|
|
|
More "Pathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ate breakfast before day, by the light of a candle covering its candlestick with a tallow glacier. It made only a hole of shine in the general duskiness of the big dining-room. The landlady bade them a pathetic good-by. She was sure there were dangers ahead of them. The night stage had got in three hours late, owing to a breakdown, and one calamity she said, is only ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... fulfilment of which is a fading dream. A solitary figure is the hero of the third novel, The Fool (1909), as well. It is a young clergyman who settles in a small Franconian town with the sole purpose of doing good. He visits those who are weary and heavy-laden; with pathetic faith in the goodness of humanity he sees in every man a brother, and finally he suffers the Saviour's fate of pining away and dying unrecognized for what he was. This is Kellermann's profoundest and best ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... sentiment prompts him to look up at my window; he gives a whimper and a wag, and goes on. I try to persuade myself that he didn't see me, and that he does this, other mornings, when I am not thus perversely bolstered up in rebellion, and peering through blinds at wrong hours. Isn't there something pathetic in the very idea that a dog may have a behind-your-back attachment of that sort?—that every morning he looks up at an unresponsive blank, and wags, and ...
— An Englishwoman's Love-Letters • Anonymous
... to direct that calm and tenacious bravery which the German opposed to the pathetic and spontaneous fury of the Frenchman, against the inward enemy, against the highly suspicious and, at all events, unnative "cultivation" which, owing to a dangerous misunderstanding, is called "culture" ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... intensely pathetic in being thus, as it were, spectators of a tragic drama which is being acted on two separate stages at once—the dreadful link of connection, which is unseen to the separate actors, being only too vividly seen by the spectators. It was with ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... was matted and plastered with some thick liquid, giving him a curious frowsy appearance. He was evidently in a towering rage but it was also apparent that he was suffering great pain, his ferocious growls being interspersed with long, low, pathetic whines. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... London slums, I had occasion to observe that among the women of the poor, and more especially in those who had lost the first bloom of youth, modesty consisted chiefly in the fear of being disgusting. There was an almost pathetic anxiety, in the face of pain and discomfort, not to be disgusting in the doctor's eyes. This anxiety expressed itself in the ordinary symptoms of modesty. But, as soon as the woman realized that I found nothing disgusting in whatever was proper and necessary to be done under the circumstances, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of applause when "Enoch Arden" was announced. Eleanor took her place at the piano while Anne stepped forward and began the pathetic tale to the subdued strains of the music that Eleanor had ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... month of October 1795, Pitt decided to come to terms with France, if the Directory, newly installed in power, should found a stable Government and exhibit peaceful tendencies. His position in this autumn is pathetic. Reproached by the emigres for recalling the Comte d'Artois from Yeu, taunted by Fox for not having sought peace from the Terrorists, and reviled by the populace as the cause of the dearth, he held firmly on his way, shelving the emigres, maintaining that ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... noblest of all ballads; while one of the greatest of modern poems opens with something personal and pathetic, key-note ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... lifting her pathetic eyes to his. "It isn't that. Oh, please be good to me! Don't ask me to say anything more. Don't make it hard for me, Brandon. I love you—I love you. To be your wife would be the most glorious—No, no! I must not even think of it. I must put it out of my mind. ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... to take him from me, grannie, after he's been and struck me?" interposed his wife, in a tone half pathetic, ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... three lines all rhyme, but the rhyme changes with each succeeding triplet. It would be difficult to persuade the English reader that this is a very effective measure, and one in which many a gloomy or pathetic tale has been told. In order to realise how a few Chinese monosyllables in juxtaposition can stir the human heart to its lowest depths, it is necessary to devote some years to the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... "they are alike except that this seems more pathetic. There is no doubt of the truth in my mind. Of course she saw the difference as Miss Lilian grew older and she was afraid she might have defrauded her of some better fortune. Oh, I pity the poor woman profoundly. She had a hard life. Mrs. Barrington, this must have seemed a haven of rest ...
— The Girls at Mount Morris • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... The traditional anecdotes relative to the Argonautic expedition are introduced with propriety, and embellished with the graces of poetical fiction. In describing scenes of tenderness, this author is happily pathetic, and in the heat of combat, proportionably animated. His similes present the imagination with beautiful imagery, and not only illustrate, but give additional force to the subject. We find in Flaccus a few expressions ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... his worried eyes, His wrinkled, shrewd, pathetic face, His shop, and all he sells and buys ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... harangue of Constantine, and from the works of St. Gregory Nazianzen, and St. Chrysostom. People generally got drunk at these feasts; and this excess was looked upon as a thing that might be permitted. This evidently appears by the pathetic complaints of St. Augustin and St. Cyprian: the former of these holy fathers expresses himself after this manner:—— "Drunken debauches pass as permitted amongst us, so that people turn them into solemn feasts, to honour the ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... paces apart, and passed out of the garden to a low, shelving bank and looked downward where a sea of glass rippled on to the broad, firm sands. What a picture of desolation! The grey, hot mist, the whitewashed cabin, the long, ugly potato patch, the weird, pathetic figure of that old man from whose brain the light of life had surely passed for ever. And yet Trent was puzzled. Monty's furtive glance inland, his half-frightened, half-cunning denial of any anticipated visit suggested that there was ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... own pure motives, entered into a union which her letters to him, full of love, tenderness, and fidelity, proved that she regarded as a sacred marriage; all the circumstances, and, not least, the pathetic way she writes to him of their child later on, prove how she only wished to remain faithful to him. It was now that the sad experiences of her early life told upon her and warped her better judgment; she who had seen ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... them simply what had happened; how he had been to see Arthur, who had talked to him upon the subject, and what he had said, and for his part he had made up his mind, and wasn't going to use cribs any more; and not being quite sure of his ground, took the high and pathetic tone, and was proceeding to say "how that, having learnt his lessons with them for so many years, it would grieve him much to put an end to the arrangement, and he hoped, at any rate, that if they wouldn't go on with him, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... trees, and old Ladrone edged close to the big fire to share its warmth. This caused us to bring in the other horses and put them close to the fire under the big branches of the fir tree. It was deeply pathetic to watch the poor worn animals, all life and spirit gone out of them, standing about the fire with drooping heads and half-closed eyes. Perhaps they dreamed, like us, of the beautiful, warm, ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... [When the pathetic peroration of M, de Seze was read to the King, the evening before it was delivered to the Assembly, "I have to request of you," he said, "to make a painful sacrifice; strike out of your pleading the peroration. It is enough for me to appear before such judges, and show my entire innocence; ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... squeezing his hand, "you are always so wise and good. That's just the point; we must not spoil the happiness by the sorrow, though that is what Marian is always trying to do. Poor Marian, she's such a pathetic creature; I ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... are not blessed with the gift of oratory, from the practice of their favourite art, if it serves to fill up their time, and gain a degree of reputation. I am an admirer of eloquence [c]; I hold it venerable, and even sacred, in all its shapes, and every mode of composition. The pathetic of tragedy, of which you, Maternus, are so great a master; the majesty of the epic, the gaiety of the lyric muse; the wanton elegy, the keen iambic, and the pointed epigram; all have their charms; and Eloquence, whatever may ...
— A Dialogue Concerning Oratory, Or The Causes Of Corrupt Eloquence • Cornelius Tacitus
... Eleanor stood beside the elderly bride that the affair ceased to be funny to her. For the first time, she saw something pathetic and beautiful in the permanence of a love that, starved and thwarted and blasted by ridicule, could survive the years and make two faded, middle-aged people like Aunt Enid and Mr. Chester eager to drain the dregs of life together, ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... wrote in a rather pathetic tone to the Shogun touching the relative strength of the Japanese and the foreigners: "I held a council the other day with my military nobility (Daimios and nobles), but unfortunately inured to the habits of peace, which for more than two hundred years has existed ...
— The Constitutional Development of Japan 1863-1881 • Toyokichi Iyenaga
... and so irreparably complete, is one of the strangest events of that still imperfectly comprehended time. There had been, and were still to be, plenty of instances of the downfall of power, as ruinous and even more tragic, though scarcely any one more pathetic in its surprise and its shame. But it is hard to find one of which so little warning was given, and the causes of which are at once in part so clear, and in part so obscure and unintelligible. Such disasters had to be reckoned ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... Shelby,'" read the reporter. "There ought to be a story in a man who has the nerve to subscribe himself like that in a New York hotel. What do you know about his pathetic case?" ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... to breakfast with a particularly disagreeable expression. He said "good-morning" into his newspaper as usual without noticing her pathetic little smile. ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... the pathetic voice, "that They will sometimes let old Antony out of hell for an hour, to sit on her jasper seat and see the Reverend Mother walk up the golden stairs, with the splendid Knight on one side and the great Lord ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... Wonderful One-Hoss Shay, we do so in spite of the religious and pathetic motive of the greater part of Dr. Holmes's work, and of his fancy, which should be at least as conspicuous as his humour. It is fancy rather than imagination; but it is more perfect, more definite, more fit, than the larger art of imagery, which is apt to be vague, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... been; men they were whom religious feeling guided correctly in choosing their expressions, and with whom the state of the language in some respects cooperated, by furnishing a diction more homely, fervent, and pathetic, than would now be available. For their apostolic functions English was the language most in demand. But in polemic or controversial cases Greek is indispensable. And of this Lady Carbery was sufficiently convinced by ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... and, thinking himself childless, the fact that his title and his old name, of which he was very proud, would die with him had been a great grief. His happiness in the knowledge of Ahmed's existence was pathetic, he was consumed with impatience for his son's arrival. Nothing had been said to Ahmed in case Lord Glencaryll should prove difficult to convince and thereby complicate matters, but his ready acceptance of the affair and his eagerness to see his son ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... this time as if nobody loved him. As a song, it was not a very pathetic song, being all about coons spooning in June under the moon, and so on and so forth, but Gussie handled it in such a sad, crushed way that there was genuine anguish in every line. By the time he reached the refrain I was nearly in tears. It seemed such a rotten sort ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... the word. But I do love the poor old thing. Her letters are rich. She tells me about all the new babies and who's courting who and how the horses are. It is pathetic." ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... without sympathy. Hard and painfully blunt as he could be, he was nevertheless compassionate towards women, though not always happy in expressing his feelings, and when Millicent folded her slender hands with a pathetic sigh, he was moved to sincere pity and indignation. He knew that some of the worthy Colonials' wives and daughters could be, on occasion, almost brutally frank, and that, in spite of his efforts, Leslie was not ...
— Thurston of Orchard Valley • Harold Bindloss
... dresses worn on the occasion; but Glover was the corsair, and burnt cork had to suffer, and I know that there was quite a pretty Miss whom he had no especial objection to embracing as Medora. When he said, "My own Medora!" it was quite pathetic—enough to cause a titter among the younger portion of ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... history shown itself in the form of aggression, but French mysticism clings to the ideal and the hope of a glorious future for a deathless France soon to be renewed. All peoples that have declined or suffered an adverse fate, even the pathetic remnants of the American Indians, expect the return of their lost power. Such mysticism is, we may think, the only condition under which national life in many cases can continue. The religious or the mystical mood of nations is created by the need of making belief dynamic, ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... lacquered, now moldering and fallen into dust. At the four corners of the room the old gods, life-size, had been gathered into piles and covered with matting, and from beneath this dusty covering protruded dirty, battered heads and gilded bodies, ludicrous and pathetic. ...
— Peking Dust • Ellen N. La Motte
... pathetic soliloquy was found written on the back of a hundred pound note of the National Bank, which passed through our hands lately, and we are sorry we can now add our sympathies to those of our poet on the transitory nature ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, Issue 353, January 24, 1829 • Various
... The glorious symphony Hath need of pause and interval of peace. Some subtle signal bids all sweet sounds cease, Save hum of insects' aimless industry. Pathetic summer seeks by blazonry Of color to conceal her swift decrease. Weak subterfuge! Each mocking day doth fleece A blossom, and lay bare her poverty. Poor middle-agd summer! Vain this show! Whole fields of golden-rod cannot offset One meadow with a single violet; ...
— A Calendar of Sonnets • Helen Hunt Jackson
... clear, a little petulant perhaps, but still very sweet. She is quite small—a little girl—and clad in deep mourning. There is something pathetic about the dense black surrounding such a radiant face, and such a childish figure. Her eyes are fixed on the professor, and there is evident anxiety in their hazel depths; her soft lips are parted; she seems hesitating as if not knowing whether ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... written none of these more elaborate works, she would deserve a permanent place in our literature for a considerable library of short stories, among which I should name "A Berkshire Tradition," a pathetic tale of the Revolution; "The White Scarf," a romantic story of Mediaeval France; "Fanny McDermot," a study of conventional morality; "Home," of which the Westminster Review said, "We wish this book was in the hands of every ...
— Daughters of the Puritans - A Group of Brief Biographies • Seth Curtis Beach
... the difficulty which a black boy experiences in America in competing with his white rivals, Booker Washington tells us that his own pathetic and desperate struggle taught him that 'success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.' There ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... put them on my writing! You do not know what it is to write! It cramps your back, it obscures your eyes, it breaks your sides and stomach!" It is interesting to note the various forms which these final words of the scribes took; sometimes the Explicit is a pathetic appeal for remembrance in the prayers of the reader, and sometimes it contains a note of warning. In a manuscript of St. Augustine now at Oxford, there is written: "This book belongs to St. Mary's of Robert's Bridge; whoever shall steal it or in any way alienate ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... through a pane of glass," said the butler, in a soft voice suited to the pathetic nature of the communication. "By great good fortune her ladyship had been dressed for the day, and had got her turban on. This saved her ladyship's head. But her ladyship's neck, sir, had a very narrow escape. ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... murk so characteristic of London draped the grimy structure of the station, and a fine drizzle was falling. London had endued no holiday garments to greet Flamby, but, homely fashion, had elected to receive her in its everyday winter guise. A pathetic little figure, she stepped out of the carriage. Something in the contrast between this joyless gloom and the sun-gay hills she had known and loved brought a sudden mist before Flamby's eyes, so that she remained unaware of the presence of a certain genial officer until ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... quick, too, to catch the difference between his speech and her own. She was quick—and pathetic. Her self-correction amused him, with a strain of pity in his amusement. If a girl like that had only had a chance.... And just then Steptoe broke in on his musing ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... with peach-trees, and topped with wistaria and valerian, and the handsome wild caperplant; and against the wall stood rows of tall golden sunflowers late in their blooming; the sun they seldom could see for the wall, and it was pathetic always to me, as the day wore on, to watch the poor stately amber heads turn straining to greet their god, and only meeting the stones and the cobwebs, and the peach-leaves of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... new and old theories of life, new and old standards of values, new and old centres of authority, new and old ambitions and dreams. And in this chaos there are only two principles of order, the first (which is also the ultimate cause of all our disorder) being the pathetic fact that nearly all the actors in the bewildering drama are still seeking for happiness outside themselves, the second being the ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... had been pronounced and the bridal pair were kneeling at the altar Dame Nellie Melba, wearing a blue dress and hat, crept from the side chapel to the choir and to the joy of the audience sang the pathetic 'Ave Maria' that Desdemona sings in the last act of Verdi's Othello when she feels her predestined doom approaching."—"Evening Standard" on ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... followed up, and a few days later the band was almost annihilated. The plunder recovered proved them guilty of many late attacks. This was toward the end of the Indian war that had for so many years been disastrous to the community, and which in many of its aspects was deeply pathetic. Originally the Indian population was large. The coast Indians were spoken of as Diggers, and inferior in character. They were generally peaceful and friendly while the mountain dwellers were inclined to hostility. As a whole they did not represent a very high type of humanity, ...
— A Backward Glance at Eighty • Charles A. Murdock
... neither they nor Anne Boleyn's can stand a moment's comparison with the unsullied purity of Catherine's life or the lofty courage with which she defended the cause she believed to be right. There is no more pathetic figure in English history, nor one condemned to a crueller fate. No breath of scandal touched her fair name, or impugned her devotion to Henry. If she had the misfortune to be identified with a particular ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... without heat, or fear, or haste. He carried a superb reserve and used no epithets. He showed how the landlords were born into their environment, just as the Irish peasantry were heirs to theirs. The speech was so full of sympathy and rich in reason, so convincing, so pathetic, so un-Irishlike, so charged with heart, and a heart for all humanity, even blind and stupid Englishmen, that everybody was captured, bound with green withes, by his quiet, convincing eloquence. The audience was melted into ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... there, with her hands pressed to her heart, her great pathetic eyes dilated with a curious fear. It was a long time before she spoke, though it was easy to see that she had penetrated Berrington's disguise. But then, he had spoken in his natural voice, which made all the difference. It seemed to him that the grey lady would have ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... stories of the strange lands he'd roved through, I'd begin to say to myself that he must surely be just lying. Then the fellow'd mention some little happening that he'd describe so vividly, would you believe it, I felt the tears in my eyes, for it would be sort of pathetic. So during that whole hour I sat there and changed my mind every ten minutes, now blowing hot, and again cold. I came away in as muddled a state as I went there. His actions seem to stamp him a rogue if ever there was ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... The pathetic career of the Gracchi had much significance in Roman history. They were the unconscious sponsors of a revolutionary movement which did not end until the republic had come under the rule of one man. They failed because they put ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... he had not the joyous nature so characteristic of the time. Moreover, as I have said, he retained the old sweet religious spirit, and clothed it with new forms of beauty in his sacred paintings. There is something pathetic about many of these—the Virgin, while she nurses the Infant Christ, seems to foresee all the sorrow in store for her, and but little of the joy. The girl angels who nestle around her in so many of his pictures, have ...
— The Book of Art for Young People • Agnes Conway
... The brief pathetic life of Powhatan's daughter is well portrayed. (p. 76) This large oblong volume contains ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... of Henry II,, the best and most just of these (the Norman) princes, * *Peter, of Blois, a judicious and even elegant writer, of that age, gives a pathetic description of the venality of justice, and the oppressions of the poor, * * and he scruples not to complain to the king himself of these abuses. We may judge what the case would be under the government of worse ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... return for them money. Girls and boys alike should study these annuities. Life insurance is a helpful form of investment for those who have dependents. The girl at work should not put her savings into speculative investments. Business men of the best standing say it is pathetic to see the waste of girls' savings in unwise investments. One of the best investments a girl can make is to continue ...
— The Canadian Girl at Work - A Book of Vocational Guidance • Marjory MacMurchy
... up mysel'," said the old man, with an affected indifference that was pathetic in its self-abnegation. "I thought twa going a warfare together might do better than ane alone. Ye ken Christ sent out the disciples by twa and twa. And, Davie, when you are hard beset, just utter the name of Christ down in your heart, ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... merchant class. An incident of the afternoon was the singing by five thousand school-children of mixed Eastern races and the presentation of a bouquet to the Duchess. The effect of "God Save the King" in their quaint, native accents was described as being strangely pathetic. On the following morning the Ophir steamed out of the harbour bound for Australia and left eastern civilization behind for the forms and customs of England transplanted upon Australian soil. The shores of Sumatra were coasted, the Straits ...
— The Life of King Edward VII - with a sketch of the career of King George V • J. Castell Hopkins
... aspirant. Although Dickens has told the whole story most feelingly in an introduction to Miss Procter's "Legends and Lyrics," issued after her death, to hear it from his own lips and sympathetic heart, as I have done, was, as may be imagined, something better even than reading his pathetic words on ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... legislation of Congress. Permanent deadlock was thus proposed as the remedy for the ills of sectional conflict. Resolute as the old nationalist was, he could not bring himself in these closing days of his life to pronounce to his party the word "secession." It was pathetic to see the disappointed and broken leader of the South as he literally wore his life away trying to defeat Clay, his lifelong antagonist, or to conciliate Webster, for whom he had ...
— Expansion and Conflict • William E. Dodd
... reckon as the second in the group, because he treats the two former as so closely connected as to be but one in numeration, need not detain us long. It is found only in this Gospel. The first point to be observed in it is the cry of these two blind men. There is something pathetic and exquisitely natural in the two being together, as is also the case in the similar miracle, at a later period, on the outskirts of Jericho. Equal sorrows drive men together for such poor help and solace as they can give each other. They have common experiences ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... turn of a hair how much. She had the air of a spoiled child, which became her; was golden and rosy; could pout; had dark blue eyes, which she could cloud at will, and fill, as we know, with tears. She excelled in pathetic silences, to which her parted lips gave an air of being breathless. She was beautifully dressed in cloudy, filmy things, and had a soft, slight, drooping figure. Innocence was her ...
— Rest Harrow - A Comedy of Resolution • Maurice Hewlett
... The most pathetic page in the history of the Negro race in America is the story of reconstruction days. Kept in ignorance during the days of slavery his one great desire under freedom was for knowledge and self-improvement. Because the white South was spiritually unprepared to deal with ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... remained mute. In view of the fact that she believed love to be dead between them, this method of stimulating an outworn romance seemed sentimental and insincere. Had he loved her, she might well have thought it boyish and pathetic. What he spoke of as a disguise had seemed so natural as to escape her notice; and this indicated the height from which she had never really descended and could now never descend. He had lost his great opportunity of appearing the mayor in her eyes. It was no part ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... bright, as well as a pathetic side to scenes like this. The two have shared for fifty years, but if the days have been full of toil, with them have come strength of body, of mind and sterling character. If the burdens have been heavy, each has made the other's lighter, ...
— Farmers of Forty Centuries - or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea and Japan • F. H. King
... madame went on. "Presently they told her that it was consumption. She went to a hospital and she wrote a pathetic little note to the man. He tore it up. There had been an article in the papers a few weeks before proving that consumption was among the diseases which were more or less infectious. He sent her a few brutal ...
— The Mischief Maker • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... its indescribable glamour, its affecting sincerity, its restraint, its exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy personages who invest its scenes—Melisande, timid, naive, child-like, wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelleas, dream-filled, ardent, yet honorable in his passion; old Arkel, wise, gentle, and resigned; the tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; the grave and simple diction, at times direct and homely in phrasing ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... attempt, gentlemen," said Albert, "to move your sympathy by a pathetic description of my own feelings as a man, and as an advocate. Whatever mine may be, it is my wish and my duty to repress them. I have need of that calm possession of my understanding, which will be necessary to convince yours of the innocence of my friend. To convince is my object. ...
