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More "Plaint" Quotes from Famous Books



... courtiers' ears I pour my plaint, They drink it as the nectar of the great; And squeeze my hand, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... sway like dancing girls; or an afternoon at Kiyomidzu, in the old, old summer-house, where everything is like a dream of five hundred years ago,—and where there is a great shadowing of high woods, and a song of water leaping cold and clear from caverns, and always the plaint of flutes unseen, blown softly in the antique way,—a tone-caress of peace and sadness blending, just as the gold light glooms into blue ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn

... heart you'd be meaning," he corrected. "'Tis the very heart and throat of love that are yours this night. And for the first time, dear lady, have I heard the full fair volume that is yours. Never again plaint that your voice is thin. Thick it is, and round it is, as a great rope, a great golden rope for the mooring of argosies in the harbors ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... in any of the small happenings of home, the frank rivalry of Eudora's suitors, the bickerings of the girls and boys over the division of household labor. The one thing that had momentarily aroused his somnolent intelligence was a revival of his wife's plaint anent the unbuilt bird-house. That, and a certain furtive anxiety during supper lest his daughter Eudora should forget to keep his plate piled high, were the only signs of a participation ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... harsh voice of Tom Plate on the stairs indicated his coming up. He reached toward Tom with one hand, holding a cocked pistol with the other; but Tom slid easily out of his wavering grasp and fled along the deck. He followed his footsteps until he lost them, and picked up instead the angry plaint of the negro cook ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... not answer. He sat silent and immovable until the light in the valley had quite faded, and the twitter of the birds had been superseded by the monotonous, mournful plaint of a whip-poor-will in a distant tree. Then he stirred and looked up at Eleanor with ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... best of the early poems are: "The Ruined City," reflecting the feeling of one who looks on crumbling walls that were once the abode of human ambition; "The Seafarer," a chantey of the deep, which ends with an allegory comparing life to a sea voyage; "The Wanderer," which is the plaint of one who has lost home, patron, ambition, and as the easiest way out of his difficulty turns eardstappa, an "earth-hitter" or tramp; "The Husband's Message," which is the oldest love song in our literature; ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... takes on a more vivid hue in a poem written shortly after God's Funeral, called A Plaint to Man, where God remonstrates with man for having created Him at all, since His life was to be so short and ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps

... I am going to do my duty to myself!" Whereat Harry Hardwicke was suddenly aware that Cupid carries a double-barreled gun, sometimes. In her own apartment, Nadine Johnstone listened to Janet Fairbarn's sobbing plaint, as the heart-happy Mattie Jones flew around the rooms making her young mistress's boxes. Nadine was still in an entrancing dream of freedom, life, and love, and the cunning Scotswoman's plaint was all unheeded. Major Hardwicke ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... to her lord, the good Earl of Gloucester, with but little liking of her side, and yet less on his. Nathless, she made no plaint, but submitted herself, as a good maid should do—for mark thou, Clarice, 'tis the greatest shame that can come to a maiden to set her will against those of her father and mother in wedlock. A good maid—as I trust ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt

... grief. I should entone No plaint to thee; no loss should I bemoan! I should be patient, I, though full of care, And not attempt, by bias of a prayer, To sway thy spirit, or to urge anew A claim contested. For my days are few; My days, I think, are few upon the earth Since I must ...
— A Lover's Litanies • Eric Mackay

... among the knolls he chases and slays the wild beasts, the God, with keen eye, and at evening returns piping from the chase, breathing sweet strains on the reeds. In song that bird cannot excel him which, among the leaves of the blossoming springtide, pours forth her plaint and her honey-sweet song. With him then the mountain nymphs, the shrill singers, go wandering with light feet, and sing at the side of the dark water of the well, while the echo moans along the mountain crest, and the God leaps hither and thither, and goes into the midst, with ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... we always miss, And so to seek and fly the sun, By turns, around which love should run, Perverts the ineffable delight Of service guerdon'd with full sight And pathos of a hopeless want, To an unreal victory's vaunt, And plaint of an unreal defeat. Yet no less dangerous misconceit May also be of the virgin will, Whose goal is nuptial blessing still, And whose true being doth subsist, There where the outward forms are miss'd, In those who learn and keep ...
— The Victories of Love - and Other Poems • Coventry Patmore

... person or persons being of the same fellowship of English Merchants for discouery of newe trades, or their successors in any court of Record, or in any other Court or courtes within this Realme, or els where, by Action of debt, action of detinue, bill, plaint, information, or otherwise: in which suite no essoine, protection, wager of lawe, or iniunction shal be allowed, for, or on the behalfe of the ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, • Richard Hakluyt

... below a violin sang its very soul out upon the summer night, weaving its plaint into the soft, adagio rippling ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day

... city of stones and the sea that wrought so on his spirit. Tourgenieff was right; only the young should come here, not those who had seen with Virgil the tears of things. And then he recalled the lines of Catullus—the sad, stately plaint of the classic world, like the suppressed sob ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... to her in the form of the song under her window. Great Heavens! you find an outrage in this! But M. Flaubert has only done what Shakespeare and Goethe have done, who, at the supreme moment of death, have not failed to make heard some chant, or perhaps plaint, or it might be raillery, which recalls to him who is passing to eternity some pleasure which he will never more enjoy, or some fault to be atoned. ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various

... of a semaphore signalling national events. She sprang before Aminta to stop her retreat, and stamped and gibbed, for sign that she would not be driven. She fell away to Mr. Morsfield, for simple hearing of her plaint. He appeared emphatic. There was a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... had lost a friend; and the others, too, seemed equally affected by the scene, even Bob turning his back on the beach without a murmur at their going indoors so early, as he would otherwise have done; this being the young gentleman's usual plaint. But, if depressed for the moment, on reaching "the Moorings" the thermometer of their spirits ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson

... here to enjoy this fine spring morning. It is like April, bright, calm, warm, and dreamy, sparrows singing, robins and blue birds calling, hens cackling, crows cawing, while now and then the ear detects the long drawn plaint of the meadow lark. The ice in the placid river floats languidly by and I dare say your hunting ground is alive with ducks. I am boiling sap on the old stove set up here in the chip yard. I have ten trees tapped and lots of sap. ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... the earth," down to "A woman shall not speak in church, but shall ask her husband at home," the tendency of the Bible has been to crush out aspiration, to deaden human faculties, and to humiliate mankind. From Adam's plaint, "The woman gave me and I did eat," down to Christ's "Woman, what have I to do with thee?" the tendency of the Bible has been degradation of the divinest half of humanity—woman. Even the Christian Church itself is not based upon Christ as a savior, but upon its own teachings that woman brought ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton

... complain that he felt worse. It was then that he became the ranch's incubus, its harpy, its Old Man of the Sea. He shut himself in his room like some venomous kobold or flibbertigibbet, whining, complaining, cursing, accusing. The keynote of his plaint was that he had been inveigled into a gehenna against his will; that he was dying of neglect and lack of comforts. With all his dire protestations of increasing illness, to the eye of others he remained unchanged. His currant-like eyes were as bright and diabolic as ever; his ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry

... mighty Father, she, with plaint and prayer, departed: Then from fierce Aetna to the sea a ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... to the action. These rules exclude in a vast degree the pitiable defects and vices that mark all the unprofessional arguments one ever hears; for on a breach of any one of the said rules the other party can demur; the demurrer is argued before the judges in Banco, and, if successfully, the faulty plaint or faulty plea is dismissed, and often of course the cause won or lost thereby, and the country saved the trouble, and the suitors the expense of trying ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... Thou mourner fair, Nor pour the fruitless tear! The plaint of woe is all too low— The ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope

... carefulness. Suddenly he paused. His dark eyes, in vague, alcoholic meditation, sought the distant peaks stained with the blush-rose of sunset. The evening-purple of the hills fringed the bay with mystery. Gulls floated high on lavender wings, their intermittent plaint answering the Indian voices that drifted up from the beach where the ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... And on the holy hearth, The Lars and Lemures moan with midnight plaint; In urns, and altars round, A drear and dying sound Affrights the Flamens at their service quaint; And the chill marble seems to sweat, While each peculiar power foregoes ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various

... was eager to get away, for he feared his mother's plaint for money. He knew nothing of the three five-hundred-dollar bills now sewed up in the ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage

... no word or plaint, Clasping the child unto her bosom still, Unflagging when all else began to faint, Intent to save her little one from ill; And they look'd on her as she sped along, Wond'ring what made ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... settled down in his seat as one who has made up his mind. "Let the case of the summoner be laid before me," said he. "Justice shall be done, and the offender shall be punished, be he noble or simple. Let the plaint be ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... were a-holding of their sides with laughter. Jack Lewthwaite drew the Chancellor, and right well he carried him. Ere their Majesties abdicated, and the Court dispersed, had we rare mirth, for Aunt Joyce laid afore the throne a 'plaint of one of her maids for treason, which was Gillian, that could no way keep her countenance: and 'twas solemnly decreed of their Majesties, and ratified of the Chancellor, that the said prisoner be put in fetters, and made to drink poison: the which fetters were a long piece of silver lace that ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... my song, When the green grass answers to my plaint, When in sighs respond to my moan, Then my voice shall be heard in his praise: Linger, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones

... she fared. The love withheld she never sought, She grew uncherished—learnt untaught; To her the inward life of thought Full soon was open laid. I know not if her friendlessness Did sometimes on her spirit press, But plaint she never made. The book-shelves were her darling treasure, She rarely seemed the time to measure While she could read alone. And she too loved the twilight wood And often, in her mother's mood, Away to yonder hill would hie, Like her, to watch the setting sun, Or see the ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

