What is musing?

Famous quotes containing the word musing:

    “Still grows the vivacious lilac a generation after the door and lintel and the sill are gone, unfolding its sweet-scented flowers each spring, to be plucked by the musing traveller; planted and tended once by children’s hands, in front-yard plots,—now standing by wall-sides in retired pastures, and giving place to new-rising forests;Mthe last of that stirp, sole survivor of that family.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Mary sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
    Waiting for Warren.”
    —Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    “The mountains look on Marathon—
    And Marathon looks on the sea;
    And musing there an hour alone,
    I dreamed that Greece might still be free;
    For standing on the Persians’ grave,
    I could not deem myself a slave.”
    —George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)