"Poignancy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prejudicially affecting her health. The dear old soul always tried to make the best of it, but nature would out, although it was more from indirect remarks than from any positive complaints, that Tournier gathered the true state of the case. Of course it grieved him exceedingly, and added fresh poignancy to his unhappiness. But there was one thing that, for the first two years, her letters always contained in one form or another, that made some sweet amends, and that was that she invariably added how his dear Elise soothed and comforted her. "Whenever I see her," his ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... remembered the taste of whiskey and of blood. If only it had been Dickie's lips that had first touched her own. Blinding tears fell. The memory of Dickie's comfort, of Dickie's tremulous restraint, had a strange poignancy.... Why was he so different from all the rest? So much more like her father? What was there in this pale little hotel clerk who drank too much that lifted him out and up into a sort of radiance? Her memory of Dickie was always white—the whiteness ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... believe, have not yet completely died out. In the end, however, Mr. Moncrieff beat his opponent by sixty-seven votes, a majority so small in proportion to the constituency that the bitterness and humiliation of defeat must have been felt with more than ordinary poignancy. It seemed at that time as if the Conservatives would never have another chance of lifting their heads above water. There were few constituencies in Scotland on which they could place perfect reliance, and ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... Darsie had listened while a woman who had been near San Francisco at the time of the earthquake and fire endeavoured to describe what was in truth indescribable, how the very air itself was at that time charged with a poignancy of agony—an impalpable spiritual agony, apart from such physical cause as heat and fire, an agony which arose from the grief of thousands of ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of foolish illusion. Indeed, I am not telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring back to me with indescribable poignancy the particular impression of a time or a place. I prize them more highly than almost any other of my possessions, for they come to me seemingly out of the air, and the remembrance of them enables ...
— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson
... new symptoms developed themselves with a rapidity and poignancy that made Fisher feel uncommonly anxious. Savitch's face became as white as marble—its paleness rendered startling by the sharp contrast of the black skull cap. His form reeled as he sat on the bed, and he clasped his head convulsively ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various
... gorge, with a sound like the rumbling of an earth-quake, broke away, and swept us along in its dreadful course. Now did it seem, indeed, as if we had been tempted with hope, only that we might feel to its full extent of poignancy the bitterness of absolute despair. I yielded in hopeless inactivity to the current; my companion, in the meantime, was separated from me—and I felt as if fate had singled out me, alone, as the victim; but, while thus yielding to despondency, Victor again appeared at my side, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... employed in making of patties, for stuffing of veal, game, and poultry. The ingredients should be so proportioned, that no one flavour predominates; and instead of using the same stuffing for veal, hare, and other things, it is easy to make a suitable variety. The poignancy of forcemeat should be regulated by the savouriness of the viands, to which it is intended to give an additional zest. Some dishes require a very delicately flavoured stuffing, while for others it should be full and high seasoned. The consistence of forcemeats ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... various regrets in her mind, incipient even before he had quite gone, and now defining themselves momently with added poignancy. A woman who, in her retirement at home, charges herself with the control of a man's conduct abroad, is never likely to be devoid of speculation upon probable disasters to ensue upon any abatement of the activities of her discretion. She was sorry ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... pressing the hoped-for fruit of that union to your breast, in that tenderness which you will hourly receive from me, will there be nothing to compensate you for sorrows in which there is no remorse, and which, indeed, will owe their poignancy to the ...
— Jane Talbot • Charles Brockden Brown
... poignancy of pity, whether the coolie-woman were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... have come to understand the term in the West. There is no "construction," no knot tied and untied, no character. Rather there is a succession of scenes selected from a well-known story for some quality of poignancy, or merely of narrative interest. The form, I think, should be called epic or lyric rather than dramatic. And it is in this point that it most obviously differs from the Greek drama. It has no intellectual content, or very little. And, perhaps for that reason, it ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... personalities—a work which is as easily spoiled by a word out of season as a fine porcelain vase is cracked in a furnace—to direct their ideas of the aims of life towards worthy and unselfish ends, to foster true loyalty because of God from whom all authority comes—and this lesson has its pathetic poignancy for us in the history of our English martyrs—to show the claims that our country has upon the devotion of its sons and daughters, and to inspire some feeling of responsibility for its honour, especially ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... crowned the 'meek usurper's holy head,' after his dreary half-century of suffering under the retribution of the ancestral sins of two lines of forefathers. All had been undergone in a deep and holy trust and faith such as could render even his hereditary insanity an actual shield from the poignancy of grief. ...
— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... flowers of that idyllic land. It was the life vapor of the hinano, the tiare and the frangipani exhaled by those flowers of Tahiti, to be wafted to the sailor before he sights the scene itself, the breath of Lorelei that spelled the sense of the voyager. No shipwrecked mariner could have felt more poignancy in his search for a hospitable strand than I on the plunging prow of the Noa-Noa in my quest through the bright sunshine of that afternoon for the haven of desire. I strained my eyes to see it, to realize the gossamer dream I had spun since boyhood from ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... exposure to danger. The extreme vanity of the modern Englishman in making a momentary Stylites of himself on the top of a Horn or an Aiguille, and his occasional confession of a charm in the solitude of the rocks, of which he modifies nevertheless the poignancy with his pocket newspaper, and from the prolongation of which he thankfully escapes to the nearest table-d'hote, ought to make us less scornful of the pride, and more intelligent of the passion, in which the ...
— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin
... with instructive sympathy: Alfieri never subtly analysed the anatomy of individual nature, nor did he unconsciously mimic its action and tones; what most of us mean by pathos did not appeal to him. Neither metrical nor imaginative pleasurableness, nor descriptive charm, nor lyric poignancy, nor psychological analysis or intention entered, therefore, into Alfieri's conception of a desirable tragedy, any more than any of these things fell within the range of his special talents; for, we must always bear in mind that with this man, whose feelings and desires were in such ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... a humourous meaning in that expression, and that this turn, in most cases, gives a delightful poignancy both to your conversation and correspondence; but indeed, my dear, this case will ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... Frenchmen, but Americans, Argentinians, Australians, etc. etc.... Thousands of little children, without their parents' knowledge, took pen in hand and wrote to tell him their love: most of them called him Our Father. And there was poignancy about their effusions, their adoration, these sighs of deliverance that escaped from thousands of hearts at the defeat of barbarism. To all these naif little souls, Joffre seemed like St. George crushing the dragon. Certainly he incarnated for the conscience ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... he, "let England, as an abstraction, fend for itself. But you've a bonny English soul within you, and for that you are fighting. And so had poor Taffy Jones. And I have a bonny Scottish thirst, the poignancy of which both of you have been happily spared. I will leave you, laddie, to seek in ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... natural, the Hebertist Python did hiss and writhe amazingly; and threaten 'sacred right of Insurrection;'—and, as we saw, get cast into Prison. Nay, with all the old wit, dexterity, and light graceful poignancy, Camille, translating 'out of Tacitus, from the Reign of Tiberius,' pricks into the Law of the Suspect itself; making it odious! Twice, in the Decade, his wild Leaves issue; full of wit, nay of humour, of harmonious ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... she is so soon afterwards to inflict upon herself, was not indeed inherited by her son; he is, on the contrary, conspicuous throughout for the purity of his intentions; and his care and anxiety to escape from the predicted crime, added naturally to the poignancy of his despair, when he found that he had nevertheless been overtaken by it. Awful indeed is his blindness in not perceiving the truth when it was, as it were, brought directly home to him; as, for instance, when he ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... naturally evolving towards an attitude, a philosophy, more profound and comprehensive than could be expressed adequately in such records of momentary aspiration and emotion as the Odes; though the keen and sudden poignancy that had invaded them belongs to the new Keats. They mark the transition to the new poetry which he vaguely discerned. The problem was to find the method. The letters we have quoted to show his reaction from the Miltonic influence ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... that even she could not doubt the immense yet incredible result. Then despair whispered its cold-blooded taunts, and her last hopeless words echoed in his ear. But he was too agitated to be calmly miserable, and, in the poignancy of his feelings, he even meditated death. One thing, however, he could obtain; one instant relief was yet in his power, solitude. He panted for the loneliness of his own chamber, broken only by ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... countenance had been one more of sorrow than of anger. The tone of melancholy reproach in which she had uttered the words: "I did not expect this from you, Monsieur de Buxieres!" seemed to convey the hope that he might, one day, be forgiven. At the same time, the poignancy of his regret showed him how much hold the young girl had taken upon his affections, and how cheerless and insipid his life would be if he were obliged to continue on unfriendly terms with the ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... strange that she so reluctantly admitted the idea of love; especially as, in the sculptor, she found both congeniality and variety of taste, and likenesses and differences of character; these being as essential as those to any poignancy ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the unequalled facilities of a European railway carriage for rendering unpleasant things almost intolerable. These people could find no way to alleviate the poignancy of their position. Coleman did not know where to look. Every personal mannerism becomes accentuated in a European railway carriage. If you glance at a man, your glance defines itself as a stare. If you carefully look at nothing, you create for ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... man leaped to his feet and turned his face westward towards the sea with outstretched arms, and a look and gesture of utter yearning gave poignancy and spirit to the careless, sleepy grace of his face and figure. He seized the boy's arm. "See now," he cried, his voice trembling upon the verge of music, "it is nearly twelve years that I have been a wanderer, shorn of my strength and my glory! Look you, boy, ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... imply censure of those, who, in planning the expedition, were far more anxious to make discoveries, than to extend their importance by the labours of the naturalist. Considering then from whom it comes, a liberal interpreter would concede a little allowance to its poignancy of complaint. Men very naturally attach superior importance to studies which have long and almost exclusively engrossed their own attention, and are exceedingly apt to ascribe to ignorance, or something still more dishonourable, that indifference to them which those who are in power seem to manifest. ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... can hope to convey the poignancy and pathos of the original. The ideal translation, then, must be in verse, and perhaps the best way for us to determine which style and metre are most suited to convey to the modern reader an impression of the charm of Virgil, will be to take a brief glance at some of the best-known of ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... these were common to most of the defalcations, great and small, which were of daily fame in the newspapers. But the doubt as to the man's fate, and the enduring mystery of his whereabouts, if he were still alive, were qualities that gave peculiar poignancy to Northwick's case. Its results in the failure of people not directly involved, were greater than could have been expected; and the sum of his peculations mounted under investigation. It was all much worse than had been imagined, and in most of the editorial ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... himself up for lost, an amateur cornetist who occupied a studio on the floor above began to play the Lost Chord. A counter-pain set in immediately. At the second bar of the Lost Chord the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his vitals seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater suffering, and physical relief was instant. As the musician proceeded the internal disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally passed away entirely, leaving him so far from prostrated ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... narrative of outward events, the phases through which Tennyson had been passing. Desultory though the method of its production be, and loose 'the texture of its fabric', there is a certain sequence of thought running through the cantos. We see how from the first poignancy of grief, when he can only brood passively over his friend's death, he was led to questioning the basis of his faith, shaken as it was by the claims of physical science—how from those doubts of his own, he was led to think of the universal trouble of the world—how at ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... and toes into the grass and bit a mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing poignancy of it. Was there no way ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... hamlet pictured by Goldsmith was neither one thing nor the other, but first Irish and then English. Criticism purely aesthetic cannot destroy the poignancy and profoundness of the theme and throughout the ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... were obliged to delay their vengeance out of respect for the sacred place (Peace-stead) where they were assembled. They at length gave vent to their grief by loud lamentations, though not one of them could find words to express the poignancy of his feelings. Odin, especially, was more sensible than the others of the loss they had suffered, for he foresaw what a detriment Baldur's death would be to the AEsir. When the gods came to themselves, Frigga asked who among them wished to gain all ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... to be sincere, while romantic plays live in an atmosphere of ingenuity and make-believe. The Iphigenia is not of the same order as The Trojan Women. Yet it is a delightful play; subtle, ever-changing, full of movement and poignancy. The recognition scene became to Aristotle a model of what such a scene should be; and the long passage before it, from the entrance of the two princes onward, seems to me one of the most skilful and fascinating ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... beset us for not having taken the left-hand road in life instead of the right are our chief mental resources after forty, and they tell me that we men only know half the poignancy of these miserable recollections. Women have a special adaptiveness for this kind of torture—would seem actually to ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... azalea on the long mahogany table, strewn with books, separated them by its fierce splash of color. The apathy of Diane's voice was not that of worn-out emotion, but of emotion which finds no adequate tones. The very way in which her inquiry ignored all other subjects between them had its poignancy. ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... performing my ablutions, guess my mortification, when a huge rat running from his hole leaped into the dish which was placed upon the floor. I was near fainting with agony at the sight, and could not refrain from tears; but at length recovering from the poignancy of disappointment, the rays of comfort darted upon my mind, and I reflected that as disgrace and imprisonment had instantaneously followed the fortunate recovery of my cup and ring, so this mortification, a greater than which could not have happened, would ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... little now, and to have regained some mastery of his drunken self. Old Mariani tottered back to his buffet, and stood leaning against it, his eyes wandering, with the look of a man demented, to the fire that had devoured his child. There, indeed, if he escaped the madness with which the poignancy of his grief was threatening him, was a tool that might turn its edge against this inhuman monster, this devil, this bloody carnifex ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... Fairless"—the gleam of the White Gate is seen all along the Road, though the writer strives so bravely to keep it hidden till it must open to let him pass. One of the purest gems of Jefferies—"Hours of Spring"—has a pathos and haunting melody of compelling poignancy. It is like a white violet ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Thank you!" Then in tearful appeal, seeing his displeasure, "Oh, Felix, I love you!" The poignancy of her cry made him relent suddenly, and turn. He put an arm about her, and she clung to him wildly. "Oh, Felix, trust me! Oh, you're all ...
