"Tragi-comical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... several of the campaigns in the Seven-Years War belonged to an auxiliary corps of the Austrian Army.'—Was he at the Ball of Fulda, one wonders? Yes, for certain! He was at the Ball of Fulda (tragi-comical Explosion of a Ball, not yet got to the dancing-point); and had to run for life, as his Duke, in a highly-ridiculous manner, had already done. And, again, tragically, it is certain that he stood on the fated Austrian left-wing ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... will dissent from this, but be it as it may, the styles of the two men are vastly different, like their ways of thinking. Bacon's essay on Love is cynical. The man of the world, the well-bred statesman, looked on Love as "the child of folly," a necessary nuisance, a tragi-comical perturbation. Shakespeare saw in Love the mainspring of life. Love speaks "in a perpetual hyperbole," said Bacon. Shakespeare also said that the lover "sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt," The poet knew all the philosopher ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... eating his poor supper, he smoked a pipe or two of cheap tobacco, brooding; or he fingered the pages of his menacing account-books; or, very rarely, he walked about the dark country roads, asking himself, with many a tragi-comic gesture and ejaculation, why he could not get ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... little operas, serenades, intermezzi, &c. The usual retinue of the King on his visits to Poland included also a part of the French ballet and comedy. These travels of the artistic forces must have been rich in tragic, comic, and tragi-comic incidents, and would furnish splendid material for the pen of a novelist. But such a journey from the Saxon capital to Warsaw, which took about eight days, and cost on an average from 3,000 to 3,500 thalers (450 to 525 pounds), was a mere ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... at the entrance of Henry the Seventh's Chapel; the bearers stagger under the heavy coffin and cry for help; the bishop blunders in the prayers, and the anthem, as fit, says Walpole, for a wedding as a funeral, becomes immeasurably tedious. Against this tragi-comic background are relieved two characteristic figures. The 'butcher' Duke of Cumberland, the hero of Culloden, stands with the obstinate courage of his race gazing into the vault where his father is being buried, and into which he is soon to descend. His face is distorted by a recent ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... sculpturing single situations is seldom shown in finer relief than in those poems in which he has seized upon some "occult eccentricity of history" or of legend, like this of The Heretic's Tragedy, or that in Holy-Cross Day, fashioning it into some quaint, curt, tragi-comic form. Holy-Cross Day expresses the feelings of the Jews, who were forced on this day (the 14th September) to attend an annual Christian sermon in Rome. A deliciously naive extract from an imaginary Diary by the Bishop's Secretary, 1600, first sets forth the orthodox view ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons |
