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Solitude   /sˈɑlətˌud/   Listen
Solitude

noun
1.
A state of social isolation.  Synonym: purdah.
2.
The state or situation of being alone.
3.
A solitary place.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Solitude" Quotes from Famous Books



... the rapids to that launching place named after the patron saint of French voyageur—Ste. Anne's. The river widens into the silver expanse of Two Mountains Lake, rimmed to the sky line by the vernal hills, with a silence and solitude over all, as when sunlight first fell on face of man. Here the eagle utters a lonely scream from the top of some blasted pine; there a covey of ducks, catching sight of the coming canoes, dive to bottom, only to reappear a gunshot away. Where the voyageurs land for their nooning, or camp ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut

... relays for the return journeys, were robbed of all; and when they came back to Kolobeng, found the skeletons of the guardians strewed all over the place. The books of a good library—my solace in our solitude—were not taken away, but handfuls of the leaves were torn out and scattered over the place. My stock of medicines was smashed; and all our furniture and clothing carried off and sold at public auction to pay the expenses of ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler

... reached the spot where the capital of the State now stands, with its spacious streets, its public edifices, its halls of learning, its churches, and its refined and cultivated society, they found only the silence, solitude, and gloom of the wilderness. With their hatchets they constructed a rude camp to shelter them from the night air and the heavy dew. It was open in front. Here they built their camp-fire, whose cheerful glow illumined the forest far and wide, and which converted midnight glooms into ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott

... interest in the poor concerns of transient mortality, and are permitted to hold communion with those whom they have loved on earth, I feel as if now, at this deep hour of night, in this silence and solitude, I could receive their visitation with the most ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving

... attention than give pleasure, who seeks amusement rather than delight. She suffers from a consuming desire for love; it even disturbs and troubles her heart in the midst of festivities; she has lost her former liveliness, and her taste for merry games; far from being afraid of the tedium of solitude she desires it. Her thoughts go out to him who will make solitude sweet to her. She finds strangers tedious, she wants a lover, not a circle of admirers. She would rather give pleasure to one good man than be a general favourite, or win that applause of society which ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau

... the sidewalls with singular disregard for the drizzling rain that sifted down upon their unmindful backs or blew softly into the faces of the few who enjoyed the luxury of "umberells." Despite the apparent solitude that kept pace with them down the narrow street,—little more than a country lane, on the verge of graduating into a thoroughfare,—the three travelers were keenly alert; their squinting, eager eyes searched the shadows beside and before them; their feet no longer dragged through the slippery, ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon

... girl whom extravagance of aid places in an attitude that she ends by finding "affected" had made her decide that for these few hours she must suffice to herself. She had moreover a great fondness for intervals of solitude, which since her arrival in England had been but meagrely met. It was a luxury she could always command at home and she had wittingly missed it. That evening, however, an incident occurred which—had there been a critic to note it—would have taken all colour from the theory that ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James

... in the course of long morning rambles; these he rehearsed with their accomplished author; these he declaimed in the solitude of his bed-chamber—until, one day, Mrs Bowldler (whom terror arresting, had held spellbound for some minutes on the landing) knocked in to know if Palmerston should run ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... someone to keep his house in order, than from any of the feeling that usually accompanies such unions. In time, however, he had come to love her, and her loss was a very heavy blow to him. It was the void that he felt in his home as much as his desire for solitude, that induced him to leave Highgate and ...
— A March on London • G. A. Henty

... is searching, the rain ceases and the clouds part, but no trace of her missing father does she find. Light has gone and darkness has already invaded the solitude, when White Aster descries a faint red gleam through the trees and hears the droning voice of a priest chanting his prayers. Going in the direction of light and sound, White Aster soon approaches a ruined temple, standing in the midst of a grove of cypress ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... watch I went when the table was cleared, and the others had quitted the room. Uncle Ike replenished the fire, and commended my good sense in "huggin' the chimbley-corner in sech cole weather," before he left me to solitude, to Sandford and Merton, and to "Frank." I had resolved to name him for my dear cousin-in-law. When I came to read Frankenstein I marvelled at the coincidence. Frank continued warm, as I ascertained by quarter-hourly ...
— When Grandmamma Was New - The Story of a Virginia Childhood • Marion Harland

... Ferrara. She left him, and took refuge in her native city, then honoured by the presence of Tasso and Guarini. He bore her departure with philosophical composure, recording the event in his diary as something to be dryly grateful for. Left alone, the Duke abandoned himself to solitude, religious exercises, hunting, and the economy of his impoverished dominions. He became that curious creature, a man of narrow nature and mediocre capacity, who, dedicated to the cult of self, is fain to pass for ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds

... the sorrow, mine the fault, And well my life shall pay: I'll seek the solitude he sought, And stretch ...
— English Songs and Ballads • Various

... only knew that her heroine-looking governess was laid up with severe influenza, her mother more than guessed at the kind of battle wrestled out in solitude, and was sure that more than brother, more than friend, had left her to that lonely suffering, which was being for the first time realized. But no confidence was given; when Lucilla spoke, it was only of Owen, and Mrs. Prendergast ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge

... the place where he was confined. When was this imprisonment to be at an end? Though innocent, he had been cast into wretchedness and solitude—that was his fate. How things had been ordained for him in this world, he had now time to think over. Why had he been thus treated—his portion made so hard to bear? Well, this would be revealed "in that other life" which assuredly awaits ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen

... plans and amusements, the lonely orphan was left in solitude. Her aunt knew not how her heart ached after the home she had left, but the machine of the family went its own way and trod her ...
— The Two Sides of the Shield • Charlotte M. Yonge

