"Retrospect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... commonsense it is the poorest kind of business at the present time of life to sit down and grizzle because one proved in the long run not to be a poet. I will not deny a certain inevitable melancholy in the retrospect, taking it all round. Yet even whilst I feel this, there is an inward protest. The loss is not all loss. The game of life is one in which we gain by losing, and lose by gaining. In The Ghost's Bargain with the Haunted Man it was a part of the agreement that the ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... this terrible retrospect, Paslew strove to bend his thoughts on other things. The choir was singing the "Dies Irae," and their ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... of that gathering, little noted at the time, assumes strange significance in retrospect. At one platform Patrick Pearse, then headmaster of St. Enda's school, spoke in Irish. What he said ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... will into the solitudes. The younger Pliny, moralising to his friend Minutius (I should like to think him the progenitor of Aldo Manuccio), describes the delights of seclusion at his villa on the shore of the Adriatic. 'At such a season,' says he, in a retrospect of the day's work, 'one is apt to reflect how much of my life has been lost in trifles! At least it is a reflection that frequently comes across me at Laurentum, after I have been employing myself in my studies, or even in the necessary care of the animal machine; for the ...
— The Book-Hunter at Home • P. B. M. Allan
... Queen Victoria; so assured in her own room, a large part of her attention always given to the successful issue of her duties, the remainder at the disposal of her guests. It was an old-fashioned, not unpleasant feeling: like retrospect. But she had beautiful, big, smooth emeralds and sapphires on her fingers. Money! What a curious thing it is! Aaron noticed the deference of all the guests at table: a touch of obsequiousness: before the money! And the ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... through which one looked across a vale of cornfields at an ancient town that became strange and magical as the sun went down, so that I was held gazing at it, and afterwards had to flee the twilight across the windy spaces and under the dim and darkling trees. It is only now in the distant retrospect that I identify that far-off city of wonder, and luminous mist with the commonplace little town, through whose narrow streets we drove to the railway station. But, of course, that is ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... commend to you The Mask (METHUEN) as a craftsmanlike essay in imaginative realism; ruthlessly candid and self-revealing, but free from that tiresome obsession of the ultra-realists that everything that has ever happened is equally important in retrospect. The narrator, Vanya Gombarov, a Russian Jew, discourses reflectively and detachedly, as it were from behind a mask, to an English artist friend about his early childhood in his own land and the dismal adventures of the Gombarov family in that underworld ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... looms up on the retrospect of my memory as Number 3 was as unlike the Kentuckian, as the latter was to Thompson. He was a disciple of Esculapius—not thin and pale, as these usually are, but fat, red, and jolly. I think he was originally a "Yankee," ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... dear brother, who know my strong attachment to my friends, and how much pleasure I have hitherto experienced from retrospect, can judge from the above circumstances, how intense were my sufferings. But the point, the acme of my distresses, consisted in the awful uncertainty of our final fate. My prevailing opinion was, that my husband would ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... laughed outright at her enthusiasm. Many times during her eager conversation with Baldos she had almost betrayed the fact that she was not the princess. Some of her expressions were distinctly unregal and some of her slips were hopeless, as she viewed them in retrospect. ...
