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More "Sentimentality" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... writing, which has a pure and almost childlike naivete of phrasing, there is a glow, not of rhetoric or language, but of emotion, an almost lover-like attitude towards his friends, which is yet saved from sentimentality by an obvious sincerity of feeling. In this he seems to me to be different from the majority of artistic natures and temperaments. It is impossible not to feel, as a rule, when one is brought into contact with an artistic temperament, that the basis of it is a kind of hardness, a fanaticism of spirit. ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... distracting desires; (4) a desire to win others' good opinion and sympathy,—therefore he always lavished his money on those whom that kind of "good fellowship" wins and told pathetic stories to those whose sentimentality made them easy victims; (5) a weak kind of egoism, seeking easy ways to pleasure and position, restless under discipline, always repentant after wrong-doing, fluent in speech but lacking the courage to face the difficulties ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... pleasant thing in the meaningless room was Nannie's drawing-board, which displayed the little girl's painstaking and surprisingly exact copy in lead-pencil, of some chromo—"Evangeline" perhaps, or some popular sentimentality of the sixties. In the ten years which had elapsed since Mrs. Maitland had plunged into her debauch of furnishing—her one extravagance!—of course the parlors had softened; the enormous roses of the carpets had faded, the glitter of varnish had dimmed; but the change was not sufficient to ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... human civilization. First: the let-alone policy; every man to look out for number one. This is the age of selfishness. Second: the opposite pole of thinking; every man to do somebody's else work for him. This is the dry rot of sentimentality that feeds tramps and enacts poor laws such as excite the indignation of Herbert Spencer. But the third stage is represented by our formula: every man must render and receive the best possible service, except in the case of inequality, and there ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... forward with my offering, and a certain significant shyness in her manner that were enough to throw me into a state of hopeless imbecility. And I was always miserably conscious that Consuelo possessed an exalted sentimentality, and a predilection for the highest mediaeval romance, in which I knew I was lamentably deficient. Even in our most confidential moments I was always aware that I weakly lagged behind this daughter of a gloomily distinguished ancestry, in her frequent incursions into a vague but poetic ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... remarked, simply. "I never believed in Mannering's sentimentality. To-day, with his own lips, he has confessed to me that another, an unbroached reason, stands ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Tournous, near Macon, and lived to see the century out, dying in 1805, at the age of seventy-eight. His popularity is nowadays due chiefly to his heads of young girls, which he painted in his later life with admirable skill, but with a sentimentality that almost repels. The famous example in the National Gallery is more free from the sickly sweetness that spoils most of them, and reminds us that he could paint more serious works, and paint them exceedingly well. He first came into notice by pictures like La Lecture du Bible, La Malediction ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... quietly and thoroughly himself, get to know the man, his belongings and environment, and then deal with him as he saw fit. The thing's not workable; the judge might have an attack of indigestion that would jaundice his view, or be in a rosy glow of sentimentality after port. But if the judge could be depended on for sympathy and intuitiveness, half the crime in the world would be stamped out. It's the same everywhere. If priests could be allowed to discriminate between divorced persons they ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... none of the sentimentality so common at that age, and it can be proved that she had never an attachment, nor was disappointed in love, ...
— Summer on the Lakes, in 1843 • S.M. Fuller
... boisterous movement, where Beethoven seems to be taking lessons from Mendelssohn, there comes a scherzo, or rather a Viennese waltz, where Chabrier gives old Bach a helping hand. The adagietto has a rather sweet sentimentality. The rondo at the end is presented rather like an idea of Franck's, and is the best part of the composition; it is carried out in a spirit of mad intoxication and a chorale rises up from it with crashing joy; but the effect of the whole is lost in repetitions that choke it and make it heavy. Through ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... say it a thousand times afterwards, but not here. Above all, let us have no sentimentality now or everything will fall through. We must look at this matter coldly like sensible people. [Takes out a cigar and lights it.] Now sit down there and I'll sit here and we'll take it over as ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... communicate it, as though he had discovered it. I suppose you think me silly, but you'll grant, whatever Mr. Hodder may be, he isn't silly. And women can feel these things. You know I'm not given to sentimentality, but I was never so impressed by the growth in any personality as I was this morning by his. He seems to have become himself, as I always imagined him. And, Phil, he was so fine! He's absolutely incapable of posing, as you'll admit, and he stood right up and acknowledged ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... "Sentimentality!" Novodvoroff ejaculated ironically; "it is difficult for us to understand the emotions of these people and the motives on which they act. You see generosity in the act, and it may be simply ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... short story, written with much truth and feeling, the style and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with romantic colouring. The fascination which professional dancers often exercise over natives of ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... they ate, and the amount they slept in that immense feather bed with their feet locked together... William couldn't help a grim smile as he thought of Isabel's horror if she knew the full extent of his sentimentality. ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... American poets, while Matthew Arnold did not like him at all. Emerson, in his last years, preferred him to Longfellow, but it is doubtful if he always did so. The strong point of his poetry is its intelligent manliness,—the absence of affectation and all sentimentality; but it lacks the musical element. He composed neither songs nor ballads,—nothing to match Hiawatha, or Gray's famous Elegy. America still awaits a poet who shall combine the savoir faire of Lowell with the force of Emerson and the grace and purity ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... he replied at length. "Isn't that an admission for a man of my age to make? I know it always, but there are times when I must tell you so. Don't call it weakness, dear, or sentimentality. There is a relief which I could never explain in turning from these battles with men and with events to your companionship, which demanded nothing ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... asserted their rightful influence. After publishing his greatest poem, The Excursion, the tide of generous appreciation set in. In 1843, Wordsworth was made Poet Laureate. His pure and fervent poetry was a protest against the diseased sentimentality of ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... plan," Gifford replied dryly. "All the same, if I can retrieve my evening kit, which has gone astray, I hope to enjoy myself at Wynford Place to-night without being troubled with undue sentimentality." ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... she has none of the sentimentality of the English highwayman's lady; but being wooed by a ...
— George Cruikshank • William Makepeace Thackeray
... strong as you are and be trifled with. I understand that now, Mr. Lane. You had no sentimentality to be touched, and my tears did not move you in the least until you believed in my ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... a reverie; but as her expression changed from one of annoyance to something of wistfulness and sentimentality, the question of marriage with the Duke of Marshire had clearly been dismissed for that moment from her heart. At intervals a shy smile gave an almost childish tenderness to her face. Then, on a sudden, her eyelashes would droop, she would start with a sigh, and, apparently caught by some ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... It isn't sentimentality which says that where there is no vision the people perisheth. Every time Tammany Hall sets off fireworks and oratory on the Fourth of July; every time the picture of Lincoln is displayed at a political convention; every red bandanna of the Progressives and red ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... to the helping of their brothers amongst whom they live. What is the use of prattling about Universal Brotherhood, if you do not live it? Sometimes, in discussions on Brotherhood, it is spoken of as though it only meant soft words and well-turned phrases, sentimentality and not reality. It means work, constant, steadfast, unwearied work, for those who require service at our hands; not soft words to each other, but work for the world, that is the true meaning ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... call love "mush"—"If you were a flowering rose," and "Come to my garden of love," were two typical examples. The remainder of the verses—with which the suburban sopranos will doubtless break the serenity of the suburban nights this summer—were of a "sloppy" sentimentality combined with a kind of hypersexual idiocy unparalleled except in an English ballad of the popular order. On such belief, I said to myself, are young lovers brought up. Well, I suppose it would be difficult for a youthful ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... as the sirens which English designers invent for their "Books of Beauty," Modeste was, like her mother before her, the captivating embodiment of a grace too little understood in France, where we choose to call it sentimentality, but which among German women is the poetry of the heart coming to the surface of the being and spending itself—in affectations if the owner is silly, in divine charms of manner if she is "spirituelle" and intelligent. Remarkable for her pale golden hair, Modeste belonged to the type ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... Brunt and Clive Timmis were married. It is characteristic of the fine sentimentality which underlies the surface harshness of the inhabitants of the Five Towns that, though No. 54 Machin Street was duly transferred to Ezra Brunt, the chemist retiring from business, he has never rebuilt it to accord with the ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... us always couple this exalted sentimentality with the stern logic of fact, and never misdirect or misapply it in any of our charitable work. Imperfect knowledge perverts the noblest sentiments; widened and perfected knowledge strengthens their power. A truly philanthropic sentiment ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur Pinero's Letty. This "epilogue"—so the author calls it—has been denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier than not to write it—to make the play end with Letty's awakening from her dream, and her flight from Letchmere's rooms. ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... entirely disappeared. "No, not wasted. You have enjoyed them, you say. Splendid justification. You will continue to enjoy them as the years grow between you and your college days. All men are sentimental about college, and in that sentimentality there is continuous pleasure." ...
