick Deal, and had been forced to wait more than a month. In that interval he had learned about hyenas at first hand, through the plight of Beatrice Hichens and the children; also his servant Bhanah had come to him, and the Great Dane, Nels; still it had been a vague stretch of days, in retrospect. ...
— Son of Power • Will Levington Comfort and Zamin Ki Dost

... On a retrospect, I observe that my long letter carries with it a quaint and magisterial air, and is very sententious: but, when I recollect that you requested stricture and anecdote, I hope you will pardon the didactic manner for the sake of the information it may ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White

... twenty-six members, and within fifteen years it has grown to its present impressive proportions, and has now its own magnificent church building, costing over $200,000, and entirely paid for when its consecration service on January 6 shall be celebrated. This is certainly a very remarkable retrospect. ...
— Pulpit and Press (6th Edition) • Mary Baker Eddy

... is of no use to try to console and distract ourselves with lofty thoughts, and to try to keep eternity and the hopes of man in mind. We so become only more self-conscious and superior than ever. The fact remains that the shyness of youth causes agonies both of anticipation and retrospect; if one really wishes to get rid of it, the only way is to determine to get used somehow to society, and not to endeavour to avoid it; and as a practical rule to make up one's mind, if possible, to ask people questions, rather than to meditate impressive answers. Asking other people questions ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson

... less pleasant were they, two weeks later, at the retrospect of many an unsuccessful chase from which they had returned—when, after twelve days spent in "jaging" the elephant, they had added only a single pair of tusks to the collection, and these the tusks of a cow elephant, scarce two feet in length, ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid

... distance. She remembers that she burst asunder the bonds of duty, that she caused the death of a fond parent; while I, through Heaven's mercy, have never been subject to the temptation to create for myself a retrospect ...
— The Pirate of the Mediterranean - A Tale of the Sea • W.H.G. Kingston

... the slow erosion of the power of joy is of all pains most poignant; out of it grow anxieties, premature despairs, incongruous with fresh cheeks and a mind not yet mature. This misery was mine for those four years which to most men are the happiest of a whole career, but to me at every retrospect seem so beset with gloomy shadows that could I live my life again, I would not traverse them once more for all the ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith

... understood afterwards [41] in retrospect, at once to strengthen and to purify a certain vein of character in him. Developing the ideal, pre-existent there, of a religious beauty, associated for the future with the exquisite splendour of the temple of Aesculapius, as it dawned upon him ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater

... our grasp, and its contemplation is profitable only as a legitimate topic of contrition. How much wiser and more profitable to anticipate the serious judgment which sooner or later we must pass upon our actions, and so to shape our conduct in advance, that the retrospect, when it comes, may be a source of joy and congratulation, rather than of shame and repentance. How much wiser to direct our bark to some definite and well selected channel, than to float at random along the current of events, the sport of every idle wave. Men are divided into two ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... vexations and calamities, or possessed of so great a share of content and health as at this period. Looking back on some delightful and happy events of my life, and on many misfortunes so truly overwhelming that the appalling retrospect makes me wonder how I have reached this age in vigour and prosperity, through God's goodness I have resolved to publish an account of my life; and ... I must, in commencing my narrative, satisfy the public on some few points to which its curiosity is usually directed; the ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... Past—the dark unfathom'd retrospect! The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows! The past—the infinite greatness of the past! For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past? (As a projectile form'd, impell'd, passing a certain line, still keeps on, So the present, utterly form'd, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman

... heed of dates and calendars. The importance that we attach to the beginnings or endings of years and centuries is a sentimental illusion, but even an illusion that rouses us to a consciousness of the stealthy gliding of the river may do us good, and we need all the helps we can find to wise retrospect and sober anticipation. So we must let the season colour our thoughts, even whilst we feel that in yielding to that impulse we are imagining what has no reality in the passing from the last day of one century to the first ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... he once believed that the nimble brown creatures belonged to a tribe of dwarf Indians who might attempt to scalp him with their little knives if they caught him out after dusk. Though his childhood had not been happy, he had reached a bend in the road where to pause and look back was to find the retrospect full of fairy ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... every woman has in her mind the occasion when she should and when she should not be wooed, and nothing disappoints her more than a declaration at a time which is not her time. If it does not fall out as she wishes it, retrospect, a dear thing to a woman, is spoiled. Many a man has been sent to the right-about because he has ventured his proposal at the wrong time. What would have occurred to Lambert it is hard to tell; but he saw that something was wrong, and stopped ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... comprised, then a long-needed and immeasurably valuable reform of the banking and currency system, a revised tariff, which was at least a technical victory for Democratic principles, and a number of minor measures which seem less important in retrospect than they did at the time. The program neither completely unshackled business nor opened the door to a new era of cooperation and human brotherhood, but it was a large and on the whole decidedly creditable accomplishment, and it was above all the work of President Wilson, who had led the fight ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan

... been responsible, but which he never contradicted, and I thought myself free—free to enjoy life, and the fortune that had so unexpectedly come to me; free to love and, alas! free to marry. And that is why," she pursued, in all the anguish of a dreadful retrospect, "I recoiled in such horror and hung, a dead weight on your arm, when on turning from the altar where we had just pledged ourselves to mutual love and mutual life, I saw among the faces before me the changed but still recognizable one of my brother, and beheld him make the fatal sign ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green

... and drawing his chair to the open window, he began to ruminate upon the many strange events that had happened to him since he first beheld that fair prospect almost from the same place; and he was indulging in this retrospect, when his own name, pronounced in tones familiar to him, caught his ear, and looking forth, he perceived Dick Taverner, seated on a bench in front of the house, drinking in company with some half dozen other apprentices, his ...
— The Star-Chamber, Volume 2 - An Historical Romance • W. Harrison Ainsworth

... Brook Farm as an Arcadia, for such in effect was the intention, and such is the retrospect to those who recall the hope from which it sprang.... The curious visitors who came to see poetry in practice saw with dismay hard work on every side, plain houses and simple fare, and a routine with little aesthetic aspect. Individual whims in dress and conduct, however, were ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke

... merely the adoption of a speculative opinion, but the reception of a profound and powerful religious impulse. Very strongly do I feel the force of Dr. Newman's statements as to the religious character of his mind. It is difficult in retrospect to conceive of this, except as growing up with him from infancy. But it appeared to me as if at this period, in some very special manner, his attention had been seized, his intellect exercised and enlarged in a new field; and as if the idea ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby

... the charmed ring; who were actually under the wand of the enchanter, for whom there was music in that voice, fascination in that eye, and habitual command in that spare but lustrous countenance; and who can trace again in this retrospect the colours and shadows which in those years which fixed their destiny, passed, though in less distinct hues, into their own lives, and made them ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... names of cities, and their terms of worship, were imported: that their ancient hymns were grown obsolete: and that time had wrought a great change. They explained every thing by the language in use, without the least retrospect or allowance: and all names and titles from other countries were liable to the same rule. If the name were dissonant, and disagreeable to their ear, it was rejected as barbarous: but if it were at all similar in sound to any word in their language, they changed it ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant

... sides of rocks, jumping quite a distance to the ground, again passing around those that were too high to climb, Terror all the time frolicking at their sides, certainly as happy as any of them, while they chatted and laughed, their hearts buoyant in the beautiful summer and the pleasing retrospect of a thrilling adventure already safely passed through and the prospect of a few others ...
— Adrift in the Wilds - or, The Adventures of Two Shipwrecked Boys • Edward S. Ellis

... But if the retrospect of his career must convince us that one man in so short a period never accomplished so much before, against such disadvantages, so also must we admit that probably never before did any one rest so wholly for his amazing ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... belief that after the passing of this depression, when we can examine it in retrospect, we shall need to consider a number of other questions as to what action may be taken by the Government to remove Possible governmental influences which make for instability and to better organize mitigation of the effect of depression. It is as ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Herbert Hoover • Herbert Hoover

... born in this fair southern land, I have long lingered there; and I love it even better than the land of my birth. I have there spent the hours of bright youth, of adventurous manhood; and the retrospect of these hours is fraught with a thousand memories tinged with a romance that can never die. There my young heart yielded to the influence of Love—a first and virgin love. No wonder the spot should be to me the most hallowed ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... little noted at the time, assumes strange significance in retrospect. At one platform Patrick Pearse, then headmaster of St. Enda's school, spoke in Irish. What he said ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... is further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the course of man's development from a savage and barbaric condition all manner of ills—bloodshed, slavery, etc.—have been necessary stages; may not, then, ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... for the first time gave herself up to him with tears, with twinges of her conscience, and at the same time with such ardour and tenderness, that the poor secretary lost his head completely—was plunged entirely into that senile love, which no longer knows either reason or retrospect; which compels a man to lose the last thing—the fear ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... a side-show, so distant from Europe that even the tragedy of Kut and the slaughter which failed to save our troops and prestige were felt chiefly in retrospect, when the majority of the men who suffered so vainly had gone into the silence of death or of captivity. When Maude's offensive carried our arms again into Kut, and beyond, to Baghdad, interest revived; but of the hard fighting which followed, which made Baghdad secure, nothing ...
— The Leicestershires beyond Baghdad • Edward John Thompson

... we suppose that heaven is to be one vast lazy retrospect? Why is not eternity to have action and change, yet both like God, compatible with rest and immutability? This earth is but one minor planet of a minor system. Are there no more worlds? Will there not be incident and action springing ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley

... Statue, and a hurried retrospect showed me the terrier some thirty paces away, exchanging discourtesies with an Aberdeen. The two were walking round each other with a terrible deliberation, and from their respective demeanours it was transparently clear that only an immediate distraction could avert the ...
— Berry And Co. • Dornford Yates

... subdued, but not wholly mournful, period at Bishopsworthy—a time very precious to Rachel in the retrospect—though there was much to render it anxious. Alick continued to suffer from recurrences of the fever, not very severe in themselves after the first two or three, but laying him prostrate with shivering ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge

... abundant concrete materials, and by a gradual process of comparison and induction reach the general principles and concepts at the close. It inevitably leads to a dull and mechanical repetition instead of cultivating an interesting comparison of new and old and a thoughtful retrospect. It is a clumsy and distorted application of the principle of apperception, of going from the known to the unknown. Instead of marching forward into new fields of knowledge with a proper basis of supplies in conquered fields, it gleans again and again in fields ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry

... fill many pages with such stories, but I shall not attempt it. Do they seem mean and trifling in the retrospect? Not at all. They were my work, and I liked it. And I got a good deal of fun out of it from time to time. I mind Dr. Bryant's parrot story. Dr. Joseph D. Bryant was Health Commissioner at the time, and though we rarely agreed about anything—there is something curious about that, that the men ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis

... pests, frosts, soil, weather, and weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous tome ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... the Alamo after eleven days inside, that seemed in the retrospect almost as many months. He flattened himself against the wall, and stood there for a minute or two, looking and listening. He thought he might hear Crockett again inside, but evidently the Tennesseean had gone back at once. ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler

... to reflect over our experiences in the last nine months. Summing mine up, I found, and thinking over it at home find still, little but good in the retrospect. Physically and mentally, I, like many others, have found this short excursion into strict military life of enormous value. To those who have been lucky enough to escape sickness, the combination of open air and ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers

... horribly of crude melodrama and possibly of sordid crime. His gorge rose at the picture, but a thought troubled him. Perhaps all romance in its hour of happening was rough and ugly like this, and only shone rosy in retrospect. Was he being false to his ...
— Huntingtower • John Buchan

... pictures long forgotten presented themselves; an endless, jumbled panorama. They say that a drowning man reviews his past life in the space of a few seconds; it took me a little more time, but the job was certainly a thorough one. Nor did I find it more interesting in retrospect than it had been ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout

... known many children, who were born [Footnote: It may be interesting to a mother to know the average weight of new born infants. There is a paper on the subject in the Medical Circular (April 10, 1861) and which has been abridged in Braithwaite's Retrospect of Medicine (July and December 1861). The following are extracts—"Dr. E. von Siebold presents a table of the weights of 3000 infants (1586 male and 1414 female) weighed immediately after birth. From this table (for which we have not space) it results that by far ...
— Advice to a Mother on the Management of her Children • Pye Henry Chavasse

... to the cause, example, and words of Christ, obedience to His precepts, delight in His ways, preservation from their own iniquities, and consistent behaviour, as evidences that their faith was living, and their hope warranted; and in this way the retrospect conduced to their encouragement. Moreover, they all concur in declaring that, while they left their infirmities behind them, they should take their graces along with them, and that their works ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... his thoughts upon the past, certain vague souvenirs began to shape themselves in his memory. They were only dim shadows, resembling the retrospect of a dream, and yet he was impressed with the belief that they had once been realities. He was the more confirmed in this idea, because such visions had occurred to him before—especially upon the night ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid

... historical retrospect greater and more revolutionary changes are seen to have occurred during the nineteenth century than in any century preceding. In these changes no department of thought and activity has failed to share, and theological ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... far-off western region, yet whenever, in the little village of Cleveland, he heard of a place of prayer, or a meeting, or association for the promotion of temperance or morality, thither he bent his footsteps. Now in a ripe and happy old age he enjoys, not only the retrospect, but also the present—and not only these, but he is constantly looking for a consummation of perfect happiness, beyond what either the past has, or the ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin

... in the retrospect, they were comparatively little noticed in their time. Virginia held in 1830 a convention for the revision of her constitution; among its members were Madison, Monroe, and Randolph; and emancipation was not even mentioned. ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... the bottom an origin so complex; but, whether the sympathies of the reader be for or against the standpoint of the Irish Loyalists, the actual events which make up what may be called the Ulster Movement would be wholly unintelligible without some introductory retrospect. Indeed, to those who set out to judge Irish political conditions without troubling themselves about anything more ancient than their own memory can recall, the most fundamental factor of all—the line of cleavage between Ulster and the rest ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... his retrospect of this strenuous attack on the law with a declaration that, henceforth, he intends to forsake the pursuit of that 'foolscap' literary fame, and the company of the 'infamous' nine Muses; a decision ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden

... resolution and celerity that astonished him, as he afterwards dwelt upon it in retrospect, Mr. Middleton rushed silently upon the nearest robber, him in the street, and dealt him a terrible blow upon the head with the barrel of a pistol. Without a sound, the robber sank to the earth, whereupon the citizen, whether he had lost his head through fear, or ...
— The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton • Wardon Allan Curtis

... cinquante ans depuis que j'ai premier vu Madame Warens,' what a yearning of the soul is implied in that short sentence! Was all that had happened to him, all that he had thought and felt in that sad interval of time, to be accounted nothing? Was that long, dim, faded retrospect of years happy or miserable—a blank that was not to make his eyes fail and his heart faint within him in trying to grasp all that had once filled it and that had since vanished, because it was not a prospect into futurity? ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... ebullient genius of Carducci and Swinburne this lofty disdain for theological illusions passes into the fierce derision of the Ode to Satan and the militant paganism of the Sonnet to Luther, and the Hymn to Man. In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own gods beside a fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked shingles of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation passed into the unrelieved pessimism of the City ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various

... /n./ [TMRC] A visionary quality which enables one to ignore the standard approach and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. An attack on a problem from an offbeat angle that no one has ever thought of before, but that in retrospect makes total sense. ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... the state of things that made it necessary for him to give the whole matter the go-by. If the public mind had retained its fanatical credulity, or if Mather's own share in the delusion of 1692 had been agreeable in the retrospect, it cannot be doubted that it would have afforded THE GREAT THEME, of his great book. All the strange learning, passionate eloquence, and extravagant painting, of its author, would have been lavished upon it; ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... effected. A feeling of true nationality must await years of growth. Confidence in each other had not yet replaced fear and suspicion. That the first attempt to come into a union could have been a success, that a sacrifice to the god Provincialism could have been avoided, seems in retrospect impossible. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... it is to be noted in retrospect, originated as an effort to restore order in the war-stricken Southern States. The secrecy of its methods appealed to the imagination and caused its rapid expansion, and this secrecy was inevitable because opposition to reconstruction was not lawful. As the reconstruction policies were ...
— The Sequel of Appomattox - A Chronicle of the Reunion of the States, Volume 32 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Walter Lynwood Fleming