— Beverly of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... or if sometimes he bestows a reflection on its original aspect, the mind seems to be carried back to a period of time much more remote than it really is. One advantage at least results from having lived in a state of society ever on the change and always for the better, that it doubles the retrospect of life. With me at any rate it has had that effect. Did not the definite number of my years teach me to the contrary, I should think myself at least one hundred years old instead of fifty. The case is ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... youth is going, and I have nothing to show for it but ten years of dressmaking. The best of my life is over, and when I look back on it, it is only a blank." It was as if the interview with the great man she had just left had completed the desolating retrospect of a lifetime. Was there nothing but disenchantment ahead of her? Was life merely the dropping of illusion after illusion, the falling of petals at the first touch from a flower that is beginning to fade? "Yes, nothing has ever happened to me that was worth while," she repeated, forgetting ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Dvorak's, both in advance and in retrospect, is Henry Schoenefeld, who wrote a characteristic suite (op. 15) before the Dvorakian invasion, and an overture, "In the Sunny South," afterward. The suite, which has been played frequently abroad, winning the praises of Hanslick, Nicode, and Rubinstein, is scored for string orchestra. It ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... it is further urged that in historical retrospect, and in the light of evolution, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that in the course of man's development from a savage and barbaric condition all manner of ills—bloodshed, slavery, etc.—have been necessary stages; may not, then, sin be claimed ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... by the simple sympathy of common suffering, came hurrying across my memory; for each face before me was associated with some adventure or some peril, reminded me of some triumph or of some loss. What a wild, weird retrospect it was,—that mind's flash over the troubled past! so like ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... girl laughed again, nodded, and disappeared. The consul, amused yet somewhat perplexed over the naive brusqueness of the interview, waited patiently. Presently she returned, a little out of breath, but apparently still enjoying some facetious retrospect, and said, "Maw will be down soon." After a pause, fixing her bright eyes mischievously ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... RHEIMS, Dec. 5.—Eating a ham sandwich while squinting through an artillery telescope at the cathedral and hearing the man who fired the famous shots tell all about it was the unique combination I experienced today, and in retrospect the ham sandwich stands out as the most important feature, for it symbolizes the morale ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... after eleven days inside, that seemed in the retrospect almost as many months. He flattened himself against the wall, and stood there for a minute or two, looking and listening. He thought he might hear Crockett again inside, but evidently the Tennesseean had gone back at once. In front of him was only ...
— The Texan Scouts - A Story of the Alamo and Goliad • Joseph A. Altsheler
... profitable only as a legitimate topic of contrition. How much wiser and more profitable to anticipate the serious judgment which sooner or later we must pass upon our actions, and so to shape our conduct in advance, that the retrospect, when it comes, may be a source of joy and congratulation, rather than of shame and repentance. How much wiser to direct our bark to some definite and well selected channel, than to float at random along the current of events, the sport of every idle wave. ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... overwhelming numbers. They wellnigh blocked the entrance of the Corso when we got back to it, and the cafe where we had agreed to have tea was so packed that our gay escapade began to look rather gloomy in the retrospect. But suddenly a table was vacated; a waiter was caught, in the vain attempt to ignore us, and given such a comprehensive order that we could see respect kindling in his eyes, and before we could reasonably have hoped it be spread before us tea and bread and ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... years gild our retrospect. It was in 1903 that Martin Culpepper, a man in his seventies, collected and published "The Complete Poetical and Philosophical Works of Watts McHurdie, together with Notes and a Biographical Appreciation by Martin F. Culpepper." One of the earlier chapters, ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... Actually given or only meditated, the whole of these twenty Readings—meaning the entire collection of the identical marked copies used by the Novelist himself on both sides of the Atlantic—have, for the verification of this retrospect, been placed for the time being in the writer's possession. Selecting from among them those merely which are familiar to the public, from their having been actually produced, he here proposes cursorily to glance one by one through ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... disappeared in disgrace; and there I sat by my Wife's side, endeavouring to form a retrospect of the year 1999 and of the possibilities of the year 2000; but not quite able to shake of the thoughts suggested by the prattle of my bright little Hexagon. Only a few sands now remained in the half-hour glass. Rousing myself ...
— Flatland • Edwin A. Abbott
... he continued. "In the retrospect, nothing. It seems to me already as but an infinitesimal point. Things that engrossed me, and seemed of such moment, that overshadowed the duty of obeying my conscience—what were they, and where? Ah, where? They endured but a moment. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... not know a house apparently more commodiously arranged than this, which was planned and built with utmost precipitation, and in the very heyday of a most tempestuous youth. In one thing only, upon a retrospect at this day of the whole case, there may appear to have been some imprudence, viz. that timber being then at a most unprecedented high price, it is probable that the building cost seven or eight hundred pounds more than it would have done a few years later. Allowing ...
— The Uncollected Writings of Thomas de Quincey—Vol. 1 - With a Preface and Annotations by James Hogg • Thomas de Quincey
... relish the "cold soup of retrospect" and persist in picking the "bones of regret," without any appetite for the present or promises of the future. Beside one of these I would place a happy-hearted soul, who laughs through the window of the eye and on whose face ...
— Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures • George W. Bain
... grammar school I had as good teaching as I had had in the primary. It seems to me in retrospect that it was as good, on the whole, as the public school ideals of the time made possible. When I recall how I was taught geography, I see, indeed, that there was room for improvement occasionally both in the substance and in the method of instruction. But I know of ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... Reginald bring his retrospect; his other friends come up, and they all return homeward. Here, too, ends the story of this canto; but not without warranting some surmise of what will furnish out the next. There is evidence of observation ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... backward to Marathon, and that their future existence seems to have been suspended on the contingency, whether the Persian or the Greek banner should wave victorious in the beams of that day's setting sun. And as his imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to the interesting moment, he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts, his interest for the result overwhelms him; he trembles, as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... In retrospect, the Great Rebellion seems the mightiest battle and the most glorious victory in the annals of time. The battle-field was a thousand miles in length; the combatants numbered two million men; the struggle was protracted over four years; the hillsides of the ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... The instrument known by the name of Hartley's Quadrant, now universally in use and generally attributed to Dr. Hartley, was invented by Thomas Godfrey of Philadelphia. See Jefferson's Notes on Virginia; likewise Miller's Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century, in which the original documents relative to Godfrey's invention are ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... administered the Holy Communion to the settlers at Rangihoua. The service was held in a "shed," but "the solemnity of the occasion did not fail to excite in our breasts sensations and feelings corresponding with the peculiar situation in which we were. We had retrospect to the period when this holy ordinance was first instituted in Jerusalem in the presence of our Lord's disciples, and adverted to the peculiar circumstances under which it was now administered at the very ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... for fear of being thought odd, for fear of the opinion of worldly companions, for fear of being pitied or laughed at, over and over again you have run away. The things that seemed important when they were present seem pitifully insignificant in the retrospect. ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... a strange land and recalling a glorious past, should have indulged in a bit of exaggeration in his sorrowful retrospect, is not more than natural; and that his picture on the whole is true is proved by similar schools which existed in Russia till recently. The descriptions of these institutions by Smolenskin as well as writers of ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... understand the insurrection at Genoa in April 1849, in the quelling of which H.M.S. Vengeance and its captain, the Earl of Hardwicke, took so notable a part, it is necessary to take a short retrospect ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... Press-yard," is too curious to be omitted. "That while they [the prisoners] flattered themselves with hopes of life, which they were made to believe were the necessary consequences of a surrender at discretion, they did, without any retrospect to the crimes they were committed for, live in so profuse a manner, and fared so voluptuously, through the means of daily visitants and helps from abroad, that money circulated very plentifully; and while it was difficult to change ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume II. • Mrs. Thomson
... of the later date at which they were dictated by Jeremiah—in fact only a probable reference to Egypt's invasion of Palestine in 608, Ch. II. 16, and part, if not all, of Ch. III. 6-18. The general theme is a historical retrospect—Israel's early loyalty to her God, and her subsequent declension to the worship of other gods, figured as adultery; along with a profession of penitence by the people, to which God responds by a stern call to a deeper repentance and thorough reform; failing this, her doom, though vaguely described ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... this in retrospect it seems that the blind musician stood in some peculiar and significant relation to the more ordinary life about him. But for him, I should probably have omitted to describe my night among the Turks. He made the coffee-house ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... of pain and take on the poignancy of beauty. The memory of suffering endured is often the last thing from which we would be parted, while humdrum happiness we are quite willing to forget. Because we realize completely only in retrospect, it may well be that the present exists chiefly for the sake of the future. Then let the days come with veiled faces, accept their gifts whose value we are so little able to appraise! There is a profound and practical truth in Christ's saying, "Resist not ...
— Four-Dimensional Vistas • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... Dawkins answered. He looked toward his two companions as if for confirmation. He looked at the three crewmen, at Cal, all sprawled or crouched there beneath the tree at the edge of the clearing. "We thought it was the end of everything," he said in retrospect, "but we found out quick that ...
