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More "Melancholy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the constitutional form of state. The young emperor of the Hsuean-t'ung period, after the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in 1931, was installed there. He was, however, entirely without power during the melancholy years of his nominal rule, ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... observer as myself, it was plain her kindness was of a more moving nature than the sisterly. The tones of her voice appeared more numerous; she had a light and softness in her eye; she was more gentle with all of us, even with Mr. Henry, even with myself; methought she breathed of some quiet melancholy happiness. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. XII (of 25) - The Master of Ballantrae • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of life so that nothing seems worth while,—some bottled "essence of sunshine" will give new, fresh value to existence. Are you a victim of strange, uncaused fluctuations of mood so that periodically you descend to a bottomless pit of melancholy, —well, then, why suffer, when over the bar a man will furnish you a release from agony? And so men of certain types of temperament, or with unhappy experiences, form the alcoholic habit because it gives them surcease from pain; it deals out ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... BROTHER,—I have seen in the papers the melancholy account of our poor father's decease, and the disastrous circumstances of his second marriage; and the more I have thought of it, the more it seems to me that there was a screw loose somewhere. I had the misfortune, as you know, to offend him by ...
— In Homespun • Edith Nesbit
... dinner on board. I felt elated: all my pulses were beating merrily. I was keenly alive. Morley was right in what he said. An artist is Nature's pet, and she has mixed all his blood with joy. Natural, instinctive joy, swamped occasionally by melancholy, but always there surging up anew. Joy in himself—joy ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... melancholy sound of the minute guns from sea, making the brothers more impatient than ever; and, at that moment, the fog suddenly lifted, being rapidly wafted away to leeward over the island, enabling the two anxious watchers to see a bit of bright sky overhead, with a twinkling star or two looking ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson
... couldn't be promised; and in gazing without charge at the pair of weary and sleepy little mountebanks I found the histrionic character and the dramatic profession for the first time revealed to me. They filled me with fascination and yet with fear; they expressed a melancholy grace and a sort of peevish refinement, yet seemed awfully detached and indifferent, indifferent perhaps even to being pinched and slapped, for art's sake, at home; they honoured me with no notice whatever and regarded me doubtless as no better than one of the little louts peeping through ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... something in this criticism of the absent that jarred upon my feelings. I had no love indeed for Captain Trent or any of his vanished gang; but the desertion and decay of this once habitable cabin struck me hard. The death of man's handiwork is melancholy, like the death of man himself; and I was impressed with an involuntary and irrational sense of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... before you, on a subject to which I attach the utmost importance, if I did not undertake to give you the correct point of view with regard to it. I need not here repeat how many of the perverted endeavors and melancholy fortunes of humanity you charge upon religious associations; this is clear as light, in a thousand utterances of your predominant individuals; nor will I stop to refute these accusations, one by one, in order to fix the evil upon other causes. Let us rather submit the whole conception ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Miss Gibson's approaching departure had spread through the household before the one o'clock dinner-time came; and Mr. Coxe's dismal countenance was a source of much inward irritation to Mr. Gibson, who kept giving the youth sharp glances of savage reproof for his melancholy face, and the want of appetite; which he trotted out, with a good deal of sad ostentation; all of which was lost upon Molly, who was too full of her own personal concerns to have any thought or observation to spare from ...
— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... incident in the story of Thomas is after the resurrection. The first evening the apostles met in the upper room to talk over the strange things which had occurred that day. For some reason Thomas was not at this meeting. We may infer that his melancholy temperament led him to absent himself. He had loved Jesus deeply, and his sorrow was very great. There had been rumors all day of Christ's resurrection, but Thomas put no confidence in these. Perhaps his despondent disposition made him unsocial, and ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... have a cat for your lively menage?" he said, pointing to the melancholy animal which Neeland recognised as the dignified ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... territory were for a time indefinitely multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the barbarians all came to ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... naked glass, at the hotel nearly opposite. There was not a sound, not a movement, in Cork Street. Cork Street, the flat, the hotel, the city, the universe, lay entranced and stupefied beneath the grey vapours of the Sabbath. The sensation to Christine was melancholy, but it was ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... wife and family, and their anxiety upon the account of my absence and exposed situation, made sensible impressions on my heart. A thousand dreadful apprehensions presented themselves to my view, and had undoubtedly disposed me to melancholy, if further indulged. ...
— The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone • John Filson
... 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 tread of the marching multitude rose the voices ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... dreadful hurricane. Of the whole crew, and of sixty passengers (chiefly English people returning from France), not one is saved. It is said that a very atrocious criminal was on board the Halcyon. We look with the utmost anxiety for the details of this melancholy event." ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey
... another of those melancholy little sighs, and this time the poor Gnat really seemed to have sighed itself away, for, when Alice looked up, there was nothing whatever to be seen on the twig, and, as she was getting quite chilly with sitting still so long, she ...
— Through the Looking-Glass • Charles Dodgson, AKA Lewis Carroll
... act in St. Denis was one to which perhaps the modern reader gives undue significance, but which certainly must have had a certain melancholy meaning. Before she left, dragged almost a captive in the train of the King, we are told that she laid on the altar of the cathedral the armour she had worn on that evil day before Paris. It was not an unusual act for a warrior to do this on his return from the ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... so melancholy and so pathetically human in the soft, liquid eyes of the animal, that John felt his heart ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... from his word departed, His virtues were so rare, His friends were many and true-hearted, His Poll was kind and fair; And then he'd sing so blithe and jolly, Ah, many's the time and oft! But mirth is turned to melancholy, For Tom ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... adhering to the back of the brougham. (Master Gerald had seen to that.) Then the guests began to make their adieux and melt away, and presently we found ourselves alone in the marquee, a prey to that swift and penetrating melancholy that descends upon those who begin to be festive too early in the day, and find themselves unable to ...
— The Right Stuff - Some Episodes in the Career of a North Briton • Ian Hay
... my dear lady, the relation I gave to my parents, at the time of my being first acquainted with this melancholy affair. ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... rubrum) is one of the worst of foes to both the blackberry and raspberry—the Rubus occidentalis, or black-cap family, suffering the most, usually. I have seen fields of the Early Wilson and Kittatinny blackberries in New Jersey that presented a melancholy appearance. It is believed to be very contagious, and it can be spread by both trimmer and pickers. Mr. Chas. A. Green, of Monroe County, N. Y., writes: "The end plant of a row in my garden was affected, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... the War, when Jon had been at his private school. His romance with her had begun in Paris—his last and most enduring romance. But the French—no Englishman could like them who could not see them in some sort with the detached aesthetic eye! And with that melancholy ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... see them, I suppose," lamented Cecily. "He just worries my life out. And what I mind most of all is, he sits and looks at me in school with such melancholy, reproachful eyes when he ought to be working sums. I won't look at him, but I FEEL him staring at me, and ...
— The Golden Road • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... King of Woody Valley had a daughter named Zoza, who was never seen to laugh. The unhappy father, who had no other comfort in life but this only daughter, left nothing untried to drive away her melancholy. So he sent for folks who walk on stilts, fellows who jump through hoops, for boxers, for conjurers, for jugglers who perform sleight-of-hand tricks, for strong men, for dancing dogs, for leaping clowns, ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... gratified the national feeling of the Scotch. Immediately on her arrival, she entered the apartments which were once occupied by the beautiful and unfortunate Mary, Queen of Scots. Her majesty regarded the historical objects there presented to her, with melancholy interest. The following day the royal family ascended to the top of Arthur's Seat, where it was said her majesty was intensely excited by the magnificence of the scenery. The following day, Prince Albert laid the foundation-stone of the Scottish National Gallery. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... author but yourself so frequently break the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his plot to converse with his reader and moralise his tale, we also might be offended. But who that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the wise trifling of the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other, but prefers your preaching ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... batch of papers before his eyes and walked up to the table with a rather mincing step, turning the papers over the while. Privy Councillor Wurmt, Chancelier d'Ambassade, was rather short-sighted. This meritorious official laying the papers on the table, disclosed a face of pasty complexion and of melancholy ugliness surrounded by a lot of fine, long dark grey hairs, barred heavily by thick and bushy eyebrows. He put on a black-framed pince-nez upon a blunt and shapeless nose, and seemed struck by Mr Verloc's appearance. Under the enormous ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... was a discreditable neglect of the first requirements of the public. So it is with Esmond. There is, I thought, a reference to it in the Brookfield letters; but in several searches I cannot find it. To his mother he speaks of the book as "grand and melancholy", and to Lady Stanley as of "cut-throat melancholy". It is said to have been sold for a thousand pounds—the same sum that Master Shallow lent Falstaff on probably inferior security. Those who knew thought well of ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of 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 ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... disturbing fact. However grand this project, its political and mercenary features could not be beautiful to him. Why could not all men be right-minded about a noble cause and work unselfishly for the development of the West and the future generations? It was a melancholy thing to learn that men of sincere and generous purpose had spent their all trying to raise the money to build the Union Pacific; on the other hand, it was a satisfaction to hear that many capitalists with greedy claws had ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... and remembers that it was here, even amid the comparative ruins of a building once dedicated to the sacred cause of Religion and her twin sister, Charity, that the genius of Byron was first developed. Here that he paced with youthful melancholy the halls of his illustrious ancestors, and trode the walks of the long-banished monks. The housekeeper—a remarkably good looking and polite woman—showed us through the different apartments, and explained in the most minute manner ...
— Three Years in Europe - Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met • William Wells Brown
... remarked, with a melancholy kindliness of tone, 'fate has a grudge against us two. It ruined our youth, and now it's embroiling us once more. Can't we both be philosophical? Can't we contrive to look at the thing ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... would seldom produce any music or attempt any recognized air. Leaning back in his arm-chair of an evening, he would close his eyes and scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee. Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy. Occasionally they were fantastic and cheerful. Clearly they reflected the thoughts which possessed him, but whether the music aided those thoughts, or whether the playing was simply the result of a whim or fancy was more than I could determine. I might have rebelled against ...
— A Study In Scarlet • Arthur Conan Doyle
... overcoat. Both his side pockets had been, apparently, strained to the utmost to accommodate what looked like a bunch of pasteboard-bound note-books, now far on the way to their original pulp, and lopped despondently outward. A melancholy pool had already begun forming ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... vanity, of which she had no little share, led her to accept his attentions to a certain point, but the keen man of the world soon saw that his "little game," as in his own vernacular he styled it, would not be successful, and he was the last one to sigh in vain or mope an hour in lovelorn melancholy. While ceasing to press his suit, he continued to be a frequent and familiar visitor at the house, and thus his attention was drawn to Zell, who, though young, had developed early in the stimulating atmosphere in which she lived. At first he petted ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... of this melancholy opinion,—an opinion which takes the life out of the gospel,—the author relies chiefly on that passage in which Jesus says to the Jews that they were of their father the devil. (John 8:44.) From this he argues that they had no right to regard God as Father, ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... waltzes, and couples might be seen dancing under the bright lamps and chandeliers—what a sordid spectacle they presented in comparison with the sight the streets afforded! Thinking of Hongkong, he asked himself if the moonlit nights in that island were so poetical and sweetly melancholy as those of the Philippines, and a deep sadness settled down ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... a nature but infected; A poor unmanly melancholy sprung From change of fortune. Why this spade, this place? This slave-like habit? and these looks of care? Thy flatterers yet wear silk, drink wine, lie soft, Hug their diseas'd perfumes, and have forgot That ever Timon was. Shame not these woods By putting on the cunning of a carper. Be thou ...
— The Life of Timon of Athens • William Shakespeare [Craig edition]
... wife six months ago, and was quite cheerful just at first, but now he 's really too distressin'. I 've done all I can to rouse him; it's so melancholy to see him mopin'. And, my dear Dick, the way he mangles the new rose-trees! I'm afraid he's goin' mad; I shall have to send him away; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... their views, without a trace of their sister's force of intellect or her strenuous temper. E. resembled her in person, he was tall, fair, with auburn curls; he cultivated a certain tendency to the Byronic type, fatal and melancholy. A. was short, brown and jocose, with a pretension to common sense; bluff and chatty. As a little child, I adored my Uncle E., who sat silent by the fireside holding me against his knee, saying nothing, but looking ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... however, grow up into uglier ducks, and Mrs. Govers resigned herself to the melancholy prospect of the widowed mother of ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... been founded by Warren Hastings. It was an unhealthy station, especially for youngsters fresh from England. A burning sun by day; hot stifling nights; and no breath of wind sweeping across the parched ghats. Within a few weeks the dreaded cholera made its appearance; the melancholy roll of muffled drums was heard every evening at sunset; and Ensign Gilbert was ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... has been abuse by taking too much. And therefore in the summer they feed on fruits, because they are moist and juicy and cool, and counteract the heat and dryness. In the winter they feed on dry articles, and in the autumn they eat grapes, since they are given by God to remove melancholy and sadness; and they also make use of scents to a great degree. In the morning, when they have all risen they comb their hair and wash their faces and hands with cold water. Then they chew thyme or rock parsley or fennel, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... skeleton bridge, as in the piles Of some dead lake-built city, full of skulls, Worm-worn, rat-riddled, mouldy with memories, Lingers to babble, to a broken tune (Once, O the unvoiced music of my heart!) So melancholy a soliloquy It sounds as it might tell The secret of the unending grief-in-grain, The terror of Time and Change and Death, That wastes this floating, transitory world." [Footnote: W. E. Henley, ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry
... Wortley Montague, of modern times, are generally received as some of the best specimens extant of epistolary composition. The letters of Charles Lamb are a series of brilliances, though of kaleidoscope variety; they have wit without buffoonery, and seriousness without melancholy. He closes one of them by subscribing himself his friend's "afflicted, headachey, sorethroaty, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... manner of the minister himself, who, when I entered, sat upon a sofa, with his arms folded, and his eyes directed to the ground. When he spoke there was extreme depression in the tones of his voice, his dark features wore an air of melancholy, and he exhibited all the appearance of a person meditating to escape from the miseries of this life by the most desperate of all ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... before Christmas, for the house in St. John's Wood was still the rallying-point for the family, although his elder children were now married and dispersed. But he did not stay long.] "Wife wonderfully better," [he writes to Sir M. Foster on January 8,] "self as melancholy as a pelican in the wilderness." [He meant to have left London on the 16th, but his depressed condition proved to be the beginning of a second attack of pleurisy, and he was unable to start for Bournemouth ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... against which they reposed. Her cheek was perhaps paler than when first we made her acquaintance; anxiety for her lover, and, latterly, for her father, was the cause; but her beauty had lost nothing by the change, for the shade of melancholy upon her features seemed, by adding to the interest her expressive countenance inspired, rather to enhance than diminish its charm. She was now watching for her father, who had led her to expect his return at about this ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... take the crown from Thomassin, and in the person of one Carlo Bertinazzi, commonly called Carlin. Our actor, Garrick, was an admirer of this famous Mime. Of Carlin, M. Sand speaks:—"Like most clever buffoons, he had a very melancholy disposition, and, as with Dominique, his gaiety was what the English term humour. It belonged to his mind, and not to his temperament." Carlin also wrote a book entitled, "Les Metamorphosis d'Arlequin." In 1783 Carlin died, ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... leaving the apartment, and breaking with her for ever, it cost her but a change of look and tone, from that of real and haughty resentment to that of kind and playful despotism, again shaded off into melancholy and serious feeling, to lead me back to my seat, her willing subject, on ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... a state of profound melancholy; but he soon burst from this gloomy mood into one of renewed fierceness and fatal desperation. Nine months after the battle of Morat he re-entered Lorraine, at the head of an army, not composed of his faithful militia ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... Lorenzo was at the Convent of St. Clare, furnished with the necessary mandate. The Nuns were at Matins. He waited impatiently for the conclusion of the service, and at length the Prioress appeared at the Parlour Grate. Agnes was demanded. The old Lady replied, with a melancholy air, that the dear Child's situation grew hourly more dangerous; That the Physicians despaired of her life; But that they had declared the only chance for her recovery to consist in keeping her quiet, and not ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... for him?" asked the melancholy mime, who had in his nature somewhat of the cynicism of Jaques, without his grand imaginings of soul. "There are many off the stage, my lord, in better practice." "True, most true," acquiesced Buckingham; ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... fast—beating with a new and strange happiness glowing through her. Only a few minutes ago she had felt so weary and wretched; the familiar scene, which she loved so dearly, had seemed flat and dreary and full of melancholy, and now—oh! how lovely it was! how good it was to ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... The still and pulseless world. Hark! on the winds The bell's deep tones are swelling; 'tis the knell Of the departed year. No funeral train Is sweeping past; yet, on the stream and wood, With melancholy light, the moonbeams rest Like a pale, spotless shroud; the air is stirred, As by a mourner's sigh; and, on yon cloud, That floats so still and placidly through heaven, The spirits of the Seasons seem to stand. Young Spring, bright Summer, Autumn's solemn form, And ...
— Songs from the Southland • Various
... a speculation concerning the nature and origin of those agreeable emotions which are so generally produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources of melancholy pleasure, after the poignancy of grief has been assuaged by time. Nature has beneficently provided, also, that many an object, which is capable of communicating no direct pleasure to our senses, shall affect us agreeably through the medium of sentiment. The image of the Owl is calculated ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... this part," said Cosmo. "I made acquaintance with it the last thing as I was growing ill. It looks to me so melancholy! If I were here, I should never rest till I had with my own hands got it into some ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... ministry. There are some, indeed, "whom my dim eyes in vain explore." In my mind, a greater calamity could not have fallen on the public than the exclusion of one of them. But I drive away that, with other melancholy thoughts. A great deal ought to be said upon that subject, or nothing. As to the distinguished persons to whom my friends who remain are joined, if benefits nobly and generously conferred ought to procure ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. V. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... why didn't you ever let folks know yer style, instead uv trottin' 'round like a melancholy clam with his shells shut up tight? That's what this crowd wants to know! Now yev opened down to bed-rock, we'll git English Sam from Sonora, an' git up the tallest kind ...
— Romance of California Life • John Habberton
... was the name over the shop—looked like a man with a past—a miserable past, for in his one melancholy eye and twitching, nervous mouth could be read sorrow and apprehension. His face was pale, and he had an odd habit of glancing over his left shoulder, as though he expected to be tapped thereon by a police officer. Sixty years had rounded his shoulders and weakened his back, ...
— The Opal Serpent • Fergus Hume
... peacefulest periods it was pervaded by a baneful Spook called the "Party Spirit," and always by the dull booings of unwilling young gentlemen at their lessons, like the raucous murmurings of an assemblage of melancholy rooks, or of kites and crows cawing and screaming in the intervals of their ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 8, 1893 • Various
... born to him in quick succession, and he found it no easy task to provide food, shelter and clothing for his little family. The light heartedness for which he had formerly been noted entirely deserted him, and he became sad and melancholy. His health did not improve, and it was with difficulty that he could perform his daily task. His strength was so slight that he would frequently return from his day's work too exhausted to eat. He could only go to bed, and ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... Mr. CLARKE, has now reigned at BOOTH'S for nearly six weeks. During that time there has been a perceptible change in the metaphorical atmosphere of the house. The audience no longer wears the look of subdued melancholy which was once involuntarily assumed by each mourner for the memory of SHAKSPEARE, who passed the solemn threshold. The ushers no longer find it necessary to sustain their depressed spirits by the surreptitious chewing of the quid of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, Issue 10 • Various
... intrude, convulsing their features, and working every line into an expression of the keenest agony. To these men the sun brought no return of joy. Day after day rolled on, but their state was immutable. Existence was to them a scene of invariable melancholy; every moment was a moment of anguish; yet did they wish to prolong that moment, fearful that the coming period would bring a severer fate. They thought of the past with insupportable repentance, ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... set out for Zuitburg, in Zealand, where the fleet which was to convoy him had orders to assemble. In his way thither he passed through Ghent, and after stopping there a few days, to indulge that tender and pleasing melancholy which arises in the mind of every man in the decline of life on visiting the place of his nativity, and viewing the scenes and objects familiar to him in his early youth, he pursued his journey, accompanied by ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... spell that had been laid upon him. During that time he had come to take a luxurious satisfaction in the interest his case was exciting in the neighborhood. Being in excellent physical condition, he could afford the melancholy joy of playing with the idea of death. He spent hours discussing the details of his funeral, which had assumed in his mind the proportions of ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... northern isle, with its dark fringe of pines; its wonderful moss, its fragrant and dewy ferns, its graceful sumacs, just putting on their scarlet-lipped leaves, the morning stillness broken only by the faint unearthly cry of the melancholy loon, the spar-dyked cliffs of limestone, and the fantastic couch, with its too lovely occupant, never faded from his memory and remained to the last as realities which indeed they have become likewise to me, through the intensity with ...