... progress of those operations which wear away and waste the land, both in its height and width, its elevation and extention, and that for a space of duration in which our measures of time are lost, we must sit down contented with this limitation of our retrospect, as well as prospect, and acknowledge, that it is in vain to seek for any computation of the time, during which the materials of this earth had been prepared in a preceding world, and collected at the ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 2 (of 4) • James Hutton

... life on picquet, in the delicious early summer of the South, and among the endless flowery forests of that blossoming isle. In the retrospect, I seem to see myself adrift upon a horse's back amid a sea of roses. The various outposts were within a five-mile radius, and it was one long, delightful gallop, day and night. I have a faint impression that the moon shone ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... follow him to Ireland—for Adam knew that Arthur had been gone thither three weeks ago, having recently learnt it at the Chase. Every sad look of Hetty's, since she had been engaged to Adam, returned upon him now with all the exaggeration of painful retrospect. He had been foolishly sanguine and confident. The poor thing hadn't perhaps known her own mind for a long while; had thought that she could forget Arthur; had been momentarily drawn towards the man who offered her a protecting, ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... life so imperfect? What is it but the obtrusive hindrance of the body? The body is at the mercy of the disturbing assaults of present impressions. Through ear, and eye, and touch external objects invade the mind, and dispel and distract fixed and steadfast retrospect. The present blots out the past. When we look back, scenes, and events, and words, and names fade from our memory, and are dimmed by the haze of distance. The past is smothered by what has happened since. Only with a supreme effort, only in solitude, and then only imperfectly, ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson

... letter I made some rather disparaging remarks about certain ocean liners, but I want to take them all back. Life is a series of comparisons and in retrospect the steamer on which I crossed seems a veritable floating palace. I offer it my humble apologies. Of one thing only I am certain—I shall never, never have the courage to ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding

... be considered an historical work. Yet when the author makes a survey of the slavery and reconstruction periods with a view to estimating what the Negro has been, what has been done for him, and what he himself has accomplished it claims the attention of historians. From this historic retrospect the author approaches such questions as the Negroes' grievances, their political rights and wrongs, blood admixture, race hostility and grounds ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various

... Cricketer's Manual will be published in that city during the present season indicates that home interest in the sport is on the increase. But the chief thriving-place of native American cricket is conceded to be Philadelphia, and it will be interesting, perhaps, to take a retrospect of the progress of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... The earlier retrospect was one of happiness unbroken; for all childish sorrows lost themselves in the very present sense of peace and love enveloping those far-away years. His parents' life, as he saw it then, as in reflection he saw it now, remained an ideal; he did not care to hope for himself, or to imagine, ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... for a short time missing, and remembers the pangs of doubt, the apprehension, the painful forebodings, nay, the despair itself into which an absence protracted beyond custom, and not to be accounted for, has thrown him, will be able, from a retrospect of his reflections on such an occasion, to imagine what must have been the danger of this boy, and what the courage he must have had to encounter it—and will, while pondering with admiration upon his fortitude and manliness, tremble for his fate. This writer ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Vol. I. No. 3. March 1810 • Various

... modern progressive hopes out of this static medievalism is one of the epic occurrences of history. The causes which furthered the movement seem now in retrospect to be woven into a fabric so tightly meshed as to resist unraveling. Nevertheless, it is not difficult to see at least some of the major factors which furthered this revolutionary change from a static ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick

... declining to decrepitude, there is little to be feared from the malevolence of men, and yet less to be hoped from their affection or esteem. Something they may yet take away, but they can give me nothing. Riches would now be useless, and high employment would be pain. My retrospect of life recalls to my view many opportunities of good neglected, much time squandered upon trifles, and more lost in idleness and vacancy. I leave many great designs unattempted, and many great attempts unfinished. My mind is burdened with no heavy crime, and, ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... thought of her strong and gay and happy, making a joy of life. He never permitted the recollection of her illness and death, nor of his own grief, to intrude itself. Indeed he had succeeded in reality, as well as in retrospect, in evading his grief. There had been a little daughter of six, who had formed part of the painful association which his temperament rebelled against. Foregoing, in her favor, the life-interest in her mother's estate to which he was entitled, ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... more than two minutes in length, but it seemed a good hour to Buffle, whose acquaintanceship the delicacy of the trigger of his beloved pistol caused his past life to pass in retrospect before him several times before they reached the light. The light proved to be in the saloon whose locality had provoked the quarrel. The saloon was full, the door was open, and there was a buzz of astonishment, which culminated in a volley of ejaculations, in which strength ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton

... Tresilian and the other judges; and, with the approbation of the present judges, declared the answers for which these magistrates had been impeached to be just and legal:[****] and they carried so far their retrospect as to reverse, on the petition of Lord Spenser, earl of Glocester, the attainder pronounced against the two Spensers in the reign of Edward II.[*****] The ancient history of England is nothing but a catalogue of reversals: every thing is in fluctuation and movement: ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume

... paused, smiling as if in retrospect, and kept looking into the fire and turning about in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... all the world military, our non-military antecedents. We bore the hallmark of fifty years of neutral aloofness, of fifty years of indifference to the business of national defense. What makes the situation amusing as a retrospect is the fact that we were traveling on third-class military passes, as befitted our rank as eleve-pilotes and soldiers ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... recognize in these disturbances of industry the first and incoherent phase of the great movement which ended in the establishment of the modern industrial system with all its social consequences. This is all so plain in the retrospect that a child can understand it, but not being prophets, we of that day had no clear idea what was happening to us. What we did see was that industrially the country was in a very queer way. The relation ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... with a hoop-stick." Actually given or only meditated, the whole of these twenty Readings—meaning the entire collection of the identical marked copies used by the Novelist himself on both sides of the Atlantic—have, for the verification of this retrospect, been placed for the time being in the writer's possession. Selecting from among them those merely which are familiar to the public, from their having been actually produced, he here proposes cursorily to glance one by one through ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... no artificial utterance. He had clearly interrupted himself to indulge in this sad retrospect. He then points a moral from Mrs. Nickleby, who, he says, could not conceive the idea of anyone dwelling on such thoughts in secret. I have always had a notion that this worthy lady's incongruities and rambling methods were suggested by ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald

... for instance a direct experience of art, the which no professional critic may possess. And it includes as well a direct knowledge of life, sharpened in the retrospect of that devotion to the living which is peculiarly the artist's. For what is the critic after all, but an "artistic" individual somehow impeded from satisfying his esthetic emotion and his need of esthetic form in the gross and stubborn ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... White Ladies Road, Black Boy Hill, and is carried on apart altogether from any trade or business, it may be well, in view of connecting links with the past being rapidly effaced in the march of modern progress, to take an historical retrospect of this local post office so far as evidence is forthcoming, and thus endeavour to put on record the traditions of the past. It would appear, then, according to the earliest evidence obtainable, that Mr. W. Newman had the appointment of postman and town letter receiver conferred upon him in 1827, ...
— The King's Post • R. C. Tombs

... judgment and the nicest foresight of domestic needs. It is sufficient to say that I do not know a house apparently more commodiously arranged than this, which was planned and built with utmost precipitation, and in the very heyday of a most tempestuous youth. In one thing only, upon a retrospect at this day of the whole case, there may appear to have been some imprudence, viz. that timber being then at a most unprecedented high price, it is probable that the building cost seven or eight hundred ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey

... no satisfaction in Mr. Hale's book, nor in the state of things that made it necessary for him to give the whole matter the go-by. If the public mind had retained its fanatical credulity, or if Mather's own share in the delusion of 1692 had been agreeable in the retrospect, it cannot be doubted that it would have afforded THE GREAT THEME, of his great book. All the strange learning, passionate eloquence, and extravagant painting, of its author, would have been lavished upon it; and we should have had another separate Book, ...
— Salem Witchcraft and Cotton Mather - A Reply • Charles W. Upham