— Eight Keys to Eden • Mark Irvin Clifton
... of my diffidences, and the like, I appeal to your own heart, if it be possible for you to make my case your own for one moment, and to retrospect some parts of your behaviour, words, and actions, whether I am not rather to be justified than censured: and whether, of all the men in the world, avowing what you avow, you ought not to think so. If you do not, let me admonish you, Sir, from the very great mismatch that then ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... of vol. iv. (that is to say, part ii. vol. ii.) we return, though still in retrospect, to the direct fate of Mandane. Nitocris is dead, Philidaspes has succeeded to the crown of Assyria, and has carried Mandane off to his own dominions. The situation with so robustious a person as this prince may seem awkward, and indeed, as is observed in a later part of the book, the heroine's ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... solitude, heroic execution of it in action; intrepidity and coolness in storms, fearlessness of death in civil strife; confidence in the destiny—not of an individual, but of the human race; a life risked without hesitation or retrospect in venturing into the unknown and phantom-peopled ocean, 1,500 leagues across, and on which the first step no more allowed of second thoughts than Caesar's passage of the Rubicon; untiring study, knowledge as extensive as the science of his day, skillful but honorable management ...
— Christopher Columbus and His Monument Columbia • Various
... the human organism is a natural timepiece in which the ticks are conscious sensations. The greater the number of sensations which occupy the foreground of consciousness during the day, the longer the day seems in the retrospect. But the various groups of sensations which accompany our daily work tend to become automatic from continual repetition, and to sink into the background of consciousness; and in a very complex and busied life ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... opened the situation of poet-laureate. These two offices, with a salary of L200 paid quarterly, and the celebrated annual butt of canary, were conferred upon Dryden 18th August 1670.[29] The grant bore a retrospect to the term after Davenant's demise, and is declared to be to "John Dryden, master of arts, in consideration of his many acceptable services theretofore done to his present Majesty, and from an observation of his learning and eminent abilities, and his great skill and elegant style, both in ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... return of a man to the haunts of his youth, after he has acquired fame and a recognised position in the world, which is of itself sufficient to arrest attention. We are interested in the retrospect and the contrast, the juxtaposition of the old and the new, the hopes of early years, the memory of the struggles and contests of manhood, the repose of victory. A man may differ as much as he pleases from the doctrines of Mr. Carlyle, he may reject his historical teachings, ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... thinking of Alice. His brain, playing double, calculated with lightning swiftness the chances and movements of that whirlwind rush of fight, while at the same time it swept through a retrospect of all the years since Alice came into his life. How he had watched her grow and bloom; how he had taught her, trained her mind and soul and body to high things, loved her with a fatherly passion unbounded, guarded her from the coarse and lawless influences of her surroundings. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... which did for him the office of the finer sort of memory, bringing its object to mind with a great clearness, yet, as sometimes happens in dreams, raised a little above itself, and above ordinary retrospect. The true aspect of the place, especially of the house there in which he had lived as a child, the fashion of its doors, its hearths, its windows, the very scent upon the air of it, was with him in sleep for a season; only, with tints more musically blent ...
