Attempts at gaiety may look like "a conquest over the natural pensiveness of [the] mind"

— Mackenzie, Henry (1745-1831)


Place of Publication
London
Publisher
W. Strahan, T. Cadell, W. Creech
Date
1777
Metaphor
Attempts at gaiety may look like "a conquest over the natural pensiveness of [the] mind"
Metaphor in Context
To the flippancy, which we are apt to ascribe to females of her age, she seems utterly a stranger. Her disposition indeed appears to lean, in an uncommon degree, towards the serious. Yet she breaks forth at times into filial attempts at gaiety, to amuse that disquiet which she observes in her father; but even then it looks like a conquest over the natural pensiveness of her mind. This melancholy might be held a fault in Julia; but the fortune of her family has been such, that none but those, who are totally exempted from thinking, could have looked on it with indifference.
Categories
Provenance
Searching "conque" and "mind" in HDIS (Prose)
Citation
11 entries in ESTC (1777, 1778, 1781, 1782, 1787, 1793, 1795, 1796).

Henry Mackenzie, Julia de Roubigné, A Tale in a Series of Letters. Published by The Author of The Man of Feeling, and The Man of The World, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan, T. Cadell, W. Creech, 1777). <Link to ECCO>
Date of Entry
09/23/2004

The Mind is a Metaphor is authored by Brad Pasanek, Assistant Professor of English, University of Virginia.