— Crowded Out! and Other Sketches • Susie F. Harrison
... would find a Hamlet at the root of this melancholy you must ask our Ophelia. She met no one with me. My accident left me to enjoy my holiday as best I could at a ranch deep in the foothills, and Reenie stayed with me there. There ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... of a locomotive dispels the idea that all the world is wilderness. The firefly lamps glow along the margin of the rushes. The frogs are now in full chorus, the great bulls beating their tom-toms and the small fry filling in the chinks with shriller cries. How remote the scene and how melancholy the chorus! ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... time to see the last boat go out. Already the river was "throwing ice," and every day the jagged edges of it crept further towards midstream. An immense and melancholy mob stood on the wharf as the little steamer backed off into the channel. There were uproarious souls on board, and many women of the town screaming farewells to their friends. On the boat all was excited, extravagant joy; on the wharf, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... mourning for their kindred, the deepest privation in a property sense. Everything the loss of which would make them poor was sacrificed on the graves of their relatives or distinguished warriors, and as melancholy because of removal from their old homes caused frequent deaths, there was no lack of occasion for the sacrifices. The widows and orphans of the dead warriors were of course the chief mourners, and exhibited their grief in many peculiar ways. I ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... was very melancholy, and did not know what to do, or how to act at all. Cucullin was an ugly customer to meet with; and, the idea of the "cake" aforesaid flattened the very heart within him. What chance could he have, strong and brave ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... and 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 she had never put her hands to the task herself. She brimmed over with ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... to women, and he would not shield his own good name at the cost of that of the wife of his youth and the mother of his children. But since his death his only remaining child has, in devotion to her father's memory, stated the melancholy truth: that Mrs. Bradlaugh gave way to drink; that for long years he bore with her and did all that man could do to save her; that finally, hopeless of cure, he broke up his home, and placed his wife in the care of her parents in the country, ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant
... tranquil scenes, and such placid beauty, the "melancholy Cowley," passed the later days of big anxious existence; here we may fancy him receiving Evelyn and Denham, the poets and men of letters of his troubled day, who found the disappointments of courtly life more than their philosophy could endure. Here his ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... her noble brother is a slave, with felons, laboring with the cursed chain-gang in the same city to which we are bound. Now, boys, do you wonder that when I found myself under orders to go again to the scene of all this misery I was affected, and that a melancholy has possessed me which has increased as the voyage has progressed? I did determine at first that I would leave the ship at Gibralter and go home, but I dreaded to part with my shipmates. I shall not go ashore while we ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... old Leonie again. She had a capable little head, and plenty of tact; she would know how to manage the fellow, to be sure. He was easy in his mind about her happiness but he felt ousted from the first place in her thoughts which had been his ever since the girl could speak. A melancholy regret of the days of his childhood settled upon Captain D'Hubert, third aide-de-camp to ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... glutton, he was almost always ill; and, as he did good to nobody, he had no friends; and even his servants spoke ill of him behind his back, and all his neighbours, whom he oppressed, hated him. For these reasons he was sullen, melancholy, and unhappy, and became displeased with all who appeared more cheerful than himself. When he was carried out in his palanquin (a kind of bed, borne upon the shoulders of men) he frequently passed by the cottage ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... than I found the other omnibus-tops by no means so depopulated as I had fancied. To be sure, the straw hats which six weeks before had formed the almost universal head-covering of the 'bus-top throngs were now in a melancholy minority, but they had not so wholly vanished as they vanish with us when September begins. They had never so much reason to be here as with us, and they might have had almost as much reason for lingering ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... woman so disposed to listen to reason as herself. She was ignorant of the power of habit over her temper. The rector had taught her pride, marriage had taught her misfortune, and pride and misfortune had made her fretful, melancholy and moody. She had suffered no opposition from her first husband; her will had been his law; and she knew not, till she had made the trial, how difficult it is to concede with a good grace. The least thing that offended her threw her into tears. The passions ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... taken her home and sheltered her, and had straightway fallen desperately in love with her, to discover, with unutterable horror, that her head had been severed from her fair shoulders by the cruel knife twelve hours before, and that her melancholy loveliness was altogether phantasmal ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... Street, nor is it because the actors in the one are of the humble, in the others of the noble class; but simply because the enjoyment in the first is visible and hearty, because in the other it is a listless and melancholy pretence. Helen fancied it was the swings and the booths that gave her that innocent exhilaration,—it was not so; it was the unconscious sympathy with the crowd around her. When the poetical nature quits its own dreams for the actual world, it enters and transfuses itself into the hearts and humours ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his neck out, his enormous pin settled in his stock to his satisfaction, his eyes complacently directed towards the reflection of his left and favourite whisker. Eglantine was laid on a settee, in an easy, though melancholy posture; he was twiddling the tongs with which he had just operated on Walker with one hand, and his right-hand ringlet with the other, and he was thinking—thinking of Morgiana; and then of the bill which was to become due on the 16th; and then of ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... is la belle Barberie!" repeated the young sailor, for such his dress denoted him to be, studying her features with an expression of face, in which pleasure vied with evident and touching melancholy. "Fame hath done no injustice, for here is all that might justify the folly or ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... wide experience, she was something of a fatalist. That is to say, she believed that her evil destiny might spring upon her unawares at any moment, and she felt something when she was with Harrington that warned her. For the first time in her life she knew what it was to have moods of melancholy; she caught herself asking what was really the end and object of her gay life, whether it amounted to anything worthy in comparison with the trouble one had to take to amuse one's self, whether it would not be far better in the end to live like Miss Schenectady, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... 27th, the Supply tender arrived from Norfolk Island, where she had been with a quantity of provisions and stores for that settlement; she brought the melancholy account of the loss of Mr. James Cunningham, and four others, who were drowned in the surf, by their boat being overset in landing the stores from the Supply; so exceedingly difficult of access is the shore of that island, ...
— An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island • John Hunter
... more kind and considerate than the conduct of my brother officers,—a hundred little plans and devices for making me forget the late unhappy event were suggested and practised,—and I look back to that melancholy period, marked as it was by the saddest circumstance of my life, as one in which I received more of truly friendly companionship than even my palmiest ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... at the long man and the short man. They in turn regarded him with something like respect. The long man wore a drooping, streaky-yellow horseshoe of a moustache dominated by a long and melancholy nose. Flanking the base of this sorrowful nose was a pair of eyes hard and bright ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... not been an idler in his prolonged absence. In the first place, he had striven with the whole force of a powerful will to subdue a useless passion, and had striven in vain. He had not, however, yielded for a day to a dreamy melancholy, but, in accordance with his promise "to do his best," had been tireless in mental and physical activity. The tendency to wander somewhat aimlessly had ceased, and he had adopted the plan of studying modern life at the old centres ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... youth danced in one of the ballets at St. Germain, it is said at the desire of Richelieu, who was an expert in spectacle. It appears that he was encouraged in these amusements to remedy fits of melancholy. ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... and the furious winds had sailed out over the deep, the rains descended and drenched her flimsy garment. The stormy winds sank down to a melancholy wail, and played their dirge amongst the branches of the cluster-pine, and the dawn came up from the east and struggled ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... magnanimous'—began Shubin. 'Who the devil was it in history was so particularly magnanimous? Well, never mind! And now,' he continued, with melancholy triumph, uncovering a third rather large mass of clay, 'you shall behold something which will show you the humility and discernment of your friend. You will realise that he, like a true artist again, feels the need and ...
— On the Eve • Ivan Turgenev
... their babies like balancing-poles, as they tottered along the gangway-plank. Men tried to secure themselves from being brushed into eternity by the powerful sweep of skirts. My own personal reminiscence of this transit from the wharf to the gallant bark of our choice is melancholy and vague, being marked chiefly to memory by the complicated curse bestowed upon me by a hideous old Irish-woman, whose oranges I accidentally upset in the crowd, and by whom I was subsequently derided with buffo song and scurrilous dance as long as the ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... Adela's favourite wood were already falling. At the Manor there was once more disorder; before Mutimer and his wife took their departure the removal of furniture had commenced. Over the whole scene brooded a spirit of melancholy. It needed faith in human energy to imagine the pollutions swept away, and the seasons peacefully gliding as of old between the hillsides and amid meadows ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... of dear ones, or some great cross well borne, you need not forget. But think of these things as sent to enrich your nature, and to make you more human and sympathetic. You are missing them if you permit yourself instead to grow melancholy ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... confederacy, and slavery would have been seen, at this time, shrunk up to the most contemptible dimensions, if it had not vanished entirely away. But we have furnished another instance to be added to the long and melancholy list already ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... on my fingers and jumping from foot to foot. Good people carried me to the hospital. When I began to get better and come to my senses, my drunken spell was over. Dread came over me! Horror seized me! How had I lived? What had I done? I began to feel melancholy; yes, such melancholy that it seemed better to die. And so I decided that when I got quite well, I would go on a pilgrimage, then go to my brother, and let him take me as a porter. This I did. I threw myself plump at his feet! "Be a father ...
— Plays • Alexander Ostrovsky
... and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance. A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden dump upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. So remarkable a phaenomenon merits our attention, and must be traced up to its ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... glimpses of his glorious mind. His deep passion for solitude grew to full power; the varied excitement of his travels invigorated his character and stored his imagination with impressions, and his inborn sadness rose from a querulous bitterness to the grandeur of his later melancholy. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... ago that we should sink or swim together." He paused, and then, with a melancholy smile upon his face, continued,—"I have no intention of breaking my oath, you see; but I repeat, that your road seems to be a most perilous one, and I will add that I consider you headstrong and self-opinionated; but ...
— Caught In The Net • Emile Gaboriau
... he again gives the reins to his melancholy. "Always alone, though in the midst of men," he faces the thought of suicide. With an innate power of summarizing and balancing thoughts and sensations, he draws up arguments for and against this act. He is in the dawn of his days and in four months' time ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... with singing, of which there was a plentiful repetition, the boys and girls in the foreground singing, the melancholy throng behind standing dumb. Hymn-books were supplied to them, and if they could read they might have found on the page from which the first hymn was taken a hymn so curiously infelicitous to the occasion that it is worth quoting a couple of verses. ...
— Faces and Places • Henry William Lucy
... silence interrupted only by the cry of the wild beast in his lair, and awed by the marvelous beauty of lakes and streams, framed in mountains and fringed with forests, where water-fowl of every variety of note and plumage floated buoyant upon the wave, and pierced the air with monotonous and melancholy song. Ten or twelve Indians—men, women, and children—followed them, annoying them not a little with their intrusiveness and their greedy grasp of food. The embassy traveled about fifteen miles to a small Indian village upon a branch of Taunton River. Here they arrived about ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... "poor Bess," she had to watch over the frenzied mania of the wife and to confront the almost equally insane fury of the husband. One of the letters which she wrote at this time to Everina describes forcibly enough her sister's sad condition and her own melancholy:— ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... ancient inhabitants of the mountains of Peru and Bolivia, are described as having an olive-brown complexion, with regular features, large heads, and a thoughtful and melancholy cast of countenance. They practised in early times the ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... shewn by their movements and the sounds uttered, we must admit that they possess some power of imagination. There must be something special, which causes dogs to howl in the night, and especially during moonlight, in that remarkable and melancholy manner called baying. All dogs do not do so; and, according to Houzeau (21. ibid. 1872, tom. ii. p. 181.), they do not then look at the moon, but at some fixed point near the horizon. Houzeau thinks that their imaginations are disturbed ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... visits to the court, by the queen's rival, the Lady Elizabeth Lucy. He passed into the closet; he lifted the arras; he stood in that chamber, which gratitude and chivalry and hospitable faith should have made sacred as a shrine. And suddenly, as he entered, the moon, before hid beneath a melancholy cloud, broke forth in awful splendour, and her light rushed through the casement opposite his eye, and bathed the room with the beams of ...
— The Last Of The Barons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of him was that we had the full understanding of the treasure as much as my Lord Treasurer himself, and knew what he can do, and that whatever our case is, more money cannot be got till the Parliament. So talked of getting an account ready as soon as we could to give the Parliament, and so very melancholy parted. So I back again, calling my wife at her sister's, from whose husband we do now hear that he was safe this week, and going in a ship to the fleete from the buoy of the Nore, where he has been all this while, the fleete being ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... bales, plunged the third day into mountainous wild country echoing and ghastly with long-lasting war. Their servants and muleteers walked and rode, lamented or were gay, raised faction, swore, laughed, traveled grimly or in a dull melancholy or mirthfully; quarreled and made peace, turn by turn, day by day, much alike. One who was a bully fixed a quarrel upon me and another took my part. All leaped to sides. I was forgotten in the midst of them; they could hardly have ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... said things to one another—long pent-up things that bruised and crushed and cut. But over it all in my memory now is an effect of deliberate confrontation, and the figure of Marion stands up, pale, melancholy, tear-stained, injured, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... so sad a task. His lungs were pierced through by the deer's horns in two places, and he had died of sudden suffocation by internal haemorrhage. A large hollow tree grew close to the spot; in this I buried him. The stag's antlers now hang in the hall, a melancholy but glorious memento of ...
— The Rifle and The Hound in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... held back. She could see nothing else, think of nothing else. Not that it was so very handsome—though no other had ever approached it in its power over her imagination—but because of its expression of haunting melancholy,—a melancholy so settled and so evidently the result of long-continued sorrow that her interest had been reached and her heartstrings shaken as never before in ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... dated June, 1915, is in my desk. It tells incidentally about the visit of a friend to the Ambassador shortly after his interview with the President. 'It's coming out all right,' the Count said cheerfully, his melancholy eyes lighting up, and the anxious lines etched in his face during the months past lightening. 'No, they're not going to get rid of me yet for a while,' referring to the ...
— My Three Years in America • Johann Heinrich Andreas Hermann Albrecht Graf von Bernstorff
... Maer, which he valued much—but he rarely carried it, because it tempted him to take too many pinches. In one of his early letters he speaks of having given up snuff for a month, and describes himself as feeling "most lethargic, stupid, and melancholy." Our former neighbour and clergyman, Mr. Brodie Innes, tells me that at one time my father made a resolve not to take snuff except away from home, "a most satisfactory arrangement for me," he adds, "as I kept a box in my study to which there was access from the garden without ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... thing was repeated to him. He wonders why he does not go any more in his unfortunate father's room, and why there is no more "de cher Papa," as he says: else he makes no question or observation and is very quiet and cheerful. He cannot yet feel what he has lost and his melancholy fate: but Helene does what she can to keep alive in him the remembrance of his father.... Yours ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume 1 (of 3), 1837-1843) • Queen Victoria
... the treatment which I had received at the Guest House still burned hotly within me, but the mystery of it all had taken the keen edge off my wrath, and I think a sort of melancholy was the keynote of my reflections as, descending the steps to the sunken garden, I saw Val Beverley, in a delicate blue gown, coming toward me. She was the spirit of my dreams, and the embodiment of my mood. When she lowered her eyes at my approach, ...
— Bat Wing • Sax Rohmer
... pressing against a spring, a sliding panel flew open. A screen was placed within, so as to hide from view the inmate of the secret chamber, and Nicholas, having coughed slightly, to announce his presence, and received an answer in a low, melancholy female voice, stepped through the aperture, and stood ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... his cold, fixed, grey, melancholy glance, first on the one of them and then on the other. "Some," he said gravely, "would, in my case, have avoided this meeting; but I have confidence in you both, although you are young, and beset with the snares incidental to your age. There are those within who should not know that ye have ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... approaching carriage is inelegant and also dangerous. To attempt to cross the street between the carriages of a funeral procession, is rude and disrespectful. The foreign custom of removing the hat and standing in a respectful attitude until the melancholy train has passed, is a commendable one to be followed in ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... now told of a melancholy accident which had befallen one of our marines. He had not been seen since eleven or twelve o'clock the preceding night. It was supposed that he had fallen overboard, out of the head, where he had been ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World Volume 2 • James Cook
... such formidable ideas, that I find myself disposed to share in their afflictions, though I know them to be groundless and imaginary, or, which is worse, purely affected. To offer them comfort one by one, would be not only an endless, but a disobliging task. Some of them, I am convinced would be less melancholy, if there were more occasion. I shall therefore, instead of hearkening to further complaints, employ some part of this paper for the future, in letting such men see, that their natural or acquired fears are ill-grounded, and their artificial ones as ill-intended. That all our ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... appearance of Manchester. So I was not astonished at the number of tall chimneys, nor at the quantity of smoke that issued from them. And I could quite enter into the feelings of the friend who told me that nothing was more melancholy than to see a clear atmosphere over the town; the blacker it looked the more prosperity was indicated, and the more ...
— Travellers' Tales • Eliza Lee Follen
... fresh and lovely, and bore no signs of last night's storm. Whitefoot was in frisky spirits, but she found herself looking at everything with melancholy eyes, as though she were looking her last at the pleasant prospect. In vain she strove to shake off the uncanny feeling, and to answer Richard's remarks in her usual sprightly fashion. The very effort to speak brought the tears to her eyes, and she had the vexed feeling ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... were 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 all the winds of heaven; and the prospect would be often black with tempest, and ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... her, great was the misery this most wretched father endured, and, not being able to bear the sight of that country where his last hope and only memory of his dear Thaisa was entombed, he took ship and hastily departed from Tarsus. From the day he entered the ship a dull and heavy melancholy seized him. He never spoke, and seemed totally insensible to everything ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... though with an expression somewhat too fierce to be pleasing. His frame was muscular and well-proportioned; his air commanding; and his deportment in the Spanish quarters had a degree of refinement, the more interesting that it was touched with melancholy. He is accused of having been cruel in his wars, and bloody in his revenge.33 It may be true, but the pencil of an enemy would be likely to overcharge the shadows of the portrait. He is allowed to have been bold, high-minded, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... hereditary royal family at the head of it instead of an elective chief magistrate. He believed that no nation that had ever known the joy of worshiping a royal family could ever be robbed of it and not fade away and die of melancholy. I urged that kings were dangerous. He said, then have cats. He was sure that a royal family of cats would answer every purpose. They would be as useful as any other royal family, they would know as much, they would have the same virtues and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... Mareschal the younger: his castles fell daily into the hands of the enemy; Dover was the only place which, from the valour and fidelity of Hubert de Burgh, the governor, made resistance to the progress of Lewis [b]: and the barons had the melancholy prospect of finally succeeding in their purpose, and of escaping the tyranny of their own king, by imposing on themselves and the nation a foreign yoke. But this union was of short duration between the French and English nobles: and the imprudence of Lewis, ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume
... substance of Father Marquette's narrative; and the whole of it accords so remarkably with the descriptions of subsequent travellers, and with the actual features of the country through which he passed, as to remove every doubt of its genuineness. The melancholy fate of the author, which followed soon afterwards, was probably the reason why his expedition was not in a more conspicuous manner brought before ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester
... proper, however, to declare that in our opinion, as those objections were not founded in speculative theory, but deduced from principles which have been established by the melancholy example of other nations, in different ages, so they will never be removed until the cause itself shall cease to exist. The sooner, therefore, the public apprehensions are quieted, and the government is possessed of the confidence of the people, the ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... quickly at him, but could see nothing wrong about his mind. His eyes were clear and natural; his whole appearance showed him to be a plain, blunt seaman, little disposed to invent imaginary dangers. Still, there was in his manner, a deep melancholy which showed me that it was not any natural disease that he dreaded, and ...
