"Pathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his own deep misery, and his yearning for his lost Isabelle. As he came under the last portrait of all, that of his own sweet young mother, he suddenly looked up, and as his eyes rested on the calm, beautiful countenance—which had always worn such a pathetic, mournful expression that it used to make his heart ache to look at it in his boyish days—it seemed to smile upon him. He was startled for an instant, and then, thrilling with a strange, exquisite delight, and inspired with new ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... character for satire or commendation. It is easy to perceive how such a comic art as that of Moliere lay in germ in this species of the mediaeval drama. At a late period examples are found of the historical Morality. The pathetic l'Empereur qui tua son Neveu exhibits in its action and its stormy emotion something of tragic power. The advent of the pseudo-classical tragedy of the Pleiade checked the development of this species. The very name "Morality" disappears ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... visible to all as the pair moved together up to the altar rails, and that was the size of the bridegroom as contrasted with the smallness of his bride. He looked like a great rough bear and she like a silver fairy. There was something intensely pathetic in the curve of his broad shoulders as he bent over the little hand to place in its proud position the diminutive golden circlet which was ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... character sketching needs no proof—his characters live to vouch for themselves, for their reality. It is ever amazing to me that the hand which drew the pathetic and beautiful creations, the kindly humored men, the lovely women, the unfortunate little ones, could portray also with such marvellous accuracy the villainy and craftiness of such characters as Bumble, Bill Sykes, Pecksniff, Uriah Heep and ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... "It may seem a contradiction of terms, but these family reunions, these shouts of welcome, are so thrilling it makes one feel as if there was something pathetic in them." ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... Kyoto." In one of my strolls I passed the Shinto priest carrying a rice basket and looking, as my companion said, "just like any other man." At a shrine I saw a number of bowls hung up. A hole cut in the bottom of each seemed a pathetic symbol of need, ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... and soft blue eyes fringed by sweet long lashes. Her nose and mouth were enough to attract an artist towards her; she was dressed in a lovely pink silk dress and her knob was arrayed by a pink feather. Her name was Margaret and she was known through all Paris as the "sweet young lady with the pathetic blue eyes!" and on the 20th of August (her birthday) not a single person omitted to give her a present. Beatrice thought her lovely and kissed her on both cheeks with hearty ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... work on the plans. He could not keep at it, and contented himself with going the round of the fields two or three times a day and watching the men. The sudden flame of energy that Pelle's youth had called to life within him had died down, leaving a pathetic old man, who had been out in the cold all his life, and was now luxuriating in a few late rays of evening sun. He no longer measured himself by Pelle, and was not jealous of his taking the lead in anything, but simply admired him and kept carefully within the circle of those for whom ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... it is sure to appear at the most inopportune times and unsuitable places, creating the inevitable commotion which the blunder and tactless are born to make. As it whisks aimlessly around, it may hit the clergyman's nose in the most pathetic sentence of his sermon, or drop into the soprano's mouth at the supreme climax of her trill. Satan himself could scarcely produce a more complete absence of devotion than is often caused by these ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... Tweed and Tay—he used to think of these as of something almost sacred; while even the name of that insignificant stream, the Water of Leith, sounded on his ear like sweet music, evoking a strangely tender and pathetic emotion. And this emotion, crystallized so beautifully by Stevenson in one of his essays in Memories and Portraits, must have been felt, too, by many other exiles wandering in foreign parts; for surely an analogous feeling has been experienced sometimes ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... air of pathetic dignity Kamienszka handed to the worthy patriot the proclamation of Numa Pompilius, in which that worthy confided to the tailors, cobblers, and bakers of the city the honourable task of making, stitching, and baking ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... purse,—plenty of it; but he was afraid to enter an eating-house, or to even approach the "snack-stand" on the edge of the circus lot. For a long time he stood afar off in the darkness, his legs trembling, his mouth twitching, his eyes bent with pathetic intentness upon the single pie and hot sandwich stand that remained near the sideshow tent, presided over by a kind-faced, ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... And now, listening to the historical novel, she was thinking how much she had gone through in her life, how much she had suffered, and that if any one were to describe her life it would make a very pathetic story. As the tumour was in her breast, she was persuaded that love and her domestic grief were the cause of her illness, and that jealousy and tears had brought ...
— The Darling and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... There was something pathetic in the appeal, and something young too, in spite of his grey beard and furrowed face. Still Mrs. Bowring said nothing. It meant almost too much to her, even after twenty-seven years. This old man had taken her, an innocent young girl, had married her, had betrayed ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... gathered round their late playfellow and pet, there were few dry eyes in the circle. Several of them mourned for Nino, as if he had been their own; and even the callous wreckers were softened, for the moment, by a sight so full of pathetic beauty. The next day, borne upon their shoulders in a chest, which one of the sailors gave for a coffin, it was buried in a hollow among the sand heaps. As I stood beside the lonely little mound, it seemed that never was seen a more affecting type of orphanage. Around, wiry and stiff, ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... however. Comparing the two sheets, you read beneath the dog's name a date and a pathetic legend; and on the other sheet, written in his son's boyish hand, beneath the name of Andrew Moore the same ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... space in front; of the beautiful medieval seat of the municipal government, once so sacred for the sublime and pathetic scenes enacted there during the famous siege and in the magistracy of Peter van der Werff, was accordingly enclosed by a solid palisade of oaken planks, strengthened by rows of iron bars with barbed prongs: The entrenchment ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... There is nothing more pathetic in some ways to-day than the position of the small neutral countries in Europe, and especially those which directly adjoin Germany. And there is nothing more galling than the inability of the Allies to give them any ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... resumed the mourning, temporarily laid aside. The black gown, hanging about her in soft trailing folds, added to the graceful height of her slight figure. The white tokens of widowhood at neck and wrists gave to her unusual beauty a pathetic suggestion of wistful loneliness. Her face was very pale; a purple tint beneath the tired eyes betokened tears and sleeplessness. But the calm steadfast look in those sweet eyes revealed a mind free of all doubt; a ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... the reach of those he sought to benefit. The passing years saw his great house, its wealth, its very name, vanish as if they had never been, and even his bones denied by ghoulish thieves rest in the grave. There is no more pathetic page in the history of our city than that which records the eclipse of the house of Alexander T. Stewart, merchant prince. I like to think of the banker's successful philanthropy as a kind of justice to the memory of the dead ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... drawing me closer to him, with his great strong hand, and gazing at me with a terribly pathetic look in his eyes. "Sep, tell poor father not to take on about it. We couldn't help it. An accident. Tell him it was an accident, ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... the room defiantly. She was a gallant and pathetic little figure in her blue draperies. The other child was plainly frightened at the result ...