... her. They are hard to find—not to be found among the many. Books and nature and her dreams—but the many will not follow her to these sources.... And yet every man and woman I know who are great to me, have entered this solitude in childhood. They were Solitaries—that seems the mark of the questers.... Why, you would not have one stay with the many—just to avoid the loneliness and the heart-pulling that leads us into ourselves. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... left him, to seek the solitude of her own room. In a passion of tears she flung herself upon the little bed, and there she lay, a prey to such an anguish as had ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... "I requickened a corpse," he used to say. His views were extensive and daring, but often chimerical; he had reduced to a nullity the sovereign whom he governed for so long, keeping him shut up far away from the world, in a solitude which he was himself almost the only one to interrupt. "The queen has the devil in her," he used to say; "if she finds a man of the sword who has some mental resources and is a pretty good general, she will make a racket in France and ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... gliding along the narrow path by the river bank, and pauses a moment at the entrance to the platform. Then it listens for a few minutes, and again hurries down to the crazy-looking steps. The black shadow standing there, like the genius of solitude, is a woman, and she has apparently come to add herself to the list of the cruel-looking river's victims. Standing there, with one hand on the rough rail, and staring with fascinated eyes on the dull muddy water, she does not hear a step behind her. The shadow of a man, who has apparently ...
— Madame Midas • Fergus Hume

... ever, he is commenced lover upon the old stock, walks with his hand thrust in his bosom for negligence, moping he leans his head, face yellow, beard flowing and incomposite, eyes sunken, anhelus, breath wheezy and asthmatical, by reason of over-much sighing: society he abhors, solitude is but a hell, what shall he doe? all this while his mistresse is forward, coming, amantissima, ready to jump at once into his mouth, her he hateth, feels disgust when she is but mentioned, thinks her ugly, old, a ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb

... her story in readiness, replied: "I am the daughter of a deity, and have practiced religious observances in the heavenly regions. I have now come into this forest!" And the devotee, who began to think how much more pleasant is such society than solitude, asked her where her hut was, and requested to be ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton

... enough to keep life in them and rags about them; and he built with his own hands, aided by his faithful Ruth, the mud hovel, wherein they found the only shelter that this cold world had for them. They had left Reading, preferring solitude to averted looks and abusive tongues; and not a creature in Dorchester came near them. Alike as Jews and as poor people, they ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... in her solitude, when a creaking noise struck her ear and the door of the court was flung open. Who came out, is not yet ascertained; but, reader, should you wish to know, the ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... which the conqueror of Marengo might have vailed, that the neck of the foe was the point at which the first fatal shaft of his excommunicating ire should be hurled. With rapid and decisive energy he concentrated all his powers for instantaneous action. He retired for a day to the seclusion of solitude, to summon and to spur the energies of the most self-reliant mind in Europe, as the lion draws back to gather courage for the leap. As, like the lion, he drew back; so, like the lion, did he spring forward ...
— The Laws of Etiquette • A Gentleman

... within him; and as he grows into a youth, he hankers after something which he calls sympathy, but which is really applause. He therefore makes a human crowd for himself out of carved and tapestried figures, and the few names which penetrate into his solitude, and fancies himself always the greatest personage amongst them. He simulates all manner of heroic performances and of luxurious rest. He is Eccelino, the Emperor's vicar; he is the Emperor himself. He becomes more than this; for his fancy has soared upwards ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr

... glow of dawning beauty, The fragrance and the dainty gloss of youth, Worn by long years of solitude and duty, I have no bloom to ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope

... he that preferreth before all things his rational part and spirit, and the sacred mysteries of virtue which issueth from it, he shall never lament and exclaim, never sigh; he shall never want either solitude or company: and which is chiefest of all, he shall live without either desire or fear. And as for life, whether for a long or short time he shall enjoy his soul thus compassed about with a body, he is altogether indifferent. For if even now he were to depart, he is ...
— Meditations • Marcus Aurelius

... contained various treatises laying down "the first principles of Polite Learning:" these drew her eager attention; and with one or other of the not very handy volumes in her hand, she would steal out of sight of the farm, and lapt in the solitude of the moor, would sit and read until at last the light could reveal not a word more. Even the Geometry she found in them attracted her not a little; the Rhetoric and Poetry drew her yet more; but most of all, the Natural History, with its engravings of beasts and birds, poor as they were, delighted ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald

... exhibited some study of POSE, and a certain exaggeration of attitude, that betrayed the habit of an audience; also that her voice had an artificial accent that was not wholly unconscious, even in this lofty solitude. Yet the very next moment, when she turned, and caught Rand's eye fixed upon her, she started naturally, colored slightly, uttered that feminine adjuration, "Good Lord! gracious! goodness me!" which is seldom used in ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... endeavors to establish a solidarity for it. The group at least attests, even in this event, the wide, the wild, variety of my literary production in time and space. From the beginning the journalist's independence of the scholar's solitude and seclusion has remained with me, and though I am fond enough of a bookish entourage, of the serried volumes of the library shelves, and the inviting breadth of the library table, I am not disabled by the hard conditions of a bedroom in a summer hotel, or the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... journalism. He was attacked, vilified, and denounced by the vilest of men in the vilest of manners. Sometimes, sitting alone by himself, blind and powerless, very battleworn and sad, this old man at the end of his life must have suffered in the solitude of his soul a grief almost intolerable. But he became more human and more lovable in these ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton

... not observe that any one was burdened with too much game. We got off our horses to climb through the wooded hills and ravines, and passed some hours lying under the pine-trees, listening to the gurgling of the little brook, whose bright waters make music in the solitude; and, like the soldiers at the pronunciamiento, but with surer aim, pelting each other from behind the parapets of the tall trees, with fir tops. About ten o'clock we returned to breakfast; and Colonel Y—— having arrived, we are now preparing ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... said the Princess.—"Very soon it shall be three years that I have lived in solitude," she resumed, after a pause, "and this tranquillity has nothing painful to me about it. To you alone can I dare to say that I feel I am happy. I was surfeited with adoration, weary of pleasure, emotional on the surface of things, but conscious that ...
— The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan • Honore de Balzac