— The Somnambulist and the Detective - The Murderer and the Fortune Teller • Allan Pinkerton
... It is a melancholy fact that as the vast majority of women and their husbands have, under existing circumstances, not enough nourishment, no capital, no credit, and no knowledge of science or business, they would, if the State would pay for birth as it now pays for death, be exploited by joint ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... of mass. It pleases me to know that the great Sir Walter himself had a hand in the building of this very house, planned the barbican and the water-gate. All round the house lies a broad moat of black water, full of innumerable carp. The place was breathlessly still; only the sharp melancholy cries of water-birds and the distant booming of guns broke the silence. The water was all sprinkled with golden leaves, that made a close carpet round the sluices; the high elms were powdered with gold; the chestnuts showed a rustier red. A silent gardener, raking leaves with ancient leisureliness, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of the earthly matchmaker instead of the divine guidance, and you may some day be led to use the words of Solomon, whose experience in home life was as melancholy as it was multitudinous. One day his palace with its great wide rooms and great wide doors and great wide hall was too small for him and the loud tongue of a woman belaboring him about some of his neglects, and he retreated to the housetop to get relief from ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... century ago, in the days of old King Derby, was a bustling wharf,—but which is now burdened with decayed wooden warehouses, and exhibits few or no symptoms of commercial life; except, perhaps, a bark or brig, half-way down its melancholy length, discharging hides; or, nearer at hand, a Nova Scotia schooner, pitching out her cargo of firewood,—at the head, I say, of this dilapidated wharf, which the tide often overflows, and along which, at ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... contemplating the melancholy result, "had I but chosen a mate for myself with half the care that I did for my Dog I should now be a proud ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... innocently do so? Limit and distinguish the subject as you can, it will come at last to this question. For, shall we say that we are then at liberty to commit suicide, when we find our continuance in life becomes useless to mankind? Any one who pleases, may make himself useless; and melancholy minds are prone to think themselves useless when they really are not so.... In like manner, whatever other rule you assign, it will ultimately bring us to an indiscriminate toleration of suicide, in all cases in which there is danger of its being committed. ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... wondered, jeering the while at his own grotesque fancy, how his neighbors could sleep with those mournful yet sinister howlings burdening the air, but he became convinced at last that no one heard the melancholy ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... humbly beg your Majesty's consent to't, If you believe Alcippus worthy of it; The generous Youth I have bred up to Battles, Taught him to overcome, and use that Conquest As modestly as his submissive Captive, His Melancholy, (but his easy Fetters) To meet Death's Horrors with undaunted looks: How to despise the Hardships of a Siege; To suffer Cold and Hunger, want of Sleep. Nor knew he other rest than on his Horse-back, Where he would sit and take a hearty Nap; And ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn
... ashes; here the hearth had no doubt been, and the chimney in falling had covered it with rubbish. I stood for some time in silent admiration of the exuberance of Nature and the littleness of man: and when I was obliged to leave that enchanting solitude, I exclaimed with melancholy, "Are ruins, ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... German, and other visitors. Prominent among those resting there are: Shelley, the English poet (died 1822), whose heart only was buried there; the tombstone of the English poet Keats (died 1821) bears the melancholy inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water." There is also the grave of August Goethe (died 1830), the only son of ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel
... jokes about mothers-in-law, stepmothers and stepfathers—we will none of this. My heart warms to the melancholy Jacques, who dedicated his book to his mother-in-law, "my best friend, who always came when she was needed and never left so long as there was work to do." Richard Wagner's stepfather was his patient, loving ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... up by a naked Brahman, perched on a donkey and holding over the head of the boy a huge red silk umbrella. After him a car loaded with a thousand cocoa-nuts and a hundred bamboo baskets, tied together by a red rope. The god who looks after marriages drove in melancholy isolation on the vast back of an elephant, whose mahout led him by a chain of flowers. Our humble party modestly advanced just behind the ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... about a week's continuance of this unaccountable melancholy, a welcome change tool place, for the Rajah sent to call together all the chiefs, priests, and princes who were then in Mataram, his capital city; and when they were all assembled in anxious expectation, he ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... eight times, louder and louder with each repetition. No other bird equals this little Thrush in the emphasis with which he delivers his brief communication. His notes are associated with summer noon-days in the deep woods, and, when bursting upon the ear in the silence of noon, they disperse all melancholy thoughts, and inspire one with a vivid ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... that the tide was flowing against him; instinct, premonitions, warned him that perhaps his end was not far off. In this speech—it was to be his last before the Convention—the melancholy note prevailed. {218} There was no effort to conciliate, no attempt at being politic, only a slightly disheartened tone backed by the iteration which France already knew so well:—the remedy for the evil must be sought in purification; the Convention, ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston
... squalid, like poor, stupid, top-heavy things that had felt the wrath of the summer tempest, stood the drenched structures on either side of the narrow and crooked way, ghastly and picturesque, under the giant canopy. Rain dripped wretchedly in slow drops of melancholy sound from their projecting eaves upon the broken flagging, lay there in pools or trickled into the swollen drains, where the fallen torrent sullenly gurgled on its way to the river. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... blood from the pavilion to the edge of the forest, and there was lifted to heaven, in a moment, among the angels. Michu, who had known he was not appreciated, and who mistook his wife's grieved and melancholy manner for lack of affection, and had left her to herself, living chiefly out of doors and reserving all his tenderness for his boy, instantly understood the meaning of her tears. She had cursed the part which her beauty and her father's will had forced her to take; but ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... her with a nod and slight lightening of the eyes, which, however, hardly disturbed the habitual sombreness of the face. He was a dark, finely featured man, with grizzled hair, carrying himself with an air of sleepy melancholy. He was much older than his wife, and was a prominent leader in the little Independent chapel of the village. His melancholy could give way on occasion to fits of violent temper. For instance, he had been almost beside himself when Bessie, who had leanings to the ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he now raved enormous folly, Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools, and Graves, 615 'Twould make George Colman melancholy To have heard him, like a male Molly, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... mattered in any situation. His strength in counsel lay in the rare combination of these qualities of the trained lawyer with the gift of intuition, which women claim as their distinguishing characteristic; and it often extorted from Nationalists the melancholy admission that if Carson had been on their side their cause would have triumphed ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... King Edward was walking in the park at Windsor with slow and weary steps. His rich dark brown hair and beard were lined with gray, his face was not only grave but worn and melancholy, and more severe than ever. The sorrow of his life, his queen's death, had fallen on him, and with her had gone much of softening influence; the only son who had been spared to him was, though a mere child, grieving him by the wayward frivolities not ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... They know no melancholy, But fashion crowns of holly, And gather sleep within the brake To deck a kingdom when they wake, And bless ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... with all our abilities, when our hearts should be open to information and our hands ready to administer relief, to find distrusts and jealousies taking possession of the mind and a party spirit prevailing affords a most melancholy reflection, and forebodes no good." The hoarse murmur of impending mutiny emphasized strongly the words written on the same day to Duane: "The history of the war is a history of false hopes and temporary expedients. Would to God they ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... week; and every time the trader caught her crying he beat her, uttering fearful curses. If he caught her praying, he said, he would "give her hell." Mary was a member of the Methodist Church in Washington. There were several pious people in the company; and at night, when the driver found them melancholy and disposed to pray, he had a fiddle brought, and made them dance in their chains, whipping them till they complied. Mary at length became so weak that she really could travel on foot no further. Her feeble frame was exhausted, and sank beneath accumulated ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... she sat in penance. To complete her misfortunes, something in the paper put Mad. de Coulanges in mind of former times; and she began a long history of the destruction of some fine old tapestry hangings in the Chateau de Coulanges, at the beginning of the Revolution: this led to endless melancholy reflections; and at length tears began to flow from the fine ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... collision. Accordingly when Mr. DILLON had resisted a proposal to fine any visitor to an entertainment who did not pay the Amusements-tax, it was confidently expected that Mr. HEALY would find excellent reasons for asserting that this was the best clause in the whole Bill, and that only a melancholy humbug would oppose it. Instead he vigorously supported his former foe with an argument that I am sure Mr. DILLON would never have thought of. "Was it not a weird proposal," he asked, "that a child who had unwittingly walked; through a turnstile should forthwith become ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... great relief of this half-melancholy feeling, the ladies at his departure made him a present of a waistcoat, upon which he had watched them both for some time past at work, with a silent envy of the fortunate unknown, to whom it was by-and-by to belong. Such a present is the most agreeable which a true-hearted man ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... residence on the spot, and thumbing constantly a dirty old edition of Madame's letters, worked himself up to the notion that he had witnessed the scenes which he described. We were induced, in the course of our walk, to inquire somewhat into his own history, which appeared rather a melancholy one, though common enough in the times through which he had lived. About a week after the pillage and destruction of Chateau Grignan, he was denounced as a royalist, and immured in the prison of Orange, in company with several gentlemen of the neighbourhood, acquaintances of his master. ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... was probably with reference to this that Shakespeare represented poor mad Ophelia hanging her flowers on the "Willow tree aslant the brook" (No. 6), and it is more pointedly referred to in Nos. 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. The feeling was expressed in a melancholy ditty, which must have been very popular in the sixteenth century, of which Desdemona says a few of the first verses (No. ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... use of an anaesthetic than from the shock of an operation. He liked Miller, wished him well, and would not wittingly wound his feelings. He really thought him too much of a gentleman for the town, in view of the restrictions with which he must inevitably be hampered. There was something melancholy, to a cultivated mind, about a sensitive, educated man who happened to be off color. Such a person was a sort of social misfit, an odd quantity, educated out of his own class, with no possible hope of entrance into that above it. He felt quite sure that ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... princess belonging to those wild and awesome altitudes. The spirit of the region chimed with hers. Her eyes were always turned upon the sombre cliffs, the blue gorges and the snow-clad turrets, looking a sublime melancholy equal to their own. At times on the journey she sang thrilling te deums and misereres that struck the true note of the hills, and made their route seem like a solemn march down a cathedral aisle. The rescued ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... agricultural knowledge to his father's precepts or example. Virgil perhaps had tended his father's flock, as he pictures himself doing under the guise of Tityrus; certainly he spent many hours of youth "patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" steeping his Celtic soul with the beauty and the melancholy poetry of the Lombard landscape: and so he came to know and to love bird and flower and the external ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... A bitterness and a melancholy I cannot describe was holding me. Of what good my leg and my eye if I am to suffer torment once more? A sense of forsakenness held me. Perhaps I dozed, because I was worn out, when suddenly I was conscious of a closing door, and opening my eye, I saw that ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... he had put on a little weight, and didn't know if she had noticed it! She was oppressed by the eternal melancholy miracle of the fat man who does not realize that he has ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... dervishes, in witnessing whose singular movements one is at a loss whether to sigh or to laugh. To the young the performance suggests that of the circus, and until wearied of the monotony of it, is perhaps as amusing; but to this more thoughtful observer it is melancholy to see men so debase themselves. The ring in which these people whirl about was full of deluded men, on the day of our visit, self-proclaimed disciples. About twenty of them commenced at a signal to turn rapidly about ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... service. As an observance of religion is allowed to be the foundation of virtue, so a neglect of religious duties has ever been acknowledged the forerunner of every wickedness; the confession of malefactors at the place of execution being a melancholy confirmation of this truth. Here we see him, while others are intent on the holy service, transgressing the laws both of God and man, gambling on a tomb-stone with the off-scouring of the people, the meanest of the human species, shoe-blacks, chimney-sweepers, &c. for none but such would deign to ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... Lafcadio Hearn's prose ripened and mellowed consistently to the end. In mere workmanship the present volume is one of his most admirable, while in its heightened passages, like the final paragraph of "The Romance of the Milky Way," the rich, melancholy music, the profound suggestion, are not easily matched from any but the very greatest ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... frequently weeping. I became more and more melancholy. Her parents were beyond expression happy. The eventful day approached, threatening and heavy, like a thundercloud. The evening preceding arrived. I could scarcely breathe. I had carefully filled a large chest with gold, and sat ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... the—Husband! In saying this, he flung out of the Room in spite of her Endeavours to hinder him, and going hastily through a Gallery which had a large Window that look'd into the Garden, he perceiv'd Melliora lying on a green Bank, in a melancholy but a charming Posture, directly opposite to the place where he was; her Beauties appear'd, if possible more to advantage than ever he had seen them, or at least he had more opportunity thus unseen by her, to gaze upon them: he in a moment lost all the Rage of Temper he ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... instant of even less importance. I recollect the news coming. The King, having been always in frail health, had never married; seeing clearly but not far, he was a sad man: the fate that struck down his brother increased his natural melancholy; he became almost a recluse, withdrew himself from the capital to a retired residence, and henceforward was little more than a name in which Prince von Hammerfeldt conducted the business of the country. Now and then my mother visited him; once she brought back to me a letter from him, little ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... one. They try to convince themselves that it is so, and all such efforts to sophisticate the conscience, if persisted in, are punished by entire success. The spectacle does not inspire me with hate; it fills me with wonder and profound melancholy. Do these men think that by altering their opinion of right they can alter the nature of things, or make wrong come out right in the great and solemn issues which are before us? We stand where their own great men stood ...
— The Spirit Proper to the Times. - A Sermon preached in King's Chapel, Boston, Sunday, May 12, 1861. • James Walker
... is up on the very tip-top of all, on the tip-top where the wobble is the worst? Our own Columbia! It must be fine to ride around that way all dressed up in a flag. But a sourer lot of faces you never saw in your life. No. I am wrong. For downright melancholy and despondency you must wait till the funny old clown comes along in his little bit of a buggy drawn by a ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... 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 teaching ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... Green) wrinkled her forehead—that noble, that startling forehead which had been written about in the newspapers of two hemispheres—laid down her American Squeezer pen, and sighed. It was an autumn day, nipping and melancholy, full of the rustle of dying leaves and the faint sound of muffin bells, and Belgrave Square looked sad even to the great female novelist who had written her way into a mansion there. Fog hung about with the policeman on the pavement. The ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... deported to the wilderness in the back country. Many took refuge within the British lines, especially at New York. Many Loyalists created homes elsewhere. Some went to England only to find melancholy disillusion of hope that a grateful motherland would understand and reward their sacrifices. Large numbers found their way to Nova Scotia and to Canada, north of the Great Lakes, and there played a part in laying the foundation of the Dominion of today. The city of Toronto ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... 'She is a poor melancholy half-crazed creature, I take it,' said the squire; 'at least, that is what I hear. The girl, I should think, would be glad to get away from such a home. But I am afraid you will find a good many obstacles.' After that nothing more was said about the matter at Folking ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... His frame has grown more athletic; his eye, more steadfast and less restless, looks you full in the face. His smile is more open, but there is a melancholy in his expression almost approaching to gloom. His dress is the same as that of Pisistratus and Guy,—white vest and trousers; loose neckcloth, rather gay in color; broad cabbage-leaf hat; his mustache and beard are trimmed ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... live together after all; you shall hear more of this later. Stay with my people till sundown, but you must keep your own counsel, for they are all listeners and blabs. The physician here will now take the melancholy tidings to the unfortunate widow, and then you can talk it all over with her at night. Nothing startling must take place at the house there; and with regard to your master, even his death must remain a secret from every one ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... joy upon seeing that glittering substance knew no bounds, but he overheard one of the servants say in a melancholy undertone: "What a pity his majesty has not a black complexion such as we have! What ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... in the Louvre)—the whole I would, I think, have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing—so execrable as sign-paintings even! 'Are there worse poets in their way than painters?' Yet the melancholy business is here—that the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards—but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... effacement of countenance that is sometimes a more or less successful disguise for chagrin. On this occasion it seemed to fail, for Mademoiselle Palicsky turned her attention to Lucien and her work again with a slight raising of the eyebrows and a slighter sigh. Her face assumed a gentle melancholy, as if she were pained at the exhibition of a weakness of her sex; yet it was unnecessary to be an acute observer to read there the hope that Lucien's significant phrase had not by any chance ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... How brightly glowed the fire! I wanted to linger for a week, a month, a year,—as I do now, thinking it all over,—and when I strolled to the porch,—hearing the pigeons cooing at the barn; the water streaming down the dam; the melancholy monotony of the pine boughs;—there only lacked the humming mill-wheel, and the strong grip of the miller's hand, to fill the void corner of one's ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... unfurrowed by care, and the matron who, numbering more than double her years, had felt more than treble her sorrows. The youth was deeply moved, as he gazed, and thought he might have robbed that mother of her son, that wife of her husband, that sister of a brother. Those gentle, melancholy beings had never harmed him, and, perhaps, in a moment of passion, he had deprived their existence of half its sweetness, and turned their smiles to tears. It was with an aching, an humbled heart that he bowed ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... honour him, and feigning to be in the last degree enamoured of him. But Salabaetto, being minded to requite her guile with his own, went to her one evening, being bidden to sup and sleep with her, with an aspect so melancholy and dolorous, that he shewed as he had lief give up the ghost. Jancofiore, as she embraced and kissed him, demanded of him the occasion of his melancholy. Whereto he, having let her be instant with him a good while, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... followed my conductor into his dwelling place; Poverty were depictured in his melancholy face. His bread it was corn dodger, his beef I could not chaw; This was the kind of hash they fed me in ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... in her ear, at which both laughed. Evidently I was the cause of their mirth, and my embarrassment increased. At that time I had as mistress a very affectionate and sentimental little person, whose sentiment and whose melancholy letters amused me greatly. I realized the pain I must have given her by what I now experienced, and for five minutes I loved her as no ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... It was melancholy to see how, after each one of these pauses, each fresh drinking in of the beauty of the landscape and the balmy air, the old man resumed his slow pace, with a long sigh and his eyes cast down. The fairer this beautiful ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... canning factory started up again, and so once more Marija was heard to sing, and the love-music of Tamoszius took on a less melancholy tone. It was not for long, however; for a month or two later a dreadful calamity fell upon Marija. Just one year and three days after she had begun work as a can-painter, she ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... low and tender voice, to sing a Polish song which held Godefroid dumb with admiration and also with sadness. This melody, which greatly resembles the long drawn out melancholy airs of Brittany, is one of those poems which vibrate in the heart long after the ear has heard them. As he listened, Godefroid looked at Vanda, but he could not endure the ecstatic glance of that fragment of a woman, partially insane, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... so full of sweetness and melancholy; few who had once seen could mistake or forget them; and Barbara Hare, forgetting where she was, looked at them ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... five having fallen into our clutches, we stood by and watched the rest. Most of them leaped gloriously to liberty. Some ignominiously wriggled. Others remained in the pool, their nerves so shattered by bluster and assault that they had not the melancholy courage to slip away. In his wrath—for blood still oozed from his forehead— George would have exterminated the skulkers, and, checked in his bloodthirstiness, he showered upon them contemptible titles while he cooked two of those we had ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... didn't matter. King, the driver, looked as if he thought it did, and appeared morose. Is it because coachmen always keep their appointments with society and society never keeps its appointments with coachmen that a settled melancholy seems to brood over them, and their souls seem cankered ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... had found it in Mrs. Jane Stannard, mother of a schoolmate; but the new friend soon died, and for months the grief-stricken boy, it is said, haunted the lonely grave at night and brooded over his loss and the mystery of death—a not very wholesome experience for a lonely and melancholy ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... scale. Schemes of annexation or exchange of territory were for a time indefinitely multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the barbarians all ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... in the unopened house, with a charwoman to provide her with underdone or burnt chops, and eggs at eighteen a shilling, while the shutters of the front rooms were closed, and dusty desolation reigned. She knew every detail of the melancholy squalor of it, the dragging hours, the nights of lying awake listening to the occasional passing of belated cabs, or the squeaks and nibbling of mice in the ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gilt-edged saucer with it, was in the act of presenting it to her, with a dancing-school bow, when he unfortunately lodged the contents of the saucer on her pink skirt and lace flounces. Gertrude retired to the dressing-room with the afflicted Miss Jane, offering her all the sympathy that such a melancholy occasion called for. ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... council is held, nominally at least, for the purpose of condolence, and as it necessarily revives the memory of the departed worthies of their republic, it is natural that the ceremonies throughout should be of a melancholy cast. They were doubtless so from the beginning, and before there was any occasion to deplore the decay of their commonwealth or the degeneracy of the age. In fact, when we consider that the founders of the League, with remarkable skill and judgment, managed to compress into a single day the protracted ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... the third or fourth visit this child began to recognise favourites among the pictures, and being somewhat melancholy and mystical by nature, liking trees, beechwood glades, cathedral aisles, and the end of day, he would drag upon his mother's arm when they passed two pictures hanging together in the Dutch room. One was called The Woman taken ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... blow to his sensitive temperament, already hardly tried by political anxiety, was severe. We still have the private letters which he wrote to Atticus after her death from his solitude at Astura on the edge of the melancholy Pomptine marshes;[824] and here, if our minds are sufficiently divested of modern ideas and trained to look on death with Roman eyes, we may be startled to find him thinking of her as still in some sense ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... grievously tormented, and was solemnly aware of the vanity of those fears. He could not pretend to any great esteem for his companion, but he made many suitable reflections upon the shears of the Fates and the tenacity of life, in which melancholy occupation he was interrupted by the doctor, who pointed out the necessity of immediate burial. Seven o'clock the next morning was the hour agreed upon, and Mitchelbourne at once searched in Lance's coat pockets for the letters which he carried. There ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... the old man whose head I saw bound in a red handkerchief, was the first noticeable man of the name. He was a scale of enthusiasms, ranging from the melancholy to the sarcastic. When I heard him talked of, it seemed to me that he was born under the influence of the sea, while the rest of the tribe inherited the character of the landscape. Comprehension of life, and comprehension of self, came too ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... Prime Minister had capitulated. His Final Manifesto of Six Points issued on that day to the electorate furnishes a melancholy comparison with his program of three weeks earlier. I ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... great sorrow fell upon him that Roschen first felt towards him something more than the passing interest that every maiden reasonably feels in every seemly young man. Her disposition towards him, to be sure, even when thus stimulated by a sympathetic melancholy, was only that of friendliness; but it evidently was a friendliness so cordial and so sincere that it made quite a tolerable foundation upon which Ludwig freely built fine air-castles of hope. For his disposition towards Roschen was altogether that of a lover—as anybody might have known ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... not seen beyond lat. 28 degrees. Nor was it found in a wild state beyond Fort Grey, to the best of my recollection; these miserable and melancholy animals would come to water where we were, unconscious of our presence, and would gain the very bank of the creek before they discovered us, rousing us by as melancholy a howl as jackal ever made; their emaciated bodies standing ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... his model for a hero and a god. The forehead was exceedingly lofty—a rare thing in a Gypsy; the nose less Roman than Grecian—fine yet delicate; the eyes large, overhung with long drooping lashes, giving them almost a melancholy expression; it was only when they were highly elevated that the Gypsy glance peered out, if that can be called glance which is a strange stare, like nothing else in this world. His complexion—a beautiful ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... finger, the student's intellect, the sensualist's passions, all illustrate the law on its one side; and the dying out of faculties and tastes, and even of intuitions and conscience, by reason of simple disuse, are melancholy instances of it on the other. But the solemn words of this condemnation seem to point to a far more awful energy in its working in the future, when everything that has not been consecrated by employment for Jesus shall be taken away, and the soul, stripped of its garb, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... hear the sound," was the favourite song when heaving up the anchor preparatory to pointing homeward. This chanty has a silken, melancholy, and somewhat soft breeziness about it, and when it was well sung its flow went fluttering over the harbour, which re-echoed the joyous tidings until soloist and choristers alike became entranced by the power of their ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his own interior gaiety—of which a word by and by—is so interior, and its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of life; and that ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... John Royce Pederstone's was at its height, Phil Ralston was trudging the hills alone, coming over the ranges from Lumby, a village which lay several miles distant, where he had gone by stage direct from the smithy. He walked in the melancholy enjoyment of his own thoughts. It did him good—and he knew it—to get off in this way when things were not going to his liking. It gave him an opportunity to review himself in the cold blood of retrospect, without interference; and it gave him time quietly to review the conduct of others ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... on her knees, and put up a prayer. On rising, she saw such a crazy expression of joy on her husband's face, that the diabolical suggestion returned, and then Adeline sank into a sort of idiotic melancholy. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... had ceased falling, and the clouds of the last downpour, driven before the wind, were nearing the horizon towards the heights of Pere-Lachaise, which were wrapped in gloom; and against this stormy background Paris, illumined by a uniform clearness, assumed a lonely, melancholy grandeur. It seemed to be uninhabited, like one of those cities seen in a nightmare—the reflex of a world of death. To Jeanne it certainly appeared anything but pretty. She was now idly dreaming of those she ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... and sunken, the grass knee-high about it. There was hardly a sign of life about the place, though I could see an aged man smoking a pipe peacefully in the shade of an apple tree at the back. Everything wore an air of melancholy, desertion and loneliness. ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... dreaded the darkness of the evening, the melancholy feeling of the twilight. Then a flood of sorrow invaded his heart, a torrent of despair which seemed to overwhelm him and drive him mad. He was as afraid of his own thoughts as men are of criminals, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... are to deny ourselves the solace of remembering the mercies which may, perhaps, have gone from us. Memory may be like the calm radiance that fills the western sky from a sun that has set, sad and yet sweet, melancholy and lovely. But he means that we should so forget as, by the oblivion, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... left them stranded. Irresistible reaction plunged them into listless stupor; they forgot their enthusiasm; they thought no more of the men whom they had to rejoin; they surrendered themselves to the melancholy sweetness of finding themselves alone, hand in hand, in the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... bridge. It was easy to see that he was on his good behaviour; and from some fragments of conversations I overheard between them when they met in the passage opposite my door, I learned that he was 'doing the melancholy dodge,' as in the vernacular we would express it; and had many harrowing revelations to make as to the manner in which his heart had been trifled ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... sun, very pale, had just showed itself, making the knives and forks and the white wine in their glasses gleam faintly. Lunch had not come yet. They sat looking at each other silently. Andrews felt weary and melancholy. He could think of nothing to say. Jeanne was playing with some tiny white daisies with pink tips to their petals, arranging them in circles and crosses on ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... gets his right foot loose," muttered the cochero, stifling another sigh, "I'll give him my horses, and offer him my services even to death, for he'll free us from the Civil Guard." With a melancholy gaze he watched ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... took the shape of Courts of Love, where the bored but literary chatelaine discussed delicate problems of conduct pertaining to the heart. The minstrel about the lady's castle, for his part, sought her favourable notice not only by his songs but also by giving an object lesson of his melancholy condition. One would imagine that his proceedings were not always calculated to further their purpose. A famous singer, for instance, in honour of a lady who was named Lupa, caused himself to be sewn in a wolf's skin, and ran before the hounds till he ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... There was "heroic gaiety" there; only, as usual with gaiety, the passage of a peevish cloud seemed all the chillier. Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an expression of high-bred melancholy, it was a face that looked, after all, made for suffering—already half pleading, half defiant—as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair's breadth from its ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... in a striking manner, the original motif, and somehow expresses in a few words the poignant melancholy of the whole poem. Another advantage in finishing a long poem, such as this would be, in the same way as you began it is that it makes it clear to the reader that he is still reading the same poem. Sometimes, and especially in vers libre of an emotional and digressive character, the reader ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... The melancholy result, though unfortunately too easily explained, excited reports as ingenious as malevolent, to account for its suddenness, but like the injustice to his memory he has received from rivals or successors, who sought to raise a reputation ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... not go on like this for ever. She, who apparently had no ties, was never free; she had the duties without the joys, and for these few minutes, before a knock came at the door, she allowed herself the relief of melancholy. She was incapable of tears, but she wished she could cry bitterly and for a ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... one after the other by the way. They could hear, in the wide silence, the untiring chirp-chirp of the crickets. They were afraid, both of them, and they were sad; the melancholy of nightfall had entered into their little hearts. All round them was familiar ground, but the things they knew the best looked strange and uncanny. The earth seemed suddenly to have grown too big and too old for them. They were tired, and they began ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... letter from Mrs. Whiting needs no introduction. It bears a melancholy interest from the fact that the beloved writer died shortly afterwards, at Newark, ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... unbiased Opinion that London consisted of a vast swarm of melancholy Members of the Middle and Lower Classes of the Animal Kingdom who ate Sponge Cake with Clinkers in it, drank Tea, smoked Pipes and rode by Bus, and thought they ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... wilt be able to distinguish falsehood from truth by means of which knowledge men aim at possible things with greater moderation; and do not veil thyself in ignorance, for the result of this would be that thou wouldst be ineffectual and fall into melancholy and despair. ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... local traffic, and have set their own price on all provisions, from which some have made great profits. Salazar—who has with good reason been styled "the Las Casas of the Philippines"—enumerates a melancholy list of injuries and opressions inflicted upon the hapless natives by their conquerors, and urges in most forcible and eloquent language that they be protected from injustice and treated as human beings. He cites from the royal decrees the clauses which make such provisions ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... Creeper Cottage who slept that night was Annalise. Priscilla spent it walking up and down her bedroom, and Fritzing on the other side of the wall spent it walking up and down his. They could hear each other doing it; it was a melancholy sound. Once Priscilla was seized with laughter—a not very genial mirth, but still laughter—and had to fling herself on her bed and bury her face in the pillows lest Fritzing should hear so blood-curdling a noise. It was when their steps had fallen steadily together for several turns ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... room. If my life was not so full. You don't know how hard I work from morning to night. What time is there for me to be a Christian? What time is there, what room is there for Christianity in such a life as mine?" But does not it come to seem to us so strange, so absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man should say such a thing as that? It is as if the engine had said it had no room for the steam. It is as if the tree had said it had no room for the sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room for the tide. ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... fortune, both with his money and his interest, and his industry, and if need were, not by sticking at any wickedness whatsoever that might be useful to them, to bend and turn about his own nature and laveer with every wind, to live severely with the melancholy, merrily with the pleasant, gravely with the aged, wantonly with the young, desperately with the bold, and debauchedly with the luxurious. With this variety and multiplicity of his nature, as he had made a collection ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... The 'morbid melancholy,' which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the stomach, not molesting any way, but heating him as a fire doth a kettle, that is put to it. After the first sleep 'tis not amiss to lie on the left side, that the meat may the better descend, and sometimes again on the belly, but never on the back. Seven or eight hours is a competent time for a melancholy man ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... first two days of Harry King's absence Madam Manovska relapsed into a more profound melancholy, and the care of her mother took up Amalia's time and thoughts so completely as to give her little for indulging her own anxiety for Harry's safety. Strangely, she felt no fear for themselves, although they were thus alone on the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... talked earnestly to Travers Guy Cyril, you will remember him. She looked not unlike Guido's Beatrice; (I don't mean the daubs one sees, but Guido's own), the same soul-full eyes, Grecian nose, and lovely full curved lips. Guy, always melancholy, Vaura, always sympathetic, the reflection of his sad eyes lent to hers a deep tenderness; that he loves her hopelessly, poor fellow, is only too evident, he bid us adieu for a New York trip, thence, he seemed to think, no one cared. And so, lives are parted; one is inclined to quarrel ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... infancy. One was to wander with the stain of murder upon his soul, in frightful physical pain, with a price upon his head and the curse of a world upon his name, until he died a dog's death in a burning barn; the wife was to pass the rest of her days in melancholy and madness; and one of the lovers was to slay the other, and end his ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... would be rung out in a few hours, in company with our Utopian expectations. All our hopes of a rare New Year were, like our Christmas phantasies, dashed to the ground. The morrow promised to be rare enough in a melancholy sense, but it would not be New Year's Day. There was but one ray of comfort to sustain us, namely, the approach of the hero of Candahar; for although a certain period of waiting had yet to be endured—ere another famous march could be accomplished—the coming of Roberts disposed ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... somewhat melancholy spectacle of an impoverished aristocratic class attempting to maintain some semblance of their former position, though they no longer have the means to do so. They flourished during two or three centuries of almost continuous war, and became ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... attainments do honour to the place where their education and their minds were matured. And even the recollection of most of those, who have been removed from this lower world, is attended with a soothing melancholy, which partakes more of pleasure and thankfulness for having enjoyed their society, than of pain. The memory of the ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... cheeks denoted convalescence. But I had no fears of an immediate catastrophe; nay, I persuaded myself that she would ultimately recover. And thus cheerfulness reigned in our little society. Idris conversed with animation on a thousand topics. Her chief desire was to lead our thoughts from melancholy reflections; so she drew charming pictures of a tranquil solitude, of a beauteous retreat, of the simple manners of our little tribe, and of the patriarchal brotherhood of love, which would survive the ruins of the populous nations which had lately existed. We shut out from our thoughts ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.—It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Angels, the "judgment chapter" in Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. It was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir. Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... new essays of Elia, I could not but feel somewhat indignant that such excellent productions of such an excellent writer should have been "underkept and down supprest" so long. I was as much ravished with these new-found essays of Lamb's as good old Nicholas Gerbelius (see Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Partition II., Section 2, Member 4) was with a few Greek authors restored to light. If I had had one or two loving, enthusiastic admirers of Charles Lamb to enjoy with me the delight of perusing these uncollected Elias, I should have been "all felicity up to the brim." For with me, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... to continue your studies, to read, write poetry, ramble about the woods and commune with nature, as you so love to do, and not think of assuming the duties of a woman, while you are yet nothing but a child. Oh! it is the most melancholy thing in the world to me, to see a person trying to get beyond their years. You must not do it, Gabriella. I wish I could make you stop thinking for one year. I do not like to see a cheek as young as yours pale with overmuch thought. Do you know you are getting ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... bed for three or four days, and on rising could only sit by the fireside, silent, melancholy. Widdowson indulged his hope, though Monica herself laughed it aside, and even showed annoyance if he return to the subject. Her temper was strangely uncertain; some chance word in a conversation would irritate her beyond endurance, and after ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... you contrasts merely to fit my theories. But there is Duerer's "Knight and Death," his greatest plate; and if I had Lionardo's "Medusa" here, which he painted when only a boy, you would have seen how he was held by the same chain. And you cannot but wonder why, this being the melancholy temper of the great Greek or naturalistic school, I should have called it the school of light. I call it so because it is through its intense love of light that the darkness becomes apparent to it, and through its intense love of truth and form that all mystery becomes attractive ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... that saw the sweet domestic cheer she diffused through the house with her harmless little gossip about this and that, and the artfully artless kindnesses to him she mingled with all, could have blamed him? He was given to melancholy and to musing; his cheek was sometimes pale, and his step languid; and he saw, all too often, troublesome phantoms coming to meet him. This disposition in another would have incited the keenest ridicule in the mind of Jenny Bowen, but in Hobert it was well enough; nay, more, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... entered upon the duties of his office, created a Balia for the reformation of the state, which banished Benedetto Alberti and admonished all the rest of his family except Antonio. Before his departure, Benedetto called them together, and observing their melancholy demeanor, said, "You see, my fathers, and you the elders of our house, how fortune has ruined me and threatened you. I am not surprised at this, neither ought you to be so, for it always happens thus to those who among a multitude of the wicked, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... moaned hoarsely around the heavy solid walls of "Sunnybank," and the weird sound of the rustling leaves impressed one with thoughts alike weird and melancholy. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... place of another kind, and which has more the air of what it would be, than anything I have yet met with: it was the convent of the Chartreux. All the conveniences, or rather (if there was such a word) all the adaptments are assembled here, that melancholy, meditation, selfish devotion, and despair would require. But yet 'tis pleasing. Soften the terms, and mellow the uncouth horror that reigns here, but a little, and 'tis a charming solitude. It stands on a large space of ground, is old and irregular. The chapel ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... and friend of the whites, had smoked many pipes of peace there with Colonel Zane. At a later period, when King Louis Phillippe, who had been exiled from France by Napoleon, had come to America, during the course of his melancholy wanderings he had stopped at Fort Henry a few days. His stay there was marked by a fierce blizzard and the royal guest passed most of his time at Colonel Zane's fireside. Musing by those roaring logs perhaps he saw the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... severe reprimand. He, however, went to Frey, and asked him boldly why he was so sad and silent. Frey answered, that he had seen a maiden of such surpassing beauty that if he could not possess her he should not live much longer, and that this was what rendered him so melancholy. 'Go, therefore,' he added, 'and ask her hand for me, and bring her here whether her father be willing or not, and I will amply reward thee.' Skirnir undertook to perform the task, provided he might be previously put in possession of Frey's sword, which was of such excellent quality that ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... Lord Melbourne for the position, in which he had allowed the young Queen to be placed, and considered that he had brought discredit on his Government by the circumstances in which he and his colleagues had resumed office. The melancholy death of Lady Flora Hastings following on this overthrow of the ordinary arrangements, intensified the wrath of the Tories, and helped to arouse a sense of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... French, under Gen. Berthier, and died in exile. When Berthier entered Rome, many of the cardinals "fled from the city on the wings of terror;" but those who remained "were disposed still to uphold the authority of the Pontiff." Finally, however, "with melancholy voice, they pronounced their absolute renunciation of the temporal government."—Life of Pius VI. His successor resumed his position. But in 1848 Pius IX. fled from his own subjects, and was only restored by French arms. Thus gradually the Babylonish woman became unseated, and fell ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... Even so, whatever is spoken of the joy of the Spirit, or the peace of conscience, and whatsoever is seen by the world of abstaining from the pleasures of the world, the natural mind cannot but judge it foolishness, or melancholy, because they do not hear that pleasant and sweet harmony, and concert of the word and Spirit, in the souls of God's children. Else if they heard the sweet Psalmist of Israel piping, they could ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went into their dark, stuffy, dull rooms. Both were silent. Laevsky lighted a candle, while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down, and without taking off her cloak and hat, lifted her melancholy, guilty eyes to him. ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... this at the time to their being preceded or accompanied by smiles. When five months old, he seemed to understand a compassionate, expression and tone of voice. When a few days over six months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly depressed; now this child could rarely have seen any other child crying, and never a grown-up person crying, and I should doubt whether at so early an age he could have reasoned on the subject. Therefore ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... of window. Twice the book dropped off her lap; twice she picked it up and laboriously found the page again. Then she gave it up, and descended to the back door, to see if anyone were about who might give her news. But the town-place was deserted by all save the ducks, the old white sow, and a melancholy crew of cocks and hens huddled under the dripping eaves of the cow-house. Returning to her room, she settled down on the window-seat, and watched the blaze of the bonfire increase as the short ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... touched the upper edge of Birs-Nimroud, giving it for one instant a weird effect, as though the ghost of some Babylonian watchman were waving a lit torch from its summit,—but the lurid glare soon faded and a dead gray twilight settled solemnly down over the melancholy landscape. With a sudden feeling of dejection and lassitude upon him, Alwyn, heaving a deep sigh, went onward, and soon perceived, lying a little to the north of the river, a small, roughly erected tenement with a wooden cross on its roof. Rightly ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... fairest pastoral valley of New England, he lived in the contemplation of the ideas that had passed across his mind in the quiet of European galleries, and now became more definite impressions. The secret of those years, with their deep, slow current of refined and melancholy thought, is now sealed with him in eternal sleep; but from the works that remain to us as the matured fruits of his life, we may gain some hint of his experiences. It is not to be questioned that he drew from the New-England soil that he tilled, and the air that he breathed, an inspiration which ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... tick did, and a week later he was broke. I do not say so much about Tralee being able to support one hundred and sixty liquor shops, because there is a little shipping, but how Cahirciveen can enable fifty publicans to thrive is a melancholy ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... good, Master George, to see the captain coming round as he is. Quite takes to the garden again. But dear, dear! It's in a melancholy state." ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... seems sad and melancholy. I fancy he has got a Monday head (Kipling), but he revives as the day goes on. As we go on, the banks become hills and the broad river, which has been showing sheets of sandbanks in all directions, now ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the head had not a sordid line, while the hand that he now and again raised, brushing his forehead meditatively, had gained much in strength and force. Yet there was something—something different, that brought a slight cloud into her eyes. It came to her now, a certain melancholy in the bearing of the figure, erect and well-balanced as it was. Once the feeling came, the certainty grew. And presently she found a strange sadness in the eyes, something that lurked behind all that he did and all that he was, some ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... overgrown ruins of a battery that had once commanded the entrance; and there were white-roofed houses, with deep verandas, which stood in little clearings with coral cliffs below them. On the opposite shore thick groves of palm-trees rose with their singular, melancholy beauty. Then as the channel narrowed, they passed an old Portuguese fort which carried the mind back to the bold adventurers who had first sailed those distant seas, and directly afterwards a mass of white buildings ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... they returned home. No news yet from Lerici. Lady Annabel grew uneasy again. The pensive and melancholy hour encouraged gloom; but Venetia, who was ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... me," said Camusot in a melancholy voice; "I shall not dine with you. It is my wife's birthday, I ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... and mugs and a farthing candle in the centre. Being right in the eyes of her, as it is termed, we could plainly hear the water slapping against the bends outside of her, as it was divided by the keelson, and borne away by the strong flood tide. It was a melancholy sound; I had never heard it before; and during a pause, as I listened to it, one of the men observed, "Queer sound, boy, ain't it? You'd think that the water was lapping in right among us. But noises aboard ship don't sound as they do on shore; I don't know why." ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... sometimes by reason of their divergencies Christians stand like frowning cliffs that look threateningly at one another across a narrow gorge, but deep below ground they are continuous and the rock is unbroken. In many and melancholy ways 'the unity of faith and knowledge' is contradicted in the existing organisations of the Church, and we are tempted to postpone its coming to the day of the new Jerusalem which is compact together; but the clarion note of this great text may encourage us to hope, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... night, as I am forced to reckon, I rose seasonably.... In reviewing my time from Easter, 1777, I found a very melancholy and shameful blank. So little has been done that days and months are without any trace. My health has, indeed, been very much interrupted. My nights have been commonly not only restless, but painful and fatiguing. ....Some relaxation ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... second lecture on the "Evidences of Religion afforded by the Phenomena of Nature, and the Consistency of Science with Divine Revelation." We were much pleased. He is the most complete elocutionist I ever heard, and impressed a crowded audience with his sublime subject. What a melancholy loss to England by his one false step, that degraded him in moral society! Walked to the Astor, and took one cigar each, when Mr. B. told me he was collecting charity for the poor widow of H. W——s, who had left her without a ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore
... howled in an interminable corridor all night. It did not seem to have anything to do with the wind out of doors, but to be a blast that had been casually shut in when the doors were closed behind the last Grand Duke who came hither and departed, and ever since it has been kept prisoner, and makes a melancholy wail along the corridor. The dreamy stupidity of this conceit proves how ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which we style the Madonna di San Sisto; for there she stands—the transfigured woman—at once completely human and completely divine, an abstraction of power, purity, and love, poised on the empurpled air, and requiring no other support; looking out with her melancholy, loving mouth, her slightly dilated, sibylline eyes, quite through the universe, to the end and consummation of all things; sad, as if she beheld afar off the visionary sword that was to reach her heart ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... woman's voice and mild brown eyes. What terrible crime had consigned him to this living tomb? For what past sorrow is he weary of his life? What anguish of remorse has driven him to such a solitude? Yet he looked simple and placid; his melancholy was subdued and calm, as if life were over for him, and he were waiting for death to come with a friend's greeting upon noiseless wings some summer night across the fen-lands in a cloud of soft ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... negro I knew well, who, after having been often thus transported from island to island, at last resided in Montserrat. This man used to tell me many melancholy tales of himself. Generally, after he had done working for his master, he used to employ his few leisure moments to go a fishing. When he had caught any fish, his master would frequently take them from him without paying him; and at other times some other white people would serve him in the same ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... shimmering jewel-like in the steely light of the semi-Arctic evening. Black belts of gloomy pinewoods on the lower slopes of the mountains; the trees snow-burdened, but black with the darkness of night in their melancholy depths. The earth white; snow to the thickness of many feet on all. Life none; not a beast of the earth, nor a fowl of the air, nor the hum of an insect. Solitude. Cold—grey, pitiless cold. Night ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... ardent affection—such an affection as a sister seldom 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 to afford ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... themselves; when at length he awakened, and it appeared that the latter vision was in fact realized. The sounds which had at first influenced his dreams, and at length broken his slumbers, were of the most horrible, as well as the most melancholy description. They came from the ranges of pallet-beds, which were closely packed together in a species of military hospital, where a burning fever was the prevalent complaint. Many of the patients were under the influence of a high delirium, ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... 19th, as I went to the Parliament House, the people looked melancholy, dejected, and frightened out of their wits. The members were afraid to open their mouths, and nobody would mention the name of Mazarin except Menardeau Champre, who spoke of him with encomiums, by ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... noble brother is a slave, with felons, laboring with the cursed chain-gang in the same city to which we are bound. Now, boys, do you wonder that when I found myself under orders to go again to the scene of all this misery I was affected, and that a melancholy has possessed me which has increased as the voyage has progressed? I did determine at first that I would leave the ship at Gibralter and go home, but I dreaded to part with my shipmates. I shall not go ashore while we lay at Matanzas for many reasons, though I should incur no risk, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... one of horror. A screech-owl had just sent its dreadful note in melancholy waves out upon the still night air. It started low, almost pianissimo, rose with a hideous crescendo to fortissimo, and then died away like the wail of a lost soul. It came from just ahead of them and to the right. Alice's horse shied and danced nervously. Prudence's ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... trades than to husbandry"; in spite, also, of the almost sacred character of husbandry, which was clearly recognized in "elder times," so that even the rudest and most savage peoples respected ploughmen and tillers of the soil in time of war. He then quotes some melancholy verses of Virgil, and gives the whole chapter a twist of humour by ending up with—"But not a word of this in any case, especially that I told you so; and we will proceed to the ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... walked back to his seat, the exultant light went out of his eyes, his limbs relaxed, the windows and the sunlight cleared to vulgar day, and his face flushed with timidity. He sat down with a feeling of melancholy in his heart, as if something divine had faded out of ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... time insinuates delay. Seeing her displeased, he urges for the morrow: but, before she can answer, gives her the alternative of other days. Yet, wanting to reward himself, as if he had obliged her, she repulses him on a liberty he would have taken. He is enraged. Her melancholy reflections on her future prospects with such a man. The moral she deduces from her story. [A note, defending her conduct from the censure which passed upon her ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... seen to speak to the lone knight, the one who had been made prisoner last of all. A melancholy figure, he did not seem to realize that release had come with the advent of these knights. In fact, through all the hubbub he seemed to have been lost within himself. No doubt, they were bitter thoughts that possessed him and at ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... least the boat, and attempt our relief. The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer, and turned occasionally towards the vessel, still far to leeward.[14] All this passed in the most perfect silence, and the melancholy solemnity of the group made an impression never to be ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... of the bolder of them had summoned up courage to settle among our oysters, despite the scarecrow which we had set up; but they took to flight immediately upon our approach, and hovered over us all day, uttering their melancholy cries with such persistency, and creating such a volume of sound, that we could scarcely hear our ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... nor when she light, did any body press (as she seemed to expect, and staid for it,) to take her down, but was taken down by her own gentlemen. She looked mighty out of humour, and had a yellow plume in her hat, (which all took notice of,) and yet is very handsome, but very melancholy: nor did any body speak to her, or she so much as smile or speak to any body. I followed them up into White Hall, and into the Queene's presence, where all the ladies walked, talking and fiddling with their hats and ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... on the history of genius without being impressed with a melancholy feeling at the obscurity in which the lives of the poets of our country are, with few exceptions, involved. That they lived, and wrote, and died, comprises nearly all that is known of many, and, of others, the few ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... she is devoted to her husband," said Rosamond, implying a notion of necessary sequence which the scientific man regarded as the prettiest possible for a woman; but she was thinking at the same time that it was not so very melancholy to be mistress of Lowick Manor with a husband likely to die soon. "Do you ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... sad, soft, most melancholy wreck of a promising human intellect that it has ever been my lot to behold! Where is your scorn of convention gone? ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... unhappiness, let alone misery like that of the previous night, that moved Finn to this vocal display; but only a kind of gentle melancholy such as we call home-sickness, and after five minutes of it, he curled up beside one of the ricks, after scratching and turning round and round sufficiently to make a kind of burrow for himself, and was fast asleep in about ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... Slave for twice two (m) Year. My Cloaths were fashionably new, Nor were my Shifts of Linnen Blue; But things are changed, now at the Hoe, I daily work, and Bare-foot go, In weeding Corn or feeding Swine, I spend my melancholy Time. Kidnap'd and Fool'd, I hither fled, To shun a hated Nuptial (n) Bed, And to my cost already find, Worse Plagues than those I left behind. Whate'er the Wanderer did profess, Good-faith I cou'd not chuse but guess The Cause which brought ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... Andrews Bay,' beautiful alike in winter mists and in the crystal days of still winter sunshine; the quiet brown streets brightened by the scarlet gowns; the long limitless sands; the dark blue distant hills, and far-off snowy peaks of the Grampians; the majestic melancholy towers, monuments of old religion overthrown; the deep dusky porch of the college chapel, with Kennedy's arms in wrought iron on the oaken door; the solid houses with their crow steps and gables, all the forlorn memories ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... supposed that his occupation would have inclined him to melancholy. Far from it. He was a brisk, active creature, about middle height, with jet black hair, and a quick circulation. He was never overcome, as he might reasonably have been, with meditations on the flux of time. He never rose in the morning saddened by the thought that the day would be ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... pair of Dresden figures, a blue Sevres vase of graceful shape, a bronze clock with gilded rose-wreathed Cupids; and then raised his eyes to the two portraits which hung above. One of these was familiar enough—the dark melancholy face of Felix Arnault, whose portrait by different hands and at different periods of his life hung in nearly every room of La Glorieuse. The blood surged into his face and receded again at sight of the other. Oh, so strangely like! The ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... itself, the true centre of his inheritance. The house there had been uninhabited since his father's early years; it was a closed and melancholy memento; he had reanimated a comfortable stone dwelling at Shadrach Furnace; its solid grey facade drawn out by two happy additions to the original, small square. It had been, traditionally, at first, the house of the head furnacemen; sometime after ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... was an old one, in the pockets of which Clemens kept a melancholy assortment of pipes, soiled handkerchiefs, neckties, letters, and ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... land we see from any hilltop. As we gaze at its far off rises, its hazy, shadowy valleys, we feel within us a longing and a faint melancholy. There, we think, dwell the friends who would love us, if we were known to them, and there, too, must be found the beauty and the happiness that we have failed to discover where we are. It seems to us that there, in the distance, ...
— Autumn • Robert Nathan
... dwelt by the Mediterranean might not ally himself with a woman of the Bear clan whose home was on the shores of the Baltic, and who was in no way related to him by consanguinity. These details are dry, but absolutely necessary to the comprehension of the First Radical's stormy and melancholy career. We must also remember that, among the tribes, there was no fixed or monarchical government. The little democratic groups were much influenced by the medicine-men or wizards, who combined the functions of the modern clergy and of the medical profession. The old men, too, had ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... pleased to see her, and made no attempt to assume the contrary. He was sitting in his library, moody and melancholy, still in the half-dazed condition into which the death of Christine Manderson had cast him. His face was drawn, haggard, and sickly; his eyes were bloodshot. He looked up at her with a forbidding frown, and did not move from ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... sad farewell as the Zaire passed round the bend of the river, and looked, as he desired to look, a melancholy figure with his huge pipe in his mouth and his hands thrust dejectedly into ...
— The Keepers of the King's Peace • Edgar Wallace
... attentive, reasoning fashion of our friend. It often seemed to Mallet that he wholly lacked the prime requisite of a graceful flaneur—the simple, sensuous, confident relish of pleasure. He had frequent fits of extreme melancholy, in which he declared that he was neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. He was neither an irresponsibly contemplative nature nor a sturdily practical one, and he was forever looking in vain for the uses ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... the years that followed that first happy day at Moor Court seem to me now, on looking back upon them, a good deal mixed up together—till, that is to say, a change, a melancholy one for me, came over my happy ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... when Mrs. Two-Shoes was diverting the Children after Dinner, as she usually did with some innocent Games, or entertaining and instructive Stories, that a Man arrived with the melancholy News of Sally Jones's Father being thrown from his Horse, and thought past all Recovery; nay, the Messenger said, that he was seemingly dying, when he came away. Poor Sally was greatly distressed, as indeed were all the School, for she dearly loved her Father, and Mrs. Two-Shoes, ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... Munich, Paris and London. After his first appearance in Vienna, the foremost musical critic there wrote of him: "From the outset Chopin took place in the front rank of masters. The perfect delicacy of his touch, his indescribable mechanical dexterity, the melancholy tints in his style of shading, and the rare clearness of his delivery are in him qualities which bear the stamp of genius. He must be regarded as one of the most remarkable meteors blazing on the musical horizon." In Paris he gave a concert at Pleyel's house. ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... the day set for Mr. Barnum's funeral. The morning was cold, gray, and dismal. Nature's heart, with the spring joy put back and deadened, symboled the melancholy that had fallen upon Bridgeport. No town was ever more transformed than was this city by one earthly event. On the public and private buildings were hung the habiliments of woe; flags were at half mast, and, in the store windows ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... his chair to the actor. Godolphin was very cordial, deferentially cordial, with a delicate vein of reminiscent comradery running through his manner. She spoke to him of having at last got his ideal for Salome, and he said, with a slight sigh and a sort of melancholy absence: "Yes, Miss Havisham will do it magnificently." Then he asked, with a look ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... of the opposite sex, and upon whom Mr. Jinks evidently desired to produce an impression, gazed at the cavalier with tender melancholy in her ruddy face, and especially regarded the legs of ...
— The Last of the Foresters • John Esten Cooke
... feeler and a thinker; over his emotions and his reflections spread a mellowing of melancholy; more than a mellowing: in trouble and bereavement it became a cloud. He did not know much about Lucy Snowe; what he knew, he did not very accurately comprehend: indeed his misconceptions of my character often made me smile; ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... But there was one melancholy part. In the mouth of Loch Aline we found a great sea-going ship at anchor; and this I supposed at first to be one of the King's cruisers which were kept along that coast, both summer and winter, to prevent communication with the French. ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... whole graceful line of her figure thrown back in the large arm-chair which she occupied—except, indeed, the head, which was bent slightly forward—sat a very lovely young woman, perhaps of two or three and twenty years of age, in meditations evidently of a somewhat melancholy cast. The hand on which her head leaned, and which was very soft, round, and fair, was covered with rings, while the other was quite free from such ornaments, with the exception of one small ring of gold upon the slender third finger. ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... our cavalry, was by this time far away at sea. The other officers had shown their incapacity that morning. For my own part, I chose out a snug billet on a hearthrug in the George Inn, where I slept very soundly for several hours. While I slept, the Duke held a melancholy council to ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... half-breed, on whose cheek The marks of seasons wild and winters bleak Were softened by the warm light from the west— Sunset—the last day-beauty, and the best! Beside the spring he sat and gazed and dreamed In melancholy silence, till it seemed His very soul was pouring from his eyes And melting in that mirror, where the skies Were glassed in all their purity, and where No ripple reached the surface from the fair White bosom of the palpitating sand,— A constant ...
— Indian Legends of Minnesota • Various
... 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 that is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... by degrees into a deep melancholy, from which nothing could rouse him except his desire to purify and preach morality to the students around him. To anyone who knows university life such a task will seem superhuman. Sand, however, was not discouraged, and if he could not gain ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - KARL-LUDWIG SAND—1819 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... I watched the great, clumsy, shaggy beasts, as they grazed in the open glade. Mixed with the eager excitement of the hunter was a certain half-melancholy feeling as I gazed on these bison, themselves part of the last remnant of a nearly vanished race. Few, indeed, are the men who now have, or evermore shall have, the chance of seeing the mightiest of American beasts in ...
— The Elson Readers, Book 5 • William H. Elson and Christine M. Keck
... her seclusion was explained by the death of one of her ladies whom she loved, the Countess of Nottingham: but soon it could not be concealed that the Queen herself was seized with a dangerous illness: sleep and appetite began to fail her: she showed a deep melancholy. 'No,' she replied to one of the kinsmen of her mother's house, Robert Cary, who at that moment had come back to court and addressed friendly words to her about her health, 'No Robin, well I am not, my heart has been for ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... rode forth on a quest. The first had been after my papers. The second was after my love. The second was the hopeless one, and, overcome by melancholy, I did not even spur my horse swiftly on my mission. There was upon me the deep-rooted sadness which balances the mirth of my people,—the Celtic aptitude for discouragement; and even the keening of old women in the red glow of the peat fire could ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... quietly, as if to dismiss all conception of taunt and insult and said with his soft melancholy eyes fixed upon the working features of Lily's aunt, "This man is more worthy of her than I. He prays you, in his letter, to prepare your niece for that change of relationship which he dreads too abruptly to break to her ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... ox-eye daisies, they looked at each other suspiciously, and each felt that somehow it was the other fellow's fault. Aggrieved and miserable, they went rambling off, each his own way, to face alone what Fate might have in store for him. And Young Grumpy, looking up from a melancholy but consoling feast which he was making on a mushroom, found ...
— Children of the Wild • Charles G. D. Roberts
... twist a rope of which I never held the other end. I feel sometimes as though it must be the life of another that I have taken, leaving my own unfinished, for I was never meant to be a professor. That is the way of it; and if I am sad and inclined to melancholy humours, it is because I miss my old self, and he seems to have left me without even a kindly word at parting. I was fond of my old self, but I did not respect him much. And my present self I respect, without fondness. Is that metaphysics? ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... not expect me, Miss Mutimer,' Keene replied. He invariably began conversation with her in a severely formal and respectful tone, and to-day there was melancholy in his voice. ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... this mass of smiling verdure and blossom-loaded boughs, appeared the dark funereal cypress, the emblem of death, intruding itself in melancholy contrast with the smiling and cheerful tints by which it ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... of the church is a melancholy spectacle of churchwarden methods, but probably Lockton will before many years receive that careful restoration that has taken place at Ellerburne and Sinnington. The font is one of those unadorned, ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... of a reserved nature is sometimes more attractive to women than the most fluent vivacity. Possibly there was also a melancholy grace in this sardonic soldier's manner that affected her, for she ...
— Clarence • Bret Harte
... Baseness for the Greatest to descend and looke into their owne Estate. Some forbeare it, not upon Negligence alone, But doubting to bring themselves into Melancholy in respect they shall finde it Broken. But wounds cannot be cured without Searching. Hee that cleareth by Degrees induceth a habit of Frugalitie, and gaineth as well upon his Minde, as ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... to the distant isle of Calypso, and warned the bright-haired nymph, whom he found weaving in her charmed grotto, that she must let her mortal lover go or brave the wrath of the gods. The nymph, though loath to part with her lover, sought out the melancholy Ulysses, where he sat weeping beside the deep, and giving him tools, led him to the forest and showed him where to fell trees with which to construct a raft. His labor finished, she provided the hero with perfumed ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... with deep melancholy, "it must be the city atmosphere" (Dartmoor was a town of perhaps fifteen thousand inhabitants), "for, you know, she never was so perverse in Killamet. I'm afraid she'll disgrace us all!" Upon which Sara would comfort her by saying that, as most parrots were ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... her best-beloved lord the young widow was overcome with brooding melancholy from which nothing could rouse her. At that time you, my Margery and Agnes, her daughters, clung to me as to your own father; and when, at the end of three years, your mother was healed of that melancholy, it had come about ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... little white thing regards me with melancholy. His ears twitch restlessly and his beautiful eyes, so fine, so observant of everything, say to me as plain ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... her house for one whom he called his cousin, a fair young woman, together with her serving girl, who did attend upon her. She tarried about a month, seeing no one, and going out only towards the evening, accompanied by her servant. She spake little, but did seem melancholy and exceeding mournful, often crying very bitterly. Sir Christopher came only once to see her, and Good wife Nowell saith she well remembers seeing her take leave of him on the roadside, and come back weeping and sobbing dolefully; and that ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... that reminds me that Eda and your wife are particularly desirous of having breakfast," said Frank. "In fact they sent me specially to lay their melancholy case before you; and I have great fears that Eda will lay violent hands on the raw pork if her morning meal is delayed much longer. As for Chimo, he is rushing about the island in a state of ravenous despair; so pray let ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... grieved at parting from me, at leaving her dear old Southern relatives; and secretly she perhaps half suspected that she might never come back to her Gascon home. It was a November day, dissolving fitfully into warm rain, and very melancholy. I was to take the late train to Agen with the two girls. And she and I, when all was ready, were to have the afternoon together. Of course we must have it serene, as if no parting were to close it. All traces of departure, of packing, were ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... auxiliary corps. On 20th April General Clarke, head of the Topographical Bureau at the War Office, agreed to send 10,000 men and 20,000 stand of arms. The mercurial Irishman encountered endless delays, and was often a prey to melancholy; but the news of Bonaparte's victories in Italy led him to picture the triumph of ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... it might be well to state, signified the prairie; its melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their train existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as in certain nether circles the head of the house receives his superlative ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... have added, my brother," said the Abbot, listening with melancholy acquiescence to the detail of his own merits, "that I caused to be built that curious screen, which secureth the cloisters from the north-east wind.—But all these things avail nothing—As we read in ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... perpetual disputation; and even a reprieve for three days was granted her, in hopes that she would be persuaded during that time to pay, by a timely conversion, some regard to her eternal welfare. The lady Jane had presence of mind, in those melancholy circumstances, not only to defend her religion by all the topics then in use, but also to write a letter to her sister[v] in the Greek language; in which, besides sending her a copy of the Scriptures in that tongue, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... prospect in the distance. Not that the Surveyor brought the lesson home to himself, or admitted that he could be so utterly undone, either by continuance in office or ejectment. Yet my reflections were not the most comfortable. I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavoured to calculate how much longer I ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... chaste Sita was dwelling there afflicted with melancholy and grief on account of her lord, attired in mean garb, with but a single jewel (on the marital thread on her wrist), and incessantly weeping, seated on a stone, and waited upon by Rakshasa women, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... beating and hand him over to Olynthides to be sold at auction without a character." Her survey of her former home and her selection of the ornaments, pictures, statues, articles of furniture and other objects which she desired reserved for herself she completed with an air less of melancholy than of puzzled thought. ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White
... beautiful Adonis, the Count de Volaski, looking very fair and dainty, very languid and melancholy. ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth
... however, a melancholy ride, and John felt more down-hearted than ever before in his life as he entered the market square of Capetown. Here all was in confusion, burghers were galloping hither and thither, and every one seemed too busy and excited to notice Colton as he rode wearily towards the Field Cornet's ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... up, advanced toward the place whence he heard the voice, and coming to the door of a great hall, opened it, and saw a handsome young man, richly habited, seated upon a throne raised a little above the ground. Melancholy was painted on his countenance. The sultan drew near and saluted him; the young man returned his salutation, by an inclination of his head, not being able to rise, at the same time saying: "My lord, I should rise to receive you, but am hindered by sad necessity, and therefore hope you will ...