— Poor, Dear Margaret Kirby and Other Stories • Kathleen Norris
... toil who had driven his family thirty miles across the prairie, blanketed his tired horses and slept on the ground the night before, who was willing to stand all through the afternoon and listen with pathetic eagerness to this debate, must be moved by a patriotism divine. In the breast of that farmer, in the breast of his tired wife who held her child by the hand, had been instilled from birth that sublime fervor ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... reiterated. "Mike was whining on his chain, and I said I thought it was cruel to keep a dog tied up. I suppose I ought to have kept my thoughts to myself," she said with a pathetic little smile. "Do please forgive ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell
... the morning sky, like masses of green jade against the pink petals of some marvellous rose. Lord Arthur felt curiously affected, he could not tell why. There was something in the dawn's delicate loveliness that seemed to him inexpressibly pathetic, and he thought of all the days that break in beauty, and that set in storm. These rustics, too, with their rough, good-humoured voices, and their nonchalant ways, what a strange London they saw! A London free from ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... him toward all who suffered in the same way. His eyes smarted with pitifulness as he noted the pains with which the little girl opposite him had tried to make the most of her humble charms in the hope of catching his eye. And the very poverty of those charms made her efforts the more pathetic. He blamed his eyes for the hard clearness with which they noted the shortcomings of the small, unformed features, the freckled skin, the insignificant and niggardly contour, and for the cruelty of the comparison ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... the old inhabitant, "the little children who sobbed so violently in court this morning, and to whom you made such pathetic reference, were playing on an ash-heap near their cottage; and they had a poor cat with a string round its neck, swinging backwards and forwards, and as they ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... the Community set them down as a pair of lovers. They took walks together, and were not seldom encountered in the wood-paths: Hollingsworth deeply discoursing, in tones solemn and sternly pathetic; Zenobia, with a rich glow on her cheeks, and her eyes softened from their ordinary brightness, looked so beautiful, that had her companion been ten times a philanthropist, it seemed impossible but that one glance should melt him back into a man. Oftener than anywhere else, ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the day of army overcoats, and the hard times had brought hundreds of them from closets and trunks. General Hendricks, fluttering down the street in his faded blue, made a rather pathetic figure. The winter had whitened his hair and withered his ruddy face. His unequal struggle with the wind seemed some way symbolical of his life, and the two men watched him out of sight without a word. The colonel turned toward his own blue overcoat which lay ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... 17th the General called the inhabitants to assemble at the town-hall, and "there made a pathetic speech to them;"[1] which he began by thanking them for the measures which they had pursued for mutual help and the common good. He apprized them of the great exertions made by the Trustees to support, protect, and defend the Colony; ...
— Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe • Thaddeus Mason Harris
... saying that we all must die? but he brings it home to us ever and again with pathetic tearful fascinating force. Each time we read him, his sweet sad pagan music chants its ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and we hear the earth fall upon the coffin ...
— Horace • William Tuckwell
... Maisons. Five days after the King's will had been walled up, in the manner I have described, he came to me and made a pathetic discourse upon the injustice done to M. le Duc d'Orleans by this testament, and did all he could to excite me by railing in good set terms against dispositions intended to add to the power and ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... in the Captain's eyes, was a still greater paragon. If the pale widow, whom Captain Richard, in his poetic rapture compared to a Niobe in tears—to a Sigismunda—to a weeping Belvidera, was an object the most lovely and pathetic which his eyes had ever beheld, or for which his heart had melted, even her ripened perfections and beauty were as nothing compared to the promise of that extreme loveliness which the good Captain saw in her daughter. It was matre pulcra filia pulcrior. Steele composed ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... disinclined for expounding a philosophy any longer that he gave them no time to dissent, even had they wished to, but on the instant struck up that pathetic ditty— ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... only think," said Mrs. Willoughby, after an eloquent and pathetic appeal—"think how the poor child will be ...
— The American Baron • James De Mille
... I went out myself and bought her a toy. I brought it home, and before I sent it away, I pinned a slip of paper to it, bearing this inscription: "To your little daughter, from George Germaine." There is nothing very pathetic, I suppose, in those words. And yet I burst out crying ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... an impulse from Miss Edgeworth's example as a story-teller. In the general preface to his own final edition of the Waverley Novels he said that "Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact, which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland—something ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... with a view to romantic effect than with a proper respect for the responsibility of the historian; though all Spanish history, Christian or Saracen, so abounds in romantic interest that there is less excuse, as less necessity, for outstepping the limits of truth, or giving undue prominence to the pathetic and marvellous. From this defect of most of his predecessors, the work of the Count de Circourt is in a great measure free. He has made a dexterous and conscientious use of the materials within his reach, and produced a work which unites to ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... not hearing one given in mitigation of the offence. She set out alone on her journey, deeply hurt. The reason was a feminine sentiment, and Vittoria was naturally unable to speak it. She shrank with pathetic horror from the thought of Merthyr's rising from his couch to find her a married woman, and desired most earnestly that her marriage should be witnessed by him. Young women will know how to reconcile the opposition of the sentiment. Had Merthyr been only ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... not understand the book. Beth also sat idle, listening intently, and watching her sister. If the reading had been harrowing or exciting, she would fight Bernadine for the sixpence when they went to bed. There were lively scenes during the readings. They all wept at the pathetic parts, laughed loudly when amused, and disputed about passages and incidents at the top of their voices. Mrs. Caldwell forgot that Harriet was a servant, Harriet forgot herself, and the children, unaccustomed to wordy warfare, forgot ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... caring for what was before his eyes, he was vulnerable only in the present. His outlook upon time was as a transient flash of the eye now and then: that projection of consciousness into days gone by and to come, which makes the past a synonym for the pathetic and the future a word for circumspection, was foreign to Troy. With him the past was yesterday; the future, to-morrow; never, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... attentive and civil to me; she pressed me to fix a day for dining with them, and to say what I liked, and she would be sure to get it for me. Poor Sack! He is very ill, indeed. We parted as never to meet again. It has quite broke me down.' This pathetic narrative was strangely diversified with the grave and earnest defence of a man's having married his maid. I could not but feel it as in some ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... the time. And in the morning she called him to look at something, and this something was a soft, helpless, little, baby giraffe, with delicate limbs and small body, a funny, scraggy, long neck and small head, with the very same sort of gentle, pathetic eyes ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... Little Dorrit's pathetic story Arthur learned that night. His first surprise at finding her in the Clennam house mingled strangely with his old thought that his father on his death-bed seemed to be troubled by some remorseful ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... remarkable, that it is difficult to conceive that he was ever young; but Erskine cannot grow old; his spirit is still glowing and flushed with the enthusiasm of youth. When impassioned, his voice acquires a singularly elevated and pathetic accent; and I can easily conceive the irresistible effect he must have had on the minds of a jury, when he was in the vigour of his physical powers, and the case required appeals of tenderness or generosity. As a parliamentary orator, Earl Grey is undoubtedly his superior; but there ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... her concerning enunciations, classical pose, and the best manner of reciting her lines! She listened with interest, but when she tried to play the fragment of some role according to their instructions, she found she could not do it, and they would then appear so stiff, pathetic and unnatural that she began to treat them ...
