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More "Forlornness" Quotes from Famous Books



... unforeseen. Taxes went up, sidewalks crumbled back into the grass again, the four or five unfenced little wooden houses that were erected and occupied added to the general effect of forlornness. The Estates were mortgaged, and to the old mortgage on ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... corner of the house he had been brought up in. Such furniture as had survived the havoc of war and the entire dilapidation of old age, he had gathered together in three or four rooms, which he occupied with the one servant good fortune brought to his door at a time when the forlornness of his changed position was continually accentuated by the untidy irregularity of his life and surroundings. He was only able to afford to engage the shiftless services of a slatternly negro girl, rendered insubordinate by her newly acquired ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... dialogue—as desolate and hollow in its frozen retorts as the echoes of iron heels in a granite sepulchre—but the whole piece has a petrified forlornness about it which somehow reminds one of certain verses ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... year, and at other times they vary the occupation of shaking the box by selling lives of the saints, which are sometimes wonderful enough. One sad old woman, who sits near the Quattro Fontane, and says her prayers and rattles her box, always touches my heart, there is such an air of forlornness and sweetness about her. As I was returning, last night, from a mass at San Giovanni in Laterano, an old man glared at us through great green goggles,—to which Jealousy's would have yielded in size and color,—and shook his box for a baiocco. "And where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... old man could not talk of such a thing together; but they were well aware why they were so sad, and why it was a pleasure to them to sit like this on either side of the fireplace when they were alone in the house. It was a comfort beyond telling. They loved to be near one another that their forlornness might pain them less. A wave of tenderness poured into their hearts; they would fain ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... of stopping at surfaces, of accepting a mediator instead of the Father, a sacrament instead of the Holy Ghost. And when I see how little there is to impede and bewilder us, I cannot but accept,—should it be for many years,—the forlornness, the want of fit expression, the darkness as to what is to be expressed, even that ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. II • Margaret Fuller Ossoli

... The young lover and husband rebelled—the believer rebelled—against the admission. Probably if his change had left him anchorless and forsaken, as it leaves many men, he would have been ready enough to submit, in terror lest his own forlornness should bring about hers. But in spite of the intellectual confusion, which inevitably attends any wholesale reconstruction of a man's platform of action, he had never been more sure of God, or the Divine aims of ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... relentless succession. After wandering on from door to door, and hope to its scattering, and chance to its dispelling, he obtained his first situation as a dispenser in a chemist's shop. He lost opportunities and failed to create confidence, more than anything through the forlornness of his appearance, and the too obvious simplicity of his bearing. Then he heard of an old friend, a warm-hearted Edinburgh student, a certain Dr. Sleigh. To this generous man he bent his steps. As soon as he was recognized, he was received into the home of his former companion, ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland

... very faint hopes, and no expectation, of ever returning. The longer I resided among this race of men, the melancholy and forlornness of my feelings declined. Prospects of satisfaction from the novelty and grandeur of the scene into which I had entered began to open upon me; sentiments of affection and gratitude for Holtz, and even for the Japanese lord, took root in my heart. Still, however, ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... of all my heart's woes; My case it hath altered and banished repose. The world is upon me all desolate grown. Alack, my long grief and forlornness! Who knows But the Merciful yet may incline thee to me And unite us again, ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... Bacchus arising from the sea well signifies these latter gifts, and the watery path by which they come to her; and the lonely island nymph to whom he presents the wedding-ring, may be intended to refer to the situation and original forlornness of Venice herself, when she sat in solitude amidst the sandy isles of the lagune, aloof from her parental shores, ravaged by the Hun or the Lombard. The pale yellow sunshine on these nude figures and their light transparent shadows, and the mild temperate blue of the calm sea ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton

... that had been introduced into the room filled him with longing. In vain he tried to keep off the thoughts that circled like moths round the light. When he forgot his misery at the hospital, he thought of the forlornness of the abandoned baby, and when he put that aside his own needs overwhelmed him again. 'It's no use,' he muttered, 'I ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... was only too willing to abet Kedzie's forlorn hope. It was the forlornness of Kedzie that saved her. When Strathdene saw her in her exquisite despair he was helpless. He was no Hun to break the heart of so sweet a being, and he believed her when she told him that she would die if he tried to cross the ...
— We Can't Have Everything • Rupert Hughes