— Apron-Strings • Eleanor Gates
... own particular grief in thus losing the best & most valued friend I ever had on earth, receives additional poignancy from the fact that, although duly impressed with an abiding sense of the imperishable obligation, conferred upon me by my lamented friend, I have been debarred, by my own physical infirmities, from proffering those services which it would have afforded me ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... rose and walked down a shadowy aisle between the mesquites. On his way back the Yaqui joined him. Gale was not surprised. He had become used to the Indian's strange guardianship. But now, perhaps because of Gale's poignancy of thought, the contending tides of love and regret, the deep, burning premonition of deadly strife, he was moved to keener scrutiny of the Yaqui. That, of course, was futile. The Indian was impenetrable, silent, strange. But suddenly, inexplicably, Gale felt ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... of him—how kind!" cried the little woman. The poignancy of her voice cut into his disappointment like a sharp ray of light. "Even then—to think of me. But don't you understand that he wouldn't want me to—to take anything that I felt I ought not ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... structure about the size and shape of a small canal-boat, with the most beautiful patriotic pictures all over it, of which I only remember Lord Cornwallis surrendering his sword in the politest and most theatrical manner imaginable, although the poignancy of his feelings had apparently turned his scarlet uniform to a pale orange. This magnificent equipage was a trifle rheumaticky about its underpinning, but, drawn by four, six, or eight horses, it still took the road on holidays; and in ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... good a sportsman to question his judgment by worry when once committed to an enterprise. The world now lay before him as he had wished it—an enchanted land in which he could move with as great freedom as a prince in the magical kingdoms of Arabia. The Present became sharpened to poignancy. Even as he stood there musing over the marvel of the new world into which he had leaped—the old thin world of years condensed into one thick week—he realized that this very wondering had cost him five precious minutes. A dozen such periods made an hour, two dozen hours a ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... oppression of a thing that was greater than disappointment settled upon him heavily, driving from him his own personal dread of this night's ghastly adventure, and adding to his suspense of the last forty-eight hours a hopelessness the poignancy of which was almost like that of a physical pain. Tavish was dead, and in dying he had taken with him the secret for which David would have paid with all he was worth in this hour. In his despair, as he stood there alone in the cabin, he muttered something to himself. The ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... is offensive to modest ears, yet does his poetry discover such energy of style and such poignancy of satire, as give ground to imagine what so fine a genius, had he fallen in a more happy age, and had followed better models, was capable of producing. The ancient satirists often used great liberties in their expressions; but ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part F. - From Charles II. to James II. • David Hume
... from drawer or wardrobe that which remained some moments in her hand, while the incidents of purchase and the first joys of possession, to one who had possessed so little in her life, came back to her with a certain poignancy. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... found later, I did him injustice. His tales were all literally true, and Uncle Jesse had the gift of the born story-teller, whereby "unhappy, far-off things" can be brought vividly before the hearer and made to live again in all their pristine poignancy. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... putting the reel of red silk into the square which was intended for the blue, and arranging the colours in squares and parallels. He was much absorbed in it, and yet he did not know what he was doing. His little bosom swelled high with thought, his heart was wrung with the poignancy of love rejected—of loss and change. It was not that he was jealous; the sensations which he experienced had little bitterness or anger in them. Presently he turned round and said, "I think I ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... ourselves; but my young guest has developed a new mood of late which gives poignancy to my growing tenderness for the girl. She has kept up wonderfully, with the aid of her bit of a temper, for which I like her none the less. How she will stand this idleness, monotony, and intimacy, with the accent ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... there publicly insulted him. The inevitable duel took place next morning, and at the first shot Major Warde fell dead. Sweeny had to flee the country. He escaped to St Albans, Vermont, where he died, it was said, of remorse a few months later. What must have added poignancy to his sufferings was the statement, afterwards made, that the whole affair was a malicious plot, and that {67} the fatal missive which caused all the trouble was a forgery. Afterwards Mrs Sweeny returned to Montreal, where she went into lodgings. About the same time a raw Scottish lad, who had been ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... goes forward and takes us with it. No matter how resolutely we cling to darkness and sorrow, time loosens our hearts, dries our tears, and while we declare we will not be comforted, and reproach ourselves, as the first poignancy of grief consciously fades, yet we are comforted. The world will not wait for us to mourn. The objects of love and of hate we may bear along with us, but distance will intervene between us and the sources ...