— The Arabian Nights - Their Best-known Tales • Unknown
... perhaps rather more surprising that he should have liked Spenser than that he should have liked the other two; and we must suppose that the profusion of beautiful pictures in the "Faerie Queen" enabled him, not to appreciate (for he never could have done that), but to tolerate or pass over the deep melancholy and the occasional philosophisings of the poet. But the attraction of Dryden and Chaucer for him is very easily understood. Both are eminently cheerful poets, Dryden with the cheerfulness born of manly sense, Chaucer with that of youth and abounding animal spirits. Leigh Hunt seems ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury
... may have been, their appearance would not have been altogether reassuring to a man, for instance, travelling with a good many valuables about him. There was Grant the engineer, who never spoke at all, and who loved his engines with a personal love; Pedro, a man with big, melancholy eyes, half Basque and half Italian; an old Belgian stoker and a nigger from South Carolina; and, lastly, John Lewis (or Black John, as he was always called), who came from a Danish West Indian island, and who said he was an Irishman and had ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... "8th.—Having the melancholy duty of yesterday over was a relief, only alloyed by the sad prospect of a near recurrence. I now turned my mind seriously to departure, having well weighed the pros and cons of ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... that Byron's love of the desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young and very happy. There is a certain darkness which we see in wine when seen in shadow; we see it again in the night that has just buried a gorgeous sunset. The wine seems black, and yet at the same ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... Birs-Nimroud, giving it for one instant a weird effect, as though the ghost of some Babylonian watchman were waving a lit torch from its summit,—but the lurid glare soon faded and a dead gray twilight settled solemnly down over the melancholy landscape. With a sudden feeling of dejection and lassitude upon him, Alwyn, heaving a deep sigh, went onward, and soon perceived, lying a little to the north of the river, a small, roughly erected tenement with a wooden cross on its roof. Rightly concluding that this must be Elzear of Melyana's ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... turned into mourning. It was at that very time that the disastrous conflict took place, in which the English were routed, and the Duke of Clarence, whom Henry had left his representative on the Continent, was slain. Where the King was when the melancholy tidings reached him, and which induced him to cut short his progress, does not appear. We know that the joyful news of Agincourt reached London on the fourth morning after the battle; and probably ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... grateful for the present, as his wife, he said, was in delicate health, and to her it would be especially welcome. He invited us into the cabin where she was seated. She was a nice, pleasant-looking woman, though it struck me that her countenance bore a peculiarly melancholy expression. He at once handed us a bundle of English papers, published long after we had left home, ...
— Twice Lost • W.H.G. Kingston
... court of Saul is variously accounted for. According to one narrative, Saul, being possessed by an evil spirit, fell at times into a profound melancholy, from which he could be aroused only by the playing of a harp. On learning that David was skilled in this instrument, he begged Jesse to send him his son, and the lad soon won the king's affection. As often as the illness came upon him, David took his harp, and "Saul was refreshed, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... crowded, were sent forth under the name of plays. The Cassandra or Alexandra of Lycophron is the only specimen that has come to us. Its thorny difficulties deter the reader, but Fox speaks of it as breathing a rich vein of melancholy. The Thyestes of Varius and the Medea of Ovid were no doubt greatly improved copies of dramas of ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... passed with little or no improvement, and as every hour of inactivity was a real menace to the success of their plans, no one can wonder that they chafed over this most exasperating delay. Under ordinary circumstances it would have been melancholy enough to watch the mottled, wet, green walls of their tents and to hear the everlasting patter of the falling snow and the ceaseless rattle of the fluttering canvas, but when the prospect of failure of their cherished plan was added to the acute discomforts ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... course, there was but one manly thing to do: confess the whole matter to General Bradshaw. But he felt sure he'd rather die than do this. He went over to where Aunt Silvy was barbecuing the deer, the most melancholy-looking boy, perhaps, that ever was at a barbecue with a cotton-bloom in his button-hole. To her he told the truth, and felt better the instant he had spoken it. But when he asked ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... Harwell University in June, and left class day morning for home. He had the satisfaction of seeing his name in the list of honor men for the year, having attained A or B in all studies for the three terms. The parting with Outfield West was shorn of much of its melancholy by reason of the latter's promise to visit Joel in August. The suggestion had been made by Outfield, and Joel had at once warmly ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... sighted the sea, wide-stretched and restless, ahead, and turned westward parallel with the coast-line, till, in the afternoon, he came unto "a land where it was always afternoon"—a flat, damp, dwarf-treed, relaxing, gray land, mild, as a rule, and melancholy—a land full of water. But for once it was a cold land, and the thrush realized that the bitter frost had leapt ahead of him, and that he might now never outstrip it again, perhaps. I do not know if he realized, too, that the lead sky, that looked as if it were going ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... doing a whole year, and little by little she sold off her goods and gave charitable gifts to the sick and sorry; whereby her report was bruited abroad in the city and the folk abounded in her praise. All this while Salim lay in fetters and strait prison, and melancholy gat hold of him by reason of that whereinto he had fallen of this affliction. At last, when care waxed on him and calamity grew longsome, he fell sick of a sore sickness. Then the Kitchener, seeing his plight (and verily he was like to sink for much suffering), loosed ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... married; he is the business partner of Edwin Booth, and they are likely to become as powerful managers as they have been successful "stars." Edwin Booth, who is said to have the most perfect physical head in America, and whom the ladies call the beau ideal of the melancholy Dane, dwells also on Nineteenth street. He has acquired a fortune, and is, without doubt, a frankly loyal gentleman. He could not well be otherwise from his membership in the Century Club where literature and loyalty, are never dissolved. Correct and pleasing without being powerful ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... your highness, it so happened that the great Haroun Alraschid was one night seized with one of those fits of sleepless melancholy with which it had pleased Allah to temper his splendid destiny, and which fits are, indeed, the common lot of those who are raised by fortune above the ordinary fears ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... monotony of dark house-fronts, were little isolated shops, which gave a touch of colour to the drabness. I paused before one of them, through whose small and dim window a light shed a melancholy beam upon the pavement. Nothing seemed to be sold there, for the window was occupied by empty glass jars, bearing such labels as "peppermint rock," "pear drops" and "bull's-eyes." Apparently the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, March 12, 1919 • Various
... into the beautiful leafy walks of the imperial gardens. In this way they came to a terrace, from which they could see the ship. Instead of pressing quickly forwards, they concealed themselves behind a bush. A very melancholy old man sat on this terrace, looking over the sea; and while a flood of tears ran ...
— Eastern Tales by Many Story Tellers • Various
... the world, the more I am convinced that religion is founded on fear. The immortal bard, from whom nothing seems to have been hidden, lays down the foundation of all religion in those words from 'Hamlet,' where he makes the melancholy ...
— Out of Doors—California and Oregon • J. A. Graves
... altars in it; and a piscina still remains in the south aisle, close to the west wall of the transept. A curious monument was erected in 1634 by Martin Blake, the Vicar, to his son and four children who died very young. A heavy and elaborate framework surrounds a severe likeness of a melancholy-looking man, who is resting his head on his hand. On the monument ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... fifteen miles I began to have leaden feet. I did not mind hard work, but I wanted to avoid over-exertion. When I am extremely wearied my feelings are liable to be colored somewhat by depression or melancholy. Then it always bothered me to get tired while Nielsen kept ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... friend Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio, where he painted the frescoes in the smaller Hall of Audience. These are principally scenes from the Life of Camillus. The story of the schoolmaster of Falerii is very spirited, and the Triumph of Camillus varied and pleasing in colouring. Although melancholy and suspicious, often making enemies and losing patronage by misunderstandings, Rossi and Vasari were always faithful to their first boyish friendship, often working together, but never with any spirit of rivalry. Salviati's style was bold and spirited; he ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... fine-looking old couple. The Duke still wore the blue ribbon of the Garter across his breast. He was a mild-looking gentleman, who seemed to be plunged in deep melancholy. His head was bald and highly polished, his gray side-whiskers were brushed carefully forward, and his nose was aquiline. Her Grace the Duchess surveyed the company with a haughty stare, which seemed to be a matter of habit ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... something to look at, and the excited boys shouted, cheered, and gave forth remark after remark such as must have been painful to the dignity of the melancholy-looking beast, which kept on turning its half-closed, plaintive-looking eyes at the noisy groups, wincing and seeming to protest against ...
— Glyn Severn's Schooldays • George Manville Fenn
... of enduring disappointment and changing a shadow to a spot of sunshine, there yet come days of loneliness into the life of the commercial traveler—days when he cannot and will not break the spell. There is a sweet enchantment, anyway, about melancholy; 'tis then that the heart yearns for what it knows awaits it. Perhaps the wayfarer has missed his mail; perhaps the wife whom he has not seen for many weeks, writes him now that she suffers because of their separation and how she longs for ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... more in thought than action—he had lost the eager spirit which believed it could achieve what it projected for the benefit of mankind. And yet in the converse of daily life Shelley was far from being a melancholy man. He was eloquent when philosophy or politics or taste were the subjects of conversation. He was playful; and indulged in the wild spirit that mocked itself and others—not in bitterness, but in sport. ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... strange, solemn music,—the sobbing of the 'cellos, the tenderer melancholy of the flute—the long procession was moving up the Canal Grande—the ducal barge and the gondola of the Patriarch not keeping decorous line, for the roughness of the waters. From the portals of the Palazzo ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... visited by a pelting shower, which wetted them to the skin in a moment. A gutter or hollow, misnamed a pathway, was soon overflowed, and they had to wade in it up to their knees in water, and through a most melancholy-looking forest, before they entered a village. It was called Sagba, and was about eight miles from Wow. They were dripping wet on their arrival, and the weather still continuing unpleasant, it was some time before any one made his appearance ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... some well-used pipes were on the chest of drawers, with a tin of Virginia; and an old brown camel's-hair dressing-gown hung over a castorless, shabby, American-cloth-covered armchair. And an empty whisky-bottle stood upon the washstand, melancholy witness to the ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... blazing 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 tread of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... shave while sitting snugly in a tubful of hot water. He may be viewed to-night as a plump, smooth, pink, baldish, podgy goodman, robbed of the importance of spectacles, squatting in breast-high water, scraping his lather-smeared cheeks with a safety-razor like a tiny lawn-mower, and with melancholy dignity clawing through the water to recover a slippery ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... eyebrows to the opposite side of the room, where a large, stout young woman in somber cloak and wide-plumed hat was eating her way through a chocolate eclair with just such an air of tragic and settled melancholy as one sometimes sees in a child whose grief is momentarily its ...
— Miss Pat at School • Pemberton Ginther
... countenance became sadder and more serious, except when in the presence of her husband. There she assumed an appearance of gayety: laughing, jesting, and drawing from her violin its sweetest sounds. But, with her attendants, or in the company of the other members of the imperial family, she was melancholy, and made her preparations for death, which she foretold ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Zicci, gently, and with a smile of singular but melancholy sweetness: "have you earned the right to ask me these questions? The clays of torture and persecution are over; and a man may live as he pleases, and talk as it suits him, without fear of the stake and the rack. ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... laugh even in the midst of the melancholy thoughts which involuntarily arose in her mind during the elucidation of John's plan of escape; she could not, however, explain the difficulties in the way of its successful issue to the self-satisfied expounder, and finding no other ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... 'Melancholy attends on the best joys of a merely ideal life, else I should call most happy the hours in the garden, the hours in the book closet. Here were the best French writers of the last century; for my father had been more than half a Jacobin, in the time ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... tied to the corners of a grub sack so that it could be carried over his shoulder like a game bag. With the first rose-flush of the sun he was ready for the trail of Neewa and his mother. Miki set up a melancholy wailing when he found himself left behind, and when Challoner looked back the pup was tugging and somersaulting at the end of his rope like a jumping-jack. For a quarter of a mile up the creek he could ...
— Nomads of the North - A Story of Romance and Adventure under the Open Stars • James Oliver Curwood
... went on their mission, and soon returned with the Cihuacoatl at their head, a magistrate of high authority among the Mexicans. He said, with a melancholy air, in which his own disappointment was visible, that "Guatemotzin was ready to die where he was, but would hold no interview with the Spanish commander"; adding in a tone of resignation, "It is for you to work your ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... Creole negro I knew well, who, after having been often thus transported from island to island, at last resided in Montserrat. This man used to tell me many melancholy tales of himself. Generally, after he had done working for his master, he used to employ his few leisure moments to go a fishing. When he had caught any fish, his master would frequently take them from him without paying him; and at other times some other ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... nicer he had clearly been, all the while, poor dear man, than his wife and the court had made it possible for him publicly to appear; how much younger, too, he now looked, in spite of his rather melancholy, his mildly jaundiced, humorously determined sallowness and his careless assumption, everywhere, from his forehead to his exposed and relaxed blue socks, almost sky-blue, as in past days, of creases and folds and furrows that would have been perhaps tragic if they hadn't seemed rather ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... rests with heaven. But, for myself, sir, if I should to-morrow hear that they have failed—that their last phalanx had sunk beneath the Turkish cimetar, that the flames of their last city had sunk in its ashes, and that nought remained but the wide, melancholy waste where Greece once was—I should still reflect, with the most heartfelt satisfaction, that I have asked you, in the name of seven millions of freemen, that you would give them, at least, the cheering ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... the new knowledge and method were warmly received. Boccaccio equaled Petrarch in his passion for the ancient writers, hunting for them wherever he thought they might be found. One of his pupils has left us a melancholy picture of the library at Monte Cassino, as Boccaccio found it at the time of his visit (R. 126). He wrote a book of popular tales and romances, filled with the modern spirit, which made him the father of Italian prose as Dante ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... clouds of the last downpour, driven before the wind, were nearing the horizon towards the heights of Pere-Lachaise, which were wrapped in gloom; and against this stormy background Paris, illumined by a uniform clearness, assumed a lonely, melancholy grandeur. It seemed to be uninhabited, like one of those cities seen in a nightmare—the reflex of a world of death. To Jeanne it certainly appeared anything but pretty. She was now idly dreaming of those she had loved since her birth. ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... which had been making itself felt behind the eastern line of mountains now came plainly in view, late moon, melancholy and significant, as the waning moon always is. By its dim illumination Creed saw Judith Barrier standing at the door of his own house, smiling at him tremulously, with the immemorial challenge in her dark ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... days before they were to have been married—died by the hand of violence, and Castrani had shot the rival who murdered her. Public opinion had favored the avenger, and he had not suffered for the act, but ever since he had been a prey to melancholy. He told Margie his history, and it aroused her pity; but when he asked her love, she refused him gently, telling him that her heart was another's. He had suffered deeply from the disappointment, but he did not give up her society, as most men would have ...
— The Fatal Glove • Clara Augusta Jones Trask
... trying them at home upon an exact scale of Bossu's, 'tis out, my lord, in every one of its dimensions." Admirable connoisseur! "And did you step in to take a look at the grand picture on your way back." "It is a melancholy daub! my lord, not one principle of the pyramid in any one group; there is nothing of the colouring of Titian, the expression of Rubens, the grace of Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, the corregiescity ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith
... singularly agreeable in being an object of so great interest. Sometimes I had all I could do to preserve my dejected aspect, it was so pleasant to be miserable. I incline to the opinion that people who are melancholy without any particular reason, such as poets, artists, and young musicians with long hair, have rather an enviable time of it. In a quiet way I never enjoyed myself better in my life than when I was ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... first year of the Peace was ended this class had been reduced to those elements which made it more properly called "unemployable." There were the men who had forgotten their trades and their working habits, and there were still left some of those melancholy products of our decadent industrial and social systems—the men who were determined not ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson
... of our time, which, having seen revolutions face to face, can see more clearly the destiny of humanity and comprehend Providence better,—Balzac redeemed himself smiling and severe from those formidable studies which produced melancholy in Moliere and misanthropy ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... the shadowy roofs of the town. The air was so languorous that it was as if the day were being slowly smothered in honeysuckle, the heavy scent of which drifted to him from the next garden. A vast melancholy—so vast that it seemed less the effect of a Southern summer than of a universal force residing in nature—was liberated, with the first cooling breath of the evening, from man and beast, from tree and shrub, from stock and stone. The very bricks, ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... that you have duly prepared yourself for the worst by all these reflections, I proceed to tell you the melancholy news that your book has been very unfortunate, for the public seem disposed to applaud it extremely. It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... houses with plans in very bright colors and notices in very large letters. But a serious observer, at a second glance, might have seen in his eyes something of that shining sleep that is called vision; and his yellow hair, while not affectedly long, was unaffectedly untidy. It was a manifest if melancholy truth that the architect was an artist. But the artistic temperament was far from explaining him; there was something else about him that was not definable, but which some even felt to be dangerous. Despite ...
— The Man Who Knew Too Much • G.K. Chesterton
... came to ask what had kept her from the ceremony. He learned it in the entry from Frau Lamperi, and Barbara's tearful eyes showed him what deep sorrow this loss had caused her. Her whole manner expressed quiet melancholy. This great, pure grief had come just at the right time, flowing, like oil upon the storm-lashed waves, over hatred, resentment, and all the passionate emotions by which she had previously been driven to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... This grave, melancholy man went smiling to his death. When he was entreated to seek for pardon for his crimes, his reply was, in a triumphant tone, "I am satisfied that our project was so far from being sinful, that I rely entirely upon ...
— It Might Have Been - The Story of the Gunpowder Plot • Emily Sarah Holt
... in London, where his f. was U.S. ambassador. He wrote a number of light, graceful short poems, but fell a victim to ill-health and a morbid melancholy at 25. His longest poem ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... you receive it? Here is no honest John to carry my letters to you! And, besides, I am watched in all my steps; and no doubt shall be, till my hard fate may ripen his wicked projects for my ruin. I will every day, however, write my sad state; and some way, perhaps, may be opened to send the melancholy scribble to you. But, alas! when you know it, what will it do but aggravate your troubles? For, O! what can the abject poor do against the mighty rich, when they ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... your personal prejudices? You dislike the young man himself, I know, because he is moody and emotional and uncontrolled, and because he considers his own emotions fit subjects for discussion. A boy, self-centred, melancholy, and in love—what do you want ...
— Roads from Rome • Anne C. E. Allinson
... Scott died before his grandson was four years of age; and I heard him mention when he was an old man that he distinctly remembered the writing and sealing of the funeral letters, and all the ceremonial of the melancholy procession as it left Sandy-Knowe. I shall conclude my notices of the residence at Sandy-Knowe with observing that in Sir Walter's account of the friendly clergyman who so often sat at his grandfather's fireside, we cannot fail to trace ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... has not the pathos that usually distinguishes Redgrave. "Rizpah watching her Sons," is very fine. The night, the glaring torchlight, to scare away the approaching wolves, and the paler, more distant light in the sky, with the melancholy mourning Rizpah, are of the best conception. "The Sick Child" has quite the effect of a Rembrandt plate; yet it is very tender—a scene fit for the angelic visit, and pure and devout of thought and purpose is that angel—we do ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... for thy voice remeasures Whatever tones and melancholy pleasures The things of Nature utter; birds or trees, Or moan of ocean-gale in weedy caves, Or where the stiff grass 'mid the heath-plant waves, Murmur and music ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... of the once highly cultivated fields and gardens bore the marks of gradual decay and destruction. The ranchos of Calabazas, of San Bernardino, and numerous other places on this frontier, presented the same melancholy aspect, the result of the inability of Mexico to protect this portion of territory from the inroads of the savages. There are now but a few settlements throughout this district of country, but were it protected by a power that could and would defend it, what ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... proffered them occasionally by a morose and distrustful gillie they had no help or other companionship. They won their food for themselves, cooked it by the smoking fire, and washed heroically in the icy river water. A sting of winter was already in the wind and a melancholy and bitter rain swept the hills, giving way at evening to unearthly sunsets. They saw themselves as pioneers at the world's end. And Stonehouse, who had calculated its effect on Cosgrave, was himself caught up in the fierce, rough charm of that daily life. He who had never played ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... tinge of melancholy seemed to hang about the few scraps of wreckage. How many times the little bridge must have tempted men and maidens to linger of a summer evening, dreaming the big dreams of youth—visions which the spreading wings of Time bear away into the Land of Lost Desires. Perhaps some ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... late JOHN DENT, Esq., whose library was sold in 1827; and of which library that of the late Robert Heathcote formed the basis. It contained much that was curious, scarce, and delectable; but the sale of it exhibited the first grand melancholy symptoms of the decay of the Bibliomania. The Sweynheym and Pannartz Livy of 1469, UPON VELLUM, was allowed to be knocked down for L262! Mr. Evans, who had twice before sold that identical volume—first, in the sale of Mr. Edwards's library (see Bibliographical Decameron, vol. iii. ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... There was a succession of broken treble notes that sounded like the crackling of flames. Moans deep and melancholy followed. These grew more strident and prolonged, giving place to abject howls, suggesting the lamentations ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... night dream each man his dream: Which dreams, according to interpretation, Had to themselves particular relation. And Joseph coming early the next day, Into the room where Pharaoh's servants lay, Beheld their countenances much dejected: Wherefore he said, What evil hath effected This melancholy frame, what is't that causes These marks of discontentment in your faces? Then said they, We have dream'd each man his dream, And there is no man to interpret them. Then Joseph said, Your dreams to me make known. Interpretations are from God alone. Then unto Joseph the chief butler told His dream, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... assur'd, I too shall take my turn, and will exert the—Husband! In saying this, he flung out of the Room in spite of her Endeavours to hinder him, and going hastily through a Gallery which had a large Window that look'd into the Garden, he perceiv'd Melliora lying on a green Bank, in a melancholy but a charming Posture, directly opposite to the place where he was; her Beauties appear'd, if possible more to advantage than ever he had seen them, or at least he had more opportunity thus unseen by her, to gaze upon them: he in a moment lost all the Rage of Temper he had been in, and his ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... knew it! Handsome Harry Kendal does not love this girl with whom they have forced him into a betrothal. No wonder he looks sad and melancholy, with a prospect before him of marrying a blind wife! Ah, me! it is too dreadful a fate to ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... Potomac above Washington, as a corps of observation. The Union troops, engaged in the disastrous battle of Ball's Bluff, belonged to his corps, but were under the immediate command of Colonel E. D. Baker. The repulse and slaughter on that melancholy field were followed by excitement and indignation throughout the country quite as deep as that shown in Congress. The details of the disaster were greatly exaggerated. The official summary of losses, made up with care, showed that the total number killed, including both ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine
... lightened of its load, rose to the surface of the water, and placed them beyond the reach of the voracious jaws of their relentless destroyers. The tide and current soon carried them to the shore, where they landed to tell the melancholy fate of their fellow-voyagers." ...
