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verb
Lean  v. t.  (past & past part. leant or leaned; pres. part. leaning)  To conceal. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Lean" Quotes from Famous Books



... A lean, cadaverous, painfully thin old man in answer to his name rose to his feet and edged his way through the crowd to the witness-chair. He was an inch taller than his son, though only half his weight, and was dressed in a suit of cheap cloth of the fashion of long ago, the coat too small ...
— The Underdog • F. Hopkinson Smith

... already that one should sit up at a table and not lean forward or lounge back, that he should not take large mouthfuls and that he should not snap at his food, that he should eat without noise and with great cleanliness. He knows that his napkin should be unfolded (it should be unfolded once and not spread out) and laid across his lap, ...
— The Book of Business Etiquette • Nella Henney

... may I not say, in public and in private, in innumerable publications? This winter I have had the bed of languishing; deep, very deep, prostration of soul and body; instead of being a helper to others, ready to lean upon all, glad even to be diverted by a child's book. In addition to this, I find the tongue of slander has been ready to attack me. The work that was made so much of before, some try to lessen now. My faith is that He will not give ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman

... malevolence of his unbroken mustang. For a moment he dwelt regretfully on the lazy half-developed sinews of his son; for a briefer instant there flashed across him the thought that those sinews ought to replace his own; ought to be HIS to lean upon—that thus, and thus only, could he achieve the old miracle of restoring his lost youth by perpetuating his own power in his own blood; and he, whose profound belief in personality had rejected all hereditary principle, felt this with ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte

... lean against the door?" said Frau Reindel, hastening to her assistance. "I hope you are not hurt, and do pray remember, in future, that our door opens inside, and that you must step down into the room. Sit down, neighbor," she ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, October 1878, No. 12 • Various

... is Prime Minister. I have undertaken to form a ministry, if I find it practicable, with the assistance of such friends as I possess. I never felt before that I had to lean so entirely on others as I ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope

... witch, discovered that her daughter had gone off with the prince, and told her husband he must leave his bed and go after them. The king got slowly up, groaning with pain, and dragged himself to the stables, where he saw the lean horse ...
— The Violet Fairy Book • Various

... but Lydia seldom found their mirth exhilarating. Only when Eben Jakes appeared at the door, that spring twilight, a droll look peering from his blue eyes, and a long forefinger smoothing out the smile from the two lines in his lean cheeks, and asked, as if there were some richness of humor in the supposition, "Anybody heard anything of anybody named Eunice Eliot round here?" she found her own face creasing responsively. Eunice Eliot had been her mother's maiden name, and it proved that she and Eben's ...
— Country Neighbors • Alice Brown

... severity in all that touches dialect; so that in every novel the letters of the alphabet are tortured, and the reader wearied, to commemorate shades of mis-pronunciation. Now spelling is an art of great difficulty in my eyes, and I am inclined to lean upon the printer, even in common practice, rather than to venture abroad upon new quests. And the Scots tongue has an orthography of its own, lacking neither "authority nor author." Yet the temptation is great ...
— Underwoods • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Southern host and return with much more than impressions. Such are likely to speak with more confidence than knowledge, but, on the other hand, one who confines himself to a single locality in the South and to the local facts is more likely to have his views lean to inclination than to truth. One's opinion ought to be estimated by his information. I have known an otherwise intelligent citizen of New Orleans to be ignorant of the existence of Straight University with its 500 students and its noble accomplishment. ...
— The American Missionary, Volume 49, No. 3, March, 1895 • Various

... was a tall, lean man, invariably dressed in a sky-blue coat with codfish tails and deerskin breeches. He wore a hat of flexible straw and boots with bright yellow tops, on the front of which hung two silver tassels. He talked little; his laugh was like a nervous attack, and his ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne

... Trojan wars she weaved (herself the prize) And the dire triumphs of her fatal eyes. To whom the goddess of the painted bow: "Approach, and view the wondrous scene below!(112) Each hardy Greek, and valiant Trojan knight, So dreadful late, and furious for the fight, Now rest their spears, or lean upon their shields; Ceased is the war, and silent all the fields. Paris alone and Sparta's king advance, In single fight to toss the beamy lance; Each met in arms, the fate of combat tries, Thy love the motive, and ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... lean-to in the corner of what had once been a small, but strongly-built house was a store, a very small store, outside the door of which a crippled negro was sitting. Thinking that this might be one of the old-timers of St. Pierre, ...
— Plotting in Pirate Seas • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... tribulation, finally arrived at a country which, while it was not then by any means up to expectation or representation, at least presented facilities and opportunities for living. When the great valleys of Utah were reached, men who a few months before had been strong and hardy, but who now were lank and lean, fell on their knees and offered up thanksgiving for their deliverance, while the exhausted women and children sought repose and rest, which had been denied them for so ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... Everyone knew how solemn the occasion was. Everyone felt it might be his last among them. It was as if the brooding Christ had made Himself felt in every heart. Each boy felt like crying out for some strong arm to lean upon in this his sore need. Each gave himself with all his heart to the quiet reaching up to God. It was as if the eating of that fudge had been a solemn sacrament in which their souls were brought near ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill

... other. The Bedouins, therefore, returned successfully, unseen by any one, with a considerable supply of water. It was necessary now to think of provisions. As the animals had been fed sparingly during the past week they grew lean; their necks lengthened, their humps sank, and their legs became weak. The durra and the supplies for the people, with the greatest stint, would suffice for two days more. Idris thought, however, that they might, if not during daytime ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz

... sojourner on the seas, Dock-labourer, lame longshore-man, bowed bargee, Sees it as policy to shield his life For those dependent on him. Much more, then, Should one upon whose priceless presence here Such issues hang, so many strivers lean, Use average circumspection at an hour ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy

... a lean, angular, inordinately vivacious body whose years, which were many more than forty, were making a brave struggle to masquerade as thirty. She was notorious for her execrable taste in gowns and jewelry, but her social position was impregnable, and her avowed mission in life ...
— The Bandbox • Louis Joseph Vance

... that swept o'er them A more than golden glory. Merlin said: "Our loves must soar aloft to spheres divine; The human satisfies nor you nor me, (No human love shall ever satisfy — Or ever did — the hearts that lean on it); You sigh for something higher as do I, So let our spirits be espoused in God, And let our wedlock be as soul to soul; And prayer shall be the golden marriage ring, And God will bless us both." She sweetly said: "Your words are echoes of my own soul's ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)

