|
|
|
More "Poignant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... life made expiation. In dignity, simplicity, humor, in sympathetic etching of a sturdy fisher people, and above all in the echoes of the sea, Doctor Luke is worthy of great praise. Character, humor, poignant pathos, and the sad grotesque conjunctions of old and new civilizations are expressed through the medium of a style that has distinction and strikes a ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... washed away whatever stains clung to his memory. Inwardly they made a vow that none who belonged to them should ever become a slater. The slater's calling is a dangerous one, between heaven and earth; the man who lay beneath the black pall, between the boards, silent as he was, preached that with poignant eloquence. They turned their eyes toward the old gentleman who was led by two mourners. He seemed to embody the very spirit of honest burial. But when their gaze fell upon Apollonius they forgot the mildness with which they had just judged; they unburied the dead man from the cool ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... bowl before her: the odour hung heavy in the room. Three or four women (much better gowned than Eleanor) and a dozen men applauded from the drawing-room; a strange-looking youth with a shock of auburn hair drew from a violin sounds which it required no knowledge of technique to feel extraordinarily poignant and moving. All but the dancer were smoking, and Molly sat on the floor (in copper-coloured chiffon, too!) her hands clasped about her knees, a cigarette in an amber holder between her lips ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... questioning us until it seems as if our heart would break with answering. Our friends think that they must explore with us all the depths of our grief, dwelling upon the elements that are specially poignant. The result of all this "comforting" is that our burden of sorrow is made heavier instead of lighter, and we are less brave and strong than before to bear it. If we would be truly comforted we would better flee away to Christ; for in his presence we shall ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... the weary force, and a minute later they were shaking hands with their comrades of Davoust's division. The Polish messengers had, in spite of the numerous Cossacks on the plains, succeeded in reaching Orsza safely. The most poignant anxiety reigned there as to the safety of Ney's command; and Davoust, on hearing the welcome news, instantly called his men under arms ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... the dwelling where I had been so cruelly changed to what I am, as we do while any that we love or hate remain. Vainly I had sought some method of manifestation, some way to make my continued existence and my great love and poignant pity understood by my husband and son. Always if they slept they would wake, or if in my desperation I dared approach them when they were awake, would turn toward me the terrible eyes of the living, frightening me by the glances that ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... seemed amongst the chosen ones of the world. The contrast was in itself amazing. And then the woman! Francis looked at her but seldom, and when he did it was with a curious sense of mental disturbance; poignant but unanalysable. ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... right, and farther on a brook chanted its purling song like Tessibel's brook under the mudcellar. Oh, his dear little girl! His Tess of the Storm Country! If in those olden days he had desired her, now that desire was a hundred times more poignant. In all his willful life he had never suffered like this. Tess with her clinging arms, her sweet, winning ways! He sighed a deep, long sigh. Yet soon he would hear something from her. He had written her, ... had sent her money for the necessities of her simple life ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... turned his tottering steps Abroad in the soft lengthening of the dusk Athwart a woodland close, and saw and heard A little maid, her pitcher held at poise, Singing an old lament in minors clear And plaintive as the twilight, words that voiced The poignant, passionate yearning of the soul. "A sign!" the spent man whispered low, "a sign!" And on the spot he raised a house ...
— Sprays of Shamrock • Clinton Scollard
... urged the yacht-owner. "What are the revolutionists doing and how is—how are things?" Carefully he avoided directing any question to the point on which his eagerness for news was poignant hunger. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... roses and hollyhocks in her bedroom. Now she felt that it looked cheap and flimsy because she had sacrificed material to colour. She wanted something different to-night; she wanted something better. Turning to the mirror she gazed back at her vivid face, with the large deep eyes, so full of poignant expectancy, and the soft dimpled chin. From her expression she might have been dreaming of happiness; but the thought in her mind was simply, "The powder I use is too white. Those women to-night used powder that did not show. I must get some to-morrow." She was ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... a silver bell, and from another room issued a lady with a face of rare and delicate loveliness. Her soft, clinging black gown, with a touch of white at her throat, served to emphasise the sweet purity of her face, but cast over it a shade of sadness at once poignant ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... man's food arrived. And he looked at it and sniffed at it daintily—like a reluctant patient going under the ether—and he tasted of it; and then he put his face down in his hands and burst into low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real thing at all. The stuffing of the turkey defied chemical analysis; and, moreover, the turkey before serving should have been dusted with talcum powder and fitted with dress-shields, it being plainly a ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... verdigris on all the taps, the foul opacity of the windows, are among the trivialities that somehow stamped themselves upon my mind. One of the windows was open at the top, had been so long open that the aperture was curtained with cobwebs at each extremity, but in between I got quite a poignant picture of the Thames as I went upstairs. It was only a sinuous perspective of sunlit ripples twinkling between wooded gardens and open meadows, a fisherman or two upon the tow-path, a canoe in mid-stream, a gaunt church crowning all against the sky. But inset in such ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... all the nameless graces of rank with an envy that her sunny, gladsome, generous nature had never before been touched with—with a sudden perception, quick as thought, bitter as gall, wounding, and swift, and poignant, of what this womanhood, that he had said she herself had lost, might be in its ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... Government. Alexander's father had died by the hands of murderers: his own temperament, sanguine and emotional, would make the effects of such a discovery, in the midst of all his benevolent hopes for Russia, poignant to the last degree. It is not inconsistent either with his character or with earlier events in his personal history that the Czar should have yielded to a single shock of feeling, and have changed in a moment from the liberator to the despot. But the evidence of ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... through the muffled darkness—a man and girl, always a man and a girl. They walked very closely; usually the girl was laughing. Suddenly the contrast flashed across my mind between this bubbling joy of living and the poignant silence of huddled forms beneath the same starlight, not a hundred miles away in No Man's Land. He must have been seeing the same vision and making the same contrast. He pulled on my arm. "I've got ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... been told in this way? Would you have been able to recognize Muhammad Din from the author's description? Would the destruction of the sand-house be a tragedy to most Western children? Why was it to Muhammad Din? Notice the simple pathos of the ending. Is it made more poignant ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... invention, proper expression, correct design, divine attitudes, and artful contrast, heightened with the beauties of Clar. Obscur., embellished thy celebrated pieces, to the delight and astonishment of the judicious multitude! Adieu, persuasive eloquence! the quaint metaphor, the poignant irony, the proper epithet, and the lively simile, are fled for ever! Instead of these, we shall have, I know not what! The illiterate will tell the rest ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... other hand, besides, he was bound to Don Ippolito, who had come to him as the nearest friend of both, and confided in him. He remembered with a tardy, poignant intelligence how in their first talk of the Vervains Don Ippolito had taken pains to inform himself that Ferris was not in love with Florida. Could he be less manly and generous than this poor priest, and violate the ...
— A Foregone Conclusion • W. D. Howells
... he read the humble entreaties, the passionate pleading of those written words, blotted and smeared with the bitter tears of a woman's poignant shame and anguish, Soapy's pendent cigarette fell to the floor and lay there smouldering and forgotten, and his lips were drawn back from sharp, white teeth—pallid lips contorted in a grin the more awful because of the great drops that ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... enforce his prior claim; the father, bound by his word of honor, sides with the primitive lover. The tragedy seems foreordained, for Innocencia makes spirited resistance, while Manacao avenges himself by killing the doctor. A comic figure of a German scientist adds humor and a certain poignant irony to the tale. Such a bare outline conveys nothing of the mysterious charm of the original, nor of its poetic atmosphere. Comparing Innocencia with what has been termed its sister work, Maria, I believe that Maria is the better tale ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... Goethe; we find no message in it like the message of Browning. What he does is to bring before us characters, situations, moods, images, that belong to the permanent and elemental in our nature. These are presented with a sympathy so living, a tenderness so poignant, a humor so arch and so sly, that they become a part of our experience in the most delightful and exhilarating fashion. Part of the function of poetry is to prevent us from becoming sluggish In our contemplation of life by making us feel it fresh, vivid, pulsing; and this Burns notably accomplishes. ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... disappointed, and preferring rather to hear the tocsin of alarm sounded from his own heart than from the lips of another, he suddenly, and much to the surprise of the affectionate girl, discontinued all allusion to the subject. But Henry's anxiety was not the less poignant from being confined within his own breast, and although it gratified him to find that flattering mention was frequently made of his brother at the mess-table, coupled with regret for his absence, it was reserved for his hours of privacy and abstraction to dwell upon the fears ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... brutal, strangely Prussian lieutenant with its militaristic trumpets, its abuse of the brass. One finds oneself choosing even among the acts of "Tristan und Isolde," finding the first far inferior to the poignant, magnificent third. Sometimes, one glimpses a little too long behind his work not the heroic agonist, but the man who loved to languish in mournful salons, ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld
... or I think, I will tell you what I know, which is, that barren as the Crau appears to be, it not only feeds, but fattens an infinite number of sheep and cattle, and produces such excellent wine too in some parts of it, that it is called Vin de Crau, by way of pre-eminence: it has a poignant quality, is very bright, and is much esteemed for its delicious flavour. The herb which fattens the sheep and feeds such quantities of cattle is a little plant which grows between and under the flint stones, which the sheep and other animals turn up with ...
