"Joyless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... widow, surrounded by a numerous household of serfs. Her sons were in the government service at Petersburg; her daughters were married; she went out very little, and in solitude lived through the last years of her miserly and dreary old age. Her day, a joyless and gloomy day, had long been over; but the evening of her ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Russian • Various
... it is a matter of wonder to find that Providence should bestow such a profusion of days, such a seeming waste of longevity, on a reptile that appears to relish it so little as to squander more than two-thirds of its existence in a joyless stupor, and be lost to all sensation for months together in the ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... off by the hangman's knife, and handle hell fire for ever; thrice accursed be the cruel hearts that did conceive that damned lie, to part true love for ever; may they sicken and wither on earth joyless, loveless, hopeless; and wither to dust before their time; and burn in eternal fire," He cursed the meat at their mouths and every atom of their bodies, from their hair to the soles of their feet. Then turning from the cowering, shuddering pair, who had almost hid themselves beneath ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... least by me, in my religious education, it is not to be wondered at that I should not feel at all sedentary on the Sunday afternoons after church-time. In fact, I affected any position rather than the sitting one. But all the Sundays were not joyless to me. One, in particular, though the former part of it had been passed in sickening fear, and the middle in torturing pain, its termination was marked with a heartfelt joyousness, the cause of which I must record as a tribute of gratitude ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... its power, for I have seen it tried. Pains of all sorts thro' every nerve and artery At once it scatters,—burns at once and freezes— Till, by extremity of torture forced, The soul consents to leave her joyless home. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... deer meat to eat," he said, as he spread a soft skin by the fire, for the boy to lie on. Then he turned to place the child on the skin,—but no boy was there. He had no son. Only that strange bird perched, joyless and alone, over the fire, on the pole from ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... without a smile. His eyes were bent on the ground; there was a joyless contraction of his delicate, dark brows. It was with an evident effort that he suddenly looked up and spoke. "I have an interest in such subjects. I am trying to find pupils myself—or, at least, I hope to find some when I return to England ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... at intervals diversified my doom, are better than the calm and bloodless tenor of thy solitary way—thou, who lovest nothing, hatest nothing, feelest nothing, and walkest the world with the noiseless and joyless footsteps of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... hair and his rosy countenance. Then the child would dream that he was sailing aloft over shining forests, and that his mother, beaming with all the beauty of her lost youth, flew before him, showering golden flowers on his path. These were the happiest moments of Brita's joyless life, and even these were not unmixed with bitterness; for into the midst of her joy would steal a shy anxious thought which was the more terrible because it came so stealthily, so soft-footed and unbidden. Had not this child been given her as a punishment for her guilt? Had she then a right ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the centre of the scene, The white-haired matron with monotonous tread Plied the swift wheel, and with her joyless mien Sat, like a fate, and ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 8 • Various
... all at once began to say, Her body's stain her mind untainted clears; While with a joyless smile she turns away The face, that map which deep impression bears Of hard misfortune, carved in it with tears. 'No, no,' quoth she, 'no dame, hereafter living, By my excuse ...
— The Rape of Lucrece • William Shakespeare [Clark edition]
... and its remedy, or of the proper treatment of hoof disease in sheep. I suffered keenly from the horse colic and like troubles and from the many hopes and perils of democracy in my childhood. I found the Bible, however, the most joyless book of all, Samson being, as I thought, the only man in it who amounted to much. A shadow lay across its pages which came, I think, from the awful solemnity of my aunt when she opened them. It reminded me of a dark rainy day made fearful by thunder and lightning. ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... lose a child, and especially a son," sighed Elizabeth, and involuntarily she thought of Anna, that poor mother whom she had robbed of her son, that he might grow up in eternal joyless imprisonment, that he might be morally murdered, and from a man be converted ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... robbed. "We only ask freedom of speech,—the right to exercise all the franchises conferred by the Constitution upon an American. Can you safely deny us these things?" Mingled also with pathetic appeals were joyless pictures of the ravages of war, and cheerless glimpses into the future of a Republic with its bulwarks of liberty torn away. "We stand to-day," he continued, "amid new made graves; we stand to-day in a land filled with mourning, and our soil is saturated with the blood of the ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... of affairs and projects, into which many are betrayed by degrees, in order to supply increasing expenses, that might be avoided by strict frugality; for they load the soul with thick clay, are a heavy weight to the most upright, render a man's way doubtful and joyless, and drown ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... I knew better how to deal with the present hour and the present day. There was no joy in them, but there was a sort of acquiescence in me. If life—as seemed the only possible thing—was to be joyless for me, I could at least behave decently. Also a certain sort of pride, I think, came to my help. I felt that it was bad manners to appear as I felt—just as when one has a headache one makes an effort to appear more brilliantly well than usual. One doesn't like ...
— Daisy's Aunt • E. F. (Edward Frederic) Benson
... but instead of retreating the girl continued to advance, followed by her long-faced brother in his knickerbocker suit, in which he had been singing comic songs for the entertainment of a joyless proletariat. She advanced not as if she had failed to understand—the word 'police' has an unmistakable sound—but rather as if she could not help herself. She did not advance with the free gait and expanding presence of a distinguished ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... witness to the fact.[25] Zeus, pitying the disappointment of Demeter at finding {56} her hopes thus blighted, succeeded in effecting a compromise by inducing his brother Aides to allow Persephone to spend six months of the year with the gods above, whilst during the other six she was to be the joyless companion of her grim lord below. Accompanied by her daughter, the beautiful Persephone, Demeter now resumed her long-abandoned dwelling in Olympus; the sympathetic earth responded gaily to her bright ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... He sung Darius great and good, By too severe a fate Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, Fallen from his high estate, And weltering in his blood; Deserted at his utmost need By those his former bounty fed, On the bare earth exposed he lies With not a friend to close his eyes. With downcast looks the joyless victor sate, Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of Chance below And now and then a sigh he stole, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... brick-dust head, twined his feet among the rungs of his chair, and heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste. The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney's removal of the restrictions laid upon the weed, the familiar blended odors of soaked lemon peel, ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... all, who by rights should be the teachers and who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last—might I not finally teach them—a wiser and more generous-hearted way to improve the ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... name has not been mentioned once. Nature allows no trifling with her laws; flowers do not bloom in deserts. He has crushed sentiment; he has stifled affection. With a heart by nature kindly, he sits now an image cut in steel. He gazes calmly at his desolate hearth, at his joyless age, and smokes. Man has no power to move him; fate condemned him to be ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... WRETCH WITHOUT IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... unwilling to pay the price, what is there left for them save the joyless sensuality and ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... ostentatious brilliancy, poor human nature refuses to be comforted with diamonds and pearls, or to acknowledge that happiness consists in gilded galleries, gay equipages, or fashionable parties. They are cold and artificial. The heart longs to discard this joyless pageantry, to surround itself with human affections, and only asks to love ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... north. Thereupon God became angered and hostile 35 towards the beings whom he had formerly exalted in beauty and glory: he created for the traitors a marvelous abode as penalty for their action, namely the pangs of Hell, bitter afflictions; Our Lord called forth that 40 abysmal joyless house of punishment to wait for the outcast keepers of souls.[3] When he knew that it was ready, he enveloped it in eternal night and equipped it with torment, filling it with fire and fearful cold, with fume and red flame: ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... board, from choral roofs the song; And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they wear a cold and joyless smile. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... to grief what music is to aching silence, dumbness, inarticulate pain—though perhaps in that silence one hears a deeper, stranger sound, the buzz of the whirring atom, the soft thunder of worlds plunging through the void, joyless, gigantic, oblivious forces. ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... who had done wickedness in the world above were imprisoned by her in those gloomy regions. To her came also all those who had died, not on the battlefield, but of old age or disease. And though these were treated kindly enough, theirs was a joyless life in comparison with that of the dead warriors who were feasting and fighting in the halls of Valhalla, under the kindly rule ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... affairs. She could make her feet go in a one-two-three triangle with approximate accuracy, if she didn't take any liberties with them. She was relieved to find that Todd danced with a heavy accuracy which kept her from stumbling.... But their performance was solemn and joyless, while by her skipped Sam Weintraub, in evening clothes with black velvet collar and cuffs, swinging and making fantastic dips with the lovely Miss Moore, who cuddled into his arms ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... great glee; "I had never thought to have seen them again! And they were so changed, I should scarcely have known them. Bob, in particular, looked so much taller, and stronger, and oh! so much happier than he had done last year! He was no more the wretched, joyless, hopeless creature, cowering in rags, one that even rats might look on with pity; he had a bright, fearless eye, and hopeful smile; and if ever a face expressed gratitude and affection, it was his when he looked on his gentle ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... portraits of his ancestors, while wholly ignoring his