... of his pursuers and retreated to his own fastnesses. Soon the approach of night brought the siege operations to an end. Metellus drew off his men and led them back to camp after a day's experience that did not leave a pleasant retrospect behind it. Warned by its incidents that the cavalry should be posted nearer to the camp, he began the work of the following day by disposing the whole of this force over that quarter of the ground on ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... ambitions remained to him, built himself a shepherd's hut in a valley of the Wiltshire Downs, and planned out his memoirs in three stout volumes. He believed that he had reached that stage in life where retrospect is all. ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett

... composition. Yet it may serve as a text for the last remark I have to offer. To Pepys I think I have been amply just; to the others, to Burns, Thoreau, Whitman, Charles of Orleans, even Villon, I have found myself in the retrospect ever too grudging of praise, ever too disrespectful in manner. It is not easy to see why I should have been most liberal to the man of least pretensions. Perhaps some cowardice withheld me from the proper ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 3 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... to the Seven Years' war (I may be permitted to take this retrospect, I hope, since it is the fashion, and those who differ with me in opinions go much farther back than I do), let the French royalists and emigrants recollect the confiscation of property and barbarity exercised by Marshall ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye

... year permitted an unmarried woman to wear. It seemed to her that Siddall was still more costly and elegant-looking than before, though this may have been due to the fact that he always created an impression that in the retrospect of memory seemed exaggerated. It seemed impossible that anyone could be so clean, so polished and scoured, so groomed and tailored, so bedecked, so high-heeled and loftily coiffed. His mean little countenance with its grotesquely waxed mustache and imperial ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips

... such things in the world as Home Rule, Obstruction, Newmarket Lowther, and Brummagem Joe. And all the time here were we, who could be his sons, grinding our hearts in despair—in futile anger—in melancholy retrospect. ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... days, before Mr. McAlpine cam'," replied his friend, giving himself up to the joys of retrospect. "Yer faither used to say the Glen was jist like the Garden o' Eden until the serpent cam', an' it wes the tavern. Ah mind when yon Eerish crew from the Flats cam' up here to Pete Nash's tavern, an' ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... Lescott, because a guest and wounded, was given a small room aside. Samson, however, shared his quarters in order to perform any service that an injured man might require. It had been a full and unusual day for the painter, and its incidents crowded in on him in retrospect and drove off the possibility of sleep. Samson, too, seemed wakeful, and in the isolation of the dark room the two men fell into conversation, which almost lasted out the night. Samson went into the confessional. This was the first ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck

... slowly left the room, regarding me as he went in such a manner, that I could not fail recognising him: and here, my friend, I must lay aside every particle of self-love and vanity ere I can make you a complete confession; the retrospect of my life brings many events, of which the remembrance is indeed painful to me, and only the solemn promise I am under to conceal nothing restrains me from consigning many particulars to oblivion. I am once more about to incur the chance of drawing down ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon

... the present season indicates that home interest in the sport is on the increase. But the chief thriving-place of native American cricket is conceded to be Philadelphia, and it will be interesting, perhaps, to take a retrospect of the progress of the game ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... In a retrospect of my six years as a Member of the House of Representatives, I can see, and will freely admit, that my chief fault was my intense partisanship. This grew out of a conscientious feeling that the repeal of the Missouri ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... respectable, disrespect, inspection, speculate, special, especial, species, specify, specimen, spice, suspicion, conspicuous, despise, despite, spite; (2) specter, spectrum, spectroscope, prospector, prospectus, introspection, retrospect, circumspectly, conspectus, perspective, specie, specification, specious, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... whirl and confusion of events. Personally at the time, in traversing this battlefield, I was slightly horrified at first, but chiefly conscious only of the frightful odour of mortality. It is on thinking the thing over in retrospect and with cold blood that the real sense of horror begins to creep into one's soul. Such is the so-called "ennobling influence of war"! As I went over this grim battlefield, with all its tragic sights, I reflected bitterly on the triumph ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... must await years of growth. Confidence in each other had not yet replaced fear and suspicion. That the first attempt to come into a union could have been a success, that a sacrifice to the god Provincialism could have been avoided, seems in retrospect impossible. ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... blank about those last minutes. In less than an hour after my escape I struck the highway, but it was an hour which in the retrospect unrolls itself into unquiet years. I was dimly conscious of scrambling through a ditch and coming to a ghostly white road. The schimmel swung to the right, and the next I knew some one had taken my bridle and was speaking ...
— Prester John • John Buchan

... that lingered for a moment over our heads, might seem even to muse and hesitate, and then sullenly passed away into distant quarters. It is noticeable that a danger which approaches, but wheels away,—which threatens, but finally forbears to strike,—is more interesting by much on a distant retrospect than the danger which accomplishes its mission. The Alpine precipice, down which many pilgrims have fallen, is passed without much attention; but that precipice, within one inch of which a traveller has passed unconsciously ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... or a cruel woman ... she was very kind and loved her son with a long clutching love ... but her life with her husband had contained so many disturbances of comfortable courses, thrilling enough at the time, but terrifying when viewed in retrospect, that her nature, inclined to quiet, fixed ways and to acceptance, with slight resistance, of whatever came to her, made all the efforts that were possible to it to keep her life and her son's life in peace. She hated ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine

... this retrospect, I could not but ask myself with stirrings of the most genuine wonder, whether he could possess this intimate knowledge of all the great families of Europe! It was as if he had spent a part of his life in making special study of the history ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... of the Smells— London Smells! What a world of retrospect his tyranny compels! In the silence of the night How we muse on the old plight Of Kensington,—a Dismal Swamp, and lone! Still the old Swamp-Demon floats O'er the City, as our throats Have long known. And the people—ah, the people— Though as high as a church ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various

... unbuttoned his gloves, there passed through Trysdale's mind a swift, scarifying retrospect of the last few hours. It seemed that in his nostrils was still the scent of the flowers that had been banked in odorous masses about the church, and in his ears the lowpitched hum of a thousand well-bred voices, the rustle ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry

... a custom can be observed of peculiar significance and friendliness; everybody can help to prepare the feast, decorate the house with flowers, and save the bride from those tearful moments which come with any retrospect. All should try to make the scene a merry one, for there is no other reason for ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood

... could have had no application to the strange combinations of untoward circumstance that were now rising up with such deadly rapidity in every quarter of the horizon, like vast sombre banks of impenetrable cloud. Prudence in new cases, as has been somewhere said, can do nothing on grounds of retrospect. The work of the Constituent was doomed by the very nature of things. Their assumption that the Revolution was made, while all France was still torn by fierce and unappeasable disputes as to seignorial rights, was one of the most ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... smokestack and out the other, the glass in one window had been shattered to bits and in various other places damage had been wrought. But they had recovered the Follow Me, and that, viewing the affair in retrospect, had been something of an achievement. Everyone, even Tom by now, was more than satisfied at the outcome of their first real adventure. Dinner, delayed as it was and none too palatable by reason of having been prepared for a much earlier ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour

... If our relation to Jesus Christ were only that 'Once in the end of the ages He appeared to put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself'; and if we had to look back through lengthening vistas of distance and thickening folds of oblivion, simply to a historical past, in which He was once offered, the retrospect would not have the sweetness in it which it now has. But when we come to this thought that the Christ who was for us is also the Christ in us, and that He is not the Christ for us unless He is the Christ ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren

... for some seven or eight miles. Here and there the road passed through an open gate as into a farmyard, though there were no adjoining fences to mark these boundaries of some new hacienda or estate. From the highest point there was a pretty retrospect back on Atequisa and the railroad and the broad valley almost to far-off Guadalajara, and ahead, also still far away, Lake Chapala shimmering in the early sunset. Between lay broad, rolling land, rich with flowers and shrubbery, and with much cultivation also, one vast field ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... "Sometimes in retrospect of a great book the mind falters, confused by the multitude and yet the harmony of the detail, the strangeness of the frettings, the brooding, musing intelligence that has foreseen, loved, created, elaborated, perfected, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton

... since it was more difficult to imagine; he was opening the door to go, when he heard himself called back in these words (which, by cutting off from the party that possible ending which had so appalled him, made the party itself seem innocent in retrospect, made Odette's return home a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible, but tender and familiar, a thing that kept close to his side, like a part of his own daily life, in his carriage; a thing that ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... think of this in retrospect it seems that the blind musician stood in some peculiar and significant relation to the more ordinary life about him. But for him, I should probably have omitted to describe my night among the Turks. ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham

... my promise. 'Tis true the story you wished me to give you is more easily communicated by the pen than by the lips. I admit your claim to be acquainted with all the incidents of my life, be they momentous or trivial. I have often told you that the retrospect is very mournful; but that ought not to prevent me from making it, when so useful a purpose as that of thoroughly disclosing to you the character of one, on whom your future happiness is to depend, ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... said the preacher; "its sins and sorrows are irrevocably over; why dwell upon it now? Do not waste the present, with all its opportunities, in a hopeless and helpless retrospect. The worst of us need not despair, much less those who may have been betrayed into sudden error by some moment of unguarded passion. There lies the future before you; onwards then, and forwards! it is yet an innocent, it may be a happy, future. Take ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar

... struck!" said the Virginian, looking round upon the whole company. He allowed himself a broad smile of retrospect. "To hear 'em talk frawgs at Tulare! Same as other folks talks hawsses or steers or whatever they're raising to sell. Yu'd fall into it yourselves if yu' started the business. Anything a man's bread and ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister

... was a man again, physically and mentally sound, doing all reverence to the memory of his dead wife—a flawless angel in the retrospect—while finding natural solace in the company of living women who were also young and fair. The living women were much in evidence from the first; nothing but the sea could keep them from trying to ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge

... the rapid motions of a long sea voyage. The pleasure of travel, which only exists as a matter of fact in retrospect and seldom in the present, at the instant when it is being experienced, he could fully relish at his ease, without the necessity of fatigue or confusion, here in this cabin whose studied disorder, whose transitory appearance and whose seemingly temporary furnishings corresponded ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... was more unhappy in her solitude than, in her unbending nature, she would avow, observes her faithful friend and chronicler, the record of the last years of her existence too plainly demonstrates. Although she derived consolation in retirement from the retrospect of the part she had played in her prosperity, still there were moments of poignant grief when her very soul groaned within her. She was ambitious, and her ambition had been foiled; she loved irresponsible command, but the time had come ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... genius and energy, and lift our politics to a broader view of the people's essential interests. It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence as the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time, rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the ...
— President Wilson's Addresses • Woodrow Wilson

... called upon to give ear, "for the LORD hath spoken!" ... From the sole to the crown,] "there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores.... Your hands are full of blood[28]!" ... About all this hideous retrospect of what was going on at school, Dr. ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon

... complex; but, whether the sympathies of the reader be for or against the standpoint of the Irish Loyalists, the actual events which make up what may be called the Ulster Movement would be wholly unintelligible without some introductory retrospect. Indeed, to those who set out to judge Irish political conditions without troubling themselves about anything more ancient than their own memory can recall, the most fundamental factor of all—the ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill

... use. This Germanic horde, which I saw pouring down across Belgium, bound for France, does not in retrospect seem to me a man-made, man-managed thing. It seems more like a great, orderly function of Nature; as ordained and cosmic as the tides of the sea or the sweep of a mighty wind. It is hard to believe that it was ever ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb

... compositions, in which there is an ironical mixture of the quaint and serious, such as his lines on a picture of Gaspar Poussin, the fine tale of Gualberto, his Description of a Pig, and the Holly-tree, which is an affecting, beautiful, and modest retrospect on his own character. May the aspiration with which it concludes be fulfilled! [11]—But the little he has done of true and sterling excellence, is overloaded by the quantity of indifferent matter which he turns out ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... discover the vast changes that are likely to come as a direct consequence of the present Armageddon, it is necessary to refer in brief retrospect to some of the main causes and features of the great European war. Meanwhile, I think the general feeling amongst all thoughtful men is best expressed in the phrase, "Never again." Never again must we have to face the possibility of such a world-wide catastrophe. Never again must it be possible ...
— Armageddon—And After • W. L. Courtney

... reminiscence of Mendelssohn. "Anyone can find that out," was the rough-and-ready reply of Brahms. But if Mendelssohn be the prevailing influence in the Scherzo, Schubert has his turn in the Trio. The fourth movement is an Intermezzo, entitled "Rueckblick" (Retrospect). The opening phrase, and indeed the whole of the short movement, carries us back to the picture of the lovers. Some change has taken place: have the lovers grown cold? or has death divided them? The themes ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock

... ventures to suggest either boots or sandals as an improvement. Had Goethe felt himself at liberty from all restraints of private consideration in composing these Memoirs, can it be doubted that he would have taken his retrospect of this Frankfort inauguration from a different station; from the station of that stern revolution which, within his own time, and partly under his own eyes, had shattered the whole imperial system of thrones, in whose equipage this gay pageant made ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey

... it may not be considered out of place if, in this retrospect, which is intended, first of all, for my children and grandchildren, I state that a personal fact, which was known to many from other sources, was confirmed to me in one of these conversations: General Grant informing me, ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White

... glorious than ever before." There had been improvement in the candles; the audience was more civilised; the orchestra had been increased; the rushes had been swept from the stage; everything that had been mean was now "all otherwise." The manager possibly had in his mind during this retrospect the condition of the Vere Street Theatre while under his management. The audience possessed an unruly element. 'Prentices and servants filled the gallery; there were citizens and tradesmen in the pit, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook

... sufficient if we can withdraw at will into the solitudes. The younger Pliny, moralising to his friend Minutius (I should like to think him the progenitor of Aldo Manuccio), describes the delights of seclusion at his villa on the shore of the Adriatic. 'At such a season,' says he, in a retrospect of the day's work, 'one is apt to reflect how much of my life has been lost in trifles! At least it is a reflection that frequently comes across me at Laurentum, after I have been employing myself in my studies, ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan

... himself free from his cheerless retrospect. There was a thing or two he wanted to get from his desk, and his time was growing very short. He found what he wanted, and then, just as he was about to close the drawer, his eye fell on ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell

... that heaven is to be one vast lazy retrospect? Why is not eternity to have action and change, yet both like God, compatible with rest and immutability? This earth is but one minor planet of a minor system. Are there no more worlds? Will there not be incident ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley

... of the old man's family who would mourn his loss. The "case," now so nearly finished, appeared, as she reviewed it, quite an ordinary one, all the tiny things that had struck her as odd or arresting seemed trivial in retrospect, unworthy of the attention she had bestowed on them. No doubt everything had grown out of the rather peculiar personality of Sartorius from whom she would soon be dissociated—without regret. She would certainly not continue to work for him, ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... to listen to any speech from Polykarp's mother, but her question suggested to him for the first time a rapid retrospect of all that had occurred, and he could not conceal from himself that his suspicions rested on weak grounds. And at the same time he now said to himself, that if indeed Sirona had fled into the desert instead of to the senator's ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... to other aspirations the retrospect is more cheerful. Slavery has been entirely abolished, and, with all due respect to Mr. George Curzon, is not going to be re-established under the British flag. The punishment of death, rendered infinitely more impressive, and therefore more deterrent, by its withdrawal ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... her fancy followed Frida in delightful retrospect. Durant said nothing, he sat waiting for her to ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... desirable—or, rather, she shrank from the alternative. When she visualized the North it uprose always in its most threatening presentment, indescribably lonely, the playground of ruthless, elemental forces, terrifying in its vast emptinesses. It appalled her in retrospect, loomed unutterably desolate in ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... or two, on her fide. But without waiting to hear all, he turns abruptly upon Harry Blew, who is seen some paces off. Neither by word, nor gesture, has the sailor yet saluted him. He stands passive, a silent spectator; as Crozier supposes, the greatest criminal on earth. In quick retrospect of what has occurred, and what he has heard from Don Gregorio, how could it ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid

... and I would have purchased a franc's worth of iodine for almost anybody on earth. Not then. On the contrary, I grew positively low-spirited when, after three more days, the lamentations began to diminish in volume. They were sweet music to my ears, at the time. They are sweeter by far, in retrospect. If only one could extract the same amount of innocent and durable pleasure out of ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... it may not be inopportune to make a break in the record of Cardan's life and work, and to treat in retrospect of that portion of his time which he spent in the composition of his treatises on Arithmetic and Algebra. Ever since 1535 he had been working intermittently at one or other of these, but it would have been impossible to deal coherently ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... severest) cross Thou canst lay upon us we shall regard as only the apparent severity of unutterable and unalterable love. Eternity will unfold how all, all was needed; that nothing else, nothing less, could have done! If not now, at least then, the deliberate verdict on a calm retrospect of ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... not but be a true record of the broad impressions made on the mind of Scott by the marvellous revolutions of his own time in their progress. Feeling how justly in the main that work has preserved those impressions, though gracefully softened and sobered in the retrospect of peaceful and more advanced years, I the less regret that I have it not in my power to quote any letters of his touching the reappearance of Napoleon on the soil of France—the immortal march from Cannes—the ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... unconscious that he called her by the familiar name. He was wishing he could have shielded her from all this. Painful as the retrospect might be to her, the recital was far ...
— Verner's Pride • Mrs. Henry Wood

... women," broke out the junior Hahn chuckling to himself, as if absorbed in some particularly delightful retrospect. "There is the girl, now, who is to sing as Germania to-night,—and, between you and me, I don't mind telling you that she is rather smitten with me. She is as fine a specimen of a woman as ever trod in two shoes; splendid arms, a neck ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... of the Mountain, therefore, it is necessary for us to travel back in retrospect to ancient Roman days. In the first place, however, one word as to its present name that we use to-day, for all are familiar with Vesuvius, but comparatively few, until they visit Naples, have heard mention made of Monte Somma. The name of Vesuvius, then, though strictly ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... my belief that after the passing of this depression, when we can examine it in retrospect, we shall need to consider a number of other questions as to what action may be taken by the Government to remove Possible governmental influences which make for instability and to better organize mitigation of the effect of depression. It is as yet ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... of life which are formulated into certain products of art, literature, and criticism." Dealing with only one form of the social phenomenon, with sensualism so far as it appeared to affect contemporary poetry, the writer proceeded with a literary retrospect intended to show that the fair dawn of our English poetry in Chaucer and the Elizabethan dramatists had been overclouded by a portentous darkness, a darkness "vaporous," "miasmic," coming from a "fever-cloud generated ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... there in the desert of wheat had she felt sympathy for him. And now with intelligence and a woman's intuition, barring the old, insidious, dreamy mood, Lenore went over in retrospect all she could remember of that meeting. And the truth made her sharply catch her breath. Dorn had fallen in love with her. Intuition declared that, while her intelligence repudiated it. Stranger than ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... stern, unceasing years of labor on the farm. His tireless energy and his indomitable spirit came back, filling my mind with pictures of his swift and graceful use of axe and scythe, and when I spoke of the early days, he found it difficult to reply—they were so beautiful in retrospect. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... that he had meant neither a rudeness nor a wish to desecrate her reticence, but only an indirect assurance of gratitude to her for suffering him and willingness to serve her within the compass of his poverty-stricken powers. For in retrospect his invitation assumed the proportions of an importunity, an egregious piece of presumption: so that he could have groaned ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... a peaceful and grateful retrospect; the brothers all doing so well in their several ways, and such a comfort to their father. Tom, concerning whom she had made the greatest mistake, might be looked upon as rescued by Norman. Aubrey, Margaret said, smiling, was Ethel's ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge

... thus completed a painful retrospect of the appalling amount of crime committed by the colored population in the District at large, compared with the general mass of the white population, I now consider it my duty to advert more particularly to ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... discovery of different classes of animals in ancient rocks, to enable him to perceive at a glance how gradual has been our progress in tracing back the signs of vertebrata to formations of high antiquity. Such facts may be useful in warning us not to assume too hastily that the point which our retrospect may have reached at the present moment can be regarded as fixing the date of the first introduction of any one class of beings upon ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... read the book of fate, and have seen the forty years' fearful afflictions that were to follow, I certainly should not have rejoiced at this my escape from Glatz. One year's patience might have appeased the irritated monarch, and, taking a retrospect of all that has passed, I now find it would have been a fortunate circumstance, had the good and faithful Schell and I never met, since he also fell into a train of misfortunes, which I shall hereafter ...
— The Life and Adventures of Baron Trenck - Vol. 1 (of 2) • Baron Trenck

... head. He leaned back, half closed his eyes, put his finger-tips together, and almost smiled as if something in retrospect pleased ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic

... interest of the reigning Valois, not the Huguenots only but the rival houses of Guise and Bourbon. The word, the act, from hour to hour through what presented itself at the time as a long-continued season of frivolity, suggested in retrospect alike to friend and foe the close connexion of a mathematical problem. And yet that damning coincidence of date, day and hour apparently so exactly timed, in the famous letter to the Governor of Lyons, by which Charles, the trap being now ready, seems to shut all the doors upon escaping ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater

... more leisurely survey of things. The hoper's eyes are glued to the distant peak. The attainer of that peak may recover his breath and enjoy a complete panorama of his present achievement and may amuse himself moreover by re-climbing the mountain in retrospect. He has also yonder farther and loftier peak in his eye, which he may now look forward to attacking the week after next; for this little preliminary jaunt is giving him his mountain legs. Hence, while the hoper enjoys only the future, the achiever, if his joy-digesting ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler

... table before you the works of a Hammond and a Baxter, and reflect how many and how momentous their points of agreement, how few and almost childish the differences, which estranged and irritated these good men. Let us but imagine what their blessed spirits now feel at the retrospect of their earthly frailties, and can we do other than strive to feel as they now feel, not as they once felt? So will it be with the disputes between good men of the present day; and if you have no other reason ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... they, two weeks later, at the retrospect of many an unsuccessful chase from which they had returned—when, after twelve days spent in "jaging" the elephant, they had added only a single pair of tusks to the collection, and these the tusks of a cow-elephant, scarce two feet in length, and ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid

... judgment. It is said that, immediately upon the retirement of Mr. Fox, while Lord John Cavendish (whose resignation was for a short time delayed by the despatch of some official business) was still a minister, Mr. Burke, with a retrospect to the sweets of office which showed that he had not wholly left hope behind, endeavored to open a negotiation through the medium of Lord John, for the purpose of procuring, by some arrangement, either for himself or his son, ...
— Memoirs of the Life of the Rt. Hon. Richard Brinsley Sheridan V1 • Thomas Moore

... This retrospect seems necessary before giving a summary of the various efforts to negotiate a peace. About the first open suggestion to that end came from General Robert E. Lee in a letter to President Davis written at Fredericktown, ...
— Slavery and Four Years of War, Vol. 1-2 • Joseph Warren Keifer

... the downtown district was almost deserted, took the crushed letter from his pocket. For a moment he made no attempt to read it, his dark eyes, now that he was free from observation, full of troubled retrospect, fixed on the window at his side. It was not a pleasant thought that it had cost a man his life, nor yet that that life was also the price of his own freedom. True, if there were two men in the city of New York whose crimes merited neither sympathy ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... beloved. Something that Miriam had said, in their final conversation, recurred to her memory, and seemed now to deserve more weight than Hilda had assigned to it, in her horror at the crime just perpetrated. It was not that the deed looked less wicked and terrible in the retrospect; but she asked herself whether there were not other questions to be considered, aside from that single one of Miriam's guilt or innocence; as, for example, whether a close bond of friendship, in ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... quality of the talk was far more manifest in the retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak yielding of ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells

... to give a value to my recent labours, and my name may be remembered by after generations in Australia, as the first who tried to penetrate to its centre. If I failed in that great object, I have one consolation in the retrospect of my past services. My path amongst savage tribes has been a bloodless one, not but that I have often been placed in situations of risk and danger, when I might have been justified in shedding blood, but I trust I have ever made allowances for ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... a wise man who knows when he is happy and can appreciate the divine bliss of the tangible now. Most of us retrospect or anticipate ...
— The Damsel and the Sage - A Woman's Whimsies • Elinor Glyn