— A Year's Journey through France and Part of Spain, Volume II (of 2) • Philip Thicknesse
... sceptre in the enchanted land, to rescue old-time comrades fallen into oblivion; or, again, if we had the insight of the simple old peasant into the nature of his enduring love, out of the exquisite and poignant emotions kindled would arise the flame of a passionate love, which would endure long aeons of anguish that it might shield, though but for a little, the kingly hearts who may ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... discounted as a product of the prevailing odium bellicosum. But it appeared well in the piping times of peace, and I remember it (as I remember others of the collection) with a freshness which only attaches to work that lifts itself out of the common ruck. An almost too poignant intensity of realism, expressed in a distinguished and fastidious idiom, characterises Mr. LAWRENCE'S method. It is a realism not of minutely recorded outward happenings, trivial or exciting, but of fiercely contested agonies of the spirit. None of those ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... voice, which had sounded all the more strange and sad to her from its contrast with the quick, cheerful, vigorous tones she had come to think the mark of him. He had spoken as though he looked forward with a poignant regret through a weary span of days, and saw himself always in youth and middle years and age coming home always to an empty room. Therefore she put her question, and Wogan was taken off ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... that unless some help should come I was about to lose my mind. And just then it did come. I heard the rustle of drapery, and looked up. Edith Leete was standing before me. Her beautiful face was full of the most poignant sympathy. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy
... gallant roadster, his proud pacer through the streets of Barbie, touched him with a sense of quite personal loss and bereavement. Coming on the heels of his other calamities it seemed to make them more poignant, more sinister, prompting the question if misfortune ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... letter from that nobleman, to announce that he had made arrangements for sending his ward to Eton, and to request that he would accordingly instantly proceed to the metropolis. This announcement occasioned both Cadurcis and Venetia poignant affliction. The idea of separation was to both of them most painful; and although Lady Annabel herself was in some degree prepared for an arrangement, which sooner or later she considered inevitable, she was herself scarcely ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... asserted that in the arms of the celestial Spouse she swam in an ocean of delight. Concerning that Spouse, Marie Alacoque added: "Like the most passionate of lovers he made me understand that I should taste what is sweetest in the suavity of caresses, and indeed, so poignant were they, that I swooned." The ravishments which St. Theresa experienced she expressed in terms of abandoned precision. Mme. Guyon wrote so carnally of the divine that Bossuet exclaimed; "Seigneur, if I dared, I would pray that a seraph with a flaming sword might come and purify ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... acts of the South are a calumny; for I affirm that the simple reading of these acts and these laws, a glance at the advertisements of a Southern journal, saddens the heart more, and wounds the conscience deeper, than the most poignant pages of Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. I admit willingly that there are many masters who are very kind and very good. I admit that there are some slaves who are relatively happy. I cast aside unhesitatingly ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... poignant thing interpolated. A volley crashed ahead of them some half of a mile away and another volley answered from a still nearer point. Swishing noises which the correspondent had heard in the air he now know to have been from the passing of bullets. He and the ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... collie uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to one side. His bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom. The next instant he dashed past his master's legs, almost upsetting his balance, and shot out into the room, where he went blundering wildly against walls and ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... opposite was slightly ajar; evidently the visitor had failed to close it. Celia waited, with the familiar horror, the tense expectation, for a repetition of the groan. It came. Obeying an impulse, a womanly impulse, to fly to the call of such poignant distress, Celia crossed the corridor softly and opened ...
— The Woman's Way • Charles Garvice
... passed through the dim and silent aisles of the store, he surveyed them again with mixed emotions. Here he might, apparently, have been king. But he had no very poignant regret. Another of his numerous selves, he reflected, had committed suicide. That was the right idea: to keep sloughing them off, throwing overboard the unreal and factitious Gissings, paring them down until he discovered the genuine ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... broke the quiet routine of his life. The presence of Ume in the chamber seemed to fade a little, but, for some reason inexplicable to himself, this brought now no poignant grief. He did not tell the wonderful thing to Mata or old Kano, but hid the still unfinished picture where no one but himself ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... indebted to you, sir," said the Professor, "for about twenty-four hours of the most poignant and humiliating mental and bodily anguish a human being can endure, inflicted for no valid reason that I can discover, except the wanton indulgence of your unholy powers, I can only say that any gratitude of which I am conscious is of a very qualified description. As for ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... and at his heart the oppression (he was still young enough to feel it) of the secret and abominable things he knew. And in his eyes the unknown girl and her behavior became suddenly adorable. She was the darting joy and the poignant sweetness, and the sheer extravagant ardor and energy of life. His tempestuously romantic youth rose up and was troubled at the sight of her. And his eyes, that had stared at her in wonder and amusement and inquisitive interest, followed her now with that queer pathos that ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... made out of ecstasy and wonder; Love is a poignant and accustomed pain. It is a burst of Heaven-shaking thunder; It is a linnet's fluting after rain. Love's voice is through your song; above and under And in each ...
— Main Street and Other Poems • Alfred Joyce Kilmer
... It was one of the most poignant memories of my life. The look she gave him and the look he gave her! Indeed, I ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... myself—necessarily I am silent. I cannot help thinking of their last days, remembering their sufferings, and what they said and did, and how they looked in mortal affliction. Perhaps all this will become less poignant in time. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... its face and limbs became clearer. I knew that it was something repulsively, diabolically grotesque, but whether the phantasm of man, or woman, or hellish elemental, I couldn't for the life of me say; and this uncertainty, making my fear all the more poignant, added to my already sublime ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... said the other simply. "I did not accept her renunciation, though I acknowledge I forbade it with a very poignant envy. I could not be the cause of her giving up for my sake her state of ease and luxury—for my relatives are more than well-to-do, and they made it plain she must choose between them and me, with the design, I think, of making it more difficult to choose me. And, also, it seemed to ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... the situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe, what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big, girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such exquisite pathos of the poor creature's crazed return to her first meeting with her lover. So clearly did she picture to herself this early scene that we ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... begging for a mitigation of my sentence; but the firm composure of innocence was mistaken for defiance; and the blood mounting to my forehead from a feeling of injustice—of injustice from those I loved and venerated— perhaps the most poignant feeling in existence to a sensitive and generous mind—was falsely estimated as proceeding from impetuous and disgraceful sources. Mrs Drummond looked upon me with a mournful face, sighed, and said nothing; little Sarah watching ...
— Jacob Faithful • Captain Frederick Marryat
... prison-cell clangs upon him for the first time, and shuts him from the world. The common liberty to go where we will is estimated, while we have it, at nothing; but, once denied, it becomes the most precious boon in life. How infinitely more poignant, then, must be the feelings of one thus unhappily circumstanced, to whom the idea of such a catastrophe has never occurred; who has always looked upon the law from the vantage-ground of a good social position, and acquiesced in its working ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn
... a poignant moment! All the witnesses, the magistrate included, were thrilled with the certainty that the journalist was about to ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... not been so keen and so poignant Mary Burton would not have fought so long against the idea which seemed to open ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... mass of money at that moment, when money was everything to me, roused every lurking demon in my breast) seemed to appall, if it did not frighten her, for she rose, and meeting my eye with a gaze in which shock and some strange and poignant agony totally incomprehensible to me were ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... for marrying them; and their joy, in the end, that they have escaped matrimony and the wasting of good money. And yet this theme is underlaid with an emotion so vital, the emotion of a wild free life, and invested with a pathos so poignant of the quick passing of all good things, that no understanding heart can but be profoundly moved by that pathos and racily ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... of a dirge For dying gods, remembering flutes and shawms: With perverse moods I trouble you, and urge The sense to beauty. Give me some sweet alms, Some reverie, some pang of a damasked sword, Some poignant moment yet unparalleled In my dream-broidered chronicles, some chord Of mystery Love's music never knelled Before;—but nought of the rough alchemy ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... do not mean down-right punk,—but punk of more than ordinary sense in conversation; punk in ragou, punk, who plays on the lute, and sings; and, to sum up all, punk, who cooks and dresses up herself, with poignant sauce, to become a new dish every time she is ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... ones that obey. It divorces knowing and doing, Kennen and Koennen, a separation which the Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be ripened to more practical form. Not only do muscles come before mind, will before intelligence, and sound ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... does the sense of being pleased and amused blunt our faculties of perception and discrimination of character, that I can only compare it to the taste of certain fruits, at once luscious and poignant, which renders our palate totally unfit for relishing or distinguishing the viands which are subsequently subjected to ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... almost word for word from father Brumoi, seemed to me very proper to give an insight into that poet's character, and the genius of the ancient comedy, which was, as we see, a satire of the most poignant and severe kind, that had assumed to itself an independency from respect to persons, and to which nothing was sacred. It is no wonder that Cicero condemns so licentious and uncurbed a liberty. ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... form some idea of my poignant dismay and disappointment on finding that this dreary-looking place of swamps and marshes was quite deserted, although there were still a number of ruined brick houses, gardens, and orchards there. The blacks told me that at one time it had been one of the ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... turned about by pike-handles and trodden upon with contemptuous heels, and the pick of the plenishing was gone. Though upon the rear of the kirk there were two great mounds, that showed us where friend and foe had been burled, that solemn memorial was not so poignant to the heart at the poor relics of the homes gutted and sacked. The Provost's tenement, of all the lesser houses in the burgh, was the only one that stood in its outer entirety, its arched ceils proof against the malevolent fire. Yet its windows gaped black ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... divisions,' and all the rest of it. I 'went to the people,' worked in factories, worked as an oiler, as a barge hauler. Afterwards, when wandering over Russia, I had a taste of Russian life, I turned into a fervent devotee of that life. I loved the Russian people with poignant intensity; I loved their God and believed in Him, and in their language, their creative genius. . . . And so on, and so on. . . . I have been a Slavophile in my time, I used to pester Aksakov with letters, and I was a Ukrainophile, and an archaeologist, ...
— The Chorus Girl and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... time the thought of war inspired Prescott with the most poignant repulsion, since he was taking this girl to the army which he ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... powerful of this globe preach their sound gospel of palpable progress. The part of the ideal you embrace is the better one, if only in its illusions. No great passion can be barren. May a world of gracious and poignant images attend the lofty solitude of ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... baseness of human nature; and, strangers to disinterestedness themselves, they do not expect to meet with it in others. They are content with a low degree of enjoyment, and are thus exempted from much poignant suffering; and it is only when the casualties of life interfere with their individual ease, that we can perceive that they are not ...
— The Ladies' Vase - Polite Manual for Young Ladies • An American Lady
... through the sunshine and shadow-filled forest, their hearts filled with a happiness so poignant it seemed ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... stumbled occasionally in the snow; his legs, from thigh to knee, began to ache with the gnawing torment that centers in the marrowbone; and with this beginning of the "runner's cramp" he was filled with a new and poignant terror. ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... ever felt that all his thinking powers were absorbed, even by the most poignant mental misery that could occupy them? In moments of imminent danger, the mind can still travel of its own accord over the past, in spite of the present—in moments of bitter affliction, it can still recur to every-day trifles, in spite of ourselves. While I now sat silent in my father's ...
— Basil • Wilkie Collins
... her chair like a tragedienne. "It isn't my body, it's my mind!" she cried, with poignant inflection, clasping her head with both her hands; and her look transformed her in the eyes of the young scientist. It was the tragic gaze of one who confronts insanity and death at a time when life should be at its sweetest. For an instant she stood there absorbed ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... and beat heavily with the sense of ownership and the dread of losing what was her own; it was a fear more poignant than any other of the fears which she had suffered in a long chain since she fell asleep in Randal Bellamy's ...
— Ambrotox and Limping Dick • Oliver Fleming
... that the father had died without a will. But after twenty-one years the defendant's wife died, and he very soon afterwards, at the age of seventy-eight, married a very young woman: which caused some anxiety to his two sons, whose poignant expressions of this feeling so exasperated their father, that he in his resentment executed a will to disinherit his eldest son, and in his fit of anger showed it to his second son, who instantly determined ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... another in a slow, continual rotation. But there was a sweetness in his heart and, strange to say, Alyosha was not surprised at it. Again he saw that coffin before him, the hidden dead figure so precious to him, but the weeping and poignant grief of the morning was no longer aching in his soul. As soon as he came in, he fell down before the coffin as before a holy shrine, but joy, joy was glowing in his mind and in his heart. The one window of the cell was open, the air was fresh and cool. "So ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... forth across the small white pages, pausing as if of its own accord. She looked at the last words she had written and shut the book. Yes, she was near to all humanity; but nearer than any to one who was all the world to her. Suddenly she felt, with poignant intensity, the nearness not only of his body to hers, but the nearness of their souls. Her spirit and his touched in the silence of the forest. She did not look at him yet, but she knew that he was looking at her, and that his heart was in the look, calling to ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... in a shoe factory established by an enterprising Yankee in that city. The work lasted but a few months, when the proprietor failed and the factory was closed. In a strange city mother and children were left without employment. In her anxiety and distress a new trouble, the greatest and most poignant since Abijah's desertion, wrung her with a supreme grief. James, the light and pride of her life, had run away from his master and gone to sea. Lloyd, poor little homesick Lloyd, was the only consolation left the broken heart. And he did not ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... talent of the simple punster predominated, but in great perfection of the art, while Bishop Blomfield and Baron Alderson, whom I have often seen in friendly conflict, enriched this art by the high classical accompaniments they brought to it. The wit of Lord Dudley, Lord Alvanley, and Rogers was poignant, personal sarcasm; in Luttrell it was perpetual fun of lighter and more various kind, and whimsically expressed in his features, as well as in his words.[19] 'Natio comaeda est' was the maxim of his mind and ...
— History of English Humour, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alfred Guy Kingan L'Estrange
... no answer; and those subtle movements—shadows of movements I might almost call them—recommenced. Then there came a sudden cry, shrill and poignant—had Grandfather been in his room he would surely have heard it—and the flash coming almost simultaneously with its utterance, I saw what has haunted my sleep from that day to this, my father pinned against the wall, sword still in hand, and before him my mother, fiercely triumphant, ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Detective Stories • Various
... their employers intended. Major Sicard was removed from Tette as too friendly, and his successor had emmissaries in the Ajawa camp. Well, he saw their policy, and regretted that they should be allowed to follow us into perfectly new regions. The regret was the more poignant, inasmuch as but for our entering in by gentleness, they durst not have gone. No Portuguese dared, for instance, to come up this Shire Valley; but after our dispelling the fear of the natives by fair treatment, they came in calling themselves ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... The poignant vision of something bruised, dimmed, listless, was with him, and it was odd to hear himself urging:—"But in the meantime, you, too, have changed. The whole thing over here, the thing we so care for, isn't yours. You don't really care about it much, if at ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... Gervais! His features grew contracted, his hair rose up, and a sudden faintness overpowered him, so that the turnkeys were obliged to lead him to a seat. When he recovered a little, his involuntary and convulsive movements seemed to show the poignant remorse of a guilty and tortured soul, or perhaps the horrible regret of not having committed a second ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... head" by the occasional English word she is obliged to introduce, etc., yet all this is partially atoned for by the warm praise she subsequently accords him for his goodness to her and his "disinterested friendship," by the poignant regret she expresses at parting with him,—perhaps wholly expiated by the high compliment she pays him of making her heroine, Lucy, fall in love with him, or the higher compliment it is suspected she paid him of falling in love with him herself. One who reads the strange history ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various
... a more poignant symbol of irreclaimable vanished things than that so happily hit ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... impersonal. We cannot identify ourselves with what moves us in painting or sculpture or architecture: on the contrary, it lifts us out of ourselves, away from our griefs and cares, instead of giving them a more intense and poignant expression, which at some moments is all the divinest music seems to do. Their influence is always benign and serene, and we may always have recourse to it, while the secrets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann lie hidden between leaves, in the keeping of crabbed ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... before he could think or reflect, was the rush of a poignant and searching tenderness. This intimate, human sound, heard amid the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so pitifully incongruous—and so vain! Tears—in this vast and cruel wilderness: of what avail? He thought ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... For one poignant second fear leaped alive again and he called himself no better than a lost man. But the eyes that were lifted to his were the eyes of a questioning child, so guilelessly innocent that he immediately suffered another relapse into ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... reader, suspect that because I am choosing my words nicely, and playing with metaphor, and putting my commas in their proper places, my sorrow is not really and truly poignant. I write elaborately, for that is my habit, and habits are less easily broken than hearts. I could no more 'dash off' this my cri de coeur than I could an elegy on a broomstick I had never seen. Therefore, reader, bear with me, despite my sable plumes and purple; and weep with me, though ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... its climax, is utterly broken and shattered. In doing this he has tried to epitomize the whole work. While in the other movements he aimed at expressing tragic details, in the last he has tried to generalize; thinking that the most poignant tragedy is that of catastrophe in ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... face was coldly still as he regarded the powerful frame of his challenger. Then his retort came swift and poignant. ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... loyal feet that waited—eager to run on love's errands—till dawn brought the sight of faded flowers, the suddenly bleak apartment, the unpressed couch! Then the brave, swift flight of the spirit's wings to other altitudes, above pain and shame! And like love and sorrow, refined to a poignant essence, still the music ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... not to be wondered at, then, if the Countess of Arestino were a prey to the most poignant anxiety, as each successive quarter of an hour passed without bringing either Stephano or any tidings from him. Even if she feigned illness, so as to escape the ceremony of the following day, relief would only be temporary, for the moment she ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... difficulty in actually seeing the Superman, who is now about fifteen years old, and is kept by himself in a quiet room. Even my conversation with the father and mother did not quite clear up the character of this mysterious being. Lady Hypatia, who has a pale and poignant face, and is clad in those impalpable and pathetic greys and greens with which she has brightened so many homes in Hoxton, did not appear to talk of her offspring with any of the vulgar vanity of an ordinary human mother. I took a bold step and ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... certain specious literature dealing with the fancied delights—I say fancied advisedly and for greater emphasis repeat the whole phrase—against the fancied delights of life in the greenwood, then in such case my own poignant pangs shall not have entirely ...
— Fibble, D. D. • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... Winny worked for him for nothing; but to know that she was there, moving about his house, loving and caring for his child as he loved and cared for it, whether it was sick or well, clean or dirty, gave him pleasure that when he thought about it too much became as poignant as pain. For there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that he could do for Winny to repay her. He did not know that Winny paid herself in a thousand inimitable sensations every time she touched the things that he had touched, ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... but each is satisfied without what the other enjoys; and so his will is not determined to the pursuit of it. But yet, as soon as the studious man's hunger and thirst make him uneasy, he, whose will was never determined to any pursuit of good cheer, poignant sauces, delicious wine, by the pleasant taste he has found in them, is, by the uneasiness of hunger and thirst, presently determined to eating and drinking, though possibly with great indifferency, what wholesome food comes in his way. And, on the other side, the ...
— An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume I. - MDCXC, Based on the 2nd Edition, Books I. and II. (of 4) • John Locke
... returned to the farm kitchen Railton was sitting moodily by the fire and his wife's face was sternly set. They are not an emotional people in the dales, and her trouble was too deep for useless tears, but as she glanced about the room all she saw wakened poignant memories. The old china in the rack had been her mother's; she had brought it and the black oak meal-chest to Mireside thirty years since. The copper kettles and jelly-pan were wedding presents, and Tom, her son, who died in Australia, had sent the money to buy the sewing machine. Now ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... not their subtlety that makes them thus suffer; it is their lack of it. What? Is the poignant world-old play of poor mortal men and women, with their absurdities and excesses, their grotesque reserves and fantastic confessions, their advances and withdrawals, not interesting enough to serve? It serves sufficiently; it serves well enough, when genius ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... the forest, the breath of leaf and flower. They were keen and poignant to him, and then came another odor that did not belong there. It was brought on the edge of the gentle wind, and his nostrils expanded, as he noticed that it was growing stronger and stronger. He knew at once ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... author has introduced foreign words and the old printers have made pie of them. In a single case he has accepted his responsibility as dragoman, and the amount of his success is not such as to give us any poignant regret that he has everywhere else left us to our own devices. On p. 119, Vol. II., Francischina, a Dutchwoman, exclaims, "O, mine aderliver love." Here is Mr. Halliwell's note. "Aderliver.—This is the speaker's error for alder-liever, the best beloved by all." Certainly ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... took the part of a charwoman whose life moves in piteous tragedy. It registered what, up to that time, was the most poignant note that this gifted young woman had uttered. Yet the very next season she turned to a typical Clyde Fitch play, "Her Sister," and disported herself in charming frocks ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... that, after all, it had not been love! He had offered himself up to a girl's just contempt, but he had no recompense in the shape of a great addition to knowledge, to experience. Save for a few doubtful moments at the beginning, when he had all but surprised himself in something more poignant, what he had been conscious of had been nothing more than a suave and delicate charm of sentiment, a subtle surrender to one exquisite aesthetic impression after another. And these things in other relations the world had ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... remember that the moral being of mankind is as yet in its childhood; all poets play with images not understood; they touch on emotions sharply, at random, as in a dream; they suffer each successive vision, each poignant sentiment, to evaporate into nothing, or to leave behind only a heart vaguely softened and fatigued, a gentle languor, or a tearful hope. Every modern school of poets, once out of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and sentimental. None has ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... reverie of anything else between it and "Almayer's Folly." The only doubt I suffered from, after the publication of "Almayer's Folly," was whether I should write another line for print. Those days, now grown so dim, had their poignant moments. Neither in my mind nor in my heart had I then given up the sea. In truth I was clinging to it desperately, all the more desperately because, against my will, I could not help feeling that there was something changed in my relation to it. "Almayer's Folly," ...
— An Outcast of the Islands • Joseph Conrad
... they are offensive, and for no other reason in the world. Aus guter Familie, by Gabrielle Reuter, is another remarkable novel, and I believe it has never been translated into English. It presents the poignant tragedy of a woman's life suffocated by the social conditions obtaining in a small German town where a woman has no hope but marriage, and if she is poor no chance of marriage. It is one of the most sincere books I ever read. Das Taegliche Brot, Klara Viebig's story of servant-life ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... step was taken so bravely, it was not an easy one. Some idea of the courage it required is shown by the doctor's report of her first year in Nanchang; "The very thought of making a report causes many poignant memories to rush upon us. With what hesitancy and timidity did we begin our work in the new field! Knowing our own limitations, it was not with a light heart that we began the new year. Yet," she was able to add, "as we toiled ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... be absolute madness; Mrs. Morriston's face grew black at the very thought of it. She soon got my father on to her side, and between them I had a hateful time of it. It's the old story, which will be told as long as there are worldly, selfish women on the earth, but it was none the less fresh and poignant to me who had to live through ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... She was seized; she was held fast in the grip of a memory so intense, so poignant, that she made, she could make, no effort to release herself. She heard the drowsy wail of the Ceramella dropping down the mountain-side in the radiant heat of noon. She felt Maurice's warm hand. She remembered her words about the woman's need to love—"I wanted, I needed ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens
... dire distress, and poignant grief, Might lead to think, soon death would bring relief; But I, who know full well the female mind, At best oft doubt affliction of ...
— The Tales and Novels, Complete • Jean de La Fontaine
... had a small but telling part in the drama to-night; only a character bit, but one of those poignant bits that stand out in the memory. The subtitle was, "Merton, won't you let me give you another piece of the mince pie?" That was all, and yet, as screen artists say, it got over. There came very near to being not ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... to see. The last hymn was announced. Cameron was conscious of a deep, poignant emotion. He glanced swiftly about him. The eyes of all were upon the preacher's face while he read in slow sonorous tones the words of ...
— Corporal Cameron • Ralph Connor
... course of his Special Patrol duties Commander John Hanson resolves the unique and poignant mystery ...
— The God in the Box • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... being nothing but epithets, the cheapest and most contemptible of all species of abuse. Were two men, in your presence, to call each other such names, I think it would excite nothing but disgust in your mind. When the thought is clear and poignant, there is little need to have recourse to mere epithets; indeed, men never use the latter, except when there is a deficiency of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Fitz the subsequent proceedings became merged in a nightmare of blinding heat and glare, made actual only by poignant anxiety as to the length of her green skirt. The hope that she might be unrecognisable was shattered by the yell of "More power, Miss Fanny!" that crested the thunderous encore evoked by her hornpipe with Captain Carteret, and the question of the ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... 1856 are singularly full and interesting. It was a year of poignant suffering, of sharp conflicts of soul, and of great peace and joy. Its earlier months, especially, were shadowed by a dark cloud of anxiety and distress. And her feeble bodily state caused by care-worn ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... like shipwrecked sailors on a rock in the foothills. His attentiveness, his courtesy, his freedom from any conventional restraint, his manly respect which was so much greater than conventional restraint—all these came back to her with a poignant tenderness. She pictured Transley in his place. Transley would probably have proposed even before he bandaged her ankle. Grant had not said a word of love, or even of affection. He had talked freely of himself—at her request—but there had been nothing ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... battling to the best of their powers and striving hard for victory. Thou always speakest to me of the Pandavas as obtaining victory and mine as becoming weaker and weaker. O child, I am incessantly hearing of countless cause of unbearable and poignant grief on account of Duryodhana's doing. I do not see, O Sanjaya, the means by which the Pandavas may be weakened and sons of mine may obtain ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... treatment would not half so well have served his purpose. His audience were not prepared for any philosophy of exposure, still less for any attack upon the essential principles of the Church; he himself did not see how the successive laxities which he fixes with his poignant satire, or sets in the light of his withering scorn, spring from a vicious conception of Christianity and of the office of the Church. He does what he does, however, with exquisite effect; and the Jesuit Order, ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... cause. The language is more than simple, it is familiar. And this familiarity is characteristic of Lear (except at certain moments, already referred to) from the time of his madness onwards, and is the source of the peculiarly poignant effect of some of his sentences (such as 'The little dogs and all....'). We feel in them the loss of power to sustain his royal dignity; we feel also that everything external has become nothingness to him, and that what remains ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... various works have been chosen with care. It was evidently by no means an easy task. The passage chosen to show Colonel Newcome in the 'Cave of Harmony' gives in one poignant incident his character; the selection from 'Pendennis' does much the same. In the passage from 'Esmond' the story of the duel is a fine selection; the chapter on 'Some Country Snobs' is an apt choosing; the celebrated 'Essay on George IV' demonstrates ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... expressed that she was waiting, waiting. Suddenly she threw up her hands and sped across the room like a swallow. I never forgot it. She was very thin, very pathetic, very young, and the movement was as poignant as ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... reflected that it is Christmas Eve—do we live in a melodrama, that I should wander homeless on Christmas Eve? Seriously, you cannot expect a man of taste to lend himself to so hackneyed a situation? Besides, I share this apartment with the composer monsieur Nicolas Pitou. Consider how poignant he would find the room's associations if he returned to ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... at my hands. My life has been one long expiation for that wrong. My broken health, my altered character, my weary secret sorrows, unpartaken and unconsoled, have punished me for many years past more heavily than you think. Do you desire to see me visited by more poignant sufferings than these? If it be so, you may enjoy the vindictive triumph of having already inflicted them. Your threats will force me, in a few hours, from the friends I have lived with, at the very time when the affection shown to me, and the honor conferred on me by those ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... of antiquity in his "art of gradual tension, accumulation, increase, and alarming concentration of dramatic action." His books are veritably tragic. In Russian music alone may be found a parallel to his poignant pathos and gloomy imaginings and shuddering climaxes. What is more wonderful than Chapter I of The Idiot with its adumbration of the entire plot and characterisation of the book, or Chapter XV and its ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... the very fringe of their bear-skin caps. A couple of officers, with swords drawn, walked up and down behind the ranks, but, though they were tall, fine fellows, and expressed in the nonchalant fulfilment of their part a high sense of boredom, they did not give the scene any such poignant interest as it had from the men in performing a duty, or indulging a privilege, by hopping into the air and bouncing their knapsacks up to their necks. After what seemed an unreasonable delay, but was doubtless requisite for the transaction, the detachment sent for ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... rat-elves, when Pao-ch'ai entered unannounced, and began to gibe Pao-yue, with trenchant irony: how that on the fifteenth of the first moon, he had shown ignorance of the allusion to the green wax; and the three of them then indulged in that room in mutual poignant satire, for the sake of fun. Pao-yue had been giving way to solicitude lest Tai-yue should, by being bent upon napping soon after her meal, be shortly getting an indigestion, or lest sleep should, at night, be ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... the mail arrived she roused from her apathy, and with trembling fingers sorted out the letters, going over them again and again, and never finding the one she sought. Gradually beneath the poignant grief for her father, came the dull persistent pain of a first disillusion. The belief and loyalty with which she had started out to defend Donald began to weaken before his silence. In his trouble she had ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... hero through a woman's love ... we take to be a mere commonplace of romanticism, which Ibsen, though he satirised it, had by no means fully outgrown when he wrote Peer Gynt. Peer's return to Solveig is (in the original) a passage of the most poignant lyric beauty, but it is surely a shirking, not a solution, of the ethical problem. It would be impossible to the Ibsen of to-day, who knows (none better) that No man can save his brother's soul, or pay ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... impure thought, had gone to make up the sum of her existence. As a reward for all these virtues she was now called upon to bear the burden of an unspeakable anguish. What keener joy could she know than that which had come to her through her love for Dic? What agony more poignant could she suffer than the loss of him? But, putting Dic aside, what calamity could so blacken the future for her, or for any pure girl, as marriage with a man she loathed? We often speak of these tragedies regretfully ...
— A Forest Hearth: A Romance of Indiana in the Thirties • Charles Major
... speak of anything it is nothing of much concern. Each seated on a white horse, they rode rapidly toward the camp, which was plunged in great sorrow. The whole army is beside itself with grief, but they are altogether wrong in supposing Cliges to be dead: hence their bitter and poignant grief. And for Fenice, too, they are in dismay, thinking never to win her back again. Thus, for her and him the whole army is in great distress. But soon upon their return the whole affair will change its aspect; for now they have reached the camp again, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... too poignant a word for what is so stingless as this. And yet God the Father, who gives the love, understands and knows how much may lie behind two words and two dates. "Given . . . Taken . . ." Only indeed we do bless Him when the cup holds no bitterness ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... painted velvet words, extravagant fables, and unbelievable characters he is so fond of erecting? Some of his work almost approaches the burlesque in form. He carries his manner to a point where he seems to laugh at it himself, and then, with a touch of poignant realism or a poetic phrase, he confounds the reader's judgment. The virtuosity of ...
— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten
... in the lofty bema. Short and slender, wasted by sickness, gray before his time, with pale cheeks and wrinkled brow, he seemed at first like a person of no significance—a reed shaken in the wind. But there was a look in his deep-set, poignant eyes, as he gathered all the glances of the multitude to himself, that belied his mean appearance and prophesied power. Hermas knew very well who it was: the man who had drawn him from his father's house, the ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... Bill, whose queer side limp awoke poignant memories of the Bludston brickfield. Paul ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... could see the exact bearings of things, and he felt a desperate courage to stand his ground. All his sense of suffering, of the shipwreck he had made, and of what he might have to face in the next few days, had become fused into one large poignant emotion. It was an extra poignancy to be aware that Helen would continue to suffer because of his determination to face the consequences. But he was married to Cleo, and, unless she expressly left him, he ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... the stone, Nor dream we of his pent abode; The heart conceals the anguished groan, With all the poignant griefs that goad The brain to madness; Within the hushed volcano's breast, The molten fires of ruin lie;— Thus human passions seem at rest, And on the brow serene and high, Appears no sadness. But still the fires are raging there, Of vengeance, hatred, and despair; And ...
— Autographs for Freedom, Volume 2 (of 2) (1854) • Various
... in forty thousand verses?" The demand but feebly expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem existed only by the challenger's invention. Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... faultless strain of music. Stepping out of a paradise in which pain becomes so lovely, he can see the beauty which is the other side of madness, and, in a sonnet, "To One in Bedlam," can create a more positive, a more poignant mood, ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... critics neglected to note what the Duke says about "Come away, come away, Death," and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this must not really have been sung by Viola, all the while insensible to the poignant dramatic value of it as warbled by the ironic Clown in the presence of the blinded pair. But indeed the whole of Twelfth Night is burdened with melody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and at each change of scene some unseen hand is overheard touching a harp-string. The ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... which we have discovered in artistic expression has been that of delightful and orderly sympathetic vision. This is supplemented from still another source of value. Through artistic expression pent-up emotions find a welcome release. No matter how poignant be the experience expressed, the weight, the sting of it disappears through expression. For through expression, as we have seen, the experience is drawn from the dark depths of the self to the clear and orderly surface of the work ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... yellow sands stretching to the far-off horizon. She had tempted him willingly, deliberately. Something had compelled her to test her power. Her annoyance at his apparent indifference to her presence had become too poignant to hide any longer. Anger was exhausting her nerves. She was conscious that she had burnt her boats, that ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... again and his choking gratitude to her for having looked after them were evidence enough that this kind-eyed man meant to be both father and mother to his recovered little folks. His emotion was too poignant for him to talk about his wife, but Sheba understood and ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... Wyn, upon whom the mantle of Ceiriog has fallen, by two exquisitely simple and pathetic poems, "Ora pro Nobis" and "A Flower-Sunday Lullaby"; and William John Gruffydd, the bright hope of "Y Beirdd Newydd" ("The New Poets"), by his poignant ballad of "The Old Bachelor of ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... music ousting doctrine. Do you not think that the truest, the most poignant doctrine, speaks, utters itself through the arts. Music has its religion and its atheism, painting its holiness and its sin. A statue, in its white and marble stillness, may suggest to us dreams in which the angels ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... Cecille half-pagan or divine in any degree. He wouldn't have noticed her, even, unless his attention had been pointedly called that way. And if another, contemplating her with an eye not greedy of the flesh alone, had finally hit upon the word poignant to describe the hungry youth of her, the odd little tilt of her head, the soft and eager promise in swelling line of hip and breast, Denby himself most certainly would ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... was one of the most poignant memories of my life. The look she gave him and the look he gave her! ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... more poignant torture. Next day, while Rudolph Musgrave was making out the list of honorary pall-bearers, the postman brought a letter which had been forwarded from Chicago. It was from Agatha, written upon the morning of that day wherein ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell
... Morris that more poignant emotion could be displayed than in Abe's first reception of his news, but this last suggestion almost finished Abe. For fifteen minutes he fought off apoplexy ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... had made up her mind to ask her father to allow her, knowing well that he would consent to that or to any other wholesome wish of hers. But then came the thought that he would be all alone at home; and following that came another thought, and one of more poignant feeling. He was alone now! Already, for many days, she had left him, for the first time in her life! Stephen was quick to act; well she knew that at home there would be no fault found with her for a speedy return. Within a few hours ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... the fire and the Carringford's poignant trouble, Janice Day had a mental problem to solve which occupied her thoughts a good ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... represented Agamemnon thus, for a painter, Timanthes, had made a picture of this subject about B.C. 400, and in describing it Quintilian said that "when he had painted Calchas sad, Ulysses sadder, and had represented in the face of Menelaus the most poignant grief that art can express, having exhausted the deepest feelings and finding no means of worthily portraying the countenance of the father, he covered his head and left it to every man's own ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the moral of "Griffith Gaunt,"—so poignant and effective for the most part,—and see how lamentably it suffers from the defective art of the denouement. In brief: up to the end of Mrs. Gaunt's trial we are presented with a terrible image of the evils that jealousy, anger, and lies bring upon ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various
... course for amplitude of style, Tintoretto's great renderings of the scene in Venice. The abject anguish of the crucified and the straddling authority and brutality of the mounted guards in the foreground are contrasted in a fashion worthy of a great dramatist. But the most poignant touch is the tragic grimaces of the little angelic heads that fall like hailstones through the dark air. It is genuine realistic weeping, the act of irrepressible "crying," that the painter has depicted, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... was pleased to call my ready invention. But when we came next to the order in which the dishes were to be served—" Miss Notman paused in the middle of the sentence, and shuddered over the private and poignant recollections which the order of the ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... knew that he could never forget, and that the old memories of the wilderness and of the woman he had loved would force themselves upon him, year after year, with their old pain. But these new thoughts and plans for the child made his grief less poignant. ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... another chorus—from three miles down the river: the convicts singing hymns in their cells at midnight. And I ground gently and sit in the silvered shadows with little bewildered shrimps flicking against me, and unlanguaged thoughts come and go—impossible similes, too poignant phrases to be stopped and fettered with words, and I am neither scientist nor man nor naked organism, but just mind. With the coming of silence I look around and again consciously take in the scene. I am very glad to be alive, and to know that the possible dangers of jungle and water ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... poverty and feebleness of mankind, the inveteracy of selfishness, the uncertainty of human impulses and aspirations and promises; what poignant questioning of the necessity, the utility of self-immolation must have tortured the soul of Jesus in that hour! It was His black hour. None can imagine the depth of that darkness but those who have themselves passed through some of its outer shadows, in the times when love seems ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... women (much better gowned than Eleanor) and a dozen men applauded from the drawing-room; a strange-looking youth with a shock of auburn hair drew from a violin sounds which it required no knowledge of technique to feel extraordinarily poignant and moving. All but the dancer were smoking, and Molly sat on the floor (in copper-coloured chiffon, too!) her hands clasped about her knees, a cigarette in an amber holder between her lips ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... that most poignant of Latin hymns, the "Stabat Mater dolorosa"; he wrote also a joyous Christmas pendant ...