— Bart Ridgeley - A Story of Northern Ohio • A. G. Riddle
... thenceforth suffering and they were to be strangers. And united by the memory of what they had endured together in ties closer than those of brotherhood, they clasped each other in a wild embrace, and the kiss that they exchanged at that moment seemed to them to possess a savor and a poignancy such as they had never experienced before in all their life; a kiss such as they never could receive from lips of woman, sealing their undying friendship, giving additional confirmation to the certainty that ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... breakfast; and just as he was conjuring up visions of a country-house meal, with hot bread, delicious butter, and yellow cream, he detected in the distance the cooking of home-made bacon, and as if to add poignancy to the keen edge of his hunger, a hen began loudly to announce that somewhere or other there was ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... felt the poignancy of this sarcasm, and whose constant and unaffected value of Mrs Delvile by no means deserved it, was again silenced, and again most cruelly depressed: nor could she secretly forbear repining that at the very moment she found herself threatened with a necessity ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... a moment's silence, a silence which in this corner of the great room seemed marked with a certain poignancy. It was the Prime Minister ...
— The Illustrious Prince • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... years the shadow and glory of a great Eastern figure has lain upon our English literature. Fitzgerald's translation of Omar Khayyam concentrated into an immortal poignancy all the dark and drifting hedonism of our time. Of the literary splendour of that work it would be merely banal to speak; in few other of the books of men has there been anything so combining the ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... before she suspected that her imagination had deceived her; imagination, ever the most potent factor of her being, the source alike of her strength and her weakness. But there came a day when the poignancy of her grief was subdued, and she looked around her upon a world more desolate than that in which she found herself on the day of her mother's burial. She began to know once more that she was young, and that existence stretched before ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... and I was lost in a game where I didn't know the rules. The explanation I thought might get me out alive might be the very one which would bring down instant and painful death. Suddenly, with a poignancy that was almost pain, I wished Rakhal were standing here at ...
— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... question a word of the narrative that had reduced a dismal enigma to luminous, connected facts. With the swift processes of reason and the promptness of decision of which he was capable on occasion, he had made up his mind as to his future even as he ascended the stairs to his room. The poignancy of his father's appeal had struck to the bed-rock of his affection and his conscience, revealing duty not as a thing that you set for yourself, but which circumstances set ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... twice narrowly escaped hanging, and composed many of his poems in prison. He was a poet of great originality, for he broke away from the conventional subjects and the allegorizing habit of the Middle Ages and gave to the lyric a personal note and a depth and poignancy of feeling that made it almost a new creation, though he still adhered mainly to the traditional forms and showed a special preference for the ballade. Most of his ballades are introduced into his main works, the Petit Testament and the ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... very point about which we are so solicitous. Sorrow shared with affectionate friends is relieved of half its poignancy. ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... thwarted her. Now, however, the unforeseen had happened. She was smitten with the grand passion, and confronted for the first time in her life with the startling proposition of "self-sacrifice." She loved Shiel. She wouldn't marry him for the very simple reason he had no money—but that only added poignancy to the situation. She loved him all the more. She knew Shiel loved Gladys Martin. Whether he could ever marry Gladys was another matter—but he loved her all the same. And the proposition, that had been ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree. It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes of ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... why we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of other people. I think it would have been quite enough for her to do the trapeze acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added a poignancy to the contemplation of her perils. One could follow every motion of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin as she bit her lips before taking her flight through the air, the straining eagerness of her eye as she measured the distance, the frown with which ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... he wished that he could have seen Forrest Haviland again before he started. He wished with all the poignancy of man's affection for a real man that he had told Forrest, when they were dining at the Brevoort, how happy he was to be with him. ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... were an admirable achievement, or even of any particular importance. And yet she seemed to think it was both of these when, resting against him, within the circle of his arm, still shy and silent under the breathless poignancy of an emotion which ever seemed to sound ...