... they say the ladies are very pretty, and wear hats as large as parasols. You are a monster of ugliness now, but you were very smart, though I, who am your aunt, say so. And now you have come back so lean and suffering! You must have lived very fast; who knows what you have done in the world—sly boots! And your poor mother, who thought you would be a saint! God have mercy on us! Don't deny it; you have done no good and I hate lies. You did right to enjoy yourself and to take advantage ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... at Cambridge in 1840. Here he realised one of the serious disadvantages to which stock-breeders in England are exposed, in "showing" sheep, cattle or swine at these annual exhibitions. The great outside world, with tastes that lean more to fat sirloins or shoulders than to the better symmetries of animated nature, almost demands that every one of these unfortunate beasts should be offered up as a bloated, blowing sacrifice to those great twin ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... He had paid much attention to his toilet, selecting, with purpose, the white waistcoat, the long, blue-grey coat cut in a fashion anterior to this time by thirty years or more, and particularly to the arrangement of his hair. He resembled Napoleon—not the later Napoleon, but the Bonaparte, lean, shy, laconic, who fought at Marengo; and this had startled the Cure in his pulpit, and the rest ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... received from the Indies, by the last ships, two ostriches or cassowaries which were shut up and much prized, though they are very common in Holland. We came to his horse stable; there was only one horse in it, and that was so lean it shamed every one, as also did the small size of the stable, which stood near that of the Duke of Monmouth, where there were six tolerable good Frisic horses, with a saddle horse or two. Our stables[460] look more kingly than these. We were about leaving the place when we heard them ...
— Journal of Jasper Danckaerts, 1679-1680 • Jasper Danckaerts

... instinct—is the faith of our boyhood. The boy, as the father of the man, transmits this hope to riper years; but if the experience of the day correspond not with the promise of the dawn, how rapidly old age comes upon us! White hairs, lean cheeks, withered muscles, feeble steps, and that dull, dead feeling about the heart—that utter abandonment of cheer—which would be despair were it not for a certain blunted sensibility—a sort of drowsy indifference to all things that the day brings ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms

... corral, taking great pains to make little noise. Rope's saddle—a peculiar one with a high pommel bearing a silver plate upon which the puncher's name was engraved—he placed conspicuously near the door of the bunkhouse. His own he carefully suspended from its accustomed hook in the lean-to. Then, still carefully, he made his way inside the bunkhouse ...
— The Two-Gun Man • Charles Alden Seltzer

... blaze of the sun, I envied the boy his breath and muscle. Now and then he slaked his thirst at a stone fountain by the wayside, not without reverencing the blue-hooded Madonna painted over it. A few lean, brown peasants, bending under faggots, and one or two carts, passed us before we gained the top, and half-way up there was a hovel where drink could be bought; but with these exceptions nothing broke the loneliness of the long, wild ascent. My man was not talkative, but answered inquiries ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing

... above seventy, was as bold as a lion, and came forth in the old garb of an American huntsman, like, as I was told, a Robin Hood in the play is; and it was just a sport to see him, feckless man, trying to march so crousely with his lean, shaking hands. But the whole affair proved a false alarm, and our men, when they heard it, were as well pleased that they had been constrained to sleep in their warm beds at home, instead of lying on coils of cables, like ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... man with steely eyes set near together, the strong lean face of a fighter, and the colourless complexion of most high ecclesiastics, who are generally what the physicians of that day called 'saturnians.' He held out a large, hard, white hand, with a ring in which was set an engraved amethyst, Ortensia touch ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... for the writer of these notes was to be at the front of the stage in order that the lecturer might lean over now and then and pretend to be asking information concerning Fulton. I was not entirely happy in the thought of this showy honor, and breathed more freely when this plan was abandoned and the part assigned to ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... in the darkness, and I did the same, bringing on the giddy feeling once more, so that I was glad to lean against the wall of ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn

... friend's behalf Hanna carried on a shrewd campaign in the newspapers, keeping the question of currency in the background as far as possible, playing up McKinley's sound tariff policy, and repeating often the slogan—welcome after the recent lean years—"McKinley and the full dinner pail." McKinley prudently refused to take any stand on the currency question, protesting that he could not anticipate the party platform and that he would be bound by whatever declarations the party might see fit to make. ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck

... but they stood patiently and never complained, though sometimes I know they must have nearly frozen in the bitter winds that blew through the stable on winter nights. They were lean and poor, and were never in good health. Besides being cold they were fed ...
— Beautiful Joe - An Autobiography of a Dog • by Marshall Saunders

... would, indeed, be difficult to prove that the expansion of the United States has differed much, in methods and morals, from that of the European monarchies; and the methods of trade-unions are the methods of pitiless belligerency. Democracy and socialism are broken reeds for the lover of peace to lean upon. ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... type. His lean young face looked older than his five-and-twenty years would warrant. It held a certain recklessness, together with a decided hint of temper, and he was much too good-looking to have escaped being more or less spoiled by every other woman with whom he came in ...
— The Vision of Desire • Margaret Pedler

... for many years his sole companion. He was, the shepherd says, the best dog he ever saw, in spite of his surly manners and unprepossessing appearance. The first time he saw the dog, a drover was leading him by a rope, and, although hungry and lean, "I thought," Hogg tells us, "I discovered a sort of sullen intelligence in his face, so I gave the drover a guinea for him. I believe there never was a guinea so well laid out. He was scarcely then a year old, and knew nothing of herding; but as soon as he discovered ...
— A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals • Percy J. Billinghurst

... she will always be true to herself,' he observed. 'It is singular how these unbalanced, pleasure-loving natures lean towards asceticism—how rapidly they pass from one extreme to another. Even her repentance is not free from selfishness. She would free herself from her maternal responsibilities, as she freed herself ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... tailor's hand for its purity and excellent fit, and one had said that he (the artisan) had laboured hard thereat, for the sheen of it shimmered like unto silver.[FN237] Then the Warlock considering the face of this Cook saw his colour wan as the hue of metal leaves[FN238] and he was lean of limb;[FN239] so he took station facing him and said to him, "The Peace be upon thee, O my brother," and said the other in reply, "And upon thee be The Peace and the Truth of Allah and His blessings: so well come to thee and welcome and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... extractives, etc., of lean meat (usually beef) forms the basis of several nutrient media. This solution is termed "meat extract" and it has been determined empirically that its preparation shall be carried out by extracting half a kilo of moist meat with one litre of water. For many purposes, however, it ...
— The Elements of Bacteriological Technique • John William Henry Eyre