descendant. But Michael was too wise to put himself into places where he could be pointedly ignored, and the resplendent dinner, with its six footmen and its silver service, was not really more joyless than usual. But his father's majestic displeasure was more apparent when the three men sat alone afterwards, and it was in dead silence that port was pushed round and cigarettes handed. Francis, it is true, made a couple of ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... that he was one of the number of the damned. This delusion took such possession of his soul that he lost his appetite, was unable to sleep, and day by day grew more and more wasted and languid. His tutor and director noticing how his health was affected and how pale, listless, and joyless he had become, often questioned him as to the cause of his dejection and evident suffering, but his tormentor who had filled his mind with this delusion, being what is called a dumb devil, the poor ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... its hideous way with him. Physicians would have given a name to his mental and physical condition. He had heard these names often—applied to men the strain of whose lives had been like the strain of his own, and had left them as it had left him—jaded, joyless, breaking things. Some of them had been broken and had died or were dragging out bruised and tormented days in their own homes or in mad-houses. He always shuddered when he heard their names, and rebelled with sick fear against the ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... sects, Jainism considers the world of transmigration as a bondage or journey which the wise long to terminate. But joyless as is its immediate outlook, its ultimate ideas are not pessimistic. Even in the body the soul can attain a beatific state of perfect knowledge[256] and above the highest heaven (where the greatest gods live in bliss for immense periods though ultimately subject to transmigration) ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... self-restraint and unwearied toil through all previous life; between the expressed subject and sentiment of home violation, and the expressed subject and sentiment of home love; between the sympathy of audience, given in irreverent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the rabidness of a dog, and the sympathy of audience given in an almost appalled humility of intense, rapturous, and yet entirely reasoning and reasonable pleasure; between these two limits of octave, the reader will find he can class, ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flower; With listless eyes the dotard views the store— He views, and wonders that they please no more. Now pall the tasteless meats and joyless wines, And Luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels! try the soothing strain, Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds, alas! would touch the impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness'd ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... methought, on that dear morn, To pour out all his heart to me; As if, the separation borne, The coming hours would joyless be, ...
— Rural Tales, Ballads, and Songs • Robert Bloomfield
... found in a new residence. The poor man had alighted there for a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these continually shifting scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a stranger among strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though joyless satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire college and submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... Well then, I own my heart has broke your chains. Patient, I bore the painful bondage long, At length my gen'rous love disdains your tyranny; The bitterness and stings of taunting jealousy, Vexations days, and jarring, joyless, nights, Have driv'n him forth to seek some safer shelter, Where he may rest his weary wings ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... rewards that naturally follow the first—is God to destroy the law of his universe, the divine sequence of cause and effect in order to say: 'You must do well, but you shall gain no good by it; you must lead a dull joyless existence to all eternity, that lack of delight may show you pure'? Could Love create with such end in view? Righteousness does not demand creation; it is Love, not Righteousness, that cannot live alone. The creature must already be, ere ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... operation of falsity, and so still be poison, moral poison. Too well I know this Tacitus. In my college-days he came near souring me into cynicism. Yes, I began to turn down my collar, and go about with a disdainfully joyless expression." ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... the fantastic arabesque of the frost, the moor was like a frozen sea, and four miles away lay Buttermere, ringing from morn to night with the sound of skates. There is no greater error than to suppose winter a drear and joyless season in the country. It has delights of its own unimagined by the townsman, to whom winter means burst pipes and slushy streets, and snow that is soiled even as it falls. But among mountains winter has its own incomparable glories, and holds a pageant ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... only thing they seem likely to be lavish in is funeral expenses, which come in the wake of leaky shoes and imperfect clothing. These funeral expenses at last swallow all, since nobody can dispute an undertaker's bill. One pities these joyless beings. Economy, instead of a rational act of the judgment, is a morbid monomania, eating the pleasure out of life, and haunting them to ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... great and good, By