— The Comedienne • Wladyslaw Reymont
... in at last breaking loose. But the long restraint had impaired the power of all who were subjected to it; and as in the works of Giotto, so in the rarer works of Duccio, one often finds an effort after truth of expression, which is almost pathetic in its character, from its revealing the inefficiency of the hand to carry out the thought, and the resolute will striving half in vain to overcome the impediments of bad teaching and imperfect knowledge of the materials ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... still in the mock heroic—"where is the pride and dignity of woman? Remember, oh maternal relative, that you are the mother of one Gracchus at least! Scorn the hydraulics, I say; abandon the pathetic; cast sorrow to the winds, and—give me another ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... The pathetic tremor of her voice lent even greater significance to her words than in themselves they ...
— A Love Story Reversed - 1898 • Edward Bellamy
... had been laughed at, but she never knew it; she was treated as a bore, but she never cared. She had nothing in the world but the clothes on her back, and when she should go down into the grave she would leave nothing behind her but her grotesque, undistinguished, pathetic little name. And yet people said that women were vain, that they were personal, that they were interested! While Miss Birdseye stood there, asking Mrs. Farrinder if she wouldn't say something, Olive Chancellor tenderly fastened a small battered ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... we prefer a simple and natural, to an artificial and affected style; a regular and well-connected story, to loose and scattered narratives; a catastrophe which is tender and pathetic, to one which leaves us unmoved."—Ib., ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... do, but free for a time, and hoping, a little heavily, for some adventure to break the military monotony of their lives; the shopgirls, also in hope of something to "take them out of themselves"—pathetic desire of escape from the little prison, where the soul sits, picking its oakum sometimes, in its cell of flesh!—young men making for the parks, workmen for the public houses, an old woman, in a cap, peering out of an upper window ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... started past the barred gate to one of the ramps leading down into the vats below, the buzzer beside it sounded. A Jelly was standing behind the gate, fat, pathetic face pressed against ...
— Rebels of the Red Planet • Charles Louis Fontenay
... obstacles. Jack discovers that the girl he has just learned to love is the well-loved sister of his college enemy. How will this complication work out? An interesting series of movements and counter-movements immediately becomes possible, and any number of amusing or pathetic circumstances may arise to bring about the denouement—which simply means the untying ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... pathetic and humorous and contemptuous, augmented Kurt's Homeric mood. He understood that she would not even let him, for a moment, have a wrong impression ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... fine spirit to be able to treat the enemy that way. A lot of people in the passing crowd spotted me and stopped to say good-bye or called out as they went by. It was pathetic to see how grateful they were for the least kind word. I never saw such a pitiful crowd in my life and hope I never may again. They hurried along, looking furtively to right and left with the look of a rat that is in fear of his life. I have seldom ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... writer was conveyed to hers; and she practically gave up hope for anything better than the discovery and return of his remains. Her father, mother, and intimate friends tried in vain to rally her; but the conviction remained that she had read her lover's farewell words. In spite of the most pathetic and strenuous effort, she could not keep up any longer, and sobbed till ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... the wampum, they took my advice, and prepared to leave their country and people immediately. Their relatives accompanied them a short distance on their journey, and when about to part, their old uncle, the Tall Chief, addressed them in the following pathetic and sentimental speech: ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... its gates came alike the hopeful and the hopeless, the dreamers and those who would destroy those dreams. From all over the world there came men who sought a chance to labor. They came in groups, anxious and dumb, carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded by men ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... This pathetic note was in Swift's writing in his own copy of the "Miscellanies," ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift
... of the scene loosened her tongue, gave her whole being expression, and made her words thrill. She took off her hat as if to free her body, even by that little, while she drank in the scene of leaping flames, the crescendo of light, the pathetic, noble emptiness between the fire-eaten ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... may blacken their lives, but they suffer in silence. They try to conceal it all from us. Their feverish attempts to find some sunshine in life every evening, the desperate and futile migrations they make each few months, and the pathetic mental deadness of their gatherings, they try to keep private. We might never know to what straits many rich folk have come, were it not for the newspapers and their kindly society columns. Bless their noble insistence on showing us the lives of the rich, their portraying ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... by the practical difficulties in the way or the dark uncertainty at the end. Her life could never be happy any more, but it must not, could not, be ignoble. And by a pathetic mixture of childish romance with her woman's trials, the philosophy which had nothing to do with this great decisive deed of hers had its place in her imagination of the future: so far as she conceived her solitary loveless life at all, she saw it animated ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... Miss Allen watching us as we opened our parcels and letters," Beth went on. "I happened to look up once, and such an expression as was on her face, girls! It was pathetic and sad and envious all at once. It really made me feel bad—for five minutes," she ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... words to express! Destitute childhood, destitute old age, are both sorrowful enough, Heaven knows! But they have power to make their sufferings known, and to ask for help! But destitute infancy! Oh! look here! look here! Can anything on earth be so pathetic as this? ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... not really such a far-away dream, when we remember that her brother was then Emperor and childless. Her thought was more for her child than for herself, and her expectation was that he would succeed Caligula. The persistency with which she told this ambition for her boy is both beautiful and pathetic. Every mother sees her own life projected in her child, and within certain bounds this is right ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... in some degree successful with his voice, his eyes and his mouth and his forehead still threatened her. He was always threatening her. All her thoughts respecting him reverted to that inward assertion that he might 'cut her to pieces' if he liked. He repeated his question in the pathetic strain. 'Will you do this now,—to save us all from ruin?' But ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... the lake the white men had decided to part from their native companions. Villages clustered here and there on the margin of the waters, and the appearance of a large company would spread alarm, and send reports through the land that might betray them all. The leave-taking was pathetic enough. The poor Indians looked like so many helpless children. They begged the white men to stay with them, and settle in the mountains between the lake and the sea. The country was rich, and food and water plentiful. They would be faithful children ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... came in—it was Mihalevitch. The appearance of this man, almost his only acquaintance in Moscow, on the society of the girl who had suddenly absorbed his whole attention, struck him as curious and significant. The performance ceased to interest Lavretsky, and at one pathetic part he involuntarily looked at his beauty: she was bending forward, her cheeks glowing. Under the influence of his persistent gaze her eyes slowly turned and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... finished with an equal claim to indulgence, if not to applause. The traditional anecdotes relative to the Argonautic expedition are introduced with propriety, and embellished with the graces of poetical fiction. In describing scenes of tenderness, this author is happily pathetic, and in the heat of combat, proportionably animated. His similes present the imagination with beautiful imagery, and not only illustrate, but give additional force to the subject. We find in Flaccus a few expressions not countenanced by the authority of the most celebrated Latin writers. His language, ...