— A Book of English Prose - Part II, Arranged for Secondary and High Schools • Percy Lubbock
... subordinating to humanistic values, of a brutal Imperialism which the so-called Conservatives among them set up in place of the truly humane devotion of which man is capable, of the sickening humanitarianism which appears in retrospect to have been merely an excuse for absolute indolence—but they certainly have forfeited the right to censure it. Let those who are so eager to cast the first stone at the aesthetic and moral anarchy of the present day consider Professor Babbitt's ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... adverse conditions; a battle against pests, frosts, soil, weather, and weariness. The conflict never ceased, nor was there hope of emerging from its sordidness into the high places where were breathing space and vision. One could never hope when night came to glance back over the day and see in retrospect a finished piece of work. There was no such thing as writing finis beneath any chapter of the ponderous ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett
... matter. I am coming to the very instant of actuality, to the show which I saw yesterday, and which I should have brought my paper down to mention if it had been accepted." He drew a long breath, and said, with a dreamy air of retrospect: "It is all of a charming unity, a tradition unbroken from the dawn of civilization. When I go to a variety show, and drop my ticket into the chopping-box at the door, and fastidiously choose my unreserved seat ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... pleasant were they, two weeks later, at the retrospect of many an unsuccessful chase from which they had returned—when, after twelve days spent in "jaging" the elephant, they had added only a single pair of tusks to the collection, and these the tusks of a cow elephant, scarce two feet in ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... of retrospect Stuart began to wonder at his host's strange behavior until of idle speculation suspicion was born, but as to that circumstance ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... In retrospect one feels almost sorry for them: the Great War must have come almost as a relief. Not one of them was what you would call a bad man. Some of them suffered over forcible feeding and the Cat and Mouse Act as acutely as does the loving father or mother who says ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... detail, and with the tranquillity of closet retrospect, thoughts that follow one another with the rapidity of lightning flashes. To say that I reflected coolly, would not be true: I was at that moment too much under the influence of fear for tranquil reflection. I perceived ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... have dealt with the retrospect of English ethnology. The chief questions in the prospect are the one just indicated and the effects of change of area in ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... and the determination of nearly all the broad features of this century's history may be traced directly or indirectly to that process. And since an interesting light is thrown upon the new phases in land locomotion that are now beginning, it will be well to begin this forecast with a retrospect, and to revise very shortly the history of the addition of steam travel to ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the others, they were on the far side of the hill, whence the paths are smooth and gentle and the prospect is peacefulness and the retrospect is dimly rosal. They dressed as they had done those ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... the retrospect of the past. There we are on perfectly firm ground—ground which we have traversed carefully already, and which we may survey in ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... self she had hated. And always, when the dark memory impinged upon peace, she fought and fought until she seemed to be fighting hatred itself. Scorn of scorn and hate of hate! Yet even her battles grew to be dreams. For when the inevitable retrospect brought back Jean Isbel and his love and her cowardly falsehood she would shudder a little and put an unconscious hand to her breast and utterly fail in her fight and drift off down to vague and wistful dreams. The clean and healing forest, with its whispering ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey
... contempt, was now become a hated enemy, but of her father, and she mourned for him with profounder feeling than when her tears flowed over his new-made grave. But for headstrong folly, incredible in the retrospect, that father would have been her dear and honoured companion, her friend in every best sense of the word, her guide and protector. Many and many a time had he invited her affection, her trust. For long years it was in her ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... his brother, of the 29th of May, just after his return to Munich, gives a retrospect of the Viennese visit, including the personal details which he had hesitated to write to his father. They are important as showing the position he already, at twenty-three years of age, held among scientific men. "Everything," he says, "was open to me as a foreigner, and to my great ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... national progress and decay. The history of religion, of art, of literature, of social and industrial development, of scientific progress, have all their different methods. A writer who treats of some great revolution that has transformed human affairs should deal largely in retrospect, for the most important part of his task is to explain the long course of events that prepared and produced the catastrophe; while a writer who treats of more normal times will do well to ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... now as absolutely to belong to a bygone order of things, as if they had wrangled before the Dikasts of Athens, or pleaded before the Praetor at Rome. Mr. Phillips seems to feel this, and, as the gay days of his sanguine youth flit by his memory, the retrospect brings, as it will ever bring, melancholy, and even sadness, with it. Yielding himself up to the dominion of feeling, in place of keeping his reason predominant, he mourns over the past, as if, in comparison ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various
... failing. In fact she was altogether a failure, so far as her housekeeping was concerned. She could cook, after a fashion, but the fashion was so limited that even the bill of fare at the perfect boarding house looked tempting in retrospect. ...
