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More "Mournfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... it burst in horrid clamour from my lips, sending crinkles of cold through my inmost blood. For with the words which I read were all mixed up visions of crawling hearses, wails, and lugubrious crapes, and piercing shrieks of madness in strange earthy vaults, and all the mournfulness of the black Vale of Death, and the tragedy of corruption. Twice during the ghostly hours of that night the absolute and undeniable certainty that some presence—some most gashly silent being—stood at my right elbow, so ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... course, between Alice and Lady Midlothian;—a scene in private. "You must go through it," Lady Glencora had said, with jocose mournfulness; "and why should you not let her jump upon you a little? ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... lips which were otherwise grave, calm, almost sad. In fact, looking nearer, I thought he did look sad; and though when he looked at me his eyes were so piercing, yet in repose they had a certain distant, abstracted expression not far removed from absolute mournfulness. Broad-shouldered, long-armed, with a physique in every respect splendid, he was yet very distinctly removed from the mere handsome animal which I believe enjoys a distinguished popularity ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... me," he said, again putting his head between his hands and shaking it with the same tired mournfulness; "at nights I think that my bed is flung up and down, and when I spring out the room reels round me as though I were drunk. There was no escape. It was no use trying to bend the bars of the cage, or to pull up the planks of the bottom. And ...
— The Tale Of Mr. Peter Brown - Chelsea Justice - From "The New Decameron", Volume III. • V. Sackville West
... as Gospel all that she had been taught. She hardly ever went out, and she had very little standard of comparison; she admired her family naively, and believed what they said. She was of an expansive and confiding nature, easily satisfied, and tried to fall in with the mournfulness of her home, and docilely used to repeat the pessimistic ideas which she heard. She was a creature of devotion—always thinking of others, trying to please, sharing anxieties, guessing at what others wanted; she had a great need of loving without demanding anything in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... aver that the Africans, on their way to slavery, are so merry, that they dance and sing. But upon a careful examination of witnesses, it was found that their singing consisted of dirge-like lamentations for their native land. One of the captains threatened to flog a woman, because the mournfulness of her song was too painful to him. After meals they jumped up in their irons for exercise. This was considered so necessary for their health, that they were whipped, if they refused to do it. And this was their dancing! "I," said one of the witnesses, "was employed ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... in the red glow of evening, the charming light was spread out over the fields, the forest and the leaves of the trees were motionless, the clear sky looked like an open paradise, and the evening bells of the villages rang out with a strange mournfulness across the lea. My young soul now got its first presentment of the world and its events. I forgot myself and my guide; my spirit and my eyes were wandering among ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... brought some relief. During the rest of the day she did nothing but walk up and down the garden path in a state bordering on stupefaction. Night came, and with it but little rest. The next day, with an instinct to do something which should reduce prostration to mournfulness, she went to her son's room, and with her own hands arranged it in order, for an imaginary time when he should return again. She gave some attention to her flowers, but it was perfunctorily bestowed, for they no ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... behind the little, old-fashioned greenish panes. The goats scattered along the paths nibbled languidly at the new spring grass, with "baas" at the woman who was tending them, and looked bored, as she followed the visitors with a lack-lustre eye. A mournfulness was over the place, like the terror of a contagion. Yet it had been a cheerful house, and one where even recently there had been high junketings. Replanted with timber for the famous singer who had sold it to Jenkins, it revealed ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... their obvious meaning was, naturally, missed by Arabella. The latter, after evincing that she was struck by Sue's avowal, recovered herself, and went on to talk with placid bluntness about "her" boy, for whom, though in his lifetime she had shown no care at all, she now exhibited a ceremonial mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to the conscience. She alluded to the past, and in making some remark appealed again to Sue. There was no answer: Sue had invisibly ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... and dreary? Why did my bosom heave with sighs and my eyes overflow with tears? Was the tempest that had just passed a signal of the ruin which impended over me? My soul fondly dwelt upon the images of my brother and his children; yet they only increased the mournfulness of my contemplations. The smiles of the charming babes were as bland as formerly. The same dignity sat on the brow of their father, and yet I thought of them with anguish. Something whispered that the happiness we at present enjoyed was set on mutable foundations. Death must happen to all. ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... restlessness; you go out, only to return hurriedly for news. You are eternally listening, and what you hear shocks you; the common sounds of life, the roll of the carts and cabs in the street, the footsteps of the passers-by, are full of an indescribable mournfulness; music increases your misery into madness, and the joy of others is monstrous as laughter heard ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... holding out her hand to Uncle Geoffrey, with a look of relief and congratulation, and yet of inexpressible mournfulness ...