— The Lives Of The Twelve Caesars, Complete - To Which Are Added, His Lives Of The Grammarians, Rhetoricians, And Poets • C. Suetonius Tranquillus
... is the inculcation, in a quiet, simple way, of the principles of good nature, kindness, and integrity among children. They consist of the usual pathetic and mirthful incidents that constitute boy and ...
— Rollo on the Rhine • Jacob Abbott
... minor-keyed tune was doled forth, which seemed quite refreshing to Sam's pathetic vein, as he sang ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... wife," Helen pronounced severely. "I am sure Henry is a delightful person, even if he is a little irresponsible, and it is almost pathetic to remember how much you were in love with him, a ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... an enemy. She saw again the nude woman who made, while running, the gesture which had not been explained to her; the Florentine models which recalled to her Fiesole and the enchanted hours of Italy; the profile sketch by Dechartre of the girl who laughed in her pretty pathetic thinness. She stopped a moment sympathetically in front of that little newspaper girl who had come there too, and had disappeared, carried away in the irresistible current of life and ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... not altogether ill with the invalid, after all. If it is only rarely that anything penetrates vividly into his numbed spirit, yet, when anything does, it brings with it a joy that is all the more poignant for its very rarity. There is something pathetic in these occasional returns of a glad activity of heart. In his lowest hours he will be stirred and awakened by many such; and they will spring perhaps from very trivial sources; as a friend once said to me, the "spirit of ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... effect. The moral is the great thing. Mr. Allan says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allan and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry. Jane and Ruby almost always cry when I come to the pathetic parts. Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and her Aunt Josephine wrote back that we were to send her some of our stories. So we copied out four of our very best and sent them. Miss Josephine Barry wrote ...
— Anne Of Green Gables • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... resentment, or even doubt as to the necessity for his orders. Now she came back to him, and raised a pair of trusting eyes to his face, and he, looking down into them, thought he had never gazed upon anything so sweetly pathetic; nor had he ever encountered anything quite so rousing as the implicit trust of her manner toward him. Whatever he had felt for her before, it was as nothing to the delicious sense of protection, the indefinable wave of responsibility, almost ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... and kissed her and the bairns with solemn, and, as I thought, with pathetic thankfulness. I was afraid she would be sorely upset with the terrible events of the day, and I never closed my eyes that night, but sat up by her bedside lest she should take a bad turn; but she did not seem any the worse of it, and both her and the bairns got on brawly. The loss of the sheep ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence
... the supreme value of this last essay is made by the fact that in its pathetic statement of uncertainties and probabilities one can discern something very much resembling a declaration of faith. Though assured that we have yet no foundation for any belief in the persistence of consciousness after the death of the brain, ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... some gilding, might be likened to a gingerbread imitation of a throne; the royal arms above it and the little witness box to one side, where so many honest poor people are bullied, insulted and laughed at by third-rate blackguardly little "lawyers," and so many pitiful, pathetic and noble lies are told by pitiful sinners and disreputable heroes for a little liberty for a lost self, or for the sake of a friend—of a "pal" or a "cobber." The same overworked and underpaid magistrate trying to keep his attention fixed on the same old miserable ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... of Alline's illness and death, which occurred in the town of Northampton, New Hampshire, February 2nd, 1784, is pathetic in the extreme, but ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... this in such a pathetic way that she drew tears from the eyes of all and even Sancho's filled up; and he resolved in his heart to accompany his master to the uttermost ends of the earth, if so be the removal of the wool from those venerable countenances depended ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... novels, however, more than his poetry, that this resemblance appears; the author of Waverley more nearly approaches the blind bard than the author of the Lay. His romances in verse contain some passages which are sublime, many which are beautiful, some pathetic. They are all interesting, and written in the same easy, careless style, interspersed with the most homely and grotesque expressions, which is so well known to all the readers of the Iliad. The battle in Marmion is beyond all question, as Jeffrey long ago remarked, the most Homeric strife ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... myself that he must surely be just lying. Then the fellow'd mention some little happening that he'd describe so vividly, would you believe it, I felt the tears in my eyes, for it would be sort of pathetic. So during that whole hour I sat there and changed my mind every ten minutes, now blowing hot, and again cold. I came away in as muddled a state as I went there. His actions seem to stamp him a rogue if ever there was one; and yet, Thad, ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... turbulent giants from the north,—or by the still more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had driven long since out of Asia. They poured down into Greece; they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy; host after host of them;—civilization was a pathetic sand-castle washed over and over by ruining seas. Rome, indeed, could still command generals at times: Stilicho, Aetius, and afterwards Belisarius and Narses; but they were all pitiful Partingtons swishing their ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... the last hope he can ever have of really knowing the thing he appears to know, and, unless he is careful, the last hope he can ever have of really knowing anything. He destroys the thing a man does his knowing with. It is not the least pathetic phase of the great industry of being well informed, that thousands of men and women may be seen on every hand, giving up their lives that they may appear to live, and giving up knowledge that they ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... distant wolf, but it was her mother's wish. Her will being done here over the dead—was that anything like the will of the Father being done in heaven? Her untrained thoughts hovered on the verge of great questions, and then slipped back into her pathetic self and its fear, while her tongue hurried on through the words of ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... force but with its old aspect of rigidity? Perhaps: but then, in losing its force, in abandoning its myths, and threats, and rhetoric, this religion has lost its deceptive sanctimony and hypocrisy; and in retaining its rigidity it has kept what made it noble and pathetic; for it is a clear dramatic expression of that human spirit—in this case a most pure and heroic spirit—which it strives so hard to dethrone. After all, the hypostasis of the good is only an unfortunate incident in a great accomplishment, which is the discernment of the ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Col des Ossemens, the Foret du Refuge, the Champ de la Victoire; and traditions attach to each of these. There is, however, a gayer, livelier character amongst them than that which inspires the pathetic ballads of Brittany. The Basques are very ready to be amused; are more hilarious and less gloomy than the Bretons: yet they have the same love of their country, and regret at leaving it. An author[37] who has written on the subject, says: "To judge properly of the Basque, he should ...