— Cy Whittaker's Place • Joseph C. Lincoln
... show that only heroic measures could now save the American cause. Fortunately Washington was surrounded by a little knot of officers of approved fidelity, whose spirit no reverses could subdue. And though a calm retrospect of so many disasters, with all the jealousies, the defections, and the terror which had followed in their wake, might well have carried discouragement to the stoutest hearts, this little band of heroes now closed up around their ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... all as in a dream, for her mind had no time for reverie or retrospect; it was set on one ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... begin my story on that winter morning when I came into the world and bleated my protest against living at all, but I pass by those years when I was only a slip of humanity taking root on earth and come to that May day which is the first to rise distinctly on my inward vision when I turn to retrospect. Even now I mark it as a day of great adventure. Since then I have battled with salmon in northern waters, I have felt my line strain under the tarpon's despair, I have heard my reel sing with the rushes of the bass, yet I do ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... feel toward him, as he felt under his instructress in the art. Some nature, however, is required for every piece of art. Wilfrid knew that he had been brutal in his representation of the part, and the retrospect of his conduct at Brookfield did not satisfy his remorseless critical judgement. In consequence, when he again saw Lady Charlotte, his admiration of that one prized characteristic of hers paralyzed him. She looked, and moved, and spoke, as if the earth ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... a quarter of a century has unfolded its events for us to lay blame and grow wise in retrospect. It is easy to say that what happened was foredoomed to happen; and yet here was a man, walking up and down the curved verandahs that Mrs. Nesbit had added to the house at odd times, walking up and down, and speaking to a girl in the ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... unfriendly sky, it kept me at home. I am sorry now, as for many another omission on my wanderings, when lack of energy or a passing mood of dullness has caused me to miss what would be so pleasant in the retrospect. ...
— By the Ionian Sea - Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy • George Gissing
... rag-dolls representing Anarchy and Discord; Cleobis and Biton dragging their revered parents through the streets; bonnets rouges, banderolles, ca iras, carmagnoles, fraternisations, accolades; the properties, as well as the text of the plays, borrowed from Ancient Greece or Rome. What a bewildering retrospect! A period well summed up by Emerson:—"To-day, pasteboard and filigree; to-morrow, madness and murder." Tigre-singe, Voltaire's epigrammatic definition, describes his countrymen of the Reign ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... enter into the particulars of this adventure, let us take a retrospect of the amours of his Royal Highness, prior to the declaration of his marriage, and particularly of what immediately preceded this declaration. It is allowable sometimes to drop the thread of a narrative, when real facts, not generally known, give ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... high-class work; but among ourselves it is painful to contemplate the decline, not of power, but of encouragement, and the unhealthy tendency to a style of illustration which will not probably be very creditable to the country in retrospect. A collection of modern illustrated works of mixed origin may well dispense, except by way of sample and contrast, with much of the fantastic and preposterous creations of ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... to the people was entrusted the sovereign power of choosing their chief magistrate. It is our glory, in the retrospect of more than a century, that none other than patriots —statesmen well equipped for the discharge of its timeless duties —have ever been chosen to the Presidency. May we not believe that the past is the earnest of the future, and that during the rolling years and ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... confess that the spectator gets from it at first chiefly an impression of quantity. Then he sees that this quantity is really wealth; that the dim confusion of faces is a magnificent composition, and that some of the details of this composition are extremely beautiful. It is impossible however in a retrospect of Venice to specify one's happiest hours, though as one looks backward certain ineffaceable moments start here and there into vividness. How is it possible to forget one's visits to the sacristy of the Frari, however frequent they may have been, and the great work of John Bellini which forms ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... lies in the deeper contrasts offered by life itself: the strange incongruity between our aspiration and our achievement, the eager and fretful anxieties of to-day that fade into nothingness to-morrow, the burning pain and the sharp sorrow that are softened in the gentle retrospect of time, till as we look back upon the course that has been traversed we pass in view the panorama of our lives, as people in old age may recall, with mingled tears and smiles, the angry quarrels ...