— Man on the Ocean - A Book about Boats and Ships • R.M. Ballantyne
... sobered. Pete Murphy became subject at regular intervals to wild rhapsodical seizures when he raved, almost in impromptu verse, about the beauty of sea and sky. These were followed by periods of an intense, bitter, black, Celtic melancholy. Ralph Addington degenerated into what Honey described as "the human sourball." He spoke as seldom as possible and then only to snarl. He showed a tendency to disobey the few orders that Frank Merrill, who still ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... the tragical business of the day were ended. The vast range of Pendle was obscured by clouds, and ere long the vapours descended into the valleys, and rain began to fall; at first slightly, but afterwards in heavy continuous showers. Melancholy was the aspect of the abbey, and it required no stretch of imagination to fancy that the old structure was deploring the fate of its former ruler. To those impressed with the idea—and many there were who were so—the very stones of the convent church seemed dissolving into tears. The statues ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... to coincide throughout with the opinions either of abolitionists or of slaveholders: but they will be found to present a masterly view of a most perplexing and interesting subject, which seems to cover the whole ground, and to lead to the melancholy conclusion of the utter impotency of human effort to eradicate this acknowledged evil. But on this, and on the various topics of the deepest interest which are discussed in this work, it was thought that the American readers would be fully competent to form ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... Melancholy was the prevailing characteristic of the great Italian's mind. It was so profound that it penetrated all his thoughts; so intense that it pervaded all his conceptions. Occasionally bright and beautiful ideas flitted across his imagination; visions of bliss, experienced for a moment, and then lost ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... was very old and melancholy. He accepted a piece of locust-bean with leisurely condescension and watched us with quiet interest as he chewed. He rather frightened me; the wisdom of all the ages was behind his ...
— Punch, Volume 156, January 22, 1919. • Various
... more beautiful than his countenance, or to fancy a form more replete with living grace than his. His hair swept round his clear and open countenance in dark wavy curls; and while he held the taller of the two gentlemen by the hand, he gazed forward over the wide melancholy sea, which came rolling up towards their feet, with a look full of thought, and perhaps of anxiety. There was certainly grief in that gaze; for the black eyelashes which surrounded those large blue eyes became, after a moment or two, moistened with something bright like a tear; and apparently ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Unrequited love. Dandelion Coquetry. Everlasting Always remembered. Everlasting Pea Wilt thou go with me. Ebony Blackness. Fuchsia Humble love. Foxglove Insincerity. Fern Sincerity. Fennel Strength. Forget-me-not For ever remembered. Fraxinella Fire. Geranium, Ivy Fond of dancing. Geranium, Oak A melancholy mind. Geranium, Rose I prefer you. Geranium, Scarlet Stillness. Gladiolus Ready armed. Golden Rod Encouragement. Gillyflower Promptness. Hyacinth Benevolence. Honeysuckle Devoted love. House Leek Domestic economy. Heliotrope I adore you. Hibiscus Delicate beauty. Hollyhock Ambition. ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... or a submissive patience but rather the quickening bread and wine of an intense and high-keyed life. This is why the Saints, be the provocation ever so great, never develop nerves, or experience those melancholy and humiliating reactions which are the natural ebb-tide of spiritual energies. This is why Saints can fast and keep their temper sweet, can wear hair-shirts without cultivating wry faces, can be passed by in the distribution of honors without ...
— For Greater Things: The story of Saint Stanislaus Kostka • William T. Kane, S.J.
... tickled by the story. He came in smiling and thoroughly self-possessed. Then, addressing the governess, he said, "Madame, allow me to compliment you and to thank you at the same time. I thought you were of a serious, melancholy disposition, but as I listened to you through the keyhole, I am no longer surprised that you have such long talks with the Marquise. Will you do me the favour of being as amusing some other time, if I venture to make one ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... husband, on the contrary," said Dr. Carr, overhearing her; "you must learn that lesson once for all, children. There's no escape from the melancholy fact; and it's quite right and natural that Ned should wish to go to his sister, and she should want ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... undertaker, who had just succeeded to a thriving business. Things, I believe, are going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the landlady's daughter and her mother. Sextons and undertakers are the cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-clowns are the most melancholy in their ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it appeared to me a hyperbolical criticism from the very beginning. On that account I resolved to make a few brief commentaries on the matter in the letter, both for the consolation of those whom our Lord may call to these missions, and so that it may be understood that at times sadness and melancholy are accustomed to heighten things, making giants out of pygmies—all the more, if a relish for revery and grumbling be joined with a tendency to exaggeration and with figures of speech corresponding thereto. Consequently, I am surprised that the reverend annalist ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... Priest Shallow of the parish of Newbawn was present, and twenty five not included in the above number were shot in the most deliberate manner, their cloaths being worth preserving. I pass within two miles of the melancholy spot every month, and often converse with those who know every particular relative to it, ...
— An Impartial Narrative of the Most Important Engagements Which Took Place Between His Majesty's Forces and the Rebels, During the Irish Rebellion, 1798. • John Jones
... and crannies the homes of basking lizards, its charming loggia trodden only by enthusiasts for whom every spot touched by the genius of Raphael is a shrine of pilgrimage—the Villa Madama, though appealing in its desertion, is not a melancholy solitude. ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney
... contralto voice, even when it sank to the lowest notes of melancholy, was full of tenderness and caressing feeling. As he touched her tapering fingers on the steel bars and watched the red blood mount until her delicate ears shone like transparent shells in the dark mass of her hair, visions of their life together would rise until the past few years ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... peculiar a character as to merit particular notice. Should any of my readers ever go to Bombay, he will find two of these dakhmas, or Temples of Silence, in a secluded part of Malabar Hill, though admittance is denied within the walls enclosing the melancholy structures to aught but Parsees. The interior is fitted up with stages or stories of stone pavement, slanting down to a circular opening, like a well, covered with a grating, into which the bones are swept, after the fowls ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... the same lines. The complexion, indeed, in the picture, was more brilliant; and it was that, perhaps, as well as a certain roundness, which marked a difference of age; but then the expression was precisely the same—a depth, a tenderness even approaching to melancholy—in the picture, as in her whom he had seen; and though he gazed, and wondered, and wearied imagination for probabilities, he found none, but could only end by believing that, in the facts connected with that picture, lay the mystery of his fate, and of the link ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... these people were so visibly strangers to the causes of the fatality, of this catastrophe, that their innocence led them like children to look elsewhere for the guilty. It comforted and quieted their conscience. Clerambault breathed more easily when he got to Paris. A stoical and virile melancholy had succeeded to the agony of the night. He was however only at ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... one of those melancholy events in life to which the mind cannot for a long time reconcile or accustom itself. I saw her so short a time ago 'glittering like the morning star, full of life and splendour and joy;' the accents of her voice still so vibrate ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... I stood, smiling and silent, while she spoke of Walter Butler, describing him vividly, even to his amber black eyes and his pale face, and the poetic melancholy with which he clothed the hidden blood-lust that smoldered under his smooth pale skin. But there you have it—young, proud, and melancholy—and he had danced with her at Niagara, too, and—if I knew him—he had not spared her hints of that impetuous flame that burned for all pure women deep in ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
... old man, dear reader, if he spares himself and does not expatiate on these anxious years. He is not a friend of tears and does not like to give in to melancholy. ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... fact that I have to brood over it alone. I have not one friend in this wide world to whom I can fly for consolation. No! not one! My life is unspeakably lonely. You will forgive me for not being more gay; I cannot help it! I strive to be, but it is impossible. I often fear that my melancholy has a chilling effect on those around me, and that they think me cold ...
— The Expressman and the Detective • Allan Pinkerton
... Maurice Ogston, and Edward Coffin were executed on the 16th of August, 1837, at San Josef Barracks. Nothing seemed to have been neglected which could render the execution solemn and impressive; the scenery and the weather gave additional awe to the melancholy proceedings. Fronting the little eminence where the prisoners were shot was the scene where their ill-concerted mutiny commenced. To the right stood the long range of building on which they had expended ...
— The History of the First West India Regiment • A. B. Ellis
... She had once made it her place of summer residence, but it was now given over to the people and was, during the spring and summer, used by them as a kind of fair and pleasure-garden. The place had always been to me romantic and melancholy, with the old faded wooden palace, the deserted ponds, and the desolate trees. I had never been there in the summer. I don't know with what idea I hurried there. I can only say that I had no choice but to go, and that I went ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... course of things would be universally seen and acknowledged to be the wickedest of men.' To man himself, moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more unnatural than most of the virtues.' We need not multiply from poets and divines, from moralists and sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy, the savage moral indignation, the passionate intellectual scorn, with which life and the universe have filled strong souls, some with one emotion and some with another, were all to Emerson in his habitual thinking unintelligible ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve. At Education-Farm, the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry. A political orator wittily compared our party promises to western roads, which opened stately ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... dominion over thee, who art baptized into him. Satan is defied and dared to try all his powers and terrors on Christ; for we are assured, "Death no more hath dominion over him." Death may awaken anger, malice, melancholy, fear and terror in our poor, weak flesh, but it hath no more dominion over Christ. On the contrary, death must submit to the dominion of Christ, in his own person and in us. We have died unto sin; that is, we have been redeemed from the sting and power, the control, of death. ...
— Epistle Sermons, Vol. III - Trinity Sunday to Advent • Martin Luther
... in the world should be fairly run away with by a set of reckless, loose young spendthrifts, was indeed a melancholy and unprecedented fact; for the body of fellows of St. Ambrose was as distinguished for learning, morality and respectability as any in the University. The foundation was not, indeed, actually an open one. Oriel at that time alone enjoyed this distinction; ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... their homes, a melancholy train, To traverse climes beyond the western main. 342 GOLDSMITH: ...
— Handy Dictionary of Poetical Quotations • Various
... all.... They are simply the Romish army for the earthly sovereignty of the world in the future, with the Pontiff of Rome for Emperor ... that's their ideal, but there's no sort of mystery or lofty melancholy about it.... It's simple lust of power, of filthy earthly gain, of domination—something like a universal serfdom with them as masters—that's all they stand for. They don't even believe in God perhaps. Your suffering Inquisitor is a ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... were talking to yourself. Don't be too melancholy. You'll soon learn the Bible verses and I'll relieve you ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... everything just as he is about to realize his aim. Is the repentance of the usurping Duke merely a ruse of Shakespeare's to bring the play to a happy ending? In Lodge's story he does not repent, but is proceeded against by his brother. Contrast Jaques and Touchstone. Is Jaques's melancholy affected? What is the main difference between Rosalind and Celia? Which is the more the friend of the other? (For valuable suggestions on these points see 'Characters in "As You Like It,"' Poet-lore, Vol. IV. pp. 31 and 81, Jan. ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... in anything else was I interested in the adventures and melancholy fate of La Salle; and I could not help wondering that American writers have done so little to illustrate the life of the brave chevalier—surely the most picturesque passage in their early history— the story and ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... account of the melancholy catastrophe of three men being poisoned, after excruciating sufferings, in consequence of eating food cooked in an unclean copper vessel, on board the Cyclops frigate; and, besides these, thirty-three men became ill from the ...
— A Treatise on Adulterations of Food, and Culinary Poisons • Fredrick Accum
... from the edges of the level, tree-clad, or grassy, alluvial meadows. In front of the ranch-house veranda was a row of cottonwood trees with gray-green leaves which quivered all day long if there was a breath of air. From these trees came the far-away, melancholy cooing of mourning doves, and little owls perched in them and called tremulously at night. In the long summer afternoons we would sometimes sit on the piazza, when there was no work to be done, for an hour or two at a time, watching the cattle on the sand-bars, and the sharply channeled and strangely ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... remarked, 'ain't so strengthening as the port what gentry has.' Tony added hot water to his ginger-wine, lay back in the courting chair, plumped his feet on Mrs Widger's lap, and sang some more of those sea songs that have such melancholy windy tunes and yet most curiously stimulate one to action. I think it must be because they echo that particular sub-emotional desperation which causes men to do their reckless best—the desperation that the ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... knee. The old lady is the mother of four comely daughters and nine stalwart sons, the eldest of whom is now a grizzled man. Besides our host, four of the brothers are here to-night; the handsome melancholy Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon, with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and my friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later, worried with many cares, but ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... author of "The Anatomy of Melancholie," an amusing and instructive medley of quotations and classical anecdotes, showing a profound erudition. In this all the causes and effects of melancholy are set forth with varied illustrations. His nom de plume was Democritus, Jr., and he is an advocate of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... arrival of some member of the fair sex, it hardly seemed the place for a love-tryst, this melancholy Zoological Gardens, misty, with the leaves falling, gradually baring the trees at the approach ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... inhabitant of Creeper Cottage who slept that night was Annalise. Priscilla spent it walking up and down her bedroom, and Fritzing on the other side of the wall spent it walking up and down his. They could hear each other doing it; it was a melancholy sound. Once Priscilla was seized with laughter—a not very genial mirth, but still laughter—and had to fling herself on her bed and bury her face in the pillows lest Fritzing should hear so blood-curdling a noise. It was when their steps had ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... was in reality a changed man. Once among the most high-spirited and joyous of the crew, he became melancholy and silent, though he went through his duty as usual. About a month afterwards, as Adair was going forward, he saw a whitehaired man sitting on the coamings ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... These melancholy thoughts were interrupted by a step on the stairs. 'Hallo!' cried Geoffrey, 'who would have thought of their coming home just now?' and he was going to lift me down from my nail; but when the door opened, the housemaid came in alone, and he changed ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... felt—as she often had done before on similar occasions—a pang of painful regret, and even of jealousy, towards those much-loved relatives whom her husband still so deeply regretted. She laid her hand on his, and raising her large expressive eyes to his now melancholy countenance, ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... seclusion was explained by the death of one of her ladies whom she loved, the Countess of Nottingham: but soon it could not be concealed that the Queen herself was seized with a dangerous illness: sleep and appetite began to fail her: she showed a deep melancholy. 'No,' she replied to one of the kinsmen of her mother's house, Robert Cary, who at that moment had come back to court and addressed friendly words to her about her health, 'No Robin, well I am not, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... in all lands a stew full of fish, as it were, for gentlemen from court, and Junker Henning von Beust had no sooner come in than he began to angle; and whereas Sir Franz's bait was melancholy and mourning, the Junker strove to win hearts by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... been a frail, delicate boy. As he was riding one evening, a strange, wild-looking being sprang out of the darkness and seized the bridle of his horse, crying, "Fly, fly! you are betrayed." The astonished youth after the shock, became melancholy; then was suddenly seized with a fit of frenzy, in which he killed four of his pages. A mad king was on the throne of France, the worst woman in Europe regent, and three uncles waiting like vultures around a dying ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... the glass of adolescence and the mold of Indiana. The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in The Gentleman from Indiana, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing distant from Princeton by about the same number of years and also not yet famous, could not put up with failure in a hero. ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... with the faithful few Who wait their Chief, a melancholy crew: But some remained reluctant on the deck Of that proud vessel—now a moral wreck— And viewed their Captain's fate with piteous eyes; While others scoffed his augured miseries, 130 Sneered at the prospect of his pigmy sail, And the slight bark so laden and so ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... bellow, blackens Visse Time, du er kommen. heaven! Hvad de gav, de tog tilbage— Comes the hour of melancholy; Evig bortsvandt Helligdommen. Back is taken what was given,— Vanished is ...
— The Gold Horns • Adam Gottlob Oehlenschlager
... The deep melancholy in many of Gordon's poems has been attributed to the influence of Australian scenery, and to the loneliness of the earlier years of his life in the colonies. This explanation, if not wholly erroneous, is at least much ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... the thought of death, a thought so strong, so vivid, that all fear is lost, all ties broken, all duties, all obligations, all hopes forgotten, and naught remains except a fierce and wild desire to die. Thousands and thousands become moody, melancholy, brood upon loss of money, of position, of friends, until reason abdicates, and frenzy takes possession of the soul. If there be an infinitely wise and powerful God, all this was known to Him from the beginning, and He so created things, established ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... darkened and the stars brightened. After a while Stevens ceased talking and drooped in his saddle. Duane kept the horses going, however, and the slow hours wore away. Duane thought the quiet night would never break to dawn, that there was no end to the melancholy, brooding plain. But at length a grayness blotted out the stars and mantled the level ...
— The Lone Star Ranger • Zane Grey
... of the patriotism of his friends, so much interrupted by applause. The warm manner in which his conclusion is received assures him that he now is the most popular man in the State. Mr. Scranton, armed with his usually melancholy countenance, rises to the stump, makes his modestly political bow, offers many impressive apologies for the unprepared state in which he finds himself, informs his hearers that he appears before them only as a substitute ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... likeness in the sensible qualities of things. The poet's principle of association is in the effect produced on his imagination. Things which have not in themselves a single point of similarity, are connected together, because they produce the same emotions of pleasure, or pain, or hope, or melancholy. A beautiful illustration of this is found in the opening ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... the story of Thomas is after the resurrection. The first evening the apostles met in the upper room to talk over the strange things which had occurred that day. For some reason Thomas was not at this meeting. We may infer that his melancholy temperament led him to absent himself. He had loved Jesus deeply, and his sorrow was very great. There had been rumors all day of Christ's resurrection, but Thomas put no confidence in these. Perhaps his despondent disposition made him unsocial, and kept him from meeting ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... if only there had been nightingales in Ireland. There were no nightingales in Devon, so that the first Hewish was under no necessity of importing them to complete his picture. But he had his gravelled walks, his poets' avenue of yews, that grew kindly, his sundials with their graceful and melancholy admonitions, his box-hedges and white peacocks, and the fancy of some Hewish unknown had blossomed at last in a Palladian bridge of freestone, ...
— The Tragic Bride • Francis Brett Young
... this legitimate festival of my birth a profound melancholy began to possess my spirit. I had lived. I had succeeded in the eyes of my fellows and of the general public. I was married to a charming woman. I had two marriageable daughters and a son who had already entered on his career as ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train
... of my ill-fortune!" Then I said to her, "O my cousin, I conjure thee by my life, contrive me some device whereby I may win to her!" She wept and answered, "O Aziz, O my cousin, verily my heart is full of melancholy thought and I cannot speak: but go thou again to-night to the same place and look that thou sleep not, and thou shalt surely attain thy desire. This is my counsel and peace be on thee." "God willing," said I, "I will not sleep, but ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... hope—or just a little like her mother, who is not so very ugly, either; at least, Angus says not." And Mrs. Rothesay drew up her tiny figure, patted one dainty hand—the wedded one—with its fairy fellow; then—touched perhaps with a passing melancholy that he who most prized her beauty, and for whose sake she most prized it herself, was far away—she ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... right foot loose," muttered the cochero, stifling another sigh, "I'll give him my horses, and offer him my services even to death, for he'll free us from the Civil Guard." With a melancholy gaze he watched the Three Kings ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... his mind a remote wonder why he had suddenly unbosomed himself to her in a way so extraordinarily unlike himself. It was, he thought next, because as he had taken her about from one place to another he had known that she had seen in things what he had seen in them so long—the melancholy loneliness, the significance of it, the lost hopes that lay behind it, the touching pain of the stateliness wrecked. She had shown it in the way in which she tenderly looked from side to side, in the very lightness of her footfall, in the bluebell softening of her eyes. Oh, yes, she ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... her outside, and I went, feeling that she had at last made a decision. Her attitude throughout her period of cogitation had been not unlike that of Napoleon before Waterloo. There were the same bent head and clasped hands, the same melancholy ...