— Henrietta's Wish • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Madame had sighed very noiselessly, but with an accompaniment very far more dangerous for the king's repose. Madame had sighed, first closing her beautiful black eyes, next opening them, and then, laden, as they were, with an indescribable mournfulness of expression, she had raised them towards the king, whose face at that moment visibly heightened in color. The consequence of these blushes, of these interchanged sighs, and of this royal agitation, was, that Montalais had committed an indiscretion ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the things I wanted much to see when I first traveled South was the famed live-oak, the majesty and the mournfulness of which had been long sung into me. Perhaps I expected too much, as I did of the palmetto, another part of my quest, but surely there was disappointment when I was led, on the banks of the Manatee River in Florida, to see a famous live-oak. It was tall and grand, but its ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... Edinburgh, a friend asked him if he made much money in Wakefield. "Not a shilling!" was the reply. "Not a shilling!" reiterated his astonished acquaintance. "Why, didn't you go there to star?"—"Yes," replied Mathews, with mirthful mournfulness; "but they spell it ...
— The Jest Book - The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings • Mark Lemon
... law-cases, diversified with sociability and funny stories, he would sometimes be seen in the early morning brooding by the fire-place with hands outspread, and murmuring his favorite verses,—a soliloquy on the mournfulness and mystery of life: "Oh, why should the ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... without, and making many a circle in the gale before joining their innumerable comrades that whitened the ground. The wind sighed and soughed about the old house as it had done a year before, but Webb and Amy were armed against its mournfulness. They were in the parlor, on whose wide hearth glowed an ample fire. Burt and Gertrude were expected on the ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... or rather the fortress of Lochleven, already somewhat gloomy in its situation and architecture, borrowed fresh mournfulness still from the hour at which it appeared to the queen's gaze. It was, so far as she could judge amid the mists rising from the lake, one of those massive structures of the twelfth century which seem, so fast shut up are they, the stone ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... the dark, high-boned face with horror-stricken eyes, but could see no sign of death on it, or any great change after seventeen years, except a more unearthly mournfulness ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... more ride forth at his side. At the tidings of Stuart's extremity, General Jackson aroused himself to interrogate the bearer of the message, query succeeding query with characteristic impetuosity. Suddenly the martial fire faded ashily, his eyes dulled into mournfulness. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... friends of her early days such consolation as they might minister to a grief which only those who have experienced it can measure. She never brought her own peculiar sorrows before the public; but there is a tone of gentle mournfulness pervading many of her poems, that may be traced to this cause; and there are touching allusions to "one of rare endowments," that no one who remembered her husband's character could fail to recognise. Her intense love of nature happily remained unchanged; and the green hills, the flowing ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... Throckmorton, who, in the distance, was surveying the Archbishop's spy with a sardonic amusement, and a great mournfulness went through her. For there was the traitor and here before her was the betrayed. Throckmorton had told her enough to know that he was conspiring against his master, and Cromwell trusted Throckmorton before any man in the land; and it was as if she saw one man with a dagger hovering behind another. ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... expression, and, wrestling like a pinioned giant, the soul of matter throws off the weight of Its superincumbent inertia. Slowly, gently, most sorrowfully through the golden air cleaves a voice that is somewhat a wail, yet not untuned by love. Inarticulate at first, I catch only the low mournfulness; but it clears, it concentrates, it murmurs into cadence, it syllables into intelligence, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... handkerchief. St. Nicodemus was selected for the august rite. Similar phenomena occurred when Eve introduced the point whether the reception should be at Manchester Square or at Claridge's Hotel. And when Eve suggested that it might be well to enliven the mournfulness of a wedding with an orchestra and dancing, Sissie leaped up and seizing her father's hand whizzed him dangerously round the room to a tuna of her own singing. The girl's mere physical force amazed him The dance was brought to a conclusion by the overturning ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
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