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More "Wretchedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... father harassed by creditors, trying one scheme after another, and failing in all; her mother and herself, half starved—with their very bedclothes sometimes at the pawnbrokers. I attended them in their illnesses, and though they hid their wretchedness from everybody else (proud as Lucifer, both of them!), they couldn't hide it from me. Fancy the change to this house! I don't say that living here in clover is enough for such a person as Regina; I only say it has its influence. She is one of those young women, sir, who delight ...
— The Fallen Leaves • Wilkie Collins
... lime-washed towers, and the graceful minarets beyond, all dazzling white in the sun, contrasting with the dark blue waters of the Mediterranean. Such is the delusion of all these sea-coast Barbary towns; at a distance and without, beauty and brilliancy, but near and within, filth and wretchedness. ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... Trenck forgot me in his prosperity: well, then, sire, in his misfortune he has remembered me. In his misfortune he has forgotten the faithless, cold, and treacherous letter which I wrote to him, and which he received in the prison of Glatz. In his wretchedness, he has written to me, and called upon me for aid. It shall not, be said that I did not hear his voice—that I was not joyfully ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... crazy. I am crazy with disappointment and the bitterness of what I have lost. Add to that the wretchedness ...
— Confidence • Henry James
... to see in the blue eyes of her stepmother—eyes so soft and tender when they looked upon her hitherto—only a harsh, mistrustful glare, almost a look of hatred, was a punishment greater than she could bear. What had she done to deserve punishment? Of what was she accused? She spoke of her wretchedness to Fraulein Schult, who, perfidiously, day after day, drew from her something to report to Madame de Nailles. That lady was somewhat consoled, while suffering tortures of jealousy, to know that the girl to whom these sufferings were ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... gives the history of a Prostitute. The story commences with her arrival in London, where, initiated in the school of profligacy, she experiences the miseries consequent to her situation, and dies in the morning of life. Her variety of wretchedness, forms such a picture of the way in which vice rewards her votaries, as ought to warn the young and inexperienced from entering ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... now, during which I could count every throb of my heart, and throat, and temples—my whole frame was transfigured into an anvil, on which a thousand tiny hammers seemed to ring. Yet I could not move, nor speak, nor weep—no wretchedness was ever more supreme than this cataleptic seizure. Evelyn was the first to ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... thought himself a pattern of benevolence, was a sore check upon his self applause, and he formed many prudent resolutions to be more upon his guard in future. Some days after, in passing through his grounds, he was accosted by a man who exhibited an appearance of extreme wretchedness. His face was wan, and his features sunken. His dimmed eye seemed hardly able to discern the object on which it gazed; and his tottering limbs with difficulty supported his feeble frame. His moving lips appeared to be framing a prayer for compassion, but his hollow voice had not ...
— The Flower Basket - A Fairy Tale • Unknown
... would like to see the man who could make up his mind to come into the midst of such wretchedness ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... eel, continually moving aside to make way for generals, for officers of the guards and the hussars, or for ladies. At such minutes there used to be a convulsive twinge at my heart, and I used to feel hot all down my back at the mere thought of the wretchedness of my attire, of the wretchedness and abjectness of my little scurrying figure. This was a regular martyrdom, a continual, intolerable humiliation at the thought, which passed into an incessant and direct sensation, that I was a mere fly in the eyes of all ...
— Notes from the Underground • Feodor Dostoevsky
... I led a life which nothing but having led a worse could make me think tolerable; for perfect solitude can never be reconciled to a social mind, like mine, but when it relieves you from the company of those you hate. What added to my wretchedness was the loss of my little infant: not that I pretend to have had for it that extravagant tenderness of which I believe I might have been capable under other circumstances; but I resolved, in every instance, to discharge the duty of the tenderest ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... plaster, bricks nor windows, nor any visible roofs. They don't give one the notion of human dwellings at all at first, but soon the eye gets used to the absence of all that constitutes a house in Europe, the impression of wretchedness wears off, and one sees how picturesque they are, with palm-trees and tall pigeon-houses, and here and there the dome over a saint's tomb. The men at work on the river-banks are exactly the same colour as the Nile mud, with just the warmer hue of the ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... him a good character. The man acknowledged his firm belief in the existence of a Supreme Being, which touched the governor's heart deeply. Does he not know that it has ever been the mission of the Supreme Being to serve as Impresario to Falsehood and Wretchedness? ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... comes back to the ocean, as the stars come with the night. She tried to smother it, but it would not be smothered. At last she resigned herself to the wretchedness of it—as one when, despairing of throwing off a mood, gives way to it and lets it ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... your foot on shore than you flounder about in it as if it were a mire; and it pursues you everywhere—in the country, in the streets, and in the houses. The Touaregs are impressed on you because, though you never see them, everything recalls them. The town is in ruins, but its wretchedness is overpowered by life and movement. The quays are astir with lively bustle, and encumbered with bales, jars, and sacks in the process of unloading. To travel from Kabara to Timbuctoo, only five miles distant, there is a daily convoy—medley ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... her nerveless fingers, while she sat staring vacantly before her, her brain almost turned by the heartless words she had just read, her heart broken with its weight of woe, while a feeling of utter wretchedness and desolation made her long for death to steep her senses ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... man were born large and strong, his size and strength would be useless to him until he had learned to use them. They would be prejudicial to him, by preventing others from thinking of assisting him; and left to himself he would die of wretchedness before he had known his own necessities. We pity the state of infancy; we do not perceive that the human race would have perished if man had not begun by ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... hanging, Which serv'd to keep her carcase from the cold: So there was nothing of a piece about her. Her lower weeds were all o'er coarsly patch'd With different-coloured rags, black, red, white, yellow, And seem'd to speak variety of wretchedness. ...
— The Coverley Papers • Various
... her patience completely worn out, she had told him not to come home any more. This was the last straw to Parrot's own wretchedness. He went to a chemist, purchased some oxalic acid, dropped it into a pint of beer and drank it; stumbling into the street, overcome by pain and gasping for breath, he fell to the ground. The police picked him up, took him to the hospital and his life was saved. When he had sufficiently ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... sorrowful are there; men are dying there, men are being born; men are praying,—on the other side of a brick partition, men are cursing; and around them all is the vast, void Night. The proud Grandee still lingers in his perfumed saloons, or reposes within damask curtains; Wretchedness cowers into buckle-beds, or shivers hunger-stricken into its lair of straw: in obscure cellars, Rouge-et-Noir languidly emits its voice-of-destiny to haggard hungry Villains; while Councillors of State sit plotting, and playing their high chess-game, whereof the pawns are Men. The ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... controlled her feelings with heroic firmness, but on the evening of that day, while waiting for her husband, the long, severe tension of her nerves utterly gave way, and when found in a paroxysm of tears and questioned by him, in her wretchedness and misery she had confessed the infidelity of her heart and pleaded for time to ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... mystery as was the first locomotive; yet they scarcely turn their uncovered heads to look; and my cheery greeting of "How," scarce elicits a grunt and a stare in reply. Long years of chronic hunger and wretchedness have well-nigh eradicated what little energy these Diggers ever possessed. The discovery of gold among their native mountains has been their bane; the only antidote the rude grave beneath the pine and ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... tyranny," he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving Ireland to herself which she demands so passionately that was the cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for instruction, but to look out for mistakes. ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... nineteen. She did not blame Lady Russell, she did not blame herself for having been guided by her; but she felt that were any young person, in similar circumstances, to apply to her for counsel, they would never receive any of such certain immediate wretchedness, such uncertain future good. She was persuaded that under every disadvantage of disapprobation at home, and every anxiety attending his profession, all their probable fears, delays, and disappointments, she ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... Neither men nor gods, death nor life, the winds nor the waves, were beyond their control. Like Old Men of the Sea, they have clung to the neck of their nations, throttling all attempts at progress, binding them to the thraldom of superstition and profligacy, dragging them down to wretchedness and death. Christianity and civilization meet in them their most determined, most implacable foes. But what is this but the story of priestcraft and intolerance everywhere, which Old Spain can repeat as well as New Spain, the white race as well as the red? Blind leaders of the blind, dupers ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... tell you all I know about it.—Some six weeks ago, I woke suddenly one morning, very early—I think about three o'clock—with an overpowering sense of blackness and misery. Everything I thought of seemed to have a core of wretchedness in it. I fought with the feeling as well as I could, and got to sleep again. But the effect of it did not leave me next day. I said to myself: 'They say "morning thoughts are true." What if this should be ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... homeless Belgians in England and Holland proclaimed and still proclaim their wretchedness broadcast. The future may bring redress, but the present story of Belgium belongs to the world. America, the greatest of the neutral countries, has a right to know now the suffering and misery of this patient, ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... and absurdity, which makes infinite goodness the eternal source of infinite misery, there is wisdom in the Manichaean doctrine of two conflicting principles, holding a divided dominion over the universe, and contending, one for the production of the universal degradation and wretchedness, the other, for the purity and bliss of all intellectual ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... placed his ear to that—anything to know—anything. Yes, he recognized Ramsey's voice distinctly; he was there. On tiptoe he retraced his steps. Arrived at the entrance hall he flung himself into a chair, a prey to utter wretchedness. ...
— War-time Silhouettes • Stephen Hudson
... which had been answered by assurances that Mr. Talbot was as good as the Bank of England. But it turned out that the assurances were forged, and that the letter of inquiry addressed to the London banker had been intercepted. In short, it was all ruin, roguery, and wretchedness. ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... knew not what words, but he knew that they had been straining at his lips—to wreck his self-respect for ever, and hopelessly defeat even the crazy purpose that had almost possessed him, by drowning her wretchedness in disgust, by babbling with the tongue of infatuation to a woman with a husband not yet buried, to a woman who ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... insolent luxuriousness, insulting to the wretchedness of the poor rentiers who expire with hunger in their garrets, no longer possessing the courage to crawl to the Treasury and get the wherewithal to prolong their misery ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... quadrupeds,—aided only by such wretched helots as misfortune had flung in the way of their common masters. The men, mostly idle,—ludicrously nonchalant,—reclining on their saddle-pads, or skins, inhaling the narcotic weed, apparently proud in the possession of that lordship of wretchedness ...
— The Boy Slaves • Mayne Reid
... something like convulsive emotions. This strange figure was suddenly changed into his grandson! It was an apparition he knew not how to endure. To be claimed by such a wretched creature, to have been himself the author of his wretchedness, to have had an oath extorted from him, in direct violation of an opposite oath, to feel this universal shock to his pride and his prejudices was a complication of jarring sensations that confounded him. To resist was an effort beyond his strength. For a moment he lost his voice: at last he exclaimed, ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... goes on, and many thousands of our women lose their fathers, their husbands, and their sons. With every victory (as they call it) peace, which should be nearer at hand, seems to retire further and further away, and only sorrow and wretchedness come close to us. And that is not all. Our food, like everything else we have to buy, is so dear that we women find it above all things difficult to provide ourselves with what we need for our daily ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... said Mr. Everett. And what is their advice to us? That we should come down from the high place we have built for ourselves, and be even as they are. They screech at us from the low depths in which they are wallowing in their misery, and call on us to join them in their wretchedness. I am not quoting Mr. Everett's very words, for I have not them by me; but I am not making them stronger, nor so strong as he made them. As I thought of Mr. Everett's reputation, and of his years of study, of his long political ...