— The Plastic Age • Percy Marks
... propensity to emotional tenderness. He wept sweet tears over Maillard, that nice little man introduced la paperasserie into the September massacres. But as emotional tenderness leads to fury, he becomes all at once furious against the victims. There was no help for it. It is the sentimentality of the age. The assassin is pitied, but the victim is considered quite unpardonable. In his later manner Michelet is more Michelet than ever before. There is no common sense in it; it is simply wonderful! Neither art nor science, neither ...
— The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard • Anatole France
... Harte's technique. Like Dickens and like Bret Harte, Duncan was a frank moralist. His chief concern was in winnowing the souls of men and women bare of the chaff of petty circumstances which covered them. His stories all contain at least a minor chord of sentiment, but are usually free from the sentimentality which mars some of Harte's sketches. He is not ashamed to employ pathos, but his tragic situations are rarely overstrained and maudlin. He has all the tenderness of Dickens; his Christmas Eve at Topmast Tickle may well be compared with A Christmas Carol. Norman Duncan never married, ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... The story developed with a flavour of strangely twisted sentimentality. Suddenly he did not like it. He liked it less as ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... him that I had been coming more and more to the idea—not as a sentimentality or a metaphor, but as the ruling and directing idea, the structural idea, of all one's political and social activities—of the whole world as one state and community and of God as the King ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... the army are rejected; a large proportion of them because their teeth are gone or decayed. Do these figures need comment? Can you look for sound minds in such unsound bodies? Can you look for manliness, for self- respect, and self-control, or anything but animalistic sentimentality? ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... of the hungry looks of the company; he was a soldier, and concentrated his mind upon the duties of the moment. Sentimentality was no part of his nature. He was a man, and must eat; he was a soldier, and must perform the work as ...
— The Humourous Story of Farmer Bumpkin's Lawsuit • Richard Harris
... femininity, with the possession of which he would not have credited Brinnaria. At first he was irritated. As he missed sale after sale he became more and more aggravated. But he kept his temper, held his tongue and waited for Brinnaria's mood to alter. Her sentimentality gradually waned as the prices offered steadily mounted. After long hesitation she gave orders to sell at auction the furniture from the house of a distant cousin, and to rent the house. That broke the spell. One by one the late abodes of the Brinnarii were cleared and sold; sold furniture and ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... punning conceits as "Fears are my feres," and in his "Saint Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good Jesuit's poems with his own which carried him serenely to the fatal tree. The ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... because she was tremendously in earnest. She was pledged in her deepest heart to break up what she felt was Honor's silly sentimentality—sentimentality with a dark and sinister background of mortgages and young widows and Wild Kings and shabby, down-at-the-heel houses ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... forward to seeing doomsday, is a warning for you to give substantial and material affairs close attention, or you will find that the artful and scheming friends you are entertaining will have possession of what they desire from you, which is your wealth, and not your sentimentality. ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... Again and again in India I would find myself in little circles of the official English,-supercilious, pretentious, conventional, carefully "turned out" people, living gawkily, thinking gawkily, talking nothing but sport and gossip, relaxing at rare intervals into sentimentality and levity as mean as a banjo tune, and a kind of despairful disgust would engulf me. And then in some man's work, in some huge irrigation scheme, some feat of strategic foresight, some simple, penetrating realization of deep-lying things, I ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... to say, as did His other son, "I and my Father are one"—the ultimate destiny of each human soul, each of the Father's children, for all, no matter what differences man may see, are equal in His sight; and He created not one in vain. So love to God in its true expression is not a mere sentimentality, a mere abstraction: it is life, it is growth, it is spiritual awakening and unfoldment, it is realization. Again, it is life: it is the more ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... do. Nothing is more charming than the frank comradeship of girls and boys, and that is why I am so sorry to see them spoil it with sentimentality. They ought to be good friends, helping each other, having jolly good times together, but never in ways that will bring a blush to the cheeks of either, now, or ...
— Almost A Man • Mary Wood-Allen
... opened, then closed tightly. She had almost answered, for no Madigan may be accused of sentimentality and live unavenged. Only a moment, though, was she at a loss. Then calmly, prettily, she glided into Split's own particular "piece." She knew this would draw ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... altitude, his aesthetic sense—which by this time had necessarily developed—he was struck by the exquisite beauty of Christianity, and thus, as a shallow philosophy had nearly induced him to become an atheist, a deep and sensual spirit of sentimentality nearly made him a Christian. His Madonna was the Madonna of Raphael, not that of Albert Duerer: the woman whose placid grace of countenance creates an emotion more subtly voluptuous than desire; ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... settle; and if the old Viscount and that abominable Abiram don't find her out before then, you may depend upon it they will abandon the search. In the interim, the lady will have cooled. Walks upon the sea-shore are uncommonly dull without something like reciprocal sentimentality. The odds are, that the old aunt is addicted to snuff, tracts, and the distribution of flannel, and before August, the fair Dorothea will be yearning for a sight of her adorer. You can easily gammon ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... irritating conventions. He began to doubt even whether she realised the full import of what had happened between them. There was nothing gross about his love, not even a speculation in his mind as to its ultimate conclusion. He was immersed in a wave of sentimentality. He wanted her by his side, free from any restraint. He wanted the joy of her presence, more of those soft, almost reluctant kisses, the mute obedience of her nature to the sweet and natural impulse of her love. Of the inevitable end of ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... they not been hers and she his. Only the poorest part of his poetic equipment had propagated in her, and had he taught her anything, she would not have overvalued it so much. Herself full of mawkish sentimentality, her verses could not fail to be foolish, their whole impulse being the ambition that springs from self-admiration. She had begun to look down on Kirsty, who would so gladly have been a mother to the motherless ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years of war and victories can give. His adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... additions, for which the distinguished coadjutors are responsible, reek with mawkish sentimentality, inane vapidity, or vulgar buffoonery. Most of the leading characters are duplicated or triplicated. Miranda has a sister, Dorinda, who is repellently coquettish. This new creation finds a lover in another new character, a brainless youth, Hippolito, who has never before ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... me capable of religious sentimentality after what I have said of my religious opinions. Still, in these twenty years I have seen a great deal of the seamy side of the world. I have known its back-stairs, and I have discerned, in the march of events, a Power ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... anecdote and hilariousness. There is no deception about it: it tastes of tannin and spruce and creosote. Everything, in short, has the flavor of the wilderness and a free life. It is idyllic. And yet, with all our sentimentality, there is nothing feeble about the cooking. The slapjacks are a solid job of work, made to last, and not go to pieces in a person's stomach like a trivial bun: we might record on them, in cuneiform characters, our incipient civilization; and future generations would doubtless turn ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... after the cause for anger has been removed. All feelings tend to acquire a strength beyond what is necessary for action and to endure after their proper objects and conditions have disappeared; hence the luxury of grief and revenge and sentimentality. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... public taste and I hope much from its judicious use. Be careful that you select only the highest, purest types to offer to your countrymen and women, when Peace enables us to turn our attention to the great work of building up a noble school of Southern Art. We want no feeble, sickly sentimentality, nor yet the sombre austerity which seems to pervade your mind, judging from the ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... characters like his. It is possible that he may have always spoiled her a little; and it will soon be shown in what way her tenderness so often received that special material and encouragement which made it often degenerate into sickly sentimentality. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the coarsest irregularities; but if you step far back and study the circle as a whole, its regular, perfect form becomes quite distinct.'' But the circle must be drawn carefully and correctly, and one must not give way to sentimentality and tears when running over a fly's legs in drawing. Emil du Bois-Reymond[1] says against this: "When the postmaster announces that out of 100,000 letters a year, exactly so and so many come unaddressed, we think nothing of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... book-sales, and book-men, will then—if I am spared—pass before me as the faint reflex of "the light of OTHER DAYS!" ... when literary enterprise and literary fame found a proportionate reward; and when the sickly sentimentality of the novelist had not usurped the post of the instructive philologist. But enough ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... shoulders. "German sentimentality," said she. "If you mix sentiment with your cards, we shall lose the game, Count Podstadsky. Hear, then, what I have to say to you. It is true that we stand upon the brow of a precipice; but we must contemplate it fearlessly, and so we shall grow accustomed to our danger, and learn ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... the whole crew of quacks collectively, and also, of course, individually. I don't believe in medicine. It's a useless institution. I mean to go into all that. But what's that sentimentality you've got up there? The whole class seems to be ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... what one wishes, and she wished to believe Legrand's protestations. She began to pity herself profoundly, feeling that she had thrown away the substance for the shadow. In the sentimentality to which she yielded, even the prospect of being a star turn failed to console her; and during the next few weeks she invented reasons for visiting at her ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... observation was made by someone speaking in harsh and bitter accents—"It is not love that really moves them so much as the self-satisfaction of BEING LOVED. No woman could be faithful for long to a dead man—she would lack the expected response to her superabundant sentimentality, and she would tire of waiting to meet him in Paradise—if she believed in such a possibility, which in nine cases out of ten she ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... which even now can be ascribed to the Mongol blood. The Bulgar is more stolid than the Serb; he is less given to sympathy and on that account can be cruel. The Bulgar is benevolent because he is urged by kindliness, whereas the more impressionable Serb is under the influence both of sentiment, sentimentality and sympathy. These differences of temperament—and there are others, more or less distinguishable—do not seem to Balkan thinkers any reason why the two should keep apart. And a couple of months after the Great War, during which the Bulgars, as their ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... stand up in this presence to indulge in any mock sentimentality. You brave men who wore the gray would be the first to hold me or any other son of the North in just contempt if I should say that, now it was all over, I thought the North was wrong and the result of the war a mistake, and that I was prepared to suppress my political opinions. I believe ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... curious piece of sentimentality in Sheridan.[100] The other night we were all delivering our respective and various opinions on him and other hommes marquans, and mine was this:—'Whatever Sheridan has done or chosen to do has been, par excellence, always the best of its kind. He has written ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... not used it much; rather they prefer to sing of heaven with a golden floor and a gate of pearl, ignoring a really fine hymn that pictures God as a sensible Being and not a Lord Chief Justice either of sickly sentimentality or of the type of a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... sex. You never returned. A few weeks later, through the elaborate investigations of the Metropolitan police, the perambulator was discovered at midnight, standing by itself in a remote corner of Bayswater. It contained the manuscript of a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality. [Miss Prism starts in involuntary indignation.] But the baby was not there! [Every one looks at Miss Prism.] Prism! Where is ...