... me, overwhelmed and defeated me. I bent my head; I felt a shame, a degradation as though I should have crept into some shadow and hidden.... I would not mention this were it not that afterwards, in retrospect, the moment seemed to me an omen. After all, life is not always to ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... perhaps, a good deal to you; even its sorrows, in the retrospect, were good in their way; they meant something. And you look forward to happier things in the future; it will be a long and on the whole a successful future perhaps. Think of the variety and the opportunity which this great, multiform, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne

... breathed. The words above quoted are an example, and 'Chester,' it is said, was frequently heard from every fife in the New England ranks. The spirit of the Revolution was also manifest in his 'Lamentation over Boston,' his 'Retrospect,' his 'Independence,' his 'Columbia,' and ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... not been realized. Our hope of settling a township, to be represented in Parliament by one of our own people, was now forever blasted. I remembered too, that many of the colonists had been unjustly incited against my course; but in the retrospect my heart did not condemn me. Errors many, no doubt I had committed; but I was grateful, when reviewing the whole ground, for a conscience void of offence toward God and man; and I finally took my leave of all, craving the choicest blessings of Heaven to rest upon ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward

... with the recruits in a short time. Those Indios, only caught the other day, had gone swinging past in double quick time, like bersaglieri; they looked well fed, too, and had whole uniforms. "Uniforms!" he repeated with a half-smile of pity. A look of grim retrospect stole over his piercing, steady eyes. It had been otherwise in his time when men fought against tyranny, in the forests of Brazil, or on the plains of Uruguay, starving on half-raw beef without salt, half naked, with often only a knife tied to a stick for a ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... hardly an appreciable interval between the time of the desertion of her artists and the thunder of assault at her door, but in that space there passed before Amaryllis that useless retrospect which is death's recapitulation of the life it means to take. And out of that long procession, she singled one conviction which made the step of the Roman on her threshold welcome. It was an old, old moral, so old that it had never had weight with her, who believed ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... apart, and practically an extinct species: we need not pause to study its methods. In his fictitious plays, with two notable exceptions, it was Shakespeare's constant practice to bring the whole action within the frame of the picture, opening at such a point that no retrospect should be necessary, beyond what could be conveyed in a few casual words. The exceptions are The Tempest and Hamlet, to which we ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... active service one happens upon experiences that, though they make no immediate impression, become more prominent than the most dramatic events, when the period is past and can be viewed in retrospect. Sub-consciousness, wiser than the surface brain, penetrates to the inner sanctuary of true values, photographs something typical of war's many aspects, places the negative in the dark room of memory, and fades into inertia until again called upon to act as arbiter ...
— Cavalry of the Clouds • Alan Bott

... to her would have been the time following the dawn of her own drama. A man in her place would have "looked up" the past—would even have consulted old newspapers. It remained remarkable indeed that in her long contact with the partner of her retrospect no accident had lighted a train; but there was no arguing about that; the accident had in fact come: it had simply been that security had prevailed. She had taken what Hague had given her, and her blankness in ...
— The Altar of the Dead • Henry James

... minds To vaster issues. So to live is heaven: To make undying music in the world, Breathing a beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man. So we inherit that sweet purity For which we struggled, failed, and agonized With widening retrospect that bred despair. Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued, A vicious parent shaming still its child, Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved; Its discords quenched by meeting harmonies, Die in the large and charitable air. And all our rarer, better, truer self, That sobbed religiously ...
— The World's Best Poetry Volume IV. • Bliss Carman

... the story, until Fenton and I had made sure if there were anything golden about the mountain, except its name. If we were doomed to disappointment I could then give the tale a humorous turn, easier to do in retrospect than anticipation. Now, when in blinding light of noon we pointed out, in an impersonal manner, to all who cared to see, the pyramid-field of Meroee, it seemed strange to think that no heart but Anthony's and mine beat the faster. The sun was so hot that most people, blinking dazedly, retired behind ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson

... in mystical retrospect, beginning in vein of prologue: over mysterious murmuring strings, long sustained notes of the reed and horn in octave descent are mingled with a soft carillon of horns and trumpets in the call of the Scherzo. In broad swing ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... consequence of what Godwin expressly denounces, punishment for murder. "I conceived it to be in the highest degree absurd and iniquitous, to cut off a man qualified for the most essential and extensive utility, merely out of retrospect to an act which, whatever were its merits, could not be retrieved." Then a new element is imported into the train of causation, Caleb's insatiable curiosity, and the strife begins between these well-matched antagonists, the man of wealth and station utilizing ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... Corot, or an Aubert dips the pencil in the glowing sky, and transfers its hues to the canvas; so that, in after time, our souls are gladdened by some retrospect, which makes life dearer ...
— By Water to the Columbian Exposition • Johanna S. Wisthaler

... meeting of the Conference. Remarks of the leading representative of a Catholic power, on the correspondence between the Vatican and the Netherlands Government which had been presented to the Conference. Retrospect of the ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White

... a general retrospect, finally, of the effects produced by stimulus of light, we find that there is not a single phenomenon in the responses, normal or abnormal, exhibited by the retina which has not its counterpart in the sensitive cell constructed of ...
— Response in the Living and Non-Living • Jagadis Chunder Bose

... Howell, and in 1668 the death of Davenant opened the situation of poet-laureate. These two offices, with a salary of L200 paid quarterly, and the celebrated annual butt of canary, were conferred upon Dryden 18th August 1670.[29] The grant bore a retrospect to the term after Davenant's demise, and is declared to be to "John Dryden, master of arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his great skill ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott

... an interesting task to compose a catalogue raisonne of Antinous statues and basreliefs, and to discuss the question of their mythological references. This is, however, not the place for such an inquiry. And yet I cannot quit Antinous without some retrospect upon the most important of his portraits. Among the simple busts, by far the finest, to my thinking, are the colossal head of the Louvre, and the ivy-crowned bronze at Naples. The latter is not only flawless in its execution, but is animated with a pensive beauty of expression. The ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... of sulphurous lake, No need of fiery coal, But only that crowd of human kind Who wanted pity and dole— In everlasting retrospect— Will ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... our great experiment is in itself a sufficient cause for gratitude, on account of the happiness it has actually conferred and the example it has unanswerably given But to me, my fellow-citizens, looking forward to the far-distant future with ardent prayers and confiding hopes, this retrospect presents a ground for still deeper delight. It impresses on my mind a firm belief that the perpetuity of our institutions depends upon ourselves; that if we maintain the principles on which they were established they are destined to confer their benefits ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... must still go on in laying these enormities before men's eyes, and let them answer for going on in their practice.[5] My province is much larger than at first sight men would imagine, and I shall lose no part of my jurisdiction, which extends not only to futurity, but also is retrospect to things past; and the behaviour of persons who have long ago acted their parts, is as much liable to my examination, as that of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... or home of a slave. They had not his habitual patience; and he saw that they were little likely to attain it; but they daily manifested qualities and powers—enterprise, forecast, and aspiration of various kinds, adorning their youth with a promise which made their father sigh at the retrospect of his own. He was amused, at the same time, to see in them symptoms of a boyish vanity, to which he had either not been prone, or which he had early extinguished. He detected in each the secret eagerness with which they looked forward to displaying their military ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau

... in the horrible throes of seasickness, had performed a radical operation for acute mastoiditis. There had been no facilities. The whole thing had been in the last degree makeshift. The half-trained stewardess had held his instruments ready for him, and the sea-sickness, comic in retrospect, had weighed heavily against Mr. Fletcher's chance of seeing land again. Nevertheless, the eminent New York surgeon, consulted at the first opportunity, had pronounced the operation a neat ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie

... character; one, finally, whose writings and whose life have happily concurred in winning for him general respect, esteem, and confidence. Then, in a sort of autobiography which Zschokke published a few years back, (Selbstschau, it is entitled—Self-retrospect,) there occurs the following passage, which I translate and give at length, from its marvellous interest, from its unquestioned fidelity, from the complete and irresistible evidence it affords that the phenomenon, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various