— Volume 1 • Anthony Trollope
... sadness, the peculiar melancholy, that pervades Jewish relations, then he attains to moral heights and lyric vigor unsurpassed. In his three volumes of poetry, by the side of numerous worthless pieces, we meet many gems of style and thought. The distressed cry of humanity against the wretchedness under which it staggers, the sorrowful protest man makes against the lack of compassion he encounters in his fellow, his obstinate refusal to understand the implacable cruelty of nature when she snatches his dearest ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... prevent you from hurrying us into wretchedness without any necessity," said Rosamond, the tears coming again from a softened feeling now that her husband had softened. "It is so very hard to be disgraced here among all the people we know, and to live in ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... the seventeenth of the present month, and reported that they had no news of the said almiranta. This has been a very great loss and one which has thrown this kingdom into almost incredible misery. The return of the flagship has added to its wretchedness, because the citizens have nothing from which to obtain money from Nueva Espana, since their goods have not arrived there. The documents which were sent in the flagship last year go in it again; and in this ship I send duplicates, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various
... was of Nassau, and consequently his surprise was great when he found himself looking out upon the wharves of a thriving, bustling little town. The slave-holders' rebellion, "which brought woe and wretchedness to so many of our States, was the wind that blew prosperity to Nassau." When President Lincoln's proclamation, announcing the blockade of all the Confederate ports was issued, Nassau took on an air of business and importance, and at once became the favorite resort of vessels engaged ...
— Marcy The Blockade Runner • Harry Castlemon
... nothing to the public. He must give pleasure to the public, and not explanations and excuses. But genius, goodness, many friends, no enemy, the consciousness of imparting enjoyment to multitudes, and to no man wretchedness, a heart alive with all that is tender and gentle, and strong to manful and noble purpose and achievement,—these are grand compensations,—compensations for even more ills than Hood was heir to; and with such ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... was to be kind,[70] To render with thy precepts less The sum of human wretchedness, And strengthen Man with his own mind; But baffled as thou wert from high, Still in thy patient energy, 40 In the endurance, and repulse Of thine impenetrable Spirit, Which Earth and Heaven could not convulse, A mighty lesson we inherit: Thou art a symbol and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... the dominion of any one or any number of native princes, all hope of mental improvement, or even of security for person or property, will at once vanish. Nothing could be then expected but scenes of rapine, plunder, bloodshed, and violence, till its inhabitants were sealed over to irremediable wretchedness, without the most distant ray of hope respecting the future. And were it severed from Britain in any other way, the reverse felt in India would be unspeakably great. At present all the learning, the intelligence, ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... insidious abominations of the factory and landlord system. To repeat, it was a system in which incredible numbers of working men, women and children were killed off by the perils of their trades, by disease superinduced and aggravated by the wretchedness of their work, and by the misery of their lot and habitations. Millions more died prematurely because of causes directly traceable to ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... mischiefs that this kind of existence included. Why should I insist upon such aggravations as hunger, beggary, and external wretchedness? These were an inevitable consequence. It was by the desertion of mankind that, in each successive instance, I was made acquainted with my fate. Delay in such a moment served but to increase the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... have a memory of horrible fatigue, as the long night of despair wore away; of looking in this impossible place and that; of groping among moon-lit ruins and touching strange creatures in the black shadows; at last, of lying on the ground near the sphinx and weeping with absolute wretchedness. I had nothing left but misery. Then I slept, and when I woke again it was full day, and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on the turf within reach ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... of 1910. "It is for waging implacable war against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step toward the time when poverty, and the wretchedness and the human degradation which always follows in its camp, will be as remote from the people of this country as the wolves which once ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... doing you honor, of becoming a noble wife. But I gather from that futile hope the courage to return to a life of vice and infamy, that I may put an eternal barrier between us. I sacrifice both honor and fortune to you. The pride I take in that sacrifice will support me in my wretchedness,—fate may dispose of me as it will. I will never betray you. I shall return to Paris. There your name will be to me a part of myself, and the glory you win will console my grief. As for you, you are a man, and you will ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... me, the utterly accursed, while the darkness crept and gathered round us, till at length the dead and I were alone in the black silence. Oh, how tell the misery of that hour! Imagination cannot dream it, nor words paint it forth. Once more in my wretchedness I bethought me of death. A knife was at my girdle, with which I might cut the thread of sorrow and set my spirit free. Free? ay, free to fly and face the last vengeance of the Holy Gods! Alas! and alas! I did not dare to die. Better the earth with all its woes than the quick approach of those ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... Tarbert, on the Shannon, by the stage-coach, passing through several old, but uninteresting towns, and seeing a great deal of barrenness and wretchedness on our way. At Tarbert, we took a steamer, to ascend the river to Limerick, and as the weather that afternoon was clear and bright, we had one of the most delightful ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood
... name is a shame to speak; who counterfeits with a cold heart the transports of affection, and submits herself as the passive instrument of lust; who is scorned and insulted as the vilest of her sex, and doomed for the most part to disease and abject wretchedness and an early death, appears in every eye as the perpetual symbol of the degradation and sinfulness of man. Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her the unchallenged ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... see. I shall have gone to my room before he comes. I'll not keep you long. It's enough that you've proved you cared to come. It's a crumb of comfort in my wretchedness." ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... me. I've been asking your sweet niece to take me for better, for worse; and she, like a good girl, informs me she cannot think of it without her uncle's and aunt's consent. So let me implore you not to condemn me to eternal wretchedness: if you favour my cause, I am safe; for Mr. Maxwell, I am certain, can ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... the father and mother of John, old Parker Clare and his wife. Poor as were their neighbours, they were poorer than the rest, being both weak and in ill health, and partly dependent upon charity. The very origin of Parker Clare's family was founded in misery and wretchedness. Some thirty years previous to the birth of John, there came into Helpston a big, swaggering fellow, of no particular home, and, as far as could be ascertained, of no particular name: a wanderer over the earth, passing himself off, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... of all his misfortunes. Once in Manila, ragged and sick, he went from door to door offering his services. A boy from the provinces who knew not a single word of Spanish, and sickly besides! Discouraged, hungry, and miserable, he wandered about the streets, attracting attention by the wretchedness of his clothing. How often was he tempted to throw himself under the feet of the horses that flashed by, drawing carriages shining with silver and varnish, thus to end his misery at once! Fortunately, he saw Capitan Tiago, accompanied by ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... around him. A shudder ran through his body. The wall tottered ... and he was so high up, all alone, seen by nobody: such a small creature in that blue sky, in that endless space. In a clear vision he saw his own figure in all its lean wretchedness, cut out like a paper silhouette, standing out sharply against the sky, such a miserable little object: two thin legs, like laths, a little stomach, two little sticks of arms and that small, everyday, vulgar head. Was that he, that tiny atom of ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... not endure. Not seventy years have gone since that clutch was loosened, but the iron which entered into the souls of our fathers is no more remembered. How many old labourers, old operatives, or miners are now left to recall the wretchedness of that toiling and starving childhood before the corn-tax was removed? Few are remaining now, and they speak little and will soon be gone. The horror of it is scattered like the night, and we think no more of it, nor imagine ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Such is the course we are beginning to run when born into the world; and were it not for the gospel promise, what a miserable event would the birth of children be! Who could take pleasure at the sight of such poor beings, unconscious as yet of their wretchedness, but containing in their hearts that fearful root of sin which is sure in the event of reigning and triumphing unto everlasting woe? But God has given us all, even the little children, a good promise through Christ; and our prospects are changed. And He has given not only ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... CHAPLAIN in the army, A chaplain in the prisons, An exhorter in Spoon River, Drunk with divinity, Spoon River— Yet bringing poor Eliza Johnson to shame, And myself to scorn and wretchedness. But why will you never see that love of women, And even love of wine, Are the stimulants by which the soul, hungering for divinity, Reaches the ecstatic vision And sees the celestial outposts? ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... delivered to vulgar pedants of every kind, to idleness and to ennui, the youth saw the foaming billows which they had prepared to meet, subside. All these gladiators glistening with oil felt in the bottom of their souls an insupportable wretchedness. The richest became libertines; those of moderate fortune followed some profession and resigned themselves to the sword or to the church. The poorest gave themselves up with cold enthusiasm to great ...
— Child of a Century, Complete • Alfred de Musset
... her folly with a life-time of wretchedness. She was to marry a man she did not love; and her friends were ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... it with your own hand and heart—in no other way. It comes to nothing just contributed to some thing. Ah!" he added, with sudden animation, "the tangles men can get themselves into, the snarls, the wretchedness! Troubles with women, with men whom they owe, with evil things they say and think, until they can't walk down the street any more without peeping about to see if they are followed. They can't look you in die face; can't walk a straight course, but have got ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... to do their own work, it was not necessary that it should be done before such an "audience." Such a social crisis is always short, but it is very severe. No doubt those who have gone through it look back upon it as one does upon the day after a fire, when the wretchedness of dirt and destruction seems hopeless, but, like other mundane things, soon passes away and is spoken of as all "part ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... near at hand which must probably determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness from which no human effort will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance, or the most abject submission. ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... of the Masters, and his colleague in that great task, closely allied to him, of a noble Austrian family, known to us in later days as H.P.B. When those made their attempt to change the face of Europe, they failed, the time not being ripe; the misery and the wretchedness of the epoch, the degradation of the masses of the population, the horrible poverty, the shameful starvation, all these were the rocks on which split, and was broken up into foam, the spiritual wave ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... bring them, and lay them before the Spirit of Grace. O Almighty Spirit of Grace, May these Poor, blind, mad Sinners become objects for the Triumphs of Grace! O Almighty Spirit of God, and of Grace, cause these poor men to see their own Sinfulness and Wretchedness! Make them willing to be Saved from such Sinfulness and Wretchedness; Discover to them the only Saviour of their Souls. Oh! Dispose them, Oh! Assist them to give the Consent of their Souls unto ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various
... and lovely to be kind; But charity should not be blind; For as to wretchedness ingrate, You cannot raise it from ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... women? The thought roused me from my reverie of wretchedness. A gleam of joy shot suddenly across my mind. It was the wild huntress that had given origin to the thought. On her I had founded a new hope. She must be seen! No time should be lost in communicating with ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... melancholy day for everyone. And to fill the cup of wretchedness to overflowing, the rain, beginning with a drizzle, ended with a downpour. Consultations took place between men who had not spoken to one another for weeks. Fred offered to go on, at all events to Salt Lake City, if Nelson the Canadian and ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... you made me the plaything of your selfish and changing passions, you began a dangerous game. You thought me, perchance, a love-sick maiden, whose heart would break in silence and darkness, but you know me not. I will not suffer alone. If I sink into an abyss of wretchedness, it shall not be alone. I will drag down with me all who have part or lot in ...