— The Importance of Being Earnest - A Trivial Comedy for Serious People • Oscar Wilde
... harmless vanity, it rewards the attention of the reader by its lively, rapid descriptions, its unfailing fund of good humor, and its local and geographical details, which are frequently instructive and entertaining. The snatches of common-place sentimentality, which the author appears to indulge in both as a matter of taste and from a sense of duty, might safely be ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... art, ever realised. The first descent of Freedom to our modern world, the first unfurling of her standard on the rocky pinnacle of Europe, is here celebrated in the style which it deserved. There is no false timsel-decoration about Tell, no sickly refinement, no declamatory sentimentality. All is downright, simple, and agreeable to Nature; yet all is adorned and purified and rendered beautiful, without losing its resemblance. An air of freshness and wholesomeness breathes over it; we are ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... adultery, and for men in abstaining from theft! In short, the first injustice is practised by literature; it has no interest in esthetics, which is only a higher justice. The romantics will have a fine account to render with their immoral sentimentality. Do you recall a bit of Victor Hugo in la Legende des siecles, where a sultan is saved because he had pity on a pig? it is always the story of the penitent thief blessed because he has repented! To repent is good, but not to do evil is better. The school of rehabilitations has led us to see no ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... in our religion these twilight thoughts prevail. We seek no completeness here. What is beyond, what is inexpressible attracts us. Hence the greater spirituality of romantic literature, its deeper emotion, its more passionate tenderness. But hence likewise its sentimentality, its melancholy and, in particular, the morbid fascination which the thought of death has had for the Gothic mind. The classic nations concentrated their attention on life and light, and spent few thoughts upon ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... book is extremely good reading from end to end; it abounds in entertaining and exciting episodes, is wholly void of sentimentality, and enforces in the most unmistakable and wholesome way the duty of ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... Blinker tells Florence that he loves her. So accustomed is she to this display of sentimentality in her cavaliers that she merely laughs. He persists, and she indicates a belief that he is just like the rest. Mention of "the rest" awakes question in Blinker. He learns that she meets men indiscriminately. He has a horror of this evidence of what he considers to be moral laxity, ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... stages of Irish educational history, might easily be multiplied, but they will serve as typical instances of that want of recognition by English statesmen of Irish thought on Irish problems, and that ignoring of Irish sentiment—as distinguished from Irish sentimentality—which I insist is the basal element in the misunderstandings ...
— Ireland In The New Century • Horace Plunkett
... wife could be altered. Birth costs nothing, except in pain and valour and such old-fashioned things; and the merchant need pay no more for mating a strong miner to a healthy fishwife than he pays when the miner mates himself with a less robust female whom he has the sentimentality to prefer. Thus it might be possible, by keeping on certain broad lines of heredity, to have some physical improvement without any moral, political, or social improvement. It might be possible to keep a supply of strong ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... perfectly disgusted. I was sorry for her; an excess of sentimentality. But she hasn't kept ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers
... because he had the same sort of power of exhibiting both his charm and his weakness as Boswell had in dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was not at all a typical Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his character, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque. He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said—though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality—leaving the world better for the art that they practised ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... from his thoughts in sudden action, shaking this folly off with fierce impatience, heaping abusive epithets upon his own head, arraigning himself as a drivelling sentimentalist; and what shame could equal that of a puling sentimentality? ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... meat herself. She listens at the back door a moment to make sure no one's out there, then opens the door and puts out the garbage and wastebasket. There goes the adventurous kitten. You got to hand it to Kate. She has no sniffling sentimentality about her cats. Kitten's dead, it's dead, that's all. She doesn't mope over the limp mite of fur. In fact, anything to do with cats she's got sense and guts. They're her family. I don't know that I could have put that kitten out of ...
— It's like this, cat • Emily Neville
... another when she first returned, but her attention wandered from her best beloved, and all that were solid came somehow to be set aside and replaced, the nourishing fact by inflated fiction, reason and logic by rhyme and rhythm, and sense by sentimentality, so far had her strong, simple, earnest mind deteriorated in the unwholesome atmosphere of London drawing rooms. It was only a phase, of course, and she could have been set right at once had there been anybody there to prescribe a strengthening ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... much I wished to hear from a man's standpoint, but how to make him understand was difficult. He had faced life frankly, knew what was subterfuge, what sincere, and the restrictions of custom and convention no longer handicapped him. Between sympathy and sentimentality he had found the right distinction, and his judgment and emotions had learned to work together. My judgment ...
— People Like That • Kate Langley Bosher
... feeling of too much sentimentality, back into the "stack" at the university library. I took down book after book of the great English poets, and pressed my cheek to them in long farewell ... first glancing cautiously around, to be sure that no one was ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... other women is too low for him to heap upon you. Believe that the French men are sympathetic because they laugh and cry openly at the theatre. But appeal to their chivalry, and they will rescue you from one discomfort only to offer you a worse. The French have sentimentality, but not sentiment. They have gallantry, but not chivalry. They have vanity, but not pride. They have religion, but not morality. They are a combination of the wildest extravagance and the strictest parsimony. They cultivate the ground so close to the ...
— As Seen By Me • Lilian Bell
... insincerity or conscious arrangement would have ruined all; as it is, the scene holds and haunts one with an impression of absolute truth, For the end, marked like all by an almost grim avoidance of sentimentality, I shall only refer you to the book itself. After reading it you will, I hope, not think me guilty of exaggeration when I call it, slight though it is, one for which its author has deserved well ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156., March 5, 1919 • Various
... not relinquished; when the Executive, consulting the spirit of the community, receives the demands of the mob, and humbly complies, throwing down the fences of the law, that base rioters may walk unimpeded, to their work of vengeance, or unjust mercy? A sickly sentimentality too often enervates the administration of justice; and the pardoning power becomes the master-key to let out unwashed, unrepentant criminals. They have fleeced us, robbed us, and are ulcerous sores to the body politic; yet our heart ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... you will find the whole sexual life of men and women analyzed in its relationships to sin. Everything is set forth, as clearly and as concisely as it can be—without morbid prudery on the one hand, or morbid sentimentality on the other—in the coldest scientific language; the right course of action is pointed out for all the cases that may occur, and we are told what is lawful, what a venial sin, what a mortal sin. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... art, and the people ought to hear it instead of the horrors which they cram into our ears under the pretence of satisfying our tastes. What pleases people most is sentimental music, but it need not be a silly sentimentality. Instead, they ought to give the people the charming airs which grow, as naturally as daisies on a lawn, in the vast field of opera-comique. That is not high art, it is true, but it is pretty music and it is high art compared with what is heard too often in ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... said Mr. Wharton angrily, "for soft sentimentality. Well;—she must take her bed as she makes it. It is very hard on me, I know. Considering what she used to be, it is marvellous to me that she should have so little idea left of ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... heritage, and he ate and drank eagerly of the masculine fare I provided. He had shed a few tears at Miss Redwood's departure and I liked him for them, for they showed his loyalty, but he had no more games of the nursery nor the mawkish sentimentality that I found upon the nursery shelves. I had other plans for Jerry. John Benham should have his wish. I would make Jerry as nearly the Perfect Man as mortal man could make God's handiwork. Spiritually he should grow "from within," directed by me, but ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... years before, a pyramid sixty feet high, which stood upon an acre of ground in the centre of an artificial lake. The two inscriptions that the prince chose for his sepulchre illustrate, appropriately enough, the sharply contrasting qualities of his strange individuality—his romantic sentimentality, and his callous cynicism. The first inscription was a line from ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... all silly sentimentality in the bud. The real thing is never silly," said Joyce out of her ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi
... when their business compels them to be away from home all day; but young children may be, and quite often are, killed by her cuddling and coddling and doctoring and preaching: above all, by her continuous attempts to excite precocious sentimentality, a practice as objectionable, and possibly as mischievous, as the worst ...