... But it is only now, in the retrospect of years, that I have any sense of triumph; for I had won the supremacy with small effort, comparatively,—with the small effort required of him who sees the conditions of a situation clearly, and, instead of trying to combat or to change ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... heat—these must I have or perish, and, but for the timely refuge of this thrice-blessed apothecary's shop, I might have left this retrospect unwritten! ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... conceived in the spirit of sincerity. Such is my design. It is given to the public with a perfect freedom from all party influence; with a total avoidance of all personality; with that calmness of retrospect which best becomes one who has no desire to share in the passions of the world; and with that wish of the French almanack-maker, which lies at the bottom of many a bulkier enterprise ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various

... considerations, Mr. Gladstone is far from assuming that they are conclusive upon the whole case; in dealing with which the government has hardly ever at any of its stages been furnished sufficiently with those means of judgment which rational men usually require. It may be that, on a retrospect, many errors will appear to have been committed. There are many reproaches, from the most opposite quarters, to which it might be difficult to supply a conclusive answer. Among them, and perhaps amongst the most difficult, as far as Mr. Gladstone ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle

... goodwill, and to the impressive effect of his preaching and teaching upon the people of the city.[12] Vadian, the Humanist and reformer of St. Gall, too, in spite of his disapproval of some of Denck's ideas, speaking of him in retrospect after his death, called him "a most gifted youth, possessed of all excellencies." But his teaching was too strange and unusual to be allowed currency even in free Strasbourg. After being granted a public discussion he was ordered to leave the city forthwith. During a short stay in Worms, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... that if hereafter the spirit of her husband could know anything of the troubles of his mortal life, could ever look back to the things which he had done in the flesh, then would he certainly know the truth, and all suspicion would be at an end. And if not, if there was to be no such retrospect, what did it matter now, for these few last hours before the coil should be shaken off, and all doubt and all sorrow should be at an end? But the wife, who was soon to be a widow, yearned to be acquitted in this world by him to whom her guilt ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... composed a poem, of fifteen hundred lines, entitled "Mahomet, or the Hegira," and performed the extraordinary mental effort of retaining the whole on his memory, at the period being unable to write. "The Retrospect," a poem of more matured power, was announced in 1824. At the recommendation of friends, having proceeded to Edinburgh to seek the counsel of men of letters, he submitted the MS. of his poem to Professor Wilson, Dr M'Crie, Mr ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... A calm retrospect of the reform movement, culminating in the acts of 1832, compels us to see how little the course of politics is guided by reason, and how much by circumstances. Every argument employed in that and the preceding year possessed equal force at the end of ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... the cares and pleasures of the world has been often recommended as useful to repentance. This at least is evident, that every one retires, whenever ratiocination and recollection are required on other occasions; and surely the retrospect of life, the disentanglement of actions complicated with innumerable circumstances, and diffused in various relations, the discovery of the primary movements of the heart, and the extirpation of lusts and appetites deeply rooted and widely spread, may ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson

... late reverend and venerable DR. MILLER of New Jersey, then an active minister of the Presbyterian church in this city, published here, in two large octavo volumes, the First Part of A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, containing a Sketch of the Revolutions and Improvements in Science, Arts and Literature, during that Period. Six other volumes were contemplated, to cover grounds since occupied by the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... wigwam, obliterating, in its ruthless, intrusive, advent, that lingering relic of the picturesque aspect of Indian life—a relic that, with its emblems and inner garniture of war, bids a scion of the race indulge a prideful retrospect of his sometime grandeur, and pristine might; that has power to invoke stirring recollections of a momentous and a thrilling past; to re-animate and summon before him the shadowy figures of his redoubtable sires, and re-enact their lofty deeds: ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie

... reconstruct his conception of the narrative, and may even re-read the entire passage through which the secret has been withheld from him. But in the theatre, the spectators cannot stop the play while they reconstruct in retrospect their judgment of a situation; and therefore, in the drama, a moment of surprise should be carefully led up to by anticipatory suggestion. Before Lady Macbeth is disclosed walking in her sleep, her doctor and her waiting-gentlewoman are sent on to tell the audience of her "slumbery agitation." ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton

... could have been given him the night of Mrs. Plume's unconscious escapade? The major well remembered that his demijohn had grown suddenly light, and that he had found himself surprisingly heavy, dull, and drowsy. The retrospect added to his gloom and depression. Byrne had not reoccupied his old room at Plume's, now that madame and Elise were once more under the major's roof, and even in extending the customary invitation, Plume felt confident that Byrne could not and should not ...
— An Apache Princess - A Tale of the Indian Frontier • Charles King

... hindrance is want of rest; my nocturnal complaints grow less troublesome towards morning; and I am tempted to repair the deficiencies of the night[423].' Alas! how hard would it be if this indulgence were to be imputed to a sick man as a crime. In his retrospect on the following Easter-Eve, he says, 'When I review the last year, I am able to recollect so little done, that shame and sorrow, though perhaps too weakly, come upon me.' Had he been judging of any one ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... looked into sweet eyes and talked of Italian airs, when his future appeared all a succession of bright scenery and joyous acts, without any provision for a drop-curtain. And as my ear listened, and my mind wandered in this happy retrospect, my every faculty seemed exalted, and, without any thought upon the matter, I ground points upon my pins so fine, so regular and smooth, that they would have pierced with ease the leather of a boot, or slipped among, without abrasion, the finest ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems to him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood. And so men grow by having responsibility laid upon them, the burden of other people's business. Their powers are put out at interest, and they ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various

... the self-renunciation of affection, there comes a spontaneous adjustment of various wills; and not an innocent pleasure is lost, not a pure taste offended, nor a peculiar temper unconsidered; and every day has its silent achievements of wisdom, and every night its retrospect of piety and love; and the tranquil thoughts, that in the evening meditation come down with the starlight, seem like the serenade of angels, bringing in melody the peace of God! Wherever this picture is realized, it is not by microscopic solicitude of spirit, but by ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur

... we enter into the particulars of this adventure, let us take a retrospect of the amours of his Royal Highness, prior to the declaration of his marriage, and particularly of what immediately preceded this declaration. It is allowable sometimes to drop the thread of a narrative, when real facts, not generally known, give such ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... the storekeeper, it does not take very long before he accumulates a burden greater than he can carry. When he begins to totter he tries to pass some of the load over to others, and it is usually the storekeepers who are willing to assist him to the limit if his assets are in good retrospect. And what could be a greater security than a whole mountain full of gold? So the storekeepers assumed a large portion of the Too Sure Man's burden. And their loads became heavier and heavier. One day a company came along, attracted by the noise that had been made, and bonded the ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... On the other hand, many things happen to us in the way of pleasure and pain which we do not connect with any prior activity of our own. They are mere accidents so far as we are concerned. There is no before or after to such experience; no retrospect nor outlook, and consequently no meaning. We get nothing which may be carried over to foresee what is likely to happen next, and no gain in ability to adjust ourselves to what is coming—no added control. Only by courtesy can such an experience ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... four in the afternoon. It seemed to me that nowhere in all the world was life so joyous and blithe and worth while as in "old New York"; nowhere were the theatres so attractive, nowhere such restaurants. Even, in retrospect, the subway looked alluring, and as for the Fifth Avenue stages they were too beautiful for words. Ah, what a builder of unreal things a spell of homesickness may become if one gives ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon

... a minute. Lady Kilmarny had said it would not be many weeks before the Turnours went to England. There, if Miss Paget (who seemed extremely nice by contrast and in retrospect) were still of the same mind, I might find a good home. If not, she was as kind as she was queer, and would help me look further. So I replied that I would accept the fifty francs, and would do my ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson

... This dame, who seemed more merry than refined, hailed me, seized me, and tried to seat me in her lap; a jolly and coarse old girl from whom, in my hour of sentiment, I fled with craven shrinking: to whom, upon a retrospect, I do more justice. The two lepers (both women) sat in the midst of their visitors, even the children (to my grief) touching them freely; the elder chatting at intervals—the girl in the same black weed and bowed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... falls," said Mrs. Wilfer, "shall I say into a reverie, or shall I say into a retrospect? on a day ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various









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