— Tales And Novels, Volume 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... the Community set them down as a pair of lovers. They took walks together, and were not seldom encountered in the wood-paths: Hollingsworth deeply discoursing, in tones solemn and sternly pathetic; Zenobia, with a rich glow on her cheeks, and her eyes softened from their ordinary brightness, looked so beautiful, that had her companion been ten times a philanthropist, it seemed impossible but that one glance should melt him back ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... has to forget me," he answered calmly. "You can bring me back to bed when she is through." And to this plea was added a pathetic wag of the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... defects is, in true tenderness of feeling. He has very few passages which can be called pathetic. His Elegies and funeral Odes, such as those on "Mrs Killigrew" and "Eleonora," are eloquent; but they move you to admiration, not to tears. Dryden's long immersion in the pollutions of the playhouses, had combined, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... the initiative against the patricians, at my suggestion, and the Annals were written by a plebeian demagogue, instead of by one of that party, whose account of my extinction by command of the emperor was pathetic. He apologized in turn for my imperial master and me, saying truly, that the misunderstanding between us was past cement: for each of us loved the man but hated his office; and as the man is always more in his office than he is in himself, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... arrived at Djenan-el-Maqui she found Claude in the little dining-room with Caroline, who was seated beside him on a chair, leaning her lemon-colored chin upon the table, and gazing with pathetic eyes at the ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... mournful story of colonel Lee's little bugler, and how he was murdered by colonel Tarleton. This "poor beardless boy", as Lee, in his pathetic account of that horrid transaction, calls him, had been mounted on a very fleet horse; but to gratify a countryman who had brought some news of the British, and was afraid of falling into their hands, Lee ordered the boy to exchange his horse, a moment, for that of the countryman, which happened ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... man there," pointing to Miller, "is Karl von Mueller, captain in the Secret Service." A low moan broke from Kathleen, and she looked anywhere but at Miller, who had stepped forward to stand between her and the pine table with its pathetic burden. "Von Mueller," continued ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... was illustrated by translations into English verse, was followed by another on Josephin Soulary, in whom she saw more than her maturer judgment might have justified. There is something very interesting and now, alas! still more pathetic in these sturdy and workmanlike essays in unaided criticism. Still more solitary her work became, in July, 1874, when her only sister, Aru, died, at the age of twenty. She seems to have been no less amiable than her sister, and if gifted with less originality and a less forcible ambition, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... glad to see the end of the Manchus. Among other acts of desolation, the large and beautiful city of Soochow was burnt and looted, an outrage for which the T'ai-p'ings were held responsible, and regarding which there is a pathetic tale told by an eye-witness of the ruins; in this instance, however, if indeed in no others, the acts of vandalism in question ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles
... permanent and beautiful things in his literary work. Past and Present (1843) is certainly a success—a happy and true thought, full of originality, worked out with art and power. The idea of embedding a living and pathetic picture of monastic life in the twelfth century, and a minute study of the labours of enlightened churchmen in the early struggles of civilisation—the idea of embedding this tale, as if it were the remains of some disinterred ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... some very pathetic additional particulars. It is in three parts—a plaintive prayer and portraiture of the psalmist's mental distress (vers. 1-8); a vehement supplication against his foes, and indignant recounting of their treachery (vers. ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... much, or rather a good deal too little, for the Signora Ballatino. She had hitherto been standing in a meek attitude of pathetic appeal, wearing a fixed smile of ineffable sweetness but she evidently felt that she could go a bit farther than that herself, even if she was a lady. Calling the chairman "an old messer," and telling him for Gawd's sake ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome
... systems, and that those systems are optimistic. It is as though they said: 'Things must be good. But as they obviously are not good, they must really be other than they are.' And hence these extraordinary doctrines, so pitiful, so pathetic, so absurd, of the eternal good God who made this bad world, of the Absolute whose only manifestation is the Relative, of the Real which has so much less reality than the Phenomenal. Or, if all that be rejected, we transfer our heaven ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... Johnson remarked, with his usual pointed severity, 'Here is a man telling the world what the world had all his life been telling him.' His 'Monody' expresses real grief in an artificial style, but has some stanzas as natural in the expression as they are pathetic ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... his ungraciousness; for my angry passions rose, at this rebuff, in a way that would have scandalized good Dr. Watts. He was a disappointment in all respects, (the rebel, not the blessed Doctor,) for he was neither fiendish, romantic, pathetic, or anything interesting; but a long, fat man, with a head like a burning bush, and a perfectly expressionless face: so I could dislike him without the slightest drawback, and ignored his existence from that day forth. One redeeming ...
— Hospital Sketches • Louisa May Alcott
... its boundary. The Germans exacted, further, an enormous indemnity for the unjustifiable attack which the French had made upon them. This was fixed at five billion francs, and German troops were to occupy France till it was paid. The French people made pathetic sacrifices to hasten the payment of this indemnity, in order that the country might be freed from the presence of the hated Germans. The bitter feeling of the French for the Germans dates from this ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... again. These big children called men were almost to be pitied. She had expected a fight, but the man had thrown up the sponge from the outset, and now he was going to give himself into her hands. Only for that pathetic look in his eyes and that searching tone in his voice she could have found it ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... for children look more picturesque as bridesmaids than the {73} average half-dozen grown-up girls who cannot be chosen for their appearance. Elderly bridesmaids in youthful frocks and girlish hats are ridiculous to the unthinking, but pathetic to those ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... on every side, the pathetic figures of men who could not let go after their greatest usefulness was past; of other men who dropped before they realized their arrival at the end of the road; and, most pathetic of all, of men who ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... breaks in from time to time to bewilder and deflower these quiet homes; not "passionate sorrow" only, for the overthrow of the soul's beauty, but the loss of, or carelessness for personal beauty even, in those whom men have wronged—their pathetic wanness; the sailor "who, in his heart, was half a shepherd on the stormy seas;" the wild woman teaching her child to pray for her betrayer; incidents like the making of the shepherd's staff, or that of the young boy laying the first stone of the sheepfold;—all the pathetic episodes of ...
— The Gate of Appreciation - Studies in the Relation of Art to Life • Carleton Noyes
... waited all those centuries for this night; who has given up to the coming hour all the freedom of eternity, won in the old way, in hope of a new life in a new world such as she longed for...!" She stopped suddenly. As she had gone on speaking there had come with her words a strange pathetic, almost pleading, tone which touched me to the quick. As she stopped, I could see, before she turned away her head, that her eyes were full ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... of joy streamed down her face, and then Mercy's flowed too. She uttered a little pathetic cry of joy. "Ah," she sobbed, "the bit of comfort I needed so has come to my heavy heart. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 109, November, 1866 • Various
... so humble, so pathetic, so self-forgetful in the homage that the tears sprang to the girl's eyes and she longed to put her arms about his neck and draw his face close to hers and tell him how her heart was ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill
... Nan, simply; and then she added, with quaintness that was pathetic, "You see, we are so unused to the feeling, and it is over-hard at first: by and by we shall be more used to not having our own ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... weeks to do. And it suddenly impressed me as something poignant, as something with the Vergilian touch of tears in it. It seemed so full of history, so vocal of the tragic expedients to which men on the prairie must turn. It seemed pathetic. It brought a lump into my throat. Yet that Joseph's Coat of metal was a neatly done bit of work. All it needed was a coat of paint or two, and it would look less like a crazy-quilt solidified into a homestead. And I suddenly ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... but his fear of losing an army made all pleadings vain. In fact, as I ascertained by the following cablegram which came into my hands, Napoleon's instructions for the French evacuation were in Mexico at the very time of this pathetic scene between him and Carlotta. The despatch was in cipher when I received it, but was translated by the telegraph operator at my headquarters, who long before had mastered the key of the ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... line seems to me particularly interesting—even pathetic. It is a telegram sent by the late Czar Nicolas to his Imperial Cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. It is dated July 29, ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... that she couldn't read, run, and ride as much as she liked. A quick temper, sharp tongue, and restless spirit were always getting her into scrapes, and her life was a series of ups and downs, which were both comic and pathetic. But the training she received at Aunt March's was just what she needed, and the thought that she was doing something to support herself made her happy in spite of ...
— Little Women • Louisa May Alcott
... wrote to you once that you must be unconcerned when you write pathetic stories. And you did not understand me. You may weep and moan over your stories, you may suffer together with your heroes, but I consider one must do this so that the reader does not notice it. The more objective, the stronger will ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... France loaded Wilfrid with rich presents, and sent him over to England in a gallant ship to bear the mournful tidings of poor Prince Edwin's death to England's king. She thought that when Athelstane should hear the sad tale told in the pathetic language of the faithful page, his heart would be touched with remorse for what he ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... the present editor for severity during the chairmanship of the critical department are invited to take a vicarious revenge this month, observing the uncensored remarks of the present juvenile chairman concerning our pathetic ignorance. Of us Master Galpin says: "when the author approaches involved or technical subjects, he shows clearly the unfortunate circumstance that he has never profited by an advanced education." This certainly should ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... show a remarkable freedom of dealing with the sacred text. They repeat in terser language what I ventured to utter four years ago regarding the Book of Genesis. 'Profoundly interesting and indeed pathetic to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. It is a poem, not a scientific treatise. In the former aspect it is for ever beautiful; in the latter it has been, and it will continue to be, purely ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... the passengers to be put to death, in detail, until it came the turn of Herrera. As he was about to be cast into the sea, his daughter sprang wildly forward, and kneeling before the cruel pirate captain, she beseeched him in such earnest and pathetic tones to spare her father's life, or let her die in his stead, that Rowland, fired by the voluptuousness of her extreme beauty, and perhaps touched by her tears, promised to spare her father on condition that she would become his wife. Such were the dread alternatives. Death for her father ...