... nothing to say; she leant back in a limp forlornness while Mina expatiated on this doleful text. There came a luxury into the Imp's woe as she realized for herself and her auditor the extreme sorrows of the situation; she forgot entirely that there was not and never had been any reason why Harry should be anything in particular to her ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope

... threshold of the dressing-room she caught sight of a listless little figure sitting in one of the deep window-seats of the corridor. There was something in her attitude that struck Margaret—an air of deep dejection, of utter forlornness, that went to her heart. The beautiful little head seemed drooping with weariness; but as she went closer and saw the wan face and the baby mouth quivering, with the under lip pressed like a child's in pain, she gave an involuntary exclamation. ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... was touched by the utter forlornness expressed in the youth's face when he heard how far away the surveyor's camp was located, ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy

... more than once with no more than the glimpse of a white face. An attendant from the hospital looked in now and again, at long intervals, to minister to his wants. The sufferer showed no sign of requiring or wishing anything more, and while his forlornness troubled me, I did not see that I could be of any ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham

... very striking in a lonely central figure in a scene, the outline cuts so sharply against the horizon. Nan's eyes seemed riveted on it as she listened to Phillis's voice; it seemed to her as immovable as a Sphinx, its rigidity lending a sort of barrenness and forlornness to the landscape, a black edition of human nature set under a ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... in the grip of utter forlornness, moody, wishful to cry. Roaring Bill lumped on his side of the fire, staring thoughtfully into the blaze. After a long period of abstraction he glanced at his watch, then arose and silently arranged her bed. After that he spread his ...
— North of Fifty-Three • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... evening stroll with me, in the soothing company of the pedagogue; when we were hailed by Ned with an invitation to a mug of ale in the tavern. Struck with the man's apparent wistfulness for company, and moved by a fellow feeling of forlornness, Philip accepted; and Cornelius, always acquiescent, had not the ill grace to refuse. So the four of us sat ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... of her own forlornness, the utter impossibility to struggle with an omnipotent foe, who, her husband had taught her, was above all scruples, prejudices, and fears, and who, though he respected law, despised opinion, made the victim yield. But her sufferings were not long; the separation ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... determined more by the impression which it makes upon our feelings than by the vividness of the picture which it presents. Read the following description of the Battery in New York by Howells. Notice how the details which have been selected emphasize the "impression of forlornness." The sickly trees, the decrepit shade, the mangy grass plots, hungry-eyed and hollow children, the jaded women, silent and hopeless, the shameless houses, the hard-looking men, unite to give the one impression. Even the fresh blue water of the bay, which laughs and ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... private office opened to admit an important client he happened to glance up. And between the edge of the door frame and his client's automobile-fattened and carefully dressed body, he caught a glimpse of the "poor little forlornness" who chanced to be crossing the outer office. A glint of sunlight on her hair changed it from lifelessness to golden vital vividness; the same chance sunbeam touched her pale skin with a soft yellow radiation—and her profile was delicately fine and regular. Thus Norman, who observed ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips

... fortitude broke down. One Sunday night he appealed to his father, with many tears, on the subject, not of his employment, which he seems to have accepted at the time manfully, but of his forlornness and isolation. The father's kind, thoughtless heart was touched. A back attic was found for Charles near the Marshalsea, at Lant Street, in the Borough—where Bob Sawyer, it will be remembered, afterwards invited Mr. Pickwick to that disastrous party. ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials

... faulty conduct had caused them. As to this business of Kendricks and Miss Gage, I denied in the dispute I now began tacitly to hold with Mrs. March's conscience that my conduct had been faulty. I said that there was no earthly harm in my having been interested by the girl's forlornness when I first saw her; that I did not do wrong to interest Mrs. March in her; that she did not sin in going shopping with Miss Gage and Mrs. Deering; that we had not sinned, either of us, in rejoicing that Kendricks had come to Saratoga, or in letting Mrs. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... cards; he saw the delicate little shoulders and the poor frail neck and chest bedizened with tawdry mock jewelry and spangles; he saw the innocent young face, whose pure beauty no soil of stage paint could disfigure, with the smile still on the parted lips, but with a patient forlornness in the sad blue eyes, as if the seeing-sense that was left, mourned always for the hearing and speaking senses that were gone—he marked all these things in an instant, and felt that his heart was sinking as he looked. A dimness stole over his sight; a suffocating ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins

... time, nevertheless, the storm began to subside. But with it died the hope which is inherent in revolt; in proportion as she grew more calm the forlornness of her situation rose more clearly before her. At last that had happened which she had so long expected to happen. The thing was known. Soon the full consequences would be upon her, the consequences on which she dared not dwell. Shudderingly she tried to close her eyes to the things that might ...
— The Long Night • Stanley Weyman

... in a lonely central figure in a scene, the outline cuts so sharply against the horizon. Nan's eyes seemed riveted on it as she listened to Phillis's voice; it seemed to her as immovable as a Sphinx, its rigidity lending a sort of barrenness and forlornness to the landscape, a black edition of human nature set under a ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey

... certainly a proper amount of that forlornness which lurks about every object to which the Campagna forms a background—in the primitive little taverns where, on the homeward stretch, in the waning light, you are often glad to rein up and demand a bottle of their best. Their best and their worst are indeed the same, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... city. To tell the truth, the number of things that turn shabby under the ordeal of moving strikes a pang of unaccustomed poverty to the heart which, loving all manner of makeshifts, is rich even in its dilapidations. For the time you feel degraded by the spectacle of that forlornness, and if you are a man of spirit, you try to sneak out of association with it in the mind of the passer-by; you keep scrupulously in-doors, or if a fancied exigency obliges you to go back and forth between the old house and the new, you seek ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells

... was enormous, unforeseen. Taxes went up, sidewalks crumbled back into the grass again, the four or five unfenced little wooden houses that were erected and occupied added to the general effect of forlornness. The Estates were mortgaged, and to the old mortgage on the homestead ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris

... on a corner of the kitchen table while she busied herself with the kettle and teapot, marveling that in four years everything should apparently remain the same and still suffer such grievous change. There was an air of forlornness about the house which hurt him. The place had run down, as the sands of his father's life were running down. Of the things unchanged the girl he watched was one. Yet as he looked with keener appraisal, he saw that ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... with a very sorrowful heart, kept her resolutions, and for very forlornness and weariness, slept away a great part of the next day. Neither would she appear in the evening, for fear of more people than one. It was impossible to tell whether Mrs. Evelyn's love of mischief would not bring Mr. Olmney there, and the Thorns, ...
— Queechy, Volume II • Elizabeth Wetherell

... handsome too, for he was well mounted and knew how to manage himself and his horse. He wanted to manage Daisy too; and that was difficult. Daisy would have been tempted, and would have gone with him at the first asking; but the thought of Molly and her forlornness, and the words warm at her heart—"Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you"—and a further sense that her visitations of Molly were an extraordinary thing and very likely to be hindered on short notice, kept her firm as a rock. She had an opportunity now in hand; she would not throw ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 2 • Susan Warner

... for a moment, then, moved by some hint of forlornness in the clear eyes, he bent, as he had bent at the Castle on that summer evening weeks before, and lightly touched her ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... to make him wonder why his father cried when he kissed him. But unhappily he was like his mother in constitution as well as in face, and lo, died too before he had grown out of childhood. Then Mr. Edson, who had good abilities, in his forlornness and despair, threw them all to the winds. He became apathetic, reckless, lost. Little by little he sank down, down, down, down, until at last he almost lived (I think) by gaming. And so sickness overtook ...
— Mrs. Lirriper's Legacy • Charles Dickens

... pastures outside the city were ringing with the incessant creak of grasshoppers, which rose in clouds under his feet as he brushed through the thin grass. The blue-curl and the life-everlasting distilled their pungent aroma in the autumn sunshine. A feeling of change and forlornness weighed upon his spirit. As with Thomas of Ercildoune, whom the Queen of Faery carried away into Eildon Hill, the short period of his absence seemed seven years long. An old English song came into ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various

... the time when I was beginning to see that I could not "improve" Miss Grief, I came upon the maid. I was driving, and she had stopped on the crossing to let the carriage pass. I recognized her at a glance (by her general forlornness), and called to the driver to stop: "How is Miss Grief?" I said. "I have been intending to write to her for ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson

... say; she leant back in a limp forlornness while Mina expatiated on this doleful text. There came a luxury into the Imp's woe as she realized for herself and her auditor the extreme sorrows of the situation; she forgot entirely that there was not and never had been any reason ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope

... all allowance for the feeling of insignificance and forlornness which is apt to overwhelm us when we begin to realise the immensity of the material universe, a little closer thought should make it obvious that nothing in the nature of mere bulk or bigness furnishes even a reasonable ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer

... Oriental as the scene,—heartless arbitrary insolence on the part of my employers; homelessness, forlornness, helplessness, mortification, indignation, on mine. Fears and misgivings crowded and stunned me. My tears fell thick and fast, and, weary and despairing, I closed my eyes, and tried to shut out heaven and earth; but the reflection would return to mock and goad me, that by my own act, ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens

... to find, that, according to the authority of a certain great French author, "cooks, half stewed and half roasted, when unable to work any longer, generally retire to some unknown corner, and die in forlornness and want."—BLACKWOOD'S Edin. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... succeed in so rapid a train, that I fear I shall be unable to distribute and express them with sufficient perspicuity. As I look back, my heart is sore, and aches within my bosom. I am conscious to a kind of complex sentiment of distress and forlornness that cannot be perfectly portrayed by words; but I must do as well as I can. In the utmost vigour of my faculties, no eloquence that I possess would do justice to the tale. Now, in my languishing and feeble ...
— Edgar Huntley • Charles Brockden Brown

... volume and power of penetration. Sleep was quite out of the question, with so much to distract our attention. In fine, our misery became so perfect that we both broke out into loud and sarcastic laughter over the absurdity of our situation. We had subjected ourselves to all this forlornness simply for pleasure. Whether Old Phelps was still in existence, we couldn't tell: we could get no response from him. With daylight, if he continued ill and could not move, our situation would be little improved. Our supplies were gone, we lay ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... hardly at all about the father of whom it was the symbol. Had she not a father very close to her, who loved her better than any real fathers in the village seemed to love their daughters? On the contrary, who her mother was, and how she came to die in that forlornness, were questions that often pressed on Eppie's mind. Her knowledge of Mrs. Winthrop, who was her nearest friend next to Silas, made her feel that a mother must be very precious; and she had again and again asked Silas ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot

... behind the mountains and the dusk was descending upon the little Mexican town. A few of the houses showed a light, but more of them were dark. The Morgan house, a very long way down the street, it seemed to the girl, was lit and she started to go toward it. A sense of desolation, a forlornness greater than she had ever known in all her short life descended upon her. She swallowed quickly and increased her pace. It wasn't fear, she reflected, it was worse than fear; it was the awful loneliness of one who had never been really ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall

... silent spectacle! Yet sounds, 'tis said, On their forlornness broke; a hissing cry Of mockery and wild laugh, as, overhead, Those blight fantastic squadrons flaunted by:— And that false dawn, long nickering, died away, And the Sun came not forth, and Heaven ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave

... a while, however, he recognised her as Madame Maze. The thought of the letter which she had received during the day then recurred to him. And the sight of her filled him with pity; he could feel for the forlornness of this solitary woman, who had no physical sore to heal, but only implored the Blessed Virgin to relieve her heart-pain by converting her inconstant husband. The letter had no doubt been some harsh reply, for, with bowed head, she seemed almost annihilated, filled with the humility ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... never made anybody laugh! But for a while she did "hold him"—because he was a gallant youngster, making the best of his bargain. That he had begun to know it was a bad bargain did not lessen his regret for his wife's childlessness, which he knew made her unhappy, nor his pity for her physical forlornness—which he blamed largely on himself: "She almost died that night on the mountain, ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland

... faint hopes, and no expectation, of ever returning. The longer I resided among this race of men, the melancholy and forlornness of my feelings declined. Prospects of satisfaction from the novelty and grandeur of the scene into which I had entered began to open upon me; sentiments of affection and gratitude for Holtz, and even ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown

... middle ages, they have now to preserve God against the free-thought of the modern world. We are the Swiss guards of Deism. God was always the beginning and end of my thought. When I hear His existence questioned, I feel as I felt once in your Bedlam when I lost my guide, a ghastly forlornness in a mad world. Is not my best work, The Rabbi of Bacharach, devoted to expressing the 'vast Jewish ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... yourself go, like that, you can't stop. Hearing your own little chokes and gasps makes you pity yourself so much that your heart nearly breaks. I was sobbing out loud, presently, which made Vivace whine, and I had almost begun to enjoy my utter forlornness and the distinction of being the most miserable person in the whole world when a distracted ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson

... They are bent, gnarled, shriveled, faded, weak, and wizened. Their faces reveal the absence of the looks that betoken hope, courage, aspiration, and high purpose. Their lineaments and their gait show forth a ghastly forlornness that excites pity and despair. They seem the veriest derelicts, tossed to and fro by the currents of life without ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson

... tender, gentle nature, in which was great kindliness; and before she knew Pepe there was some little chance, perhaps, that in sheer pity of his forlornness she might have given Pedro her love. This, of course, showed how weak and how thoughtless Pancha was; how ignorant of the feelings of society; how careless of the good opinion of the world. To be sure, the possibility of her loving Pedro never passed beyond a possibility; but that it went so far ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... said, gravely, "that with all my loneliness and poverty and general forlornness, I have had a different bringing up from any of you. My father did not believe in any of ...
— The Chautauqua Girls At Home • Pansy, AKA Isabella M. Alden

... to add to the burden of his days and tribulations. His eyes were weak and bloodshot, his bold nose was sadly compromised, and his reddish beard, largely streaked with grey, bristled under a month's neglect of the razor. In all this rusty forlornness lurked a visible assurance of our friend's having known better days. Obviously he was the victim of some fatal depreciation in the market value of pure gentility. There had been something terribly affecting ...
— A Passionate Pilgrim • Henry James

... looked very happy. Her aunt's hair hung in two thick braids, like a girl's, over her shoulders, and her face, seen in the moonlight, made Elliott feel things that she couldn't fit words to. She didn't know what it was she felt, exactly, but the forlornness inside her began to grow less and less, until at last, when her aunt bent down and kissed her and a braid touched the pillow on each side of Elliott's face, it was ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist

... in at the window, the floor was lighted up, and there were shadows on it. A cricket was chirping. Through the wall Father Sisoy was snoring in the next room, and his aged snore had a sound that suggested loneliness, forlornness, even vagrancy. Sisoy had once been housekeeper to the bishop of the diocese, and was called now "the former Father Housekeeper"; he was seventy years old, he lived in a monastery twelve miles from the town and stayed sometimes in the town, too. He had come to the Pankratievsky ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... good place to begin. Its ugliness and forlornness can be matched in the factory section of almost any large city. South Chicago is dominated by its steel mills,—enormous drab structures, whose every crevice leaks quivering heat and whose towering chimneys belch forth unceasingly a pall of ashes ...
— What eight million women want • Rheta Childe Dorr

... house or out of it. It wore in parts an air of emptiness and neglect, not exactly as though gone to seed, but as if little human love and care had been expended there. The deep-set windows of the brick wing, like the sunken eyes of an old woman, peered at the visitor with dusky forlornness. Lonely and stern on the other side stood the Egyptian pilasters, as though unused to the eye of man; the hieroglyphics along the cornice intensified the impression of desertion. As the young man set foot beneath the portico, he laid a hand on one ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne

... lips quickly, avoiding her eyes, and went out whistling. A forlornness overtook her; she ran back through the dining-room to the window, and, leaning out, watched for him to emerge from the doorway below; when he came, and started down the street towards the tramcar terminus, she made ready to wave as she used to ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton

... rural mind," smiled Howard at his mother, who was looking up at him through her glasses with a pathetic forlornness which sobered him again. "Why, Mother, you could live in Orange, New Jersey, or out in Connecticut, and be just as lonesome as you are here. You wouldn't need to live in the city. I could see you then every ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... stalking. In a corner of an A.B.C. shop she found an unoccupied table, whereat she promptly installed herself, impelled by the fact that at the next table was sitting a young girl, rather plain of feature, with tired, listless eyes, and a general air of uncomplaining forlornness. Her dress was of poor material, but aimed at being in the fashion, her hair was pretty, and her complexion bad; she was finishing a modest meal of tea and scone, and she was not very different in her way from thousands of other girls who were finishing, or beginning, or continuing their teas ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki

... necessary evil as they used to be—not that she could still imagine herself plucking the fruits of life without suspicion of their core. But this general disenchantment with the world—nay, with herself, since it appeared that she was not made for easy pre-eminence—only intensified her sense of forlornness; it was a visibly sterile distance enclosing the dreary path at her feet, in which she had no courage to tread. She was in that first crisis of passionate youthful rebellion against what is not fitly called pain, but ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... could not talk of such a thing together; but they were well aware why they were so sad, and why it was a pleasure to them to sit like this on either side of the fireplace when they were alone in the house. It was a comfort beyond telling. They loved to be near one another that their forlornness might pain them less. A wave of tenderness poured into their hearts; they would fain have ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola

... in the distance. The dusk deepened. A sense of utter forlornness, utter weariness, came upon Avery. The struggle was over, and she had emerged triumphant; but it did not seem to matter. She could think only of those awful blows raining down upon the defenceless shoulders of the boy who had championed ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... seen, but is to be submerged in the new reservoir. In the vale of Keswick itself, Applethwaite, Skiddaw, St. Herbert's Island, Lodore, are commemorated in sonnets or inscriptions. And the Borrowdale yew-trees have inspired some of the poet's noblest lines,—lines breathing all the strange forlornness of Glaramara's solitude, and the withering vault ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... temperament, was fully alive to the fascination and uniqueness of her surroundings, but being a little tired with the drive, she felt for the moment somewhat impatient with ruins generally, and just a shade depressed with a certain air of dead forlornness that hovered all around. Then into the midst of this dream of antiquity strode a stern, fierce-looking, very up-to-date sportsman, who sat, for no conceivable reason, on a broken wall and stared at the ground. For one moment her sense of the ludicrous made her almost laugh aloud. ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... down he found it precisely as he expected. He went up to Miss Herrick, where she stood receiving with her mother and two of the other girls, and allowed them to chaff him on his forlornness. ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris

... half smiled to himself at the forlornness of the hope that he should ever need a standing ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall

... deportment. I could not prevail upon myself to unfold the true cause of my dejection, and permitted him therefore to ascribe it to a kind of homesickness; to inexperience; and to that ignorance which, on being ushered into a new scene, is oppressed with a sensation of forlornness. He remarked that these chimeras would vanish before the influence of time, and company, and occupation. On the next week he would furnish me with employment; meanwhile he would introduce me into company, ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown

... of the room at one of the tables was a young man sitting alone. Something caught my attention. Perhaps it was his listlessness or the dreamy unconcern with which he watched the dancers; or it may have been the utter forlornness of his expression. I noted his unusual pallor and his cast of dissipation, also the continual working of his long, lean fingers. There are certain set fixtures in the night life of any city. But this was not one. He was not an habitue. There was a certain greatness to ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint

... look of having lost everything, still succeeded in possessing, while Henrietta was alone. She had no place in the world. John's affianced bride was busy among the guests, like a daughter of the house, a slobbering bulldog at her heels; and Henrietta, isolated on the lawn, was overcome by her own forlornness. It had been very different at the ball. And how queer life was! It was just a succession of days, that was all: little things happened and the days went on; big things happened and seemed to change the world, but nothing ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG

... a dark red stain under the lash of many winter storms, and some tough lichens had incrusted patches of the surface; but, for the rest, the walls rose in the univied nakedness of all ruins in our climate, which has no clinging evergreens wherewith to pity and soften the forlornness of decay. Out of the rubbish at the foot of the walls there sprang a wilding growth of syringas and lilacs; and the interior was choked with flourishing weeds, and with the briers of the raspberry, on which a few berries hung. The heavy beams, left where they fell a hundred ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells

... the girl quickly, "yes. He would have said: Tell everything; tell anything!" In the desolate forlornness of her grief she had not left to her even an illusion. Just as he was, she had known the man, good and bad, brave and cowardly—and had loved him. Would ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher

... boarding-house, when she might be expected at Beechcote, how long she could be persuaded to stay—speculations, in fact, innumerable. Her agitation was pathetic in Mrs. Colwood's eyes. It testified to the girl's secret sense of forlornness, to her natural hunger for the ties and relationships other girls possessed in ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... (confound the woman!) he could well have spent an hour or two about the streets and the Quay, renewing old acquaintance. The whole town had heard of his return, and there were scores of folk to remember him and bid him welcome. They would chase away this feeling of forlornness, of being an alien. . . . Strange that, wide awake though he was, it should ...
— Hocken and Hunken • A. T. Quiller-Couch

... Corby resentfully. They were gathered in the hall, the carriages were driving to the open door, the Barberry's glistening brougham whisking them off, and then the battered vehicle in Hilda's hire. It had an air of ludicrous forlornness, with its damaged paint and its tied-up harness. Hilda, when its door closed upon the purple vision of her, might have been a modern Cinderella in mid-stage of ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)

... of a complaint from Sylvia moved her mother strangely. There was a forlornness, moreover, in her appealing attitude. Just for a moment Mrs. Thesiger began to think of early days of which the memory was at once a pain and a reproach. A certain little village underneath the great White Horse on the Dorsetshire Downs rose with a disturbing vividness ...
— Running Water • A. E. W. Mason

... or no the terrible adversary of my peace were in the carriage. I persuaded myself that he was. I looked after the equipage, and exclaimed, "There you may see the luxurious accommodations and appendages of guilt, and here the forlornness that awaits upon innocence!"—I was to blame to imagine that my case was singular in that respect. I only mention it to show how tile most trivial circumstance contributes to embitter the cup to the man of ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin

... he went forth to the abodes of ice. Death is not a breaker but a renewer of ties. And if in view of death we gird up the loins of our minds, and unite our hearts into a whole of love, and tenderness, and atonement, and forgiveness, then Death himself cannot be that thing of forlornness ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... the feeling of forlornness, of loneliness, well and thoroughly realized; with the single gleam of better things that sprung from the promise her heart had embraced that day. True and strong it was, and her soul clung to it. But yet its real brightness, to her apprehension, ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... insignificance, but it is difficult to conceive how a dog bold enough to raise his bristles under Calderwood's very eyes could be as insignificant as Free Joe. But both the negro and his little dog seemed to give a new and more dismal aspect to forlornness as they turned into the road ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris

... "Our rooms at the inn at Capua, where we slept, opened on a terraced garden, with orange trees, vines trained on arched trellises, marble fountains, &c., which, for ten shillings expense, might have been made very gay and attractive; but all was forlornness and disorder, the beds untrimmed, and the walks littered with dirt. Two magnificent plants of Opuntia vulgaris, which flanked one of the windows, the waiter said, were planted there 'per pompa' (for pomp's sake); a motive, unfortunately, so often ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 551, June 9, 1832 • Various

... when she was not thinking of them, preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot









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