— More Tish • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... whether the Roman or the Saxon derivation of its name be preferred, in either case etymology would fairly allow the inference, that its foundation was considerably more ancient. During the reign of Louis XI. Eu obtained a melancholy celebrity: a report was circulated in the summer of 1475, that it was the intention of the English to make a descent upon the coast of France, and to establish themselves there for the winter. At the same time, this town was confidently mentioned ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman
... was done and the spirit of the beauteous and unfortunate Jane McRea had left its mangled tenement and fled forever! [Footnote: From the various published accounts of the massacre of Miss McRea, we have followed, in our illustrations of that melancholy tragedy, as far as our limits and plan permitted us to carry them, the one deemed by us the most probable. By way of finishing the details of the horrible scene, however, it may be proper here to state, that Captain Jones, the strangely infatuated lover, having despatched, for the ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... more than half a century. The other, on top of the stack, wrapped apparently in gloomy meditation, was Sam'l Todd. A solid Dales—man, he, with huge hands and hairy arms; about his face an uncomely aureole of stiff, red hair; and on his features, deep-seated, an expression of resolute melancholy. ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... The latest volume of them is My Remembrances (CASSELL), in which Mr. EDWARD H. SOTHERN recounts, with the pleasant humour to be expected from him, what he quaintly (and quite unjustifiably) calls "The Melancholy Tale of Me." One has heard that Mr. SOTHERN, now that he has retired from the stage, proposes to live in England; the book explains such an intention by its evidence of the writer's intense love for this country. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 28, 1917 • Various
... Nile is dreary beyond description, as a vast desert, unenlivened by cultivation, forms its borders, through which the melancholy river rolls towards Lower Egypt in the cloudless glare of a tropical sun. From whence came this extraordinary stream that could flow through these burning sandy deserts, unaided by tributary channels? That was the mysterious question as we stepped ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... containing a meat stew, which had now gone cold, so that a rime of gray suet coated the upper half of the pot. But of human occupants there was an ample sufficiency, considering the cubic space available for breathing purposes. Sitting in melancholy array against the walls, with their legs half buried in the straw and their backs against the baseboards, were eighteen prisoners—two Belgian cavalrymen and sixteen Frenchmen—mostly Zouaves and chasseurs-a-pied. Also, there were ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... strong that "I fear, for such men as we are it is better to serve than to be free. If our appetites were let loose altogether against our neighbours, they would be like wild beasts uncaged, and bring a deluge of calamity on the whole civilised world." Melancholy words, and appropriate to our own age, when cleverness is almost universal, and genius rare indeed, and the choice between liberty and servitude hard to make, were the ...
— On the Sublime • Longinus
... is soon told. It is in general like that of many more who in France have broken away from religion. A clever studious boy, a true son of old Brittany—the most melancholy, the most tender, the most ardent, the most devout, not only of all French provinces, but of all regions in Europe—is passed on from the teaching of good, simple, hard-working country priests to the central seminaries, ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... such melancholy forebodings intrude upon the festivities of this anniversary. Serene skies and balmy breezes are not congenial to the climate of freedom. Progressive improvement in the condition of man is apparently the purpose of a superintending Providence. That purpose will not be disappointed. ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... Birthday of the Prince of Peace. We all can recall disasters and disappointments which have overcast the spring, and tidings of achievement or deliverance which have been happily out of keeping with the melancholy beauty of autumn. ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... forgotten, no new theological literature has arisen, and the influence of Germany has borne no considerable fruit. The evangelical party, or Methodists, as they are called, are accused by the rest of being the cause of their present melancholy state. The rationalism of the indifferens generally prevails among the clergy, either in the shape of the naturalism of the eighteenth century (Coquerel), or in the more advanced form of modern criticism, as ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... the systematists is the one most melancholy sequela of Darwinism. It seems an irony that we should read in the peroration to the Origin that when the Darwinian view is accepted "Systematists will be able to pursue their labours as at present; but they will not ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... illustrious descent is, I believe, equally true of a talent for poetry, none ever despised it who had pretensions to it. The fates and characters of the rhyming tribe often employ my thoughts when I am disposed to be melancholy. There is not, among all the martyrologies that ever were penned, so rueful a narrative as the lives of the poets.—In the comparative view of wretches, the criterion is not what they are doomed to suffer, but how they are formed to bear. Take a being of our kind, give him a stronger imagination ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... day, melancholy with the misfortunes of his friends, though he doesn't name Dickens. Landor had just fled to his (Forster's) house in London for protection ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... FAILURE, there exists amongst us, as, indeed, there has always existed, an innumerable body of those upon whom you have cast your melancholy blight. Amongst their friends and acquaintances they are known by the name you yourself bear. They are the great army of failures. But there must be no mistake. Because a man has had high aspirations, has tried with all the energy of his body and soul to realise them, and has, in the end, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 103, November 26, 1892 • Various
... a decided victory, but the youthful Queen, instead of giving her hand to young King Edward, left the country and married the son of the King of France. She will appear with melancholy prominence in the reign of Elizabeth. Had Mary Queen of Scots married Edward, we should perhaps have been spared that tragedy in which she was called to play both the leading ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... But there is Duerer's "Knight and Death," his greatest plate; and if I had Lionardo's "Medusa" here, which he painted when only a boy, you would have seen how he was held by the same chain. And you cannot but wonder why, this being the melancholy temper of the great Greek or naturalistic school, I should have called it the school of light. I call it so because it is through its intense love of light that the darkness becomes apparent to ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... ascribe the numerous complaints which prevail? How many sweet creatures of your sex languish with a weak digestion, low spirits, lassitudes, melancholy, and twenty disorders, which, in spite of the faculty, have yet no names, except the general one of nervous complaints? Let them change their diet, and, among other articles, leave off drinking tea, it is more than probable, the greatest ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... his music at its worst is the merest drivel ever set down by a great composer; hence at anything but its best it lacks concentrated passion and dramatic intensity; more than any other composer's it has one prevailing note, a note of deepest melancholy; and therefore, when a few pieces are known, most of the rest seem barren of what is wanted by those who seek chiefly in music the expression of ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... tones in things, further strengthened by actual circumstances; and religious sentiment, that [193] system of biblical ideas in which he had been brought up, presented itself to him as a thing that might soften and dignify, and light up as with a "lively hope," a melancholy already deeply settled in him. So he yielded himself easily to religious impressions, and with a kind of mystical appetite for sacred things; the more as they came to him through a saintly person who loved him tenderly, and believed that this early ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... up for long, thinking, if his dull mind could form a thought through his melancholy dreams, that Ridgar had ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe
... always lived a very retired existence 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
... fine mustache showed a mouth with a rather satirical curve and closely compressed lips A strong aquiline nose and narrow bright blue eyes completed a physiognomy indicating great reserve and a remarkable degree of melancholy. It is no advantage to a man to possess a Sphinx-like head. The pretty faces apparently full of secrets offer easy deceptions, and one expects that the mouth when open will reveal all that the eyes seem to mean. One is half-angry and half-inclined to laugh ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... from the Square into the drive leading to the spring at the foot of the mountain. On the meadows near the stream, is always to be found a group of Baalbekians bibbing arak and swaying languidly to the mellow strains of the lute and the monotonous melancholy of Arabic song. Among such, one occasionally meets with a native who, failing as peddler or merchant in America, returns to his native town, and, utilising the chips of English he picked up in the streets of the New-World ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... not at first see the exact purport of this oleaginous periphrasis. Presently he caught a glimpse; but said he thought confinement was hardly the thing to drive away melancholy. ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... grass-grown drive in front of the blotched and weather-stained door, I had doubts as to my wisdom in visiting a man whom I knew so slightly. He opened the door himself, however, and greeted me with a great show of cordiality. I was handed over to the manservant, a melancholy, swarthy individual, who led the way, my bag in his hand, to my bedroom. The whole place was depressing. Our dinner was tete-a-tete, and though my host did his best to be entertaining, his thoughts seemed ...
— The Adventure of Wisteria Lodge • Arthur Conan Doyle
... on which the wedding was to be, Lady Cecilia was in Lady Davenant's room, sitting beside the bed while her mother slept. Suddenly she was startled from her still and ever the same recurring train of melancholy thoughts, by a sound which had often made her heart beat with joy—her husband's knock; she ran to the window, opened it, and was out on the balcony in an instant. His horse was at the door, he had alighted, and was going up the steps; she leaned over the rails of the balcony, and ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... and its rays, which still gilded the tree-tops, left the wood below pensive and melancholy. The house stood in a solitary place on the edge of the forest, half a mile from Poissy; and these two things had their effect on my mind. I began to wish that we had brought with us half a troop of horse, or at least two or three gentlemen; and, startled by the thought of the unknown chances ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... squirrel gloats o'er his accomplished hoard, The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain, And honey bees have stored The sweets of summer in their luscious cells; The swallows all have wing'd across the main; But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, And sighs her tearful spells Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. Alone, alone Upon a mossy stone She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a love-rosary. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the preceding evening, remarked to him the great change in the temper of her daughter, "who from being," she said, "one of the liveliest, merriest girls in the world, was, on a sudden, become all gloom and melancholy." ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... you guess, or must I tell you? Sidney and I did the very same, and had just such a melancholy parting last night as I suspect you ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in their calculation before." Some good reason or other is always at hand. If by chance one of them do happen to win a large sum, it is ten to one that it will cost him his life,—that he will fall into a fit, or drop in an apoplexy, on hearing the news. There is a most melancholy instance of this in the very next house,—of a Jew made suddenly and unexpectedly rich, who instantly became insane in consequence, and is now the most wretched and melancholy spectacle that man can ever become,—starving in the midst of abundance, and moving like a beast about his ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... violent will and incessant craving for movement as the mark of a poet, whose contemporaries adored him for what they took to be the musing sweetness of his melancholy, may seem a critical perversity. There is, however, a momentous difference between that melancholy, which is as the mere shadow projected by a man's spiritual form, and that other melancholy, which itself is the reality and substance of a character; ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 3: Byron • John Morley
... Thebes, and the chivalrous glories of her one great man. Demosthenes has yet to prove how vain is the divinest eloquence when poured to degenerate hearts. Agis and Cleomenes have yet to exhibit the spectacle, ever fraught with melancholy interest, of noble natures out of harmony with the present, and spending their energies in the vain attempt to turn back the stream of time and call again into existence the feelings and the institutions of an irrevocable past. The monarchy of Philip is yet due to fate. Macedon ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, August 1850 - of Literature, Science and Art. • Various
... national policy, and as I have reserved a place expressly, where it will undergo a thorough discussion, I shall not here embarrass myself with it,—being resolved to preserve all the order in my power, in the examination of this important, melancholy subject. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... misapplications or misapprehensions of the meaning of Scripture: his false glosses, and truly preposterous specimens of exegesis[235]. I am content to take leave of him, while he is flattering himself that he has "found the pearl of great price, after sweeping the house:" (p. 414:) and under that melancholy delusion, I fear he must be left,—holding the broom ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... propensity was in the first moment of its operation, we know not; but with men accustomed to company, its enjoyments and disappointments are reckoned among the principal pleasures or pains of human life. Sadness and melancholy are connected with solitude; gladness and pleasure with the concourse of men. The track of a Laplander on the snowy shore, gives joy to the lonely mariner; and the mute signs of cordiality and kindness which are made to him, awaken the memory of pleasures which he felt in society. ...
— An Essay on the History of Civil Society, Eighth Edition • Adam Ferguson, L.L.D.
... with both of them. But Marguerite could not understand her father, and her father could not understand either his daughter or George. Never could they understand! He alone understood. And his understanding gave him a melancholy, hopeless feeling of superiority, without at all lessening the strange conviction of guilt. He had got himself gripped by destiny. Destiny had captured all three of them. But not the fourth. The ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... his Majesty more deeply than you imagine," replied Don Luis. "The singer's days are probably numbered. It is a pity! She was wonderfully successful in subduing the spirits of melancholy." ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of the river in the glowing dusk. They stood for a while, with their elbows resting on the stone balustrade, and looked down on the dark tide beneath them. The great, grim arches of Waterloo Bridge, made melancholy by the lemon-coloured light of the lamps which surmounted them, cast big, black shadows on the water. They could hear little lapping waves splashing against the pillars, and presently a tug went swiftly down to the Pool. Neither of them spoke. Behind them the tramcars went ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... and of its robe bereft By needy man, that all-depending lord, How meek, how patient, the mild creature lies! What softness in his melancholy face, ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... groom, into it, to learn what it was. 'They have something posted up about your Majesty,' reported the groom; and Friedrich, who by this time had ridden forward, took a look at the thing; which was a Caricature figure of himself: King in very melancholy guise, seated on a Stool, a Coffee-mill between his knees; diligently grinding with the one hand, and with the other picking up any bean that might have fallen. 'Hang it lower,' said the King, beckoning ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... same moment, in a tiny room four miles away, an elderly, melancholy man sat bowed over a telegraph board and drowsily plied his keys. He was the Gazette's special operator, and, having his orders from Mr. Parker, who looked after the news bureau when Hammerton was away, he was methodically going through his ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... "without any of the little refinements and luxuries, you know—not so much as a flower-pot or a basket-table"—weighed heavily on her happy soul. Needless to say she had never dreamed that Nevill would let the house remain in its present state; her intellect could never have grasped so melancholy a possibility, and the fact was somewhat unsettling to her faith in Nevill Tyson. "Isn't it—for a young bride, you know—just a little—a little triste?" And being more than a little afraid of her son-in-law, she waved ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... the way," said Wally, in tones of melancholy. "Every fortune teller I ever saw told me that no one ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... siege to the citadel cautiously, as was his way. Bluff Jack Lorrimer's courage was paralyzed by his love, and he drank deep to dispel his melancholy. Harry Bent—who was already under the spell of Netty Swinton, Dick's sister's—was indifferent, and Carnaby had been rejected ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... occurred to me when I was recalling all I had seen, that night. What if ghosts be one of the terrors of these jails? I have pondered on it often, since then. The utter solitude by day and night; the many hours of darkness; the silence of death; the mind forever brooding on melancholy themes, and having no relief; sometimes an evil conscience very busy; imagine a prisoner covering up his head in the bedclothes and looking out from time to time, with a ghastly dread of some inexplicable silent figure that always sits upon his bed, or stands (if a thing can ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... tossing on the waves out of sight of land, and not knowing where we were going. Perhaps Ali knew better than I did. He, at all events, did not seem to be alarmed, and when unemployed, he continued humming melancholy Malay airs, which certainly did not tend to raise my spirits. There is a great difference in reading of an adventure and going through it. I confess I should have felt less anxiety had Oliver been with me; ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... nobles indeed, will have packed up, and be gone for Jerusalem (Isa 34:10-17). So that the world, I say, will be left empty, void, and stripped both of treasure, beauty, and health, at the day of Jerusalem's building again. But O how melancholy a forlorn, beautiless world will this be at this day! It will be only the place of 'dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie' (Rev 22:15). It will now be the very emblem of hell, as the church at this day ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... gloom; for the first object in this world that presented itself, was a vast expanse of sea, just visible by the gleamings of the moon, bathed in watery clouds; a chill air ruffled the waves. I went to shiver a few melancholy moments on the shore. How often did I try to wish away the reality of my separation from those I love, and attempt to persuade myself it was ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... rocks towered gloomily on either hand: and of the city below, with its buildings of pure marble, and the yellow earthworks that crested Arlington Heights. The clouds over the Potomac were gorgeous in hue, but forests of melancholy pine clothed the sides of the hills, and the roar of the river made such beautiful monotone that I almost thought it could be translated to words. Our passes were now demanded by a fat, bareheaded officer, and while he panted through their contents, two ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... of all the petty difficulties into which Mr. and Mrs. Ludgate's foolish extravagance led them. The life of the shabby genteel is most miserable. Servants' wages unpaid, duns continually besieging the door, perpetual excuses, falsehoods to be invented, melancholy at home, and forced gaiety abroad! Who would live such a life? Yet all this Mr. and Mrs. Ludgate endured, for the sake of outshining ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... airs, Melancholy, wild and slow, Such, mayhap, as pleased the maidens Of a hundred ...
— The Haunted Hour - An Anthology • Various
... father, giving his head a melancholy shake, and looking towards Martin as though he would say, 'I can't deny it, sir. ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... coffee, and thinking how nearly it must be his last, his father's letter was brought to him. The letter had been delayed one day, as he himself had omitted to call for it. It was necessarily a sad time for him. He was a man who fought hard against melancholy, taking it as a primary rule of life that, for such a one as he had become, the pleasures of the immediate moment should suffice. If one day, or better still, one night of excitement was in store for him, the next day should ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... more attractive pier than their fatuous ingenuity could produce. There is a spice of danger associated with the Brig, adding much to its interest; for no one should venture along the spit of rocks unless the tide is in a proper state to allow him a safe return. A melancholy warning of the dangers of the Brig is fixed to the rocky wall of the headland, describing how an unfortunate visitor was swept into the sea by the sudden arrival of an abnormally large wave, but this need not frighten away from the fascinating ridge of rock those who use ordinary care in watching ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... noticed, dry, oblong willow-leaves were fluttering, and so he knew it was not a forest but a settlement, but he did not wish to say so. And in fact they had not gone twenty-five yards beyond the ditch before something in front of them, evidently trees, showed up black, and they heard a new and melancholy sound. Nikita had guessed right: it was not a wood, but a row of tall willows with a few leaves still fluttering on them here and there. They had evidently been planted along the ditch round a threshing-floor. Coming up to the willows, which moaned sadly in the wind, the horse suddenly planted ...
— Master and Man • Leo Tolstoy
... on living at Ford Bank, quite unconscious of the state of her father's affairs, but sunk into a deep, plaintive melancholy, which affected her looks and the tones of her voice in such a manner as to distress Miss Monro exceedingly. It was not that the good lady did not quite acknowledge the great cause her pupil had for grieving—deserted by her lover, her father dead—but that she could not bear the ...
— A Dark Night's Work • Elizabeth Gaskell
... of life; all diabetes, asthmas, consumptions of several kinds; many sorts of colics and diarrhoeas; some kinds of gouts and rheumatisms, all palsies, various kinds of ulcers, and possibly the cancer itself; and most cutaneous foulnesses, weakly constitutions, and bad digestions; vapors, melancholy, and almost all nervous distempers whatsoever. And what a plentiful source of miseries the last are, the afflicted best can tell. And scarce any one chronical distemper whatever, but has some degree of this evil faithfully attending it. The reason ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... the sentimental best. There's Whyte Melville, then, there's always something melancholy about him—'When the old horse died,' and that sort of thing—makes you cry, don't you know. You all like that. Certainly, if that dog-cart had been coming here it must have come by ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... fully than by simply saying it. Yet sombre as the event is, it seems a fit overture to the opening life of this spirit so nobly sad whom we are about to study. The tradition seems to have become established that Captain Nathaniel was inclined to melancholy, and very reticent; also, that though he was an admirable shipmaster, he had a vigorous appetite for reading, and carried many books with him on his long voyages. Those who know the inheritances that come with the Puritan ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... crowing of a cock, accidentally awakened, would sound far, far off, from some farmhouse away among the hills—but it was like a dreaming sound in his ear. No signs of life occurred near him, but occasionally the melancholy chirp of a cricket, or perhaps the guttural twang of a bullfrog from a neighboring marsh, as if sleeping uncomfortably and turning suddenly ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... comrades, the other lying in the first wagon among the wounded. Frau Martha had summoned sufficient courage to stand beside her husband, but the moment the procession had passed, she burst into bitter tears. Her life was bereft of all hope and the future stretched out dark and melancholy before her. ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... gormandizing maw will devour his dainty all at once. Cakes in this world will grow by being fed on, if only the feeder be not too insatiate. On all which wisdom Mr. Sowerby pondered with sad heart and very melancholy mind as he walked away from the premises of Messrs. Gumption & Gazebee. His intention had been to go down to the House after leaving Mr. Fothergill, but the prospect of immediate ruin had been too much for him, and he ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... a lump was gathering in her throat. Finally she laid her cheek to the desk and cried a little pool of her unaccountable melancholy on to the ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... trials were in reserve for us. We missed the best of the many inns at Liskeard, and went to the very worst. What a place was our house of public entertainment for a great sinner to repent in, or for a melancholy recluse to retreat to! Not a human being appeared in the street where this tavern of despair frowned amid congenial desolation. Nobody welcomed us at the door—the sign creaked dolefully, as the wind swung it on its rusty ...
— Rambles Beyond Railways; - or, Notes in Cornwall taken A-foot • Wilkie Collins
... and to further impose upon the marquis, she fetched a kind of box marked with figures and strange emblems. Opening this, and putting together certain figures which it contained, she declared that what the marquis had told her was true, and that his situation was a most melancholy one. She added, in order to frighten him, that he was threatened by still more serious misfortunes than those which had already overtaken him, but that it was easy to anticipate and obviate these mischances by ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... though he had bought it for her himself. He resented her attitude of having ceased to recognize his existence. A sadness, a filmy melancholy, crept over him. He brooded on the unutterable silliness of humanity, especially the female portion of it, in erecting artificial barriers to friendship. It was ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Salagua and Hell's Hip Pocket bars the river's sweep, he saw that vague, impalpable haze—a smoke, a dust, a veil of the lightest skein, stirred idly by some wandering wind, perhaps, or marking the trail of sheep. And as he looked upon it his melancholy gaze changed to a staring, hawk-like intentness; he leaned forward in the saddle and Chapuli stepped eagerly down the slope, head up, as if he ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
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