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Foreboding   Listen
noun
Foreboding  n.  Presage of coming ill; expectation of misfortune.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Foreboding" Quotes from Famous Books



... look across the ages and the beacon-moments see, That, like peaks of some sunk continent, jut through Oblivion's sea; Not an ear in court or market for the low foreboding cry Of those Crises, God's stern winnowers, from whose feet earth's chaff must fly; Never shows the choice momentous till the ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various

... mutely. She did not want to talk about Arthur Chicksands. There was in her a queer foreboding sense about him. She did not in the least expect him to fall in love with her; yet there was a dim, intermittent fear in her lest he might become too important to her, together with a sharp shrinking from the news, which of course might come any day, that he was ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... weeping in her private tent, and I saw that for the first time in my acquaintance with him he was downcast. He was one of the bravest of men, yet now a foreboding of evil oppressed him. The result justified it, for he was captured during the raid, and never fully rallied after the war from the physical depression caused by his captivity. He told me that on the morrow General Kilpatrick would lead four thousand ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe

... He gazes north and south, and east and west, and is inclined to look intemperately upon the waters of the Mediterranean when they are blue. The disappearance of the Russian phantom has given a foreboding of unwonted freedom to the Welt- politik. According to the national tendency this assumption of Imperial impulses would run into the grotesque were it not for the spikes of the pickelhaubes peeping out grimly from behind. Germany's attitude proves that no peace for the earth can ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... careened the schooner to her bearings, and before she had recovered herself the true breeze was upon us, with a deep, weird, moaning sound that was inexpressibly dismal, and that somehow seemed to impart a feeling of dire foreboding to the listener. Not that there was anything in the least terrifying in the strength of the wind—far from it, indeed,—for it was no heavier than a double-reefed topsail breeze, to which the schooner ...
— The Log of a Privateersman • Harry Collingwood

... from view. There is a foreboding silence as I near the heavy entrance-way at the top. But before I can pound for admittance, the great door swings deferentially open, a guard within salutes still more deferentially, I advance, friend, and proffer the countersign,—and the Monte ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... foreboding, David,—of evil, of something dreadful. Perhaps it is due to the unexpected ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... thousands of shafts at him, but none of these succeeded in piercing him, for he was none else than the Destroyer of all creatures. Day by day strong winds blew, and many were the evil omens that arose, awful and foreboding the destruction of the Vrishnis and the Andhakas. The streets swarmed with rats and mice. Earthen pots showed cracks or broke from no apparent cause. At night, the rats and mice ate away the hair and nails of slumbering men. Sarikas chirped, sitting within the houses of the Vrishnis. The noise made ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... of still, cloudless days, but experience had taught her to suspect them. As was the custom in that locality, the water supply depended on a rickety windwheel. It was with a dark foreboding that she returned to the kitchen and turned on one of the taps. For perhaps three seconds a stream of the dimension of a darning-needle emerged, then with a sad gurgle the tap relapsed into a stolid inaction. There is no stolidity so utter as that ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse

... then, in spite of his all-absorbing work, there came to his sensitive consciousness a feeling of foreboding and dread that he could not explain, save by some subtle law of suggestion, as he recalled half in mirth and half in seriousness the dark prophecies of the astrologist at the suffrage ball. He had suspected his brother Frank, and when he learned that the seeress was Miss Renner, that suspicion ...
— An American Suffragette • Isaac N. Stevens

... was perhaps illogical, but it was unpleasant. It was the more awkward from the fact that he fancied that not only Rupert's beautiful eyes, but even the infant Johnny's round ones, were fixed upon him with an embarrassed expression of hesitating and foreboding sympathy. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte

... her large, wide-open eyes—her face was strange to him. And the glance of those terrible eyes, motionlessly fixed somewhere in the distance through the wall—that, too, was unfamiliar to Ignat. His heart, compressed by a painful foreboding, slackened its joyous throbbing. ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky

... troth to the other, and gave and received burning kisses. During the sweet, fast-fleeting hours on the calm plain, in her lover's arms, with no witness but the yellow moon, she took no heed of the barriers that lay between a union with her beloved; nor had he any foreboding of obstacles, but heard and declared vows ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins

... for eternal rest, like the final chorus of the "Matthew" Passion, or given us something equal or almost equal to the austere grandeur of the Dead March in Saul. But he saw death differently, and in the opening bar of the "Requiem aeternam" we have only sullen gloom and foreboding, deadly fear begotten of actual foreknowledge of things to come. The discord at the fifth bar seems to have given him the relief gained by cutting oneself when in severe pain; and how intense Mozart's pain was may be estimated by the vigour ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... will be unable to repent. Is it not assuredly a dreadful, a disgraceful thing to have one's head cut off and set up in the Forum, if it so happen, for any one, man or woman, to insult? Do not hate me as one foreboding evil to you: I but give you warning; be on your guard. Do not let the fact that you have certain friends among the influential men deceive you. You will get no help against those hostilely disposed from the men ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio

... pitiful sight, Joab, and one that fills me with foreboding, as well as with pity. What agonies may not these poor people be doomed to suffer, when the Romans lay ...
— For the Temple - A Tale of the Fall of Jerusalem • G. A. Henty

... herself. When he looked up she answered him with a smile which she felt to be mysterious, and he perceived its mystery, for he compared it to the hesitating smile of the Monna Lisa, a print of which hung on the wall. But the remark increased her foreboding and premonition. And she was sorry for her father, who was saying that he hoped to send her abroad in the spring; that he would have done so before, but she was studying harmony with him. And she ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... forestalling." It has often been said that Macbeth approaches the nearest of all Shakespeare's tragedies to the antique model: and in nothing is the resemblance clearer than in the employment of the Witches to point their skinny fingers into the fated future. In Romeo and Juliet, inward foreboding takes the place of outward prophecy. I have quoted above Romeo's prevision of "Some consequence yet hanging in the stars"; and beside it ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer

... had had a dim foreboding that Mr. Maynard's kindness might take a shape which it would be hard to submit to. Great as her gratitude was, her family pride resented dictation, and resented also the implied slight to poor Nat. As I look back now, I can see that, except for this reaction ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson

... have carried on the action of the proverbe, while they were gone. They have spoken of that vague young love which never finds peace but unceasingly flits through all the lands of foreboding and through all the heavens of hope; this love that is dying to satisfy itself in the powerful, fervent glow of a single great emotion! Of this they spoke; the younger one in bitter complaint, the elder one with regretful tenderness. Now the latter said—the yellow one to the blue—that he should ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen

... lay with her hands folded over the small packet, wondering what it contained, regretting that the conditions of the gift prohibited her opening it for so many long years, and striving to divest herself of a haunting foreboding that she had looked for the last time on the bright benignant countenance of the donor, who was indissolubly linked with the happiest memories of her ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... the common prejudices of its age as oriflammes to follow on Life's battlefield. Hopkins the witch-finder's common sense suggested pricking all over to find an insensible flesh-patch, in which case the prickee was a witch. We prefer to keep an open mind about Lady Gwendolen Rivers' foreboding anent that little bottle of Indian poison, until vivisection has shown us, more plainly than at present, how brain secretes Man's soul. We are aware ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan

... misery and disappointment, for on the day of his return his hall and his broad acres are to become the property of a villain, the unfaithful steward of his own family. Here is a situation full of gloom and sad foreboding. But Scribe and Boieldieu knew better. Their hero is a dashing cavalry officer, who makes love to every pretty woman he comes across, the 'White Lady of Avenel' among the number. Yet no one who has witnessed the impersonation ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... was able to get my feet into them at all. Then, with a few shillings, a knife, a handkerchief, and some brown papers and flake tobacco stowed away in my pockets, I thumped down the stairs and said good-bye to my foreboding friends. As I paused out of the door, the "help," a comely middle-aged woman, could not conquer a grin that twisted her lips and separated them till the throat, out of involuntary sympathy, made the uncouth animal noises we are wont to ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... down the stairs like a man possessed. Heavy with such a foreboding of calamity as I had not known for two years, I followed him—along the hall and out into the road. The very peace and beauty of the night in some way increased my mental agitation. The sky was lighted almost tropically with such a blaze ...
— The Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer

... ancient,—and though his own soul was steadfastly set upon the faith he followed, he was compassionately aware of a strange and growing confusion in the world,—a combination of the elements of evil, which threatened, or seemed to threaten, some terrible and imminent disaster. This sorrowful foreboding had for a long time preyed upon him, physically as well as mentally; always thin, he had grown thinner and more careworn, till at the beginning of the year his health had threatened to break down altogether. Whereupon those who loved him, growing alarmed, summoned a physician, who, (with ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli

... husband was wounded and a prisoner. She knew he had suffered amputation of an arm, but could learn nothing more. Rumors were fearful enough to distress the young wife, whose trembling heart was filled with foreboding. Every few days reports that seemed true startled her,—he was dead. Alas! it might be true, for how could he live in the midst of enemies to whom his high spirit would not bend, wounded, suffering, deprived of the loving care for which he pined? Again, he had tried to escape in the garb ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers

... trinkets deeply laden, He this way steers his course, in hopes of trading — Yet ere he lands he 'as ordered me before, To make an observation on the shore. Where are we driven? our reck'ning sure is lost! 15 This seems a barren and a dangerous coast. what a sultry climate am I under! Yon ill foreboding cloud seems big with thunder. ('Upper Gallery'.) There Mangroves spread, and larger than I've seen 'em — ('Pit'.) Here trees of stately size — and turtles in 'em — ('Balconies'.) 20 Here ill-condition'd oranges abound — ('Stage'.) And apples ('takes up one and tastes it'), bitter apples ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... lieutenant dared utter no further remonstrance, but with a heart, heavy with sad forebodings, busied himself to keep up the failing spirits of his men who were as apprehensive of the threatened danger as himself. And his sad foreboding was only too soon fulfilled, for whilst the pilot imagined his vessel to be sailing on the open sea, she was already among the rocks that lay but a mile and an half from the coast, but yet were sixty distant from the roadstead by which they ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur

... plated hulls glinting dully in the sun. Their levitator helices moaned dismally, and as their long, slanting shadows slid over the assembled thousands, it seemed that they cast a prophetic pall; that there was a hush of foreboding. ...
— The Martian Cabal • Roman Frederick Starzl

... her eyes to a level with his own. Again the light of foreboding, of unrevealed shadows flashed at him out of her smile. She understood something not clear in his own head; nor in hers. He grasped her hand as she passed and with a dolorous grimace of his heart felt ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht

... father and Edith from tree to tree, she flattered herself that all must be well with the joyous child, and that her apprehensions were unfounded. But, again, when the following day found him pale and exhausted, and all the more so for the excitement and exercise of the previous evening, these foreboding fears would return, and her heart would sink heavily at the ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb

... a strange revulsion of fooling—or was it a flash of foreboding from the hell-lit, battle-scorched future! The orator hesitated and turned pale. It was an honor he could not now decline and yet ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon

... little smile, for those hands to have stretched their death-dealing fingers over the bed where he had lain asleep. He looked once more out over the park. Somehow, its sunny peace seemed to have become disturbed. The strange sense of foreboding which he, in common with the others, had carried about with him ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... time, see that they care for me properly at Hanwell Asylum ... the best by all accounts: yet I feel so sure of you, so safe and confident in you! If any of it had been my work, my own ... distrust and foreboding had pursued me from the beginning; but all is yours—you crust me round with gold and jewelry like the wood of a sceptre; and why should you transfer your own work? Wood enough to choose from in the first instance, but the choice once made!... So I rest on you, for ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... was horrible to think that perhaps I should never see him again. I had liked him so much, and he had seemed to like me. I should not have said that he was a happy man. There was something melancholy about him. I hoped he would prosper. I had a foreboding that some great calamity was in store for him, and wished I could avert it. I thought of his little daughter who was 'as pretty as a pink.' Perhaps Fate was going to strike him through her. Perhaps when he got home he would find that she was dead. There were tears in my eyes when ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... in truth, time that our sufferings should have an end: they had already lasted thirteen days; the strongest among us might, at the most, have lived forty-eight hours more. Mr. Correard, felt that he must die in the course of the day; yet he had a foreboding that we should be saved; he said that a series of events so extraordinary was not destined to be buried in oblivion: that providence would preserve some of us at least, to present to mankind the affecting picture ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard

... watch the tender shadows creep upon the western fire, to see the great gray rocks dissolve, to hear the sea's melodious whispering; but to him (it seemed) the sea spoke harshly and the night came with foreboding. In the silence and failing light of the hour, looking upon the stupendous works of the Lord, he would repeat the words of the prophet of ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan

... began to appear among the gods foreboding fear. Indra's favourite thunderbolt blazed up in a fright. Meteors with flames and smoke, loosened from the welkin, shot down during the day. And the weapons of the Vasus, the Rudras, the Adityas, the Sabhyas, the Maruts, and other gods, began to ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... amazement—even a foreboding—on Shattuck's face as he paused in his walk, and, for the first time speaking anxiously ejaculated, "I swear I don't ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich

... foreboding possessed me, the moment I entered my room. Was it the coffee? Twice in the night I lighted my candle, looked at the little French clock on the mantel, and under the bed. At last I fell asleep, but starting violently from its oblivious dark, to become aware that the darkness of the room was ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard

... production of cotton was slow and costly, the acreage therefore small, and the profits slender. The South was burdened with debt, the plantations were mortgaged, and in 1792 the outlook for the cotton planters was very dark, and all hearts were filled with foreboding and fear. One winter's night Mrs. General Greene, wife of the Revolutionary soldier, was entertaining at dinner a company of planters. In those days the planters had but one thought—how to rid their plantations ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis

... the fact that it actually changes the chemical composition of the secretions of the body. Fear victims not only age prematurely but they also die prematurely. All work done when one is suffering from a sense of fear or foreboding has little efficiency. Fear strangles originality, daring, boldness; it kills individuality, and weakens all the mental processes. Great things are never done under a sense of fear of some impending danger. Fear always indicates weakness, the presence of cowardice. What a ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden

... first gray streaks stretching along the eastern horizon and throwing an indistinct light upon the face of the deep, which combines with the boundlessness and unknown depth of the sea around, and gives one a feeling of loneliness, of dread, and of melancholy foreboding, which nothing else in nature can. This gradually passes away as the light grows brighter, and when the sun comes up, the ordinary monotonous ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana

... was therefore going to be obliged to recognize her more or less officially as consort of the reigning prince. Simla did not realize that, of course; but it was too late to wire for different instructions. He had a grim foreboding that he himself would catch it later on when the facts leaked out, as they ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... secret agents were watching the posts; so he and his fellow-Poles protected themselves and their correspondence by various precautions, fictitious names, confidential messengers. "Bieda"—misfortune—was the pseudonym by which Kosciuszko, his heart heavy with foreboding for his country and grief at her loss, signed himself, and wished to be known, as he set out for a foreign land. Cracow lay in the route that as a fugitive from the Austrian Government he was obliged to choose. He tarried a few ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner

... foreboding fears, her sore mind was hurt by new instances of ingratitude: disgusted with the family, whose misfortunes had often disturbed her repose, and lost in anticipated sorrow, she rambled she knew not where; when turning down a shady walk, ...
— Mary - A Fiction • Mary Wollstonecraft

... The old pine was one of the most splendid things of beauty in the valley. And it was something vital in 'Gene's strange, choked, inarticulate life. She stopped to listen a moment, feeling a chill of apprehension and foreboding. It was dreadful to have 'Gene do that. It was as though he were cutting at his own strength, cutting off one of his own members to please his wife. Poor 'Gene! He would do that too, now, if Nelly ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... and when it was cut up the ring was found in its stomach, and restored to Polycrates. Upon this Amasis renounced his friendship, declaring that, as the gods threw back his offering, something dreadful was before him. The foreboding came sadly true, for the Persian satrap, or governor, of Sardis, being envious of Polycrates, declared that the Ionian was under the Great King's displeasure, and invited him to Sardis to clear himself. Polycrates ...
— Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Greek History • Charlotte M. Yonge

... wait for me, Elsa?" Andor asks for the twentieth time, and for the twentieth time her lips murmur an assent, even though her heart is heavy with foreboding. ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... kept this picture clear of those dreadful shadows of the hour by which it would have been sadly overdarkened. I refer especially to the uncertainty attending the lot of these rural households, to their constant fear and foreboding of some casual outrage which might at any moment descend ...
— La Sorciere: The Witch of the Middle Ages • Jules Michelet

... that night, their intimacy had so far advanced that arrangements had been made for its continuance. Arabella had an instinctive foreboding that her father would be less charmed than herself with Jasper Losely; that, if Jasper were presented to him, he would possibly forbid her farther acquaintance with a young clerk, however superb his outward appearance. ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... left her, Mary had walked on slowly, her heart filled with foreboding. Barry was not like Jerry. Jerry, coarse of fiber, lacking temperament, would probably come to middle age safely—he would never be called upon to pay the piper as Barry would for dancing to the tune of the ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey

... words pulled himself together with a giant effort. "What in the name of wonder are you doing here?" He had bitten his cigar through in his astonishment, and he tossed it away as he spoke with a gesture of returning confidence. He silenced the uneasy foreboding within and met the hard eyes that confronted him without discomfiture. "What's your game?" he said. "You have come to tell me something, I suppose. But why on ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... doctor, recovered. He took quite an affectionate leave of the young ensign, and with an appearance of great friendliness and honesty, promised to interest himself at headquarters in behalf of the young officer. This somehow filled Edith with a vague distrust, and dark foreboding, for which she could neither account, nor excuse herself, nor yet shake off. Thorg had been exchanged, and he joined his regiment after its return from Washington City, and before it sailed ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... previous. Before Bertha was dressed for breakfast her aunt had sent to borrow her writing-desk (having no correspondents, the countess did not travel with one of her own), and Bertha experienced a heart-sickening foreboding at the request. When she entered the drawing-room, Madame de Gramont was writing slowly and elaborately, as though she were preparing some document which was to pass into the hands of critical judges; but she never wrote in any other manner. A hasty, impulsive, dashing off of words and ideas ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie

... physiognomist than most children are, that one sight of him was enough to verify all Mr. Jolly had said. The remembrance of his hard sinister face sealed her fears. Nothing but evil could come of having to do with such a man. It was however still not so much any foreboding of the future that moved Fleda's tears as the sense of her grandfather's present pain,—the quick answer of her gentle nature to every sorrow that touched him. His griefs were doubly hers. Both from his openness of character and her penetration, they could rarely ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner

... as to the general feeling of the gentry and farmers who live in the midst of this population: All regard it with dissatisfaction, and with a foreboding—an uncomfortable anticipation for the future, as they behold the annual inpouring of a people with whom they have few or no sympathies in common, many of whose characteristics are obnoxious and bad, and who have to make ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various

... east too certainly pointed out that it was time for these lovers to part. Romeo took his leave of his dear wife with a heavy heart, promising to write to her from Mantua every hour in the day, and when he had descended from her chamber-window, as he stood below her on the ground, in that sad foreboding state of mind in which she was he appeared to her eyes as one dead in the bottom of a tomb. Romeo's mind misgave him in like manner; but now he was forced hastily to depart, for it was death for him to be found within the ...
— Books for Children - The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 3 • Charles and Mary Lamb

... Miss Anderson's rendition of the balcony scene, help feeling in the tones of her voice, an almost stern foreboding of their saddening fates—a foreboding stranger than that which falls as a shadow to all ecstatic youthful hope and joy. Other faults—as evident, undoubtedly, to her and to her advisers, as to us—are for the most part superficial, and will disappear ...
— Mary Anderson • J. M. Farrar

... neither can this circumstance be alleged as in itself disparaging to the doctrines thus misapplied. A religious belief which does not provide language for the darkest moods of the human mind, for profound melancholy, torturing remorse and gloomy foreboding, is a religion not calculated to lay a powerful grasp upon the imaginations of mankind. Had Cowper been a Roman Catholic, the same anguish of mind might have driven him to seek relief in the recesses of some austere monastery. Had he, like Rousseau, been a theoretical ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... horseman reined in before the surgery-door and dismounted with a monkey-like dexterity, his one arm twined in the bridle. A moment later the surgery-bell pealed loudly, and her heart stood still. She felt suddenly sick with a nameless foreboding. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell

... had told herself again and again, during those hours of anxious calculation in which she had tried to cast Dick's horoscope; but not in her moments of most fantastic foreboding had she figured so cruel a test of her courage. If her prayers for him had taken precise shape, she might have asked that he should be spared the spectacular, the dramatic appeal to his will-power: that his temptations ...
— Sanctuary • Edith Wharton

... been able to throw off entirely the foreboding of calamity that she had voiced at the time Bob left home. Every morning she awoke with a heavy heart, like one bearing a great weight of sorrow. Before going about her daily duties she would pray ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace

... his own room, and I never felt more nervous or more unhinged than after this conversation. I had a melancholy foreboding—but that I believe every one has, when he, for the first time, has to assist at a mortal rencontre. I was in a deep musing when he returned with his pistols and all the necessary apparatus; and when the Major pointed out to me, and made me once or twice practice the setting ...
— Japhet, In Search Of A Father • Frederick Marryat

... obscure perception—a foreboding, which is to them always indicative of an approaching earthquake. They experience a feeling of anxiety and restlessness, a pressure of the breast, as if an immense weight were laid on it. A momentary shudder pervades the whole frame, or there is a sudden trembling of the limbs. ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi

... bodies, not only independent of one another, but oftentimes opposing, rather than helping forward, the extension and well-being of the Kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. And the result has been that we have learned by sad experience the reason of the foreboding tone of our Lord's last prayer, "That they all may be one; ... that the world may believe that Thou hast sent Me" (S. John xvii. 21). The multitudes of men, practically heathen, in the midst of this professedly Christian ...
— The Kingdom of Heaven; What is it? • Edward Burbidge

... But that respectable personage kept his furtive watch upon Giraumont and Gawtrey, who appeared talking together, very amicably. The younger novice of that night, equally silent, seated towards the bottom of the table, was not less watchful than Birnie. An uneasy, undefinable foreboding had come over him since the entrance of Monsieur Giraumont; this had been increased by the manner of Mr. Gawtrey. His faculty of observation, which was very acute, had detected something false in the chief's blandness to their guest—something ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 3 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... Here is a sincere and solemn avowal—a public declaration from his own will—a confession at once devout, poetical, and human—a history in the shape of a prophecy! What more was required of the biographer than to have put his seal to the writing, testifying that the foreboding had been realized, and that the record was authentic?—Lastingly is it to be regretted in respect to this memorable being, that inconsiderate intrusion has not left us at liberty to enjoy his mirth, or his love; his wisdom ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... her guest's arrival, Lady Tranmore wandered about her rooms, unable to rest, unable even to read the evening papers on Ashe's speech, so possessed was she still by her altercation with Kitty, and by the foreboding sense of what it meant. William's future was threatened; and the mother whose whole proud heart had been thrown for years into every successful effort and every upward step of her ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... across the desolate fields. Sally was not ordinarily impressionable, yet at this moment she felt a curious sense of foreboding. ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook

... A vague foreboding filled Blake's soul. He had imagined that the ignominy and agony of physical labor was a thing of the past with him. And he was still sore in every sinew and ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer

... the Count at the reappearance of this man, whom he fully believed to have been killed when he himself was rescued from the Christinos by Zumalacarregui, was succeeded by a joyful foreboding. By the aid of Paco, with whose sagacity and courage he was well acquainted, who had been at a former period in his service, and whom he knew to be entirely devoted to him, he felt at once that he should be able to accomplish the escape ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various

... may seem, I felt neither anger nor jealousy, but a terrible sense of sorrow and foreboding. I did not suspect, and yet I doubted. The mind of man is so strangely formed that, with what he sees and in spite of what he sees, he can conjure up a hundred objects of woe. In truth his brain resembles the dungeons of the ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset

... came against the curtain, making so great a noise that you would have said that a drum was being beaten, and all ran towards the place, but found no trace of the wasp. It could not have flown out of the room, because all eyes had been fixed upon it. Then all of us who were then present felt some foreboding of what subsequently came to pass, but did not deem that the end would be so bitter as ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... of Miss Milbanke, a relative of Lady Melbourne. His proposal was not at first accepted, but a correspondence ensued between them, and in September, 1814, after the appearance of "The Corsair" and "Lara," they became formally affianced. I was much in his society at this time, and was filled with foreboding anxieties, which the unfortunate events that followed only too fully justified. At the end of December he set out for Seaham, the seat of Sir Ralph Milbanke, the lady's father, and on January 2, 1815, was married. On March 8, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various

... they neither espoused nor attacked any particular party; they laid down no abstract doctrines of government. But somehow or other, in language terse yet familiar, sometimes careless yet never vulgar, they expressed a prevailing sentiment of uneasy discontent, a foreboding of some destined change in things established, without defining the nature of such change, without saying whether it would be for good or for evil. In his criticisms upon individuals, the writer was guarded and moderate—the keenest-eyed censor of the press ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... every thing finite and mortal is lost in the contemplation of infinity; life has become shadow and darkness, and the first day of our real existence dawns in the world beyond the grave. Such a religion must waken the vague foreboding, which slumbers in every feeling heart, into a distinct consciousness that the happiness after which we are here striving is unattainable; that no external object can ever entirely fill our souls; ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... night; None like your coward can describe a fight. See him as down the sparkling potion goes, Labour to grin away the horrid dose; In joy-feigned gaze his misty eyeballs float, Th' uncivil spirit gurgling at his throat; So looks dim Titan through a wintry scene, And faintly cheers the woe-foreboding swain. Timon, long practised in the school of art, Has lost each finer feeling of the heart; Triumphs o'er shame, and, with delusive wiles, Laughs at the idiot he himself beguiles: So matrons, past the awe of censure's tongue, Deride the blushes of the fair and young. Few ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe

... satisfaction and prevailed upon his father to invite Charles and Jeanette to a New Year's dinner (only a family gathering). Jeanette being unwell excused herself from going, and Charles went alone. Jeanette felt a fearful foreboding when she saw him leaving the door, and said to herself, "I hope his father will not offer him wine. I am so afraid that something will happen to him, and yet I hated to persuade him not to go. His ...
— Sowing and Reaping • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

... situation in which he feared he should neither answer the expectations of his friends nor of the nation. Having noticed the various tasks which would devolve upon him, his lordship said, with an apparent foreboding of what was to ensue, that he could not perform them without the cordial and energetic support of her majesty's cabinet, and the co-operation of the imperial parliament. Lord Glenelg closed the debate by retaliating ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... lived on. The grave was closed against it, and in neither heaven nor hell could it find an abiding-place. Ghostly and forbidding, it had sent Constance to haunt Miriam's troubled sleep, it had filled Ambrose North's soul with cruel doubt and foreboding, and had now come back to Roger and Barbara, to ask eternal questions of the one, and stir the heart of the other to ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed

... himself at full length on the bench. Mr. Peacock, now absorbed in a game of patience, vouchsafed no return to my parting salutation, and in another moment I was alone on the high-road. My thoughts turned long upon the young man I had left; mixed with a sort of instinctive compassionate foreboding of an ill future for one with such habits and in such companionship, I felt an involuntary admiration, less even for his good looks than his ease, audacity, and the careless superiority he assumed over a comrade ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... and cautious step, but with firm and resolute hearts. The land of their fathers had become too small for their children. Its soil answered not their wants. The parents shook their heads and said, with doubtful and foreboding faces: "Stand still, stay at home. This has sufficed for us; we have lived and enjoyed ourselves here. True, our mountains are high and our soil is rugged and cold; but you won't find a better; change, and trial, and toil, will ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... the setting sunbeams faded from her figure, she was exhaling away, and that something of her ethereal substance was withdrawn, with each lessening gleam of light. With his farewell glance, a shadow had fallen over the portal, and Lilias was invisible. His foreboding spirit deemed it an omen at the time; and so it proved; for the sweet earthly form, by which the Lily bad been manifested to the world, was found lifeless, the next morning, in the Temple, with her head resting on her arms, which were folded ...
— The Lily's Quest (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Inverness, in which cholera was raging at the time, would to a certainty attend it. What, it was asked, were we to do with the politicians—the formidable bankers, factors, and lawyers—who would form, we knew, the Inverness cavalcade? Individually, the question seemed to be asked under a sort of foreboding terror, that calculated consequences; but when the Association came to ask it collectively, and to answer it in a body, it was in a bold tone, that set fear at defiance. And so it was resolved, nem. con., that the Inverness politicians should be smoked like the others. My turn to mount guard had ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... 'thrashers,' or grampuses, accompanied me. The Seer-King would have detached a cohort of white whales, but the animosity of my tribes might have provoked combat. I left the cetacea with some foreboding. They were allied in some degree to man; they were capable of some human impressions; their blood was warm like mine; they breathed with lungs; they had double hearts; and nourished kindness for their offspring. But I was now about to be delivered over to the cold, cruel, gluttonous tribes of ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... transformations which issue in the locomotive's flight, in the whirl of factory and mill. Thus in some degree is allayed the fear, never well grounded, that when the coal fields of the globe are spent civilization must collapse. As the electrician hears this foreboding he recalls how much fuel is wasted in converting heat into electricity. He looks beyond either turbine or shaft turned by wind or tide, and, remembering that the metal dissolved in his battery yields at his will its full content of energy, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - Invention and Discovery • Various

... hours earlier, in the murk of coming night, the sense of my own helpless insignificance in all that solitude had descended upon me in the shape of physical fear. Sea and sand laughed with me now, where before they had smitten me with lonely foreboding, almost with terror. I had my first bathe from a Pacific beach that morning; and, given just a shade more of venturesomeness in the outsetting, it had been like to be my last. In Livorno Bay the breakers were big, and the back-wash of their surf ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... I would have starved a week rather than have climbed on that table, if I had had the slightest foreboding of what was to follow. But how could I know that Miss Patricia was to choose that very moment for walking into the dining-room? She had just come in from the street, for she had on her bonnet, and carried ...
— The Story of Dago • Annie Fellows-Johnston

... again up the canyon, all the brightness of her day was gone. Her heart was heavy with foreboding fear. She was oppressed with a dread of some impending evil which she could not understand. At every sound in the mountain wild-wood, she started. Time and again, as if expecting pursuit, she looked over her shoulder—poised like a creature of the woods ready for instant ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... formalized minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, as solitary as similar—not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark the time when every man's aim is ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin

... also of the Biblical "Mene tekel," displays without sermonizing the greatest ethical vigor. It has far more dramatic energy than either Byron's or Heine's "Belshazzar" poems, with fully as much dismal foreboding. Taillefer, which has been called "the sparkling queen" of Uhland's ballads, has fresh vigor but lacks the power of handling the moral forces of the universe with as much dramatic vividness. It has a naive joy of life not elsewhere ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various

... prophetic foreboding proved but too correct, for on nearing the camp we were met by an aide-de-camp of the commander-in-chief, who informed me that, on that very morning, all communication between the foreign ships of war and the besieged ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid

... — N. precursor, antecedent, precedent, predecessor; forerunner, vancourier^, avant-coureur [Fr.], pioneer, prodrome^, prodromos^, prodromus^, outrider; leader, bellwether; herald, harbinger; foreboding; dawn; avant-courier, avant-garde, bellmare^, forelooper^, foreloper^, stalking-horse, voorlooper [Afrik.], voortrekker [Afrik.]. prelude, preamble, preface, prologue, foreword, avant-propos [Fr.], protasis^, proemium^, prolusion^, proem, prolepsis [Gramm.], prolegomena, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... mother in the sun and shade. Now all the leaves had fallen; the branches bare Made a perpetual moaning in the air, And screaming from their eyries overhead The ravens sailed athwart the sky of lead. With his own hands he lopped the boughs and bound Fagots, that crackled with foreboding sound, And on his mules, caparisoned and gay With bells and tassels, ...
— Tales of a Wayside Inn • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... down a flight of steps to a street below, never doubting his benefactor an idiot, and dreading some one to whom he belonged would be after him presently to reclaim the gift. Mrs. Sclater saw the proceeding with some amusement and a little foreboding. She did not mourn the fate of the jacket; had it been the one she had just ordered, or anything like it, the loss would have been to her not insignificant: but was the boy altogether in his right mind? She in her black satin on the opposite ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... of sea-gulls on a gloomy day is a joyous sound; and the sight of those theatrical angels, with their shameless, unfinished backs, flying off the top of the rococo facade of the church of the Jesuits, has always been a spectacle to fill me with despondency and foreboding. ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells

... most forcibly of similar scenes in Scott's novels. In particular the ancient Tower of Tillietudleni was presented to my mind's eye, and I gazed for a moment on this gifted person with a melancholy foreboding that it was for the last time, and experienced an elevation of feeling connected with the scene which it is impossible to describe. Such moments are worth whole years of everyday existence. We turned our heads to look once ...
— Recollections of the late William Beckford - of Fonthill, Wilts and Lansdown, Bath • Henry Venn Lansdown

... {113} and has been described under the words "presentiment" or "foreboding." These words, however, refer, on the one hand, only to an unknowable in the future, separated from us by space, and not to one that is actually present; on the other hand, they denote only the ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler

... is painful. Mr. Strahan informs us, that the strength of religion prevailed against the infirmity of nature; and his foreboding dread of the divine justice subsided into a pious trust, and humble hope of mercy, at the throne of grace. On Monday, the 13th day of December, the last of his existence on this side the grave, the desire of life returned with all ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson

... With an uneasy foreboding of evil—he was, in fact, rarely now without that feeling—Leonard Jasper took his way to the office of Grind. Notwithstanding he had defied Martin, he yet feared him. But he was so near to the point of comparative ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur

... clerk was being brought up by hand. It was all rather grim and solid and forbidding. To Bob the law had always been full of mystery; this grey, silent office, in the heart of the city, was a fitting place for it. He felt a little chill at his heart, a foreboding that no comfort could come ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce

... say, this very exfoliation gave it something of a quite peculiarly desolate aspect. It looked so harsh, so millennial-old, so antediluvian and pre-adamic! I still remember with particular distinctness the slight dizziness that overcame me, the sinking feeling in my heart, the awe, and the foreboding that I had challenged a force in Nature which might defy all tireless effort ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... own, was assured that no postponement of a voluntary kind was credible of her. Twelve o'clock struck. Again Franz went out into the road, and walked nearly up to the archway; he returned with heavy sadness and foreboding at his heart, reluctantly admitting that now all hope of seeing her that night was over. That night? Poor sorrowing heart, the night was to be eternal! The anguish of the desolate ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... meant to brandish Druro as a trophy—fastening him publicly to the wheels of her chariot. Strangely enough, what Gay dreaded still more was that Druro would not turn up at all. She felt a miserable foreboding about the gang at Glendora. And it was based on good grounds. They had once lured her brother Derry out to that camp, and what he had told her of his experiences there had left her with a wholesome dread and detestation ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... You fairly made me jump!" Boyne said at length, moving toward her with a sudden, half-exasperated laugh. The shadow of apprehension was on his face again, not now a look of fixed foreboding, but a shifting vigilance of lips and eyes that gave her the sense of his ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... and stronger in him. If he expected the end of the world, it was due to dim remembrances from the far-distant past of the German people, which still hovered over the soul of the new reformer. Yet it was likewise a prophetic foreboding of the near future. It was not the end of the world that was in preparation, but the ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various

... the whole of it, but enough to give me a dreadful foreboding of its hideousness, not two ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle

... against the bitterness of coming loss, "I might have loved him, had he lived, too dearly—you know how deeply I do love him now." And three years later, when "little Tom," on his eighth birthday, had just said, wistfully—with a curious foreboding instinct, "I think that the eight years I have now lived will be the happiest of my life," Arnold, painfully struck by the words, wrote some verses upon them which I still possess. "The Doctor" was no poet, though the best of his historical prose—the well-known passage ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... but ineffectually. Slowly, and as though with some foreboding of danger, the footsteps came nearer and nearer. An unseen hand cautiously pushed the door open. Isaac stood upon the threshold, peering anxiously into the room. The inspector turned and ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim



Words linked to "Foreboding" :   apprehension, fateful, portent, omen, dread, presage, forebode, portentous, shadow, prophetic, premonition, apprehensiveness



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