"Melancholy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were poison to the Dives, and made them melancholy."[3] You pity them, and they will sneer at you. But what have we here?—"Characters of Imagination—Juliet—Viola;" are these romantic young ladies the pillars which are to sustain your moral edifice? Are they to serve as examples ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... intimate with him in 1618, and the nobleman Carl von Endern, who copied out the entire manuscript of the Aurora. These friends frequently encouraged Boehme to break his enforced silence, and he himself was restless and melancholy, feeling that he was "entrusted with a talent which he ought to put to usury and not return to God singly and without improvement, like the lazy servant." "It was with me," he writes, describing his years of silence, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... looked brilliantly successful, and declared to Mr. Rupert Gunning that nothing made a show so interesting as having something up for it. She even encouraged him to his accustomed jibes at her Connemara speculation, and personally conducted him to stall No. 548, and made merry over its melancholy occupant in a way that scandalised Patsey, and convinced Mrs. Spicer that Fanny's pocket was even harder ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... of the beach began to be cold to our bare feet; the frogs set up their croaking in the marshes, and one solitary owl, from the end of the distant point, gave out his melancholy note, mellowed by the distance, and we began to think that it was high time for "the old man,'' as a shipmaster is commonly called, to come down. In a few minutes we heard something coming towards us. It was a man on horseback. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday best; the heavy ploughman's figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought, and his large dark eye "literally glowing" as he spoke. "I never saw such another eye in a human head," says Walter Scott, "though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." With men, whether they were lords or ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mind his insane vanity," said Arkwright, vaguely uneasy at the expression of her hazel eyes, at once so dark, mysterious, melancholy, so light and frank ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... songs, a thousand times repeated, continued to answer each other from side to side of the glacier. Then we could hear no longer the voice of men, nor the bell of the church of Grindelwald, whose melancholy notes the wind had hitherto wafted to us. We were in the bosom of an immense wilderness, face to face with Heaven and the wonders of Nature. We scaled precipitous blocks of stone, and left behind us the snowy summits. The march became more and more painful. We crawled ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... me a melancholy satisfaction that the humble tribute which I wish to pay to the memory of your lamented son, in attaching his name to the enclosed plant, elicited such kind recognition from yourself. I need not assure you that I ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... with an old, pious, and gloomy aunt, up to the time when the law-student, destined in the first instance to the career in which his father had left an excellent reputation, had found himself introduced to a few judges' drawing-rooms, ancient, melancholy dwellings with faded pier-glasses, where he used to go to make a fourth at whist with venerable shadows. Jenkins's evening party was therefore a debut for this provincial, of whom his very ignorance and his southern adaptability made immediately ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... said Wally, in tones of melancholy. "Every fortune teller I ever saw told me that no ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... he heard the news, but he sank into a morose and enduring melancholy. He neglected his business, avoided his friends, and spent much of his time in the low taverns of the fishermen and seamen. There, amidst riot and devilry, he sat silently puffing at his pipe, with a set face ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trouble, the probabilities are that your children will have consumption. If you both are of rheumatic proclivities, you may expect a manifestation of the same early in the life of your children. If you both are "nervous" or irritable in temper, both jealously inclined, or are morbid and melancholy, you need not be surprised at an intensifying of these qualities in ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... and as long as we observe no difference in bodily and mental energy after such losses, there is no danger to be apprehended from them. It is well established and attested by the experience of eminent physicians, that certain indispositions, especially those of hypochondriasis and complete melancholy and incurable by any other means, have been happily removed in persons of both sexes, by exchanging ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... flambeaux. Down the high street, between the lofty, many-storeyed and balconied houses, where every window, every balcony, every housetop was crammed with a dense mass of spectators, all dressed and masked in fantastic gorgeousness, the procession took its melancholy way. Over the scene flashed and played the shifting cross-lights and shadows from the moving torches: red and blue Bengal lights flared up and died out again; and above the trampling of the horses and the measured ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... notice of these warnings. He loved solitude and was perfectly fearless. No one knew why he was so sad. Certainly he had lately lost his mother, and still wore a badge of crape on his arm. Of course, this had increased his melancholy, but it was not the original cause ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... suffer from the melancholy of a cellar: my solitude is gay with light and verdure; I attend, whenever I please, the fields' high festival, the Thrushes' concert, the Crickets' symphony; and yet my friendly commerce with the Spider is marked by an even greater devotion than the young typesetter's. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... she gave him a shadowy, fleeting smile, which vanished almost before it had fully appeared. Her eyes were heavy and dim with unshed tears, and she was as pale as the mist clouds that drifted slowly across the sky and away over the eastern hills. Perhaps it was the melancholy of that smile appealing to his deep love that made Professor Young hurry toward ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Writer" proffered further aid to the aspiring mind. Improvement, stark, blatant Improvement, advertised itself from that culturous and reeking compartment. But just below—Io was tempted to rub her eyes—stood Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"; a Browning, complete; that inimitably jocund fictional prank, Frederic's "March Hares," together with the same author's fine and profoundly just "Damnation of Theron Ware"; Taylor's translation of Faust; "The [broken-backed] Egoist"; "Lavengro" (Io touched its magic pages with tender ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his harp,—three times Arose the well-known martial chimes, And thrice their high heroic pride In melancholy murmurs died. 'Vainly thou bidst, O noble maid,' Clasping his withered hands, he said, 'Vainly thou bidst me wake the strain, Though all unwont to bid in vain. Alas! than mine a mightier hand Has tuned my harp, my strings has spanned! ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... nor looked flattered; it seemed indeed to Longmore that she took his reappearance with no pleasure. But he was uncertain, for he immediately noted that in his absence the whole character of her face had changed. It showed him something momentous had happened. It was no longer self-contained melancholy that he read in her eyes, but grief and agitation which had lately struggled with the passionate love of peace ruling her before all things else, and forced her to know that deep experience is never peaceful. She was pale and had ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... of Israel, I come to Thine ancient dwelling-place to pour forth the heart of tortured Europe. Why does no impulse from Thy renovating will strike again into the soul of man? Faith fades and duty dies, and a profound melancholy falls upon the world. Our kings cannot rule, our priests doubt, and our multitudes toil and moan, and call in their madness upon unknown gods. If this transfigured mount may not again behold Thee, if Thou ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the gentlemen to their cigars, Edith was bubbling over with anxiety to confide to Mrs. Morton the joke about the "lady's cheeks coming off," and that gave the married women the chance to express melancholy convictions as to the wickedness of the world, to which ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... three hours or so after he went down, and the weather got dirtier and dirtier, and the scud drove by, and the wind sang and hummed through the rigging—it made me melancholy to listen to it. I could think of nothing but the youngster down below, and what I should say to his poor old uncle if anything happened. Well, soon after midnight I went down and turned into his hammock. I didn't go to sleep at once, for I remember very well listening to the creaking of the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... bowed with a slow and gentle pace, clad always in such sober dress as befitted his ripe years. His face was long, his nose aquiline and his eyes rather large than small. His jaws were large and his lower lip protruded beyond the upper. His complexion was dark and his expression very melancholy and thoughtful. His manners, whether in public or at home, were wonderful, composed and restrained, and in all ways he was more courteous and ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... our legal readers, we feel convinced, that this week's sketch of the late Henry Cooper, the friend companion and intended biographer of the late Lord Erskine, will prove highly acceptable. The unexpected and melancholy event which deprived the bar of one of its most promising ornaments, and cast a shade over the gay and talented circle in which he moved, must be fresh within the memory of our readers. As yet no memoir, no frail tribute to stamp even a fleeting remembrance of his learning, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... HENCE loathed Melancholy Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born, In Stygian Cave forlorn 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shreiks, and sights unholy, Find out som uncouth cell, Where brooding darknes spreads his jealous wings, And the night-Raven sings; ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... her as Miss Inches did, she thought, or discovered such fine things in her character. Ten long years and a half had she lived with Papa and the children, and not one of them had found out that her eyes were full of soul, and an expression "of mingled mirth and melancholy unusual in a childish face, and more like that of Goethe's Mignon than any thing else in the world of fiction!" Johnnie had never heard of "Mignon," but it was delightful to be told that she resembled her, and she made Miss Inches a present of the whole of her ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... did not attend the trials of the Nor'westers at York, and seems to have returned to Britain with his wife and children before the end of the year 1818. He was ill and in a most melancholy state of mind. {136} Unquestionably, he had not secured a full measure of justice in the courts of Canada. A man strong in health might have borne his misfortunes more lightly. As it was, Selkirk let his wrongs prey upon his spirit. ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... here, with a report of Lord Temple's dangerous illness. I called at your brother W. Grenville's to know the particulars, but did not find him. I then learnt from Fitzherbert that the crisis was happily passed, and that you and Lady Buckingham were released from the melancholy alarms which you both had on so dreadful a visitation of Providence. I hope this letter will find you all as well as you can wish or expect. I do not know how far employment and a great situation compensate to you for other ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... had not been without her suspicions that Diana was proving false to the melancholy Byronic hero of her early dreams. But as "things seen are mightier than things heard," or suspected, the realization that it was actually so came to her with almost the shock of perfect surprise. This was succeeded by a queer, little ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of ascending the throne without drawing the sword. [35] His emissaries, dispersed in the capital, assured the guards, that provided they would abandon their worthless prince, and the perpetrators of the murder of Pertinax, to the justice of the conqueror, he would no longer consider that melancholy event as the act of the whole body. The faithless Praetorians, whose resistance was supported only by sullen obstinacy, gladly complied with the easy conditions, seized the greatest part of the assassins, and signified to the senate, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... report by what token of respect and affection it may be proper for the Congress of the United States to express the deep sensibility of the nation to the event of the decease of their late President, James Abram Garfield; and that so much of the message of the President as refers to that melancholy event be ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... "And haply I so nimbly might have made Between you, that the stroke I might have caught, And with my head, as with a buckler, stayed: For little ill my dying would have wrought. Anyhow I shall die; and — that debt paid — My melancholy death will profit nought: When, had I died, defending thee in strife, I could not better have ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... level, well-made road through a barren wind-swept country whence the meager harvest had already been garnered. There were no villages. All around was a houseless land, rolling miles of brown and green, broken and checkered by bits of forest and clumps of dark melancholy pines. The road ran ever and anon right down to where the cold, green waves broke upon the rocky shore. In a few weeks that coast would be ice-bound and snow-covered, and then the silence of the God-forsaken country would ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... a tailor, and married a young country girl, for whom he had formed a devoted attachment. He established a village library, and debating club, became a diligent reader, a leader in every literary movement in the district, and a writer of poetry of some merit. A poem on the melancholy story of "Fair Helen of Kirkconnel," which he composed at this period, obtained a somewhat extensive popularity. To aid his finances, he became an itinerant seller of cloth,—a mode of life which gave him an opportunity of studying character, and visiting ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... even melancholy in its every aspect, for the scattered denizens of a vast region round about Mancos's principal street was the local Great White Way that furnished all the fun and frolic most of them ever knew. To it flocked miners from their dusky, pine-clad gorges in the north, grangers from the then ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... Tuesday evening to say good-bye to Miss Lowther. Early on the Wednesday Mr. Fenwick was to drive her to Westbury, whence the railway would take her round by Chippenham and Swindon to Loring. On the Tuesday morning she was very melancholy. Though she knew that it was right to go away, she greatly regretted that it was necessary. She was angry with herself for not having better known her own mind, and though she was quite sure that were Mr. Gilmore to repeat his offer ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... animals who wallow in the mire and eat corruption. This seems strange to us: much stranger to an Angel is it how any one can take pleasure in any thing so filthy, so odious, so loathsome as sin. Many men, as I have been saying, wonder what possible pleasure there can be in any thing so melancholy as religion. Well: be sure of this,—it is more wonderful to an Angel, what possible pleasure there can be in sinning. It is more wonderful, I say. He would turn away with horror and disgust, both because sin is so base a thing in ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... should be able to bring over a great body of his disciples to the royal side, found himself on a sudden an object of contempt and abhorrence to those who had lately revered him as their spiritual guide, sank into a deep melancholy, and hid himself from the public eye. Deputations waited