— Helen and Arthur - or, Miss Thusa's Spinning Wheel • Caroline Lee Hentz
... me again: receive these then as the last words of mine that will ever reach you; and although I have forfeited your filial love, yet regard them I conjure you as a father's command. Resolutely shake of[f] the wretchedness that this first misfortune in early life must occasion you. Bear boldly up against the storm: continue wise and mild, but believe it, and indeed it is, your duty to be happy. You are very young; let not this check for more than a moment retard your ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... reach—first of all, to provide that the people should be able, if they would, to live decently. He had no notion of domestic inspection, or of offering prizes for cleanliness and order. He knew that misery and wretchedness are the right and best condition of those who live so that misery and wretchedness are the natural consequences of their life. But there ought always to be the possibility of emerging from these; and as things were, over the whole country, for many who would if they ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... removed his embarrassment. "It's always been a passion of mine—my house," she said quietly. "And now—more than ever. . . . It's a duty, even, though a pleasant one—— After all, whatever may go on outside, whatever wretchedness worries one—it's something to have a real sanctuary to come to. I want the children to feel that—so much. I want them to love the beautiful things in life," she went on passionately, "even though they live in these surroundings." She stared out of the window ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... fire, to turn our spinning-wheels—and,—ARE WE YET CLOTHED? Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with sale of cast clouts and rotten rags? Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honour, nature clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her den? And does not every winter's snow robe what you have not robed, and shroud what ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... Guard, from whom he tore himself away amidst sobs and tears, and threw himself into his carriage. On the 19th of March 1815 he was back again in this palace from the island of Elba, wandering with almost infantine joy through the splendid apartments which had witnessed his glory and his wretchedness. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... shed invariable tears over Werther, however often I read it; here I wade through Wilhelm Meister, and sit in amazement before the complications of the Wahlverwandschaften; here I am plunged in wonder and wretchedness by Faust; and here I sometimes walk up and down in the shade and apostrophise the tall firs at the bottom of the glade in the opening soliloquy of Iphigenia. Every now and then I leave the book on the seat and go and have a refreshing potter among my flower beds, from which I return greatly ...
— The Solitary Summer • Elizabeth von Arnim
... dense. For so long had he considered Sidney as unattainable that now his masculine mind, a little weary with much wretchedness, refused to move ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... you how I passed yesterday. I never was so miserable in all my life. It went to my heart to see Kate so happy and busy with the dressmakers, giving orders about those wedding-garments she is never to wear. It was a day of unutterable wretchedness, and the evening was as dull and dreary as its predecessor. Father Francis came up for an hour, and his sharp eyes detected the trouble in my face. I would have told him if Kate had not been there; but it was impossible, and I had ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... much of him after her stolen glance in the morning, she longed to do that which he dreaded she would try to do—attempt his reformation. Not that she cared for him personally, or that she had grown sentimentally interested in his Byronic style of wretchedness. So far from it, her happy and healthful nature was repelled by his diseased and morbid one. She found him what girls call a "disagreeable man." But she yearned toward a sinning, suffering soul, found in ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... The absence of it, on the contrary, disfigures the finest scenes in the south of Italy, and causes Naples, the most delightful spot on earth, perhaps, for situation and climate, to dwell on the recollection like a whited sepulchre, a gilded lazar-house of helpless and incurable wretchedness. A Roman beggar, glaring at you from the arches of a ruined temple, like one of Salvator Rosa's Radicals, with a look at once abject and ferocious, may be, perhaps, a characteristic accompaniment ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... was not recalled from the banishment to which for unchastity her father Augustus had condemned her; nay, he even put her under lock and key till wretchedness and starvation caused ...
— Dio's Rome, Vol. 4 • Cassius Dio
... emperor continued his efforts as president to win the approval of the people by public works. He recognized the necessity of aiding the working classes as far as possible, and protecting them from poverty and wretchedness. During a dearth in 1853 a "baking fund" was organized in Paris, the city contributing funds to enable bread to be sold at a low price. Dams and embankments were built along the rivers to overcome the effects of floods. New streets were opened, bridges built, railways ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... the hour of high noon, the vast and terrible silence when all life seems suspended, a sudden glimpse into his own heart revealed shuddering abysses, inextinguishable desires, ineffaceable memories, accumulations of suffering and regret—all the wretchedness he had gone through, all the inevitable scars of his vices, all the results of his passions. He seemed to be witnessing the shipwreck of his whole life. A thousand voices cried to him for succour, imploring aid, cursing death—voices that he knew, that he had listened ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... what is now in the Church, ought therethrough to be the more moved in all their wits to able them to grace, and set lesser price by themselves: that they, without tarrying, forsake wilfully [voluntarily] and bodily all the wretchedness of this life; since they know not how soon, nor when, nor where, nor by whom GOD will teach them, and assay their patience. For, no doubt, who that ever will live piteously, that is charitably, in CHRIST JESU shall suffer now, here ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... new thrill of wretchedness to see that she wore by chance the very dress she had worn the day he had made the sketch—a pale, pure-looking gray, with a scarf of white lace loosely fastened at her throat. Next, he saw that there was a painful change in her, that she looked frail and ...
— Lodusky • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the American Colonies were not due to a political preference for a republic, but were the work of public opinion driven by misgovernment to protest. The difficulty in England was that the mass of people might be in great wretchedness, badly housed, ill-fed, and generally neglected, but they were not conscious of any desire for democracy. They were against the government, doubtless, and willing enough, in London, to shout for "Wilkes and Liberty," but the time had not yet come for ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... more at Almouth House. Beauclerk's consideration for me is almost more than I can bear. The rest is not borne. If it were not cowardly, I would go away alone, and brood at my leisure and yield to the appalling yet all but irresistible wretchedness which calls me, which I actually crave. An effort not to depress or discourage others may be right and my duty. I cannot be sure of this. Sometimes I feel as though it would be wiser to meet the dark hours and make acquaintance with them.... And what ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... straitened upon him, so that he left his people and family and went forth in distraction. He wandered on at random till he came to a high-walled and splendidly built city and entered it in a state of wretchedness and despair, gnawed with hunger and worn with the toil of his journey. As he passed through one of the streets, he saw a company of notables going along; so he followed them, till they entered a house like to a royal palace. He entered with them, and they stayed ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume IV • Anonymous
... less dense, and this terrible procession passed by—the street was once more unobstructed. The prince rushed onward regardless of the direction he was taking, crushed as he was by the disgrace and wretchedness brought upon Prussia. He was again suddenly in front of a large gathering. He looked about him wonderingly and in dismay. Without knowing it, he had gone down to the large square in front of the Brandenburg Gate, where was ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach
... Leopold Schefer, the German novelist, has composed an excellent sketch of Durer's married life. It is an admirably philosophic narrative of an intellectual man's wretchedness.] ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... that Montague could do save to sit and listen to this outburst of wretchedness. His attempts to soothe the old man only had the ...
— The Metropolis • Upton Sinclair
... hard disappointed bitter-minded woman—envious, at times, even of you—into your loving and devoted friend. You have changed me from a miserable creature into a contented and hopeful one. You have taught me to forget that my childhood and youth were one long night of wretchedness and degradation. You have taught me to forgive the father who suffered my life to be what it was, and made no one poor effort to lift me out of the slough of despond to which he had sunk. I can say no more, Charlotte. There are things that cannot ...
— Charlotte's Inheritance • M. E. Braddon
... of the serpent into religious symbolism, with a time in the history of mankind when they first began to recognize the fact, that through the abuse of the reproductive functions, evil, or human wretchedness, had gained the ascendency over the higher forces. The Deity represented by a woman and a serpent involved the idea not alone of good, but of good and evil combined. Together they prefigured not only Wisdom ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... witnesses of their lament, As thus they passed away! And their neglected corpses, as they lay Upon that horrid sea of snow exposed, Were by the beasts consumed; The memories of the brave and good, And of the coward and the vile, Unto the same oblivion doomed! Dear souls, though infinite your wretchedness, Rest, rest in peace! And yet what peace is yours, Who can no comfort ever know While Time endures! Rest in the depths of your unmeasured woe, O ye, her children true, Whose fate alone with hers may ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... to deal with him. Besides, there might be nothing wrong. All might yet be explained, all might yet be set to rights, all—unless, unless Gertrude—Oh, why should there arise this new and terrible complication? Gertrude with her youth and beauty and enthusiasm—why must she be drawn into the wretchedness? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... through the wood, thick and thin, and more or less wet, to the distance I should think of three miles. By this time my clothes were all thoroughly soaked through, and I felt once more a gloom and wretchedness; the recollection of which makes me shudder at this distant day. My young friends in this highly favoured Christian country, surrounded with all the comforts of home and parental care, visited by pastors and Sabbath-school teachers, ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... nature, lies some hidden principle, the antagonist of Bliss. An intimate and anxious examination of his career, has taught me to understand that, in general, from the violation of a few simple laws of Humanity, arises the Wretchedness of mankind; that, as a species, we have in our possession the as yet unwrought elements of Content,—and that even now, in the present blindness and darkness of all idea on the great question of the Social Condition, it is not impossible ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 4 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... The wretchedness of his tone quite touched me. I forgot my anger and sense of resentment, and all the old affection and loyalty came back with a rush. How could I ever have imagined a fellow like Crofter was worthy to hold a candle ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... my life, but our lives, Amelie. We have crossed the threshold of this house together for the last time. We go no more out to look upon a world fair and beautiful to see, but so full of disappointment and wretchedness to have ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... was often little more than a track, he had great difficulty in keeping his way, and regretted that he had not hired a servant knowing the country before leaving the army. He generally, however, was able to obtain a guide from village to village. The loneliness of the way, the wretchedness of the people, the absence of the brightness and comfort so characteristic of English life, made the journey an oppressive one, and Harry was glad when, five days after leaving Dublin, he approached the end of his ride. Upon ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... pilgrim had saluted with a sign of the cross. Swayed once more by the habits of cultivated intellect, the young priest and his two companions forgot themselves together in the midst of their fellow-passengers, all those poor, suffering, simple-minded folk, whom wretchedness stupefied. Another hour went by, two more canticles had just been sung, and the stations of Toury and Les Aubrais had been left behind, when, at Beaugency, they at last ceased their chat, on hearing Sister Hyacinthe ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... women, spoke of her with something like devotion, and all said how kind and charitable she was, and as merry as a bird on a bright day; they said she pitied their wretchedness and their troubles, and was still the young girl in spite of her long dresses, and fearing nothing, while ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... he repeated the Lord's Prayer, but she did not join; and then he added a broken, hesitating intercession for the mourners, which caused her to bury her face deeper in her hands, but her dull wretchedness altered not. ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... of very considerable value, and the harness of whose carriage was studded with paste, in imitation of diamonds. This woman, however, lived to repent of her folly; and if she did not literally die in a poorhouse, she at least ended her days in wretchedness. ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... idleness following a long run of fever, a lost position, and consequent discouragement had brought poverty and wretchedness to Joe Bennett. ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... strength, and Death comes, not as the 'King of Terrors,' but a welcome messenger, for whose coming the weary woman has waited and longed, ever since hope died out, and she knew life held for her nothing but wretchedness and woe. ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... about six minutes' walk from City Road Wesleyan Chapel—one of the most wretched neighbourhoods in London. I never knew before what the ragged poor of London, in the lanes and alleys, were. I never witnessed such a sight of squalid wretchedness—the neighbourhood literally swarming with children—every window of the houses around full of heads—all indicating that lowest degradation, but many of the children had good features and bright eyes sparkling through ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... if wretchedness Can move most hearts to pity man's distress, I will not think that here A heart can be so cruel and severe As to repel a wretch from out the wave. Pity, for God's sake, ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... be remedied with a strong hand. These men seem not to know that rivalry may be good in buying palm-oil, but is the wrong thing in mining. Such a jealousy assisted in making the Spanish proverb 'A silver mine brings wretchedness; a gold mine brings ruin.' Even in England I have met with unwise directors who told me, 'Oh, you must not say that, or people will prefer such and such a mine.' But, speaking generally, employers are aware that unity of interest should produce solidarity of action. The local employes like ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Humanity. And a brute beast —whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed—a brute beast to work out for me—for me a man, fashioned in the image of the High God—so much of insufferable wo! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... at any time and to Julie, who had stared at the rows of slatternly kept backyards until she grew familiar with each battered garbage can, the sight was hateful. The rain had driven even the starved alley cats to cover, and with a sigh forlorn in its wretchedness, she turned from the window and contemplated her nicely furnished bedroom. The two days she had been there had passed on leaden feet. Captain Miller's money had secured her a haven of refuge—food and a roof over her head—but ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... in the abstract, are salutary and benevolent; but when we hear those influential gentlemen, who are advocating this cause, generalize by language directly calculated to increase that prejudice, which is already one grand reason of our wretchedness, we are moved by a spirit of reliance upon justice and humanity, to lift our positive and decided voice against their proceedings; and consider them as a stigma upon our morals as a people, as natives and citizens of ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison
... the only effectual remedy for the great mass of vice and wretchedness in our large towns, to which you are endeavouring to call public attention; and we must not be content with presenting that Cross in words alone, but must endeavour to show, by our personal efforts and example, how it may practically be applied so as to purify the lives ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... coach-office in less than ten minutes. Hot water was a luxury not to be procured: at that villanous hour not a human being in the house (nor, do I believe, in the universe entire), had risen—my unfortunate self, and my companion in wretchedness, poor Boots, excepted. The water in the jug was frozen; but, by dint of hammering upon it with the handle of the poker, I succeeded in enticing out about as much as would have filled a tea-cup. Two towels, which had been left wet in the room, were standing on a chair bolt upright, as stiff ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 471, Saturday, January 15, 1831 • Various
... little room was more than the human imagination had ever before conceived. Think only of six hundred persons linked together, trying to get rid of each other, crammed in a close vessel with every object that was nauseous and disgusting, diseased, and struggling with all the varieties of wretchedness. It seemed impossible to add any thing more to human misery. Yet shocking as this description must be felt to be by every man, the transportation had been described by several witnesses from Liverpool to be a comfortable conveyance. Mr. Norris had painted the accommodations ...
— The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (1808) • Thomas Clarkson
... little fight for a long time, partly because I was very much affected by the sight of his wretchedness, and partly because I did not at first realize how necessary it was for him to find out just how far my self-control could be depended upon. As soon as this became clear to me I determined to seize the first favorable opportunity ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... vision in eternal night; Man cannot face nor seraph power display The mystic beams of such an awful day. Enough for thee, that thy delighted mind Should trace the temporal actions of thy kind; That time's descending veil should ope so far Beyond the reach of wretchedness and war, Till all the paths in nature's sapient plan Fair in thy presence lead the steps of man, And form at last, on earth's extended ball, Union of parts and happiness of all. To thy glad ken these rolling years have shown The boundless blessings thy vast labors crown, That, with the joys ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... families, no wonder that all his sympathies were with the Stuarts and their dissipated insolent party, and all his hatred directed against those who endeavoured to check them in their proceedings, and to raise the generality of mankind something above a state of vassalage that is wretchedness. Those who were born great, were, if he could have had his will, always to remain great, however worthless their characters. Those who were born low, were always to remain so, however great their talents—though ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the revolt, and brought on the ruin of the angelic spirits, so it is not improbable, that it will be a principal instrument of misery in a future world, for the envious to compare their desperate condition with the happiness of the children of God; and to heighten their actual wretchedness by reflecting on what ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... were real, and from his own experience. The Tales of the Hall, referring chiefly to the higher classes of society, are more artificial, and not so good. His pen was most at home in describing smugglers, gipsies, and humble villagers, and in delineating poverty and wretchedness; and thus opening to the rich and titled, doors through which they might exercise their philanthropy and munificence. In this way Crabbe was a reformer, and did great good; although his scenes are sometimes revolting, and his pathos too exacting. ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... the sea; overwork of the imagination, of the perceptive faculty, and in the mere mechanical labour of putting on canvas what he imagines and what he perceives. In consequence of this overstrain and subsequent breakdown, he has become possessed by a fixed sea-idea, and traces all his wretchedness to this episode of the boy and the picture. You will say I did not succeed in curing him because I did not discover what this fixed idea was. How can that be, if the idea comes from the illness and ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... there, closed from the world, with an angel his companion, he might have forgotten Edward was lord in Scotland, had not that which was without his little paradise made a way to its gates, and showed him the slavery of the nobles and the wretchedness of the people. In these cases, his generous hand gave succor where it could not bring redress. Those whom the lawless plunderer had driven from their houses or stripped of their covering, found shelter, clothing, and food at the house of Sir ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... and oblivion in the same country where he had formerly been distinguished for his rank and magnificence. Having paid his debts, therefore, in the most honourable manner, he retreated with his daughter to the town of Lucerne, where he lived unknown and in wretchedness. My father loved Beaufort with the truest friendship and was deeply grieved by his retreat in these unfortunate circumstances. He bitterly deplored the false pride which led his friend to a conduct so ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... last he abandons himself to the guidance of a power which his firmer nature had long resisted, the impression of the spectator is, that his mind has yielded in the struggle, and that, in the desperate hope of obtaining relief from present wretchedness, he is about to commit the most horrible crimes, by obeying the suggestions of a spirit, which he more than suspects to be employed only to tempt him on to perdition. No description can possibly do justice to the manner in which this situation of Hamlet ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... London came to seem unreal save the poverty in its East End. During the following two years on the continent, while I was irresistibly drawn to the poorer quarters of each city, nothing among the beggars of South Italy nor among the salt miners of Austria carried with it the same conviction of human wretchedness which was conveyed by this momentary glimpse of an East London street. It was, of course, a most fragmentary and lurid view of the poverty of East London, and quite unfair. I should have been shown either less or more, for I went away with no notion of the hundreds of men and ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... won, and neglected—a yielding puppet, of whom, strange to say, he broke the heart and made the fortune. He lived at that time in the Roule addition, in a plain garret, where he was in the habit of receiving Zephirin Marcas. The wretchedness of his quarters did not keep La Palferine out of the best society, and he was the guest of Josepha Mirah at the first entertainment given in her house on rue de la Ville-l'Eveque. By a strange order of events, Comte Rusticoli ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... fear of the miscarriage of the first; (and both letters did miscarry, as the wife never received them.) Peter gave himself up as a lost man, his family lost or scattered, and nothing but death could end his detailed wretchedness. But still, as fortune would have it, he never again sought refuge from his sorrows in the poisoned chalice, the rum glass; not he. Peter toiled, saved his money, and at the end of four years found himself in the ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... Satan would have it. This was what for ages he had been working to secure. His policy is deception from first to last, and his steadfast purpose is to bring woe and wretchedness upon men, to deface and defile the workmanship of God, to mar the divine purposes of benevolence and love, and thus cause grief in heaven. Then by his deceptive arts he blinds the minds of men, and leads them to throw back the blame ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... seventy-eight. Poor little Jasper woke for an interval from the sense of present discomfort to hear it. He seemed to stiffen all over with the shock of horror, and then hung a dead weight on Stephen's arm. It would have dragged him down, but there was no room to fall, and the wretchedness of the lad against whom he staggered found vent in a surly imprecation, which was lost among the cries and the entreaties of some of the others. The London magistracy were some of them in tears, but the indictment for high treason removed ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte M. Yonge
... and wretchedness which often fall upon people come from their not having exercised a little thought in the use of their money. A little self-denial would have saved them, and those depending on them, from many sorrows. A saving habit is good. ...
— Life and Conduct • J. Cameron Lees
... loins to cover his nakedness, could not be persuaded but that the fellow was some father who had given all away to his daughters and brought himself to that pass; for nothing, he thought, could bring a man to such wretchedness ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... said he, "it was my own misfortune to suffer by an ill-assorted marriage. In early youth, my parents united me with Artaynta, a Persian lady, whose affections had been secretly bestowed upon a near kinsman. Her parents knew of this fact, but mine were ignorant of it. It ended in wretchedness and disgrace. To avoid the awful consequences of guilt, she and her lover eloped to some distant land, where I never attempted to ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... maintain a regular paid bode of adherents in foreign lands, ever ready to engage in schemes of assassination, conspiracy, sedition, and rebellion against the legitimate authority, to make mankind miserable, so far as it was in the power of human force or craft to produce wretchedness, were ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... husbandman sowed as much corn as the weight of the volumes we have about this commodity, he might hope for the amplest harvest, and become richer than those who in their gilded and lacquered drawing-rooms ignore his exceeding labour and wretchedness. ...
— Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary • Voltaire
... Harrison, and I was not unprepared to hear, as I did a few hours afterward, that her two sons had fallen into drinking habits; and, not only this, had been enticed to the gaming-table. Unhappy mother! What a life-time of wretchedness was compressed for thee into a few ...