— Between Friends • Robert W. Chambers
... is how the dear Lord looked, or acted—see, the words in the Bible are so or so forth. Therefore, there enters into these designs, which contain after all only the same sort of skill which was rife in Italy, so much homeliness at once, and poignancy and sublimity of imagination. The Virgin, they have discovered, is not that grandly dressed lady, always in the very finest brocade, with the very finest manners, and holding a divine infant that has no earthly wants, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... us by all the providences and events of our changeful lives. Our sorrows by their poignancy, our joys by their incompleteness and their transiency, alike call us to Him in whom alone the sorrows can be soothed and the joys made full and remain. Our duties, by their heaviness, call us to turn ourselves to Him, in whom alone we can find the strength to fill the role ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... for the negative which Julian hastened to give. He was both perplexed and troubled by the unexpected violence of her emotion, and blamed himself as the cause. But, though he blamed himself, his regret for what was irrevocable had none of the poignancy of Cuckoo's. For a long time he had gloried in living in a cloister with Valentine. Now he had left the cloister, he did not look back to it with the curious pathos which so often gathers like moss upon even a dull and vacant past. He did not, ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... ballroom where Van Lennop claimed his dance. She grew white even to her lips, and her knees shook unaccountably beneath her as she watched Dr. Harpe glide the length of the room in Van Lennop's arms. The momentary pain she felt in her heart had the poignancy of an actual stab. It was so—so unexpected; he had so unequivocally ranged himself upon her side, he had seen so plainly Dr. Harpe's illy-concealed venom and resented it in his quiet way, as she had thought, that this seemed ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... freedom from the suspicion of anything behind the scenes, showed how incapable Knight was of deception himself, rather than any inherent dulness in him regarding human nature. This, clearly perceived by Elfride, added poignancy to her self-reproach, and she idolized him the more because of their difference. Even the recent sight of Stephen's face and the sound of his voice, which for a moment had stirred a chord or two of ancient kindness, ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... as her intellect ripens faster, into deep and serious subjects: and that her range of literature should be, not more, but less frivolous; calculated to add the qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural poignancy of thought and quickness of wit; and also to keep her in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not now into any question of choice of books; only let us be sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap as they fall out ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... the poignancy of sensation. She was all throat. Faust's opening greeting to the dawn, his challenge to happiness, pierced her. She sat forward on her chair, anticipating the lyrical vision of Marguerite, her hands clasped over the handle of her wet umbrella, ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... great-grandson, may be named after him. In this tribe the taboo is not much observed at any time except by the relations of the dead. Similarly the Jesuit missionary Lafitau tells us that the name of the departed and the similar names of the survivors were, so to say, buried with the corpse until, the poignancy of their grief being abated, it pleased the relations "to lift up the tree and raise the dead." By raising the dead they meant bestowing the name of the departed upon some one else, who thus became to all intents ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... to be supposed that Andrew Melville could retain the least personal resentment against Mr. Herbert; whose verses have in them so little of the poignancy of satire, that it is scarce possible to consider them as capable of exciting the anger of him to ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... life flow over me. I would yearn for amusement, and search in vain for some object to amuse me. When you first came I was deeply interested in so extraordinary a case as yours; and after a while, when the acuteness of my curiosity and the poignancy of my sympathy for you had abated, you became to me a joy, as a child is a joy in the ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... force of such a supposition, with all its poignancy, its dramatic intensity, and its pathos, possessed the crowd. In the momentary clairvoyance of enthusiasm they caught a glimpse of the truth, and by one of the strange reactions of human passion they ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... a confectioner's frequently stood beside the florist's. Young Florence, an immune who had known the mumps in infancy, became an almost constant attendant upon the patient, with the result that the niece contracted an illness briefer than the aunt's, but more than equalling it in poignancy, caused by the poor child's economic struggle against waste. Florence's convalescence took place in her own home without any inquiries whatever from the outer world, but Julia's was spent in great part at the telephone. Even a poem was repeated to her ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... of the political action, such as it was, seemed closer, and acquired poignancy by Antonia's belief in the cause. Its crudeness hurt his feelings. He was surprised at his ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... so little to be said of Keats that critics are at their wit's end to express their appreciation. So we read of Keats's "pure aestheticism," his "copious perfection," his "idyllic visualization," his "haunting poignancy of feeling," his "subtle felicities of diction," his "tone color," and more to the same effect. Such criticisms are doubtless well meant, but they are harder to follow than Keats's "Endymion"; and that is no short or easy road of poesy. Perhaps ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... from the fervency of the sun, from whence we could see him blazing at both ends of it. A long and endearing familiarity has indeed been ours, melancholy and unsating; and it has given rise to a host of trying associations, conjured up by each new visit after a brief absence from Rome, and now adds poignancy of regret to what we feel must be ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... famous Dr. Swinnerton, who, on his death- bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to his favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row of shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and had the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he told him, that, properly used, they would be worth all the rest of the legacy a hundred-fold. As the apothecary, however, found the manuscripts, in which he conjectured there was a treatise on the subject of these ...