... which were unintelligible to me, perhaps because I have always been more woman than artist. He always put the theater first. He lived in it, he died in it. He had none of what I may call my bourgeois qualities—the love of being in love, the love of a home, the dislike of solitude. I have always thought it hard to find my inferiors. He was sure of his high place. He was far simpler than I in some ways. He would talk, for instance, in such an ingenuous way to painters and musicians that I blushed for him. But I know now that my blush was far more unworthy than his freedom ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry

... you, Jean; it was my usual forgetfulness of others which so misled you. I was tired of the world, and came hither to find peace in solitude. Effie cheered me with her winsome ways, and I learned to look on her as the blithe spirit whose artless wiles won me to forget a bitter past and a regretful present." I paused; and then added, with a smile, "But, in our wise schemes, we have overlooked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... old man," said he at length: "if you live a few years longer, that period must be passed in solitude and cheerlessness:—if you suddenly fall ill you must die the lingering death of famine, without a soul to place a morsel of food, or the cooling cup to your lips; and when you shall be no more, who will follow you ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds

... philosophy in justification of our own pleasures: and no doubt one hears the personal prejudices of the lover of society as well as the serious thought of the student of life in the warmth with which he denounces solitude as "dangerous to reason without being favourable to virtue," and declares that "the solitary mortal is certainly luxurious, ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey

... exclamation Wyvis paid no attention in the least: his mood was fitful, and he was glad to step out of the ill-lighted room into the hall, and thence to the silence and solitude of ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... universe; some, for instance, animate the whole of the physical universe, and are distinguished as being what is called blended with matter, the class that gives the sense of life, of consciousness, to all those things in Nature which so much impress the mind occasionally when we are face to face in solitude with some splendid landscape—some great forest, perhaps, in the silence. We need not go into these various classes; I only mention them in order to separate from the rest that particular class of freed, ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... to journey by night till they could reach a more hospitable part of the country. They accordingly started as soon as the people in the village had gone to sleep. The stillness of the air, the howling of the wild beasts and the deep solitude of the forest made the scene solemn and impressive. Not a word, except in a whisper, was uttered; and his companions pointed out to him the wolves and hyaenas, as they glided like shadows from one thicket ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston

... Dee and other famous mathematicians. He was also intimate with Sir Robert Cotton, William Camden, and their antiquarian associates. Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, had a particular esteem for Allen, and would have conferred a bishopric upon him, but his love of solitude made him decline the offer. His great skill in mathematics and astrology earned him the credit of being a magician; and the author of Leicester's Commonwealth accuses him of employing the art of "figuring'' to further the earl of Leicester's unlawful designs, and of endeavouring by the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... There was no reason why he should not begin again... I remember now the intense silence of the Grande Place that day after the gas-attack, when we three men stood there looking up at the charred ruins of the Cloth Hall. It was a great solitude of ruin. No living figure stirred among the piles of masonry which were tombstones above many dead. We three were like travelers who had come to some capital of an old and buried civilization, staring with awe and uncanny fear at this burial-place of ancient ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... disposal. To these hours we owe great part of her Diary. At five she had to attend her colleague, Madame Schwellenberg, a hateful old toadeater, as illiterate as a chambermaid, as proud as a whole German Chapter, rude, peevish, unable to bear solitude, unable to conduct herself with common decency in society. With this delightful associate, Frances Burney had to dine, and pass the evening. The pair generally remained together from five to eleven, and often had no other company the whole time, except during ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... of most of the gentlemen and the unexpected relief of some of her own sex, Maruja, after an evening of more than usual caprice and willfulness, retired early to her chamber. Here she beguiled Enriquita, a younger sister, to share her solitude for an hour, and with a new and charming melancholy presented her with mature counsel and some younger ...
— Maruja • Bret Harte

... though the companions of Beowulf stood again before us: "So, we have learned, in days of yore, of twelve beneath the stars, heroes gloriously blessed." These "heroes," these "warriors," are the twelve apostles. One of them, St. Andrew, arrives in an uninhabited country; not a desert in Asia, nor a solitude in Greece; it might be the abode of Grendel: "Then was the saint in the shadow of darkness, warrior hard of courage, the whole night long with various thoughts beset; snow bound the earth with winter-casts; ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... on three sides around a little church, which, in green and gray, seemed almost a part of its surroundings. A little church, with a little quaint bell-tower and arched doorway, built after some old, old model; it stood as quietly in the green solitude of trees and rocks, as if it and they had grown up together. It was almost so. The walls were of native greystone in its natural roughness; all over the front and one angle the American ivy climbed and waved, mounting to the tower; while at the back, the closer clinging Irish ivy covered the ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner

... possible." I said this with so much conviction that the two burst out laughing at me. I could not think of anything more to add, and I felt relieved when, with a warning shriek, the train dashed into a tunnel. By the time we had emerged again into the sunlight and the solitude of the open landscape I had ready an impromptu which I had been working at in the darkness. I looked straight at Miss Metford ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... No; she certainly knew or believed that Richard, her second son, had escaped and was living, and was glad to overturn the usurper without risking her child. The plot failed, and the queen dowager was shut up, where she remained till her death, "in prison, poverty, and solitude."(35) The king trumped up a silly accusation of her having delivered her daughters out of sanctuary to King Richard, "which proceeding," says the noble historian, "being even at the time taxed for rigorous and undue, makes it very probable ...
— Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of King Richard the Third • Horace Walpole

... approach they run away, They leap and stare, away they bound, With a sudden angry sound, To the sunny quietude; Crouching down where nothing stirs In the silence of the furze, Couching down again to brood In the sunny solitude. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... has a reddish beard that is turning white on the left side. He cultivates the vineyard, and the owner takes half the produce; but for a consideration the man lets the small house in the Via di Santa Sabina to persons who are fond of vineyards and solitude. The only condition is that the shutters of the windows looking on the road must not be opened, lest the owner ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... streets of a city upon a sabbath morn, when crowds of well-dressed persons are seen moving in every direction; when the cheerful bells are sounding, and the beautiful smiling children are hurrying in troops to Sunday school! Here I was in solitude. I saw not the laborer resting from toil, nor the smile of infancy, nor the christian bowing before his God; but Nature proclaimed a sabbath by the silence that reigned abroad, and the splendor with which she ...
— Great Indian Chief of the West - Or, Life and Adventures of Black Hawk • Benjamin Drake

... no chance for the husband and wife to speak to each other. John looked at Helen steadily a moment, but her eyes veiled any thought. In the midst of Mrs. Grier's chatter, she had gone into the solitude of her own heart, and slowly and silently light was beginning to shine into the mysterious darkness of the last few days. John's grief must have had something to do with this terrible sermon. She felt her heart leap up from the past anxiety like ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland

... others laughed, I could have wept, and would gladly have exchanged that gay scene, for the quiet of my own room. But this could not be, and I was forced to assume a serenity of feeling I was far from experiencing. Had you not been here, I should have given vent to my grief in solitude, and none would have been the wiser. As it is I must entreat that you will forgive me for (tho' unintentionally) making you suppose I do not sympathize in your happiness, but I do indeed, for I know that Harry is all that is good, and is ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings

... Italy were years of rest, of solitude, of calm. The attitude of Ibsen to Italy was totally distinct from that of other illustrious exiles of his day and generation. The line of pilgrims from Stendhal and Lamartine down to Ruskin and the Brownings had brought with them a personal interest in Italian affairs; Italian ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... blue-stocking literature, threadbare sophistries, forms erected into important principles, mediocrity elevated into consideration, and the pre-eminence of the vain, the ignorant, and the contemptible, he will shut himself up in his solitude, and say with the Englishman at Paris Je m'ennuis trs bien ici. Against the recurrence of these annoyances, day after day renewed, what nerves can hold out? As life advances, time becomes precious, every moment is counted, every enjoyment is computed; and while the effort ...
— The Mirror, 1828.07.05, Issue No. 321 - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction • Various

... seems too awful. I wonder what his poor mind thinks about. When told that he would probably be sent home, he said he did not want to go. Surely somewhere in God's sweet world there is somebody who cares for and thinks about him. I cannot half express to you the sadness of his solitude. ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross

... steep for snow to lie, and save also for the intense azure of the sky, all is radiant whiteness. A region far distant from any haunt of man, where reigns a mountain which acknowledges supremacy to Mount Everest alone. A region of completest solitude, where the solemn silence is unbroken by the twitter of a single bird or the drone of the smallest insect, and is disturbed only by the occasional thunder of an avalanche or the grinding crunch of the glacier as ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband

... sky, where thousands of slaves bend over desks all day. On the ground floors are only little fruit shops and laundries and book shops, where you see copies of "Littell's Living Age" and G. W. M. Reynold's novels in the windows. And next—poor Fourth Avenue!—the street glides into a mediaeval solitude. On each side are shops ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... she said. As if these common words could express the vacancy, the blank solitude, into which her life ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

... well-knit man of the world—who happens to be a heaven-born diplomatist into the bargain—to be forewarned is to be doubly armed. At the end of the half-hour of studious solitude in the smoking-room, Ormsby had pricked out his course on the chart to a boat's-length; had trimmed his sails to the minutest starting of a sheet. A glance at his watch and another at the time-table gave him the length ...
— The Grafters • Francis Lynde

... place of honorable exile for officers who may be suspected of heresy in politics, and hostility to existing institutions. They are advanced a step in rank, to repay them (and a poor requital it is) for the change from the delicious climate of Portugal, and the gaieties of Lisbon, to the dreary solitude, the arid soil, and burning and fever-laden air of the Cape de Verds. It is a melancholy thought, that many an active intellect—many a generous and aspiring spirit—may have been doomed to linger and perish here, chained, as it were, to the rocks, like Prometheus, merely for having dreamed of ...
— Journal of an African Cruiser • Horatio Bridge

... but a spectre now, Haunting the solitude of darkened minds, Mocked out of memory by the sceptic day? Is there no corner ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... insolent, supercilious creatures could not be. Some hothouses held them. It ached her to know that she was not one of them—that, alas, she had dreamed a dream and it had not come true. She wondered at her own solitude these two years past—her indifference to the fact that she had never ...
— Sister Carrie • Theodore Dreiser

... duke was away in exile on account of a disgraceful carouse which had ended in a street fight, and Violante was spending the time, practically alone, in the quiet little town of Gallese, which is halfway between Orvieto and Rome. In this solitude, Violante and Marcello were finally surprised under circumstances which made their guilt certain, and final confession was obtained from Marcello after he had been arrested and subjected to torture. ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... Teutones, to assault Rome and Italy in the vigor of the republic. After the departure of those Barbarians, their native country, which was marked by the vestiges of their greatness, long ramparts, and gigantic moles, [69] remained, during some ages, a vast and dreary solitude; till the human species was renewed by the powers of generation, and the vacancy was filled by the influx of new inhabitants. The nations who now usurp an extent of land which they are unable to cultivate, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... the Camp of the Stone Tepees once before. There had been a chase for a cattle thief. It was thought he had hidden somewhere in the vicinity of the white semicircle, but he had not been found there, because no man in fear of pursuit could dwell more than a night in so ghostly a place of solitude. ...
— Mystery Ranch • Arthur Chapman

... with a door, or at least a screen, between him and the other party to the conversation. All the time he does not seem to have been engaged in any manner of study or work, and he appears to have simply devoted himself to the full indulgence of his {289} passion for solitude. His figure, or some sketch suggested by it, has been made use of more than once by writers of fiction, but the man himself was a living figure in the reign of William the Fourth, and died not long before ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume IV (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy

... this lonesome cottage and said: "Viola, I feel to-night that all my honors are empty. They feel to me like a load crushing me down rather than a pedestal raising me up. I am not happy. I long for the solitude of those trees. That decaying old house calls eloquently unto something within me. How I would like to enter there and lay me down to sleep, free from the cares and divested of ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs

... to speak carelessly of what he imagined he saw in a lady's face. And now, Susie, good-by. I shall not inflict my miserable self longer upon you to-day, and I am one who can best cure my wounds in solitude." ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe

... of twilight!—in the solitude Of that pine forest, and the silent shore Which bounds Ravenna's immemorial wood, Rooted where once the Adrian wave flowed o'er To where the last Caesarean fortress stood,— Evergreen forest! which Boccaccio's lore And Dryden's lay made haunted ground ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... for some time remained in expectation, and in almost perfect solitude, when, at fifteen minutes before nine, an extraordinary noise that I heard outside announced to me the Emperor's arrival; and a few moments after I saw him appear, amidst cries of enthusiasm, borne on the arms of the officers who had escorted ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant

... seen The sky grow bright, the forest green; And many a wintry wind have stood In bloomless, fruitless solitude, Since childhood in my pleasant bower First spent its sweet and sportive hour; Since youthful lovers in my shade Their vows of truth and rapture made, And on my trunk's surviving frame Carved many a long-forgotten name. Oh! by the sighs of gentle sound, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various

... stillness and solitude that seemed to envelop these palaces suggested the enchanter's wand. To-morrow, perhaps, the perfect lawns where the robins hopped amidst the shrubbery would become again the rock-bound, windswept New England pasture above the sea, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... divinity. Five others with him, seized with a holy fear, consulted a hermit how they might escape the judgment of God. To them he gave the answer of the Psalmist, "Lo, I have prolonged my flight and remained in solitude." They, too, were fired with the love of solitude, and begged of Hugh Bishop of Grenoble that he would assign them a place suitable for a retreat. This the bishop did, and the order was established at La Chartreuse in the mountains of Savoy in ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... legend struck the knife into her bosom, and handed it to her husband with the words, 'It is not painful!' Christ has gone before us in all the dreary solitude, and in all the agony and pains of life. He has hallowed them all, and has taken the bitterness and the pain out of each of them for them that love Him. If we feel that the Breaker is before us, and that we are marching behind Him, then whithersoever He ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren

... his late offence: "Madam, the mighty power of use Now strangely pleads in my excuse; If you unused have scarcely strength To gain this walk's untoward length; If, frighten'd at a scene so rude, Through long disuse of solitude; If, long confined to fires and screens, You dread the waving of these greens; If you, who long have breathed the fumes Of city fogs and crowded rooms, Do now solicitously shun The cooler air and dazzling sun; If his majestic eye you flee, Learn hence ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... repeter les memes banalites et a s'abaisser autant qu'on le peut au niveau des femmelettes avec lesquelles l'on vit, et qui, pour plaire, affectent plus de frivolite qu'elles n'ont reellement. Le plaisir de causer nous est defendu." Nevertheless, however much she may have mentally appreciated the solitude of a crowd, she determined to adapt herself to her social surroundings. "C'est un sacrifice," she says, "que je fais a mon Dieu et a mon devoir comme Anglaise." Impelled, therefore, alike by piety and patriotism, she cast aside all ideas of leading ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... missed no chance of riding her pony to the little valley church. Mrs. Caxton generally went with her, after the first week; but going in her car she was no hindrance to the thoughtfulness and solitude of the rides on horseback; and Eleanor sometimes wept all the way home, and oftener came with a confused pain in her heart, dull or acute as the case might be. She saw truth that seemed beautiful and glorious to her; she saw it in the faces and lives as well as in the ...
— The Old Helmet, Volume I • Susan Warner

... her. Masters had never been out of her mind for a moment during her waking hours, and she had slept little. She ate still less, and kept herself up in Society with punch in the afternoon and champagne at night. Only in the solitude of her room did she give way briefly to excoriated nerves; but the source of her once ready tears seemed dry. There are more scientific terms for her condition these days, but she was poisoned by love and despair. Her collapse was only a ...
— Sleeping Fires • Gertrude Atherton

... ever noticed the least sign of an unhinged mind. One thought that she was too much alone; but, of course, her loss was a very recent one, and everybody knows that in grief there often comes a desire for solitude.' ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan

... evil, could have brought me to such despair, and hatred of life, and distaste of all pleasure, and lasting sorrow. I bitterly wept this misery, that I must needs be a laughing-stock, that marriage must be denied me, and that I must ever live in solitude. You ask for the cause of this misfortune, a matter which I am quite unable to explain. Because of the reasons just mentioned, and because I dreaded that men should know how grave was the ill afflicting me, I shunned the society of women; and, on account of this habit, ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters

... bustling businesses of the world. In that silent retirement, in thousands of instances, a tragedy not less severe than unobtrusive is enacted, the tragedy of the lonely and breaking heart. An obscure mist of sighs exhales out of the solitude of women in the nineteenth century. The proportionate number of examples of virtuous love, completing itself in marriage, will probably diminish, and the relative examples of defeated or of unlawful love increase, until we reach some new phase of civilization, with better harmonized social arrangements, ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... though an increasing taste for inactivity and solitude betokened the growth of a bastard Christianity, and though various other circumstances were indicative of tendencies to adulterate religion, either by reducing it to a system of formalism, or by sublimating it into a life of empty ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... all the skies with snow were grey, And all the earth with snow was white, I wandered down a still wood way, And there I met my heart's delight Slow moving through the silent wood, The spirit of its solitude: The brown birds and the lichened tree Seemed less a part of ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... shyness and the isolation of his exalted position hardly account for it. A humanistic scholar in a University where the practical departments were making greatest progress, engrossed in his intellectual interests in the solitude of his upper chamber while the busy commercial world went heedless by, always leisurely in the midst of a most active life, a man of religious reticence who was misunderstood because he did not make a noisy profession ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan

... for my own pleasure only, and amused myself with it as best I could. No sorrow weighs on me, but I long to be away—where, I do not know, but far away, perhaps in Africa or India. For my place is in the woods, in solitude... ...
— Pan • Knut Hamsun

... the figure of the "Explorer," grim and hard and determined; silent and solitary in a land of silence and solitude, brooding over a region where "the trails run out and stop." Something urged, something called, and his blood responded. About him rose the voice of the endless leagues of pines in a hushed utterance which might ...
— The Everlasting Whisper • Jackson Gregory

... Caspar had shown himself an intelligent, unassuming and useful man, and the Duke of Wuertemberg was willing to retain him in his service. The laying-out of various nurseries and plantations in the pleasure-grounds of Ludwigsburg and Solitude was intrusted to the retired soldier, now advanced to the rank of captain: he removed from one establishment to another, from time to time; and continued in the Duke's pay till death. In his latter years he ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... sorry that he had shot the poor beast that lay stiffening by his side for he had leaped down, and had, as if by instinct, taken hold of Black Boy's rein, lest he should suddenly take it into his head to gallop off and leave his master in the solitude by himself. ...
— The Silver Canyon - A Tale of the Western Plains • George Manville Fenn

... the far end. Lucia was sitting in a low chair by the fireplace, under the tall shaded lamp, where the light fell full on her shoulders. She was not alone. On a settee by the other side of the open hearth sat the young lady who had intruded on his solitude in the library. The presence of the young lady filled him with ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... dearest interests lie beyond the domains of science, in the regions of faith. Science treats of things—faith is confidence in persons. Take away the persons, and of what value are the things? The world becomes at once a vast desert, a dreary solitude, and more miserable than any of its former inhabitants the lonely wretch who is left to mourn over the graves of all his former companions—the last man. Solitary science were awful. Could I prosecute the toils of study alone, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... presence of man beyond a few miles round the establishment. Years ago the fort was built, and there it stands now, with new tenants, it is true, but in its general aspect unchanged; and there it is likely to remain, wrapped in its barrier of all but impregnable solitude, for ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... in bands maltreating and plundering the people. Petrarch, who visited France at this period, tells us that he could not believe that this was the same kingdom which he had once seen so rich and flourishing. "Nothing presented itself to my eyes but fearful solitude and extreme poverty, uncultivated land and houses in ruins. Even about Paris there were everywhere signs of fire and destruction. The streets were deserted; the roads overgrown ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson

... Bagdad, a hermit, renowned for his sanctity, passed his days in an agreeable solitude. The neighbouring inhabitants, to obtain an interest in his prayers, daily flocked to his hermitage, to carry him provisions and presents. The holy man, without ceasing, gave thanks to God for the blessings, with which providence ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach

... than speculative, political rather than theological, established the Civitas Dei where once stood the Civitas Roma. This ecclesiastical masterpiece of human wisdom "may still exist in undiminished vigor," says Macaulay, "when some traveler from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's." Truly the Church of Rome has left upon Christianity an ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... indifferently, putting the note into her pocket. She liked Marian's letters, and kept them to read in her hours of solitude. ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... the poison of regret. I found myself often longing for my independence, which, however, would not have contributed to my happiness, but would at least have permitted me to indulge in my secret sorrow. My temporary solitude, therefore, became precious to me, for I was about to abandon myself to sadness without annoying any one, and without exciting a curiosity which it was impossible for me to satisfy. When one evening I had been wandering alone on the banks of the lake, I was terrified by a terrible scene on the water. ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various

... five minutes of solitude on the depressing platform of Market Blandings Station, he was what the spiritualists call a sensitive subject. He had reached that depth of gloom and bodily discomfort when a sudden smile has all the effect of strong liquor and good news administered simultaneously, warming the blood and ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse

... child should be taught to think and should be given opportunity for a quiet hour for self communion and self entertainment. It should be taught to live a period of solitude so that in after life it may not always be compelled to hunt around for ...
— The Colored Girl Beautiful • E. Azalia Hackley

... the calamities which soon after happened, men were buoyed with hope and trust. They may have hidden themselves in caves and deserts, they may have sought monastic retreats, they may have lost faith in man and all mundane glories, they may have consumed their lives in meditation and solitude, they may have anticipated the dissolution of all things, but they awaited in faith the coming of their Lord. Prepared for any issue or any calamity, a class of heroes arose to show the moral greatness of the passive virtues, and the triumphs of faith amid the wrecks of material grandeur. ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord

... the Indians who were in the mountains, where they perpetrated marvellous massacres. Thus they ruined and depopulated all this island which we beheld not long ago; and it excites pity, and great anguish to see it deserted, and reduced to a solitude. ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... it only to declare, that "if all her hairs were worlds," she should reckon them "well lost for love;" and Pastorella fondly conceived, that she could dwell for ever by the side of a bubbling fountain, content with her swain and fleecy care; without considering that stillness and solitude can afford satisfaction only ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson

... moment came. Others could not help; he was alone with his thoughts, and yet, as he did no fasting, not alone in the proper use of the word. On that last day, therefore, he resolved upon retiring to some solitude. It would attract no undue attention, and he would have done according to the spirit of the shaman's instructions. After leaving the Rito he climbed to the northern mesa, and instead of resting on its brink as Shotaye had, he strolled into the timber perfectly at random, hardly conscious ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier

... once again the shapes and circumstances of things, as one sitting by his fireside sees castles and cottages, men, women, and children in the embers, and shapes them the better for the silence and the solitude round him? Let the reader take what reason he will. I have seen the world, and fought my way through it; have stumbled, like greater men, have risen, like lesser; have been flung into the most rapid current of the most hurried, wild, and vivid ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... can never experience the feeling of complete solitude which the Westerner knows in wild and lonely places; for him the hillside, the ravine, and the mountain gorge are peopled with presences best described as fairies, though in nothing resembling the light-hearted beings which this description ...
— The Fulfilment of a Dream of Pastor Hsi's - The Story of the Work in Hwochow • A. Mildred Cable

... entries in her diary she made in this fair spot, alone, but for the sympathetic presence of her big black dog. The morning solitude was amply atoned for by the dozens of young friends who joined the "fruit parties" every afternoon, filling the air with their gay voices and wholesome, ...
— The Petticoat Commando - Boer Women in Secret Service • Johanna Brandt

... our Chartreuse; what are they in retirement for? Looking back into history, with the glow of discovery in my eyes, I find records of wise men—everyone acknowledged they were wise men—who lived apart. In every age the same associate of solitude, silence, and wisdom. The holy hermits!... I grant it, they professed to flee wickedness and seek after righteousness, but now my impression is that they fled bothers. We all know they had an intense aversion to any savour of domesticity, and they never shaved, washed, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... long quiets brood, Where the calm is never stirred By the harshness of a word, But instead the singing bird Sweetens all my solitude. ...
— Poems: Patriotic, Religious, Miscellaneous • Abram J. Ryan, (Father Ryan)

... Sociability. Life in Factories.—The social relations of man exert a great influence on sexual life. Hermits and those who live on isolated farms are interesting in this respect. Solitude generally leads man to chronic melancholia and to abnormal peculiarities, unless he has a library in his hermitage, when he may live in the spirit of the intellectual sociability derived from ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel

... man, passionately. "Haven't I been patient? Haven't I waited and waited, eating my heart out in solitude, and loneliness, and misery? But for your love, Kate, your undying love and faith in me—I should long ago ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming

... the evening dried up as it touched my burning skin. I opened my lips to the breeze; and the breeze, instead of cooling me, was itself set aglow by the fire of my breath. What torment, Chactas! to see you always near me, far from all other humankind in the deepest solitude, and yet to feel that between us there was an insuperable barrier! To pass my life at your feet, to serve you as a slave, to bring you food and lay your couch in some secret corner of the universe, would have been for me supremest happiness; ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury

... of sixteen to the day of her marriage Veronique's bearing was always thoughtful, and sometimes melancholy. Living in such deep solitude, she was forced, like other solitary persons, to examine and consider the spectacle of that which went on within her,—the progress of her thought, the variety of the images in her mind, and the scope of feelings warmed and nurtured in a ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac

... all night through. They are really the first throbbings of life, the harbingers of day; and it pleases you as much to hear them as it must please a shipwrecked seaman once again to grasp a hand of flesh and blood after years of miserable solitude. They have the freshness of the daylight life about them. You can hear the carters cracking their whips and crying hoarsely to their horses or to one another; and sometimes even a peal of healthy, harsh horse-laughter comes up to you through the darkness. There is ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson

... at home or in a quite new place. Memory and you must go hand in hand with (at least) decent weather if you wish to cook up a proper dish of solitude. It is in these little flights of mine that I get more pleasure than in anything else. Now, at present, I am supremely uneasy and restless - almost to the extent of pain; but O! how I enjoy it, and how I SHALL enjoy it afterwards (please God), if I ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Ellen shut her lips, and Lucy, throbbing from the stripes of the encounter and seeing further parley fruitless, slipped from the room and fled to the quiet of the still night's solitude. ...
— The Wall Between • Sara Ware Bassett

... my Cleis, on my heart; And softer than a little wild bird's wing Are kisses that she pours upon my mouth. Ah, never any more when spring like fire Will flicker in the newly opened leaves, Shall I steal forth to seek for solitude Beyond the lure of light Alcaeus' lyre, Beyond the sob that stilled Erinna's voice. Ah, never with a throat that aches with song, Beneath the white uncaring sky of spring, Shall I go forth to hide awhile from Love The quiver and the crying of my heart. Still ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse

... beach, Omega and Thalma watched the lake eagerly, but nothing disturbed its mirror-like surface. As on the preceding night the awful silence appalled them—even though they were accustomed to the vast solitude. It was so calm and still, so full of death and mystery, that it seemed they must cry out in the agony of their emotions. As the very silence was crushing their spirits so the knowledge that only one form of life on earth stood between them and the water to which ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow

... but absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total and perpetual exclusion from all society, is as great a positive pain as can almost be conceived. Therefore in the balance between the pleasure of general society, and the pain of absolute solitude, pain is the predominant idea. But the pleasure of any particular social enjoyment outweighs very considerably the uneasiness caused by the want of that particular enjoyment; so that the strongest sensations relative ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. I. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... agriculture; while the ancient marshes have been changed by human industry into rich and fertile tracts, the best parts of which are precisely those conquered from the grasp of the ocean. In order to form an idea of the solitude and desolation which once reigned where we now see the most richly cultivated fields, the most thriving villages, and the wealthiest towns of the continent, the imagination must go back to times which have not left one monument of antiquity and ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan

... to the cemetery to pray at Joseph's tomb, as he often did. For in the city of the dead solitude may be found. When he returned neither on the first day nor on the second, she began to feel anxious. She waited up the ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger

... overwrought, Oliver was anxious—and hungry. He saw his cousin gather up the fragments of the letter, piece them together for rereading, then fling them from him once more. The boy wandered about aimlessly in the solitude of the big house, wishing that this long miserable day would reach an end and that Janet and Mrs. Brown would come home. It grew dark and no one returned, although, after a long time, ...
— The Windy Hill • Cornelia Meigs

... scathe and scorch the soul—which penetrate to the vital seat of happiness—and blast it, never again to put forth bud or blossom. She never objected to frequent the haunts of pleasure, but was as much alone there as in the depths of solitude; walking about in a sad revery, apparently unconscious of the world around her. She carried with her an inward woe that mocked at all the blandishments of friendship, and "heeded not the song of the charmer, charm he never ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving

... ask whether it was unphilosophical for an individual who had examined the educational systems of various countries, and who was crossing the Alps, to retire to a mountain solitude, and there, in the abode of that "eternal sunshine," and in the presence of Him who is the fountain of light, to contemplate a system which was to diffuse intellectual and moral light throughout his native country, ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... the abbeys which remain in ruins—those, for instance, of Fountains and Tintern—were Cistercian abbeys. They are beautiful, not because the Cistercians loved pleasant places, but because they loved solitude, whilst the Benedictines had either planted themselves in towns or had allowed towns to ...
— A Student's History of England, v. 1 (of 3) - From the earliest times to the Death of King Edward VII • Samuel Rawson Gardiner

... beautiful meadows we are borne swiftly on. There we must tarry for the night, for I will not travel in the dark when I can help it. I love it. There is no solitude in the world, or at least I have never felt any, like standing alone in the doorway of the rear car on a dark night, and rushing on through the darkness,—darkness, darkness everywhere, and if one could be sure of rushing ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton

... own temper thus aggravated his solitude and his pain we must also keep in mind that neither among the priests, the prophets and the princes of his time, nor in the kings after Josiah, did Jeremiah find any of that firm material which under the hands of Isaiah rose into bulwarks against Assyria. The nation crumbling from within was suffering ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith

... said Monte-Leone, "that this is the proper hour for exercise, in this country? The complete repose of nature, the eloquent silence of night, all invite us to confidence, and make us wish for isolation and solitude—" ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 2, No. 4, March, 1851 • Various

... poetry of form, but of power; not of multitude, but of immensity. It does not divide into many, but aggrandizes into one. Its ideas of nature are like its ideas of God. It is not the poetry of social life, but of solitude: each man seems alone in the world, with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs ...
— English literary criticism • Various

... could see to do what virtue would By her own radiant light, though sun and moon Were in the flat sea sunk. And Wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse Contemplation She plumes her feathers and lets grow her wings, That in the various bustle of resort Were all-to ruffled, and sometimes impair'd. He that has light within his own ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... having taken refuge in the swamp, and there repeatedly sought for, throughout all this time he has contrived to baffle search. Nor has he either starved or suffered, except from solitude. Naturally of a social disposition, this has been irksome to him. Otherwise, he has comforts enough. Though rude his domicile, and remote from a market, it is sufficiently furnished and provided. The Spanish moss makes a soft couch, ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid

... Sollecitudine. The commentators will have it that this is an error for solitudine, solitude, but I see no necessity for the substitution, the text being perfectly acceptable as ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... sedulous in watching over me, even from my childhood, although he reposed more confidence in my sentiments of honour than in the guards he had placed around me. In short, kept thus between walls and in perfect solitude, having no other company than that of my attendants, I grew to womanhood, and with me grew the reputation of my loveliness, bruited abroad by the servants of my house, and by such as had been admitted to ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

... the fierce, unyielding, never-ceasing, ever-pressing strife of mind and unrest of life is passing, an eddy in the tide has borne him into quieter waters, and if the hum of the world reaches his solitude, it no longer rouses ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg

... and abused his power. At the period when he ran riot in his Satire, society had not yet caught him within its pale; and in the time of his Cains and Don Juans, he had again broken loose from it. Hence, his instinct towards a life of solitude and independence, as the true element of his strength. In his own domain of imagination he could defy the whole world; while, in real life, a frown or smile could rule him. The facility with which he sacrificed his first volume, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore

... those people. I found an unoccupied camp chair—one of Sim's, which he rented for funerals—and carried it to a dark spot in the shrubbery near the border of the parsonage lawn and not far from the gate. There I seated myself, lit a cigar and smoked in solitude. ...
— The Rise of Roscoe Paine • Joseph C. Lincoln

... his chance of life. Appalling too was the rapidity with which men caught the infection, dying like sheep if they attended on one another, and this was the principal cause of mortality. When they were afraid to visit one another, the sufferers died in their solitude, so that many houses were empty because there had been no one left to take care of the sick; or if they ventured they perished, especially those who aspired to heroism. For they went to see their friends without thought of themselves and were ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to prose. Volume I (of X) - Greece • Various

... scarcely any sculpture; and this, attracting my attention by a favourite contrast of colour, retained it by its own beauty. It was a Dryad, or some nymph of the woods, who had just glided from the solitude of the trees behind, and had sprung upon the pedestal to look wonderingly around her. A few large brown leaves lay at her feet, borne thither by some eddying wind from the trees behind. As I gazed, filled with a new pleasure, a drop of rain upon my face made me look up. ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald



Words linked to "Solitude" :   place, spot, topographic point, isolation, purdah



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