— Blackbeard - Or, The Pirate of Roanoke. • B. Barker
... Author of Waverley is a master of the pathetic, is evinced by several well-known passages. Such are the funeral of the fisherman's son in the Antiquary—the imprisonment and trial of Effie Deans, and the demeanour of the sister and the broken-hearted father—the short narrative of the smuggler in Redgauntlet—many parts ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various
... the stranger came from behind the bushes. Cautiously he returned to the road. His fine lips curled in a curious mocking smile. But it was himself that he mocked, for there was a look in his dark eyes that gave to his naturally strong face an almost pathetic ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright
... deep, creamy, golden hue, with delicate traceries of mould, like fairy cobwebs. The Smoked Beef, and Doughnuts, as being more sober and unemotional features of the pageant, appeared on either side the remains of a Cold Chicken, as rendering pathetic tribute to hoary age; while sturdy, reliable Hash and Fishballs reposed right and left in their mottled and rich brown coats, with a kind of complacent consciousness of having been created according to Mrs. GLASS'S standard dictum, First ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 15, July 9, 1870 • Various
... true. In March Speed wrote him that he was "far happier than he had ever expected to be." Lincoln caught at the letter with an eagerness which is deeply pathetic: ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... of a translation of one of Jonas Lie's earlier works—"Den Fremsynte" ("The Visionary")—the reviewer expressed a hope that I would follow up that translation with "an English version of Lie's 'Livsslaven,' that intensely tragic and pathetic story of suffering and wrong." It is in accordance with this suggestion that the present ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie
... musings, the people of New York do not suffer any appearances of neglect to accumulate round the last resting-place of those who died unfriended and alone. Another feature, not to be met with in England, strikes the stranger at first with ludicrous images, though in reality it has more of the pathetic. In one part of this cemetery there are several hundred graves of children, and these, with most others of children of the poorer class, have toys in glass cases placed upon them. There are playthings of many kinds, woolly dogs and lambs, and little wooden houses, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... subject you ought to talk on. Why I can hardly wait to hear it. Who better can tell it? If you are short of facts, just romance a little, that's allowable where facts are scarce. Tell 'em personal incidents and don't make 'em too solemn or pathetic. Make 'em laugh. Personally, I'm going to get a close-up seat, for in that big barn of a place I doubt if you ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney
... of nature and truth—and in every respect worthy of "one of the most elegant, pathetic, and original living poets of England." Moreover, it is just such a book as we expected from the worthy vicar of Bremhill; dedicated to the Bishop of Bath and Wells; and dated from Bremhill Parsonage, of which interesting ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various
... and from the heart, and seems made to convey both profound thought and deep emotion. There is no index of character so sure as the voice. There are tones, tones brilliant and gushing, which impart a quick and pathetic sensibility: there are others that, deep and yet calm, seem the just interpreters of a serene and exalted intellect. But the rarest and the most precious of all voices is that which combines passion and repose; and whose rich and restrained tones exercise, perhaps, on the human frame ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... my family (it was to a female too!) in the name of the Chairman of my Committee, to say, that I had fallen a sacrifice to the fury of the mob, whose rage had been turned against me by some circumstance. The caitiff described, in very pathetic language, the distress of my friends, and requested instructions for the funeral of the mangled corpse. This letter was written in the most plausible manner; the hand-writing and name of the Chairman of my Committee was forged, and every thing was admirably calculated to give the impression, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 3 • Henry Hunt
... work on the plans. He could not keep at it, and contented himself with going the round of the fields two or three times a day and watching the men. The sudden flame of energy that Pelle's youth had called to life within him had died down, leaving a pathetic old man, who had been out in the cold all his life, and was now luxuriating in a few late rays of evening sun. He no longer measured himself by Pelle, and was not jealous of his taking the lead in anything, but simply admired him ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... fully armed foot-soldier, upon whom she turns to deliver a blow with her sword. "Every reader will be struck by the beauty and spirit of the Amazon, alike in her action and her facial expression. The type of head, broad, bold, and powerful, and at the same time young and blooming, with the pathetic- indignant expression, is preserved with little falling off from the best age of Greek art. ... In spirit and expression almost equal to the Amazon is the horse she bestrides." [Footnote: The quotations ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... to weigh more heavily upon her. "If I were mother of his children," she said to herself, "it would not make so much difference if I did grow old and ugly. He would have the children to give him pleasure." "I don't see what there is left for me to do," she said again and again. Sometimes she made pathetic attempts to change the simplicity of her dress. "Perhaps if I wore better clothes, I should look younger," she thought. But the result was not satisfactory. Her severe style had always been so essentially her own that any departure from it only made her look still more altered. ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... away. She steered a course clear of the crowd of girls, the ends of her mantle floating behind her, like a brig in full sail before the breeze, while her poor little daughter hung out of the doorway gazing after her, sobbing bitterly, and mouthing in pathetic, helpless misery. ...
— Tom and Some Other Girls - A Public School Story • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... work there is something which a reader would wish to bear in his memory for ever. For power of animated description, for eloquent reflections upon the events of everyday life, and for soft, touching, pathetic appeals to the best feelings of the heart, these tales are worthy of a place on every library table in the kingdom. They are well calculated to add to ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... who has put in our prayer, 'Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil'? Here I live in temptation: I am always thrown into evil. If I were not—" Her voice was very quiet, and had a strange pathetic note in it. It ceased, and ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... it short at the end of one verse, for he could endure no more of that—the tears were in his eyes. Ugly as the dialect was in itself and often as it had revolted him in former days, there was something hauntingly pathetic about it when combined with religion, and sung in Keewatin by that weakling voice; the London voice, shut up in the mildewed box, was an exile like himself. When he was a child, he had heard his mother sing those words, and ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... sweeping it aside, rattled the windows and waved wildly in mid-air a venturesome rose which had clambered to the second story of the old inn. The barn-yard appeared even more dismal because of the coming darkness and the hens presented a pathetic picture of discomfort as they tucked their heads under their wet feathers for the night, while his lordship, the rooster, was but a sorry figure upon his high perch, with the moisture regularly and unceasingly dripping through the ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... during the singing of the last portion of it, the pious man who guided these orisons, sympathized so deeply in the passion of lamentation which encompassed him, that his accents were scarcely audible. The overpowering scene was closed by a brief and pathetic prayer to the Most High, that to His dying servant he would "stretch out His everlasting arms," and "to the friendless prove ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... months before that period had expired. The ode entitled Dejection, to which reference has so often been made, was written on the 4th of April 1802, and the evidential importance which attaches, in connection with the point under inquiry, to this singularly pathetic utterance has been almost universally recognised. Coleridge has himself cited its most significant passage in the Biographia Literaria as supplying the best description of his mental state at the time when it was written. De Quincey quotes it with appropriate comments in his ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... Goulburn, vol. ii., p. 99; ed. 1866). What is this but to say, in polite language, that Jesus was very effeminate? The Christian religion has all the vices of slavery, and encourages submission to evil instead of resistance to it; it has in it the pathetic beauty of the meekness of the bruised and beaten wife still loving the injurer, of the slave forgiving the slave-driver, but it is a beauty which perpetuates the wrong of which it is born. Better, far better, both for oppressor and for oppressed, ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... aspect spread itself over the glowing sky and earth. The nights grew vocal with the invisible chorus of insect life; there was a mellow splendour in the moonlight, which touched the distant hills and wide-spreading waters with a pathetic prophecy of change. And now, ripe, serene, and rich with the accumulated beauty of the summer, the autumn flowers appeared. Their movement was like the stately dances of olden times; youth and its overflow ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... he began to sing, and to sing well. His voice was strong, clear, and mellow, and its tones rose and fell in the silent night air with a pathetic and wonderful sweetness. The burden of his song was "We may be ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... It was not able to attain to the great heights of emotion; but to such a height of grief as it could rise to, it rose. As for his display of that grief, had he been a pretty boy the onlookers could not have failed to find it pathetic; as it was, for all that they were most of them keenly sensible of his royal condition, they were hard put to it ...
— Happy Pollyooly - The Rich Little Poor Girl • Edgar Jepson
... trip in Billy's machine and when we tiptoed into the accident ward the nurse smiled at us. And so did Patsy. He was a pathetic-looking little wisp as he lay there with the bedclothes lifted away from his body, but he smiled and moved his head a bit on the pillow. Fosgill sat down at the head of the cot and leaned over, ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... words on the prevention of gaming, the consideration of which gave rise to this hasty sketch; I mean by dramatic exhibitions of its direful effects. On our stage we have a pathetic tragedy by E. Moore, which, though seldom acted, is a fine domestic moral to old and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... window). Beg pardon, ma'am; but can you tell me what became of that—- (He recognizes Bohun, and loses all his self-possession. Bohun waits rigidly for him to pull himself together. After a pathetic exhibition of confusion, he recovers himself sufficiently to address Bohun weakly but coherently.) Beg pardon, sir, I'm sure, ...
— You Never Can Tell • [George] Bernard Shaw
... Gautier took him up among his Grotesques and embalmed him in the caressing and immortalising amber of his marvellous style and treatment; while at the end of the same century one of the chief living poets and playwrights of France made him the subject of a popular and really pathetic drama. His Pedant Joue is not a stupid comedy, and had the honour of furnishing Moliere with some of that "property" which he was, quite rightly, in the habit of commandeering wherever he found it. ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... Flagellation is not of the body—it is of the soul. Remorse is as a scorpion-whip, and memory beats us with many stripes. The first sin that besets us is forgetfulness of God. Apathy creeps over the spirit, and sloth winds itself about our deeds. Nothing is more pathetic than the decline of the merely forgetful soul. "Be sleepless in the things of the spirit," says Pythagoras, "for sleep in them is ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... up into her daughter's face with a perplexed frown. She seemed scarcely to have heard what had been said to her, not even to have been aware that any escape was possible. She felt for Beatrice's hand, and taking it in her own, stroked it with pathetic helplessness. ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... stood alone and erect in the ring of the dead, no longer attempting to defend himself, either because he was weak with wounds, or because his ammunition was exhausted. There he stood silent and solitary, presenting one of the most pathetic yet splendid sights told of in the generation that he adorned. There was no more firing now, but the natives stole out of their cover and came up to the man quietly, peering at him half afraid. Then one of them lifted his assegai and drove it through his breast. ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... John Ridd, and anxiety to relieve you, I made no condition precedent, you are not the man to take advantage, as a lawyer might. I do not even want your promise. As sure as I hold this glass, and drink your health and love in another drop (forced on me by pathetic words), so surely will you be bound to me, until I do release you. Tush! I know men well by this time: a mere look of trust from one is ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... his own deep misery, and his yearning for his lost Isabelle. As he came under the last portrait of all, that of his own sweet young mother, he suddenly looked up, and as his eyes rested on the calm, beautiful countenance—which had always worn such a pathetic, mournful expression that it used to make his heart ache to look at it in his boyish days—it seemed to smile upon him. He was startled for an instant, and then, thrilling with a strange, exquisite delight, and inspired with new ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... character for satire or commendation. It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as that of Moliere lay in germ in this species of the mediaeval drama. At a late period examples are found of the historical Morality. The pathetic l'Empereur qui tua son Neveu exhibits in its action and its stormy emotion something of tragic power. The advent of the pseudo-classical tragedy of the Pleiade checked the development of this species. The very name "Morality" disappears ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... visible to all as the pair moved together up to the altar rails, and that was the size of the bridegroom as contrasted with the smallness of his bride. He looked like a great rough bear and she like a silver fairy. There was something intensely pathetic in the curve of his broad shoulders as he bent over the little hand to place in its proud position the diminutive golden circlet which was ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... character sketching needs no proof—his characters live to vouch for themselves, for their reality. It is ever amazing to me that the hand which drew the pathetic and beautiful creations, the kindly humored men, the lovely women, the unfortunate little ones, could portray also with such marvellous accuracy the villainy and craftiness of such characters as Bumble, Bill Sykes, Pecksniff, Uriah Heep and ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... "It may seem a contradiction of terms, but these family reunions, these shouts of welcome, are so thrilling it makes one feel as if there was something pathetic in them." ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Kyoto." In one of my strolls I passed the Shinto priest carrying a rice basket and looking, as my companion said, "just like any other man." At a shrine I saw a number of bowls hung up. A hole cut in the bottom of each seemed a pathetic symbol of need, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... and soft blue eyes fringed by sweet long lashes. Her nose and mouth were enough to attract an artist towards her; she was dressed in a lovely pink silk dress and her knob was arrayed by a pink feather. Her name was Margaret and she was known through all Paris as the "sweet young lady with the pathetic blue eyes!" and on the 20th of August (her birthday) not a single person omitted to give her a present. Beatrice thought her lovely and kissed her on both cheeks with hearty ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... it is sure to appear at the most inopportune times and unsuitable places, creating the inevitable commotion which the blunder and tactless are born to make. As it whisks aimlessly around, it may hit the clergyman's nose in the most pathetic sentence of his sermon, or drop into the soprano's mouth at the supreme climax of her trill. Satan himself could scarcely produce a more complete absence of devotion than is often caused by these ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... Tweed and Tay—he used to think of these as of something almost sacred; while even the name of that insignificant stream, the Water of Leith, sounded on his ear like sweet music, evoking a strangely tender and pathetic emotion. And this emotion, crystallized so beautifully by Stevenson in one of his essays in Memories and Portraits, must have been felt, too, by many other exiles wandering in foreign parts; for surely an analogous feeling has been experienced sometimes ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... air of pathetic dignity Kamienszka handed to the worthy patriot the proclamation of Numa Pompilius, in which that worthy confided to the tailors, cobblers, and bakers of the city the honourable task of making, stitching, and baking ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... purse,—plenty of it; but he was afraid to enter an eating-house, or to even approach the "snack-stand" on the edge of the circus lot. For a long time he stood afar off in the darkness, his legs trembling, his mouth twitching, his eyes bent with pathetic intentness upon the single pie and hot sandwich stand that remained near the sideshow tent, presided over by a kind-faced, ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... And now, listening to the historical novel, she was thinking how much she had gone through in her life, how much she had suffered, and that if any one were to describe her life it would make a very pathetic story. As the tumour was in her breast, she was persuaded that love and her domestic grief were the cause of her illness, and that jealousy and tears had brought ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... There was something pathetic in the appeal, and something young too, in spite of his grey beard and furrowed face. Still Mrs. Bowring said nothing. It meant almost too much to her, even after twenty-seven years. This old man had taken her, an innocent young girl, had married her, had betrayed ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... gathered round their late playfellow and pet, there were few dry eyes in the circle. Several of them mourned for Nino, as if he had been their own; and even the callous wreckers were softened, for the moment, by a sight so full of pathetic beauty. The next day, borne upon their shoulders in a chest, which one of the sailors gave for a coffin, it was buried in a hollow among the sand heaps. As I stood beside the lonely little mound, it seemed that never was seen a more affecting type of orphanage. Around, wiry and stiff, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... however. Comparing the two sheets, you read beneath the dog's name a date and a pathetic legend; and on the other sheet, written in his son's boyish hand, beneath the name of Andrew Moore the same ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... space in front; of the beautiful medieval seat of the municipal government, once so sacred for the sublime and pathetic scenes enacted there during the famous siege and in the magistracy of Peter van der Werff, was accordingly enclosed by a solid palisade of oaken planks, strengthened by rows of iron bars with barbed prongs: The entrenchment ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... There is nothing more pathetic in some ways to-day than the position of the small neutral countries in Europe, and especially those which directly adjoin Germany. And there is nothing more galling than the inability of the Allies to give them any ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... resumed the mourning, temporarily laid aside. The black gown, hanging about her in soft trailing folds, added to the graceful height of her slight figure. The white tokens of widowhood at neck and wrists gave to her unusual beauty a pathetic suggestion of wistful loneliness. Her face was very pale; a purple tint beneath the tired eyes betokened tears and sleeplessness. But the calm steadfast look in those sweet eyes revealed a mind free of all doubt; a ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... the reach of those he sought to benefit. The passing years saw his great house, its wealth, its very name, vanish as if they had never been, and even his bones denied by ghoulish thieves rest in the grave. There is no more pathetic page in the history of our city than that which records the eclipse of the house of Alexander T. Stewart, merchant prince. I like to think of the banker's successful philanthropy as a kind of justice to the memory of the dead ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... drawing me closer to him, with his great strong hand, and gazing at me with a terribly pathetic look in his eyes. "Sep, tell poor father not to take on about it. We couldn't help it. An accident. Tell him it was an accident, ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... the room defiantly. She was a gallant and pathetic little figure in her blue draperies. The other child was plainly frightened at the result ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... toil who had driven his family thirty miles across the prairie, blanketed his tired horses and slept on the ground the night before, who was willing to stand all through the afternoon and listen with pathetic eagerness to this debate, must be moved by a patriotism divine. In the breast of that farmer, in the breast of his tired wife who held her child by the hand, had been instilled from birth that sublime fervor ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... reiterated. "Mike was whining on his chain, and I said I thought it was cruel to keep a dog tied up. I suppose I ought to have kept my thoughts to myself," she said with a pathetic little smile. "Do please forgive ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... the morning sky, like masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous rose. Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why. There was something in the dawn's delicate loveliness that seemed to him inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break in beauty, and that set in storm. These rustics, too, with their rough, good-humoured voices, and their nonchalant ways, what a strange London they saw! A London free from ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... him toward all who suffered in the same way. His eyes smarted with pitifulness as he noted the pains with which the little girl opposite him had tried to make the most of her humble charms in the hope of catching his eye. And the very poverty of those charms made her efforts the more pathetic. He blamed his eyes for the hard clearness with which they noted the shortcomings of the small, unformed features, the freckled skin, the insignificant and niggardly contour, and for the cruelty of the comparison ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... the old inhabitant, "the little children who sobbed so violently in court this morning, and to whom you made such pathetic reference, were playing on an ash-heap near their cottage; and they had a poor cat with a string round its neck, swinging backwards and forwards, and as they ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... the day of army overcoats, and the hard times had brought hundreds of them from closets and trunks. General Hendricks, fluttering down the street in his faded blue, made a rather pathetic figure. The winter had whitened his hair and withered his ruddy face. His unequal struggle with the wind seemed some way symbolical of his life, and the two men watched him out of sight without a word. The colonel turned toward his own blue overcoat which lay ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... 17th the General called the inhabitants to assemble at the town-hall, and "there made a pathetic speech to them;"[1] which he began by thanking them for the measures which they had pursued for mutual help and the common good. He apprized them of the great exertions made by the Trustees to support, protect, and defend the Colony; ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... saying that we all must die? but he brings it home to us ever and again with pathetic tearful fascinating force. Each time we read him, his sweet sad pagan music chants its ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and we hear the earth fall upon the coffin ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Maisons. Five days after the King's will had been walled up, in the manner I have described, he came to me and made a pathetic discourse upon the injustice done to M. le Duc d'Orleans by this testament, and did all he could to excite me by railing in good set terms against dispositions intended to add to the power and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in the Captain's eyes, was a still greater paragon. If the pale widow, whom Captain Richard, in his poetic rapture compared to a Niobe in tears—to a Sigismunda—to a weeping Belvidera, was an object the most lovely and pathetic which his eyes had ever beheld, or for which his heart had melted, even her ripened perfections and beauty were as nothing compared to the promise of that extreme loveliness which the good Captain saw in her daughter. It was matre pulcra filia pulcrior. Steele composed ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... disinclined for expounding a philosophy any longer that he gave them no time to dissent, even had they wished to, but on the instant struck up that pathetic ditty— ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... only think," said Mrs. Willoughby, after an eloquent and pathetic appeal—"think how the poor child will be ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... I went out myself and bought her a toy. I brought it home, and before I sent it away, I pinned a slip of paper to it, bearing this inscription: "To your little daughter, from George Germaine." There is nothing very pathetic, I suppose, in those words. And yet I burst out crying ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... an impulse from Miss Edgeworth's example as a story-teller. In the general preface to his own final edition of the Waverley Novels he said that "Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact, which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland—something ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... with a view to romantic effect than with a proper respect for the responsibility of the historian; though all Spanish history, Christian or Saracen, so abounds in romantic interest that there is less excuse, as less necessity, for outstepping the limits of truth, or giving undue prominence to the pathetic and marvellous. From this defect of most of his predecessors, the work of the Count de Circourt is in a great measure free. He has made a dexterous and conscientious use of the materials within his reach, and produced a work which unites to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... not hearing one given in mitigation of the offence. She set out alone on her journey, deeply hurt. The reason was a feminine sentiment, and Vittoria was naturally unable to speak it. She shrank with pathetic horror from the thought of Merthyr's rising from his couch to find her a married woman, and desired most earnestly that her marriage should be witnessed by him. Young women will know how to reconcile the opposition of the sentiment. Had Merthyr been only ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not understand the book. Beth also sat idle, listening intently, and watching her sister. If the reading had been harrowing or exciting, she would fight Bernadine for the sixpence when they went to bed. There were lively scenes during the readings. They all wept at the pathetic parts, laughed loudly when amused, and disputed about passages and incidents at the top of their voices. Mrs. Caldwell forgot that Harriet was a servant, Harriet forgot herself, and the children, unaccustomed to wordy warfare, forgot ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... caring for what was before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. His outlook upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... attentive and civil to me; she pressed me to fix a day for dining with them, and to say what I liked, and she would be sure to get it for me. Poor Sack! He is very ill, indeed. We parted as never to meet again. It has quite broke me down.' This pathetic narrative was strangely diversified with the grave and earnest defence of a man's having married his maid. I could not but feel it as in some ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the time. And in the morning she called him to look at something, and this something was a soft, helpless, little, baby giraffe, with delicate limbs and small body, a funny, scraggy, long neck and small head, with the very same sort of gentle, pathetic eyes ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... Little Dorrit's pathetic story Arthur learned that night. His first surprise at finding her in the Clennam house mingled strangely with his old thought that his father on his death-bed seemed to be troubled by some remorseful ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... remarkable, that it is difficult to conceive that he was ever young; but Erskine cannot grow old; his spirit is still glowing and flushed with the enthusiasm of youth. When impassioned, his voice acquires a singularly elevated and pathetic accent; and I can easily conceive the irresistible effect he must have had on the minds of a jury, when he was in the vigour of his physical powers, and the case required appeals of tenderness or generosity. As a parliamentary orator, Earl Grey is undoubtedly his superior; but there ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... her concerning enunciations, classical pose, and the best manner of reciting her lines! She listened with interest, but when she tried to play the fragment of some role according to their instructions, she found she could not do it, and they would then appear so stiff, pathetic and unnatural that she began to treat them ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... in at last breaking loose. But the long restraint had impaired the power of all who were subjected to it; and as in the works of Giotto, so in the rarer works of Duccio, one often finds an effort after truth of expression, which is almost pathetic in its character, from its revealing the inefficiency of the hand to carry out the thought, and the resolute will striving half in vain to overcome the impediments of bad teaching and imperfect knowledge of the materials ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... still in the mock heroic—"where is the pride and dignity of woman? Remember, oh maternal relative, that you are the mother of one Gracchus at least! Scorn the hydraulics, I say; abandon the pathetic; cast sorrow to the winds, and—give me another ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... had been laughed at, but she never knew it; she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque, undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! While Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder if she wouldn't say something, Olive Chancellor tenderly fastened a small battered ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... we prefer a simple and natural, to an artificial and affected style; a regular and well-connected story, to loose and scattered narratives; a catastrophe which is tender and pathetic, to one which leaves us unmoved."