— Getting Married • George Bernard Shaw
... birdlime of words, and every time Amaury recites his Credo of Love, you are certain to see all round the drawing-room rows upon rows of little rosy mouths, eagerly opening, ready to swallow the taking bait of mawkish sentimentality. Just fancy! A poet who has such beautiful moustaches and who believes in love as he believes ...
— Artists' Wives • Alphonse Daudet
... Blake, following suit, in order to keep up her reputation for sentimentality; "I would thob ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... "Except the last scene of the Broken Heart (which I think extravagant—others may think it sublime, and be right) they [Ford's plays] are merely exercises of style and effusion of wire-drawn sentiment."[93] The same strength of judgment rendered Hazlitt proof against the excessive sentimentality in Beaumont and Fletcher and gave a distinct value to his opinions even when they seemed to be wrong, which was not often. But in writing of Marlowe, of Dekker and of Webster, he spreads out all his sail to make a joyous run among ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... the word would to many readers seem to imply a degree of blame, it might be said that George Sand created Sandism, so true is it that, morally speaking, all good has a reverse of evil. This leprosy of sentimentality would have been charming. Still, Sandism has its good side, in that the woman attacked by it bases her assumption of superiority on feelings scorned; she is a blue-stocking of sentiment; and she is rather less of a bore, love to some extent ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... cleverest of the United's humorous writers. "To Charlie of the Comics" is a harmless parody on our Laureate's excellent poem "To Mary of the Movies", which appeared some time ago in The Piper. In "The Bride of the Sea", Mr. Lewis Theobald, Jr., presents a rather weird piece of romantic sentimentality of the sort afforded by bards of the early nineteenth century. The metre is regular, and no flagrant violations of grammatical or rhetorical precepts are to be discerned, yet the whole effort lacks clearness, dignity, inspiration, and poetic spontaneity. The word printed "enhanc'd" in ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... and Schmucke were abundantly given, both by heart and disposition, to the peculiarly German sentimentality which shows itself alike in childlike ways—in a passion for flowers, in that form of nature-worship which prompts a German to plant his garden-beds with big glass globes for the sake of seeing miniature ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... of so much second-rate talking expresses it to-day, we may quote some words of David Hume, Huxley's "prince of agnostics," from the Essay on Polygamy and Divorce. The least emotional of philosophers—a hard-headed Scotsman—he makes short work of the sentimentality which is invoked now-a-days against ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... the novelist. "I am extremely opposed to what we call ideal characters. I think their portrayal is mischievous; it is altogether offensive to me as an artist, and, as far as the morality goes, I believe that when an artist tries to create an ideal he mixes some truth up with a vast deal of sentimentality, and produces something that is extremely noxious as well as nauseous. I think that no man can consistently portray a probable type of human character without being useful to his readers. When he endeavors to create something higher than that, he plays the fool himself and tempts ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... ensure the volume hundreds of possessors. The names of a few of the galaxy will give the reader a faint idea of their charms, unless the reader accord with Juliet's somewhat peevish "What's in a name." Thus, we find Julia, the queen of sentimentality; Belinda, gay and sparkling; Madeline, the early prey of despair; Lolah, languishing amid Eastern magnificence; the Orphan, pencilled in the very simplicity of nature, and finely contrasted with the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 20, No. - 580, Supplemental Number • Various
... most to be dreaded in a Star Chamber is not its sternness but its sentimentality. There is no worse censorship than one which considers only the feelings of the spectators, except perhaps one which considers the feelings of people who do not even witness the performance. Take the case of the Passion Play at Oberammergau. The offence given by ...
— The Shewing-up of Blanco Posnet • George Bernard Shaw
... olives after dinner. Still, he was not without compensatory considerations, and, upon the whole, took his companion to task for evincing what, in a good-natured, round-about way, he hinted to be a somewhat jaundiced sentimentality. Nature, he added, in Shakespeare's words, had meal and bran; and, rightly regarded, the bran in its way ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... listening in the forlorn streets of a Puritan city—when for one day the cheating tradesmen leave their barbarous shops—to the wailing of unlovely hymns, empty of everything except a degraded sentimentality that would make an Athenian or a Roman slave blush with shame, is enough to cause one to regard the most scandalous levity of Voltaire as something positively ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... range, in contemporary documents, this individual has about him little of romance and nothing whatever admirable. It would be a great pity, were mistaken sentimentality allowed to clothe him in the same bright-hued garments as the cavaliers of England in the time of the Stuarts. It would be an equal pity, were the casual reader to condemn all who eventually aligned themselves against ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... indulgently; but at heart she was discontented with Lavretsky, with Varvara Pavlovna, and with the whole scene she had prepared. Very little sentimentality had come of it; Varvara Pavlovna, in her opinion, ought to have flung ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... should and must overthrow. In so doing he has every reason to be more unscrupulous and aggressive even than his brethren-in-arms. He must stab away at the gelatinous mass of popular indifference, sentimentality, and complacency, even though he seems quite unable to penetrate to the quick and draw blood. For the time the possibility of immediate constructive achievement in his own special field is comparatively small, and he is the less responsible for the production ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... comfortable advice.' He published it with a preface modestly explaining to the public his own sense of its imperfection. Nevertheless a storm of abuse broke upon him from the critics who fastened upon all the faults of the poem—the diffuseness of the story, its occasional sentimentality and the sometimes fantastic coinage of words,[xiii:1] and ignored the extraordinary beauties of which ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... you overcome me with your sentimentality. I don't believe in love. That's what I believe in," said he, as he opened his pocket-book and showed her ...
— Trumps • George William Curtis
... Real happiness is a state of dulness Reluctant to take the life of flowers for a whim Rewards, together with the expectations, of the virtuous Salt of earth, to whom their salt must serve for nourishment Sentimentality puts up infant hands for absolution Service of watering the dry and drying the damp (Whiskey) Sham spiritualism She had sunk her intelligence in her sensations She marries, and it's the end of her sparkling She herself ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... distant, is hardly known at all, except as a way station en route to Switzerland. The cathedrals of mid-France are, it is to be feared, even less known than would on first thoughts seem probable. A certain amount of sentimentality attaches itself to the chateaux of the Loire, and some acquaintance with their undeniable pleasing attributes is the portion of most travellers; but, again, such cathedral cities as Besancon, Nantes, and Langres are off the well-worn road, and their cathedrals might be myths ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... near, when their needs would be fewer. To be sure, the new dresses must be given up, but they still had one change apiece, and there were some things of the dead mother's which could be used, for poverty does not admit of morbid sentimentality. ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... on strategic arms limitations and in other areas will have far greater chance for success if both sides enter them motivated by mutual self-interest rather than naive sentimentality. ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Richard Nixon • Richard Nixon
... it. He is complete and sufficing for those who trust Him and are willing to suffer; an hostile and hateful enigma to those who are not. We must prepare ourselves for the logical outcome of this doctrine. Sentimentality must not be ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... misunderstanding has been the principal feature of German-American relations. In Germany there was no understanding for the curious mixture of political sagacity, commercial acumen, tenacity and sentimentality, which goes to make up the character of the American people. The power of the Union was therefore underestimated by us, and the high-spirited utterances of American youthful strength were more disapproved of than was necessary, because they were interpreted as mere ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... flashed across his dark features like a meteor through a cloudy sky and was gone. "I—suspected, mon ami. But—I did not even tell myself." That part of him that was French—a species of volatile sentimentality—sounded in the words like the echo of a laugh in a minor key. "I made a valet of her. I suffered her to clean my boots and brush my clothes. I kept ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... was not noted for her capacity for deep feeling and was more amused than otherwise affected by Peggy's earnest speech, classifying it as "a girl's sentimentality." Finer qualities were wasted upon that lady. So she ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... pretty mantling of her olive cheek, as I came forward with my offering, and a certain significant shyness in her manner that were enough to throw me into a state of hopeless imbecility. And I was always miserably conscious that Consuelo possessed an exalted sentimentality, and a predilection for the highest mediaeval romance, in which I knew I was lamentably deficient. Even in our most confidential moments I was always aware that I weakly lagged behind this daughter of a gloomily distinguished ancestry, in her frequent incursions ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... way competent to teach. Mr. RALPH CONNOR has described with skill and great sincerity the horrors of the War in the earlier days; but for me he has spoilt both his story and the effect of it by his extreme sentimentality. He is persistently concerned to raise a lump in my throat. I readily believe that he was actuated by the highest motive in trying to show us how responsive the Canadians were when their spiritual needs were attended ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 4, 1919. • Various
... with much truth and feeling, the style and handling rises above the commonplace device of dressing up European sentimentality in the garb and phraseology of Asia; and we have, so far as can be judged, a fairly real picture of the inner and the emotional side of native life in India, sufficiently tinged with romantic colouring. The fascination which professional dancers often exercise over natives ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... intensely human and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral part of the drama. They complete the revelation of the complex temperament of Autolycus, with his passion for flowers and millinery, his hysterical balancing between laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his sudden sentimentality, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... man, Daisy, and he richly deserves his punishment," said Noel, in an almost stern voice, for he wished to check any unhealthy sentimentality on the part of the delicate child. "You must think of what you and your sisters have suffered, and be glad he has been prevented ...