— Barn and the Pyrenees - A Legendary Tour to the Country of Henri Quatre • Louisa Stuart Costello
... war, in '65. Some of the "boys" had heard him, in a great prayer-meeting in Washington—a city which he always spoke of as his "namesake"—at the time of the great review, say, in his strong voice, with that pathetic quaver in it: "Like as de parched an' weary traveller hangs his harp upon de winder, an' sighs for oysters in de desert, so I longs to res' my soul an' my foot in Mass'chusetts;" and they were so delighted ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... with fear in the lines of his mouth, but a pathetic, dog-like trust in his eyes, stood looking up at the stern master who, it ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... again, but not heartily. He felt that this marble ship was a conception of high humor and was not without its pathetic element. The whimsicality of the idea amused him, but the sad earnestness of the nervous, unstrung visionary at his side ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... so low that he could hardly hear her. Their eyes met, and Nekhludoff knew by the strange look of her squinting eyes and the pathetic smile with which she said not "Good-bye" but "Forgive me," that of the two reasons that might have led to her resolution, the second was the real one. She loved him, and thought that by uniting herself to him ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... repeal, and an assembly of Quakers, Methodists, and "other sectaries," as he would himself call them, in the city of Cork, on an anti-slavery occasion, with equal effect. His broad-brimmed and sedate audience were as much delighted with his elegant and pathetic eloquence in favour of humanity and natural rights, as his peasant mob were while he discoursed to them upon the certainty and glory of repeal, and declared that "they were the finest peasantry in the world." On the one occasion his action ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... course it is all a humbug,—a darker vein cropping up through the gray flagstone; but, it is probably a fact, and, for aught I know, may be found in Fox's Book of Martyrs, that George Marsh underwent an examination in this house [There is a full and pathetic account of the examination and martyrdom of George Marsh in the eleventh section of Fox's Book of Martyrs, as I have just found (June 9, 1867). He went to Smithell's hall, among other places, to be questioned by Mr. Barton.—ED.]; and the tradition may have connected ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... drags or sharpens or deforms the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it lacked. There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin, and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of exhaustion. He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the quivering of her mouth. It was ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... freed them from the barbarians by whom they had been captured. They knew, from having several times before seen the British flag, that they would be kindly treated. They described through Tatai, in pathetic language, the way that they had been treated after having been captured. They had been ordered not to pray aloud, or to sing, and, when off the farther end of this island, to their grief they heard ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... "Very pathetic and touching, truly," said a rough, broken, asthmatic voice behind. "A love affair, I see, and, from my soul, I pity the tender creature as if ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... there, with her hands pressed to her heart, her great pathetic eyes dilated with a curious fear. It was a long time before she spoke, though it was easy to see that she had penetrated Berrington's disguise. But then, he had spoken in his natural voice, which made all the difference. It seemed to him that the grey lady would have fallen ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... Mrs. Sutherland, painted when Frederick was a lad of ten, hung within a few feet of him as he spoke. He did not glance at it, but Mr. Sutherland did, and with a look as if he expected to behold a responsive light beam from those pathetic features. ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... pathetic, there would be something cruel—indeed there is something cruel—in Emerson's incapacity to deal with Margaret Fuller. He wrote to her on October 24, 1840: "My dear Margaret, I have your frank and noble and affecting letter, ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... and the length of her chin. The poem went on and on, the fire crackled on the hearth, and the wind rattled against the glass doors of the balcony, as it did on a certain night of which Charlotte apparently had but little remembrance. Suddenly, during a most pathetic passage, the door opened suddenly; the servant appeared, and with a terrified air ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... good as Mrs. Lowder with a noble anxiety measured it. She found herself in short not caring what became of Kate—only convinced at bottom of the predominance of Kate's star. Kate wasn't in danger, Kate wasn't pathetic; Kate Croy, whatever happened, would take care of Kate Croy. She saw moreover by this time that her friend was travelling even beyond her own speed. Mrs. Lowder had already, in mind, drafted a rough plan of action, a plan vividly enough thrown off as she said: "You must stay on a few days, ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... his empty cup on the table and leaned closer to her, smiling. She did not smile in response; instead, her eyes fell and there was the faintest, pathetic quiver ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... all her answer to that. The plant, she thought, was dead; she had not, indeed, paid much attention to it of late; but she showed it to David, and he said it would revive if more carefully tended. He also told her its rather pathetic history, which was new to Grizel, and of the talk at the wedding which had led to Tommy's taking pity on it. "Fellow-feeling, I suppose," he said lightly; "you see, ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... person of Christ as the God-man form the central point and sphere of theology, but also that all the main points of his history are mysteries of the world's redemption. (Ephes. 19). But Ignatius is also distinguished by the fact that behind all that is enthusiastic, pathetic, abrupt, and again all that pertains to liturgical form, we find in his epistles a true devotion to Christ ([Greek: ho theos mou]). He is laid hold of by Christ: Cf. Ad. Rom. 6: [Greek: ekeinon zeto, ton hyper hemon apothanonta, ekeinon thelo ton di' hemas anastanta]; Rom. ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... ever heard or read equals in its long-sustained and dramatic interest the story of the Tsavo man-eaters as told by Col. Patterson. A lion story is usually a tale of adventures, often very terrible and pathetic, which occupied but a few hours of one night; but the tale of the Tsavo man-eaters is an epic of terrible tragedies spread out over several months, and only at last brought to an end by the resource and ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson
... during the watch kept by Uncle Jack and me after we had had a good sleep, and there was something very pathetic in the way the poor dog looked at us, as much as to say, "I wish I could speak and put ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... natural scenery and of that atmosphere of piety and religious calm—almost mediaeval in its austere beauty and serenity—which invests the hermit life of India. The abode of the ascetics is depicted with a pathetic grace that we only find paralleled in the "Admetus" of Euripides. But at the same time the construction of the drama is more like such a play as Milton's "Comus," than the closely-knit, symmetrical, and inevitable progress of such a work of consummate ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... towards Scotland had been that of divide et impera, and a series of royal minorities and the greed and poverty of the semi-independent Scottish nobles had aided him. The rout of the Scots at Solway Moss, and the pathetic passing of the gallant James V., leaving his new-born daughter, Mary, as queen (December 1542), seemed at length to place Scotland in England's power. The murder of Cardinal Beaton, the bribery of the Douglases, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... pathetic sort of performance," said Gail. "Any child can do it. You doubtless do yourself. Joy, she probably thinks your coloring too vivid for ladylikeness. Why, I'm perfectly willing to shock her—it's more interesting than talking to her as an equal—but I merely told ...