... best to sit beside me in the narrow sleigh and lean against my shoulder, her physical weariness the reflection of her spiritual unrest. She did not want to think, and she ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert

... but no one came in; so he opened the door, and there stood before him such an extremely lean man, that he felt quite strange. As to the rest, the man was very finely ...
— Andersen's Fairy Tales • Hans Christian Andersen

... to bring her a fresh cup of coffee, because an unhappy ant had scalded himself to death in her first cup. Afterward he would not let her "hurt her hands" by washing the dishes. When this was over, and the dusk was deepening, he went into the woods to the "lean-to" in which Lion was quartered, to see that the old horse was comfortable, but a minute later came crashing back through ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... the preacher sharp, who's goin' in the stage, to get tucked in among the ladies, a hollow-chested, chalk-cheeked, sardonic-lookin', cynical-seemin' bandit, drivin' a lean-laigged hoss to one of them spid'ry things they calls a quill-wheel, comes pirootin' along over to one side of the fooneral cortege at a walk. He's p'intin' in from over Red Dog way, but I savvys from the wonderin' faces of them Red Dog sports that he's as new to them as us. The cynical ...
— Faro Nell and Her Friends - Wolfville Stories • Alfred Henry Lewis

... less from sinful, selfish motives, than from the, I trust, laudable fear I had about becoming in a jiffy the father of a small family, every one with a mouth to fill and a back to cleid—helpless bairns, with nothing to look to or lean on, save and except the proceeds of my daily handiwork. Nothing, however, is sure in this world, as Maister Wiggie more than once took occasion to observe, when lecturing on the house built by the foolish ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir

... tender blue eyes grew watery and blear, and the peach-color on her cheeks fled from its old habitation, and crowded up into her nose, where, with a number of pimples, it stuck fast. Add to this a dirty, draggle-tailed chintz; long, matted hair, wandering into her eyes, and over her lean shoulders, which were once so snowy, and you have the picture of drunkenness and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray

... a long while, during which I amused, or disgusted myself in watching those river natives devouring the flesh of the beasts. The lean, what there was of it, they dried and smoked into a kind of "biltong," but a great deal of the fat they ate at once. I had the curiosity to weigh a lump which was given to one thin, hungry-looking fellow. It scaled quite twenty pounds. ...
— She and Allan • H. Rider Haggard

... warrior high o'er his fellows soar'd. Now laid he down his quiver, and quick ungirt his sword. Against the spreading linden he lean'd his mighty spear. So by the brook stood waiting the ...
— Song and Legend From the Middle Ages • William D. McClintock and Porter Lander McClintock

... Sultan and her as Scheherazade. The Dynamiter was suggested by certain attempted outrages in London which had all turned out to be fiascos. She began with the Mormon tale and followed with the others, one for each afternoon. Afterwards, when a lean time came at Bournemouth and money was badly needed, these stories, temporarily forgotten, were recalled, written, and published as the second volume of the New Arabian Nights series. As there was only enough for a thin book he wrote another, The Explosive Bomb, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez

... ever blindness so great as mine? Where could I think I should find help but in Thee? What folly to run away from the light, to be for ever stumbling! What a proud humility was that which Satan devised for me, when I ceased to lean upon the pillar, and threw the staff away which supported me, in order that my fall ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila

... in Italian means "to lean upon"), should always be long, the different ways in which it may be written having no influence upon its length. There is an exception to this when its final little note, ascending or descending, and preceding the larger note, is distant from it ...
— On the Execution of Music, and Principally of Ancient Music • Camille Saint-Saens

... saw Ralph lean forward and speak to the chauffeur who slowed down to a standstill, while he himself sprang out and came ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... dispersed. The old president Henault made me a visit yesterday: he is extremely amiable, but has the appearance of a superannuated bacchanal; superannuated, poor soul! indeed he is! The Duc de Richelieu is a lean old resemblance of old General Churchill, and like him affects still to have his ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole

... from one pole and from the other. In the south, a clump of ice-bound land, well within the Antarctic Circle, surrounds the pole. All else is a wide domain of ocean broken only where tapering and isolated tongues of land, South America, the Cape, Australia, lean down from the great land masses of the north. On the other hand, all the great land masses expand in the Northern Hemisphere, and shoulder one another round the North Pole. America is separated from Asia only by the ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... ye stand there before me, ye unfruitful ones; how lean your ribs! And many of you surely have had ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche

... difficult to find a greater contrast than that presented by Reimers and this Senior-lieutenant Guentz; externally and internally they differed radically. Reimers was tall and lean, with golden-brown hair, and a noble, but somewhat melancholy expression; Guentz was small and very fair, with a tendency to stoutness, and with a red jovial face like the full moon. The one was romantic and even exuberant, slightly fantastic in his moods; the ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein

... afternoon, Sir John march'd into Preston town, He says, "My lads, come lean you down, And we'll fight the boys in the morning." Hey, Johnnie ...
— The Jacobite Rebellions (1689-1746) - (Bell's Scottish History Source Books.) • James Pringle Thomson

... renews his Patience every Day. 7. He is not anxiously thoughtful of Death. 8. He does not travel into foreign Countries. 9. He has nothing to do with Doctors. 10. He diverts himself with Study, but does not study himself lean. On the other hand, Polygamus has brought old Age upon him, by the Intemperance of his Youth, by Drinking, Whoring, Gaming, running in Debt; he had had eight Wives. Pampirus, he becomes a Merchant; ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... her and Djama into the room, but half-way between the door and the bed I stopped, not daring to go on, held back by some impulse I could not name. I saw her lean over the pillow for a moment in silence that for me was breathless. Then came a soft, sweet sound, and then a little cry. Was it her's ...
— The Romance of Golden Star ... • George Chetwynd Griffith

... such an orderly school. Not a boy or girl moved, or uttered a whisper. The Griffin climbed into the master's seat, his wide wings spread on each side of him, because he could not lean back in his chair while they stuck out behind, and his great tail coiled around, in front of the desk, the barbed end sticking up, ready to tap any boy or girl who might misbehave. The Griffin now addressed ...
— The Bee-Man of Orn and Other Fanciful Tales • Frank R. Stockton