—Ib., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... do, but free for a time, and hoping, a little heavily, for some adventure to break the military monotony of their lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to "take them out of themselves"—pathetic desire of escape from the little prison, where the soul sits, picking its oakum sometimes, in its cell of flesh!—young men making for the parks, workmen for the public houses, an old woman, in a cap, peering out of an upper window ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... started past the barred gate to one of the ramps leading down into the vats below, the buzzer beside it sounded. A Jelly was standing behind the gate, fat, pathetic face pressed against ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... obstacles. Jack discovers that the girl he has just learned to love is the well-loved sister of his college enemy. How will this complication work out? An interesting series of movements and counter-movements immediately becomes possible, and any number of amusing or pathetic circumstances may arise to bring about the denouement—which simply means the untying ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... fine spirit to be able to treat the enemy that way. A lot of people in the passing crowd spotted me and stopped to say good-bye or called out as they went by. It was pathetic to see how grateful they were for the least kind word. I never saw such a pitiful crowd in my life and hope I never may again. They hurried along, looking furtively to right and left with the look of a rat that is in fear of his life. I have seldom ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... writer was conveyed to hers; and she practically gave up hope for anything better than the discovery and return of his remains. Her father, mother, and intimate friends tried in vain to rally her; but the conviction remained that she had read her lover's farewell words. In spite of the most pathetic and strenuous effort, she could not keep up any longer, and sobbed till ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... the wampum, they took my advice, and prepared to leave their country and people immediately. Their relatives accompanied them a short distance on their journey, and when about to part, their old uncle, the Tall Chief, addressed them in the following pathetic and sentimental speech: ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... its gates came alike the hopeful and the hopeless, the dreamers and those who would destroy those dreams. From all over the world there came men who sought a chance to labor. They came in groups, anxious and dumb, carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded by men ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... This pathetic note was in Swift's writing in his own copy of the "Miscellanies," ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... of the scene loosened her tongue, gave her whole being expression, and made her words thrill. She took off her hat as if to free her body, even by that little, while she drank in the scene of leaping flames, the crescendo of light, the pathetic, noble emptiness between the fire-eaten ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... may blacken their lives, but they suffer in silence. They try to conceal it all from us. Their feverish attempts to find some sunshine in life every evening, the desperate and futile migrations they make each few months, and the pathetic mental deadness of their gatherings, they try to keep private. We might never know to what straits many rich folk have come, were it not for the newspapers and their kindly society columns. Bless their noble insistence on showing us the lives of the rich, their portraying ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... by the practical difficulties in the way or the dark uncertainty at the end. Her life could never be happy any more, but it must not, could not, be ignoble. And by a pathetic mixture of childish romance with her woman's trials, the philosophy which had nothing to do with this great decisive deed of hers had its place in her imagination of the future: so far as she conceived her solitary loveless life at all, she saw it animated ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Miss Allen watching us as we opened our parcels and letters," Beth went on. "I happened to look up once, and such an expression as was on her face, girls! It was pathetic and sad and envious all at once. It really made me feel bad—for five minutes," she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... words to express! Destitute childhood, destitute old age, are both sorrowful enough, Heaven knows! But they have power to make their sufferings known, and to ask for help! But destitute infancy! Oh! look here! look here! Can anything on earth be so pathetic as this? ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... not really such a far-away dream, when we remember that her brother was then Emperor and childless. Her thought was more for her child than for herself, and her expectation was that he would succeed Caligula. The persistency with which she told this ambition for her boy is both beautiful and pathetic. Every mother sees her own life projected in her child, and within certain bounds this is right ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... in some degree successful with his voice, his eyes and his mouth and his forehead still threatened her. He was always threatening her. All her thoughts respecting him reverted to that inward assertion that he might 'cut her to pieces' if he liked. He repeated his question in the pathetic strain. 'Will you do this now,—to save us all from ruin?' But ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the lake the white men had decided to part from their native companions. Villages clustered here and there on the margin of the waters, and the appearance of a large company would spread alarm, and send reports through the land that might betray them all. The leave-taking was pathetic enough. The poor Indians looked like so many helpless children. They begged the white men to stay with them, and settle in the mountains between the lake and the sea. The country was rich, and food and water plentiful. They would be faithful children ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... came in—it was Mihalevitch. The appearance of this man, almost his only acquaintance in Moscow, on the society of the girl who had suddenly absorbed his whole attention, struck him as curious and significant. The performance ceased to interest Lavretsky, and at one pathetic part he involuntarily looked at his beauty: she was bending forward, her cheeks glowing. Under the influence of his persistent gaze her eyes slowly turned and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... finished with an equal claim to indulgence, if not to applause. The traditional anecdotes relative to the Argonautic expedition are introduced with propriety, and embellished with the graces of poetical fiction. In describing scenes of tenderness, this author is happily pathetic, and in the heat of combat, proportionably animated. His similes present the imagination with beautiful imagery, and not only illustrate, but give additional force to the subject. We find in Flaccus a few expressions not countenanced by the authority of the most celebrated Latin writers. His language, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... is the inculcation, in a quiet, simple way, of the principles of good nature, kindness, and integrity among children. They consist of the usual pathetic and mirthful incidents that constitute boy and ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... minor-keyed tune was doled forth, which seemed quite refreshing to Sam's pathetic vein, as he sang ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wife," Helen pronounced severely. "I am sure Henry is a delightful person, even if he is a little irresponsible, and it is almost pathetic to remember how much you were in love with him, a ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... an enemy. She saw again the nude woman who made, while running, the gesture which had not been explained to her; the Florentine models which recalled to her Fiesole and the enchanted hours of Italy; the profile sketch by Dechartre of the girl who laughed in her pretty pathetic thinness. She stopped a moment sympathetically in front of that little newspaper girl who had come there too, and had disappeared, carried away in the irresistible current of life and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity. There is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will be stirred and awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... effect. The moral is the great thing. Mr. Allan says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allan and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry. Jane and Ruby almost always cry when I come to the pathetic parts. Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and her Aunt Josephine wrote back that we were to send her some of our stories. So we copied out four of our very best and sent them. Miss Josephine Barry wrote ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... resentment, or even doubt as to the necessity for his orders. Now she came back to him, and raised a pair of trusting eyes to his face, and he, looking down into them, thought he had never gazed upon anything so sweetly pathetic; nor had he ever encountered anything quite so rousing as the implicit trust of her manner toward him. Whatever he had felt for her before, it was as nothing to the delicious sense of protection, the indefinable wave of responsibility, almost ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... and kissed her and the bairns with solemn, and, as I thought, with pathetic thankfulness. I was afraid she would be sorely upset with the terrible events of the day, and I never closed my eyes that night, but sat up by her bedside lest she should take a bad turn; but she did not seem any the worse of it, and both her and the bairns got on brawly. The loss of the sheep ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the supreme value of this last essay is made by the fact that in its pathetic statement of uncertainties and probabilities one can discern something very much resembling a declaration of faith. Though assured that we have yet no foundation for any belief in the persistence of consciousness after the death of the brain, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... some gilding, might be likened to a gingerbread imitation of a throne; the royal arms above it and the little witness box to one side, where so many honest poor people are bullied, insulted and laughed at by third-rate blackguardly little "lawyers," and so many pitiful, pathetic and noble lies are told by pitiful sinners and disreputable heroes for a little liberty for a lost self, or for the sake of a friend—of a "pal" or a "cobber." The same overworked and underpaid magistrate trying to keep his attention fixed on the same old miserable ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... of Alline's illness and death, which occurred in the town of Northampton, New Hampshire, February 2nd, 1784, is pathetic in the extreme, but ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... this in such a pathetic way that she drew tears from the eyes of all and even Sancho's filled up; and he resolved in his heart to accompany his master to the uttermost ends of the earth, if so be the removal of the wool from those venerable countenances depended ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... novels, however, more than his poetry, that this resemblance appears; the author of Waverley more nearly approaches the blind bard than the author of the Lay. His romances in verse contain some passages which are sublime, many which are beautiful, some pathetic. They are all interesting, and written in the same easy, careless style, interspersed with the most homely and grotesque expressions, which is so well known to all the readers of the Iliad. The battle in Marmion is beyond all question, as Jeffrey long ago remarked, the most Homeric strife ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... myself that he must surely be just lying. Then the fellow'd mention some little happening that he'd describe so vividly, would you believe it, I felt the tears in my eyes, for it would be sort of pathetic. So during that whole hour I sat there and changed my mind every ten minutes, now blowing hot, and again cold. I came away in as muddled a state as I went there. His actions seem to stamp him a rogue if ever there was one; and yet, Thad, ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... turbulent giants from the north,—or by the still more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had driven long since out of Asia. They poured down into Greece; they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy; host after host of them;—civilization was a pathetic sand-castle washed over and over by ruining seas. Rome, indeed, could still command generals at times: Stilicho, Aetius, and afterwards Belisarius and Narses; but they were all pitiful Partingtons swishing their ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the last hope he can ever have of really knowing the thing he appears to know, and, unless he is careful, the last hope he can ever have of really knowing anything. He destroys the thing a man does his knowing with. It is not the least pathetic phase of the great industry of being well informed, that thousands of men and women may be seen on every hand, giving up their lives that they may appear to live, and giving up knowledge that they ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... distant wolf, but it was her mother's wish. Her will being done here over the dead—was that anything like the will of the Father being done in heaven? Her untrained thoughts hovered on the verge of great questions, and then slipped back into her pathetic self and its fear, while her tongue hurried on through the words of ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... force but with its old aspect of rigidity? Perhaps: but then, in losing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric, this religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in retaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic; for it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit—in this case a most pure and heroic spirit—which it strives so hard to dethrone. After all, the hypostasis of the good is only an unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the discernment of the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Col des Ossemens, the Foret du Refuge, the Champ de la Victoire; and traditions attach to each of these. There is, however, a gayer, livelier character amongst them than that which inspires the pathetic ballads of Brittany. The Basques are very ready to be amused; are more hilarious and less gloomy than the Bretons: yet they have the same love of their country, and regret at leaving it. An author[37] who has written on the subject, says: "To judge properly of the Basque, he should ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... war, in '65. Some of the "boys" had heard him, in a great prayer-meeting in Washington—a city which he always spoke of as his "namesake"—at the time of the great review, say, in his strong voice, with that pathetic quaver in it: "Like as de parched an' weary traveller hangs his harp upon de winder, an' sighs for oysters in de desert, so I longs to res' my soul an' my foot in Mass'chusetts;" and they were so delighted ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... with fear in the lines of his mouth, but a pathetic, dog-like trust in his eyes, stood looking up at the stern master who, it ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... again, but not heartily. He felt that this marble ship was a conception of high humor and was not without its pathetic element. The whimsicality of the idea amused him, but the sad earnestness of the nervous, unstrung visionary at his side ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... so low that he could hardly hear her. Their eyes met, and Nekhludoff knew by the strange look of her squinting eyes and the pathetic smile with which she said not "Good-bye" but "Forgive me," that of the two reasons that might have led to her resolution, the second was the real one. She loved him, and thought that by uniting herself to him ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... repeal, and an assembly of Quakers, Methodists, and "other sectaries," as he would himself call them, in the city of Cork, on an anti-slavery occasion, with equal effect. His broad-brimmed and sedate audience were as much delighted with his elegant and pathetic eloquence in favour of humanity and natural rights, as his peasant mob were while he discoursed to them upon the certainty and glory of repeal, and declared that "they were the finest peasantry in the world." On the one occasion his action ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... course it is all a humbug,—a darker vein cropping up through the gray flagstone; but, it is probably a fact, and, for aught I know, may be found in Fox's Book of Martyrs, that George Marsh underwent an examination in this house [There is a full and pathetic account of the examination and martyrdom of George Marsh in the eleventh section of Fox's Book of Martyrs, as I have just found (June 9, 1867). He went to Smithell's hall, among other places, to be questioned by Mr. Barton.—ED.]; and the tradition may have connected ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... drags or sharpens or deforms the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it lacked. There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin, and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of exhaustion. He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the quivering of her mouth. It was ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... freed them from the barbarians by whom they had been captured. They knew, from having several times before seen the British flag, that they would be kindly treated. They described through Tatai, in pathetic language, the way that they had been treated after having been captured. They had been ordered not to pray aloud, or to sing, and, when off the farther end of this island, to their grief they heard ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... "Very pathetic and touching, truly," said a rough, broken, asthmatic voice behind. "A love affair, I see, and, from my soul, I pity the tender creature as if ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... Mrs. Sutherland, painted when Frederick was a lad of ten, hung within a few feet of him as he spoke. He did not glance at it, but Mr. Sutherland did, and with a look as if he expected to behold a responsive light beam from those pathetic features. ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... and the length of her chin. The poem went on and on, the fire crackled on the hearth, and the wind rattled against the glass doors of the balcony, as it did on a certain night of which Charlotte apparently had but little remembrance. Suddenly, during a most pathetic passage, the door opened suddenly; the servant appeared, and with a terrified air ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble anxiety measured it. She found herself in short not caring what became of Kate—only convinced at bottom of the predominance of Kate's star. Kate wasn't in danger, Kate wasn't pathetic; Kate Croy, whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy. She saw moreover by this time that her friend was travelling even beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder had already, in mind, drafted a rough plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You must stay on a few days, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... his empty cup on the table and leaned closer to her, smiling. She did not smile in response; instead, her eyes fell and there was the faintest, pathetic quiver ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... all her answer to that. The plant, she thought, was dead; she had not, indeed, paid much attention to it of late; but she showed it to David, and he said it would revive if more carefully tended. He also told her its rather pathetic history, which was new to Grizel, and of the talk at the wedding which had led to Tommy's taking pity on it. "Fellow-feeling, I suppose," he said lightly; "you see, ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... person of Christ as the God-man form the central point and sphere of theology, but also that all the main points of his history are mysteries of the world's redemption. (Ephes. 19). But Ignatius is also distinguished by the fact that behind all that is enthusiastic, pathetic, abrupt, and again all that pertains to liturgical form, we find in his epistles a true devotion to Christ ([Greek: ho theos mou]). He is laid hold of by Christ: Cf. Ad. Rom. 6: [Greek: ekeinon zeto, ton hyper hemon apothanonta, ekeinon thelo ton di' hemas anastanta]; Rom. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... ever heard or read equals in its long-sustained and dramatic interest the story of the Tsavo man-eaters as told by Col. Patterson. A lion story is usually a tale of adventures, often very terrible and pathetic, which occupied but a few hours of one night; but the tale of the Tsavo man-eaters is an epic of terrible tragedies spread out over several months, and only at last brought to an end by the resource and ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... during the watch kept by Uncle Jack and me after we had had a good sleep, and there was something very pathetic in the way the poor dog looked at us, as much as to say, "I wish I could speak and put ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... natural scenery and of that atmosphere of piety and religious calm—almost mediaeval in its austere beauty and serenity—which invests the hermit life of India. The abode of the ascetics is depicted with a pathetic grace that we only find paralleled in the "Admetus" of Euripides. But at the same time the construction of the drama is more like such a play as Milton's "Comus," than the closely-knit, symmetrical, and inevitable progress of such a work of consummate ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... towards Scotland had been that of divide et impera, and a series of royal minorities and the greed and poverty of the semi-independent Scottish nobles had aided him. The rout of the Scots at Solway Moss, and the pathetic passing of the gallant James V., leaving his new-born daughter, Mary, as queen (December 1542), seemed at length to place Scotland in England's power. The murder of Cardinal Beaton, the bribery of the Douglases, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... something very piteous about it. I think there is a better word than 'piteous'—yes, Clement had just told it me. It is 'pathetic.' I felt as if it nearly made me cry, and so did Peterkin. We told each other so afterwards, and though we were so interested in the parrot and in hearing him, I wished he would be quiet again, and let Mrs. Wylie go on with her soft, ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... towards that nobleman. Her amiable heart was so full of kindness and forgiveness towards the young prodigal that, even without any repentance on his part, she was ready to take him to her old arms, and give him her venerable benediction. Pathetic sweetness of nature! Charming tenderness of disposition! With all his faults and wickednesses, his follies and his selfishness, there was no moment when Lady Kew would not have received the young lord, and endowed him with the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... marked by "blank animalism."[2264] There was a great lack of all sentiment. "Parents and children made a virtue of repressing their emotions." "No period ever exhibited a more marked aversion from the emotional or the pathetic."[2265] There was no shame at perfidy or inconsistency, and very little notion of loyalty. It shocks modern taste that Isabella d'Este should have bought eagerly the art treasures of her dearest ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... came a low, wailing cry. It was that of hunger. On an old chest in a dusky corner sat a boy about thirteen. Though all else was in shadow, his large eyes shone with unnatural brightness, and followed his mother's feeble efforts at the washtub with that expression of premature sadness so pathetic in childhood. Under a rickety deal table three other and smaller children were devouring some crusts of bread in a ravenous way, like half-famished young animals. In a few moments they came out and clamored for more, addressing—not their father; no intuitive turning to ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... fainting, praying, raving, despairing? Figure to yourself, reader, the elements of the case; suffer me to recall before your mind the circumstances of that unparalleled situation. From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer night—from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight—from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love—suddenly as from the woods and fields—suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelation—suddenly ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... oculo-motor, pathetic, ophthalmic division of the trigeminal, and the abducens nerves are all ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... tear on it. As he wiped the blade lovingly, he remarked, "I shall find some other way to get it off." Returning to Paris, our tourist starts for Italy; but the book ends with his arrival at Moulines (Moulins). Some half a league from this city he encountered Maria, whose pathetic story had been told him by Mr. Shandy. She had lost her goat when Sterne saw her, but had instead a little dog named Silvio, led by a string. She was sitting under a poplar, playing on a pipe her ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... an account of his journey, prefacing the narrative by this remark, "Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary." Mr. Martin gives this extraordinary document in his "Life of Clare." It is a weird, pathetic and pitiful story, "a tragedy all too deep for tears." Having finished the journal of his escape he addressed it with a letter to "Mary Clare, Glinton." In this letter ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... the proposition was negatived without a dissenting voice, Monsieur Souley not voting. It was now pretty evident to all present that the Congress would have its time and attention pretty well absorbed in receiving deputations of citizens deluded by Saunders' letters, and listening to the very pathetic speeches of Monsieur. The day was now far gone; the Congress began to feel its appetite; the forlorns withdrew in discontent; the presence of many other deputations surrounding the doors was announced; and the Congress drank all round, and adjourned ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... read aloud in a most pathetic voice: "Votre majeste m'offre un asyle, et m'y prome la liberte; mais vous avez une epee, et vous etes roi. Vous m'offrez une pension, a moi, qui n'a rien fait pour vous. Mais en avez-vous donne a tous les braves gens qui ont perdu bras et ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... day of the second week in July he received a letter from his son in Paris to say that they would all be back on Friday. This had always been more sure than Fate; but, with the pathetic improvidence given to the old, that they may endure to the end, he had never quite admitted it. Now he did, and something would have to be done. He had ceased to be able to imagine life without this new interest, but that which is not imagined sometimes ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in Carmen's progress was almost pathetic. When in Simiti he hung over the child in rapt absorption as she worked out her problems, or recited her lessons to Jose. Often he shook his head in witness of his utter lack of comprehension. But Carmen understood, and that sufficed. His ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the faith of their ancestors. But he acted as though he did not see them—as though, in fact, he saw nothing of anything about him save the girl. He followed her with his eyes with almost childlike eagerness and greeted a glance from her with almost pathetic joy. He spoke little, apparently finding difficulty in expressing himself—in forming his scattered thoughts into correct sentences. His whole appearance was that of a man freed after a long imprisonment. The only thing of his present surroundings which he now grasped perfectly was ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... we hear, Resonant, soft, pathetic, sweet; In ringing accents, calm and clear, He sways the thousands at his feet, With more than mortal eloquence, Or ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... it by a sensibility which is constantly apparent in his letters, and diminished his value as a statesman. When he wrote from Cilicia to his more youthful friend Caelius, urging him to stick to the city, in words that are almost pathetic, it never occurred to him that he was prescribing exactly that course of treatment which had done himself much damage[387]. The clear sight and strong nerve of Caesar, as compared with so many of his contemporaries, was doubtless largely due to ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... can," admitted the Stranger. "It's such fun, don't you think, to get no thanks? Don't you sometimes amuse yourself by sending postal orders to people whose addresses look pathetic in the telephone book, or by forgetting to take away the parcels you have bought in poor little shops? Or by standing and looking with ostentatious respect at boy scouts on the march, always bearing in mind that these, in their own eyes, are ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... are quite masters of this instrument and the women too prefer it to the krob. They seem to find extreme delight in sending forth those long sustained and plaintive sounds as though lulled by a dream, or absorbed in some pathetic thought. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... Lucy were old-fashioned, repressed, timid children, with the pathetic outlook of young persons brought up by a melancholy, ancient hireling. But the baby, glowing-eyed, laughing-mouthed rogue, staggering valiantly on sturdy, emulous legs, taking tribute everywhere with all babyhood's divine audacity, walked straight into her heart. He slept beside her at night, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... them, intermingled with the shadows cast by the vaulted boughs, played the vivid brightness of the moon. Some of the trees were deeply girdled—a slow method of killing them. These lingering deaths affected the trio with melancholy. A wounded inmate of the grove, standing in mute and pathetic resignation to its fate, loses first the feeling of the sap that, blood-like, circulates through every limb, then all its leafy honours fade, and its death is slow and inevitable as the death of a forsaken woman who carries a ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... received, nor of her home-coming. They dwelt upon her life as a child, and the part she had taken in the Sunday school, and other Church work in the parish. But it was quite easy for Douglas to see that their hearts were almost broken, and the pathetic look in their eyes told more than many words of the thoughts the lips could ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... established herself in her office when Emma Dean came breezily in from her work. "Well, Gracie," was her cheery greeting, "has she materialized, and is she as pathetic and ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... human kind than confidence in his mother's love, and a dread of the schoolboys, by whom he was often annoyed. His whole occupation, as he sat on the ground, was in swinging backwards and forwards, singing "pal-lal" in a low pathetic voice, only interrupted at intervals on the appearance of any of his tormentors, when he clung to his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... you have brought it to the Lord in prayer, and feel satisfied that you are doing right, Mrs. Penn," said the minister, helplessly. His thin gray-bearded face was pathetic. He was a sickly man; his youthful confidence had cooled; he had to scourge himself up to some of his pastoral duties as relentlessly as a Catholic ascetic, and then he was prostrated by ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... What a pathetic picture was that of Palissy, plodding on through want and woe to rediscover the lost art of enameling pottery; building his furnaces with bricks carried on his back, seeing his six children die of neglect, probably of starvation, his wife in rags and despair ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... sociability of his favorite boarding-house, and wonderful are the schemes which are to attract the nautical Hercules to choose the austere virtue and neglect the rollicking and easy-going vice. Beautiful on paper, admirable in reports, pathetic in speeches,—all pictorial with anchors and cables and polar stars, with the light-house of Duty and the shoals of Sin. But meanwhile the character of the merchant-marine is daily deteriorating. More is done for the sailor now by fifty times than was done fifty years ago; yet who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... again, and the afternoon hours were even shorter than those of the morning to all but baby, who began to grow homesick towards four o'clock, and who could not be comforted, even by the children, who were out of school at three. He wanted his "Wawa," and no one else. It was really pathetic to see how the little fellow clung to her, hiding his pretty wet eyes in her neck, and lovingly patting her shoulder, as he crooned his wordless reproaches in her ear, and Mrs. Hoffstott, looking on, thought this must indeed be a good sister ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Spanish sovereignty over Cuba was formally accomplished, the Spanish flag being lowered and the Stars and Stripes temporarily hoisted in its place on the various forts and other Government buildings throughout the island. A singularly pathetic feature of the Spanish evacuation of Cuba was the solemn removal of the alleged remains of Christopher Columbus from their resting-place in Havana Cathedral, and their conveyance ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... at the door ('Homeward, at all rates!'): but takes violent spasms in the carriage; can't; can no farther in this world. Lingers here, under kind care, for above three months more: dying slowly, most painfully. With much real stoicism; not without a stiff-jointed algebraic kind of piety, almost pathetic in its sort. 'Two Capuchins from a neighboring Convent daily gave him consolations,' not entirely satisfactory; for daily withal, 'unknown to the Capuchins, he made his Valet, who was a Protestant, read to him from the Geneva ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... poetry. Up to the very last he was making plans for the future. His letters to friends outlining the volumes that he hoped to publish, — work demanding decades instead of years, — the memoranda jotted down on bits of paper or backs of envelopes as the rough drafts of essays or poems, would be pathetic, if one did not believe with Lanier that death is a mere incident in an eternal life, or with Browning, that what a man would do exalts him. The lines of Robert Browning's poems in which he sets forth the glory of the life ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... thus so much time was gained, and so much the more chance, meantime, of a new leaf being turned over in that Sibylline oracle of politicians—the Chapter of Accidents. And for the time being, he would make a pathetic appeal to respectability and moderation in general, of which Alexandria, wherein some hundred thousand tradesmen and merchants had property to lose, possessed a ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... gintlemen', says he, 'if ye deprived us iv th' right to collect debts be killin' th' debtor ye wud take away fr'm war its entire moral purpose. I must ask ye again to cease thinkin' on this subjick in a gross mateeryal way an' considher th' moral side alone,' he says. Th' conference was much moved be this pathetic speech, th' dillygate fr'm France wept softly into his hankerchef, an' th' dillygate fr'm Germany wint over an' forcibly took an open-face goold watch ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... found it easier to dispose of its enemies' lands than to compose the rivalries of its friends; and the blunders of Italy's statesmen combined with the blindness of public opinion to reduce her to a position of almost pathetic isolation. Signor Orlando's abandonment of the Conference in April failed to shake the resistance of the Allies to her extravagant expectations, and on 20 June, by a remarkable vote of 229 to 80 in the Italian Chamber, his ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... among others, readily occurs in the pathetic old ballad of the Conde Alarcos, whose woful catastrophe, with the unresisting suffering of the countess, suggests many points of coincidence with the English minstrelsy. The English reader will find a version of it in the "Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain," ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... have thought that the reading of this charming book may have been the predominating influence in the development of my taste and temper; for it was while I was absorbed in the exquisitely pathetic story of Robinson Crusoe that the first island I ever saw dawned upon my enchanted vision. We had weathered Cape Sable and the Florida Keys. No sky was ever more marvellously blue than the sea beneath ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... at the "Gaiety," with an elderly General of Life Guards, a Mistress of the Robes, and the grandfather of the Central American Ambassador at the Court of St. James, and all four of them were smiling at a neat little low comedian, who was singing, without any voice and with the utmost precision, a pathetic romance entitled, "De Coon Wot Got ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... how overwhelmingly pathetic it is—the sight of these brave Frenchmen. Every one has remarked it. Once and for all the tradition that the French are an excitable, emotional people with no grip on their passions and no rein on their impulses—that fiction is ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... to man," which was received with tumultuous enthusiasm, the whole company rising and cheering, the band playing "Will ye come to Kelvin Grove, bonnie lassie, O?" and in response to a unanimous call, some gallant and chivalric editor replied in a strain of pathetic and humorous eloquence, during which many of the company were observed to shed tears or laugh, or embrace their neighbors; after which those of the company who were able rose from the table, and hallooing, "We won't go home till morning!" they hiccoughed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... know that I ever remember seeing a sight more pathetic in its way than that of this beautiful and high-spirited young woman weeping in the presence of her Council over the utter degeneracy of the race she was called upon to rule. Being old and accustomed to these Eastern expressions of emotion, I remained silent, however; but ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Gellert fell seriously ill in December, 1769; to the fear and grief of all the world: "estafettes from the Kurfurst himself galloped daily, or oftener, from Dresden for the sick bulletin;" but poor Gellert died, all the same (13th of that month); and we have (really with pathetic thoughts, even we) to bid his amiable existence in this world, his bits of glories and him, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... then got Oxo for the men, many of whom had had nothing to eat for two days. They are a nice-looking lot of men and boys, with rather handsome faces and clear eyes. Their absolute exhaustion is the most pathetic thing about them. They fall asleep even when their wounds are being dressed. When all was made straight and comfortable for them, the nurses turned the lights low again, and stepped softly about the ward with their ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... should differ in some way (usually in but a trivial detail) from the teaching of any other of his kind. The solemnity of their discussions and the heat of their dissensions about the minutiae of their creeds would be laughable were it not so pathetic.. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... attendants could not ride down on horseback from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and surrounding): "This ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... of paper on which were jotted several items. There was a sketch written by Mary Reynolds, "The Freshman on the Top Floor," a pathetic little story of a lonely freshman. Gertrude Earle, a demure, dreamy-eyed girl, the daughter of a musician, was down for a piano solo. There was to be a sextette, a chorus and a troupe of dancing girls. Kathleen ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... suffering and could not help pitying me. My courage was pathetic, and her every word and gesture shed a sort of tender light over my devotion. She saw the struggle that was going on in me: my obedience flattered her pride, while my pallor awakened her charitable instinct. ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... rich will have to contribute (with super-tax) close on half their incomes; the comparatively well-to-do a fourth; even the class to whose special hardships the CHANCELLOR had just made such pathetic allusion will have to pay an additional sixpence in the pound. If in the circumstances some of them feel inclined to echo Sir Peter Teazle's remark to Joseph, "Oh, damn your sentiment," I think they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... cried. "May Heaven pardon him as I do. While I have strength left I will pray for him." And she poured forth her supplications for the earl in terms so earnest and pathetic, that the tears flowed down Solomon Eagle's rough cheek. At this juncture, hasty steps were heard in the adjoining passage, and the door opening, admitted the Earl of Rochester, who rushed towards ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy sort of religion, this theology in wooden shoes; it is half grotesque, half pathetic; the grandmothers pass it on to the grandchildren as they pass the bowl of potatoes round the stove in the long winter nights; it is as silly as possible, but it comforts them as they carry fagots over the frozen canals or wear their eyes blind ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... You grow tired yourself, want to get rid of the story, and hardly care how." Lady Lousia adds that Sir George Staunton would never have hazarded himself in the streets of Edinburgh. "The end of poor Madge Wildfire is most pathetic. The meeting at Muschat's Cairn tremendous. Dumbiedikes and Rory Beau are delightful. . . . I dare swear many of your readers never heard of the Duke of Argyle before." She ends: "If I had known nothing, and the whole world had told me the contrary, I should ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Grecian tragedy, it may be said that he ranks first in tragic representation and effect; Sophocles first in dramatic symmetry and ornament; AEschylus first in poetic vigor and grandeur. AEschylus was the most sublime; Sophocles the most beautiful; Euripides the most pathetic. The first displays the lofty intellect; the second exercises the cultivated taste; the third indulges the feeling heart. Each, as it were, shows a fine piece of sculpture. In AEschylus, it is a naked hero, with all the strength, boldness, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... tell you that, did he? He always lets you know all the bothers I get into. You'll think I do nothing but fight and kick up rows; and," added the speaker, with a pathetic look of injured innocence, "I've been behaving ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... act the emotion and delight of the spectator were carried almost to frenzy. In this act, played almost solely by Crescentini, this admirable singer communicated to the hearts of his audience all that is touching and, pathetic in a love expressed by means of delicious melody, and by all that grief and despair ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... to a lowly and vegetative life. If we soften the hard scientific facts which tell us of these dumb, blind creatures, with the humane mellowing thought of the oneness of all life, we will find much that is pathetic and affecting in their humble biographies from our point of view. And yet these cases of degeneration are far from anything like actual misfortunes, or mishaps of nature, as Buffon was so fond of thinking. These creatures have found their adult mode ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... them beneath his coat-tails, elevating or depressing his voice to suit the attitude assumed and the sentiment expressed. Arms and legs were continually in motion. It seemed impossible for him to stand still. In the midst of the most impassioned or pathetic portions of his speech, he would extend his long arms toward the judge or jury, and shake his bony fingers with an effect that is indescribable. He held his audience to the last; and when he sat down there was a murmur of applause which the judge with difficulty prevented from swelling to a ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... document in this line seems to me particularly interesting—even pathetic. It is a telegram sent by the late Czar Nicolas to his Imperial Cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. It is dated July 29, 1914, ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... instrument of imperial Theodora, stood begging his bread at the gate of the city he had won and lost, leaning upon the arm of the fair girl child who would not leave him, and stretching forth his hand to those that passed by, with a feeble prayer for alms, pathetic as Oedipus in the utter ruin of his life and fortune. A truer story tells how Pope Silverius, humble and gentle, and hated by Theodora, went up to the Pincian villa to answer the accusation of conspiring with the Goths, when he himself had opened the gates of Rome to Belisarius; ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... do! If St. Leger himself had been so difficult to manage, what would the old general say! He said nothing. She would not be discouraged: she began to speak again, to recapitulate every argument; she warmed with the subject; she was earnest, eloquent, pathetic—tears were in the good creature's eyes; still he was silent. At last, wearied out with useless exertion, she ceased to urge the matter any further; and endeavoring to conquer her feelings of deep disappointment, looked up ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
Copyright © 2025 Dictionary One.com
|
|
|