— The Wishing-Ring Man • Margaret Widdemer
... something very piteous about it. I think there is a better word than 'piteous'—yes, Clement had just told it me. It is 'pathetic.' I felt as if it nearly made me cry, and so did Peterkin. We told each other so afterwards, and though we were so interested in the parrot and in hearing him, I wished he would be quiet again, and let Mrs. Wylie go on with her soft, ...
— Peterkin • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... towards that nobleman. Her amiable heart was so full of kindness and forgiveness towards the young prodigal that, even without any repentance on his part, she was ready to take him to her old arms, and give him her venerable benediction. Pathetic sweetness of nature! Charming tenderness of disposition! With all his faults and wickednesses, his follies and his selfishness, there was no moment when Lady Kew would not have received the young lord, and endowed him with the ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... marked by "blank animalism."[2264] There was a great lack of all sentiment. "Parents and children made a virtue of repressing their emotions." "No period ever exhibited a more marked aversion from the emotional or the pathetic."[2265] There was no shame at perfidy or inconsistency, and very little notion of loyalty. It shocks modern taste that Isabella d'Este should have bought eagerly the art treasures of her dearest ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... came a low, wailing cry. It was that of hunger. On an old chest in a dusky corner sat a boy about thirteen. Though all else was in shadow, his large eyes shone with unnatural brightness, and followed his mother's feeble efforts at the washtub with that expression of premature sadness so pathetic in childhood. Under a rickety deal table three other and smaller children were devouring some crusts of bread in a ravenous way, like half-famished young animals. In a few moments they came out and clamored for more, addressing—not their father; no intuitive turning to ...
— Barriers Burned Away • E. P. Roe
... fainting, praying, raving, despairing? Figure to yourself, reader, the elements of the case; suffer me to recall before your mind the circumstances of that unparalleled situation. From the silence and deep peace of this saintly summer night—from the pathetic blending of this sweet moonlight, dawnlight, dreamlight—from the manly tenderness of this flattering, whispering, murmuring love—suddenly as from the woods and fields—suddenly as from the chambers of the air opening in revelation—suddenly ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... oculo-motor, pathetic, ophthalmic division of the trigeminal, and the abducens nerves are all ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... tear on it. As he wiped the blade lovingly, he remarked, "I shall find some other way to get it off." Returning to Paris, our tourist starts for Italy; but the book ends with his arrival at Moulines (Moulins). Some half a league from this city he encountered Maria, whose pathetic story had been told him by Mr. Shandy. She had lost her goat when Sterne saw her, but had instead a little dog named Silvio, led by a string. She was sitting under a poplar, playing on a pipe her ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... an account of his journey, prefacing the narrative by this remark, "Returned home out of Essex and found no Mary." Mr. Martin gives this extraordinary document in his "Life of Clare." It is a weird, pathetic and pitiful story, "a tragedy all too deep for tears." Having finished the journal of his escape he addressed it with a letter to "Mary Clare, Glinton." In this letter ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... the proposition was negatived without a dissenting voice, Monsieur Souley not voting. It was now pretty evident to all present that the Congress would have its time and attention pretty well absorbed in receiving deputations of citizens deluded by Saunders' letters, and listening to the very pathetic speeches of Monsieur. The day was now far gone; the Congress began to feel its appetite; the forlorns withdrew in discontent; the presence of many other deputations surrounding the doors was announced; and the Congress drank all round, and adjourned ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... read aloud in a most pathetic voice: "Votre majeste m'offre un asyle, et m'y prome la liberte; mais vous avez une epee, et vous etes roi. Vous m'offrez une pension, a moi, qui n'a rien fait pour vous. Mais en avez-vous donne a tous les braves gens qui ont perdu bras et ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... day of the second week in July he received a letter from his son in Paris to say that they would all be back on Friday. This had always been more sure than Fate; but, with the pathetic improvidence given to the old, that they may endure to the end, he had never quite admitted it. Now he did, and something would have to be done. He had ceased to be able to imagine life without this new interest, but that which is not imagined sometimes ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in Carmen's progress was almost pathetic. When in Simiti he hung over the child in rapt absorption as she worked out her problems, or recited her lessons to Jose. Often he shook his head in witness of his utter lack of comprehension. But Carmen understood, and that sufficed. His ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... the faith of their ancestors. But he acted as though he did not see them—as though, in fact, he saw nothing of anything about him save the girl. He followed her with his eyes with almost childlike eagerness and greeted a glance from her with almost pathetic joy. He spoke little, apparently finding difficulty in expressing himself—in forming his scattered thoughts into correct sentences. His whole appearance was that of a man freed after a long imprisonment. The only thing of his present surroundings which he now grasped perfectly was ...
— The Web of the Golden Spider • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... we hear, Resonant, soft, pathetic, sweet; In ringing accents, calm and clear, He sways the thousands at his feet, With more than mortal eloquence, Or ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... it by a sensibility which is constantly apparent in his letters, and diminished his value as a statesman. When he wrote from Cilicia to his more youthful friend Caelius, urging him to stick to the city, in words that are almost pathetic, it never occurred to him that he was prescribing exactly that course of treatment which had done himself much damage[387]. The clear sight and strong nerve of Caesar, as compared with so many of his contemporaries, was doubtless largely due to ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... can," admitted the Stranger. "It's such fun, don't you think, to get no thanks? Don't you sometimes amuse yourself by sending postal orders to people whose addresses look pathetic in the telephone book, or by forgetting to take away the parcels you have bought in poor little shops? Or by standing and looking with ostentatious respect at boy scouts on the march, always bearing in mind that these, in their own eyes, are ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... are quite masters of this instrument and the women too prefer it to the krob. They seem to find extreme delight in sending forth those long sustained and plaintive sounds as though lulled by a dream, or absorbed in some pathetic thought. ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... Lucy were old-fashioned, repressed, timid children, with the pathetic outlook of young persons brought up by a melancholy, ancient hireling. But the baby, glowing-eyed, laughing-mouthed rogue, staggering valiantly on sturdy, emulous legs, taking tribute everywhere with all babyhood's divine audacity, walked straight into her heart. He slept beside her at night, ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... them, intermingled with the shadows cast by the vaulted boughs, played the vivid brightness of the moon. Some of the trees were deeply girdled—a slow method of killing them. These lingering deaths affected the trio with melancholy. A wounded inmate of the grove, standing in mute and pathetic resignation to its fate, loses first the feeling of the sap that, blood-like, circulates through every limb, then all its leafy honours fade, and its death is slow and inevitable as the death of a forsaken woman who carries a ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam
... received, nor of her home-coming. They dwelt upon her life as a child, and the part she had taken in the Sunday school, and other Church work in the parish. But it was quite easy for Douglas to see that their hearts were almost broken, and the pathetic look in their eyes told more than many words of the thoughts the lips could ...