on several of the London clergy imploring them not to judge of the dissenting body from the servile adulation which had lately filled the London Gazette, and exhorting them, placed as they were in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him he confessed to the almighty Hump. And there was the Irish peasant who heard the voice of the Banshee calling through that mist, and heard other queer voices of supernatural beings whispering to the melancholy which had been bred in his brain in the wilds of Connemara. Here was the English mechanic, matter-of-fact, keen on his job, with an alert brain and steady nerves; and with him was the Lowland Scot, hard as nails, with uncouth speech and a savage fighting instinct. Soldiers who had ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... of these days," said Agnes, looking out of the window at the gaunt, dripping trees and gray sky and melancholy monoliths. "You ought to come to London and ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... junction with a greatly more numerous body of militia, which induced him to retrace his steps rapidly to the Ohio (which he recrossed), and arrived at Brandenburg on the very day that we got there. We found him leaning against the side of the wharf-boat, with sleepy, melancholy look—apparently the most listless, inoffensive youth that was ever imposed upon. I do not know what explanation he made General Morgan (of the lively manner in which he had acted under his order), but it seemed to be perfectly satisfactory, and he was ordered to report to Colonel ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... ushers. After that we parted and went homewards, it being market day at Brainford [Brentford]. I set my wife down and went with the coach to Mr. Crew's, thinking to have spoke with Mr. Moore and Mrs. Jem, he having told me the reason of his melancholy was some unkindness from her after so great expressions of love, and how he had spoke to her friends and had their consent, and that he would desire me to take an occasion of speaking with her, but ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... sands had been printed by the last footstep of Columbus. The solemn and sublime nature of the event that had followed, together with the fate and fortunes of those concerned in it, filled the mind with vague yet melancholy ideas. It was like viewing the silent and empty stage of some great drama when all the actors had departed. The very aspect of the landscape, so tranquilly beautiful, had an effect upon me; and as I paced the ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... shallow creek so near her feet. Suddenly the cry of the whip-Will's-widow filled the grove—"whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow!"—in headlong importunity until the whole air sobbed and quivered with the overcharge of its melancholy passion. Then as abruptly it was hushed, the echoes died, and Barbara, at the grove gate, recalled the other twilight hour, a counterpart of this in all but its sadness, when, on this spot, ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... about it, we delight in it for fear it should escape us. A really happy man says little and laughs little; he hugs his happiness, so to speak, to his heart. Noisy games, violent delight, conceal the disappointment of satiety. But melancholy is the friend of pleasure; tears and pity attend our sweetest enjoyment, and great joys call for ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... in advance. In these months he had passed her in the race of life. He felt it, but in many ways was also dimly aware that Leila was less expressively free in word and action, sometimes to his surprise liking to be alone at the age when rare moods of mild melancholy trouble the time of rapid female florescence. There was still between them acceptance of equality, with on his part a certain growth of respectful consideration, on hers a gentle perception of his gain in manliness ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... crystallized lime and porphyritic conglomerates, tinted mauve-purple as if by manganese. Further on, the path, striking over broken divides and long tracts of stony ground, became rough riding: it was bordered by the usual monotonous, melancholy hills of reddish and greenish trap, whose slaty and schist-like edges in places stood upright. On the summit of the last Col appeared the ruins of an outwork, a large square and a central heap of boulder-stones. Straight in front rose the block that backs our destination, the Jebel el-Sni', ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... his relation Dunois, walking with a step so slow and melancholy that he seemed to rest on his kinsman and supporter, came Louis Duke of Orleans, the first prince of the Blood Royal (afterwards King, by the name of Louis XII), and to whom the guards and attendants rendered their homage as such. The jealously ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... soul, dwelling exclusively on one only being, grasps in the end the moral elements that surround it, and sees in them the makings of the future. The woman who loves feels the same presentiments that later illuminate her motherhood. Hence a certain melancholy, a certain inexplicable sadness which surprises men, who are one and all distracted from any such concentration of their souls by the cares of life and the continual necessity for action. All true love becomes to a woman an active contemplation, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... and could not help smiling as his eye fell upon a figure seated on the horse block. He was looking out through the gateway, and did not at first see Philip. The expression of his face was dull and almost melancholy, but as Philip's eye fell on him his attention was attracted by some passing object in the street. His face lit up with amusement. His lips twitched and his eyes twinkled. A moment later and the transient humour passed, and the dull, listless expression ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... their methods of employing the time, which hung heavy on their hands. In all such situations the energy and hopefulness of the individual are the best guaranty for continued good health, whilst ennui, listlessness, and idleness are the pretty sure forerunners of melancholy and homesickness, which lead to serious maladies. It would be hard to find a more salubrious site for a camp than Johnson's Island. Naturally well drained, diversified with grove and meadow, open to the breeze from every quarter, washed by the pure waters of Lake Erie, it is to-day, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... a plain, bare, interminable plain, an ocean of grass, of wheat, and of oats, without a clump of trees or any rising ground, a striking and melancholy picture of the life which they must be leading in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... A melancholy result followed upon a worthy endeavour to carry the mails through the snow on the 1st February 1831. The Dumfries coach had reached Moffat, where it became snowed up. The driver and guard procured saddle-horses, ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... has a melancholy story to tell you, for which I crave your sympathy. Will you be so good as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the melancholy, woebegone faces of my captain and brother officers on our re-assembling on board. It was really most ludicrous. However, a sea voyage which included several sharp gales of wind soon erased all sad memories; things gradually 'brightened,' and ere many weeks had passed ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... reminded us of a still more melancholy fact which yet awakened no little mirth. It was in praise of De Wet, who in spite of his blue spectacles, seemed by far the most clear-sighted of all the Boer generals, and who, notwithstanding his illiteracy, ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... She nods to us, without disturbing herself. Like the pioneer, this woman is in the prime of life; her appearance would seem superior to her condition: and her apparel even betrays a lingering taste for dress. But her delicate limbs appear shrunken; her features are drawn in; her eye is mild and melancholy; her whole physiognomy bears marks of a degree of religious resignation, a deep quiet of all passion, and some sort of natural and tranquil firmness, ready to meet all the ills of life, without fearing and without braving them. Her children cluster about her, full of health, turbulence, and energy; ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... Our melancholy was immediately dispersed, and its place taken by active anticipations of our journey. The North wind in the trees, instead of blustering dismissal, sounded to our ears like the fluttering of the blue-peter at the masthead of our voyage. Strange heart of man! A day back we were in tears ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... accordingly set out with fir, and the little feathery besoms gave a false scale and lent a strange air of a toy-shop to the moors. A great, rooty sweetness of bogs was in the air, and at all seasons an infinite melancholy piping of hill birds. Standing so high and with so little shelter, it was a cold, exposed house, splashed by showers, drenched by continuous rains that made the gutters to spout, beaten upon and buffeted by ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... manifests toward a brother. It was rather the attachment of a mother for her child; inasmuch as Nisida studied all his comforts—watched over him, as it were, with the tenderest solicitude—was happy when he was present, melancholy when he was absent, and seemed to be constantly racking her imagination to devise new means ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... martyr! Strew his bier With the last roses of the year; Shadow the land with sables; knell The harsh-tongued, melancholy bell; Beat the dull muffled drum, and flaunt The drooping banner; let the chant Of the deep-throated organ sob— One voice, one sorrow, one heart-throb, From land to land, from sea to sea— The huge world quires his elegy. Tears, love, and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... received in particular an enthusiastic greeting from Pope, who wrote on September 23rd: "Welcome to your native soil! Welcome to your friend! Thrice welcome to me! whether returned in glory, blessed with Court interest, the love and familiarity of the great, and filled with agreeable hopes, or melancholy with dejection, contemplative of the changes of fortune, and doubtful for the future—whether returned a triumphant Whig or a desponding Tory, equally all hail! equally beloved and welcome to me! If happy, I am to share in your elevation; if unhappy, you have still a ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... emerged from his solitude; he came forth as a preacher, and his success was unequalled. All Parma, gentle and simple, flocked to hear the famous devotee—slender, ill-clad, so handsome and yet so profoundly melancholy. And ere he began each sermon, Fabrice looked earnestly round his congregation to see if Clelia ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... are in the very atmosphere of the brown hills. This was a Spanish gentleman in the best sense of the word, as scrupulous in personal cleanliness as any Englishman, polished, accomplished, bright and fascinating, and yet carrying with him a subtle air of melancholy and romance which lingers still among the men and women of ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... and shipyards to the breaking point, Germany could not catch up with her great rival. The first half of the new year saw no matching of the grand fleets. It did produce a few gallant combats, and was marked by a melancholy succession of German submarine attacks on defenseless craft. The sacrifice of lives among neutrals and the Allies cast a pall ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... not a limb is persuaded, perhaps, he is wise; but was this the purpose wherefor mankind was created? Ours is the choice—whether wisdom shall be the honoured wife of our passions and feelings, our thoughts and desires, or the melancholy bride of death. Let the tomb have its stagnant wisdom, but let there be wisdom also for the hearth where ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... coldness of his address, not more than by the nature of the times that he bade me recall, I was plunged in melancholy. I felt myself surrounded as with deserts of friendlessness, and the delight of my welcome was turned to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... delightful upon them; its acts and functions are free and lively: there are others who seem to bear their religion as a burden, to drag their duties as a chain—as no vital part of themselves, but rather a cumbrous appendage: this is a decisive and melancholy symptom of a heart alienated from God. There is no genuine religion, no real contact of the heart with the best of beings, unless it makes us continually resort to Him as our chief joy. The psalmist is always expressing his fervent ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... got out, and there, sure enough, one of the rear tires presented itself to her view in a state of melancholy collapse. It had picked up a horseshoe together with the three jagged nails adhering to it, and was patently, hopelessly, irretrievably punctured. Grace had seen a hundred repairs made on the road, but up to now ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... fully see the form of the building of which we say "This is a Gothic cathedral"—of the picture of which we say "Christ before Pilate"—or of the piece of music of which we say "A cheerful waltz by Strauss" or "A melancholy adagio by Beethoven." Now it is this fragmentary, superficial attention which we most often give to art; and giving thus little, we find that art gives us little, perhaps nothing, in return. For understand: you can be utterly perfunctory ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... who was the master's son, was now less forward than I. The first time he spoke to me after we were at Yarmouth, which was not till two or three days, for we were separated in the town to several quarters; I say, the first time he saw me, it appeared his tone was altered, and looking very melancholy, and shaking his head, asked me how I did, and telling his father who I was, and how I had come this voyage only for a trial, in order to go farther abroad; his father turning to me with a very grave and concerned tone, "Young man," says he, "you ought never to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... "the moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores"; I will watch the seahorses, with their white crests, in endless rank, charging the shore; I will listen to the sound which Homer heard so long before your Christ was born—the sound so monotonous, so melancholy, yet so soothing and sustaining, which stirs a pulse of poetry in the very dullest and most prosaic brain. But before I go I send you this Easter egg, to show that I do not forget you. Keep it, I pray you; study well its inscriptions; and perhaps, after all, you will ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... not forget you...Thou wilt write me volumes, my dearest love, wilt thou not? No pleasure is at all equal to that I receive from thy letters. The idea of how happy we MIGHT be will sometimes intrude itself and take away the little spirits that thy melancholy situation leaves me. I can write no longer with this confounded pen. I will find a better to-morrow. May the choicest blessings of Heaven go with thee, thou dearest, kindest, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... a long string of wild-fowl flying low over the melancholy-looking water, and they were watched ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the West—with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the earth had come. It was a magnificent spread of loneliness which bore no witness to the fact that it had seen the teeming of life in better ages long ago. The weird, yet beautiful scene, spread in a melancholy panorama before his eyes, drove his thoughts into gloomy abstraction with its dismal, depressing influence. Its funereal, oppressive aspect smote him suddenly with the chill of ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... but we do not extend it to paupers. But should a pauper get so close to us as to lay hold of us, vowing he was once our friend, how shake him loose? Tinman foresaw that it might be a matter of five pounds thrown to the dogs, perhaps ten, counting the glass. He put on his hat, full of melancholy presentiments; and it was exactly half-past five o'clock of the spring afternoon when he knocked at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... telegraph road, not far from his centre, where a shoulder jutting out from the ridge, and now called "Lee's Hill," afforded him a clear view of the city. The destruction of the place, and the suffering of the inhabitants, aroused