... continued, still flowed forth, all reason and respect being swept away amidst that distracted plaint of a wounded soul, that ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola

... What precious hopes are severed one by one! What hearts lie crushed and sick by 'hope deferred!' How many dear ones, stretched along the sand, Bleed out their lives beneath a blighting sun— With but a word— 'Mother!' for plaint or prayer! ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... there were no other, it is considered a sufficient answer to the German Chancellor's plaint that the United States "brusquely" broke off relations without giving "authentic" reasons ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller

... valley below answered her call. A trembling seized her and feeling her way to the bed where Bertie lay, she crept in beside him, cuddling the soft, warm little body close, and checking her sobs that they might not wake him. Long after the whippoorwill had ceased its plaint, she lay there staring into the darkness, ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... forward. He shrieked out for mercy from every saint in the calendar, and entreated one or all of them to carry him on shore, even if it was but to the sandy coast of Africa. "Ah! misericordia, misericordia, misericordia!" was the burden of his plaint. ...
— Salt Water - The Sea Life and Adventures of Neil D'Arcy the Midshipman • W. H. G. Kingston

... not each ditty with the glorious tale?[60] Ah! such, alas! the hero's amplest fate! When granite moulders and when records fail, A peasant's plaint prolongs his dubious date.[bw] Pride! bend thine eye from Heaven to thine estate, See how the Mighty shrink into a song! Can Volume, Pillar, Pile preserve thee great? Or must thou trust Tradition's simple tongue, When Flattery sleeps with thee, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron

... degree, that loftiness of courage, and stern, uncomplaining acceptance of the decrees of a hostile fate, which so often ennobled the otherwise gloomy and repellent traits of the Indian character. He raised no plaint over what had befallen his race; "the Great Spirit above directs us so that whatever hath been said or done must be good and right," he said in a spirit of strange fatalism well known to certain creeds, both Christian and heathen. He was careful ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt

... Had heard the boy's heart-rending plaint. He soothed his grief, his tears he dried, Then called his sons to him, and cried: "The time is come for you to show The duty and the aid bestow For which, regarding future life, A man gives children to his wife. This hermit's son, whom here you see A suppliant, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI

... came alongside, crying their never-ending begging word "yammerschooner," were two squaws and one Indian, the hardest specimens of humanity I had ever seen in any of my travels. "Yammerschooner" was their plaint when they pushed off from the shore, and "yammerschooner" it was when they got alongside. The squaws beckoned for food, while the Indian, a black-visaged savage, stood sulkily as if he took no interest at all in the matter, but on my turning my back for some biscuits and jerked beef for ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum

... this plaint! Did any aspirant for literary or dramatic honors ever pass to fame through such an antechamber of horrors? Did poet of the day ever have his head so maltreated? To be dipped in the rain-water tub, soused again and again; to ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... I mooved at her piteous plaint, And felt my heart nigh riven in my brest 30 With tender ruth to see her sore constraint; That, shedding teares, a while I still did rest, And after did her name of her request. "Name have I none," quoth she, ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser

... half-drowsing infant out of her attendant's arms, clasp it frantically to her breast, and then go parading up and down the room weeping over the wondering little face, speedily bringing on a wailing accompaniment to her own mournful plaint. It was more than ...
— 'Laramie;' - or, The Queen of Bedlam. • Charles King

... Plaint of Adolphe Culpepper Ferguson, Salesman of Fancy Notions, held in durance of his Landlady for a failure to connect on ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... below With pity stains my cheek, which thou for fear Mistakest. Let us on. Our length of way Urges to haste." Onward, this said, he mov'd; And ent'ring led me with him on the bounds Of the first circle, that surrounds th' abyss. Here, as mine ear could note, no plaint was heard Except of sighs, that made th' eternal air Tremble, not caus'd by tortures, but from grief Felt by those multitudes, many and vast, Of men, women, and infants. Then to me The gentle guide: "Inquir'st thou not what spirits Are these, which thou beholdest? Ere thou pass Farther, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... white mist came up from the river, the crickets chirped under the trees in the cemetery. The bells began to ring: first the highest of them, alone, like a plaintive bird, challenging the sky: then the second, a third lower, joined in its plaint: at last came the, deepest, on the fifth, and seemed to answer them. The three voices were merged in each other. At the bottom of the towers there was a buzzing, as of a gigantic hive of bees. The air and the boy's heart ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... crowded around him. The venerable matrons drew up their esparto-seated chairs in order to hear better. He was about to sing a romance of his own composition; a relacion, accentuated, according to the custom of the country, by a quavering plaint, a cry of pain drawn out as long as the singer had air left ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... disgusting—I shall speak to your father," with which, going to the chair he had given up, his mother sank down again with her heavy book. There was no anger, however, in her voice, and not even a harsh plaint; only a detached accepted disenchantment. Mrs. Brookenham's supreme rebellion against fate was just to show with the last frankness how much she ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James

... say, "I will forget," but perhaps the hardest task given us is to lock up a natural yearning of the heart, and turn a deaf ear to its plaint, for captive and jailer must inhabit the same small cell. Sylvia was proud, with that pride which is both sensitive and courageous, which can not only suffer but wring strength from suffering. While she struggled with a grief and ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott

... of all, In Olaf's hall Now sits in state on high; Whilst up in heaven Amidst the shriven Sits Olaf's majesty. For not in cell Does our hero dwell, But in realms of light for ever: As a ransom'd saint To heal our plaint, Be glory ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... grieving voice, trembling and faint, Blends with the hollow sobbings of the sea; Like the sad music of a siren's plaint, But shriller than Leander's voice should be, Unless the wintry death had changed its tone,— Wherefore she thinks ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... spitcat's plaint was as follows: "It ain't That I am to music a foe; For fiddle-strings bide in my own inside, And I twang them soft ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce

... eyes; but Frank could see nothing but a long wide stretch of desert country, at the horizon of which were a few palms overshadowing dingy, sun-baked mud buildings, houses formed of the brick made of straw now as in the days when the taskmaster-beaten Israelitish bondmen put up such pitiful plaint. ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn

... "she lives I know not where, and that is my sorrow; banished by Torismond, and that is my hell: for might I but find her sacred personage, and plead before the bar of her pity the plaint of my passions, hope tells me she would grace me with some favor, and that would suffice as a recompense of all my ...
— Rosalynde - or, Euphues' Golden Legacy • Thomas Lodge

... many ways, But still 'tis a riddle to me, Whose mystery is hid from the eye; But Oedipus, showing the souls All fettered, imbruted and blained, Who point where its blazonry rolls, And wail the sad plaint of the chained,— Asserts, 'There ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... wreck of their love-life. Such a Billy she could not love; in its nature such a Billy was not lovable nor capable of love. And then, at the thought of offspring, she shuddered. It was too terrible. And at such moments of contemplation, from her soul the inevitable plaint of the human went ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... little serpents of the sistrum as they lifted their melodious voices to bid Typhon depart, or watching the dancing women's rhythmic movements, or smiling half kindly, half with irony, upon the lovelorn maiden who made her plaint: ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... stood back from one another, hand in hand, and smiled as they listened to the tuneful plaint. Then the man unfolded a wonderful plan to this girl whom he loved. Her willing ears drank in the details like one whose heart is set with a great purpose. They also talked of their love in their own practical way. There was little display of ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... repose. Indeed, it was a very patient little sufferer, if such a term may be applied to so young a child. But it was strange that an infant so pale, thin, and sickly, deprived of its mother's nursing care besides, should have made so little plaint and given so little trouble. Perhaps in the lack of human pity he had the love of heavenly spirits, who watched over him, soothed his pains, and stilled his cries. We cannot tell how that may have been, but it is certain that Ishmael was an angel ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... methinks I hear the bitter plaint Of the passing of a haughty race, The wronged, friendly, childlike, peaceable tribes, The swarthy archers of the wilderness, The red men to whom Nature opened all her secrets, Who knew the haunts of bird and fish, The hidden virtue of herb and root; All the travail of man and beast they knew— Birth ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller

... certain Martinez, a young policeman who patrolled that part of the shore, spending the noon hours under the cafe shelter, his rifle across his knees, his eyes vaguely fixed on the horizon of the sea, and his ears filled with the running plaint of the tavernkeeper. A handsome chap Martinez was, an Andalusian from Huelva, slender and trim of person, natty as could be in the old service uniform which he sported with a truly martial swagger, twirling the corner of his blond mustache with an air that ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... been so for years; but I am blurred, inhabit the debatable frontier of sleep, and have but dim designs upon activity. All is at a standstill; books closed, paper put aside, the voice, the eternal voice of R. L. S., well silenced. Hence this plaint reaches you with no very great meaning, no very great purpose, and written part in slumber by a heavy, dull, somnolent, superannuated son ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... claims a place. Retiring, and unknown or but to few, Her latter days were hid from public view; But I have often witness'd, when alone— The prayer uplifted, and the sigh unknown. When no eye saw her, but with God shut in, She pour'd her plaint to Him, who saw, unseen; Then from the sacred word she succour drew, 'To hoary hairs I bear, I carry you.' This promise still her drooping spirit cheered, And shed its starlight when the night appeared. Bold, in her weakness, ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth

... and the other mighty men in Israel are like the ruder instruments of music—the trumpet of Sinai, with its one prolonged note. David is like his own harp of many chords, through which the breath of God murmured, drawing forth wailing and rejoicing, the clear ring of triumphant trust, the low plaint of penitence, the blended harmonies ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren

... songs the influence of Gilchrist's early training in hymns is patent. In only a few instances do they follow the latter-day methods of Schumann and Franz. "A Song of Doubt and a Song of Faith" is possibly his best vocal solo. It begins with a plaint, that is full of cynic despair; thence it breaks suddenly into a cheerful andante. "The Two Villages" is a strong piece of work on the conventional lines of what might be called the Sunday ballad. "A Dirge for Summer" has a marked originality, and is of that deep brooding which ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes

... see that?" gasped Bobolink, proving that his plaint about his eyes closing up could hardly ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren

... drama played itself under the open sky and in the free air with such orchestral effects as the soughing woods or some rippling stream afforded. It was not interrupted when a squirrel dropped a nut on us from the top of a tall hickory; and the plaint of a meadow-lark prolonged itself with unbroken sweetness from one ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... again the plaintive, tender notes that stole out like wounded birds and fluttered away on broken wings to the sunlight, Kitty realized that she was an ear-witness to the interpretation of a soul's pain. Though she had never heard of Jean Paul Richter's plaint to music—"Thou speakest to me of those things which in all my endless days I have found not, nor shall find"—something of the torment embodied in those exquisitely bitter words came to her through Rosanne's ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley

... the smouldering wound. And no bird spreading its light wings can cross that water; but in mid-course it plunges into the flame, fluttering. And all around the maidens, the daughters of Helios, enclosed in tall poplars, wretchedly wail a piteous plaint; and from their eyes they shed on the ground bright drops of amber. These are dried by the sun upon the sand; but whenever the waters of the dark lake flow over the strand before the blast of the wailing wind, then they roll on in a mass into Eridanus with swelling tide. But the Celts have ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius

... plaint, femme deult, Femme est malade quand elle veult, Et par Sainte Marie! Quand elle veult ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland

... heard this plaint over and over for about a week, I said: "Perhaps you ought not to have had that little daughter, the little ewe-lamb. Maybe she was one too many." "Oh, no," came the quick response. "I couldn't have spared her." Then I went down the line of ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... felicitous manner. There are sighs and plaints, all haunting in their extreme expressiveness, a great variety beneath an appearance of monotony, and from time to time two wailing notes. These notes are always the same, as the chorus gives them as a plaint, and they are both affecting and artistic. At the end comes a dim ray of light and hope. This is the only one in the work save the Amen at the end, for Faith and Hope should not be looked for here. The supplications sound like prayers which do ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens

... few or no pessimists among the birds. One might think the call of the turtle-dove, which sounds to us like "woe, woe, woe," a wail of despair; but it is not. It really means "love, love, love." The plaint of the wood pewee, pensive and like a human sigh, is far from pessimistic, although in a minor key. The cuckoo comes the nearest to being a pessimist, with his doleful call, and the catbird and the jay, with ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs

... This plaint was answered from the distance and soon a number of anti-renters hastened to the spot. Mauville, in vicious humor, moved toward the threshold. One of the panels was already broken and an arm thrust into the opening. The land baron bent forward and coolly ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... in the development of Genius is, first, Complaint; second, Plaint; third, Love. Complaint, which is the condition of Persius, lies not in the province of poetry. Erelong the enjoyment of a superior good would have changed his disgust into regret. We can never have ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... qui la vertu Etait moins que la table encensee; On ne plaint point la femme abattue, Mais ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi

... and fallen stones bestrew the ground: In loosen'd garb derang'd, with scatter'd hair, His bosom open to the nightly air, Lone, o'er a new heap'd grave poor Basil bent, And to himself began his simple plaint. ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie

... first robin in Hackensack, the stirring of the maple sap in Bennington, the budding of the pussy willows along the main street in Syracuse, the first chirp of the blue bird, the swan song of the blue point, the annual tornado in St. Louis, the plaint of the peach pessimist from Pompton, N.J., the regular visit of the tame wild goose with a broken leg to the pond near Bilgewater Junction, the base attempt of the Drug Trust to boost the price of quinine foiled in the House by Congressman Jinks, the first tall poplar struck ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein

... way along, his heart was glad. His foot was on holy ground, and at every step new associations came floating into his thoughts. These were the mountains to which Moses had looked from Pisgah; here Jephthah's daughter had made plaint for her young life; hither had come Mary in the joy of the angel's message; the stones on which he stumbled might have felt the feet of Christ. At the hill called Mount Joy they should have seen Jerusalem; but the air was thick, and they could only make out the Mount ...
— The Age of Erasmus - Lectures Delivered in the Universities of Oxford and London • P. S. Allen

... the foam fringe of the ocean the town of seven towers once lay, now stand upon a wave-washed cliff, and that he who looks forth from its shattered mullions to-day sees only the marshland and the wrinkled waters, hears only the plaint of the circling gulls and the weary crying of ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... amethyst. And robed in her mantle of mist the sprite Her low wail poured on the silent night. Then the spirit spake, and the floods were still— They hushed and listened to what she said, And hushed was the plaint of the whippowil In the silver-birches above her head: 'Wiwaste,—the prairies are green and fair, When the robin sings and the whippowil; But the land of the Spirits is fairer still, For the winds of winter ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon

... each of us be the centre of his own gravity. Maggie Delafield had, perhaps, that spark in the brain for which we have but an ugly word. We call it "pluck." And by it we are enabled to win a losing game—and, harder still, to lose a losing game—without much noise or plaint. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... What further inch of ground was there for a fight? And if the fight were over, why should he rob his boy of one sparkle from off the joy of his triumph? Silverbridge was now standing before him abashed by that plaint, inwardly sustained no doubt by the conviction of his great success, but subdued by his father's wailing. "However,—perhaps we had better let that pass," said the Duke, with a long sigh. Then Silverbridge took his father's hand, and looked up in his ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... but rather increases them. When the day's duties are over, and all the house is still, I lie tossing ceaselessly, torn by conflicting doubts and fears. E'en as the wakeful bird sits darkling all night long, and pours her endless plaint, now low and mellow, now piercing high and shrill, so wavers my spirit in its purpose, and threads the unending maze of thought. Sweet home of my wedded joy, must I leave thee, and all the faces which I love so well, and the great possessions which he gave into my keeping? Shall I become a ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell

... the sacred page, How Abram was the friend of God on high; Or, Moses bade eternal warfare wage With Amalek's ungracious progeny; Or how the royal bard did groaning lie Beneath the stroke of Heav'n's avenging ire; Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry; Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire; Or other holy seers that tune ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 8 • Charles H. Sylvester

... my plaint, I cry to Thee; Be pitiful, and pardon me, For I have sinned; O, give me grace To seek in ...
— Hymns from the East - Being Centos and Suggestions from the Office Books of the - Holy Eastern Church • John Brownlie

... swarthy-rolling eye are cast:— "Ha! Harrald," scream'd he, "have we met at last?" For the first time, the youth felt terror's force; Pale grew his cheek, as that of clammy corse, Chill was his blood, his nervous arm was faint, While thus he stammer'd forth his lowly plaint: ...
— Romantic Ballads - translated from the Danish; and Miscellaneous Pieces • George Borrow

... Sometimes the voices of our humanity as they rise blend and compose into one great cry that is lifted, shivering and tingling, to the stars, "Oh, that I knew where I might find Him!" Sometimes and more often they sink into a subdued and minor plaint, infinitely touching in its human solicitude, perplexity and pain. Again, James Stephens has phrased it for us in ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... hath spoke of every one These noble wives, and these lovers eke. Whoso that will his large volume seek Called the Saintes' Legend of Cupid: There may he see the large woundes wide Of Lucrece, and of Babylon Thisbe; The sword of Dido for the false Enee; The tree of Phillis for her Demophon; The plaint of Diane, and of Hermion, Of Ariadne, and Hypsipile; The barren isle standing in the sea; The drown'd Leander for his fair Hero; The teares of Helene, and eke the woe Of Briseis, and Laodamia; The cruelty of thee, Queen Medea, Thy little children hanging by the halse*, *neck ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer

... ever live, But told, expires; pray then, reveale (To show our wound is half to heale), What mortall nymph or deity Bewail you thus? Who ere you be, The shepheard sigh't, my woes I crave Smotherd in me, me in my grave; Yet be in show or truth a saint, Or fiend, breath anthemes, heare my plaint, For her and thy breath's symphony, Which now makes full the harmony Above, and to whose voice the spheres Listen, and call her musick theirs; This was I blest on earth with, so As Druids amorous did grow, Jealous of both: for as one day This star, as yet but set in clay, By ...
— Lucasta • Richard Lovelace

... feeble plaint, quickly silenced by a thunder crash. "If we were only home with mama," he mourned, "I shouldn't ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... claimed upon them of a long while,] consanguinity, affinity, or any other lawful cause whatsoever, there be no lawful impediment on this behalf; and that there be not at this time any action, suit, plaint, quarrel, or demand, moved or depending before any judge ecclesiastical or temporal, for or concerning any marriage contracted by or with either of you; and that the said marriage be openly solemnized in the church above-mentioned, between the hours of eight ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... sank into his heart, The plaint of the ladye, He deems she pleads to him for help, And will ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 405, December 19, 1829 • Various

... wae I hear zour plaint; Sair, sair I rew the deid, That eir this cursed hand of mine Had gard his body bleid. Dry up zour tears, my winsome dame, Ze neir can heal the wound; Ze see his head upon the speir, His heart's ...
— Book of Old Ballads • Selected by Beverly Nichols

... customs. The Dispensary work calls also for much time and strength, nursing often having to accompany the medicine; the very ignorance and superstition of the patients and their friends making the task doubly trying. Then one must be ever at hand to hear the plaint of and to shelter and reconcile the runaway slave or wife or the threatened victim of oppression and superstition. Visitors are to be received, and all the bothersome and, to European notions, stupid details of native etiquette are to be observed ...
— Mary Slessor of Calabar: Pioneer Missionary • W. P. Livingstone

... smallest consoling idea has a strength of its own that is not to be found in the most magnificent plaint, the most exquisite expression of sorrow. The vast, profound thought that brings with it nothing but sadness is energy burning its wings in the darkness to throw light on the walls of its prison; but the timidest thought of hope, or of cheerful acceptance ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck

... Lamentation. — N. lament, lamentation; wail, complaint, plaint, murmur, mutter, grumble, groan, moan, whine, whimper, sob, sigh, suspiration, heaving, deep sigh. cry &c. (vociferation) 411; scream, howl; outcry, wail of woe, ululation; frown, scowl. tear; weeping ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... and the owl is still, The bat in the shelvy rock is hid, And naught is heard on the lonely hill, But the cricket's chirp and the answer shrill, Of the gauze-winged katydid, And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will {417} Who moans unseen, and ceaseless sings Ever a note of wail and woe, Till morning spreads her rosy wings, And earth and sky in her ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... garrulous twelve was finally given to the presiding officer. For a moment, silence fell. It was broken by Ruth Howard, a girl with large, soulful brown eyes and a manner of rapt earnestness, who uttered her plaint in a tone of ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan

... book and buttoned my coat. Soo-hoo! the wind was here and the cloud—soo-hoo! drawing out longer and more plaintive in the thin mouthpiece of the chink. The cloud had no more rain in it, but it shut out the sun; and all that afternoon and all that night the low plaint of the wind continued in sorrowful hopelessness, and little sounds ran about the ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... campaign, which she knew beforehand would bring to her renown, the like of which no woman in the world's history has ever won. She would have gone back gladly, I truly believe, to her home in Domremy, and uttered no plaint, even though men ceased after the event to give her the praise and glory; for herself she ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green

... about the angles and under the wide reaching eaves. It sets the door creaking with a sound that startles the occupants. It passes on and forces its way through the dense, complaining forest trees. The opposition it receives intensifies its plaint, and it rushes angrily through the branches. Then, for awhile, all is still again. But the coming of that breath from the mountain top has made a difference in the outlook. Something strange has happened. One looks about and cannot ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... said: "The plaint of Citronella is full of a passion of dream that only the Italian poets have found ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis

... tenth year of Abbot Sampson's abbacy we monks, after full deliberation in chapter, laid our formal plaint before the abbot in his court. We said that the rents and revenues of all the good towns and boroughs in England were steadily growing and increasing to the enrichment of their lords, in every case save in that of our town of St. Edmund. ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... whether the rule of talion is the right one for the Kabyles. In 1871, at the height of the French troubles with the Commune, formidable revolts were going on among the descendants of those untamable wretches whom Saint Arnaud smoked out in a cave. In July the garrison at Setif heard the plaint of a friendly cadi, named D'joudi, who had been wantonly attacked for his loyalty to the French by some organized mutineers under Mohammed Ben-Hadad. The poor wretch had been obliged to flee, with his women and his flocks, into the protection of his country's ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... answered Jupiter; "I have heard thy plaint, and have come hither to show thee how greatly thou dost wrong me. Hark! I, who am sovereign lord of this world, promise to grant in full the first three wishes which it will please thee to utter, whatever these may be. Consider well what things can bring ...
— The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault • Charles Perrault

... me music; for my soul doth faint. I'm sick of noise and care: and now mine ear Longs for some air of peace, some dying plaint That may the spirit from ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 6, June 1810 • Various

... the sun's last beams Light up woods and streams, And brighten the gloom below; And the deer springs by With his flashing eye, And the shy, swift-footed doe; And the sad winds chide In the branches wide, With a tender plaint of woe. ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... concluded his introduction in these words: "And now, gentlemen, we have a farmer as our guest here tonight. It has been the plaint of the farmer from time out of mind that he had not representation; that he had not voice in affairs that had to do with his vocation. The newly made clod-hopper is respectfully informed that he can air his grievances to the fullest extent and that, unlike others, we will not pass resolutions ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field

... much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind." Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale wanderer down soft green allees, he had a twilight mind ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... on the holy Hearth, The Lars, and Lemures moan with midnight plaint, In Urns, and Altars round, A drear, and dying sound Affrights the Flamins at their service quaint; And the chill Marble seems to sweat, While each peculiar power forgoes ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy

... even more." Shaking his finger, the professor recited oracularly, "'Oh, wad some pow'r the giftie gie us to see oursel's as ithers see us.' Van Manderpootz is that power, Dixon. Through my attitudinizor, one may at last adopt the viewpoint of another. The poet's plaint of more than two centuries ...
— The Point of View • Stanley Grauman Weinbaum

... game path through which I passed . . . to this, palsy and senility! Oh, the subtile poisons, the intoxicating Hippocrenes I taught him how to drink! And now he turns and casts the dregs into my face. But as I said, I make no plaint; I do not lack courage. A pleasant pastime it was, this worldly lessoning; but I forgot that he was partly a reproduction of his Catholic mother; that where I stood rugged he would fall; that he did not possess ardor that is without fire, love ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath

... but Adam sat in pained silence—he could not speak otherwise than tenderly to his mother to-day, but he could not help being irritated by this plaint. It was not possible for poor Lisbeth to know how it affected Adam any more than it is possible for a wounded dog to know how his moans affect the nerves of his master. Like all complaining women, she complained in the expectation of being soothed, and when Adam said nothing, she ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... happened to bear his sad plaint Addressed in the following manner the saint: "The nation will keep thee to support splendour's throne, And interest will pay thee, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various

... in his hands, and she saw the tears trickle slowly through his fingers. He made no com-plaint, no protestation, only covered up his face and prayed, weeping, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... to the Ting of the land he goes, And straight to make his plaint began; Then murmured loud the assembled crowd, And clench’d his fist each ...
— Marsk Stig - a ballad - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise

... his sex. When a man nags, he puts his whole heart into the effort; a woman only nags, as a rule, because the heart has been taken out of her. The nagging woman is an over-tasked creature with jarred nerves, whose plaint is an expression of pain, a cry for help; in any interval of ease which lasts long enough to relax the tension, she feels remorse, and becomes amiably anxious to atone. With the male nag it is different. He is usually sleek and smiling, a joyous creature, fond of good living, ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand

... with Amelia Ellen, putting the house in order, hearing the beautiful plaint of the loving-hearted, mourning servant as she told little incidents of her mistress. Here was the chair she sat in the last time she went up-stairs to oversee the spring regulating, and that was Mr. John's little baby dress in which he was christened. His mother smoothed it out and ...
— The Man of the Desert • Grace Livingston Hill

... and more aboard the Jersey. When the wind sets from the south, on still mornings, I have heard a strange moaning—a low, steady, monotonous plaint, borne inland over the city. But, as you say, what can ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers

... Abbey, between which and the foam fringe of the ocean the town of seven towers once lay, now stand upon a wave-washed cliff, and that he who looks forth from its shattered mullions to-day sees only the marshland and the wrinkled waters, hears only the plaint of the circling gulls and the ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... and the monotonous, piteous plaint of the wailing women, which ever and anon rose into a loud, shrill, tremulous shriek, echoed through the silent rooms within to this hall, announcing that death had claimed a victim even in ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... This was the plaint that was often on Florentin's lips. Although he had never been a gambler—and for sufficient reason—in his eyes everything was decided by luck. There are those who are born under a lucky star, others under an unlucky one. There are those who, in the battle of life, receive knocks without ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... Let each of us be the centre of his own gravity. Maggie Delafield had, perhaps, that spark in the brain for which we have but an ugly word. We call it "pluck." And by it we are enabled to win a losing game—and, harder still, to lose a losing game—without much noise or plaint. ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman

... and, O oarsmen, repine! Those fair hanging woods, BULL, no longer are thine. Our high-mettled racers may pass o'er the sea— Shall sentiment challenge thy claims, L. S. D.? Our pictures may go without serious plaint— What are the best pictures but canvas and paint? Our Press? Let the alien toff take his pick. When the Dollar dictates shall mere patriots kick? Our hills and our forests? If Oil-kings appear, And want them—for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, May 20, 1893 • Various

... king of all, In Olaf's hall Now sits in state on high; Whilst up in heaven Amidst the shriven Sits Olaf's majesty. For not in cell Does our hero dwell, But in realms of light for ever: As a ransom'd saint To heal our plaint, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... the wind was abroad on nights like these. On shrill pipes it played; so weird, so wild, so prophetic were its tones that it found only a shrinking in the heart of him whose ear it constrained to listen. The sound of the torrent far below was accelerated to an agitated, tumultuous plaint, all unknown when its pulses were bated by summer languors. The moon was in the turmoil of the clouds, which, routed in some wild combat with the ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... trembling seized her and feeling her way to the bed where Bertie lay, she crept in beside him, cuddling the soft, warm little body close, and checking her sobs that they might not wake him. Long after the whippoorwill had ceased its plaint, she lay there staring into the ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice

... be meaning," he corrected. "'Tis the very heart and throat of love that are yours this night. And for the first time, dear lady, have I heard the full fair volume that is yours. Never again plaint that your voice is thin. Thick it is, and round it is, as a great rope, a great golden rope for the mooring of argosies in the ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... great Viceroy. "I have done my duty to Her Majesty," he laughed, "and now, I am going to do my duty to myself!" Whereat Harry Hardwicke was suddenly aware that Cupid carries a double-barreled gun, sometimes. In her own apartment, Nadine Johnstone listened to Janet Fairbarn's sobbing plaint, as the heart-happy Mattie Jones flew around the rooms making her young mistress's boxes. Nadine was still in an entrancing dream of freedom, life, and love, and the cunning Scotswoman's plaint was all unheeded. Major Hardwicke ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... the Last Lamp The Face at the Casement Lost Love "My spirit will not haunt the mound" "Wessex Heights In Death divided The Place on the Map Where the Picnic was The Schreckhorn A Singer asleep A Plaint to Man God's Funeral Spectres that grieve "Ah, are you digging on my grave?" Satires of Circumstance At Tea In Church By her Aunt's Grave In the Room of the Bride-elect At the Watering-place In ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy

... paused. His dark eyes, in vague, alcoholic meditation, sought the distant peaks stained with the blush-rose of sunset. The evening-purple of the hills fringed the bay with mystery. Gulls floated high on lavender wings, their intermittent plaint answering the Indian voices that drifted up from the beach ...
— Where the Sun Swings North • Barrett Willoughby

... courage. All the past rushed to my memory. He must have seen what I felt, for he said: 'A la guerre comme a la guerre. It is very good of you to come to see me.' In a quiet, natural way he then praised the kindness of the Germans at Wilhelmshoehe, nor did a single plaint escape him during our conversation. He said he had been deceived as to the force and preparation of his armies, but without mentioning names, nor did he abuse anybody, till I mentioned Trochu, who had abandoned the empress, whom he had sworn to defend. During half ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer

... himself, he philosophically rocked to and fro. "Oh! vy vos I a midshipman," cried he, "to be wrecked on this desolate island? I vish I vos at home at Bloomsbury! Oh! that I had but to turn and embrace my kind, good, benevolent, and much respected grandmother." As he uttered this pathetic plaint, he heard a chatter—of which, at first considering that it proceeded from his own teeth, he took no notice—but the sounds being repeated, he turned his head, and beheld a huge baboon with a dog-face and flowing hair, grinning with admiration ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour

... were here to enjoy this fine spring morning. It is like April, bright, calm, warm, and dreamy, sparrows singing, robins and blue birds calling, hens cackling, crows cawing, while now and then the ear detects the long drawn plaint of the meadow lark. The ice in the placid river floats languidly by and I dare say your hunting ground is alive with ducks. I am boiling sap on the old stove set up here in the chip yard. I have ten trees tapped and lots of sap. I wish you had some of the syrup. Your mother came back yesterday ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs

... and heard a feeble plaint, quickly silenced by a thunder crash. "If we were only home with mama," he ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal

... a dove fear-daunted, By howling storm-blast driven; Where waves their power vaunted, From land it had been riven. No cry nor moan it uttered, I heard no plaint repeated; In vain its pinions fluttered — It ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... The plaint gave Wallie such a pang that he could not answer, but with a twig played a game of tick-tack-toe in the dust, while he thought bitterly that no one could blame Helene Spenceley for preferring Canby to a person who seemed destined to failure in ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart

... Pour out your praise or plaint Meekly and duly; I will not enter there, To sully your pure prayer With ...
— Ballads • William Makepeace Thackeray

... been the theatre of human hopes and fears, where once men had been born, loved, and died, where once maidens had been fair, and good and evil wrestled, and little children played. Some Job may have dwelt here and written his immortal plaint, or some king of Sodom, and suffered the uttermost calamity. The world is very old; all we Westerns learned from the contemplation of these wrecks of men and of their works was just that the world is ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard

... articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself—one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad. It was invested with the woe of unnumbered generations, this plaint by which Buck was so strangely stirred. When he moaned and sobbed, it was with the pain of living that was of old the pain of his wild fathers, and the fear and mystery of the cold and dark that was to them fear and mystery. ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London

... true. In one of the willows, at the other side of the island, the mysterious bird was trilling from his hiding place, a dizzying shower of notes, which broke at the crescendo of the musical whirl-pool into a plaint as soft and long-sustained as a golden thread stretched in the silence of the night across the river, that seemed to be applauding with its hushed murmur. To get nearer, the lovers went up through the rushes, stopping, bending over at each step, to keep the branches ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez

... little avail, save that, being compelled, she will work woman's service for me, but whom none else shall compel . . . Yea, but what is all this to thee; or to me that I should tell it to thee? I will not drive thee away; but if thine entertainment please thee not, make no plaint thereof to me, but depart at thy will. Now is this talk betwixt us overlong, since, as thou seest, I and this King's Son are in converse together. Art thou a ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris

... things brings into the heart. This spectacle of life seemed to her strangely pathetic, and it seemed to mean something which eluded her, and which she would have given a great deal to have been able to express. Music alone could express the yearning that haunted her heart, the plaint of the Rhine Maidens was the nearest to what she felt, and she began to sing their song. Sister Mary John asked her eagerly what she was singing. She would have told her, but the Reverend Mother grew impatient ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore

... reflecting the feeling of one who looks on crumbling walls that were once the abode of human ambition; "The Seafarer," a chantey of the deep, which ends with an allegory comparing life to a sea voyage; "The Wanderer," which is the plaint of one who has lost home, patron, ambition, and as the easiest way out of his difficulty turns eardstappa, an "earth-hitter" or tramp; "The Husband's Message," which is the oldest love song in our literature; and ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long

... loudly heard around, And feeling bosoms shuddered at the sound; Though, we, on these occasions, truly know, The plaint is always greater than the woe. Some ostentation ever is with grief Those who weep most the soonest ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine

... were com before the Justice, he said to the dettour: doste thou owe this marchant this somme of money or no? Bea! quod he. What beste! (quod the Justice) answere to thy plaint, orels thou wilte be condemned. Bea! quod he agayne. Than his man of lawe stode forth, and sayd: Sir, this man is but an ideot. Who wolde beleue that this marchaunt, whiche is both wyse and subtyle, wolde truste ...
— Shakespeare Jest-Books; - Reprints of the Early and Very Rare Jest-Books Supposed - to Have Been Used by Shakespeare • Unknown

... mother put a stone in her vagina, yet she loves all young men." From time to time she would pause, and make ludicrous attempts to fondle the young boys, and then when they resisted her, she again took up her plaint. At last she succeeded in getting one young fellow to exchange cigars and headbands with her, and began to rub her hands on his body, urging him not to leave her. Just when she seemed on the verge of success in winning him, another spirit Baliwaga came to the medium, and the fun-maker ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole

... Fletcher did understand. She saw Joan, not as she was, a tall young creature radiantly facing life, but as a tired little child in this very room stepping' defeated from the fountain, because she could not make her desires come true! She was listening to the old plaint: "I have used the ...
— The Shield of Silence • Harriet T. Comstock

... think that I have had three or four pre-contracts in my time; but the good girls have not claimed upon them of a long while,] consanguinity, affinity, or any other lawful cause whatsoever, there be no lawful impediment on this behalf; and that there be not at this time any action, suit, plaint, quarrel, or demand, moved or depending before any judge ecclesiastical or temporal, for or concerning any marriage contracted by or with either of you; and that the said marriage be openly solemnized in the church above-mentioned, ...
— Clarissa, Volume 6 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson

... in his seat as one who has made up his mind. "Let the case of the summoner be laid before me," said he. "Justice shall be done, and the offender shall be punished, be he noble or simple. Let the plaint be ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle

... interrupting the universal tranquillity of earth, sea, and sky, rather tended to reveal to us how quiet the world round us really was. Such sounds as I refer to were the peculiar, melancholy—yet, it seemed to me, cheerful—plaint of sea-birds floating on the glassy waters or sailing in the sky; also the subdued twittering of little birds among the bushes, the faint ripples on the beach, and the solemn boom of the surf upon the distant ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne

... home betimes. His cronies knew the fun was over when they heard what happened to the great punchbowl—she made it a swine-trough. It was the heirloom of a hundred years, and as much as a man could carry with his arms out, a massive curio in stone; but to her husband's plaint about its degradation, "Oh," she cried, "it'll never know the difference! It's been ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... furniture, and Joe Laney wants to know if there's going to be any painting done and I haven't thought of any summer clothes—and with those two great growing girls! I suppose if we're going to the seashore we ought to make some reservations, too——" and Mrs. Westley concluded her plaint with a sigh that came from ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott

... legend. Hear this truth: Over the trackless past, somewhere, Lie the lost days of our tropic youth, Only regained by faith and prayer, Only recalled by prayer and plaint: Each lost day has its ...
— East and West - Poems • Bret Harte

... spring-time thereafter oft-times did Tyri make plaint to King Olaf, and cried bitterly thereover, because albeit had she such great possessions in Wendland yet had she none in this country, and that she should have such deemed she but seemly for a Queen; & thinking that by fair words would she get her own prayed she him on this matter, and ...
— The Sagas of Olaf Tryggvason and of Harald The Tyrant (Harald Haardraade) • Snorri Sturluson

... the aged Priam's lament that he must needs kiss the hands that slew his dear son Hector, and, kneeling, clasp the knees of his son's murderer! How sad is Cuchulain's plaint that his son Connla must go down to the grave unavenged, since his own father slew him, all unwitting! One remembers, too, Beowulf's words: "Better it is for every man that he avenge his friend than that he mourn him much!" ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... lad's song, far and faint, There is no sound in all the wood; 10 The murmuring pines are still; their plaint At last was ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... refus categorique, et cela malgre les instances de l'Ambassadeur qui a fait valoir, comme un bon cote de la proposition, le groupement mixte des Puissances grace auquel on evitait l'opposition de l'Alliance a l'Entente, ce dont s'etait si souvent plaint Jagow lui-meme. ...
— Why We Are At War (2nd Edition, revised) • Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History

... quiet and cushioned ease, where "all was one full-swelling bed"; the out-of-door stillness, broken only by "the stock-dove's plaint amid ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt

... for awhile, for they wish to dwell on that hopeful, that blissful season. And a nightingale, alighting on a bough above them, pours forth its sweet plaint, as if in response to their tender emotions. They praise the bird's song, and ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... one that tittered, till the most were a-holding of their sides with laughter. Jack Lewthwaite drew the Chancellor, and right well he carried him. Ere their Majesties abdicated, and the Court dispersed, had we rare mirth, for Aunt Joyce laid afore the throne a 'plaint of one of her maids for treason, which was Gillian, that could no way keep her countenance: and 'twas solemnly decreed of their Majesties, and ratified of the Chancellor, that the said prisoner be put in fetters, and made ...
— Joyce Morrell's Harvest - The Annals of Selwick Hall • Emily Sarah Holt

... with a pitying sigh, that there was not, but returned to her plaint over the sinfully wasted kopeks. Once I offered her some "tea-money" in the shape of a basket of raspberries, which she wished to preserve and drink in her tea, with the privilege of purchasing them herself. As an experiment to determine whether bargaining ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood

... through a thin veil of cirrus cloud. A pallid moon was rising. Far below, a breeze stirred the tree-fronds in Madison Forest. A bat staggered drunkenly about the tower, then reeled away into the gloom; and, high aloft, an owl uttered its melancholy plaint. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England

... of her that she had never needed to put her foot to the ground. If courage consists, for a being so tender, in toiling and enduring without faltering and plaint,—even to the very limit of physical power,—then she was the most courageous woman in the world, as she was the most charming, most faithful, most generous, and the most worthy of love. I tried not to think of her racked limbs, for the very pain and pity of it. We retraced our steps, but now following ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer

... foolishness it all am! I once jam my ban' in de do'—s'pose I went on jamin' for eber. Der's no use ob der lookin' glum at me, fer dat young man's gwine ter hab all her cakes he wants. I won'er if Missy Mara got de same 'plaint as Missy Ella. She bery deep, an' won' let on, eben ter her ole nuss. Pears ter me de cap'n's gittin' kiner lopsided toward her, but I don' ...
— The Earth Trembled • E.P. Roe

... heard this and did not lose a word, but waited to see who the lady was who had such a sorry plaint. But she shut the window and retired. The Blue Bird, curious to see and to hear some more, came again the following night, and again there was a maiden at the window who ...
— Edmund Dulac's Fairy-Book - Fairy Tales of the Allied Nations • Edmund Dulac

... reads the sacred page, How Abram was the friend of God on high; Or Moses bade eternal warfare wage With Amalek's ungracious progeny; Or how the royal bard did groaning lie Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire; Or Job's pathetic plaint, and wailing cry; Or rapt Isaiah's wild, seraphic fire: Or other holy seers that tune ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... insisting on the point, that no other will had ever been signed by him, but he always carried a will with him ready to be signed. There was much of self-pity perhaps in the letter, there was the plaint of a wrecked life, but there was still more of real delicate feeling for Rose, of intense anxiety to shield her, of poignant regret for "what might have been" in their home life. The man had been of a wholesome nature; his great physical courage was part of a good fellow's construction. But he ...
— Great Possessions • Mrs. Wilfrid Ward

... than win the honour and glory of the campaign, which she knew beforehand would bring to her renown, the like of which no woman in the world's history has ever won. She would have gone back gladly, I truly believe, to her home in Domremy, and uttered no plaint, even though men ceased after the event to give her the praise and glory; for herself she never ...
— A Heroine of France • Evelyn Everett-Green

... his faithful friend over so many years. At an engagement a month before, Tynemouth had been blinded by shrapnel, and had been sent to Durban. To the two letters he had written there had come no answer until now; and he felt that this reply would be a plaint against Fate, a rebellion against the future restraint and trial and responsibility which would be put upon the wife, who was so much ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... heaven's high register she claims a place. Retiring, and unknown or but to few, Her latter days were hid from public view; But I have often witness'd, when alone— The prayer uplifted, and the sigh unknown. When no eye saw her, but with God shut in, She pour'd her plaint to Him, who saw, unseen; Then from the sacred word she succour drew, 'To hoary hairs I bear, I carry you.' This promise still her drooping spirit cheered, And shed its starlight when the night appeared. Bold, in her weakness, ...
— Religion in Earnest - A Memorial of Mrs. Mary Lyth, of York • John Lyth

... possessing an equivalent to the Polish word zal [sadness, pain, sorrow, grief, trouble, repentance, &c.]. Indeed, he uttered the word repeatedly, as if his ear had been eager for this sound, which for him comprised the whole scale of the feelings which is produced by an intense plaint, from repentance to hatred, blessed or poisoned fruits ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... went onward with no word or plaint, Clasping the child unto her bosom still, Unflagging when all else began to faint, Intent to save her little one from ill; And they look'd on her as she sped along, Wond'ring what made so frail a ...
— Poems • Walter R. Cassels

... crying out under the slowly turning wheels, the horse's lean thighs moving with ascetic deliberation away from the light into the obscurity of the open space bordered dimly by the pointed roofs and the feebly shining windows of the little alms-houses. The plaint of the gravel travelled slowly all round the drive. Between the lamps of the charitable gateway the slow cortege reappeared, lighted up for a moment, the short, thick man limping busily, with the horse's head held aloft in his fist, the lank animal walking in stiff and forlorn ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad

... round in a circle went he and Christopher, the lad constantly trying to brighten and encourage, and the clerk as invariably bringing up with this same doleful plaint. He was not to ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett

... jerk, wiggle and kid all you want—but the Lady of the Sea Foam whispers a secret. Aphrodite, become a female barytone, still takes herself very seriously. Aphrodite, alas, is always serious. She gurgles a sonorous plaint out of the saxophone. The cornet sneers at her. The clarinet sneaks up on her and tweaks her nose. The trombone, the bull fiddle and the bassoon ignore her altogether. And the dancers on the cabaret floor are too busy to dance to her ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht

... leave thee? / Cunning rare was this. How let his love deceive thee, / since he thy liegeman is? And all in vain," quoth Kriemhild, / "the plaint I hear thee bring." "In sooth," then answered Brunhild, / "I'll tell it to my spouse ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler

... struggle that must be the beginning of a long sorrow. Only the day before, Dr. Kenn had been made acquainted with the contents of Stephen's letter, and he had believed them at once, without the confirmation of Maggie's statement. That involuntary plaint of hers, "Oh, I must go," had remained with him as the sign that she was undergoing some ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot

... with Mrs. Pagnell. She flung wild arms of a semaphore signalling national events. She sprang before Aminta to stop her retreat, and stamped and gibbed, for sign that she would not be driven. She fell away to Mr. Morsfield, for simple hearing of her plaint. He appeared emphatic. There was a ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... or the cable end; by consulting an exact photograph of the casino; by eagerly reading the Joanne guide describing the beauties of the seashore where one would wish to be; by being rocked on the waves, made by the eddy of fly boats lapping against the pontoon of baths; by listening to the plaint of the wind under the arches, or to the hollow murmur of the omnibuses passing above on the Port ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... cheerily.' Now a small bird is shrilling with a fine insect tone. A Flicker, a Wood-pewee, and a Phoebe follow in quick succession. Then a Tufted Titmouse squeals. To display his versatility, he gives a dull performance which couples the 'go-back' of the Guinea fowl with the plaint of the Wood-pewee, two widely diverse vocal sounds. With all the performance there is such perfect self-reliance and consciousness of superior ability that one feels that the singer has but to choose what ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various

... up, and her cold, pale light Coquettes with the freezing streams, What care these twain for the wintry night, Since Chloe is wrapt in dreams, And Daphnis utters no plaint of woe O'er his fair jack full on kings, But smiles that fortune should bless him so, Attending to matters ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson

... answering him occasionally—he had been watching for a trim little figure that he knew would presently appear on one of the white walks leading to the great, wide steps that led to the entrance to the building. For he had heard the long-drawn plaint of a locomotive whistle some minutes before; he had seen the train itself come gliding over the mammoth plains that stretched eastward from the capitol; and he knew that Ruth would be on ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer

... King of the land he goes, And straight to make his plaint began; Then murmured loud the assembled crowd, And clench'd his fist each ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise

... and hour, the talk of the little circle fell upon things ghostly and mysterious—strange happenings and prophetic dreams. Dorothea, who had a love of horrors, lent a suddenly attentive ear; but Jennie, though plainly fascinated, uttered a protesting plaint. "Oh, please stop! You don't know how you frighten me! Dorothea has had some awfully queer things happen to her, and it scares me almost to death ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine

... having become a great lady, could, not reasonably continue her office of governess to the King's children. M. Colbert, that man of vigour, that Mount Atlas, capable of supporting all things without a plaint, had been charged with the care of the ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan

... opportunity; for when, as a young gentleman of means and great expectations, I should have been writing sonnets to the eyebrow of some "ladye fayre," or surreptitiously wooing some farmer's daughter, in common with my kind, I was hearkening to the plaint of some Greek or Roman lover, or ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol

... literal sense if I stayed away. No, the women-heroes in this land are those who face it with a careless, selfish husband, or perhaps in a home having no love, and who win through their little day and make no plaint. God help them!" ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page

... of the twain, Sir Gawain nor Sir Lancelot, but the tears fell from their eyes when they heard the knight's tale. Such pity had they for him, they waxed pale, and red, and discovered their faces, when they heard his plaint. ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston

... aisle alone it walks, And murmurs a mournful plaint, 70 Of thee! Black Canon, it wildly talks, And ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... exclude in a vast degree the pitiable defects and vices that mark all the unprofessional arguments one ever hears; for on a breach of any one of the said rules the other party can demur; the demurrer is argued before the judges in Banco, and, if successfully, the faulty plaint or faulty plea is dismissed, and often of course the cause won or lost thereby, and the country saved the trouble, and the suitors the ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade

... was adorned, and which she, also, wore in her gown—yellow orchids, tenderly fashioned but very insistent and bright. Upon this patrician vision Mr. Heatherbloom had inadvertently looked, and the pathetic plaint regarding "Mother" died on the wings of nothingness. With unfilial respect he literally abandoned her and cast her to the winds. His eyes gleamed as they rested on the girl; he seemed to ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham

... should not be qualified according to the true intent or meaning of this act, his election should be void; and every person so sitting and voting should forfeit a certain sum to be recovered, by such persons as should sue for the same by action of debt, bill, plaint, or information, whereon no essoign, privilege, protection, or wager of law should be allowed, and only one imparlance: that if any person should have delivered in, and sworn to his qualification as aforesaid, and taken his seat in the house of commons, yet at any time after should, during ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... reconstruct the spirit of my contemporary group by looking over many documents, I find nothing more amusing than a plaint registered against life's indistinctness, which I imagine more or less reflected the sentiments of all of us. At any rate here it is for the entertainment of the reader if not for his edification: "So much of our time is spent in preparation, so much in routine, and so much in sleep, ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams

... out since Mons, who habitually, night after night, day after day, would pipe up with the same old plaint. Something like this: ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes

... white hills, and ever among the knolls he chases and slays the wild beasts, the God, with keen eye, and at evening returns piping from the chase, breathing sweet strains on the reeds. In song that bird cannot excel him which, among the leaves of the blossoming springtide, pours forth her plaint and her honey-sweet song. With him then the mountain nymphs, the shrill singers, go wandering with light feet, and sing at the side of the dark water of the well, while the echo moans along the mountain crest, and the God leaps hither and thither, ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang

... great kingdoms, and the dreadful reign Of Pluto in his throne where he did dwell, The wide waste places, and the hugy plain, The wailings, shrieks, and sundry sorts of pain, The sighs, the sobs, the deep and deadly groan; Earth, air, and all, resounding plaint and moan. ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... days and nights how many birds, Flittering above the fields and streams all frozen, Watched hungrily the tended flocks and herds— Earth's chosen nourished by earth's wise self-chosen! How many birds suddenly stiffened and died With no plaint cried, The starved heart ceasing when the pale sun ceased! And when the new day stepped from the same cold East The dead birds lay in the light on the snow-flecked field, Their song and ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 - Edited by Sir Edward Howard Marsh • Various

... besought them to delay [the execution] for a moment; and from thence, having put my horse to his utmost speed, I went to the governor's house. I presented to him, as a nazar, a ruby of inestimable value, and made intercession for them. He replied, 'A person has a plaint against them, and their crimes have been fully proved; the king's mandate has been issued, and I ...
— Bagh O Bahar, Or Tales of the Four Darweshes • Mir Amman of Dihli

... writing prose, avoid words and phrases that are merely poetical: such as, morn, eve, plaint, corse, weal, drear, amid, oft, steepy;—"what time the ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... the sun-sifted dusk of the green lane. Here the desert silence was like a benediction of peace, broken now and then by the faint, shrill note of an insect, or the occasional soft, mournful plaint of a dove. ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... bird-voices of an unseen land- No hue of forest, gleam of ocean sand- Rise in a ceaseless plaint of raucous din, On northern tides the bergs ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... keep mine to thee if ever I should need thee. Now away with thee. I hear the horses impatient for thee; and what would be the lot of the beggar if he were seen chattering longer with a lordly young page than might suffice for his plaint? I hear voices. Put a tester in my dish, fair Sir, for appearance' sake. Thou hast it not? aha—I told thee I was the richer as well as the freer man. What's that? That ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge

... lord of Babylon, wilt thou remain in hostile regions?—Let thy heart be softened, and make Babylon joyful,—and let thy face be turned toward Eshaggil which thou lovest!'" Merodach gave ear to the plaint of his servant: he answered him graciously and promised his aid. Namar, united as it had been with Chaldaea for centuries, did not readily become accustomed to its new masters. The greater part of the land belonged to a Semitic and Cossaean feudality, the heads of which, while admitting their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... womanhood—glancing toward the young man—was saying, with affected giggles, "O papa, don't! Oh isn't it perfectly lovely! O papa, don't! Do hush! What will people think?" This last variation of his daughter's plaint must have given the man some satisfaction, at least, for it furnished him another target for his pointless shafts; and he fairly outdid himself in politely damning whoever might presume to think anything at all of him; with the net result that two ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... no doubt already excessive, for an irresistible stupor once more took possession of him, his head dropped, his eyes closed, and he seemed to fall asleep again, continuing his plaint, as if in a dream, moaning in fainter and ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola

... it is likely that the Inn at Holborn Bars was still occupied by attorneys who practised for their patrons of the Staple, and that the Merchants for Wools still had their meetings there. In 1401 Hamond Elyot sued a plaint of debt against Martyn Dyne, of Haydon, Norfolk, for the sum of L26 2s. 3d., in the Court of Staple at Westminster;[143] and one hundred years later, John Dyne, his descendant, also of Haydon, Norfolk, ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various

... in deserting him? His own vessel filled to the brim with grief, had he not let the waters of its bitterness overflow into the heart of the soutar? The wail of that violin echoed now in Robert's heart, not for Flodden, not for himself, but for the debased nature that drew forth the plaint. Comrades in misery, why should they part? What right had he to forsake an old friend and benefactor because he himself was unhappy? He would go and see him the very next night. And he would make friends once more with the much 'suffering ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... steed's proud neigh, and lamb's meek plaint, The hum of bees, and vesper hymn of birds, The rural harmony of flocks and herds, The song of joy, or praise, and man's sweet words— Come to me fainter—yet more faint Was my poor soul to God's ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms

... rustling leaves and with the buzzing murmur of the myriads of living things inhabiting the wooded height, that it almost seemed like the music of nature; as a sound it resembled nothing more than a distant monotonous plaint. We were indeed undisturbed. ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... dreadful murmur that filled the heavy air, the tremulous, ceaseless plaint which comes from strong, muscular creatures, tenacious of life, who are dying and who ...
— The Maids of Paradise • Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

... he had arranged them, and began to strike their keys in unison; this seemed to him for the first time childish. Then he played some lively bars on the piano alone; they sounded too light and trivial, and he turned to the other instrument. As the plaint of the reeds arose, it filled his sense like a solemn organ-music, and transfigured the place; the notes swelled to the ample vault of a church, and at the high altar he was celebrating the mass in his sacerdotal robes. He suddenly caught his fingers away from ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells

... a sorrow so heart-breaking, a plaint so despairing in the voice, that the king was involuntarily much moved. He let fall his uplifted arm, and the expression of his ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... row of priests. In a way it reminded one of the Gregorian chant one often hears in Catholic churches, but in this Buddhist chanting there was that curious Oriental strain of semi-tones that gave a strange and peculiar plaint to ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery

... Folklore itself, in the very teeth of the now despised jargon, knew no other tongue. The period produced a large quantity of popular poems, which to this day are sung by the Jews of Lithuania. The dominant note is the national plaint of the Jewish people, its dreams, and its Messianic hopes. They ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz

... and plaints, all haunting in their extreme expressiveness, a great variety beneath an appearance of monotony, and from time to time two wailing notes. These notes are always the same, as the chorus gives them as a plaint, and they are both affecting and artistic. At the end comes a dim ray of light and hope. This is the only one in the work save the Amen at the end, for Faith and Hope should not be looked for here. The supplications sound like prayers which do not expect to be answered. No one would ...
— Musical Memories • Camille Saint-Saens

... smothered personal feeling. Long years afterwards, when time and change had softened and blurred it in memory, his early misadventure was reflected in more than one passage of the later poems. The humble plaint of Eve, and the description of her reunion with her alienated lord, in the Tenth Book of Paradise Lost, doubtless contains, as has often been said, some reflection of what took place at a similar interview in 1645, when Mistress Mary Milton returned to ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... over the past months of humiliation and agony he suddenly realized that to these same collectors he had been solely indebted toward the last of his time of trial for what human companionship had come to him. His friends, how easily they had given him up! He thought of poor old Rip Van Winkle's plaint, "How soon we are forgotten when we are gone!" and sarcastically amended it to "How soon we are forgotten when we are here!" A few invitations declined, the ordinary social calls left for some other time, and he was apparently forgotten. ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo

... my labor is so poor! Here all my love so faint! But when I reach the heavenly door, I cease the weary plaint.'" ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... that godless shrine a far shrill wail, And ran back to our lord to tell the news. But as he nearer drew a hollow sound Of lamentation to the King was borne. He groaned and uttered then this bitter plaint: "Am I a prophet? miserable me! Is this the saddest path I ever trod? 'Tis my son's voice that calls me. On press on, My henchmen, haste with double speed to the tomb Where rocks down-torn have made a gap, look in And tell me if in truth I recognize ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles

... cutting their way down through the darkness, and into the spheres of men, and that all heaven was in a tumult of expectation, whilst in yonder city men slept, as they always sleep unconscious when God is near. And then, when the feeble plaint broke from Mary's lips, I cannot go further, and the gentle beast turned aside into the rocks and whins, and called to his companions of the stable, and the meek-eyed ox looked calmly at the intruders, and there—there—dear ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... think themselves. Shepherds still piped, and maidens still listened to their piping. The old gods had not been discrowned and banished; and to fishers drawing their nets the coasts yet kept a something of the trace of amorous Polypheme, the rocks were peopled with memories of his plaint to Galatea. Inland, among the dim and thymy woods, bee-haunted and populous with dreams of dryad and oread, there were rumours of Pan; and dwellers under thatch—the goatherd mending his sandals, the hind carving ...
— Views and Reviews - Essays in appreciation • William Ernest Henley

... the end for the good of all. He had, indeed, loved her to the last, for his was an affectionate spirit, but she had become increasingly difficult: jealous of her step-daughter June, jealous even of her own little daughter Holly, and making ceaseless plaint that he could not love her, ill as she was, and 'useless to everyone, and better dead.' He had mourned her sincerely, but his face had looked younger since she died. If she could only have believed that she made him happy, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... At times his monotonous plaint reached his mother's consciousness. She suddenly realized what this ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris

... any language but his own. She, an Italian lady, remarks: "You know I say nothing to him, for he understands not me nor I him. He hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian. He is a proper man's picture, but, alas! who can converse with a dumb show." This moving plaint draws attention to a defect which is not yet supplied. There are few Englishmen nowadays who, on being challenged to court Portia in Italian, would not cut a sorry figure in dumb show—sorrier figures than Frenchmen or Germans. No ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee

... never entirely relaxed its hold on him. Among his papers has recently been found the long, wild, pessimistic rhapsody to which reference has already been made and in which there is talk of suicide. The plaint is of the degeneracy among men, of the destruction of primitive simplicity in Corsica by the French occupation, of his own isolation, and of his yearning to see his friends once more. Life is no longer worth while; his country gone, a patriot has naught to live for, especially ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... meti. Place loko. Place, a public placo. Place of abode restadejo. Placid kvieta. Plagiarist verkosxtelisto. Plague pesto—ego. Plague-stricken (person) pestulo. Plain malbela. Plain senornama. Plainly simple, klare. Plainness simpleco. Plaint plendo. Plaintive plenda. Plait (with straw) pajloplekti. Plait plekti. Plait plektajxo. Plait (hair) harligo. Plan plano. Plan (geometrical) plato. Plane raboti. Plane (tool) rabotilo. Planet planedo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... reached the front door, the voice outside ceased its dreadful plaint with the abrupt anti-climax of a phonograph stopped in the middle of a record. There was the sound of a struggle and wrestling, a turmoil in the wet shrubberies, ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington

... betwixt plaint and humor, that it always seemed to him that no one ever gave an abbreviation or an abstract of anything which he had written, without very nearly spoiling the original. This would be preeminently true of an abstract of this examination; abbreviation can be only mutilation. It ranged ...
— Benjamin Franklin • John Torrey Morse, Jr.

... risked their lives—men who in a fortnight had fallen from a high plane of life to the pitiful level of brutes. Only here and there was an exception. This man, Crittenden, was one. When sane, he was gentle, uncomplaining, considerate. Delirious, there was never a plaint in his voice; never a word passed his lips that his own mother might not hear; and when his lips closed, an undaunted spirit ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.

... Meister" seemed to be only a symptom of decline, of a moral "going to the dogs". The "Menagerie of tame cattle," the worthlessness of the hero in this book, revolted Niebuhr, who finally bursts out in a plaint which Biterolf(8) might well have sung: "nothing so easily makes a painful impression as when a great mind despoils itself of its wings and strives for virtuosity in something greatly inferior, while it renounces more lofty aims." But the most indignant of ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.

... had many a plaint for his unfortunate lot. But the one which came to tongue oftener than any other, was that which proclaimed the red fires of the artist-flesh to burn within him, while he bemoaned the fact that he had never yet found a woman worthy of his devotion. Loudly did ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... This is precisely the plaint of modern Germany. We seek, they say, to do merely what England and France—it were indiscreet to mention Austria—did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were vigorous peoples with an impulse to expand and to extend their civilisation over backward lands. They appealed solely ...
— The War and the Churches • Joseph McCabe

... pin'd at his lot, Tho' new fences the lone Heath enclose: For, alas! the blest days are forgot, When poor Men had their Sheep and their Cows. Still had Labour been blest with Content, Still Competence happy had been, Nor Indigence utter'd a plaint, Had Avarice spar'd but ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield

... bees, earth's small musicians, hum, No longer dumb, in gentle chorus. Like echoes faint of that long plaint The ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves

... God save us!—I think many ways, But still 'tis a riddle to me, Whose mystery is hid from the eye; But Oedipus, showing the souls All fettered, imbruted and blained, Who point where its blazonry rolls, And wail the sad plaint of the chained,— Asserts, 'There is, somewhere, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... that are poor, you that are rich, you that have been great sinners, listen to the voice of Jesus; listen to the plaint of Mary during this month of November; "My children are now dead; come lay thy prayers up for them, and they shall live." Hear Mass for the poor souls; say your beads for them; supplicate Jesus and Mary and Joseph in their behalf. Fly to St. Catherine of Genoa and beg her to help them, ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... Orthodoxy's faes She's swingein' through the city; Hark, how the nine-tail'd cat she plays! I vow it's unco pretty: There, Learning, with his Greekish face, Grunts out some Latin ditty; And Common Sense is gaun, she says, To mak to Jamie Beattie Her plaint this day. ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... yet a child, and knew not whence My being came, nor where to turn its powers, Up to the sun I bent my wilder'd eye, As though above, within its glorious orb, There dwelt an ear to listen to my plaint, A heart, like mine, to pity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... throughout the livelong day, are a source of so much joy and adoration to their parents that one feels no surprise at not hearing them cry as other children do. I only recollect hearing a child cry once during a two months' stay in Japan, and then there was an excuse for its dolorous plaint, because its mother was shaving its little head with a blunt razor and no soap. It must be obvious to the student of our Western civilisation that the cult of family life is on the decline. The ties and obligations which hold children and parents together are visibly slackening, and this is the ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... coloquial metaphor. The eyes of civilization are upon her, and there is legitimate curiosity from Christiania to Yokohama to discover what she is going to do. To me as a philosopher, and taking into account one consideration with another, including Josephine's plaint, it seems as though woman would have much plainer sailing in her progress toward reconstruction if it were not that she is so exceedingly good-looking in spots and bunches. Let her distinction as an ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant

... a loud laugh. "Ah, he begs for her!" said he. "This little Earl Surrey presumes to think that his sentimental love-plaint can exercise an influence on the heart of his judge! No, no, Henry Howard; you know me better. You say, indeed, that I am a cruel man, and that blood cleaves to my crown. Well, now, it is our pleasure to set in our ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach

... aray deux goriaulx Than shal I haue two coliers 28 Pour mes cheuaulx de querue. For my horses of the plowh. Xpristiene la fylle Xpristine the doughter Se plaint du serrurier, Complayned her of the lokyer, Pour ce quil nye By cause that he denyeth 32 Dun enfant quil gaigna. Of ...
— Dialogues in French and English • William Caxton

... shades of night, And mould'ring tombs uncouthly gape around, And rails and fallen stones bestrew the ground: In loosen'd garb derang'd, with scatter'd hair, His bosom open to the nightly air, Lone, o'er a new heap'd grave poor Basil bent, And to himself began his simple plaint. ...
— Poems, &c. (1790) • Joanna Baillie

... said, and she laid her hand again upon Solita's head. "Take not the speech to heart. 'Tis but the plaint of a woman whose hair is withered from its brightness and who grows peevish in her loneliness. But open your mind to me, for you have twined about my heart even as your curls did but now twine and coil about my wrist, and the more for ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... she saide, and deare constraint, Lets me not sleepe, but wast the wearie night 470 In secret anguish and unpittied plaint, Whiles you in carelesse sleepe are drowned quight. Her doubtfull words made that redoubted knight Suspect her truth: yet since no' untruth he knew, Her fawning love with foule disdainefull spight 475 He would not shend; but said, Deare dame I rew, That ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser









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