too severe a fate, Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, Fallen from his high estate, And weltering in his blood; Deserted at his utmost need, By those his former bounty fed; On the bare earth exposed he lies, With not a friend to close his eyes. With downcast looks the joyless victor sat, Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of chance below; And, now and then a sigh he stole, And tear's began ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... world—the one that's running still and godlike over me? Do I not for days and weeks at a time go about in it, guilty, shut-in, and foolish under it, slinking about—its emptied miracles all around me, mean, joyless, anxious, unable to look the littlest flower in the face—unable——. "Ah, God!" my soul cries out within me. Are not all these things mine? Do they not belong with me and I with them? And I go racing about, making things up in their presence, plodding for shadows, cutting out paper dolls to live ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... destroy, And shuts up all the passages of joy; In vain their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow'r; With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more; Now pall the tasteless meats, and joyless wines, And luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain, [bb]Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds, alas! would touch th' impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness'd Orpheus near; Nor lute nor lyre his feeble ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... along the bank of the stream, approaches him. He tells her that he has done nothing but mourn for the loss of his Pearl, and has been indeed a "joyless jeweller" (p.8). However, now that he has found his Pearl, he declares that he is no longer sorrowful, but would be a "joyful jeweller" were he allowed to cross the stream (p.8). The maiden blames her father for his rash speech, tells him that his Pearl is not lost, and ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... duty's ours to do, An' we hope to hunt those glasses till our time of life is through; It's a little bit of service that is joyous in its thrill, It's a task that calls us daily an' we hope it always will. Rich or poor, the saddest mortals of all the joyless masses Are the ones who have no mother dear to lose ...
— A Heap o' Livin' • Edgar A. Guest
... to Skernford, to blindness, now known to be inevitable, to her saddened, joyless life. I was going to remain in Elberthal—for what? When I look back I ask myself—was I not as blind as she, in truth? In the afternoon of the day of Miss Hallam's departure, I left Frau Steinmann's house. Clara promised to come and see me sometimes. Frau Steinmann kissed me, and ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... boast, fell Demon of the Deep! Though never more the universal shriek Of all that perish thou shalt hear, as when The deep foundations of the guilty earth Were shaken at the voice of God, and man Ceased in his habitations; yet the sea 80 Thy might tempestuous still, and joyless rule, Confesses. Ah! what bloodless shadows throng Ev'n now, slow rising from their oozy beds, From Mete,[188] and those gates of burial That guard the Erythraean; from the vast Unfathomed caverns ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... back from taking them home; and have left them delighted with their day, the recollection of which will long make them happy. This morning I was pitying those whose lives are obscure and joyless; now, I understand that God has provided a compensation with every trial. The smallest pleasure derives from rarity a relish otherwise unknown. Enjoyment is only what we feel to be such, and the luxurious man feels no longer: satiety has destroyed ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... longer alone, he was no longer joyless! His little friend was there in the great cage among the twittering companions who were indifferent to the little prince. In order to know him at first sight, and always to be able to recognize him, Louis took the rose- colored ribbon from the neck of the automaton, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... measure for measure. My life has been a hard one, child; hard and lonely, and loveless and joyless. My son, to whom I devoted myself in the vigour of youth and in the prime of life, never loved me, never repaid me for my love. He spent his days far away from me, when his presence would have gladdened my difficult life. He died in a strange land. Of his three ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... mechanically, without the agency of feeling or sympathy; yet though she obtruded her grief on none, it was equally true that no gleam of returning cheerfulness ever lightened the gloom which enveloped her. A something there was in the hopeless, joyless expression of her beautiful face, which made the heart ache; yet none offered sympathy, or strove to console her, for she seemed unapproachable, with the cold, haughty glance of other days. Painfully perceptible was the difference between Christian fortitude and perfect hopelessness—gentle, ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... would tell some droll tale, and another would say something comical in order to make him laugh; and laugh he did, he must laugh; it would never do to let those fellows know what was passing in his mind; so he laughed loud as any of them, but what a laugh!—how empty and hollow, how joyless and unreal, how unlike his former bursts of feeling!