... forded after some dispute as to who should ride the donkey, the donkey all the while wrinkling his nose with disgust at the coldness of the speeding water and the sliminess of the stones. When we came out on the broad moraine of pebbles the other side of the stream we met a lean blackish man with yellow horse-teeth, who was much excited when he heard I was ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos

... Cantrevs provided for their entertainment, and they feasted until noon and drank until night, when they went to sleep. And then they devoured the heads of the vermin through hunger, as if they had never eaten anything. When they made a visit they left neither the fat nor the lean, neither the hot nor the cold, the sour nor the sweet, the fresh nor the salt, the boiled nor the raw.) Huarwar the son of Aflawn (who asked Arthur such a boon as would satisfy him. It was the third great plague of ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest

... clothes, had this sheet put on him, and so tied with knots at his head and feet, and his hands so placed as dead bodies are usually fitted, to be shrouded and put into their coffin or grave. Upon this urn he thus stood, with his eyes shut, and with so much of the sheet turned aside as might show his lean, pale, and death- like face, which was purposely turned towards the east, from which he expected the second coming of his and our Saviour Jesus. In this posture he was drawn at his just height, and, when the picture ...
— Andrew Lang's Introduction to The Compleat Angler • Andrew Lang

... could laugh on such a subject, and when such interests are at stake, what can exceed the ridicule of thus systematically coupling together a friend and an enemy to toleration, like fat and lean rabbits, or the man and his wife in a Dutch toy, or like fifty other absurdities made to be laughed at, but certainly never before introduced into politics as fixed and fundamental systems for the conduct of the most difficult and ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos

... in a fierce, sudden whisper. His lean fingers clasped over the girl's hand. Sir Charles was leaning back in his chair talking gaily. Nobody seemed to heed the drama that was going on in their midst. Beatrice's ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White

... and, while Win bustled about in the lean-to kitchen making hot biscuits and coffee, he began to tell us entrancing yarns of the adventures and successes they had enjoyed hunting and trapping together during the previous winter. Apparently neither had felt it any hardship that for months they had been shut off entirely from all companionship ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly

... Timbers, and had scarcely advanced ten miles in a westerly direction, when a dog of a most miserable appearance joined our company. He was soon followed by two others as lean and as weak as himself. They were evidently Indian dogs of the wolf breed, and miserable, starved animals they looked, with the ribs almost bare, while their tongues, parched and hanging downwards, showed clearly the want of water in these horrible regions. We had ourselves been ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat

... is the love of power; the spur to avarice is either the fear of poverty or a strong desire of self-indulgence. The amassers of fortunes seem divided into two opposite classes—lean, penurious-looking mortals, or jolly fellows who are determined to get possession of, because they want to enjoy, the good things of the wo others, in the fulness of their persons and the robustness of their constitutions, seem to bespeak the reversion of a landed estate, rich acres, fat beeves, ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... as ashes; it was lean and shrivelled; the cheeks were sunken; the cheek bones projected; and a million wrinkles were carved upon the deep-seamed brow and corrugated cheeks. Over that hideous face the gray hair wandered. Bob's blood seemed to freeze within his veins. The old fable tells of the Gorgon, whose face inspired ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille

... trying to prove himself to himself the most injured of men, and to hate his wife as much as possible: though the fool knows the whole time that he loves her better than anything on earth, even than that "fame," on which he tries to fatten his lean soul, snapping greedily at every scrap which falls in his way, and, in default, snapping at everybody and everything else. And little comfort it gives him. Why should it? What comfort, save in being wise and strong? And is he ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley

... him anxiously through the window. Presently she saw him relax from his position of strained attention with a great sigh, almost a groan, and lean back in his chair, covering his eyes with his hands. When he took them down, his face had the aged, ravaged expression of exhaustion which had so startled her on her arrival. Now she felt none of her frightened revulsion, but only an aching pity which sent her out to him in a rush, her arms ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield

... amazing spaces of the air, a lean face, pinched and blue with the cold, peered over the fuselage and watched the antlike procession of pin-point dots moving ...
— Tam O' The Scoots • Edgar Wallace

... will ennoble, will make joyous your lives whilst you live, and will give you a quiet heart in the retrospect when you come to die. Begin right, dear young friends. You will never find it so easy to take any decisive step, and most of all this chiefest step, as you do to-day. You will get lean and less flexible as you get older. You will get set in your ways. Habits will twine their tendrils round you, and hinder your free movement. The truth of the Gospel will become commonplace by familiarity. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren

... volunteered to try and get hold of some of the things. To do this with safety, I begged my shipmates to hold one end of a line, which we had formed out of the various pieces collected, while the other I secured round my body. By keeping the line always tight, I was able to lean over the edge and pick up several things in the water. The first was a bucket, in sound condition. This was valuable, as it would contain fresh water, and prevent the necessity of our chewing the cold ice, which chilled us extremely. Then I found some more spars, and the fragments of one of the ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston

... Rosader hath his Rosalynde; but as Ixion had Juno, who, thinking to possess a goddess, only embraced a cloud: in these imaginary fruitions of fancy I resemble the birds that fed themselves with Zeuxis' painted grapes; but they grew so lean with pecking at shadows, that they were glad, with Aesop's cock, to scrape for a barley cornel.[1] So fareth it with me, who to feed myself with the hope of my mistress's favors, sooth myself in thy suits, and only in conceit reap a wished-for content; but if my food be no better than such ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... stranger," says the Judge, "to the officers and men, and they flocked about him to obtain a sight of their future commander. He was rather below the middle stature, lean and swarthy. His body was well set, but his knees and ankles were badly formed, and he still limped upon one leg. He had a countenance remarkably steady; his nose was aquiline, his chin projecting; his forehead large and high, and his eyes black ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms

... had worn her out. Cuvier said, the force of her imagination misled her judgment, and made her see things in a light different from all the world. As a proof of this, he mentioned that she makes Corinne lean on a marble lion which is on a tomb in St. Peter's, at Rome, more than twenty feet high. Education was very much discussed. Cuvier said, that when he was sent to inspect the schools at Bordeaux and Marseilles, ...
— Personal Recollections, from Early Life to Old Age, of Mary Somerville • Mary Somerville

... Weasel, Tommy Fox went straight back to the place where he had left him. It was easy, then, to follow his queer tracks. Grumpy's legs were so short that they did not lift his lean body clear of the deep snow, except when he jumped very high; so his trail looked somewhat like that ...
— The Tale of Grumpy Weasel - Sleepy-Time Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey

... satisfactions found by widely differing persons in many types of more or less natural places. Muscular hunters and elderly birdwatchers, water-skiers and bank-fishermen, Sunday drivers on crowded highways and lean backpackers on dim trails in the South Branch highlands, baseball players and people who take naps on the grass beside the C. & O. Canal, amateur archaeologists and stock-car racing fans—all these and many other kinds of folk depend ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... annoyed me, perhaps, the most, was the confidence with which it seemed to be Mr. Greene's intention to lean upon my resources. He certainly had not written home yet, and had taken my ten napoleons, as one friend may take a few shillings from another when he finds that he has left his own silver on his dressing-table. What could he have wanted of ten napoleons? He had alleged the necessity of paying ...
— The Man Who Kept His Money In A Box • Anthony Trollope

... to each one's peculiarity, as was the custom among the ancient Romans. Wherefore one is called Beautiful (Pulcher), another the Big-nosed (Naso), another the Fat-legged (Cranipes), another Crooked (Torvus), another Lean (Macer), and so on. But when they have become very skilled in their professions and done any great deed in war or in time of peace, a cognomen from art is given to them, such as Beautiful the Great Painter (Pulcher, ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells

... good deal wrought, but seemed to be fading under the exposure of many marches. His arms were excellent; but all his martial accoutrements, even to a keen long-bladed knife, were suspended from the rammer of his rifle; the weapon itself being allowed to lean, in careless confidence, against the trunk of the nearest oak, as if their master felt there was no immediate use ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper

... of the Hall, around the pond, Edith supporting her father's feeble footsteps, and trying to cheer him by pointing out some improvements which ought to be made, while the old man, with his mind full of sweet peace, thought it happiness enough for him to lean on her loving arm and hear her sweet voice as she spoke those words of love which for so many years he had ...
— The Living Link • James De Mille

... had a strange serving man, the same who had ridden with him and me to meet the Danish forces; and this man was a fenman from Sedgemoor, who knew all the paths through the wastes. Lean and loose-limbed he was, and somewhat wild looking, mostly silent; but where his lord went he went also. They said that he had saved the thane's life more than once in the great battles about Reading, when the Danish host ...
— King Alfred's Viking - A Story of the First English Fleet • Charles W. Whistler

... South. Two new guests had arrived while I had been so engrossed in talking to the comtesse that I had not observed their entrance, a gentleman and his wife. The lady was amiable-looking, but of no great distinction of appearance. The gentleman I thought I had seen before; his long, rather lean visage, somber but dignified, looked familiar to me. When the marchioness told me it was Mr. Monroe, I wondered that I had not recognized him at once, for he was a familiar figure on our streets during the ten years when Philadelphia was the capital. ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon

... living from her and send her to starvation without a shadow of compunction," was the reply made in the fine gentleman's cultivated voice, "—if she were capable of what you were capable of tonight. You are, I judge, about forty, and, though you are lean, you are a powerful woman; the child is, I believe, barely six." And then, looking down at her through his glass, he added—to her quite shuddering astonishment—in a tone whose very softness made it really awful to ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... snaps like glass in such a cold climate as that of Ungava), but by thongs of undressed sealskin, which, although they held the fabric very loosely together in appearance, were, nevertheless, remarkably strong, and served their purpose very well. Two short upright bars behind served as a back to lean against. But the most curious part of the machine was the substance with which the runners were shod, in order to preserve them. This was a preparation of mud and water, which was plastered smoothly on in a soft condition, ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... and called down, announcing simply that the voyage was ended: and in the dusk there I saw monk after monk upheave himself from the straw and come clambering up the ladder; tall monks and short, old monks and young and middle-aged, lean monks and thickset—but the most of them cadaverous, and all of them yellow with sea-sickness; twenty-eight monks, all barefoot, all tolerably dirty, and all blinking in the fresh sunshine. When they were gathered, at a sign from one of them—by dress not distinguishable from his fellows—all ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine

... tribe who had for some time accompanied them, went off to obtain some sheep, an ox, honey, milk and fat. On their return the milk turned out sour camels' milk, full of sand, and the fat very rancid, while a single lean sheep ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... best medicine; it has quite cured my face and left me no pain but the impossibility of being in two places at once, which is no small sorrow, since one of them would be near you. But the boys [Lord Drumlanrig and Lord Charles Douglas] are too lean to travel as yet. Compassion being the predominant fashion of the place, we are preserved alive with as much care as the partridges, which no one yet has had the heart to kill, though several barbarous attempts have been made. If I could ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville

... them, the Germans, as we should expect, lean rather to the Northern type, but vary it with touches of purity, and other touches of religion; the Italians to the Southern, exalting it into a mysticism which can hardly be called devotional, though it at times wears the garb ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury

... had done with the writing-table. He moved swiftly over to the safe and stood there listening for a few seconds. Then from his pocket he drew a bunch of keys. To Laverick's surprise, at the stranger's first effort the great door of the safe swung open. He saw the man lean forward, saw his hand reappear almost directly with the pocket-book clenched in his fingers. Then he stood once more quite still, listening. Satisfied that no one was disturbed, he closed the door of the safe softly and moved ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... morning when a carriage, filled with Americans, drew up on an inn near the foot of the mountain. There were guides without number waiting, like beasts of prey, to fall on them; and all the horses of the country—a wonderful lot—an amazing lot—a lean, cranky, raw-boned, ill-fed, wall-eyed, ill-natured, sneaking, ungainly, half-foundered, half-starved lot; afflicted with all the diseases that horse-flesh is heir to. There were no others, so but little time was wasted. ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille

... Short A Sculptor Beyond The Saddest Hour Show Me the Way My Heritage Resolve At Eleusis Courage Solitude The Year Outgrows the Spring The Beautiful Land of Nod The Tiger Only a Simple Rhyme I Will Be Worthy of It Sonnet Regret Let Me Lean Hard Penalty Sunset The Wheel of the Breast A Meeting Earnestness A ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... down in a cold pale flare of light. The trees grow dark: the shadows lean to the east: And lights wink out through the windows, one by one. A clamor of frosty sirens mourns at the night. Pale slate-grey clouds whirl up from ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken

... is under his hands to mould it as he pleases; and if he finds it untractable in the working, he may abandon it without incurring any new inconvenience. But in the question concerning the repeal of an old one, the work is of more difficulty; because laws, like houses, lean on one another, and the operation is delicate, and should be necessary: the objection, in such a case, ought not to arise from the natural infirmity of human institutions, but from substantial faults which contradict the nature and end of law itself,—faults not arising from the imperfection, ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... and pale gold of the declining light, this beautiful evening, I heard the first hum and preparation of awakening spring—very faint—whether in the earth or roots, or starting of insects, I know not—but it was audible, as I lean'd on a rail (I am down in my country quarters awhile,) and look'd long at the western horizon. Turning to the east, Sirius, as the shadows deepen'd, came forth in dazzling splendor. And great Orion; and a little to the north-east the big Dipper, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... keeping of kine.[344] The wise have said that a person who gives away the cow unto any of such sinful persons has to sink into everlasting hell. One should never give unto a Brahmana a cow that is lean, or that produces calves that do not live, or that is barren, or that is diseased, or that is defective of limb, or that is worn out with toil. The man that gives away ten thousand kine attains to heaven and sports in bliss in the companionship of Indra. The man who makes gifts of kine by hundred ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... insist upon calling Europe. The manor during these peaceful invasions showed signs of life. Men from the brig went up to the big white house, and remained there for a week or a month. And they were lean men, battle-scarred and fierce of eye, some with armless sleeves, some with stiff legs, some twisted with rheumatism. All spoke French, and spat whenever they saw the perfidious flag of old England. This ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath

... lean back, smoking his cigar and looking at them out of contented, half-shut eyes, as they stitched, one at each end of the long canvas fender stool. He was waiting, he said, for the moment when their heads would come ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair

... lounged in the dim light across the deck. D'Alcacer had got promptly in touch with the store of cigarettes he owed to the Governor General's generosity. A large, pulsating spark glowed, illuminating redly the design of his lips under the fine dark moustache, the tip of his nose, his lean chin. D'Alcacer reproached himself for an unwonted light-heartedness which had somehow taken possession of him. He had not experienced that sort of feeling for years. Reprehensible as it was he did not want anything to disturb it. But as he could ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad

... thou—thou lean and haggard wretch! Thou living satire on the name of man! Thou that hast made a god of sordid gold, And to thine idol offered up thy soul? Oh, how I pity thee thy wasted years: Age without comfort—youth that ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie

... shadow in which he was sitting the guardian examined them with the keen eyes of one who had looked upon travelers of many nations. He knew at once that the woman was English. As for the man—yes, probably he was English too, Dark, lean, wrinkled, he was no doubt an Englishman who had been much away from his own country, which the guardian conceived of as wrapped in perpetual fogs ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... as a progressive science, and lean specially on that side of it, the question will arise, how we justify our departure from ancient ways, and how we satisfy the world that there is reason and method in our innovations. ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

... feebleness and fainting, such as I never had in my life before. The men urged me to climb the ladders to a level where the air was better, but they might as well have urged me to lift up the rock. I could do nothing but sit down and lean fainting against the rocks. This arose entirely from the badness of the air. After a time I felt a trifle better, and then I climbed one short ladder, and sat down very faint again. When I recovered, two men tied a rope round me, and went up the ladder ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy

... forth, and in order to have a back to lean against, they placed it exactly across the door into ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy

... kept me living; and in dying he has taught me to die, not in sorrow and with regret, but with a fervent desire of death. Twenty and six years had he served me, and I found him a most rare and faithful man; and now that I had made him rich, and expected to lean on him as the staff and the repose of my old age, he is taken from me, and no other hope remains than that of seeing him again in Paradise. A sign of God was this happy death to him; yet, even more than ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli

... pattern of a vigorous age, seemed to lean a little upon his wife as she walked beside him, her arm tucked confidently into his; but it was a leaning of the spirit rather than of the flesh. She, younger than he by fifteen years, was a tiny woman, her hair white but her waist still slim. She seemed to tinkle and twinkle. Her slight hands,—the ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin

... rose up slowly, and bade me to her that she might lean upon my shoulder and be helped upstairs, so slothful a beast as she was; and as we went up I heard her say softly to herself: Weary on it, now must I drink a sup of the Water of Might, that I may remember and do and desire. But dear is my sister, and without doubt she hath matters ...
— The Water of the Wondrous Isles • William Morris

... had been that so soon as the men had finished their dinner we would weigh anchor, while I, smoking a cigar, with Ethelbertha by my side, would lean over the gunwale and watch the white cliffs of the Fatherland sink imperceptibly into the horizon. Ethelbertha and I carried out our part of the programme, and waited, with ...
— Three Men on the Bummel • Jerome K. Jerome

... times means that all share more or less in them, and in a period of hard times all feel the stress to a greater or less degree. It surely ought not to be necessary to enter into any proof of this statement; the memory of the lean years which began in 1893 is still vivid, and we can contrast them with the conditions in this very year which is now closing. Disaster to great business enterprises can never have its effects limited ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... are much superior to any other letters almost in the volume—certainly to Mrs. Hemans's own. Isn't this so? And so you talk, you in England, of Prince Albert's 'folly,' do you really? Well, among the odd things we lean to in Italy is to an actual belief in the greatness and importance of the future exhibition. We have actually imagined it to be a noble idea, and you take me by surprise in speaking of the general distaste ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... prairie, practising their bows and arrows on any small animal they might find. Gay young squaws—adorned on each cheek with a spot of ochre or red clay, and arrayed in tunics of fringed buckskin embroidered with porcupine quills—were mounted on ponies, astride like men; while lean and tattered hags—the drudges of the tribe, unkempt and hideous—scolded the lagging horses, or screeched at the disorderly dogs, with voices not unlike the yell of the great horned owl. Most of the warriors were on horseback, ...
— A Half-Century of Conflict, Volume II • Francis Parkman

... when they were exhibited (in the clay) in the Salon of 1876. They are admirably cast and not less admirably conceived: the one a serene, robust young mother, beautiful in line and attitude; the other a lean and vigilant young man, in a helmet that overshadows his serious eyes, resting an outstretched arm, an admirable military member, upon the hilt of a sword. These figures contain abundant assurance that M. Paul Dubois has been ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James

... forestall another. Apiadarse con los pobres: To have pity on the poor. Aportar a Barcelona: To put into Barcelona. Apreciar en mucho: To appreciate highly. Arder de colera: To burn with anger. Armarse de paciencia: To arm oneself with patience. Arrimarse a la pared: To lean against the wall. Arrostrar (con (or por)) los peligros: To face the dangers. Atender (a) los negocios: To attend to business. Aventajarse a ...
— Pitman's Commercial Spanish Grammar (2nd ed.) • C. A. Toledano

... than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through the Revolution, hand in hand they stood round the administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. Unkind feeling, if it exist, alienation and distrust are the growth, unnatural to such soils, of false principle; since sown. They are weeds, the seeds of which that ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers

... ice from the river. There is a sign at the edge of the birch swamp which says: "Positively no trespassing allowed here"—but it is not necessary now, for the river has overflowed the swamp and big masses of ice lean up against the trunks of the birches. Out in the main channel the river is swiftly flowing, packed with ice floes, from the little clear fragments which shine like crystals, to the great masses as big as the side of a house, bearing upon them the accumulated ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell

... sounded like a fly buzzing in the tomb of kings. And after all, he did not hear me; I could tell that by the look on his face as he sat there staring into the light, the lank, dark hair framing his waxen brow, his shoulders hanging forward, his lean, strong, sentient fingers wrapped around the brown neck of "Ugo," the ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various

... their own clothing and property, besides their share of the plunder from their masters' houses. And in many cases too much was given. But now hundreds and thousands are coming in, shivering, hungry, so lean and bony and sickly that one wonders to what race they belong. Old men of seventy and children of seven years have kept pace with Sherman's advance, some of them for two months and over, from the interior of Georgia; of course little or nothing could be brought but the clothing on their backs ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various

... was made to feel that she was the object of especial care and interest on the part of the management, and that if anything went wrong with her she could always have a helper and teacher in the management to lean upon. ...
— The Principles of Scientific Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor

... reach a long distance. You are of elm-shaded streets with little shops where they sell kites and marbles, You are of great parks where every one walks and nobody is at home. You cover the blind sides of greenhouses And lean over the top to say a hurry-word through the glass To your ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... April 27 a vexatious day. During the early part of the night men from my company had to carry rations to the front line companies. At midnight, while resting in a wretched lean-to in the sunken road, I had tidings that Corporal Viggers and several others had been hit by a shell, which destroyed all C Company's rations. Of these casualties there was a man whose name I forget, who insisted on going, not back to hospital, but into the raid a few hours afterwards. He went, ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose

... be music, one of the guests being Endbury's favorite amateur soprano, another a pianist much thought of. The singer took her place by the piano, assuming carefully the correct position. Lydia watched her balance on the balls of her feet, lean forward a little, throw up her chest and draw in her abdomen. As the preliminary chords of the accompaniment sounded, she was almost visibly concentrating her thoughts on the tension of her vocal chords, on the position of the soft palate and the resonance of the nasal cavities. The thoughts ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield

... why I found such comfort in coming here to lean upon your faith in me. [Taking his hat.] But now you have ...
— John Gabriel Borkman • Henrik Ibsen

... guilty in conscience before the judge has given sentence, fears every hour to die; for he was grieved, and in wailing spent the time, went talking to himself, wringing of his hands, sobbing and sighing. His flesh fell away, and he was very lean, and kept himself close; neither could he abide, see, or hear of ...
— Mediaeval Tales • Various

... conversation he is very animated, and likes to ask questions. A favourite and characteristic attitude with him was to put his foot on a chair or stool and rest his elbow on his knee, with his chin on his hand; or to sit, or rather to half sit, half lean, on the corner of a table or desk, one of his legs swinging freely, and when anything that tickled him was said he would laugh in the heartiest manner, even at the risk of bringing on his cough, ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp

... Earl was, at this most important crisis, to depend upon the subtle and dangerous Deventer, and upon two inferior personages, the "fellow Junius" and a non-descript, whom Hohenlo characterized as a "long lean Englishman, with a little black beard." This meagre individual however seems to have been of somewhat doubtful nationality. He called himself Otheman, claimed to be a Frenchman, had lived much in England, wrote with great fluency and spirit, both in French ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... upon the stairs. One after another, one after another, dozen after dozen, score after score, more, more, more, up they came; all shaking hands with Martin. Such varieties of hands, the thick, the thin, the short, the long, the fat, the lean, the coarse, the fine; such differences of temperature, the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, the flabby; such diversities of grasp, the tight, the loose, the short-lived, and the lingering! Still up, up, up, more, more, more; and ever and anon the Captain's voice was heard above the crowd—'There's ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... view nearer than this visionary one, though the little nun seldom looked at it. If she should lean from her window she would see the mountain-side dropping from the gray walls of her home, with clinging flowery vines and trees growing downward, while the olives and grapevines of the Campagna came to ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... struggling world it is! And how weary one becomes of the incessant strife when those upon whose hearts one might lean are far away, unknown, or dead! Oh, I am very lonely. What is life without love? It is not to be borne. Do you remember what it was to lie in your cot, to watch the firelight on the ceiling, feeling ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema

... either side of her sat the aunts: the elder much too lean, the younger much too dishevelled, and both as sun-tanned as harvesters, betraying their poverty in flimsy, faded gowns which the dismayed youth named to himself not draperies but hangings. Yet they were sweet-mannered, fluent, gay, cordial, and unreserved, ...
— The Flower of the Chapdelaines • George W. Cable

... only some Thirty, seated now on the extreme tip of the Left, separate from the world. A virtuous Petion; an incorruptible Robespierre, most consistent, incorruptible of thin acrid men; Triumvirs Barnave, Duport, Lameth, great in speech, thought, action, each according to his kind; a lean old Goupil de Prefeln: on these and what will follow them has pure ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... black shade of what obsidian steep Stiffens the white narcissus numb with sleep? (Seed which Demeter's daughter bore from home, Uptorn by desperate fingers long ago, Reluctant even as she, Undone Persephone, And even as she set out again to grow In twilight, in perdition's lean and inauspicious loam). She will love well," I said, "The flowers of the dead; Where dark Persephone the winter round, Uncomforted for home, uncomforted, Lacking a sunny southern slope in northern Sicily, With sullen pupils focussed on a dream, Stares on the stagnant stream ...
— Second April • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... of desolation swept over the girl as the full realization of the situation burst upon her, and the blackness of despair filled her soul with anguish. She was alone. She had no one to lean upon. No ear to which she could impart her sorrows. Her mother a prisoner like herself. Her father—a fugitive wandering she knew not whither. As the bitterness of her lot assailed her in all its force she could no longer control herself but ...
— In Doublet and Hose - A Story for Girls • Lucy Foster Madison

... problems, each in his own way, yet both in the end arriving at much the same results. Such are the coincidences between the two, that but lately an eminent German professor,[3] published a treatise to show that the Greeks had borrowed their philosophy from India, while others lean to the opinion that in philosophy the Hindus are the pupils of the Greeks. This is the same feeling which impelled Dugald Stewart, when he saw the striking similarity between Greek and Sanskrit, to maintain ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... occupy, at last understood how the model of the Mirabelle had been so painstakingly arranged inside a bottle. For the time seemed long between glimpses of shore and shore, or until they sailed for a time along some wild and beautiful tropic coast. Then Chris would lean on the side of the ship looking at the mountainous or jungled shore. A scent such as comes from the opened door of a hothouse would drift out to sea to the sailors, who looked yearningly toward the land and the greenness. A warm breath of flowers, damp moss, and leaves in ...
— Mr. Wicker's Window • Carley Dawson

... "But why lean if I'm strong enough to stand alone? Why weaken myself just to gratify your mania for owning and bossing? But let me finish what I was saying. I never got any quarter because I was a woman. No woman does, as a matter of fact; and in the ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips

... half down the western slope— Seen as along an unglazed telescope— Lingers and lolls, loth to be done with day: Gifting the long, lean, lanky street And its abounding confluences of being With aspects generous and bland: Making a thousand harnesses to shine As with new ore from some enchanted mine, And every horse's coat so full of sheen He looks new-tailored, and every 'bus ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley

... came the lean features, the sidelong shy movements of Edward Crampton, seated in a circle of talkers close at hand. I had a whiff of his strained, unmusical voice, and behold! he was saying something about the "Will of ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... second-class passenger, a lean, scraggy-looking man, wrapped up in a fur coat and a rug and surrounded ...
— The Schoolmaster and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... was held out to him. Every one watched him narrowly as he looked at it, and were amazed to see him suddenly turn deadly white. His hand shook violently and he had to lean against the desk to keep from falling. He gazed at Mr. Cook pleadingly, a ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene

... a narrow street with apartment houses of gray stone and iron balconies along either side of it. The sun sets at one end of the street at different times during the day and we all lean out on the balconies to look. On the house, one below mine, on the other side of our street, is a square sign ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... not entered a church. So Sunday became her feast day. She put in the entire morning preparing a Sunday dinner for her father and nearly always John Levine. After dinner, the three, with Adam, would tramp a mile up the road, stopping to lean over the bars and talk dairying with Pa Norton, winter wheat with Farmer Jansen, and hardy alfalfa with old Schmidt. Between farms, Amos and John always talked politics, local and national, ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow

... amount to any thing, sir, I'm sure of that; but get up on your feet, if you can. There! lean upon me, and let us get back ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne

... land; and though she never expected to return thither, yet it was not pleasant to feel that she had been cut asunder from all possibility of it. Now, for the moment, she was in the mood to look around her for a friend to lean upon; and it might be that she could find that friend in Sergius, if she would consent to let her vengeance sleep, and would forbear to pursue him with further machinations. His love, to be sure, was gone from her, never to be restored; ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... under his deep tan. In stunned silence, the Navy officers and scientists watched as Tom's lean hands ...
— Tom Swift and the Electronic Hydrolung • Victor Appleton

... said the woman obstinately, and before he could stop her she had opened the door and climbed down into the snow. A moment later he hid his face in his hands; two gaunt lean figures rushed upon her from the forest. No doubt she had courted her fate, but Abbleway had no wish to see a human being torn to pieces and ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki

... type should have selected, as the work to which he had dedicated his life, the profession of medicine, and still more strange that he had become a specialist in the diseases of children. Yet such was the case, and many a mother, whose heartstrings were plucked by the lean fingers of Despair, had cause to bless the almost uncanny surgical skill which his highly-trained brain exercised through the medium of his ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... pliable, and, provided it has the least hope to lean upon, adapts itself wonderfully to the emergencies of fortune, especially when the imagination is gay and luxuriant. This was the case with our adventurer; instead of indulging the melancholy ideas which his loss inspired, he had recourse to the flattering ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... pair of broad, lean shoulders. "He hasn't got here yet, Morton. I don't know what's happened. He wrote me two weeks ago that he'd meet me at the station in New York yesterday for the three-fifty-eight, but he wasn't there and I haven't heard ...
— Left Guard Gilbert • Ralph Henry Barbour

... oft by yon blue gushing stream Shall Sorrow lean her drooping head,[lj] And feed deep thought with many a dream, And lingering pause and lightly tread; Fond wretch! as if her step disturbed ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Vol. 3 (of 7) • Lord Byron

... so low that since—as has been said—she was but little over four feet, Christian had to lean low over Harry's withers in order to drop ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... When he has no one to tell him what to do, or to warn him against what he must not do, the child feels his helplessness. And there is valuable tonic for the child's body as well as for his will in the comfortable consciousness of a superior authority upon which he can safely lean. ...
— Your Child: Today and Tomorrow • Sidonie Matzner Gruenberg

... territory, and his round, sleek, cream-coloured palfrey, used to ambling in civic processions, was as great a contrast to raw- boned, wild-eyed Nibelung, all dappled with misty grey, as was the stately, substantial burgher to his lean, hungry-looking brother, or Dame Johanna's dignified, curled, white poodle, which was forcibly withheld from following Christina, to the coarse-bristled, wolfish- looking hound who glared at the household pet with angry and contemptuous eyes, and made poor Christina's heart throb ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge

... shrill notes the pipe uttered, You heard as if an army muttered; And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling; And out of the houses the rats came tumbling. Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, grey rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers, Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber

... move, and after a perplexed look from one to the other, Ben stooped his shoulder that she might lean upon it. ...
— Mabel's Mistake • Ann S. Stephens

... who, the very week after their marriage, bid her take her farewell of the town for ever, in consequence of five or six thousand pounds a year he enjoys on the borders of Cornwall. Alas! poor Miss Blague! I saw her go away about this time twelvemonth, in a coach with four such lean horses, that I cannot believe she is yet half way to her miserable little castle. What can be the matter! all the girls seem afflicted with the rage of wedlock, and however small their portion of charms may be, they think it only necessary to show themselves ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre



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