— The Dolliver Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... clearly as any oration what are the thoughts and feelings of the character. The orchestra makes, as it were, a tide or ocean, over which the voice, in this manner, floats, now rising high on the crest of the wave, now sinking into the trough of the seas. Sometimes for added poignancy, Wagner makes the voice sing the leitmotif of some idea connected with the idea of the moment. This is constantly occurring in ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... this perverter of the Scriptures draw his conclusions? From a single sentence expressing David's submission to the dispensation of Providence. His soul "longed to go forth unto Absalom: for he was comforted concerning Amnon, seeing he was dead." The poignancy of his grief having been softened by time, his thoughts turned from the dead to the living son, self-banished through fear of the just punishment of his crime. And this is the evidence that the incestuous, ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White
... able to set her pulse dancing. She had never craved physical nearness to him, so that she ached with the poignancy of that craving. She had been passively contented with him, that was all. And Monohan had swept across her horizon like a flame. Why couldn't Jack Fyfe have inspired in her that headlong sort of passion? ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... gentility," ratted bodily. Newspaper and public turned against the victim, scouted him, apologized for the—what should they be called?—who were not only admitted into the most respectable society, but courted to come, the spots not merely of wine on their military clothes, giving them a kind of poignancy. But there is a God in heaven; the British glories are tarnished—Providence has never smiled on British arms since that case—oh! Balaklava! thy name interpreted is net of fishes, and well dost thou deserve that name. How many a scarlet golden fish has of late perished in the mud amidst ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... is the celebrated epigram made by Rochester on Charles II. It was composed at the King's request, who nevertheless resented its poignancy. ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... trusted could have procured such intimate, such dramatic photographs. They were as unlike the usual posed portraits of Indian life as is a stage shower unlike an actual thunder storm. There was indeed a subtle passion and poignancy about the pictures that it seemed to Enoch as well as to the President, only a fine mind could have found and captured. He had made the rounds of the little room twice, threading his way abstractedly through ...
— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow
... mathematics and mechanics. But the geniuses even in strictly intellectual fields have frequently been men of sensitiveness, delicacy, and responsiveness to the feelings of others. That intellectual analysis, however, does frequently blunt the poignancy of feeling is illustrated in the case of John Stuart Mill, who writes ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... conscience for his grosser desires; nay, should he come to his wished-for yet desolate conclusion, from which the abhorrent nature shrinks and recoils, I do nevertheless firmly think, should the study have been long and deep, that he would wonder to find his desires had lost their poignancy and his objects their charm. He would descend from the Alp he had climbed to the low level on which he formerly deemed it a bliss to dwell, with the feeling of one who, having long drawn in high places an empyreal air, has become unable ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... precipitant, fickle, moving, and inconstant; a fever subject to intermissions and paroxysms, that has seized but on one part of us. Whereas in friendship, 'tis a general and universal fire, but temperate and equal, a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth, without poignancy or roughness. Moreover, in love, 'tis no other than frantic desire for that which flies ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... of these stages is a certain vague fear of evil, which seems to be conscience hardly aware of itself as such. It is "the sense of some unexplored evil ever dogging his footsteps," which reached its keenest poignancy in a constitutional horror of serpents, but which is a very subtle and undefinable thing, observable rather as an undertone to his consciousness of life than as anything tangible enough to be defined or accounted for by particular causes. On the journey to Rome, the vague misgivings took shape ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... steady nerves and a level head, and an abundant confidence in both. Because that dingy little wooden building with its outside stair to his attic, was the nucleus of memories that had by no means lost their poignancy. It was not, after all, so many years ago that she had mounted that stair for the first time, and it couldn't be considered strange that her heart quickened a little as ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... we heard a sound which sent a chill thrill running up and down our spines, the sound of singing, a faint far-off chorus of the loveliest voices that ever fell on mortal ears. The tone had that marvelous silver clang of the woodland thrush with yet a deeper, human poignancy, a note of passionate longing and endearment, shy but assertive, wild, but oh! so alluring. We chinned ourselves expectantly on the edge of ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... The waves splashed softly against the fallen rocks forty to fifty feet below. They seemed to be calling to him. It was almost like a summons from far away—almost like a bugle-call heard in the mists of sleep. Somehow they soothed him, lessening the poignancy of his anguish, checking his wild rebellion, making him aware of a strangely ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... if her heart would break, catching her indrawn breath with a strange sound of anguish, forlornness, the terrible crying of a woman with a loving heart, whose heart has never been able to relax. Alvina was hushed. In a second, she became the elder of the two. The terrible poignancy of the woman of fifty-two, who now at last had broken down, silenced the girl of twenty-three, and roused all her passionate tenderness. The terrible sound of "Never now, never now—it is too late," ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... signall'st punctual through the sleepy mould The Snowdrop's time to flower, Fair as the rash oath of virginity Which is first-love's first cry; O, Baby Spring, That flutter'st sudden 'neath the breast of Earth A month before the birth; Whence is the peaceful poignancy, The joy contrite, Sadder than sorrow, sweeter than delight, That burthens now the breath of everything, Though each one sighs as if to each alone The cherish'd pang were known? At dusk of dawn, on his dark ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... Filsted when Magdalen