— Christmas in Ritual and Tradition, Christian and Pagan • Clement A. Miles
... marble terrace, and the gleaming marble facade of the house, and the marble balustrade, with the jessamine twining round its columns. The picture was very beautiful—but something was wanting to perfect its beauty; and the name of the something that was wanting sang itself in poignant iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and longed to tell her; and he dared ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... with a voice and a magic reminding many an old frequenter of Covent Garden, through all difference, of Giulia Ravogli in her prime, played this poignant scene as though the superb music in which it was clothed was her natural voice, the mere fitting ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 16. They instantly obeyed the summons, bringing with them Valerius, a kinsman of her father, and Junius Bru'tus, a reputed idiot, whose father Tarquin had murdered, and who had accidentally met the messenger by the way. 17. Their arrival only served to increase Lucre'tia's poignant anguish; they found her in a state of the deepest desperation, and vainly attempted to give her relief. After passionately charging Sextus Tarquin'ius with the basest perfidy towards her husband and injury to herself, she drew a poinard ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... that sometimes overtake supersensitive natures. School- girls just budding into womanhood often behave in a similar manner; and they are no more to be censured for it than Hawthorne,—to whom it may have caused moments of poignant self-reproach in his daily reflections. But Doctor Howe was the man of all men whom Hawthorne ought to have known, and half an hour's conversation might have made them friends ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... for she had only to be silent now, she believed, and the success of her efforts to win him from Jennie Burton would be complete. If left to himself in this wild, distracted mood he would indeed break every tie that bound him to her rival; but after time had blunted his poignant self-condemnation he would inevitably come back to her. The conscience whispered: "Who forgave you here? What did you promise here? What does that tree mean with its branches reaching out towards heaven? What ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... his death, and Estelle, with a piercing cry, rushed toward the hall—those bearing his body were at the moment entering the house—rushing toward them she clung to his inanimate form, uttering the most poignant cries of anguish. A few restoratives brought Victor to consciousness, and sweet were the accents of reproof which fell upon his ear with the first waking into life, for they betrayed to him the tender feelings of love which the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... Helena had read hers. It seemed to her that Helena had deliberately shown her own; that the act was part of the conflict which Lucy guessed at, but must not comment on, by word or look. All the letters were the true expression of the man. The first, in which he described in words, few; but singularly poignant, the death of his wife, his recognition of his son, and the faint beginnings of hope for the boy's maimed life, had forced tears from Lucy. Helena had read it dry-eyed. But for several hours afterwards, on an evening of tempest, she had ...
— Helena • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... long slender flattened skull beneath the long pointed cap brought before Stephen's mind the image of a hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptile-like in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant and self-embittered. ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... discover his son's ardent affection must be a poignant reproach for his neglect and jealousy, and she grieved at once for him and with him; but she could not understand half the feelings of bitter anguish that she perceived in his countenance and gestures. She did not know of his expectation that ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in his belt, while a hunger that was almost too fierce to be endured assailed him. His was a strong body, demanding much nourishment, and it cried out to him for relief. He tried to forget in sleep that he was famished, but he only dozed a while to awaken to a hunger more poignant ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... resplendent loveliness. The lake sparkled in the sunshine, and as they shot past its tiny bays and woody headlands, new beauties were every moment revealed to them. But while the scene softened Wyat's feelings, it filled him with intolerable remorse, and so poignant did his emotions become, that he pressed his hands upon his eyes to shut out the lovely prospect. When he looked up again the scene was changed. The skiff had entered a narrow creek, arched over by huge trees, ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... sweetness of her voice, its high passion, the strong beauty of her presence woke a poignant longing in my heart. ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... as being nothing but epithets, the cheapest and most contemptible of all species of abuse. Were two men, in your presence, to call each other such names, I think it would excite nothing but disgust in your mind. When the thought is clear and poignant, there is little need to have recourse to mere epithets; indeed, men never use the latter, except when there is ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... a Journalist-at-Arms? Life for that paladin hath poignant charms. Whether in pretty quarrel he shall run Just half an inch of rapier—in pure fun— In his opponent's biceps, or shall flick His shoulders with a slender walking-stick. The "stern joy" of the man indeed must rise To raptures and heroic ecstacies. Oh, glorious climax of a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, Sept. 27, 1890 • Various
... President commanded impatiently, and as they removed him Mademoiselle crept from the Court, weeping softly in her poignant grief, and realising that not so much for the President's ear as for her own had La Boulaye uttered those words. They were meant to fortify her and to give her courage with the assurance that Ombreval would not be betrayed. To give her courage! ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... arrived. And he looked at it and sniffed at it daintily—like a reluctant patient going under the ether—and he tasted of it; and then he put his face down in his hands and burst into low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real thing at all. The stuffing of the turkey defied chemical analysis; and, moreover, the turkey before serving should have been dusted with talcum powder and fitted with dress-shields, it being ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... of their son's death, as may well be imagined, was received by Sir Alexander and Lady Moncton with the most poignant grief; and six years elapsed before she and her husband revisited ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... tangle of rainbow coloring, dancing in the mellow sunshine. And day by day a fine still deepening haze descends veil-like over the landscape and wraps it in a vague melancholy which most sweetly invades the spirit. It is as if one waits for a poignant thing which ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... the ninety years of Sarah, but she felt that the promise of a son was no laughing matter. These poignant hopes and awful denials and perilous adventures are not permitted to be written about or printed for respectable eyes. If they are discussed it ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... began to turn towards the mother and father who had been wrapped up in his future,—who loved him so devotedly. He was forgetting his early and passionate love, and the bitter sorrow of her death was losing fast its poignant power to steel him against his kindred. He knew they could not but be proud of the record he had made in the ranks of the gallant ——th, and then he shrank and shivered when he recalled the dreadful words of his curse. He had made up his mind to write, implore pardon for ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... very poignant. The old bachelor lodgings became unendurable. Randolph had gone to a home of his own, and Steve could not sit there alone, listening to the clods of earth as they fell ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... on all the peoples who were not anointed, and made war among themselves for fourteen hundred years, taking the names of Arians, Manicheans, Donatists, Hussites, Papists, Lutherans, Calvinists. And lastly, the Jansenists and the Molinists have had no more poignant mortification than that of not having been able to slaughter each other in pitched battle. Whence does ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... about the rat-elves, when Pao-ch'ai entered unannounced, and began to gibe Pao-y, with trenchant irony: how that on the fifteenth of the first moon, he had shown ignorance of the allusion to the green wax; and the three of them then indulged in that room in mutual poignant satire, for the sake of fun. Pao-y had been giving way to solicitude lest Tai-y should, by being bent upon napping soon after her meal, be shortly getting an indigestion, or lest sleep should, at night, be completely dispelled, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... had some unpleasant clashes with Japanese troops in Siberia, and the memory of their studied insolence was all the more poignant because it had gone unchallenged. He observed, now, that the Japanese passenger had permitted the screen door to slam in the face of the man following him; with a very definite appreciation of the ...
— The Pride of Palomar • Peter B. Kyne
... selected from the various works have been chosen with care. It was evidently by no means an easy task. The passage chosen to show Colonel Newcome in the 'Cave of Harmony' gives in one poignant incident his character; the selection from 'Pendennis' does much the same. In the passage from 'Esmond' the story of the duel is a fine selection; the chapter on 'Some Country Snobs' is an apt choosing; ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... your poignant grief for the loss of your poor drowned boy, you were spared the agony of seeing him, even in imagination, struggling faintly before that tempest of fire and smoke, calling plaintively for her on whose tender bosom his head had rested, while his naked feet were cut and bruised ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise
... details, questioning us until it seems as if our heart would break with answering. Our friends think that they must explore with us all the depths of our grief, dwelling upon the elements that are specially poignant. The result of all this "comforting" is that our burden of sorrow is made heavier instead of lighter, and we are less brave and strong than before to bear it. If we would be truly comforted we would better flee away to Christ; for ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... better be conceived than expressed. At first a general disorder, wildness, and consternation pervaded the town. The tale appeared as an illusory dream, as the raving of a sickly imagination. But these impressions soon gave place to sensations of the most poignant sorrow and extreme regret. On Monday and Wednesday the stores were all closed and all business suspended, as if each family had lost its father. From the time of his death to the time of his interment ...
— Seaport in Virginia - George Washington's Alexandria • Gay Montague Moore
... then did I suspect that her calm demeanor was assumed, and that some poignant grief was concealed beneath that air of tranquility. For a moment, we were silent and embarrassed. Then Daspry stepped ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... with virtue fraught The pious glorious saint besought. But the good speech with poignant sting Pierced ear and bosom of the king, Who, stabbed with pangs too sharp to bear, Fell ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Irish aristocracy in servile dependence. In his early years he served in the American War of Independence on the side of despotism and oppression—a circumstance which in after years caused him poignant sorrow. He joined the United Irishmen, about the time that Thomas Addis Emmet entered their ranks, and the young nobleman threw himself into the movement with all the ardour and energy of his nature. He was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the National forces in the south, and ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... intensify; inflame &c (render violent) 173; wind up &c (strengthen) 159. strike home, into home, hard home; make an impression. Adj. strong, energetic, forcible, active; intense, deep-dyed, severe, keen, vivid, sharp, acute, incisive, trenchant, brisk. rousing, irritation; poignant; virulent, caustic, corrosive, mordant, harsh, stringent; double-edged, double-shotted^, double- distilled; drastic, escharotic^; racy &c (pungent) 392. potent &c (powerful) 157; radioactive. Adv. strongly &c adj.; fortiter in re [Lat.]; with telling effect. Phr. the steam is up; vires acquirit eundo ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... moment I dreamed of the greatest happiness, I found myself most miserable; and it seemed as if fortune wished to give me this taste of joy, only to render the reverse more poignant. The change I now experienced was as painful as it was sudden and unexpected. It was a change indeed from a state of bliss to a scene which is inexpressible by me, as it discovered to me an element I had never ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... the citrons rolled Beneath thick coats their juicy pulp unfold: From some the palate feels a poignant smart, Which, though they wound the tongue, yet ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... about her, her white arms outstretched to the moonlight, her face—exquisite as a flower—upturned to meet the glory. She was like a dream too wonderful to be true, save for the passion that lived in her eyes. That was vivid, that was poignant—the fire of ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... the other hand, the effects are so various, and so intensely individual, that perhaps only such a one has a chance of forming a general judgment unbiassed by personal experience and his own temperament. What thousands of strange and poignant feelings must pass through even the least impressionable soldier who runs the gamut of this war's "experience"! And there will not be too many of our soldier-workmen returning to civil life without having had at least a taste of everything. The embryo Guardsman who sticks his bayonet into a sack, ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... young officer's face did not lighten, and very soon he turned again to the sea. The time will come, of course, when the tragedy of his mutilation will be less fresh and poignant, when the Order of Leopold on his breast will help to compensate for many things; but that sunny morning, on the deck of the hospital ship, it held small ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... matters of conjecture, and what proportion of them contain disenchantments will never be known. Honora lay awake for a long time that night, and the poignant and ever recurring remembrance of her husband's remark sent the blood to her face like a flame. Would Peter, or George Hanbury, or any of the intimate friends of her childhood have said ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to one side. His bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom. The next instant he dashed past his master's legs, almost upsetting his balance, and shot out into the room, where he went blundering wildly against walls and furniture. But that ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... strange working within him, a fierce feeling, a poignant and violent sensation of cold in his whole body, in all his limbs, as if his bones had suddenly been turned to ice. Oh! if he were to resemble Limousin and he continued to look at George, who was laughing now. He looked at him with haggard, troubled ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... that: "This Italian story, told with all the poignant relish of these vivacious natives, to whom such a stinging incident was an important event, also shows the personal freedoms taken on these occasions by a man of genius, entirely in the spirit of the ancient Roman Atellanae or ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... the hau tree. The woman that laughed especially irritated him. A curious train of thought was aroused. He was Isaac Ford's son, and what had happened with Isaac Ford might happen with him. He felt in his cheeks the faint heat of a blush at the thought, and experienced a poignant sense of shame. He was appalled by what was in his blood. It was like learning suddenly that his father had been a leper and that his own blood might bear the taint of that dread disease. Isaac Ford, the austere soldier of the Lord—the old hypocrite! What difference between him and any ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... excited ardour in many a female breast besides her own. Nevertheless, she permitted herself to return again and again to the belief that he loved her and dreamed of her; and certainly one of his most poignant sonnets had been addressed to the unknown mate whom he had sought ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... for murder, the miserable delinquent was beheld for fifteen minutes struggling with the torments of his untimely fate! The guillotine is far preferable to the savage mode, formerly used in France, of breaking the criminal upon the wheel, and leaving him afterwards to perish in the most poignant agonies. ...
— The Stranger in France • John Carr
... trenchant; penetrating, shrewd, astute, discerning; piercing, poignant, excruciating, a crimonious, mordacious, bitter, intense, severe; eager, ardent, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... larger music, the more majestic lengths of verse called epics, the exact in sculpture, the classic drama, the most absolute kinds of wine, require a perfect harmony of circumstance for their appreciation. Whatever is strong, poignant, and immediate in its effect is not so difficult to suit; farce, horror, rage, or what not, these a man can find in the arts, even when his mood may be heavy or disturbed; just as (to take their parallel in wines) strong Beaune will always rouse ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... and nations had foreborne their accustomed irony and presented her gifts to some woman mercifully lacking her own terrible power to love and suffer—and the imagination which would keep for ever vivid in her mind the poignant happiness that had been hers and that she had immolated on the cold altar of duty. She was still young, and her sole hope, glimmering at the end of an interminable perspective, was that it would be her privilege to lie at last in the grave with this man; who had been her other part and ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... Mrs. Willoughby sat up in bed, her face in her hands, and reflected in the stillness that presages the storm. But loneliness no longer pained her; the solitude had become suddenly peopled with vivid, poignant regrets, shouting loudly ...
— Stories from Everybody's Magazine • 1910 issues of Everybody's Magazine
... seemed less trying now; somehow the fact of her distress seemed less poignant. There was a way out of it—stop. No; do not look at the note there on the table. There was a way out, no doubt, but not that one; no, of course not that one. Rosella laughed a little. How easily some one else, less scrupulous, would solve this ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... reasons and to spare why the name should make her sit up straight. Her curiosity had turned the key, and lo, with a click, here was an entirely changed, immensely complicated, intensely poignant situation. But our excitable old friend was an Englishwoman: dissimulation would be her second nature; you could trust her to pull the wool over your eyes with a fleet and practised hand. Instinctively, furthermore, she would ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... difference in Jacqueline's voice since she had heard it last in that Song of the Hill; clear and expressionless, then, as a boy's; so throbbing now, so poignant with understanding, that the mother's eyes filled with tears. Jemima's, too, were a little moist, and she blinked them hard, and steeled herself to say to Jacqueline that day what ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... not like living. It is thoroughly disagreeable. Today Judith taunted me with never having lived, and I admitted the justice of the taunt and regretted in poignant misery the change from my old conditions. If to live is to have one's reason cast down and trampled under foot, one's heart aflame with a besotted passion and one's soul racked with remorse, then am I living in good sooth—and ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... demand but feebly expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem existed only by the challenger's invention. Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... to convalescence; to the days when cannon were first used, printing invented, America discovered, and the man Luther, who gave the Germans their present language by his translation of the Bible, and who delivered us from papal tyranny, born; and Agincourt, and Joan of Arc, are picturesque and poignant features of ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... towards heaven, and sit silently by him, and weep for him seven days and seven nights upon the ground." That is, they were true hearted, truly loving, devout, religious men, and yet they with their religion, were to become the instruments of the most poignant sufferings, and the sharpest temptations, which he had to endure. So it was, and is, and will be,—of such materials is this human life ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... account of their young and tender sons, who are sold to the far South, where they have to toil without requite to supply the world's market with cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, &c. Our venerable mothers are borne down with poignant grief at the fate of their children. Our sisters, if not by the law, are by common consent made the prey of vile men, who can bid ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... it, but still it was new; and in that thought, that feeling, there was something inexpressibly melancholy; and the contrast, at this moment, between her sensations and those of her companions, made the pain the more poignant; they perceived this, and were silent. Helen was grateful for this consideration for her, but she could not bear to be a constraint upon them, therefore she now exerted herself, sat forward—admired ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... in the direction of the Piazza Navona. His self-reproach was becoming poignant. He remembered the threats he had made, and told himself he had never intended to carry them out. They were only meant to impress the imagination of the person played upon, as might happen in any ordinary affair ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... but little else in any one's heart. Her youth, her prominence, her union with a man of such marked attractions as Mr. Jeffrey, the tragedy connected with her marriage, thrown now into shadow by the still more poignant tragedy which had so suddenly terminated her own life, gave to the affair an interest which for those first twenty-four hours did not call for any further heightening by a premature ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... the forgotten thrill. But it was no use. One day she found herself reading the Dedication of The Ring and the Book over and over again, without taking in its meaning, without any remembrance of its poignant secret. "'And all a wonder and a wild desire'—Mamma loved that." She thought she loved it too; but what she loved was the dark-green book she had seen in her mother's long, white hands, and the sound of her mother's ...
— Life and Death of Harriett Frean • May Sinclair
... expression, correct design, divine attitudes, and artful contrast, heightened with the beauties of Clar. Obscur., embellished thy celebrated pieces, to the delight and astonishment of the judicious multitude! Adieu, persuasive eloquence! the quaint metaphor, the poignant irony, the proper epithet, and the lively simile, are fled for ever! Instead of these, we shall have, I know not what! The illiterate will ...
— The History of John Bull • John Arbuthnot
... She had no words. Never again was she to hear the chimes without that poignant memory of her father begging her to remember ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... is really felt, and not vainly imagined, modesty is the requirement of an ideal of dignity, conceived as the very condition of that love. Separate modesty from love, that is, from love which is not floating in the air, but crystallized around a real person, and its psychological reality, its poignant and tragic character, disappears." (Dugas, "La Pudeur," Revue Philosophique, Nov., 1903.) So conceived, modesty becomes a virtue, almost ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and drank out of the bottles, sans apology. Strange were their speculations, their wonderings, their plans—now discussed specifically, now half-voiced by a mere word that thrilled them both with sudden, poignant emotion. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... school, of trying to keep order in immense classrooms, or hurrying about in search of my form. When I had my long and dreary illness, lasting for two years, I invariably had happy dreams. Now that I am well again, I often have dreams of causeless and poignant melancholy. It is the rarest thing in the world for me to be able to connect my dreams with anything which has recently happened; I cannot say that marvellous landscapes, ceremonies, conversations with exalted personages, sensational incidents, play any considerable part in my life; and yet ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... she told Billy Louise a good deal of the bitterness of the years behind; years of hardship and of slavish toil and no love to lighten it. She spoke again of Minervy, and the name brought back to Billy Louise poignant memories of her own lonely childhood and ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... How pointed, how poignant the contrast between a hero on the boards and a hero in the streets! In the world's theatre the man who is really playing the leading part—did we but know it—is too often, in the general estimate, accounted ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... shall have lived with them through a great crisis in their lives: some of them may be my friends for ever." It is one of the glories and privileges of the dramatist's calling that he can arouse in us this eager and poignant expectation; and I cannot commend his wisdom in deliberately taking the edge off it, and making us feel as though we were not sitting down to a play, but to a sort of conversational novel. A list of characters, it is true, may also affect one ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... those nights would be a hollow mockery, the glance of any possible rival in her direction a desecration. Why, he even had to restrain himself to keep from doing actual damage to Philippi, who, though on the shady side of forty-five, still sang a most dashing Escamillo; nor was his jealousy less poignant because Philippi ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... soul on the lips of infancy. That confused chirruping of a thought, that is as yet no more than an instinct, has in it one knows not what sort of artless appeal to the eternal justice; or is it a protest uttered on the threshold before entering in, a protest meek and poignant? This ignorance smiling at the Infinite compromises all creation in the lot that shall fall to the weak defenceless being. Ill, if it shall come, will ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... aside where the light fell boldest on the figure, looking at it in silence. There was not one line of beauty or grace in it: a nude woman's form, muscular, grown coarse with labor, the powerful limbs instinct with some one poignant longing. One idea: there it was in the tense, rigid muscles, the clutching hands, the wild, eager face, like that of a starving wolf's. Kirby and Doctor May walked around it, critical, curious. Mitchell stood aloof, silent. The figure touched ...
— Life in the Iron-Mills • Rebecca Harding Davis
... eons of time Powell hurried through a limitless universe of swirling, tinted fires, while vibrations of a mighty force tingled with poignant ecstasy in every atom of ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... turn freely, or was it closed with a combination? The question was poignant. The key turned and the door opened. On a shelf and in a wooden bowl were packages of bank-notes and rolls of gold that he had seen the evening when the bank-clerk came. Roughly, without counting; he thrust them into his pocket, and without closing the safe, he ran to the front ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... proportions of the "frail" ladies that amused Killigrew, found himself waiting for that moment every evening, and his satisfaction when he caught it was rather that of a person who is pleased at verifying something he has had the acumen to discover than any more poignant emotion. He went far oftener to see this than he did to watch Blanche in her small part as one of the innocuous and well-bred company performing at the little old Strand Theatre, which was then still a phalanx ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... scene of fears, Still in my view, some tyrant chief appears, Some base-born Hessian slave walks threatening by, Some servile Scot with murder in his eye, Still haunts my sight, as vainly they bemoan Rebellions managed so unlike their own. O may I never feel the poignant pain To live subjected to such fiends again! Stewards and mates that hostile Britain bore, Cut from the gallows on their native shore; Their ghastly looks and vengeance beaming eyes Still to my view in dismal visions rise,— O may I ne'er review these dire abodes, These piles for slaughter floating ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... felt that I could do none of these things, and in a dreary, slow, helpless way, I thrust the watch back in amongst the tow, rammed more in after it, and then stood, after laying the rabbit down, asking myself what I should do next, while a poignant sense of misery and wretchedness seemed to make ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... the amphitheatre had thus commenced, there was one in the loftier benches for whom it had assumed indeed a poignant, a stifling interest. The aged father of Lydon, despite his Christian horror of the spectacle, in his agonized anxiety for his son had not been able to resist being the spectator of his fate. Once amid a fierce crowd of strangers, the lowest rabble ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... on him nothing else would have produced. Also a fantastic and finely ironic vision of Joseph and Potiphar's wife rose before him and the vision of himself as Joseph irked a certain complexness of his mentality. Poignant as the thing was in its modern way, ...
— The Head of the House of Coombe • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... prayer; No mellowing moonlight, but dawn, Frail, fanciful, and fair In the east of my dream and desire. At the portal of unending desire, Draped in diaphanous dreams, With a whispered word of fire That quivers and gleams Through the clouds of my longing. Longings poignant with pains and tears Enfold, and fill my soul That aches with hopes and fears As thy chariot wheels' roll Sets fire with torches of gold To my words, my silences, my singing, And to this black pyre of my life To take my being on the wings of thy embracing To sail away, far away from man's ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... death of his gallant roadster, his proud pacer through the streets of Barbie, touched him with a sense of quite personal loss and bereavement. Coming on the heels of his other calamities it seemed to make them more poignant, more sinister, prompting the question if misfortune ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... their journey—he thought only of the horrible death of his poor old horse, the ancient companion of his fatigues and wars, the faithful animal, twice wounded like himself, and from whom for so many years he had never been separated. This poignant emotion was so cruelly, so affectingly visible in the soldier's countenance, that the landlord and his people felt themselves for a moment touched with pity, as they gazed on the tall veteran kneeling beside his ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... and the poet has mourned and eulogized him in a long poem entitled In Memoriam. It contains one hundred and twenty-nine four-lined stanzas, and is certainly very musical and finished; but it is rather the language of calm philosophy elaborately studied, than that of a poignant grief. It is not, in our judgment, to be compared with his shorter poems, and is generally read and overpraised only by his more ardent admirers, who discover a crystal tear of genuine emotion ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... strength as her body leaned to his. Slowly he picked his way ashore while she reclined in his embrace, her arms about his neck, her smooth cheek brushing his. A faint, intoxicating perfume she used affected him strangely, increasing the poignant sense of her nearness; a lock of her hair caressed him. When he deposited her gently upon her feet he saw her face had gone white and that ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach
... Hatch's partner almost cried with vexation and disappointment when he found that the woman and child he pointed out were not the "parties" they were looking for. Indeed, Mr. Buckley's grief was so poignant that Von Barwig almost felt sorry for the man, who declared that his professional honour as a detective was ruined from that moment. It was, in this case, for Von Barwig made up his mind at once never ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... upon whom the mantle of Ceiriog has fallen, by two exquisitely simple and pathetic poems, "Ora pro Nobis" and "A Flower-Sunday Lullaby"; and William John Gruffydd, the bright hope of "Y Beirdd Newydd" ("The New Poets"), by his poignant ballad of "The Old ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... chamber's chastened gloom. In all great hearts there is abundant room For memories of greatness, and high pride In what sects cannot kill nor seas divide. The Light hath led thee, on through honoured days And lengthened, through wild gusts of blame and praise, Through doubt, and severing change, and poignant pain, Warfare that strains the breast and racks the brain, At last to haven! Now no English heart Will willingly forego unfeigned part In honouring thee, true master of our tongue, On whose word, writ or spoken, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 23, 1890. • Various
... In wafts that poignant sweetness drifts, until The wounded soul ooze sadness. The red sun, A bubble of fire, drops slowly toward the hill, While one bird prattles ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... momentary heroism had died away. Faint and trembling, recoiling from every harsh word of his as from a blow, she had followed him towards the door, and in her straining eyes and seeking, outstretched hands as she watched him disappear, there was a pathos so true, so poignant, that it laid a spell upon the audience, and the curtain fell amid a breathless silence, which made the roar that ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... flashed through Nick's mind: there was something quaintly poignant in the sight of the brisk and efficient Mr. Buttles reduced to a limp image of unrequited passion. And what a painful surprise to the Hickses to be thus suddenly deprived of the secretary who possessed "the foreign ...
— The Glimpses of the Moon • Edith Wharton
... recent history are more poignant than that of the British prime minister, sitting at the breakfast table with that morning's paper before him, protesting that he cannot do the sensible thing in regard to Russia because a powerful newspaper proprietor has drugged the public. ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... aside upon hearing the captain's words. They brought a too vivid picture of the great capital, six miles under their feet, and a too poignant recollection of the disastrous escape of the royal family from ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... suitor of many cities, stood, bashful, like any country swain. For the first time he experienced the poignant humiliation of being ignored. And when he tried to reduce this brilliant, swiftly changing, ice-cold city to a formula he failed utterly. Poet though he was, it offered him no color similes, no points of comparison, ...
— The Trimmed Lamp • O. Henry
... Ristori made her debut as an infant in the cradle, and was for years a member of a troupe the leading lady of which was her late mother, Signora Maddalena Ristori, a woman of great talent and merit, whose death at an advanced age has recently occasioned her celebrated daughter poignant grief. There still exists in Italy a Venetian troupe of comedians whose ancestors were the first interpreters of the comedies of Goldoni, and several of them claim descent from players who enacted the tragedies and comedies of serious classical literature before the courts of Lucrezia Borgia ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... coils of hair, in the poise of her head. She wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it she stepped with the buoyancy—the long steps—of ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... is he frequently found of guiding himself. His simplicity exposes him to all the insidious approaches of cunning; his sensibility, to the slightest invasions of contempt. Though possessed of fortitude to stand unmoved the expected bursts of an earthquake, yet of feelings so exquisitely poignant as to agonize under the slightest disappointment. Broken rest, tasteless meals, and causeless anxieties shorten life, and render it unfit for active employments; prolonged vigils and intense application still further contract his span, and make his ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... shape appeared in the bright opening, the pig saw it. It filled his heart with a quite justifiable horror, which found instant poignant expression. Within those four walls the noise was so startlingly loud that, in spite of himself, the bear drew back—not intending to retreat, indeed, but only to consider. As it chanced, however, seeing out of only one eye, he backed upon the handle of a hay ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... Pyramid Texts the dead are spoken of as Those Who Ascend, the Imperishable Ones who shine as stars, and the gods are invoked to witness the death of the King "Dawning as a Soul." There is deep prophecy, albeit touched with poignant pathos, in these broken exclamations written on ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... hesitating, startled by that appeal, angered almost by his heart's response to it, reason and sentiment at grips in his soul. This was not real, his reason postulated; this poignant emotion that she displayed and that he experienced was fantastic. Yet he went. Her arms enfolded him; her wet cheek was pressed hard against his own; her frame, which the years had not yet succeeded in robbing of its grace, was shaken by ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... feet that waited—eager to run on love's errands—till dawn brought the sight of faded flowers, the suddenly bleak apartment, the unpressed couch! Then the brave, swift flight of the spirit's wings to other altitudes, above pain and shame! And like love and sorrow, refined to a poignant essence, still the music brooded and ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... to each other's infirmities, and pass their time not without some taste of plebeian enjoyment—but, name their child, they never fail to burst into tears, and still feel a return of the most poignant sorrow." ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... suspense occurs while Isolda is waiting for Tristan; and, as the situation is to be one of the most poignant in the drama, it is only fitting that Wagner should prelude it with one of his most tremendous passages. Isolda tells Tristan what is his crime, and how she had meant to slay him. He offers her his sword to carry out her old purpose, and ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
Copyright © 2024 Free Translator.org
|
|
|