— Ten Nights in a Bar Room • T. S. Arthur
... long impending; and if we would further inquire how a hitherto harmless usage, which like many others had but served to keep up superstition, could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into account the unusual excitement of men's minds and the consequences of wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated by hunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases were attacked with excruciating pain, and the tympanitic state of the intestines points out to the intelligent physician an origin of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... without anyone to hear you. Think of illness where to your bodily pain is added the mental torture of the fear of dying all alone. Think of the empty heart, the empty arms always, always. And in old age, more wretchedness in the regret for a wasted life. And for what and for whom are you making this sacrifice? For a convention; for a morality that nobody really believes in. Who'll think the better of you for it? People won't even believe in your honesty. They will find explanations for it that would make ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... the Mahabharata, we find a sort of heaven for the virtuous and a hell for the vicious. While the academic thought of Brahmanism and the altruistic systems of Jainism and Buddhism looked to the absorption of the departed into the All, the popular Hindu faith held fast to the scheme of happiness and wretchedness in the future.[172] As in Dante's Divina Commedia, the heaven was somewhat colorless, the hell more distinct and picturesque; pain is acute and varied, happiness ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... horrid stare of these idols, the tattered garments upon some of them, and the heaps of rotting offerings before them, seemed to us no improper emblems of the system they were designed to support; distinguished alike by its cruelty, folly, and wretchedness. We endeavoured to gain admission to the inside of the house, but were told it was strictly prohibited.... However, by pushing one of the boards across the doorway a little on one side, we looked in ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... faces that have bent over the spade and done the rough work of the world—those homes with their tin pans, their brown pitchers, their rough curs, and their clusters of onions. In this world there are so many of these common, coarse people, who have no picturesque sentimental wretchedness! It is so needful we should remember their existence, else we may happen to leave them quite out of our religion and philosophy, and frame lofty theories which only fit a world of extremes. Therefore let Art ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... God, a gentleman who is NOT so (and SEEMS to be so mainly by Malice of the Devil, and by the very great and nearly unforgivable indifference of Mankind to resist the Devil in that particular province, for the present), is the deepest fountain of human wretchedness, and the head ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... his search, very properly to my mind, at the Mountains of the Moon. Afterward he came around into Palestine, then wandered on into Europe, and at last when his money was all spent and he was in rags, wretchedness, and poverty, he stood on the shore of that bay at Barcelona, in Spain, when a great tidal wave came rolling in between the pillars of Hercules, and the poor, afflicted, suffering, dying man could not ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... completeness; which seldom abides with fulness(sic) of possession, and never stops with self, but always inspires to some great work of love and sacrifice—as in such a case there can be no religious life, he fully realizes the poet's description of the splendor and the wretchedness of him who ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... kind, his beard neglected, his person filthy, his diet bordering on starvation. To the passers-by this ragged misanthrope indulged in contemptuous language, and offended them by the indecency of his gestures. Abandoned at last by every one except Diogenes of Sinope, he expired in extreme wretchedness. It had been a favourite doctrine with him that friendship and patriotism are altogether worthless; and in his last agony, Diogenes asking him whether he needed a friend, "Will a friend release me from this pain?" ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... supplant him in rank or influence. Marital jealousy of men seems to be rare. Yet I heard not long since of a man who was so afraid lest some man might steal his wife's affections that he could not attend to his business, and finally, after three months of married wretchedness, he divorced her. A year later he married her again, but the old trouble reappeared, and so he divorced her a second time. If marital jealousy is less common among men than among women, the explanation is at hand in the lax moral standard for man. The feudal ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... lowly, the loving and laborious, the condescending and self-sacrificing Saviour whose name they bear? They are amazed that so little is done by professing Christians to save the perishing classes; that so many of the churches, instead of grappling with the vice and wretchedness of our large towns, turn their backs on them, build their churches in aristocratic neighborhoods mostly, and compete with one another for the favor of the rich and powerful. They cannot understand how it is, that churches and ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... proceeded, now knowing that our destination was Versailles. Oh, the misery and wretchedness of that weary march! The sun poured fiercely down on our uncovered heads, our throats were parched with thirst, our blistered feet and tired legs could hardly support our aching bodies. Now and again a man utterly worn out would drop by the wayside. One of our guard would then ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... nothing! What a hubbub of questions which waited for no reply, of replies which answered no question! The old woman herself shared in the wild merriment of the little ones! I have always been struck at the ease with which the poor forget their wretchedness. Being used to live only for the present, they make a gain of every pleasure as soon as it offers itself. But the surfeited rich are more difficult to satisfy: they require time and everything to suit before they ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... human love and jealousy no philosophy can explain. Secret wretchedness was gnawing at the heart of Napoleon. He loved Josephine with intensest passion, and all the pride of his nature was roused by the conviction that she had trifled with him. With these conflicting emotions rending ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... islands, however, the Government had taken the matter in hand, and all the lepers that could be found were torn from their families and carried to a lonely island named Molokai. Here they were outcasts, deserted by their friends and relatives, living in wretchedness and desolation and, in that time, provided only with the barest ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... her confiding look, and her face lost almost all the restless wretchedness which had so transformed it. 'Thank you,' she said, with a long breath; 'I knew you would ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. II) • Charlotte M. Yonge
... hands in the pockets of his silk-lined lounging coat, taking at each turn a steady look at the other. Presently he stopped, and took his cigar out of his mouth. "I say, Brown," he said, after another minute's contemplation of the figure before him, which bore such an unmistakable impress of wretchedness, that it made him quite uncomfortable, "why don't you ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... dreadful fighting still goes on, and many thousands of our women lose their fathers, their husbands, and their sons. With every victory (as they call it) peace, which should be nearer at hand, seems to retire further and further away, and only sorrow and wretchedness come close to us. And that is not all. Our food, like everything else we have to buy, is so dear that we women find it above all things difficult to provide ourselves with what we need for our daily life, and the worst of it, they say, has not yet come. I could understand that if we ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 150, February 2, 1916 • Various
... acknowledgment of her excellence can neither satisfy those who have studied the character, nor convey a just conception of it to the mere reader. Amid the awful, the overpowering interest of the story, amid the terrible convulsions of passion and suffering, and pictures of moral and physical wretchedness which harrow up the soul, the tender influence of Cordelia, like that of a celestial visitant, is felt and acknowledged without being quite understood. Like a soft star that shines for a moment from behind a stormy cloud and the next is swallowed up in tempest and darkness, the impression it ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... of the unhappy man, whether of reproach, sorrow, or regret, were ended for the time by another phase in the ever-changing condition of the invalid. In tones expressive of the deepest wretchedness, the daughter, once more arousing from the stupor of exhaustion, would piteously exclaim, in low, sad accents, whose inexpressible woe pierced the afflicted watcher's heart as ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... absurdity, which makes infinite goodness the eternal source of infinite misery, there is wisdom in the Manichaean doctrine of two conflicting principles, holding a divided dominion over the universe, and contending, one for the production of the universal degradation and wretchedness, the other, for the purity and bliss of ...
— On Calvinism • William Hull
... purchasing beyond their means, or at least spending their money needlessly. However such sinful tricks may be allowed to prosper in the case of a man of the world, in the case of a child of God they will not prosper, except God allow them to do so in the way of chastisement, whilst leanness and wretchedness are brought into the soul. I knew a case of this kind where it was the whole bent of the mind of a professed believer to obtain such "good salesmen," and where even a Jew was kept outside the shop, walking up and down, to induce persons to come ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... sympathy with his son. It never occurred to him to think of the agony with which those few lines had been written; of the wretchedness of the young heart which had hoped so much and failed so greatly; of the misery which the son felt in disappointing the father. He was a good, kind parent, who spent his long days and longer nights in thinking of his family and their welfare; he would, too, have greatly ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... fell, did almost nothing to mitigate the distresses of the unfortunate. But they ignore the fact that a blind and undiscriminating charity was the cause, and not the cure, of much of the miserable wretchedness of the poor. Modern society has learned that the monastic method is wholly wrong; that fraud and laziness are fostered by a wholesale distribution of doles. The true way to help the poor is to enable the poor to assist themselves; to teach them trades and give them work. The sociological ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... ever called an inn, had so much the shew of wretchedness; nor could it be expected otherwise, for being far from any great road, it was frequented only by shepherds, and others the meanest sort of peasants, who worked in the adjacent ...
— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... expression which recalled her first remembrance of him as nothing had recalled it yet. "I had no idea," he resumed, "of what the life of a farm-laborer really was, in some parts of England, until I undertook the rector's duties. Never before had I seen such dire wretchedness as I saw in the cottages. Never before had I met with such noble patience under suffering as I found among the people. The martyrs of old could endure, and die. I asked myself if they could endure, and live, like the martyrs whom I saw round me?—live, ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... submit ultimately—Lord Colambre saw; and all this time he endured the smell of tobacco and whisky, and of the sound of various brogues, the din of men wrangling, brawling, threatening, whining, drawling, cajoling, cursing, and every variety of wretchedness. ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... pale, ragged man, rushing along frantically, and striving to throw off his wife and children, who clung to his arms and legs; and, in God's name, conjured him not to desert them. He seemed bent upon rushing down to the water, and drowning himself, in some despair, and craziness of wretchedness. In these haunts, beggary went on before me wherever I walked, and dogged me unceasingly at the heels. Poverty, poverty, poverty, in almost endless vistas: and want and woe staggered arm in arm along ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... the corridor, he muttered a curse. What did that chairborne brass hat know about space cafard? About the depthless blackness, the wretchedness of free fall, the tides of primitive terror that swept you when the animal realization hit that you were away, away, away from the environment that gave you birth. That you were alone, alone, alone. A million, a million-million miles from your nearest fellow human. Space ...
— Medal of Honor • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... then an alien to the common Italian tribe appeared,—an Irish soldier, on his way to Salem, and willing to show me more of his mutilation than I cared to buy the sight of for twenty-five cents; and more rarely yet an American, also formerly of the army, but with something besides his wretchedness to sell. On the hottest day of last summer such a one rang the bell, and was discovered on the threshold wiping with his poor sole hand the sweat that stood upon his forehead. There was still enough of the independent citizen in his maimed ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... see Deliverance from my woes by thee. Now comes this endless grief and wrong, So dire I cannot bear it long, Sinking, with age and sorrow worn, Beneath my rivals' taunts and scorn. How shall I pass in dark distress My long lone days of wretchedness Without my Rama's face, as bright As the full moon to cheer my sight? Alas, my cares thy steps to train, And fasts, and vows, and prayers are vain. Hard, hard, I ween, must be this heart To hear this blow nor burst apart, As some great river bank, when first ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... my card brought Gabrielle directly to my rooms, and when I returned I found the lovers blissfully united, after only one day of direst wretchedness. They rushed toward me as I entered and doubly embraced me. I was the crowned hero—crowned with more praise than I could ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... said before," the woman replied, with bitter irony in her tones, "I have come with my little girl to thank you for the present we received last night;—a present of wretchedness and abuse." ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... lives snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and excitement. Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... on the floor in the dim and dusty corner, it seemed as if her wretchedness held no hope. Turn whichever way she might, the dreadful words she had uttered rang through her heart. They could not be unsaid; they were never to be forgotten but must always ...
— Five Little Peppers Midway • Margaret Sidney
... standard of happiness for all can be defined. But it is not so. Man is not the measure of his own happiness, any more than of his own health. The diet that he takes to be healthy, may prove his poison; and where he looks for happiness, he may find the extreme of wretchedness and woe. For man must live up to his nature, to his bodily constitution, to be a healthy man; and to his whole nature, but especially to his mental and moral constitution, if he is to be a happy man. And nature, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... them to peer into her mirror. She—as she assured them—had descended from the heights of the Comandancia (her husband had been a commander of the carbineers) to the wretchedness of running a boarding-house, yet she was resigned, and her lips curled in ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... unfailing resource and solace in her love of literature. With pen in hand, extracting beautiful passages and expanding suggested thoughts, she forgot her griefs and beguiled many hours, which would otherwise have been burdened with intolerable wretchedness. Maria Antoinette, woe-worn and weary, in tones of despair uttered the exclamation, "Oh! what a resource, amid the casualties of life, must there be in a highly-cultivated mind." The plebeian maiden could utter the same ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... bloat, and while they bloat it, blast, As from the first its lot was cast. For as I lie, smiled on, full-fed By unexhausted power to bless, I gaze below on hell's fierce bed, And those its waves of flame oppress, Swarming in ghastly wretchedness; Whose life on earth aspired to be One altar-smoke, so pure!—to win If not love like God's love for me, At least to keep his anger in; And all their striving turned to sin. Priest, doctor, hermit, monk grown white With prayer, the broken-hearted ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... each cutting off a slice with his own sheath knife. But notwithstanding simple food, frugal meals and primitive conditions, the hospitality was genuine and against the background of our recent hunger, thirst and general wretchedness, the place was heaven and our hosts were ...
— Out of the Fog • C. K. Ober
... power. Divinity will be known to consist, not in any senseless might, however majestic and miraculous, but in moral or spiritual perfection. If God were indifferent to the evil of the world, acquiesced in it without reason, and let it ripen into all manner of wretchedness, then man, in condemning the world, though without power to remove the least of its miseries, would be higher than God. But we have still to account for the possibility of man's assuming an attitude implied in the consciousness ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... up in narrow bounds within your Majesty's wide empire, and even within those bounds forced to reside chiefly in towns that reek and overflow with every form of poverty and wretchedness; forbidden all free movement; hedged in every enterprise by restrictive laws; forbidden tenure of land, or all concern in land, their means of livelihood have become so cramped as to render life for ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... own little fight for a long time, partly because I was very much affected by the sight of his wretchedness, and partly because I did not at first realize how necessary it was for him to find out just how far my self-control could be depended upon. As soon as this became clear to me I determined to seize the first favorable opportunity which presented itself of getting into my intrenchments ...
— An Adventure With A Genius • Alleyne Ireland
... cried. "What ungodly wretchedness you've made that child suffer! And you were married all the time to Morse, and the mother of ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... days. Ellerslie was his hermitage; and there, closed from the world, with an angel his companion, he might have forgotten Edward was lord in Scotland, had not that which was without his little paradise made a way to its gates, and showed him the slavery of the nobles and the wretchedness of the people. In these cases, his generous hand gave succor where it could not bring redress. Those whom the lawless plunderer had driven from their houses or stripped of their covering, found shelter, clothing, and food at the ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... should be raised to Heaven! He that had known only misery, and mean slavery: the news was too blessed to be credible. It could not become clear to him how, by fasts, vigils, formalities and mass-work, a man's soul could be saved. He fell into the blackest wretchedness; had to wander staggering as on the verge of ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... feet, to pray for pardon, to pour out words—he knew not what words, but he knew that they had been straining at his lips—to wreck his self-respect for ever, and hopelessly defeat even the crazy purpose that had almost possessed him, by drowning her wretchedness in disgust, by babbling with the tongue of infatuation to a woman with a husband not yet buried, to a woman who loved ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... a pretty little town, all orchards and gardens and winding hilly streets smothered in trees. And the dreary wretchedness of its back entrance, as it might be called, was all the more painful in contrast. Willow Lane, this miserable little street was named; but Angus McRae had long termed it, in his secret heart, the Jericho Road. For the old tavern ...
— The End of the Rainbow • Marian Keith
... them?—the wailing women? The thought roused me from my reverie of wretchedness. A gleam of joy shot suddenly across my mind. It was the wild huntress that had given origin to the thought. On her I had founded a new hope. She must be seen! No time should be lost in communicating with her? Had she accompanied ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... to the utter wretchedness of both of them," said Lady Laura. "He says," and she pointed to Phineas, "that were I there he would renew his accusation against me. He has not told me all. Perhaps he cannot tell me all. But I certainly will not return ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... is that which they call sumban, which is incest in the first degree; for they regard it as assured by long experience and knowledge inherited in tradition from their ancestors, that the land which allows that crime is bound down by wretchedness and misfortunes until its infamy is purged by the rigorous chastisement of the offender. There is no other means which can placate the wrath of heaven. Consequently, when they suffer long droughts, or other ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... and I remember every one of them, but I never could haul back one from the fate toward which he shambled so blindly; what could I do when Drink was driving him? If I could not shake off the memories of squalor, hunger, poverty—well-deserved poverty—despair, crime, abject wretchedness, then life could not be borne. I can always call to mind the wrung hands and drawn faces of well-nurtured and sweet ladies who saw the dull mask of loathsome degradation sliding downward over their loved one's face. Of all the mental trials that are cruel, that must be the worst—to ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... whole district in a cloud of sulphurous smoke; which turns beautiful rivers into filthy sewers; which condemns all but the rich to live in houses idiotically cramped and confined at the best, and at the worst in houses for whose wretchedness there ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... considered how he would address her; he had not thought what he would say. He had only felt that it was wretchedness to him to quarrel with her, and that it would be happiness to be allowed to love her. And yet he could not lower himself by asking her pardon. He had done her no wrong. He had not calumniated her, not injured her, as she had accused him of doing. He could ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... immortal life. And that will be a glorious consummation (may it be ours to hasten it) when the destined alliance between religion and learning shall be perfected, and their united influence shall be employed, and shall prevail, to raise a world from ignorance and sin and wretchedness, to the dignity and the privilege of the sons of God. And let us hope, both in regard to this college, whose interests we now cherish, and all other kindred institutions, that amidst the changes of society by which they ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... Canyon and had to be hauled bodily up the steep cliffs to the plateau above; some of their stock ran away, after heartbreaking struggles over the Salt Lake desert; mirages intensified their burning thirst by their disappointing lure; Indians threatened them, and finally, to add despair to their wretchedness, a quarrel arose in which Mr. Reed, in self-defence, killed one of the drivers, named Snyder. Reed was banished from the party under circumstances of unjustifiable severity which amounted to inhuman cruelty, and his wife and helpless children, ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... the whole world has been changed for me. I would die a thousand deaths if need be for the joy of rescuing you from your prison. Yet I do not wish to die. I wish to live, to take you far away and make you so happy that you will forget the wretchedness and failure of the past. A new life will begin for both of us, if you will only trust me, and forget the scruples of which you write—false scruples, believe me. As he had a wife living when he married you, and has taken another since, surely you cannot consider that you are bound by the law of ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... his strengthless hand for a few inches, and let it fall with a gesture of hopeless wretchedness. "Oh, what do such things matter?" ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... everywhere and at all hours, you see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the bay sparkle merrily. But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It is not well to find Saint Giles's so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attractive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged red scarf, do not make ALL ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... ancestral poison, for the vis medicatrix naturae has wonderful efficacy when allowed free play; and perhaps the time may come when the worst cases shall deem it a plain duty to curse no future generations with the damnosa hereditas, which has caused such bitter wretchedness ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... very little experience in public speaking, but I felt a deep interest in matters of morality and religion, and would attempt in a plain way, to set before them the duties and privileges of man. I appealed to every man's experience, observation and reason, to confirm the Bible doctrine of wretchedness in vice and happiness in virtue. We cannot violate the laws of God with impunity, and He will not keep back the wages of well-doing. The outside show of things is of very small account. We must look to realities and not to appearances. 'Diamonds may glitter on a vicious ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... many burdened souls before their time, coming, as they did, with the belief that they were bowed down with the only misery like theirs in the universe; for each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... soreness of the need of a world that is without Him, surely there can be nothing that so reinforces the natural necessity and impulse to impart what we possess of truth or beauty or goodness as the greatness of the unspeakable gift, and the wretchedness of a world that wants it. Brethren, there are many things that come in the way— and perhaps never more than in our own generation—of Christian men and women making direct and specific efforts, by lip as well as by life, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... also crackled under foot. Dust was on everything, especially the persons of the crumpled and weary passengers of overnight. Those who came aboard at Rochester failed to lighten the spiritual gloom, and presently they sank into the common bodily wretchedness. The train was somewhat belated, and as it drew nearer Buffalo they knew the conductor to have abandoned himself to that blackest of the arts, making time. The long irregular jolt of the ordinary progress was reduced to an ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... not like to do this, for he was a friend of Prometheus, and yet he did not dare to disobey. And so the great friend of men, who had given them fire and lifted them out of their wretchedness and shown them how to live, was chained to the mountain peak; and there he hung, with the storm-winds whistling always around him, and the pitiless hail beating in his face, and fierce eagles shrieking in his ...
— Old Greek Stories • James Baldwin
... parentage as the doubts were, no sooner had they shown themselves than the wings of the ascending prayers fluttered feebly and failed. They sank slowly, fell, and lay as dead, while all the wretchedness of his position rushed back upon him with redoubled inroad. Here was a man who could not pray, and yet must go and read prayers and preach in the old attesting church, as if he too were of those who knew something of the secrets of the Almighty, and could bring out from ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald
... through the canon. No; it could not be traversed by night, he asserted; they would certainly break their necks among the bowlders. At last the girl suffered herself to be wrapped in the blankets, and made an endeavor to forget her wretchedness and vexation in slumber. ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... cannot agree with her, nor with her probable authority, Walter Simson, in believing that the gypsies are the descendants of the mixed races who followed Moses out of Egypt. The Rom in Egypt is a Hindoo stranger now, as he ever was. But that the echo of centuries of outlawry and wretchedness and wildness rises and falls, like the ineffable discord in a wind-harp, in Romany airs is true enough, whatever its origin may have been. But I beg pardon, madam,—I ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... to ask her name, so stupified she felt, and with a responsive kiss she sent her away. Leaning her head upon the table, she forgot all but her own wretchedness, and so did not see the gayly-dressed, haughty-looking lady who swept past the door, accompanied by Guy and Dr. Holbrook. Neither did she hear, or notice, if she did, the hum of their voices as they talked together for a moment, Agnes ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... meet the maid on the Whisper Cove road in the morning, thinks I, and resolve the puzzle. I would discover more than that. I would discover whether or not I had blundered. But this new hope, springing confidently though it did, could not thrive in the wretchedness of John Cather's departure. ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... you can rescue her from this den of wretchedness, to which no man, and still more no woman, should ever be consigned if I had my will," resumed Mr. Perker. "I have seen the woman this morning. By paying the costs, you can obtain a full release and discharge from the damages; and, further, a voluntary statement, under her hand, that this ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... a few hours, must attach to it. I offered him any sum of money—all that he could ask—for his pains, and he promised to comply with my request. The idea that I had been the victim of a trick, a fraud, never glanced across my mind. No, when my wretchedness permitted me to think at all, I suspected and accused no one but myself. I could imagine and believe that, inadvertently, I had committed some great error when my soul had been darkened by the daily and hourly anxieties ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... threatening to blow up everything and everybody if the savages did not withdraw at once. He was eager to leave the country. In 1752 he handed over the command to St. Luc de la Come and, in August of that year, having experienced "much wretchedness" on his journeys, he was safely back in Montreal. The founding of Fort La Jonquiere was, no doubt, a great feat. Where the fort stood we do not know. It may have been on the North Saskatchewan, near Edmonton, or on the south branch of the river near Calgary. In any ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... sustained, and the little fruit I reaped from them, moved Thee with compassion. This was the state of my soul when Thy goodness, surpassing all my vileness and infidelities, and abounding in proportion to my wretchedness, granted me in a moment, what all my own efforts could never procure. Beholding me rowing with laborious toil, the breath of Thy divine operations turned in my favor, and carried me full sail over this sea ...
— The Autobiography of Madame Guyon • Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon
... long as you remained in servitude every farthing given to you for such a purpose would have been simply thrown away. Formerly we could do nothing more than support the victims of your social system and mitigate the misery and wretchedness you inflicted upon yourselves. As a matter of fact, there have long been large sums of Freeland capital—bearing interest, it is true—invested in Europe and America. What has been the result? This ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... eat the leek; but the child and the helpless and the sick it is a pleasure to aid. I love the poor as much as I love anything. I could live their life, if I were put to it. As a gentleman, I hate squalor and the puddles of wretchedness but I could have worked at the plough or the anvil; I could have dug in the earth till my knuckles grew big and my shoulders hardened to a roundness, have eaten my beans and pork and pea-soup, and have been a healthy ox, munching the bread of industry and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Christ, if it be right, must be wrought by the exceeding greatness of his mighty power; the working of which faith, I perceive, poor Ignorance, thou art ignorant of. [1 Cor. 12:3, Eph. 1:18,19] Be awakened, then, see thine own wretchedness, and fly to the Lord Jesus; and by his righteousness, which is the righteousness of God, for he himself is God, thou shalt ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... mouth, his eyes gleaming through glasses, and heard his sharp, persistent voice which rasped their nerves. His muddy skin, with its sickly tones of green and yellow, expressed the jaundice of his balked ambition, his perpetual disappointments and his hidden wretchedness. He could talk and argue; he was well-informed and shrewd, and was not without smartness and metaphor. Accustomed to look at everything from the standpoint of his own success, he was well fitted for a politician. A man who shrinks from nothing so long as it ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... singularly adaptable. In a few days it was as though she had been for years in her little ruined house. She was very happy, though there was scarcely a day when her heart was not wrung. Such young-old faces! Such weary men! And such tales of wretchedness! ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... full of grief and excitement that she had ceased to notice how everyone looked at her—she saw only the wretchedness, and dirt and misery. She did not know, poor child! that she was surrounded by danger—that she was not only in the midst of misery, but of dishonesty and crime. She had even forgotten her timidity—that it was growing late, and that she was far from home, ...
— Little Saint Elizabeth and Other Stories • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... "half-faced camp," fourteen feet square—that is to say, a covered shed of three sides, the fourth side being open to the weather. Then the family achieved the luxury of a cabin, but a cabin without floor or door or window. Amid this wretchedness, Lincoln's mother died, and was laid away in a rough coffin of slabs at the edge of the little clearing. Three months later, a passing preacher read the ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... that he had made many attempts to befriend him, but without success. "In fact," concluded F——, with some embarrassment, "he drinks dreadfully, poor fellow. Of course that is the secret of all his wretchedness, but I believe despair drove him to it in the ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... community, we must find some working programme that will make it easy for all the members of the group to observe health standards. A city government that spends taxes inefficiently can produce more sickness, wretchedness, incapacity in one year than pamphlets on health can offset in a generation. Failure to enforce health laws is a more serious menace to health and morals than drunkenness or tobacco cancer. Unclean streets, unclean dairies, unclean, overcrowded tenements can do more harm than alcohol ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... the absurdest Corn-laws; there is dearth, real, or were it even 'factitious;' an indubitable scarcity of bread. And so, on the second day of May 1775, these waste multitudes do here, at Versailles Chateau, in wide-spread wretchedness, in sallow faces, squalor, winged raggedness, present, as in legible hieroglyphic writing, their Petition of Grievances. The Chateau gates have to be shut; but the King will appear on the balcony, and speak to them. They have seen the King's face; their Petition of Grievances has been, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... stepped into had been transformed. Behind my blurred vision, as I hurried along, I saw no squalor, no wretchedness now. Through tears of thankfulness the houses, the streets, and the hurrying people were all glorified, all transfigured. Everything was right—the whole world and everybody ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... acknowledged that it was useless for him to attempt to get rid of the matter and let it be as though there were no such persons in the world as Marie Bromar and Adrian Urmand. He must think about it; but he might so give play to his feelings that no one should see him in the moments of his wretchedness. He went out, therefore, among the dark walks in the town garden, and there, as he paced one alley after another in the gloom, he revelled in the agony which a passionate man feels when the woman whom he loves is to be given into the arms ...
— The Golden Lion of Granpere • Anthony Trollope
... two weeks that intervened before Portia and her mother left for the West, Rose disregarded the physical wretchedness—which went on getting worse instead of better—and dismissed her psychical worries until she should have time to attend to them. She helped Portia pack, she presented a steady cheerful radiance of optimism to her mother, that never faltered ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... uneasy feeling, after giving this certificate. It might be all right enough; but if it happened to end badly, I should always reproach myself. There was a chance, certainly, that it would lead him or others into danger or wretchedness. Any one who looked at this young man could not fail to see that he was capable of fascinating and being fascinated. Those large, dark eyes of his would sink into the white soul of a young girl as the black cloth sunk into the snow in Franklin's famous ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... that Alice is not alone in her wretchedness. It appears that our friends Lawyer Miles and Mr. Redleigh and their families are at present engaged in the momentous task of getting the name of the street in which they live changed from Cemetery ...
— The House - An Episode in the Lives of Reuben Baker, Astronomer, and of His Wife, Alice • Eugene Field
... blacks. Through these advertisements, therefore, we can get at the very life of the Negro when slavery was still of the patriarchal sort and can thus contrast his then favorable condition with the wretchedness of the institution after it assumed its economic aspect in the nineteenth century. We observe that the eighteenth century slave was rapidly taking over modern civilization in the West Indies and in the thirteen colonies on the American continent. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... then Thou well may'st note from what's to follow now That more for glory do they braggart forth Than for belief. For mark these very same: Exiles from country, fugitives afar From sight of men, with charges foul attaint, Abased with every wretchedness, they yet Live, and where'er the wretches come, they yet Make the ancestral sacrifices there, Butcher the black sheep, and to gods below Offer the honours, and in bitter case Turn much more keenly to religion. Wherefore, it's surer testing of a man In doubtful perils—mark him as he is Amid ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... tranquil and idyllic there—until the house door opened and a line of men filed out, bringing to his shameful end a human creature who shambled with the wretchedness ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... Metropolis. Who can without Remorse see a disabled Sailor, the Purveyor of our Luxury, destitute of Necessaries? Who can behold an honest Soldier, that bravely withstood the Enemy, prostrate and in Want amongst his Friends? It were endless to mention all the Variety of Wretchedness, and the numberless Poor, that not only singly, but in Companies, implore your Charity. Spectacles of this Nature every where occur; and it is unaccountable, that amongst the many lamentable Cries that infest this Town, your Comptroller-General should not take notice of the most ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... not be spared the want and wretchedness of war; these are particularly useful in shattering its energy and subduing its will.—GENERAL v. HARTMANN, D.R., Vol. xiii., ...
— Gems (?) of German Thought • Various
... with pride and satisfaction this bright picture of our country's growth and prosperity, while only a closer scrutiny develops a somber shading. Upon more careful inspection we find the wealth and luxury of our cities mingled with poverty and wretchedness and unremunerative toil. A crowded and constantly increasing urban population suggests the impoverishment of rural sections and discontent with agricultural pursuits. The farmer's son, not satisfied with ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... life. Then the awful suddenness, which had in the past marked her sorrows, burst in again. In one heart-breaking, repelling half-hour his other self was revealed, and a damaged love was left to minister to wretchedness. Here was a hurt denied even the expression of mourning stationery or black apparel—a hurt which must be hidden and ever crowded back into the bursting within. Immediate catastrophe would probably have followed had not, first, the fine pride of her fine ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... in cities, become, in the issue of that punishment, frightful subjects of exclusive interest to themselves; and the art of fiction in which they finally delight is only the more studied arrangement and illustration, by colored fire-lights, of the daily bulletins of their own wretchedness, in the prison calendar, the police news, and the ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... neglected—a yielding puppet, of whom, strange to say, he broke the heart and made the fortune. He lived at that time in the Roule addition, in a plain garret, where he was in the habit of receiving Zephirin Marcas. The wretchedness of his quarters did not keep La Palferine out of the best society, and he was the guest of Josepha Mirah at the first entertainment given in her house on rue de la Ville-l'Eveque. By a strange order of events, Comte Rusticoli became ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... hell but the hulks and the convicts decorated by justice and the police with brandings and manacles, and driven on their course by that wretchedness from which they have no escape? Paradise is a fine house, sumptuous carriages, delightful women, and the prestige of rank. In this world there exist two worlds. I put you in the fairest of them, I remain myself in the foulest, and ...
— Vautrin • Honore de Balzac
... the substance of the thing that is, but differing just in the measure of the will and imagination that goes to make them. They will be strong and fair as the will is sturdy and organised and the imagination comprehensive and bold; they will be ugly and smeared with wretchedness as the will is fluctuating and the imagination ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... were those two young people whom all supposed destined for a union, that in the judgment of friends would be most fitting, but that in truth would be unnatural and productive of wretchedness. Though Hemstead's mind dwelt unwaveringly upon them, he never once looked back during the drive. He would have seen a strange sight if he had,—a beautiful woman, with a face looking almost spirit-like in the pale moonlight, with her arm, for the first time, ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... year; gradually I ripened. The electoral struggles of the closing days of the Empire left me cold; I was the son neither of a Senator nor a proscript and I had but to outlive, no matter what the regime, the traditions of mediocrity and wretchedness long since adopted by my family. The law pleased me but little. I thought that the Code had been purposely maldirected in order to furnish certain people with an opportunity to wrangle, to the utmost limit, over the smallest words; even ...
— Sac-Au-Dos - 1907 • Joris Karl Huysmans
... of Christ is the only effectual remedy for the great mass of vice and wretchedness in our large towns, to which you are endeavouring to call public attention; and we must not be content with presenting that Cross in words alone, but must endeavour to show, by our personal efforts and example, how it may practically be applied so as to purify the lives and quicken ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... received his disquisitions on poetry and art on that first unlucky evening. For the most part, however, he, too, was inclined to silences, in which he looked at Elizabeth in the happiness of a lover's wretchedness. The love she had given to Brassfield seemed to him based on the deceitful pretensions of that wretch, and in any case it was not his, and he felt repelled from accepting it. He yearned to show ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... family is ever a pleasing object; but there was something peculiarly interesting and affecting in the groups of these poor people. Whether it was, that those who saw them compared their present situation with the state of misery and wretchedness from which they had been taken; —or whether it was the joy and exultation which were expressed in the countenances of the poor parents in contemplating their children all busily employed about them;—or the air of self-satisfaction which these little urchins put on, at the consciousness ...
— ESSAYS, Political, Economical and Philosophical. Volume 1. • Benjamin Rumford
... through all there was one consolation so great, that it was enough to compensate for all the wretchedness of her position. She was assured of her husband's love, beyond all possibility of future doubt. He was by her side, never to leave ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... September. Bills were brought in, and passed both houses with the utmost rapidity, the standing orders being waived. On the 25th they received the royal assent. On that day ministers communicated their plans for the melioration of Irish suffering. So overwhelming was the wretchedness of Ireland, that the amount of relief for January was calculated by Lord John Russell at three-quarters of a million sterling. Colonel Jones, who was at the head of the board of works in Ireland, with very little advantage to his country, and no moral advantage to himself, had, in a letter dated ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... hair? and sat not the king by my side? Let that, then, be sufficient for the present. You have seen the queen all day long. Allow me now for one brief, happy moment to be again the feeling, sensitive woman, who can pour into the bosom of her friend all her complaint and her wretchedness. Ah, Jane, if you knew how I have longed for this hour, how I have sighed after you as the only balm for my poor smitten heart, smitten even to death, how I have implored Heaven for this day, for this one thing—'Give me back my Jane, so that ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... hour the same prayer, the same cry for Justice, is still ascending to the throne of the King of Righteousness from the disinherited masses, on whose shoulders the weight of our civilisation rests, and whom it presses down to helpless poverty, misery, and wretchedness, and who are still suffering from the same fundamental injustice against which, as we have seen, Gerrard Winstanley protested so eloquently over two ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... the womankind, was prostrate on the cabin floor, treating Cilly's smiles and roses as aggravations of her misery. Had there been a sharer in her exultation, the gay pitching and dancing of the steamer would have been charming to Lucy, but when she retreated from the scene of wretchedness below, she felt herself lonely, and was conscious of some surprise among the surviving ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... disappeared; but shortly afterwards such a host of rats took up their abode in the farmer's house that it was impossible for him to defend himself against them. The rats gnawed everything in the house, and whatever was brought into it. In time the farmer was reduced to beggary, and died in wretchedness. ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... seen have coats to their backs; and not one in four of the women and children have each a pair of shoes or stockings. And those feet!—if the owners would only wash them once a week, the general aspect of affairs in this section would be materially brightened. Wretchedness, rags and despair salute me on every side; and if this be the best part of Ireland, what must the state ...
— Glances at Europe - In a Series of Letters from Great Britain, France, Italy, - Switzerland, &c. During the Summer of 1851. • Horace Greeley
... a home and a school for such girls as may be presented to the magistrates of the state, appointed for that purpose, as vagrants, perversely obstinate, deprived of the control and culture of their natural guardians, or guilty of petty offences, and exposed to a life of crime and wretchedness. ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... ate nothing but roots and berries, and did nothing but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about I in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel lived in wretchedness. He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went towards it, and when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes, and they grew clear ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... suspicion could not be now avowed. A movement as penetrating and as universal as that which France had experienced in 1792 swept through the Prussian State. It had required the experience of years of wretchedness, the intrusion of the French soldier upon the peace of the family, the sight of the homestead swept bare of its stock to supply the invaders of Russia, the memory of Schill's companions shot in cold blood for the cause of the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... however, there were two exceptions. One, within the Wakeham family, was Elfie. Quick to note the signs of wretchedness in him and quick to feel the attitude of neutrality assumed by her family toward the war, the child, without stint and without thought, gave him a love and a sympathy so warm, so passionate, that it was to his heart like ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... of a life you are leading. You are forty years old, and have you lived? Father beat you. I understand now that he avenged his wretchedness on your body, the wretchedness of his life. It pressed upon him, and he did not know whence it came. He worked for thirty years; he began to work when the whole factory occupied but two buildings; now there are seven of them. The mills grow, and ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... God to witness that it was only for his sake she had asserted her legal rights; that, having lost the heart of her husband, all she wished was to die. Then, sinking on her knees before me, she entreated me to forgive her the wretchedness she had caused. ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... been patched with square pieces of cloth, several shades darker than the original fabric, and these patches were now all in rags. His coat was several sizes too large for him and hung about him like a dirty ragged sack. He was a pitiable spectacle of neglect and wretchedness as he sat there on an upturned pail, eating his bread and cheese with fingers that, like his clothing, were grimed ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... contact was delicious. She was surrounded, not by the slatternly Five Towns landscape and by the wretchedness of the familiar bedroom, but by the unanswerable, intimidating, inspiring mystery of life itself. A man came hurrying with a pole out of the western vista of the lane, and stopped in front of the gas-lamp, and in an instant the flame was reduced to a little fat worm of blue, and the man passed ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... have sinned not, till at last it grows too great for her feeble strength, and Death comes, not as the 'King of Terrors,' but a welcome messenger, for whose coming the weary woman has waited and longed, ever since hope died out, and she knew life held for her nothing but wretchedness and woe. ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... with a sense of her detected guilt, burst into a passionate fit of tears, sobbing so bitterly that Dora, touched by her grief, stole softly to her side, and was about to speak, when, thrusting her away, Eugenia exclaimed, "Leave me, Dora Deane, and never come here again. The sight of you mocking my wretchedness is hateful and more than ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... right, mother. My life and death are by the will of God, but I can say that my happiness or wretchedness is in Jane ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... this ways the greatest part of them made out to elude the clutches of these bloody hounds, tho' some of them were shot by the merciless soldiery in the river. It was observed that these Rangers, almost without exception, closed their days in wretchedness, and particularly a Capt. Danks, who rode to the extreme of his commission in every barbarous proceeding. In the Cumberland insurrection (1776) he was suspected of being 'Jack on both sides of the bush,' ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... visitor is the squalor and the wretchedness of these homes of India's poor. The clothing of a whole family is not worth one American dollar, while about ten cents in our money will feed a family of four. The houses have no furniture, except a bed of the most primitive pattern, made of latticed ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... Misery, neglect, and wretchedness appeared on every hand; but the population swarmed, and habit seemed to have hardened them to the power of existing where it appeared to be a certainty that some pestilence must ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sensation of gloomy wretchedness[115]. From him then his son inherited, with some other qualities, 'a vile melancholy,' which in his too strong expression of any disturbance of the mind, 'made him mad all his life, at least not sober[116].' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... ecclesiastical vows, became not only the admirer, but the lover of the queen, addressing her in the most impassioned words of endearment. Thus years of intrigue and domestic wretchedness passed away until 1624. The queen had then been married nine years, and was twenty years of age. She ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... mighty army, identified in principles and interests. Here was the principle of the Church—association for reciprocated strength; they were thus taught the inevitable result of the indulgence of the vice. The missionaries of temperance went through the country contrasting the wretchedness and the degradation and the filth of drunkenness with the domestic comfort, and the health, and the regular employment of those who were masters of themselves. So far as men believed this, and gave up ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... been subject to general obloquy. Probably there was no one in the country around, against whom popular suspicion could have been more readily directed, or in whose favor and defence less interest could be awakened. She was a forlorn, friendless, and forsaken creature, broken down by wretchedness of condition and ill-repute. The following are the minutes of her examination, as found among ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... hundreds of young lives whom the morning light awakes to hunger, filth, and wretchedness, and whom the evening shadows limit to rooms in which you would not care to keep your dogs. They are growing up without the least sense of decency, or the slightest reverence for God. Their existence ...
— Love to the Uttermost - Expositions of John XIII.-XXI. • F. B. Meyer
... 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 my ...
— Burr Junior • G. Manville Fenn
... not see him again that trip, but on my next (I had a six months' charter) I went up to the store. Ten yards away from the door Blake's scolding met my ears, and when I came in he gave me a glance of utter wretchedness; Egstrom, all smiles, advanced, extending a large bony hand. "Glad to see you, captain. . . . Sssh. . . . Been thinking you were about due back here. What did you say, sir? . . . Sssh. . . . Oh! him! He has left ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... Caroline assumed the management of that bankrupt establishment. The funeral expenses were unpaid, and Auguste's pupils had been frightened away by the shock of successive disasters and the general atmosphere of wretchedness that pervaded the house. Auguste himself was writing a symphonic poem, Icarus, dedicated to the memory of his son. Caroline was barely twenty when she was called upon to face this tangle of difficulties, but she reviewed the situation ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... the second time opened his eyes, he was afresh bewildered. Which was the dream—that vision of wretchedness, or this of luxury? If it was not a dream, how had they moved him without once disturbing his sleep? It was as marvellous as anything in the Arabian Nights! Could it be the same chamber? Not a thing seemed the same, yet in him was a doubtful denial of transportance. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... different being in a few minutes after Salaman and the others had finished their duties with all the assiduity of Hindu servants; and then as I sat in the handsome apartment arranged in its simple, rich, Eastern luxury, a feeling of wretchedness and misery came over me. I looked round at the rich carpets, soft cushions, and costly curtains; and then at my magnificent uniform, and began thinking of the old, old fable I had read as a child, of the jackdaw in borrowed ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... fierily. Let them meddle with Robert, or Robert's mill, or Robert's interests, and I shall hate them. At present I am no patrician, nor do I regard the poor around me as plebeians; but if once they violently wrong me or mine, and then presume to dictate to us, I shall quite forget pity for their wretchedness and respect for their poverty, in scorn of their ignorance ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... of profligacy, gambling, and poverty. She became with child of you; was cursed by her own parents at that discovery; though she never upbraided, except by her involuntary tears, and the misery depicted on her countenance, the author of her wretchedness ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... to say how much of all this squalor and wretchedness and hunger is the fault of the people themselves, how much of it belongs to circumstances and environment, how much is the result of past errors of government, how much is race, how much is religion. I only know that ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... virtuous, she usually became resigned to her fate and lived happily; if she undertook to imitate her husband's tactics, she fell from the good graces of one lover to those of another, ending her life in absolute wretchedness. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... who all told varieties of one woeful tale. Here, too, you could be drunk for five cents, and be lodged for three, with men, women, and children of all colors lying about you. It was this hideous mixture of black and white and yellow wretchedness which made the place so peculiar. The blacks predominated, and had mostly that swollen, reddish, dark skin, the sign in this race of habitual drunkenness. Of course only the lowest whites were here—rag-pickers, pawnbrokers, old-clothes men, thieves, and the like. All of this, as it came before ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... Never such a nation-builder and never a man so feared and hated for valid cause. He was the King of the greatest, the most powerful France Europe had ever known, but it was a miserable France, a France seething with wretchedness, with discontent, and each hour he went in terror for his life. Only a few, such as Commines himself, could foresee how great would one day be the power of these weak, antagonistic states he had so ruthlessly ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... his Old Guard, from whom he tore himself away amidst sobs and tears, and threw himself into his carriage. On the 19th of March 1815 he was back again in this palace from the island of Elba, wandering with almost infantine joy through the splendid apartments which had witnessed his glory and his wretchedness. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... collected and paid, out of fourteen thousand pounds we had but four hundred remaining. My chief attention therefore was now to bring down the pride of my family to their circumstances; for I well knew that aspiring beggary is wretchedness itself. 'You cannot be ignorant, my children,' cried I, 'that no prudence of ours could have prevented our late misfortune; but prudence may do much in disappointing its effects. We are now poor, my fondlings, and wisdom bids us conform to our ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... frequently, cruel re-actions upon what he thought her unreasonable, captious, dissatisfied states of mind, having no ground but in her imagination, were heavy heart-strokes—or, as a discordant hand dashed among her life-chords, putting them forever out of tune. Oh! The wretchedness, struggling with patience and concealment, of those weary years. The days and days, during which her husband maintained towards her a moody silence, that it seemed would kill her. And yet, so far as the world went, Mr. Leslie was among the best of ...
— Heart-Histories and Life-Pictures • T. S. Arthur
... have no peace till I am dead. Begone, cursed black crow! you wish me peace; that shows you are a glozing cheat! Go to, and caw to simpler fools than I! I know very well the quarryman's lot is an utterly miserable one, and there is no comfort for his wretchedness. I hale out stones from dawn to dark, and for price of my toil, all I get is a scrap of black bread. Then when my arms are no longer as strong as the stones of the mountain, and my body is all worn out, I ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France
... "you have been boys, as I have, and you can form your own ideas as to the wretchedness that must prevail among a body of lads of whom more than half are caned daily. This, your worships, is a state of tyranny which might well drive any boys to desperation. But I have not done with Mr. ...
— Through the Fray - A Tale of the Luddite Riots • G. A. Henty
... book, I think, that you have resisted, and even longer than was right. I think, too, that these locutions have done your soul good, and in particular that they have made you see your own wretchedness and your faults more clearly, and amend them. They have lasted long, and always with spiritual profit. They move you to love God, and to despise yourself, and to do penance. I see no reasons for condemning them, I incline rather to regard them as ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
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