— The Palace Beautiful - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... never could come within the influence of a subject in the least pathetic without overflowing his banks. He ought to be dammed—or leveed, I should more properly say. Such is the history—not as it is usually told, but as it is when stripped of the nauseous sentimentality that would enshrine for our loving worship a dastardly seducer like Pierre Abelard. I have not a word to say against the misused, faithful girl, and would not withhold from her grave a single one of those simple tributes which blighted youths and maidens ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... indiscretion would have been in various ways embarrassing. Hence not a word was said. Nor were definite plans for the wedding made until George remarked one evening that he would like to be married at Chichester, Chichester being the name of his new private hotel. Which exhibition of sentimentality had both startled and touched Hilda. Chichester, however, had to be renounced, owing to the difficulty of residence. The subject having been thus fairly broached, George had pursued it, and one day somewhat casually ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... memory and sentimentality. The war has well-nigh crushed the latter out of my nature. I thank God though, that we have now embarked together on the ocean of life, with no fear of separation, and with the hope, too, that storms, ...
— Leah Mordecai • Mrs. Belle Kendrick Abbott
... as you ask it wid such a brilliant smiled Miss Norah, do you think that any educated young man who has read about beauty an' sentimentality in books, could refuse you? But you know, Miss Norah, that the clergyman who marries a couple has always the right of kissing the bride. Now I wouldn't claim my right then; but it might be possible by a present compromise ...
— Going To Maynooth - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... designing coats for his friends, liveries for his servants, and even uniforms. Nor did he ever make the mistake of giving away outmoded clothes to his valets, but kept them to form what must have been the finest collection of clothes that has been seen in modern times. With a sentimentality that is characteristic of him, he would often, as he sat, crippled by gout, in his room at Windsor, direct his servant to bring him this or that coat, which he had worn ten or twenty or thirty years before, and, when it ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm
... understand, which is in harmony with the laws of art, and the people ought to hear it instead of the horrors which they cram into our ears under the pretence of satisfying our tastes. What pleases people most is sentimental music, but it need not be a silly sentimentality. Instead, they ought to give the people the charming airs which grow, as naturally as daisies on a lawn, in the vast field of opera-comique. That is not high art, it is true, but it is pretty music and it is high art compared ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens
... the right tone," flashed through my mind. "I may not get far with sentimentality." But it was only a momentary thought. I swear she really did interest me. Besides, I was exhausted and moody. And cunning so ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... instance of the unemphatic ending is the last act of Sir Arthur Pinero's Letty. This "epilogue"—so the author calls it—has been denounced as a concession to popular sentimentality, and an unpardonable anticlimax. An anticlimax it is, beyond all doubt; but it does not follow that it is an artistic blemish. Nothing would have been easier than not to write it—to make the play end with Letty's awakening from her dream, and her flight ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... least emphasis: they are strong, tender, and sweet, yet never without a sufficient infusion of brisk natural acid and piquancy to keep their sweetness from palling on the taste: they are full of fresh, healthy sentiment, but never at all touched with sentimentality: the soul of romance works mightily within them, yet never betrays them into any lapses from good sense, or any substitutions of feeling ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... impulse in its outward accomplishment? Did he love the poet in the woman rather than the woman in the poet? As Adams turned to look at him, he thought, not without a certain grim humour, that he beheld another victim to the vice of sentimentality; and in his mental grouping he placed his companion among those who, like Connie, were in bondage to the images ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... exclaimed the angry marquise, "your folly exceeds all bounds. I should be glad to know what connection there can possibly be between your sickly sentimentality and ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... many of her companions had been treated in the same way, and according to public opinion in that part of the country there was nothing abnormal in the proceeding. Indeed, it may be said in general that there is very little romance or sentimentality about Russian peasant marriages. In this as in other respects the Russian peasantry are, as a class, extremely practical and matter-of-fact in their conceptions and habits, and are not at all prone to indulge in sublime, ethereal sentiments of any kind. They have little or ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... convenient plan," Gifford replied dryly. "All the same, if I can retrieve my evening kit, which has gone astray, I hope to enjoy myself at Wynford Place to-night without being troubled with undue sentimentality." ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... any religion, of any ethical teaching, of any principle—to be of use to men and women at the present stage of their development—must be incontestable common sense. Ridiculous sentimentality should be ruthlessly crushed, and investigation of the meaning of Nature should be strenuously encouraged. And with clear eyes we should try to see the truth. Let those born fighters who like fighting for fighting's ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... lovable to the last degree, but cautious and tormentingly self-restrained when it came to loving. At the first intimation of dangerous sentimentality on the part of Old Heck the widow would suddenly and without an instant's warning change the subject. When Skinny had been pensive and silent for half an hour or so and would then start, in a halting and quivering ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman
... only the emotion out of which art and religion are made, but even the sensibility to respond to what the few can still offer, art and religion founder. After that, nothing is left of art and religion but their names; illusion and prettiness are called art, politics and sentimentality religion. ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... for a moment. He was looking at her and thinking how perfect in every way she was now, as she stood there purged of sentimentality, all aglow with curiosity to know how her nefarious plans had succeeded. It was his Ann who stood there, not the author of ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... enthusiasm, not reason, the guide of conduct. A character was given to political conflict which obtained for years to come. There was, it is true, a certain manliness about it in remarkable contrast with that maudlin sentimentality of our time which is rather inclined to ask pardon of the rebels of the late civil war for having put them to the trouble of getting up a rebellion. It was a conflict, nevertheless, more of party passion than of principle, wherein ...
— James Madison • Sydney Howard Gay
... unmistakably silly—as her father would had they not been hers and she his. Only the poorest part of his poetic equipment had propagated in her, and had he taught her anything, she would not have overvalued it so much. Herself full of mawkish sentimentality, her verses could not fail to be foolish, their whole impulse being the ambition that springs from self-admiration. She had begun to look down on Kirsty, who would so gladly have been a mother to the motherless ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald
... church and state. Tryon was not a devout man, but he thanked God with religious fervor that he had been saved a second time from a mistake which would have wrecked his whole future. If he had yielded to the momentary weakness of the past night,—the outcome of a sickly sentimentality to which he recognized now, in the light of reflection, that he was entirely too prone,—he would have regretted it soon enough. The black streak would have been sure to come out in some form, sooner or later, if not in the wife, then in her children. He saw clearly enough, ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... spiritual meaning of this poem, nor into that of its age. A very particular though succinct account of all these theories, ancient and modern, may be found in a work by Dr. Ginsberg. I confess that Dr. Ginsberg's theory, which is rather tinged with the virtuous sentimentality of the modern novel, seems to me singularly out of harmony with the Oriental and ancient character of the poem. It is adopted, however, though modified, by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1 • Various
... amulets has been attributed to religious sentimentality or religiosity. The latter word has been defined as "an excessive susceptibility to the religious sentiments, especially wonder, awe, and reverence, unaccompanied by any correspondent loyalty to divine law in ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... as though to shut out something that the mind saw. He had had a rough life, he had become inured to the seamy side of things—there was a seamy side even in this clean, free, wide land; and he had no sentimentality; though something seemed to hurt and shame ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... that now oppresses it, and might come to bloom openly as the penetrating eye of the lover, even now, sees that it could bloom. Love, then, and sympathy, particularly towards the sinful and diseased, a love relieved of sentimentality by the deliberate practice of healing, warning, and comforting; a complete aversion from all the interests of political society, and a confident expectation of a cataclysm that should suddenly transfigure the world—such was Christian religion in its origin. The primitive Christian was filled ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Cardot despatched four lines intended not to reach Chesnel's heart, but to produce the money. Chesnel made the draft payable to Sorbier's young successor; and the latter, feeling but little inclination to adopt his correspondent's sentimentality, was delighted to put himself at the Count's orders, and gave Victurnien as much money ...