in him a deep melancholy, mingled with exasperation, and his comment on the scene was probably as bitter as any speech which he uttered during the whole war. Standing, wrapped in his cape, with only a few officers near, he ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... arrived when she reached the castle. Miss Carew glanced at her melancholy face as she entered, but asked no questions. Presently, however, she put down her book, considered for ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Jones has improved the story, and heightened the incident in the last act, which renders the whole more moving; after the scene of parting between Essex, and Southampton, which is very affecting, Rutland's distress upon the melancholy occasion of parting from her husband, is melting to the last degree. It is in this scene Mr. Barry excells all his cotemporaries in tragedy; he there shews his power over our passions, and bids the heart bleed, in every accent of anguish. After Essex is carried out to execution, Mr. Jones introduces ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... scarcely be admitted as a testimony of their character in the early times of their prosperity; and though a sadness of expression might be observed in the present oppressed population, they can not be considered a grave or melancholy people. Much, indeed, may be learned from the character of the modern Egyptians; and notwithstanding the infusion of foreign blood, particularly of the Arab invaders, every one must perceive the strong resemblance they bear to their ancient predecessors. It is a common error to suppose that the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... young egotists, who are angry at being deprived of their personal ease and independence; or elderly pensive gentlemen, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer fit for action, and, being denied action, fall into melancholy; or feverish journalists, who live on the proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse and take the temperature of the War every morning, and then rush into the street to announce their fluttering hopes and fears; or cosmopolitan philosophers, to whom the change from London to Berlin means ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... indication that seriously she would drink no more. And she gave a great sigh. "School over! And the only son going out into the world! How time flies!" And she gave another great sigh, implying an immense melancholy due to this vision of the reality of things. Then she remembered her courage, and the device of leaning hard, and ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... After this melancholy reflection, he prepared to pass the night with as little discomfort as possible. Godfrey went off to the reef to get a new stock of eggs and mollusks, with which he had to be contented, and then, tired out, he came back to the tree and soon fell asleep, while Tartlet, whose ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... it into his head that he had a soul. The soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery, or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in "Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief in ancestral memory ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... a man of dwarfish stature came towards them. Under the dome of his tiny hat his unshaven face began to smile with pleasure and he was heard to murmur. The eyes were melancholy as ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... His melancholy thoughts were dissipated by a sudden increase in the shouting of the little ones. On regarding them attentively, he observed that they scattered themselves in the direction of the several huts, and ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... ultramarine; and under the reverberating light of the sun, the white facades, the slate roofs, and the granite wharves glowed dazzlingly. In the distance arose a confused noise in the warm atmosphere; and the idleness of Sunday, as well as the melancholy engendered by the summer heat, seemed to shed around ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... recollections; yet we seem to be, in general, little aware that for one solitary incident in our lives, preserved by memory, hundreds have been buried in the silent charnel-house of oblivion. We peruse the past, like a map of pleasing or melancholy recollections, and observe lines crossing and re-crossing each other in a thousand directions; some spots are almost blank; others faintly traced; and the rest a confused and perplexed labyrinth. A thousand feelings ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... hand, whose frank countenance and dreamy, melancholy eyes won every sympathy, was unable to protect himself against the traps laid for him by the judge or to counteract Vaucheray's lies. He burst into tears, talked too much, or else did not talk when he should have talked. Moreover, his counsel, one of the Leaders of ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... the sailing-party, I had a melancholy fit. I was restless, and after dark I put a shawl over my head and went out to walk. I went up a lonesome road, beyond our house. On one side I heard the water washing against the shore with regularity, as if it were breathing. On the other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... the setting sun were now faintly gleaming on a vast sheet of shallow stagnant water, the Stagna di Biguglia, between the road and the sea, from which it is only separated by a low strip of alluvial soil. It was a solitary, a melancholy scene. A luxuriant growth of reeds fringes the margin of the lagoon, and heat and moisture combine to throw up a rank vegetation on its marshy banks. The peasants fly from its pestiferous exhalations, and ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Pyramids, from the snows of Moscow, from Waterloo, they gather in one vast array with Ney, McDonald, Masenna, Duroc, Kleber, Murat, Soult, and other marshals in command. Forming, they silently pass in melancholy procession before the Emperor, and are dispersed with 'France' as the pass word and ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... education? Are the best instructed classes the least vicious? Has eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge diminished the power of the Tempter? So far from it, the consequences, hitherto at least, have been melancholy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... the sunlight. All at once the wind awoke, and began to sing the strange, thin, monotonous Elysian ghost-song of the pine-wood—for she sat in a little grove of pines, and they were all around her. The sweet melancholy of the hour moved her spirit. So close was her heart to that of nature that, when alone with it, she seldom or never longed for her piano; she had the music, and did not need to hear it. When we are very near to God, we do not desire the Bible. When we ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... memory's tablet, while the mists of the "positive philosophy," "the absolute," and "the conditioned," float past unheeded, to the land of forgetfulness. God's prophetic symbols are the glorious embodiments of living truths, while man's philosophic abstractions are the melancholy ghosts ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... indemnity to witnesses, or, in plain words, for a bill to reward all who might give evidence, true or false, against the Earl of Orford. This bill Pitt supported, Pitt, who had himself offered to be a screen between Lord Orford and public justice. These are melancholy facts. Mr. Thackeray omits them, or hurries over them as fast as he can; and, as eulogy is his business, he is in the right to do so. But, though there are many parts of the life of Pitt which it is more agreeable to contemplate, we know none more instructive. What must ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... will come when you, in a melancholy hour, shall reckon up your miseries by your murders in America. Life, with you, begins to wear a clouded aspect. The vision of pleasurable delusion is wearing away, and changing to the barren wild of age and sorrow. The poor reflection of having served your king ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... the train kept getting further and further north, my feelings kept getting more and more mixed. It come to me that I might be steering straight fur a bunch of trouble. The feeling that sadness and melancholy and seriousness was laying ahead of me kept me from really enjoying them dollar-apiece meals on the train. It was Martha that done it. All this past and gone love story I had been hearing about reminded me of Martha. And I was steering straight toward her, and no way out of it. How did ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... is melancholy," I replied; "it is one of those cases which a man requires all his fortitude ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... land of dreams, where even the high noon itself was dreamy; a melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of revery! Whence came the melancholy of this? I had seen woods as solitary and streams as silent, I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater awe; but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness. I only know that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores, those rivers that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... away, and, although crowds of monkeys came to examine Zingle in his cage, the poor Prince grew very pale and thin for lack of proper food, while the continuance of his unhappy imprisonment made him sad and melancholy. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... before alluded to the sad, dejected faces of the natives of North India; the Bengali seemed a trifle more melancholy, as is their reputation. We did not regret our departure, although it meant the loss of our faithful Indian guide, Dalle, and our travelling servant, Jusef, both with their long India bordered shawls artistically ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... day he would be watering his thousands of sheep along its rushing vein. That was John Mackenzie's intent and purpose as he trudged the dusty miles of gray hills, with their furze of gray sage, and their gray twilights which fell with a melancholy silence as chilling as the breath of death. For John Mackenzie was going into the sheeplands to become a master. He had determined it all by ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... her hand. He held it very lightly, looking at her with his blue eyes, which indeed expressed a profound melancholy. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... finest collections of hollyhocks anywhere in cultivation, which had been under my special care for eleven years, and up to within a month of my resigning that position I had observed nothing uncommon amongst them; but before taking my final leave of them I had to witness the melancholy spectacle of bed after bed being smitten down, and amongst them many splendid seedlings, which had cost me years of patience and anxiety to produce. And again, upon taking a share and the management of this business, another infected collection fell to my lot, so that I have ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... the idea that the preservation of our liberties, the consummation of our citizenship, must be conserved and matured, not by standing alone and apart, sullen as the melancholy Dane, but by imbibing all that is American, entering into the life and spirit of our institutions, spreading abroad in sentiment, feeling the full force of the fact that while we are classed as Africans, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... first time England was now divided between two great parties. Matters proceeded with constantly increasing friction, and at last the struggle developed into civil war. Macaulay's summary of it, and Knight's picture of its culmination in that most melancholy tragedy, the execution of the King, cover the subject in its essential aspects, without ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... wound and walked across to the house from whence he came, at the door of which he dropped down and expired. Such was the catastrophe. Raja Muda survived his wounds, but being much deformed by them lives a melancholy example of the effects ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... My history and my rearing have been such that had I bowed before them, I had become the most gloomy, melancholy man that steps this gloomy, melancholy world. By now I might have found existence insupportable, and so—who knows? I might have set a term to it. But I had the wisdom to prefer laughter. Humanity is a delectable spectacle ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... AEgean, which he much desired. In the pensive beauties of that delicate land, where perpetual autumn seems to reign, Coningsby found solace. There is something in the character of Grecian scenery which blends with the humour of the melancholy and the feelings of the sorrowful. Coningsby passed his winter at Rome. The wish of his grandfather had rendered it necessary for him to return to England somewhat abruptly. Lord Monmouth had not visited ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... younger boy, Maurice, he suffered a blow which had results more abiding than the melancholy wherewith for a year or two his genial nature was overshadowed. From that day onwards he was never wholly at ease among the pursuits which had been wont to afford him an unfailing resource against whatever troubles. He could no longer ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Louvois refused to let Dauger be put with Lauzun as valet. In 1675, however, he allowed Dauger to act as valet to Fouquet, but with Lauzun, said Louvois, Dauger must have no intercourse. Fouquet had then another prisoner valet, La Riviere. This man had apparently been accused of no crime. He was of a melancholy character, and a dropsical habit of body: Fouquet had amused himself by doctoring him and ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... forth its melancholy song, far down in the black depths beyond. The tide was high, and the breeze freshening every moment. Christian could have crept up to the man's very feet without being detected. Lying still upon the short, dry grass, he ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... to insult me, uncle," and Boris smiled his handsome melancholy smile, "very well, very well. Perhaps we Poles cannot keep our heads and hearts as well in check as you Germans; but that does not prevent us ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the commission was sold, and the estate bought, what does Fanny do but fall into a deep melancholy? I found her crying one day, in her mother's room, where the two ladies had been at work ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have become a raging madman. He put to death his niece Agrippina, with her two children, and ruled over the Senate with pitiless cruelty. His companion, Cocceius Nerva, filled with melancholy at the misfortunes of his country, resolved upon suicide; nor could all the entreaties or commands of Tiberius prevail upon him to live. In A.D. 35 Tiberius made his will, dividing his estate between Caius, the youngest son of Germanicus, and Tiberius Gemellus, the son of the second Drusus. ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... the solace, the aider, the familiar spirit of the thinker," cries the apologist; yet Plato the Divine thought without its aid, Augustine described the glories of God's city, Dante sang his majestic melancholy song, Savonarola reasoned and died, Alfred ruled well and wisely without it. Tyrtaeus sang his patriotic song, Roger Bacon dived deep into Nature's secrets, the wise Stagirite sounded the depths of human wisdom, equally unaided by it Harmodius and Aristogeiton twined the myrtle round their ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... Ponsonby thought of the days when she herself had been left to stay with her old uncle and aunt. In this very house while her husband was absent abroad, when she had assisted them to receive the poor young wife, sent home in failing health. She thought of the sad weeks, so melancholy in the impossibility of making an impression, or of leading poor Louisa from her frivolities, she recalled the sorrow of hearing her build on future schemes of pleasure, the dead blank when her prattle on them failed, the tedium of deeper subjects, and yet ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... taken to a house in the neighbourhood, till he was able to be removed to his own habitation. Thither I bent my way with Domingo, and undertook the sad task of preparing Virginia's mother and her friend for the melancholy event which had happened. When we reached the entrance of the valley of the river of Fan-Palms, some negroes informed us that the sea had thrown many pieces of the wreck into the opposite bay. We descended towards it; and ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... calculated to excite mingled sensations both of a melancholy and pleasing nature. The hand that penned it is now among 'the just made perfect.' Your mother had given you up by faith. Have you ever ratified the vows she made in your behalf? When she bade you a long ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... wake only twenty-four cows had been killed, when but a few years previously ninety-four had been slaughtered on a similar occasion. Perhaps you will permit me to state in your columns that this year the festival, in this particular, has afforded as melancholy and unquestionable proof of distress as the last, while it bore other evidence, which though trivial in itself, is not unworthy of notice. Last year two theatrical shows visited us, displaying their "Red Barn" tragedies, and illuminated ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... saddened on account of her former husband, the Wazir's son, and she rejoiced with exceeding joy when she gazed upon the damsels and their charms; nor was her sire, the Sultan, less pleased and inspirited when he saw his daughter relieved of all her mourning and melancholy and his own vanished at the sight of her enjoyment. Then he asked her, "O my daughter, do these things divert thee? Indeed I deem that this suitor of thine be more suitable to thee than the son of the Wazir; and right soon (Inshallah!), O ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... or in the numerous commercial and industrial enterprises which were springing up at that time. There they have since remained. Their country-houses, if inhabited at all, are occupied only for a few months in summer, and too often present a melancholy spectacle of neglect and dilapidation. In the Black-earth Zone, on the contrary, where the soil still possesses enough of its natural fertility to make farming on a large scale profitable, the estates are in a very different condition. The owners cultivate ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... give a few melancholy dabs at his thighs, just as though they still ached from the long service in the tree; while Bluff managed to emit a ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... interested. A melancholy, mysterious hero in a setting of silver-rimmed sand hills and wide blue sweeps of ocean was something that ought to lend piquancy to ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... she of a painter's dream,— Wise only as are artists wise, My artist-friend, Rolf Herschkelhiem, With deep sad eyes of oversize, And face of melancholy guise. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... from a prattling mite who may herself be fatherless or motherless to-morrow. We think as little as possible of such things, putting them from us with the light comment that they happen daily elsewhere than in besieged towns, and making the best we can of a melancholy situation. ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... in the same week. Frequent changes of wind brought an alternation of mild rainy days and frosty mornings; but every time the wind came afresh from the north-west it was a little colder, a little more remindful of the icy winter blasts. Everywhere is autumn a melancholy season, charged with regrets for that which is departing, with shrinking from what is to come; but under the Canadian skies it is sadder and more moving than elsewhere, as though one were bewailing ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... room, in spite of profuse expenditure and gorgeous furniture, had the same air of discomfort. The servants too, were, with one single exception, from the hard-visaged housekeeper to the Calvinistic footman, a depressing and melancholy race. The only departure from this general rule was Kate's own maid, Rebecca Taylforth, a loudly-dressed, dark-eyed, coarse-voiced young woman, who raised up her voice and wept when Ezra departed for Africa. This damsel's presence was most disagreeable to Kate, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with one another, it was clear that I was regarded with some degree of suspicion, for they evidently considered I must have some secret ulterior object in visiting them. The Lapponic language is as liquid as the purest Italian, but it always struck me as being pervaded with a plaintive, melancholy, wailing tone. Anxious to conciliate my Lappish friends, I addressed a few words of Norwegian to one after another, but a shake of the head and a dull, glowering stare was the only answer I got. At length, finding one who appeared a principal man of the commonwealth, who spoke ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... have gone before them out of this life. And indeed, when we are advanced in years, there is not a more pleasing entertainment than to recollect in a gloomy moment the many we have parted with that have been dear and agreeable to us, and to cast a melancholy thought or two after those with whom, perhaps, we have indulged ourselves in whole nights of mirth and jollity. With such inclinations in my heart I went to my closet yesterday in the evening, and resolved ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... is less intolerable. The daily duties are certainly scarcely more onerous and he had as chiefs, or colleagues, Xavier Charmes and Leon Dierx, Henry Roujon and Rene Billotte, but his office looked out on a beautiful melancholy garden with immense plane trees around which black circles ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... counted it as joy to share his hardships and perils. While upon the journey she had undertaken, she chanced to enter in his company, in order to pass the night, a dwelling, the funeral of whose dead master was being conducted with melancholy rites. Here, desiring to pry into the purposes of heaven by the help of a magical espial, she graved on wood some very dreadful spells, and caused Hadding to put them under the dead man's tongue; thus forcing him ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... left the shore, the Indians carried away the dead body of Captain Cook and those of the marines, to the rising ground, at the back of the town, where we could plainly see them with our glasses from the ships. This most melancholy accident appears to have been altogether unexpected and unforeseen, as well on the part of the natives as ourselves. I never saw sufficient reason to induce me to believe, that there was any thing of design, or a pre-concerted plan, on their side, or that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... than was good for me—as much as 85 degrees, I should think,—and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation. When I got better I labelled them all "Pie-crust," and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as they have great names on their title-pages,—Doctors ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... uneasy. He did not even enjoy his newspaper as much as he used to. He would put the paper down on his knee after reading it, and sit and stare at the high stool for a long time. There were some marks on the long legs which made him feel quite dejected and melancholy. They were marks made by the heels of the next Earl of Dorincourt, when he kicked and talked at the same time. It seems that even youthful earls kick the legs of things they sit on;—noble blood and lofty lineage do not prevent it. After looking at those marks, Mr. Hobbs would ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the precise spot where we had met on my outward journey, but I did not pause there, pushing some twenty miles into the defile where we had seen the man-monkeys before we outspanned for the night. Two days later we passed the grave of the unhappy Siluce, and I had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing that, thus far, it had not been disturbed by wild animals. And on the following day we arrived at the spot where, according to the vision in which Bimbane had revealed to me the route I must follow in order ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the northeast, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreading corn ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... the feasts of the town; and as comedy arose out of those, so these will give rise to tragedy. For his entrance upon this new stage of his career, his coming into the town, is from the [40] first tinged with melancholy, as if in entering the town he had put off his country peace. The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... as if to read his words before he