— Further Foolishness • Stephen Leacock
... in search of sacred and profane knowledge. Yet Gedaliah made up in style for his lack of historical method. The "Chain of Tradition" is a picturesque and enthralling book, it is a warm and cheery retrospect, and even deserves to be called a prose epic. Besides, many of his statements that were wont to be treated as altogether unauthentic have been vindicated by later research. Azariah di Rossi, on the other hand, is immortalized by his spirit ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... for her, and then walking to the window, stood looking down into the garden in an attitude of thoughtfulness and dejection. She was mentally taking a review of the manner in which she had spent the day, as was her custom before retiring. The retrospect had seldom been so painful to the little girl. She had a very tender conscience, and it told her now that she had more than once during the day indulged in wrong feelings toward her father; that she had also allowed another to speak ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... edition of 'Paracelsus' was affixed a preface, now long discarded, but which acquires fresh interest in a retrospect of the author's completed work; for it lays down the constant principle of dramatic creation by which that work was to be inspired. It also anticipates probable criticism of the artistic form which on this, and so many subsequent occasions, he ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... indeed a melancholy night in which the youths had been summoned to watch the passing away of her gentle spirit for ever from their love. Isabella De Haldimar had, from her earliest infancy, been remarkable for her quiet and contemplative character; and, bred amid scenes that brought at every retrospect, recollections of some acted horror, it is not surprising that the bias given by nature, should have been developed and strengthened by the events that had surrounded her. Not dissimilar in disposition, as she was not unlike in form, ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... There was an implied crime-partnership in her glance which revolted him. Dick Langdon must have talked in his own home. Crane's conscience—well, he hardly had one perhaps, at least it was always subevident; to put it in another way, the retrospect of his manipulated diplomacy never bothered him; but this gratuitous sharing in his evil triumph was disquieting. The malicious glitter of the girl's small black eyes contrasted strongly with the honest, ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... drowning man lives his life again before the last; but my own fight with the sea provided me with no such moments of vivid and rapid retrospect as those during which I stood breathless outside the lighted windows of Kirby Hall. I landed again. I was dogged day and night. I set it down to nerves and notoriety; but took refuge in a private hotel. One followed me, engaged the next room, set a watch on all ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung
... the fiction in which there was a Flora to set against its predecessor's Dora, both derived from the same original. The fancy had a comic humor in it he found it impossible to resist, but it was kindly and pleasant to the last;[6] and if the later picture showed him plenty to laugh at in this retrospect of his youth, there was nothing he thought of more tenderly than the earlier, as long as he was conscious ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... her reminiscent, and when she was reminiscent she invariably exaggerated—in retrospect she saw everything as she would have liked it to have been. "When he first came here what a man he was! And this, what a neighbourhood then, an elegant residential district. I had a position then, I could recommend him; everybody knew Miss Houston of Houston ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... whispered Carry, with a vague retrospect of their recent conversation. "Don't ky. I fink I SHOULD like a new papa, if he loved you ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... brief retrospect, conscious that while nothing had happened, since the croaking printer's remark, that I would care to print in the paper, experiences had occurred that touched me closer than would the news that all the Malays of Asia were running amuck. I felt as if thrown back on to my old life ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... Fielding follows his retrospect of this strenuous attack on the law with a declaration that, henceforth, he intends to forsake the pursuit of that 'foolscap' literary fame, and the company of the 'infamous' nine Muses; a decision based partly on the insubstantial nature of the rewards achieved, ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... never come from Hanover, the Whartons would now probably be great people and Britain a great nation. But the Evil One had been allowed to prevail, and everything had gone astray, and Sir Alured now had nothing of this world to console him but a hazy retrospect of past glories, and a delight in the beauty of his own river, his own park, and his own house. Sir Alured, with all his foibles and with all his faults, was a pure-minded, simple gentleman, who could not tell a lie, who could not do a wrong, and who was earnest in his desire to make those who ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... of the period, we very considerably enlarge our first estimate of the duration. And this leads to great discrepancies in the appreciation of the relative magnitudes of past sections of time. Thus, as Wundt observes, though in retrospect both a month and a year seem too short, the latter is relatively much more shortened than ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... went on Fritz, enjoying the retrospect, "one could see that quite well. He was putting on my boots for me all the time, and was willing to pay a good deal more for the accommodation than he had expected ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... thus, within my "heart of hearts," Doth this returning day, Another golden zone complete, Another circle lay; And when unto the shadowy past In retrospect I flee, I numerate the fleeting years By ...