— The Collection of Antiquities • Honore de Balzac
... he wanted every incident to be immediately effective. Now cynicism, in France, supplies a sufficient basis for all these requirements; it is the equivalent, for popular purposes, of that appeal to the average which in England is sentimentality. Compare, for instance, the admirable story "Boule de Suif," perhaps the best story which Maupassant ever wrote, with a story of somewhat similar motive—Bret Harte's "Outcasts of Poker Flat." Both stories ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... threatened, if felons are not relinquished; when the Executive, consulting the spirit of the community, receives the demands of the mob, and humbly complies, throwing down the fences of the law, that base rioters may walk unimpeded, to their work of vengeance, or unjust mercy? A sickly sentimentality too often enervates the administration of justice; and the pardoning power becomes the master-key to let out unwashed, unrepentant criminals. They have fleeced us, robbed us, and are ulcerous sores to the body politic; yet our heart turns to water ...
— Twelve Causes of Dishonesty • Henry Ward Beecher
... knowledge was not confined to car costs and such impersonal items, but included meals, scandals, relationships, finances, love affairs, quarrels, peccadillos. Here Nick often played his harmonica, his lips sweeping the metal length of it in throbbing rendition of such sure-fire sentimentality as The Long, Long Trail, or Mammy, while the others talked, joked, kept time with tapping ...
— Gigolo • Edna Ferber
... of the intrinsically "true, good, and beautiful" was part of the homage that his nature rendered to its Creator, and instead of flowering into a morbid and maudlin sentimentality which craves low-browed, long straight-nosed, undraped statuettes in every nook and corner,—or dwarfs the soul and pins it to the surplice of some theologic dogmata claiming infallibility—or coffins the intellect in cramped, shallow, psychological categories,—it bore ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... although with grave misgivings, that they would not too violently shock the polite taste of the eighteenth century. The eighteenth century, wearied to death of its own politeness, worn out by the heartless elegance of Pope and the insipid sentimentality of Prior, gave these fresh, simple melodies an unexpected welcome, even in the face of the reigning king of letters, Dr. Johnson, who forbade them to come to court. But good poems are not slain by bad ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... Albrecht himself that the tale of his domestic wretchedness has come. He was as manfully patient and silent as one might have expected in a man upright, firm, and self-reliant as he was tender. I do not think it is good for men, and especially for women, to indulge in egotistical sentimentality, and to believe that such a woman as Agnes Duerer could utterly thwart and wreck the life of a man like Albrecht. It is not true to life, in the first place; and it is dishonouring to the man, in the second; for although, doubtless, ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... battle din which only observant souls hear: Love contending with Impurity; Passion springing mines under the calm entrenchment of Reason; scowling Ignorance thrusting in the dark at holy-eyed Reverence; Romance deathfully encountering Sentimentality on the one side and Commonplace on the other; young Sensibility clanging swords with gigantic maudlin Conventionalities. . . . I have seen no man who did not suffer from the shock of these wars, unless he got help from that One Man whom it ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... pilgrimage chanced to lead them in this direction. The floor was of cement, and great patches of damp displayed themselves on the walls. Over the bed hung a peaceful picture of a chubby boy clasping a crook to his breast, and exchanging glances of maudlin sentimentality with a sheep that skipped at his side. The damp had eaten up one of the legs of mutton, and the sheep went on three legs. But nothing could exceed the more than human tenderness with which it regarded the ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... little sentimentality about the Forsytes. In that great London, which they had conquered and become merged in, what time had ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of John Galsworthy • John Galsworthy
... sense of guilt that latter hung as a pall over his life there is no mention in the original. Here we touch upon the most thoroughgoing change that Tegnr made in the character of his hero. He invested him with a sentimentality, a disposition towards melancholy, an accusing voice of conscience that torments his soul until full atonement has been won, that are modern and Christian in essence and entirely foreign to the pagan ...
— Fritiofs Saga • Esaias Tegner
... benevolence, and had the courage to think about the future of the whites as well as the future of the savages, thought that both ends would be attained by making a permanent settlement for the Indians beyond the Mississippi River. Those whose benevolence was a mixture of sentimentality and romantic misinformation thought the Indians ought to be left where contact with the whites would tend to civilize and Christianize them. Consequently there were two parties to the discussion, and a good deal of practical selfishness at the bottom of it ...
— Stories Of Georgia - 1896 • Joel Chandler Harris
... spiritual condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of places, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and in advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemn as mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the tradition of such fashion or accent. "The praise of beggars," "the cries of London," the traits of actors just grown "old," the spots in "town" where the country, its fresh green and fresh water, still lingered on, one after another, amidst the bustle; the ...
— Appreciations, with an Essay on Style • Walter Horatio Pater
... say!" cried Clameran, threateningly. "Do you suppose that I will allow your sentimentality to blast all my hopes? I shall tolerate no such folly, madame, I can assure you. Your niece's fortune is indispensable to us, and, more than that—I love the fair Madeleine, and am ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... and I can imagine that Mr. JOHN OXENHAM'S many admirers will derive considerable pleasure from them. Mr. OXENHAM'S weak points are that sometimes he fails to distinguish between real pathos and sticky sentimentality, and that when he tries his hand at telling a practical joke he does not know when to stop. There are, however, stories in this volume which deserve unqualified praise. The shortest, "How Half a Man Died," is the best; indeed, it is a real gem. But "The Missing K.C.'s" has a genuine thrill ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... saints' days and ceremonies of the Church of England calculated to correct the concession of the service, and pull up sharply any who thought that Presbyterianism was giving way to the spurious attractions of sentimentality or ritual. The special Easter service, with every appropriate feature of hymn and invocation, was apt to be marked by an unsparing denunciation of the pageants and practices of the Church of Rome. Balance was thus preserved, and principle ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... he, too, joined this company of argonauts. He was an ordinary man, with a bank account as deep as his culture, which is saying a good deal. He had no reason to embark on such a venture—no reason in the world save that he suffered from an abnormal development of sentimentality. He mistook this for the true spirit of romance and adventure. Many another man has done the like, and ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... sentimentality—which refuses to recognise the obvious inequalities of intelligence and morality, and thereby reduces the teaching of the highly developed to the level attainable by the least evolved, sacrificing the higher to the lower in a way that injures both—had no place in the virile ...
— Esoteric Christianity, or The Lesser Mysteries • Annie Besant
... understand that there can be little sympathy between the Countess Hahn-Hahn, an imaginative and somewhat capricious fine lady, with strong aristocratic and exclusive tendencies, and such a matter-of-fact person as Mr Boas, who, in spite of his sentimentality, which is a sort of national infirmity, and although he informs us in one part of his book that he is a poet, leans much more to the practical and positive than to the imaginative and dreamy, and we moreover suspect is a bit of a democrat. Having, however, taken the Countess ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol 58, No. 357, July 1845 • Various
... it has ceased, or angry after the cause for anger has been removed. All feelings tend to acquire a strength beyond what is necessary for action and to endure after their proper objects and conditions have disappeared; hence the luxury of grief and revenge and sentimentality. ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... possible; but one does not see why their very clothes should be ill painted, and their disposition unpicturesque. I believe, however, though it never struck me until I had examined this picture, that this is one of the painter's fixed principles: he does not, with German sentimentality, make shepherds and peasants graceful or sublime, but he purposely vulgarizes them, not by making their actions or their faces boorish or disagreeable, but rather by painting them ill, and composing their draperies tamely. As far as I recollect at present, the principle is universal with him; exactly ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... literary and scientific activity of the period, Italian society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this long peace, which was broken only by the invasions of the French republic. A wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and letters, enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business of life, went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue to the social history of the time; but the idea which remains in the mind is one of ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... nor cross-grained; and he was even moved by the pathetic and frank avowal which Barbara made to him on the state of her heart. But, though touched by her tears, he understood them not, treated them but as the natural mawkishness of girlish sentimentality; nor had her assurance that she could never love any one but her cousin John, power to dissuade him from the prosecution of his suit. He was void of all delicacy of feeling, was neither hurt nor displeased ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... Porto Rico, should be governed for their own benefit and development and should never be exploited for the mere profit of the controlling powers. It may be well, too, to add Mr. Roosevelt's own explanation of his criticism of sentimentality. "Weakness, timidity, and sentimentality," he said in the Guildhall address, "many cause even more far-reaching harm than violence and injustice. Of all broken reeds sentimentality is the most broken reed on which righteousness ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... indeed sufficient to agitate Pendennis. The head of the Pendennises going to marry an actress ten years his senior,—a headstrong boy going to plunge into matrimony. "The mother has spoiled the young rascal," groaned the Major inwardly, "with her cursed sentimentality and romantic rubbish. My nephew marry a tragedy queen! Gracious mercy, people will laugh at me so that I shall not dare show my head!" And he thought with an inexpressible pang that he must give up Lord Steyne's dinner at Richmond, and ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... also, that the coarseness of the eighteenth century was a healthy coarseness, bred of energetic natures and animal spirits. In our time, and in the midst of our advanced refinement there lurks a sickly sentimentality, a false modesty, and an unhealthy delicacy which are in a degree inimical to morality. We have novels in great numbers, not broadly coarse, as those of Fielding or Smollett, but insidiously immoral, painting vice and unbridled passions ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman
... I have said that there is too much of mere sickly sentimentality about the ordinary treatment of this great commandment, and that I desired to lift it out of that region into a far nobler, more strenuous, and difficult one. This is what we see in that life and in that ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... welcome as wine and olives after dinner. Still, he was not without compensatory considerations, and, upon the whole, took his companion to task for evincing what, in a good-natured, round-about way, he hinted to be a somewhat jaundiced sentimentality. Nature, he added, in Shakespeare's words, had meal and bran; and, rightly regarded, the bran in its way was ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... photographed. Above all, she was cheerful and self-reliant. There was not much in common between the brother and the sister save perhaps their aloofness from strangers. I questioned much if the Princess had any of her brother's sentimentality. She had all her brother's decision and fire, however, as I was to see exemplified ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... wherein he puts a new feeling into Italian poetry, which had been expressed before by Ariosto in his amatory verse, but which cannot be found to any great extent in his more pretentious work, the Orlando Furioso. This new feeling was real sentiment, and not sentimentality, and it denotes the growing conception of the worth and dignity of womanhood which we have already discovered in the poetry of Michael Angelo. Allowing for the infinite contradictions possible in human nature, it may be that these men of the same time, who so coolly ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... deep sympathy without sentimentality, and an all-saving sense of humor amid dreadful and depressing conditions are the salient features of this little book. The author, who preserves her anonymity, has been "over the top" in the fullest sense. She has faced bombardments and aerial ...
— Attack - An Infantry Subaltern's Impression of July 1st, 1916 • Edward G. D. Liveing
... had never fancied that poetry was a thing to be seen and understood and lived, and that such common things as bread and wine and love and hatred were shot through with the pure gold of mystery. Once, if he had been moved to magnanimity it would have been through an impulse of weak and bloodless sentimentality ... now he had risen to generosity on the wings of a supreme indifference, a magnificent contempt for unessentials, a full-blooded understanding. Not that he had achieved a cold and pallid philosophy ... a system of lukewarm expediencies. He could still be swept by gusts of feeling ... he could ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... are going to do anything as a nation, we must be honest with ourselves and with everybody else. If we are story writers or story readers, and practically every one is either one or the other in these days, we must come to grips with life in the fiction we write or read. Sloppy sentimentality and slapstick farce ought to bore us frightfully, especially if we have any sense of humor. Life is too real to ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... tightly. She had almost answered, for no Madigan may be accused of sentimentality and live unavenged. Only a moment, though, was she at a loss. Then calmly, prettily, she glided into Split's own particular "piece." She knew this would ...
— The Madigans • Miriam Michelson
... verse is not so good as his music. Most of the Songs of Adieu are marred by their excessive sentimentality of feeling and by the commonplace character of their weak and lax form. There is nothing that is new and little that is true ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... deft fingers moved about the man's body, his thoughts travelled faster. He was not a man given to morbid sentimentality; his calling demanded too much of the practical side of human nature. He was there to aid his flock, materially as well as spiritually, but at the moment he felt positively sick in the stomach with sorrow and ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... fortune, and more friends who exerted themselves for her husband. By inexcusable levity, ignorance, misjudgment, or heartless cupidity their daughter Lydia published, after the death of both, letters some of which contain courtship of the most lackadaisical sentimentality and others later expressions (which occasionally reach the scandalous) of weariness and disgust on Sterne's part. Other evidence of an indisputable character shows that he was, at least and best, an extravagant and ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... distrust and sullenness. "He does not say much," he used to say, "and thinks the more." But soon, within a fortnight indeed, he took to embracing him and kissing him terribly often, with drunken tears, with sottish sentimentality, yet he evidently felt a real and deep affection for him, such as he had never been capable of ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... peculiar force, in the hearts of men and women, the old, deep, human notes which "make us men." Youth, beauty, charm, death—they are the great themes with which all art, plastic or literary, tries to conjure. It is given to very few to handle them simply, yet sufficiently; with power, yet without sentimentality. Breathed into Laura's short life, they affected whose who knew her like the ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... civilization. First: the let-alone policy; every man to look out for number one. This is the age of selfishness. Second: the opposite pole of thinking; every man to do somebody's else work for him. This is the dry rot of sentimentality that feeds tramps and enacts poor laws such as excite the indignation of Herbert Spencer. But the third stage is represented by our formula: every man must render and receive the best possible service, except in the case of inequality, and there the ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... immaterial to her which one she had a good time with. The good time was the main thing to her. Sahwah had a fifteen—year—old brother, and she knew what a boy was under his white collar and "boiled" shirt. There was no silly sentimentality in her spicy make-up. She was a royal good companion when there was any fun going on, but it was about as easy to "get soft" with her as with a stone fence post. She was a master hand at ridicule and the boys knew this and respected ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... recurred to the other side; told himself that his instinct was no more than a ludicrous sentimentality; he must be guided by reason, not impulse. Then he glanced at the impulse again. Then the two sides rushed together, locked in conflict. He moaned a little, and lay back ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... artistically—his invariable wear being light, loose-fitting suits, very fine shirts, and large collars and cuffs. Everything seemed to suit his upright figure and quiet, assured air. He was sensitive to the pitch of sentimentality, and, when reading a pathetic passage, his voice would begin to tremble and the tears to come into his eyes, until he had to lay the book aside. Likewise he was fond of music, and could accompany himself on the piano as ...
— Childhood • Leo Tolstoy
... the truth of their time; a headlong, reckless audacity, an intimacy with violence, an unthinking fearlessness, and an exuberance of vitality which only years of war and victories can give. His adventures are enthralling; the rapidity of his action fascinates; his method is crude, his sentimentality, obviously incidental, is often factitious. His ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... suggested Mrs. Voorhees. Mrs. Voorhees was an exuberant blonde, with broad shallows of sentimentality overflowing ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... much; rather they prefer to sing of heaven with a golden floor and a gate of pearl, ignoring a really fine hymn that pictures God as a sensible Being and not a Lord Chief Justice either of sickly sentimentality or of the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... strange people you see there, and the ugly, funny side of human life amused me, though it seems to me more sorrowful than you perhaps feel it. People amuse me very much sometimes, too; but I have not your eye for their foibles. You draw them rather as Forain does; I should do it, I suspect, with more sentimentality. The fruit comes regularly once a week, and punctual thanks seem inappropriate for what has become an institution. But you know how grateful I am. And for the weekly Punch;—so gemuetlich and ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... market of Villarceaux; seven communes under requisition prevented it through the district of Sozannes which constantly keeps an armed force there to carry grain away as soon as thrashed."—It is interesting to remark the inquisitorial sentimentality of the official agents and the low stage of culture. (Proces verbal of the Magincourt municipality, Ventose 7.) Of course I am obliged to correct the spelling so as to render it intelligible. The said Croiset, gendarme, went with the national agent into the houses ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... drank eagerly of the masculine fare I provided. He had shed a few tears at Miss Redwood's departure and I liked him for them, for they showed his loyalty, but he had no more games of the nursery nor the mawkish sentimentality that I found upon the nursery shelves. I had other plans for Jerry. John Benham should have his wish. I would make Jerry as nearly the Perfect Man as mortal man could make God's handiwork. Spiritually he should grow "from within," directed ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... realization of that which she had so long desired—an ideal affection. In the case of Mme. du Deffand, the soul was willing, but the body failed. Her emotion can scarcely be termed love, but is rather to be designated as a mental hallucination, an exaggerated intellectual affection bordering upon sentimentality—the outgrowth of that morbid imagination developed from her long ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... healthy of a ruddy complexion, and full of life. It knows no sadness but the sadness of sin, and it rejoices for evermore. It eschews melancholy as the devil's best friend on earth, abhors the morbid sentimentality which feeds upon itself and grows by what it feeds upon. . . . It washes its face, anoints its head, puts on its festive robe, goes forth into the fresh air, the bright sunshine; and, when occasion requires, rings out the merry laugh ...
— The Young Priest's Keepsake • Michael Phelan
... my trivial personalities,—those splashes and streaks of sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which you may see when I show you my heart's corolla as if it were a tulip? Pray, do not give yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot, whose conceit it is to treat himself as an exceptional being. It is because you are just like me that I talk and know ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... there are a strange lightness and grace in the temple of Philae; there is an elegance you will not find in the other temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any sentimentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can be sentimental.) Edward FitzGerald once defined taste as the feminine of genius. Taste prevails in Philae, a certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call it ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... more than familiar. After a funeral march of commonplace character and boisterous movement, where Beethoven seems to be taking lessons from Mendelssohn, there comes a scherzo, or rather a Viennese waltz, where Chabrier gives old Bach a helping hand. The adagietto has a rather sweet sentimentality. The rondo at the end is presented rather like an idea of Franck's, and is the best part of the composition; it is carried out in a spirit of mad intoxication and a chorale rises up from it with crashing ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... mouth, and a long chin—and her eyes, looking very straight out through gold-rimmed spectacles, had a penetrating brightness about them that was a little formidable. It was not what one would call a good-natured face. But good-natured sentimentality was the last ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... following nowise blindly in pursuit of fresh sensation, excitement, a mere phantasy, or freak of the mind. It was, and is, the product of a logic essentially of themselves, and of the period they represent; and because this period is not the period of sentimentality in art, but a period striving toward a more vigorous type of values—something as beautiful as the machinery of our time—it is not as yet to any great degree cared for, understood nor, up to very recently, ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... the little shanty, they set about their housekeeping at once. The situation might have been delicate in other periods and climes, but here no false sentimentality clouded the grisly facts. Face to face with them stood hunger and cold, two relentless enemies. Hunger, in a land where the temperature burns up the tissues as a freight-engine on a grade eats coal, makes no truces; it ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... else did, prevent his name from sinking into oblivion. It deserves to live for its intrinsic merits. It is one of the few instances of a devotional book which is not unreadable. It is not, like some of the class, full of mawkish sentimentality; nor, like others, so high-flown that it cannot be used for practical purposes by ordinary mortals without a painful sense of unreality; nor, like others, so intolerably dull as to disgust the reader with the subject which it designs to recommend. ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... often remote parts of the United States had been for many years a detail of his daily experience; and even when they consisted of the request for an autograph, an application to print selections from his works, or a mere expression of schoolboy pertness or schoolgirl sentimentality, they bore witness to his wide reputation in that country, and the high esteem in which he was held there.** The names of Levi and Celia Thaxter of Boston had long, I believe, been conspicuous in the higher ranks of his disciples, ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... he would issue the necessary safe-conducts placed the whole of his future, perhaps his very life, in jeopardy. And he had consented to do this not for the sake of a reality, but out of regard for an idea—he who all his life had avoided the false lure of worthless and hollow sentimentality. ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... time! To-morrow is their last day for walking, and, like loving fools as they are, they will be so absorbed in each others' feelings, and the silly sentimentality of love, as to be easily surprised. Yes, ...
— Ellen Walton - The Villain and His Victims • Alvin Addison
... small collection of his poems, published after his death, gained him a posthumous recognition as the greatest Danish poet of the 18th century. Stub's style is extremely noble and expressive, devoid of the excessive bombast and sentimentality that many writers then mistook for poetry. He was of a cheerful disposition with a hopeful outlook upon life that only occasionally is darkened by the hardships and disappointments of his own existence. Even the poems of his darker ...
— Hymns and Hymnwriters of Denmark • Jens Christian Aaberg
... for Mrs. Earle's sentimentality. "Surely," she exclaimed with tragic earnestness, "you wouldn't have me live with him after what occurred? Contrition? He said everything he could think of to get me to stay, but I made my decision then ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... that he may have always spoiled her a little; and it will soon be shown in what way her tenderness so often received that special material and encouragement which made it often degenerate into sickly sentimentality. ...
— Weird Tales, Vol. II. • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... hand-to-hand melee. It certainly seemed, at the first blush, to be rather cowardly to pelt the poor beggars with grape while they were unable to strike a blow in return; but the feeling was, after all, one of very weak, false sentimentality. Every man of them was an outlaw and, even if not yet an actual murderer at least a potential one, and a consorter with cruel, cowardly brutes in human shape who would destroy without mercy if they were not themselves ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... in his chair and looked at her through a cloud of smoke. She saw that his eyes were not gray, as she had thought, but brown, a hazel brown with points of light sparkling in the irises and taking away all the suggestion of weakness and sentimentality that makes pure brown eyes unsatisfactory in ...
— Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise • David Graham Phillips
... our conceptions as to the love-passions of these southerners; no people are more fundamentally sane in matters of the heart; they have none of our obfuscated sentimentality; they are seldom naively enamoured, save in early stages of life. It is then that small girls of eight or ten may be seen furtively recording their feelings on the white walls of their would-be lovers' houses; these archaic scrawls go straight to ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... lying with my head on another person's knapsack full of used clothes; I am doing this solely because it is just the right size. But sleep will not come; there are only thoughts and dreams and lines of poetry and sentimentality. The sack smells human, and I fling it away, laying my head on my arm. My arm smells of ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... first phase in the break-up of any system of unsound assumptions that a number of its votaries should presently set about padding its cutting corners and relieving the harsh pressure of its injustices by exuberances of humour and sentimentality. Mr. Brumley became charitable and romantic,—orthodox still but charitable and romantic. He was all for smashing with the generalization, but now in the particular instance he was more and more for forgiveness. One finds creeping into the later Euphemia books a Bret-Harte-like doctrine that a great ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... Galilean." It was like his sentimentality to quote Swinburne. But he was perfectly quiet and he had given up drinking. The only thing that he ever said to me after that drive to the ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... temptation of saying to oneself, "Where shall I be in an hour's time?" One gazes with a subtle feeling of affection on one's limbs, and wonders, "Where shall I get it?" Subconsciously one is amused and a little ashamed of such concessions to sentimentality. The best thing to do under the circumstances is to go and check the range-finders' figures, or prepare the headlines of a message ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... anyone is to be hated or blamed, it is the person who sends the bird-catcher into the fields; not the dealer, but he who buys trapped birds and keeps them in cages to be amused by their twitterings. This is not a question of morality, nor of sentimentality, as some may imagine; but rather of taste, of the sense of fitness, of that something vaguely described as the feeling for nature, which is not universal. Thus, one man will dine with zest on a pheasant, partridge, or quail, but would be choked by a lark; while another man will eat pheasant and ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... about love, and laughing at the different ways that men adopted to declare it; admitting to themselves that the cleverest men, and naturally the least loving, did not like to wander in the labyrinths of sentimentality and went straight to the point,—in which perhaps they were right; for the result was that those who loved most deeply and reservedly were, for a time at ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... That's the sort of thing we scientific men have to put up with nowadays, Mr. Cuthbertson. Ignorance, superstition, sentimentality: they are all one. A guinea pig's convenience is set above the health and lives of the entire ...
— The Philanderer • George Bernard Shaw
... hand by which I could escape into the fields, so I walked quietly on, saying to myself, 'It may not be he after all; and if it is, and if he do annoy me, it shall be for the last time, I am determined, if there be power in words and looks against cool impudence and mawkish sentimentality so inexhaustible as his.' ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... desire is to run on and tell many paragraphs of Kib; but that, as I have said, would be bad taste, which is one form of immorality. For in such things sentiment runs too closely parallel to sentimentality,—moderation becomes maudlinism,—and one enters the caste of those who tell anecdotes of children, and the latest symptoms of their physical ills. And the deeper one feels the joys of friendship with ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... snatches of song, which he trolled out in a tenor voice of great richness and flexibility. Tristram listened in admiration on the other side of the partition. The songs were those of Tom d'Urfey and his imitators, and dealt in a strain of easy sentimentality with hay-rakes, milking-pails and all the apparatus of a country life as etherealised by a cockney fancy; but the Captain sang with such a gusto, such bravura, and such an appealing tremolo in the pathetic passages, ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... gentleness, sensibility, melancholy, scorn for rank and wealth, dreams of immortality with posterity. His greatest successes with the public were secured by "Poor Liza," and "Natalya, the Boyar's Daughter," which served as much-admired models for sentimentalism to succeeding generations. Sentimentality was no novelty in Russia; it had come in with translations from English novels, such as Richardson's "Clarissa Harlowe," and the like; and imitations of them in Russia. "Sensibility" was held to be the ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
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