uttered them. Something in the happy surrender of her gesture, or in the brooding mystery of the Indian summer, when one seemed to hear the earth turn in the stillness, touched Christopher with a sudden melancholy, and it appeared to him when he went on again that a shadow had fallen over the brightness of the autumn fields. Disturbed by the unrest which follows any illuminating vision of ideal beauty, he asked himself almost ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Governor of Mahe and Marquis de Repentigny—for this was he—was a tall, spare man whose complexion the suns of the tropics had browned, whose hair was whitened with foreign service, and whose blue eyes and sensitive, handsome features wore a strange, settled look of melancholy. Evidently some long-standing sorrow threw its ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... not share that spirit," said Mordecai, who had turned a melancholy glance on Pash. "Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... scarcely accomplished this task, when a strange, unnatural cry resounded throughout the cellar—a cry so indescribably fearful that it chilled his blood with horror. It was almost instantly followed by a low and melancholy wail, so intense, so solemn, so profoundly expressive of human misery, that Frank was convinced that some unfortunate being was near him, plunged in ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... infecting the air. The prisoners carried, wrapped in linen, the bodies of the newly dead to bury them in the sand beyond the city, where the real charge of the funeral was assumed by hyenas. Above the city hovered flocks of vultures from whose wings fell melancholy shadows upon the illuminated sand. Stas, witnessing all this, thought that the best for him and Nell would be to die ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... going to be drawn down amid the vortex. The people held on tightly for their lives. Tossing violently, however, up it again came to the surface, and floated evenly on the water. Still their condition was melancholy in the extreme. ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... with delight; she, who is always so melancholy, was singing like a bird. Besides, you highness knows how much she detests going out, and also that her character has a ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... useful as well as the most ordinary plant in the valley is the American aloe, or "Century Plant."[38] It is the largest of all herbs. Not naturally social, it imparts a melancholy character to the landscape as it rises solitary out of the arid plain. Most of the roads are fenced with aloe hedges. While the majority of tropical trees have naked stems with a crown of leaves on the top, the aloe reverses this, and looks like a great chandelier as its ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... awful silence. At length, after consultation, we determined to steer west and by north by compass, the make of the land indicating the existence of a river. We continued to march all day through a country untrodden before by an European foot. Save that a melancholy crow now and then flew croaking overhead, or a kangaroo was seen to bound at a distance, the picture of solitude was complete and undisturbed. At four o'clock in the afternoon we halted near a small pond of water, where we took ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and though she still did not meet his eye, he accepted the nod with a grim look that passed in a moment into a melancholy laugh. ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... indecorous to begin to speak of plans and what was to be done afterwards, so long as her dead husband was still master of the oppressed and melancholy house; but her mind, as may be supposed, was occupied by them in the intervals of other thoughts. She was not of the Warrender breed, but a woman of lively feelings; and as soon as the partner of her life was out of her reach she had begun ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... while then. I knew what he meant—that I was to conquer the world, somehow, and the idea seemed to me so absurd I could hardly help laughing as melancholy as ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... knew to be so small. But she had no alternative at the time and trusted that it would not be long before she would be able to procure the situation she had in view, or some other. The tea remained untasted on the table, for Isabel was absorbed by the melancholy thoughts that filled her heart. She tried to feel resigned, but her pride was wounded at the idea of becoming a 'governess.' She had been the spoiled petted daughter of a wealthy merchant of the city of New York, whose chief delight had been to indulge her ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... last few days, gave way, and she sunk down into a condition of mind that was almost despair. Towards evening, her husband and son came home drunk, and lay all night stupid. In the morning, they stole off by day-light, and she was left alone with her little ones, to brood over her melancholy prospect. She could not, of course, go to market, for she had nothing to sell, nor anything with which to purchase ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... selection), and the delicate draperies; an open grate full of glowing coals, to temper the sea winds; and in the midst of it, between a landscape by Enneking and an Indian in a canoe in a canyon, by Brush, he saw a somber landscape by a master greater than Millet, a melancholy subject, treated ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... Brother, take a delight to keep and increase your music. You will not believe what a want I find of it, in my melancholy times. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... months? Just because he is too lazy and pleasure-loving to hunt and shoot. He strums the piano, and sketches, and runs after married women, and reads literary books and poems. He actually plays the flute; but I never let him bring it into my house. If he would only—[she is interrupted by the melancholy strains of a flute coming from an open window above. She raises herself indignantly in the hammock]. Randall, you have not gone to bed. Have you been listening? [The flute replies pertly]. How vulgar! ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... companionship may have brought Hood's natural qualities of mind into early growth, and helped them into early ripeness. Striking as the difference was, in some respects, between them, in other respects the likeness was quite as striking. Both were playful in manner, but melancholy by constitution, and in each there lurked an unsuspected sadness; both had tenderness in their mirth, and mirth in their tenderness; and both were born punsters, with more meaning in their puns than met the ear, and constantly bringing into sudden and surprising revelation the wonderful ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... The sight of the boy clinging, sobbing, to his mother aroused within his savage breast a melancholy loneliness. There was none thus to cling to Tarzan, who yearned so for the love ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... who has lost his father, who accuses himself of disobedience and ingratitude to that father, and who has been grievously jilted by a Frenchwoman, arrives in Italy in a large black cloak, the deepest melancholy, and the company of a sprightly though penniless French emigre, the Count d'Erfeuil. After performing prodigies of valour in a fire at Ancona, he reaches Rome just when a beautiful and mysterious poetess, the delight of Roman society, is being crowned on the Capitol. ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... mastered her anger, and answered in a melancholy, plaintive tone, "Ah, good sister Anna! I had a miserable toothache, so that I could not sleep, and I just crept down here into the fresh air, thinking it might do me good. But what are you all doing here by night ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... artistic, visible quality, holds good also as to the imaginative value. Velasquez's Flagellation, if indeed it be his, in our National Gallery, has a pathos, a something that catches you by the throat, in that melancholy weary body, broken with ignominy and pain, sinking down by the side of the column, which is inseparable from the dreary grey light, the livid colour of the flesh—there is no joy in the world where such things can be. But the angel ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee) |