—a got-up laugh, which shewed plainer than ever something was wrong. Abe knew it, and he felt it was of no use trying any longer to keep up a sham happiness, ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... obsequious slaves in the outer lodge. Neither harps nor singing-boys, neither woman's ringing laughter nor man's bacchanalian glee, now woke the echoes in the lonely halls. The pulse of pleasure seemed to have throbbed its last in the joyless being of ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... considers how this thrice accursed weight of Protestant Puritanism, the most odious and inhuman of all the perverted superstitions that have darkened man's history, a superstition which, though slowly dying, is not yet, owing to its joyless use as a "business asset," altogether dead, has, ever since it was spawned in Scotland and Geneva, made cruel war upon every childish instinct in us and oppressed with unspeakable dreariness the lives of generations of children, ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the centre of the scene, The white-haired matron, with monotonous tread, Plied the swift wheel, and, with her joyless mien, Sat like a Fate, and ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... superior self-righteousness. As the new arrivals walked down the main street, half beach, half thoroughfare, their baggage following them in low trolleys drawn by porters at their heels, like a decorous funeral, the joyless faces of the lookers-on added to the resemblance. Beyond them, in the prolonged northern twilight, the waters of the bay took on a peculiar pewtery brightness, but with the usual mourning-edged border of Scotch seacoast scenery. Low banks of cloud lay on the chill sea; ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... He would probably be obliged to go as far as Texas before his return; he might be absent a month. Business of a perplexing nature, which it was impossible to explain then, called him from me, but he would shorten as much as possible the days of absence which would be dreary and joyless to him. I was overwhelmed with grief at the thought of his leaving me; my nerves were still weak, and I wept in all the abandonment of sorrow. I feared for him the dangers that beset the path of ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... Learning to speak Private Tyrants Margin The Fine Art of Smiling Death-bed Repentance The Correlation of Moral Forces A Simple Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner Children's Parties After-supper Talk Hysteria in Literature Jog Trot The Joyless American Spiritual Teething Glass Houses The Old-Clothes Monger in Journalism The Country Landlord's Side The Good Staff of Pleasure ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... Of virtuous hope, of liberty, and right, Hath followed wheresoe'er a way was made By the Wind goddess—ruthless, undismayed; And so hath gained at length a prosperous height, Round which the elements of worldly might Beneath his haughty feet like clouds are laid. Oh, joyless power that stands by lawless force Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate, Internal darkness and unquiet breath; And if old judgments keep their sacred course, Him from that height shall heaven precipitate By violent or ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... you shining ran With peaceful floods, where the soft voice prevails Of building doves in lordly trees set high, Trees which enclose a home where love abides — His love and hers, a passioned ecstasy; Your tone has caught its echo and derides My joyless lot, as face down pressed I lie Upon the shifting sand, and hear the reeds Voicing a thin, dissonant threnody Unto the cliff and wind-tormented weeds. As with the faint half-lights of jade toward The shore you come and show a violet hue, I wonder ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... begins immediately to express itself in movements which are closely dependent upon bodily actions. Even when I suddenly resolve to face some correctly- supposed disagreeable matter, or to think about some joyless thing, a bodily movement, and indeed quite an energetic one, will ensue upon the resolution—I may push my chair back, raise my elbows, perhaps put my head quickly between my hands, push the chair back again, and then begin to look or to think. ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... seemed to look triumphantly through the solemn, purplish blue eyes of the young martyr, and Beryl knew that her own heart beat under the pamted folds of the diploidion; that she had epitomized in a symbolic picture, the history of her own joyless youth. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... from on high, to the abyss, The cataract of the Nile falls down and dulls the senses Of the joyless folk to every other sound, So stood I too, with spirit all intent Upon the living light, that lights the world; Dead henceforth to all the lesser splendours, While that light shines, let every other thing Be to the voluntary blind concealed. I pray you save me stumbling 'mongst the stones, Make ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... off their footmen's coats, to save the world? Or does it rather mean, that they are ready to leave houses, lands, and kindreds—yes, and life, if need be? Life!—some of us are ready enough to throw that away, joyless as we have made it. But "station in Life"—how many of us are ready to quit that? Is it not always the great objection, where there is question of finding something useful to do—"We cannot leave ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... plain that she had had another purpose in coming there than to make that speech. Ah, that marriage that her son had insisted on contracting, contrary to her wish, at the mature age of fifty, after twenty years of joyless married life with a shrewish, bony wife; he, who had always until then deferred so to her will, now swayed only by his passion for this gay young widow, lighter than thistle-down! She had promised herself to keep watch ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... mother, whom he is much attached to? What white man would have been his brother? What white woman his sister? He had two courses left open to him,—he could either have renounced all natural ties, and have led a hopeless, joyless life among the whites, ever a servant, ever an inferior being; or he could renounce civilisation, and return to the friends of his childhood, and to the habits of his youth. He chose the latter course, and I think that I ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... painfully true, and this desire is not so much the outcome of young women's natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from Stonor House and the joyless existence there. ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... fine house was silent and deserted now. Only his wife and his daughter Eliza lived in it, and they passed their days in dreary loneliness and incessant fear and anguish. Eliza Wallner was alone, all alone and joyless. She had not seen her beloved Elza since the day when she was married. She herself had started the same night with Haspinger for her father's headquarters. Elza had remained with her young husband in Innspruck, where her father died on the following day; and after the old Baron ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... much afraid of death, however; for his life had been a joyless one, a monotonous existence of perpetual toil, unrelieved by any home joys or social pleasures. He was not a bad man, for he was honest, conscientious, industrious, ...
— Henry Dunbar - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... not destined to accompany Manon's. Doubtless, Heaven did not as yet consider me sufficiently punished, and therefore ordained that I should continue to drag on a languid and joyless existence. I willingly renounced every hope of leading ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, overwhelmed her with reproaches. For consolation she had but the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... my Unitarian congregation for about a twelvemonth. My life during that time, save so far as my intercourse with Mrs. Lane, and one other friend presently to be mentioned, was concerned, was as sunless and joyless as it had ever been. Imagine me living by myself, roaming about the fields, and absorbed mostly upon insoluble problems with which I never made any progress, and which tended to draw me away from what enjoyment of life there was which I ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... he leave it again soon? Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than a fortnight at a time; and he has now been resident eight weeks. If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine days ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Our Club, the Van Twiller affair, though it was rather a joyless thing, I fancy, for Van Twiller. To understand the case fully, it should be understood that Ralph Van Twiller is one of the proudest and most sensitive men living. He is a lineal descendant of Wouter Van Twiller, the famous old ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... have the ordeal ended then and there; but second thought whispered, "To-morrow will soon be here; be patient." She entered her room, and, wearied by the events of the day, fell asleep, dreaming of the new lot in the cemetery, and the lonely, joyless man who haunted it. ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Hail, sleep, restorer of the tortured mind, Balm of the soul, and friend to human kind! The toils and tumults of our earthly scene Subside, and melt into thy sway serene. Life's sweetest cup, with purest blessings fraught, Were, without thee, a vapid joyless thought! My fellow captives all thy pleasures taste; Their fears, their sorrows, all in sleep are past; } Oh! be it peaceful still, for this may be the last! } Now, borne in vision to those airy plains } Where fancy ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... by. After many years of joyless life, the blind grandmother had at last found something to make her happy; her days were no longer passed in weariness and darkness, one like the other without pleasure or change, for now she had always something ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... Ah, the joyless fleeting Of our primal meeting, And the fateful greeting Of the How and Why! Ah, the Thingness flying From the Hereness, sighing For a love undying ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... countenance made upon me. The features so handsome, the colouring so fine, the person that of a finished gentleman; and yet, all this pleasing combination of form and face marred by that cold, cruel, merciless eye. Its expression so dead, so joyless, sent a chill through my whole frame, and I shrank from encountering its icy gaze, and was about quietly to retire by a back door, when my attention was arrested ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... thought, and he climbed the cliffs to look out. A line of fir-trees grew there, a comb of little misshapen ghoul-like things, stunted by the winds that swept over the seas in winter. In a fork of one of these a bird's nest of last year was still hanging; but it was now empty, songless, joyless, and dead. ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... frightful expectance of one accusing, child-claiming ghost that never came. The air softened to Indian summer; the ice faded off the pool; a million leaves, crimson and bronze, scarlet and gold, dropped tenderly upon its silvering breadth and lay still; and both the joyless master of the larger house and the merry maid of the cottage asked Heaven impatiently if the pond would never freeze ...
— Bylow Hill • George Washington Cable
... must be her state! And, torn from her, Doth Nala cling to life; or, day by day, Waste with long yearning? Oh, as I behold Those black locks, and those eyes—dark and long-shaped As are the hundred-petalled lotus-leaves— And watch her joyless who deserves all joy, My heart is sore! When will she overpass The river of this sorrow, and come safe Unto its farther shore? When will she meet Her lord, as moon and moon-star in the sky Mingle? For, as I think, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... yelled at her, and set their dogs upon her. The soil was thick with dust like soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... sufficient to look around us, and to consider the effects that religion produces on minds really penetrated with its pretended truths. We shall generally find in those who the most sincerely profess and the most exactly practise them, a joyless and melancholy disposition, which announces no contentment, nor that interior peace of which they speak so incessantly, without ever exhibiting any undoubted manifestations of it. Whoever is in the enjoyment of peace within, shows some exterior marks of it; ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... wearisome journey (ll. 521-535). On All-hallows day Arthur entertains right nobly the lords and ladies of his court in honour of his nephew, for whom all courteous knights and lovely ladies were in great grief. Nevertheless they spoke only of mirth, and, though joyless themselves, made many a joke to cheer the good Sir Gawayne (ll. 536-565). Early on the morrow Sir Gawayne, with great ceremony, is arrayed in his armour (ll. 566-589), and thus completely equipped ...
— Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight - An Alliterative Romance-Poem (c. 1360 A.D.) • Anonymous
... I sighed. Joyless, vacant, barren hours prefigured themselves to me, drifting through my brain, till their vacant shapes crowded it into darkness. I must do something! I would go out; a walk would be good for me. Moreover, wishing to purchase a parting gift for Adelaide and Ann, ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... quite clear to the Britisher that he must go, and it had been made quite clear by the Britisher that he should stay. Always outside the Hotel de Ville at 2.30 of an afternoon was this queue of natives, each waiting his turn to be admitted to the joyless sanctum of the Commissaire, there to receive those illegible documents without which no French home is complete. Never before had a British soldier fallen in with them, and, when requested to dismiss, showed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... objects of the taunts and revilings of their wicked pursuers, the insufficiency of the current explanation of misfortune was tragically demonstrated. To their minds Sheol or the grave offered no solution, for, as among all early Aryan and Semitic peoples, it was thought of as the dark, passionless, joyless abode of the shades. ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence assigns them. One alone, The redbreast, sacred to the household gods, Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky, In joyless fields ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... flood in quest of gain And beat for joyless months, the gloomy wave. Let such as deem it glory to destroy, Rush into blood, the sack of cities seek; Unpierced, exulting in the widow's wail, The virgin's ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... bridegroom sound thy virtues! Have our songs thus quickly vanished, Have our joyful tongues grown silent? Evil then has been the brewing, Then the beer must be unworthy, That it does not cheer the singer, Does not move the merry minstrel, That the golden guests are joyless, And the cuckoo is not singing. Never will these benches echo Till the bench-guests chant thy virtues; Nor the floor resound thy praises Till the floor-guests sing in concord; Nor the windows join the chorus Till the window-guests have spoken; All the tables will ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... to such as are my second, In spirit and in truth; Have pity on their helpless age And on their joyless youth. Remember them whene'er you feast, And on your downy bed, For the sake of Him who "had not where On ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... to join the "Ragged Regiment." They colour his face with walnut juice so that he looks a "true son of an Egyptian." Hundreds of pages are filled thereafter by tediously dragging in, mostly from other books, joyless and leering adventures of low dishonesty and low lust. Another book of the kind which Borrow knew was the life of Bamfylde Moore-Carew, born in 1693 at a Devonshire rectory. He hunted the deer with some of his schoolfellows from Tiverton and they played truant for ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... said, there is to me an indescribable pathos in these sombre pictures of Nature in our old Beowulf here, — these drear marshes, these monster-haunted meres, that boil with blood and foam with tempests, these fast-rooted, joyless woods that overlean the waters, these enormous, nameless beasts that lie along on promontories all day and wreak vengeance on ships at night — have you not seen them, headlands running out into the ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Greek in life was far greater than that of the Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring to a pagan, and "Pax tecum aeterna" is among the commonest of the inscriptions. The life beyond the grave was at best an unreal and joyless copy of an earthly existence, and Achilles told Odysseus that he would rather be the serf of a poor man upon earth than ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... to hear About our journey and our cheer, Our ships in autumn reach the sound, But long the way to Swedish ground. With joyless weather, wind and raind, And pinching cold, and feet in pain— With sleep, fatigue, and want oppressed, No songs ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... publish all these verses in one volume. They produce an impression of grey monotony which is hardly fair to the poet. The individuals change their names, but they pass through the same typical woe of childbirth, desertion, loveless old age, incipient insanity, with eternal joyless toil. One will form a higher opinion if one reads the separate volumes as they appeared, and not too ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... recurred to her mind—"May you never feel the want of a sincere and affectionate friend! May the triumphs of fashion make you amends for all you sacrifice to obtain them!"—"Alas!" thought she, "Ellen foresaw that I should soon be disgusted with this joyless, heartless intercourse; but how can I recede? how can I disengage myself from this Lord Bradstone, now that I have encouraged his addresses?— Fool that I have been!—Oh! if I could now be advised by that best of friends, who used to assist me in all my difficulties!—But she despises, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... analysed so deeply in his Cite antique. They subsisted in all their strength in Assyria, and must have had all the consequences, all the social effects that they had elsewhere, and yet we find mentioned a home for the dead, a joyless country in which they could assemble in their countless numbers; as Egypt had its Ament and Greece her Hades, so Chaldaea and Assyria had their hell, their place of departed ghosts. We know from ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... Around us, friends upbore the gentle dead Home, and dear women's heads about them wound White shrouds, and here they sleep in the old ground Beloved. And the rest long days fought on, Dwelling with wives and children, not alone And joyless, like these Greeks. ...
— The Trojan women of Euripides • Euripides
... bow thee down the livelong day, in the Jotuns' courts. To the Hrimthursar's halls, thou shalt each day crawl exhausted, joyless crawl; wail for pastime shalt thou have, ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... their habits, language, and beliefs. One day he said to the chief man of the little tribe, "You Veddas never laugh. Why do you never laugh?" The little wild man replied, "It is true; we never laugh. What is there for us to laugh at?"—an answer almost terrible in its pathetic submission to a joyless life. For laughter is primarily, to all races and conditions of men, the accompaniment, the expression of the simple joy of life. It has acquired a variety of relations and significations in the course of the long ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... of Gunnar the war-king cried out o'er the weeping hall: "Wail on, O women forsaken, for the mightiest woman born! Now the hearth is cold and joyless, and the waste bed lieth forlorn. Wail on, but amid your weeping lay hand to the glorious dead, That not alone for an hour may lie Queen Brynhild's head: For here have been heavy tidings, and the Mightiest under shield Is laid on the bale high-builded in the Niblungs' ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... antecedents. The winds never reach it and its surface is never ruffled; but its deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it in communication with the capricious and treacherous forces of nature. Its very colour is of a joyless beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it affects the very type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening to see the ghosts of classic nymphs ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... way in case the nightingales were silent; and even along the streets of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures, etc.," the true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and harassed ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson |
