How vain and foolish, then, thought I, for timid untravelled man to try to comprehend aright this wondrous whale, by merely poring over
his dead attenuated skeleton, stretched in this peaceful wood.
While Goldsmith lay a-dying in London, in the breezy Scottish Lowlands a big rough lad of fifteen called Robert Burns was following his father's plow by day, poring over
Shakespeare, the Spectator, and Pope's Homer, of nights, not knowing that in years to come he was to be remembered as our greatest song writer.
The day was made for laziness, and lying on one's back in green places, and staring at the sky till its brightness forced one to shut one's eyes and go to sleep; and was this a time to be poring over
musty books in a dark room, slighted by the very sun itself?
And have I not tallied the whale, Ahab would mutter to himself, as after poring over
his charts till long after midnight he would throw himself back in reveries --tallied him, and shall he escape?
In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over
them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits.
They had grown gray in study; their eyes were bleared with poring over
print and manuscript by the light of the midnight lamp.
The watch-maker, always poring over
a little desk with a magnifying glass at his eye, and always inspected by a group of smock-frocks poring over
him through the glass of his shop-window, seemed to be about the only person in the High-street whose trade engaged his attention.
Heyling would sit whole days together, in the office, poring over
the papers as they accumulated, and reading again and again, his eyes gleaming with joy, the letters of remonstrance, the prayers for a little delay, the representations of the certain ruin in which the opposite party must be involved, which poured in, as suit after suit, and process after process, was commenced.
I'm sure I am," echoed Amy, poring over
the engraved copy of the Madonna and Child, which her mother had given her in a pretty frame.