— Indian Legends and Other Poems • Mary Gardiner Horsford
... himself to give over so soon the unusual pleasure of blowing up his only son. It was so long since Lord Kilcullen had been regularly in his power, and it might never occur again. So he returned from consideration of the future to a further retrospect on ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... It was a melancholy retrospect. Mrs. Nesbit might be said to have perfectly succeeded in the object of her life. She had formed her beloved niece, like the fabled image of snow, moulded by the enchanter and animated by no will but his, and had seen ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... band of miserable diseased hungry fugitives than to the two triumphant figures on the other side of me, overwhelmed and defeated me. I bent my head; I felt a shame, a degradation as though I should have crept into some shadow and hidden.... I would not mention this were it not that afterwards, in retrospect, the moment seemed to me an omen. After all, life is ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... of desire and human pleasure,—worldly, social, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious,—does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow—a fear of what is to come—a doubt of what is—a retrospect to the past, leading to a prognostication of the future? (The best of Prophets of the future is the Past.) Why is this? or these?—I know not, except that on a pinnacle we are most susceptible of giddiness, and that ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... foremost objects of interest and concern. Such additions, whether literary or social, are the best kind of refreshment that travel supplies. She published two books on America: one of them abstract and quasi-scientific, Society in America; the other, A Retrospect of Western Travel, of a lighter and more purely descriptive quality. Their success with the public was moderate, and in after years she condemned them in very plain language, the first of them especially as 'full of affectations and preachments.' Their only service, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... certain strong impressions inaccessible to reason: I cannot share those impressions, and you have withdrawn all trust from me in consequence. You have changed towards me; it has followed that I have changed towards you. It is useless to take any retrospect. We have simply to adapt ourselves ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... mature judgment led him to reject it. [46] Like Milton, he seems to have revolved for many years the different themes that came to him, and, like him, to have at last chosen one which by mounting back into the distant past enabled him to indulge historical retrospect, and gather into one focus the entire subsequent development. As to his aptitude for epic poetry opinions differ. Niebuhr expresses the view of many great critics when he says, "Virgil is a remarkable instance of a man mistaking his vocation; his real calling was lyric poetry; his small lyric ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the retrospect of his career must convince us that one man in so short a period never accomplished so much before, against such disadvantages, so also must we admit that probably never before did any one rest so wholly for his amazing achievements on the sole power of intrinsic ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... wholly without struggle, is frequently not less decisive. Great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical character is seen only in retrospect. It is only the historian who can say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and ...
— The Fight For Conservation • Gifford Pinchot
... given to those queer Florentine friends of his, and whom she had never thought of since, though she had then promised herself to do something for him. She had then even given him some vague hints of a prospective hospitality, and she confessed her sin of omission in a swift but graphic retrospect to one of her brave girls, while Jeff stood blocking out a space for his stalwart bulk amid the alien elegance just within the doorway, and the host was making his way toward him, with an outstretched hand of ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the city of Alexandria was intense and universal when the Roman army entered it to reinstate Cleopatra's father upon his throne. A very large portion of the inhabitants were pleased with having the former king restored. In fact, it appears, by a retrospect of the history of kings that when a legitimate hereditary sovereign or dynasty is deposed and expelled by a rebellious population, no matter how intolerable may have been the tyranny, or how atrocious ...
— Cleopatra • Jacob Abbott
... and its life perpetual. But it was not the state alone which thus took detriment from her connection with the Church; the latter paid a full price for the temporal advantages she received in admitting civil intervention in her affairs. After a retrospect of a thousand years, the pious Fratricelli loudly proclaimed their conviction that the fatal gift of a Christian emperor had been the doom of ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... so thickly is it studed and storied with objects and recollections. Altogether, we have rarely seen a topographical panorama of such diversified character: it has reminiscences of history and poetry to lead us through the retrospect of chivalrous ages, princely contests for crowns that rarely sat lightly on their wearers, and the last flickering hopes of defeated ambition and ill-starred fortune. Yet, how powerfully, not to say painfully, are these ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 581, Saturday, December 15, 1832 • Various
... the talk was far more manifest in the retrospect than it had been at the time. It had seemed then bold and strange, but not impossible; now in the cold darkness it seemed sacrilegious. And the bishop's share, which was indeed only the weak yielding of a tired man to an atmosphere he had misjudged, became a disgraceful display of levity ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells |
