" We know that Nelson's method of fighting had for months before the battle been his constant preoccupation, and that he had lost no opportunity of explaining his ideas to his captains.

"Is he alive?" Johnnie, generous soul, even in the intense preoccupation of her own pain, could pity the woman who looked and spoke thus.

It is capable of conquering the most obstinate and serious mental preoccupation, and it conquered Priam's.

Since he came out of the hospital he had not been able to talk to anyone; these people back here sickened him with their little preoccupations, their business, their pleasures, the restrictions to their pleasures, their selfishness, their ignorance and lack of comprehension.

At breakfast, his wife noticed with intense anxiety his sharpened features and his evident preoccupation of mind.

Russia was the only danger that Germany saw, and the continual increase of the Russian army was her gravest preoccupation.

"Perhaps she may come to-day...." With the superstition of the enamored and all those who wait, he kept hunting certain places preferred by the widow, believing that in this way he would attract her from her distant preoccupation, obliging her to come to him.

To me this opinion, like Taney's opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case, indicates that the tension had reached the breaking point, the court yielding in all directions at once, while the dominant preoccupation of the presiding judge seemed to be to plant his tribunal in such a position that it could so yield, without stultifying itself hopelessly before the legal profession and the public.

Occasionally in his darker hours Neilson foresaw even more sinister possibilities in this change in Ray: the abnormal intensity manifest in every look and word, the weird, evil preoccupation that seemed ever upon him.

It might have been expected, from the general's excessive preoccupation with lobbyists and politicians, that the business of the bureau should languish, and so it did.

This careful armor, these verses plated with enamel and studded with jewels, captivated him, but the exclusive preoccupation with form, the sonorities of tone, the clangor of metals, did not entirely conceal from him the emptiness of the thought, the turgidity of those blisters which emboss the skin of the Pharsale.

After the letter had come, Veronica spoke to Don Teodoro, who had noticed her extreme preoccupation and was wondering what could have happened.

He appeared not to hear their excited whispers, and feigned preoccupation until he was quite sure his manner had been noted, then as if modesty held him, he spoke, "Is there not in these parts a monastery upon the estates of the noble Lord Cedric of Crandlemar?"

Would he let the train go, in his feverish preoccupation?

Along with all the other constituents of his work, its sacerdotalism, its subtle reverie, its sensuous colour and perfume, its marmoreal austerity, its honeyed music, its frequent preoccupation with the haunted recesses of thought, there go an endearing homeliness and simplicity, a deep human tenderness, a gentle friendliness, a something childlike.

she asked, making her voice full of a gentle preoccupation.

The regular writers, poets, and novelists, who have no official ties, they, at least should have the advantages of their independence; but unfortunately few of them are able to judge for themselves of events which are beyond the limits of their habitual preoccupations, commercial or aesthetic.

In my idiotic preoccupation with the other man I had let that wretch depart without a glance at his hair.

It is not always from official neglect, or human pride and indifference, that this want of sympathy for human labour and human devotion arises, but rather from the infinite preoccupations and monotonous overwork of the faculties of all public servants of any position of importance in that vast continent of swarming bees intent on their day's labour and nothing else.

At this period of his youth Eliot had more than ever the appearance of inhuman preoccupation.

He presented a picture of bored indolence, of innocent preoccupation.

And it is the wanderer, the life-explorer without irrelevant preoccupations, who is the true naturalist, collecting experiences and making maps for spiritual eyes.

Further, it seems clear that the British Government, so far from "hemming-in" Germany in this matter, were ready from the first to accept, if not to welcome, her enterprise, subject to their quite legitimate and necessary preoccupation with their position on the Persian Gulf.

" There is surely a great gulf fixed between this lofty preoccupation with great human emotions and high spiritual and intellectual excitements, and a vulgar gospel of "eat, drink, for tomorrow we die," whether or not both counsels start out from a realization of "the awful brevity" of our mortal day.

To cry "sex" and to talk of nature's mad preoccupation with the species throws no light on the matter, and robs it of no whit of its magic.