— The Unknown Wrestler • H. A. (Hiram Alfred) Cody
... established herself in her office when Emma Dean came breezily in from her work. "Well, Gracie," was her cheery greeting, "has she materialized, and is she as pathetic and ...
— Grace Harlowe's Return to Overton Campus • Jessie Graham Flower
... human kind than confidence in his mother's love, and a dread of the schoolboys, by whom he was often annoyed. His whole occupation, as he sat on the ground, was in swinging backwards and forwards, singing "pal-lal" in a low pathetic voice, only interrupted at intervals on the appearance of any of his tormentors, when he clung to his ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 395, Saturday, October 24, 1829. • Various
... you have brought it to the Lord in prayer, and feel satisfied that you are doing right, Mrs. Penn," said the minister, helplessly. His thin gray-bearded face was pathetic. He was a sickly man; his youthful confidence had cooled; he had to scourge himself up to some of his pastoral duties as relentlessly as a Catholic ascetic, and then he was prostrated by ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... What a pathetic picture was that of Palissy, plodding on through want and woe to rediscover the lost art of enameling pottery; building his furnaces with bricks carried on his back, seeing his six children die of neglect, probably of starvation, his wife in rags and despair ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... sociability of his favorite boarding-house, and wonderful are the schemes which are to attract the nautical Hercules to choose the austere virtue and neglect the rollicking and easy-going vice. Beautiful on paper, admirable in reports, pathetic in speeches,—all pictorial with anchors and cables and polar stars, with the light-house of Duty and the shoals of Sin. But meanwhile the character of the merchant-marine is daily deteriorating. More is done for the sailor now by fifty times than was done fifty years ago; yet who ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... again, and the afternoon hours were even shorter than those of the morning to all but baby, who began to grow homesick towards four o'clock, and who could not be comforted, even by the children, who were out of school at three. He wanted his "Wawa," and no one else. It was really pathetic to see how the little fellow clung to her, hiding his pretty wet eyes in her neck, and lovingly patting her shoulder, as he crooned his wordless reproaches in her ear, and Mrs. Hoffstott, looking on, thought this must indeed be a good sister ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Spanish sovereignty over Cuba was formally accomplished, the Spanish flag being lowered and the Stars and Stripes temporarily hoisted in its place on the various forts and other Government buildings throughout the island. A singularly pathetic feature of the Spanish evacuation of Cuba was the solemn removal of the alleged remains of Christopher Columbus from their resting-place in Havana Cathedral, and their conveyance ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... at the door ('Homeward, at all rates!'): but takes violent spasms in the carriage; can't; can no farther in this world. Lingers here, under kind care, for above three months more: dying slowly, most painfully. With much real stoicism; not without a stiff-jointed algebraic kind of piety, almost pathetic in its sort. 'Two Capuchins from a neighboring Convent daily gave him consolations,' not entirely satisfactory; for daily withal, 'unknown to the Capuchins, he made his Valet, who was a Protestant, read to him from the Geneva ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... poetry. Up to the very last he was making plans for the future. His letters to friends outlining the volumes that he hoped to publish, — work demanding decades instead of years, — the memoranda jotted down on bits of paper or backs of envelopes as the rough drafts of essays or poems, would be pathetic, if one did not believe with Lanier that death is a mere incident in an eternal life, or with Browning, that what a man would do exalts him. The lines of Robert Browning's poems in which he sets forth the glory of the life ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... thus so much time was gained, and so much the more chance, meantime, of a new leaf being turned over in that Sibylline oracle of politicians—the Chapter of Accidents. And for the time being, he would make a pathetic appeal to respectability and moderation in general, of which Alexandria, wherein some hundred thousand tradesmen and merchants had property to lose, possessed a ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... gintlemen', says he, 'if ye deprived us iv th' right to collect debts be killin' th' debtor ye wud take away fr'm war its entire moral purpose. I must ask ye again to cease thinkin' on this subjick in a gross mateeryal way an' considher th' moral side alone,' he says. Th' conference was much moved be this pathetic speech, th' dillygate fr'm France wept softly into his hankerchef, an' th' dillygate fr'm Germany wint over an' forcibly took an open-face goold watch ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... found it easier to dispose of its enemies' lands than to compose the rivalries of its friends; and the blunders of Italy's statesmen combined with the blindness of public opinion to reduce her to a position of almost pathetic isolation. Signor Orlando's abandonment of the Conference in April failed to shake the resistance of the Allies to her extravagant expectations, and on 20 June, by a remarkable vote of 229 to 80 in the Italian Chamber, his ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... among others, readily occurs in the pathetic old ballad of the Conde Alarcos, whose woful catastrophe, with the unresisting suffering of the countess, suggests many points of coincidence with the English minstrelsy. The English reader will find a version of it in the "Ancient Poetry and Romances of Spain," ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... have thought that the reading of this charming book may have been the predominating influence in the development of my taste and temper; for it was while I was absorbed in the exquisitely pathetic story of Robinson Crusoe that the first island I ever saw dawned upon my enchanted vision. We had weathered Cape Sable and the Florida Keys. No sky was ever more marvellously blue than the sea beneath ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... at the "Gaiety," with an elderly General of Life Guards, a Mistress of the Robes, and the grandfather of the Central American Ambassador at the Court of St. James, and all four of them were smiling at a neat little low comedian, who was singing, without any voice and with the utmost precision, a pathetic romance entitled, "De Coon Wot Got ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... how overwhelmingly pathetic it is—the sight of these brave Frenchmen. Every one has remarked it. Once and for all the tradition that the French are an excitable, emotional people with no grip on their passions and no rein on their impulses—that fiction is ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol 1, Issue 4, January 23, 1915 • Various
... to man," which was received with tumultuous enthusiasm, the whole company rising and cheering, the band playing "Will ye come to Kelvin Grove, bonnie lassie, O?" and in response to a unanimous call, some gallant and chivalric editor replied in a strain of pathetic and humorous eloquence, during which many of the company were observed to shed tears or laugh, or embrace their neighbors; after which those of the company who were able rose from the table, and hallooing, "We won't go home till morning!" they hiccoughed ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... know that I ever remember seeing a sight more pathetic in its way than that of this beautiful and high-spirited young woman weeping in the presence of her Council over the utter degeneracy of the race she was called upon to rule. Being old and accustomed to these Eastern expressions of emotion, I remained silent, however; but ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Gellert fell seriously ill in December, 1769; to the fear and grief of all the world: "estafettes from the Kurfurst himself galloped daily, or oftener, from Dresden for the sick bulletin;" but poor Gellert died, all the same (13th of that month); and we have (really with pathetic thoughts, even we) to bid his amiable existence in this world, his bits of glories and him, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... then got Oxo for the men, many of whom had had nothing to eat for two days. They are a nice-looking lot of men and boys, with rather handsome faces and clear eyes. Their absolute exhaustion is the most pathetic thing about them. They fall asleep even when their wounds are being dressed. When all was made straight and comfortable for them, the nurses turned the lights low again, and stepped softly about the ward with their ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... should differ in some way (usually in but a trivial detail) from the teaching of any other of his kind. The solemnity of their discussions and the heat of their dissensions about the minutiae of their creeds would be laughable were it not so pathetic.. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... attendants could not ride down on horseback from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and surrounding): "This ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... of paper on which were jotted several items. There was a sketch written by Mary Reynolds, "The Freshman on the Top Floor," a pathetic little story of a lonely freshman. Gertrude Earle, a demure, dreamy-eyed girl, the daughter of a musician, was down for a piano solo. There was to be a sextette, a chorus and a troupe of dancing girls. Kathleen ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... suffering and could not help pitying me. My courage was pathetic, and her every word and gesture shed a sort of tender light over my devotion. She saw the struggle that was going on in me: my obedience flattered her pride, while my pallor awakened her charitable instinct. ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... rich will have to contribute (with super-tax) close on half their incomes; the comparatively well-to-do a fourth; even the class to whose special hardships the CHANCELLOR had just made such pathetic allusion will have to pay an additional sixpence in the pound. If in the circumstances some of them feel inclined to echo Sir Peter Teazle's remark to Joseph, "Oh, damn your sentiment," I think they ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, April 12, 1916 • Various
... cried. "May Heaven pardon him as I do. While I have strength left I will pray for him." And she poured forth her supplications for the earl in terms so earnest and pathetic, that the tears flowed down Solomon Eagle's rough cheek. At this juncture, hasty steps were heard in the adjoining passage, and the door opening, admitted the Earl of Rochester, who rushed towards ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... very unreasonable, foolish, clumsy sort of religion, this theology in wooden shoes; it is half grotesque, half pathetic; the grandmothers pass it on to the grandchildren as they pass the bowl of potatoes round the stove in the long winter nights; it is as silly as possible, but it comforts them as they carry fagots over the frozen canals or wear their eyes blind ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... You grow tired yourself, want to get rid of the story, and hardly care how." Lady Lousia adds that Sir George Staunton would never have hazarded himself in the streets of Edinburgh. "The end of poor Madge Wildfire is most pathetic. The meeting at Muschat's Cairn tremendous. Dumbiedikes and Rory Beau are delightful. . . . I dare swear many of your readers never heard of the Duke of Argyle before." She ends: "If I had known nothing, and the whole world had told me the contrary, I should ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Grecian tragedy, it may be said that he ranks first in tragic representation and effect; Sophocles first in dramatic symmetry and ornament; AEschylus first in poetic vigor and grandeur. AEschylus was the most sublime; Sophocles the most beautiful; Euripides the most pathetic. The first displays the lofty intellect; the second exercises the cultivated taste; the third indulges the feeling heart. Each, as it were, shows a fine piece of sculpture. In AEschylus, it is a naked hero, with all the strength, boldness, ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... tell you that, did he? He always lets you know all the bothers I get into. You'll think I do nothing but fight and kick up rows; and," added the speaker, with a pathetic look of injured innocence, "I've been behaving ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... act the emotion and delight of the spectator were carried almost to frenzy. In this act, played almost solely by Crescentini, this admirable singer communicated to the hearts of his audience all that is touching and, pathetic in a love expressed by means of delicious melody, and by all that grief and despair ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... to a lowly and vegetative life. If we soften the hard scientific facts which tell us of these dumb, blind creatures, with the humane mellowing thought of the oneness of all life, we will find much that is pathetic and affecting in their humble biographies from our point of view. And yet these cases of degeneration are far from anything like actual misfortunes, or mishaps of nature, as Buffon was so fond of thinking. These creatures have found their adult mode ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... them beneath his coat-tails, elevating or depressing his voice to suit the attitude assumed and the sentiment expressed. Arms and legs were continually in motion. It seemed impossible for him to stand still. In the midst of the most impassioned or pathetic portions of his speech, he would extend his long arms toward the judge or jury, and shake his bony fingers with an effect that is indescribable. He held his audience to the last; and when he sat down there was a murmur of applause which the judge with difficulty prevented from swelling to a ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... document in this line seems to me particularly interesting—even pathetic. It is a telegram sent by the late Czar Nicolas to his Imperial Cousin, Kaiser Wilhelm. It is dated July 29, 1914, ...
— Fighting For Peace • Henry Van Dyke
... instrument of imperial Theodora, stood begging his bread at the gate of the city he had won and lost, leaning upon the arm of the fair girl child who would not leave him, and stretching forth his hand to those that passed by, with a feeble prayer for alms, pathetic as Oedipus in the utter ruin of his life and fortune. A truer story tells how Pope Silverius, humble and gentle, and hated by Theodora, went up to the Pincian villa to answer the accusation of conspiring with the Goths, when he himself had opened the gates of Rome to Belisarius; ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... do! If St. Leger himself had been so difficult to manage, what would the old general say! He said nothing. She would not be discouraged: she began to speak again, to recapitulate every argument; she warmed with the subject; she was earnest, eloquent, pathetic—tears were in the good creature's eyes; still he was silent. At last, wearied out with useless exertion, she ceased to urge the matter any further; and endeavoring to conquer her feelings of deep disappointment, looked up ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various |