was a very young girl. His father had come down suddenly, had found debt and dissipation, had broken all off decidedly, and no more had been heard of the young man. It was many years previously; but those cheeks and the tone of the reply made her suspect that there was still poignancy ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... capital form, and talked freely, with a certain poignancy, being no fool. He told two or three stories verging on the improper, a concession to the company, for his stories were not used to verging. He proposed Irene's health in a mock speech. Nobody drank it, and Winifred said: "Don't be such ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... noticing them, he found these airy nothings as harmless as they were unreal. The habits of the literary character will, however, be tried by the men and women of the world by their own standard: they have no other; the salt of ridicule gives a poignancy to their deficient comprehension, and their perfect ignorance, of the persons or things which are the subjects of their ingenious animadversions. The habits of the literary character seem inevitably repulsive ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... well understood my clanger, and I saw him wringing his hands in his anxiety; yet he saw that he could do nothing to help me. I felt that I had been very foolish; and the poignancy of my regret was heightened when I remembered that I had placed myself in my present predicament without any necessity or an adequate object. I had little time, I own, to indulge in such reflections, for all my thoughts ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... poignancy of a poisoned arrow reality came to me. Because Dick had loved Leila Burton he had laid his bond with me on the altar of his chivalry. For her sake he had sacrificed me to the hurt to which Standish would not sacrifice her. And the joke of it—the pity of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... for Sylvia the visit which always afterward stood out in her memory unique in the poignancy of its novel impressions. Despite the simplicity of life at Anemone Cottage, there was an order and smoothness in the management of details which constantly attracted and charmed the guest. The poetry of the wild enchanting surroundings was ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... itself had done all that was expected of it, but the first attempt at walking, to which the poor fellow had looked forward as to a festival, proved in reality a painful and depressing experience. Back in his bed, limp with pain and exhaustion, poor Pat realised his own weakness with a poignancy of disappointment. He had expected to be able to walk at once, though not perhaps for any length of time, and these few stumbling steps had been a bitter revelation. All these weeks of confinement and suffering, and now ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... a moment and looked down on the happy young people. She wondered if they realized how happy they were or if it would be necessary to be old to appreciate the blessing of merely being young. Suddenly a picture of her youth came back to her with a poignancy that almost hurt. It was in that very hall and she was standing on those very stairs—perhaps in that self-same spot. There was a house party at Buck Hill and she had come from Peyton only that morning in a brand new carriage with Billy driving the spanking pair of nags. Billy was young ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... the practice of the nefarious profession. But there are few, very few, we suppose, who are not connected by the ties of blood, the bonds of matrimony, or the relation of father to child, who are all affected by such degradation as the gambler visits upon himself, and who feel the bitter poignancy of the stroke with greater force than he whose heart has been gradually but surely abased. While a man has a single relation or friend, he should not gamble; and if he stood alone in the world, with no friend, the fear of the eternal judgment should deter him from the commission ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green
... the time my whole being is still restless with the storms that raged in it last spring! I have all those memories, all that poignancy. I can not realize it—any of what I was and had—but I know it as a fact, a memory, and I crouch and tremble, I grow sick ...
— The Journal of Arthur Stirling - "The Valley of the Shadow" • Upton Sinclair
... supposition is but too just," replied the weeping girl; "and it is that circumstance which adds to the poignancy of my grief: were he a less estimable character, were he divested of those amiable qualities that render man dear to the eyes of woman, my reasons for refusing his addresses would be unanswerable. In that ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... thing would seek to make it easy for the little girl. And Margaret will need to take Dugald over his mathematics, I fear, before he goes up to the entrance." At which remark the painful feeling which the reciting and singing had caused Barney to forget for the time, returned with even greater poignancy. ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... used to furnish a picture for coming events. Like drama which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into a unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens an epoch into an episode. It gains in poignancy, but loses reality. Men grew from infancy to old age, their children's children had married and loved and worked while the social change we speak of as the industrial revolution was being consummated. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... enjoy the agony of his sister's suspense. Her face he could not see, but her trembling figure gave evidence of the poignancy of her anguish. ...
— Prince Eugene and His Times • L. Muhlbach
... help us to the conviction of the relative insignificance of all that can change. That will not spoil nor shade any real joy; rather it will add to it poignancy that prevents it from cloying or from becoming the enemy of our souls. But the thought will wondrously lighten the burden that we have to carry, and the tasks which we have to perform. 'But for a moment,' makes all light. There was an old rabbi, long ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... the lost is an experience old as the world, its poignancy was new to me. I saw Eagle tangled in the wild oats of the river. I saw her treacherously dealt with by Indians who called themselves at peace. I saw her wandering out and out, mile beyond mile, to undwelt-in places, and the ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... or the story proceed from point to point, other details must be admitted. They must be admitted, alas! upon a doubtful title; many without marriage robes. Thus any work of art, as it proceeds towards completion, too often—I had almost written always—loses in force and poignancy of main design. Our little air is swamped and dwarfed among hardly relevant orchestration; our little passionate story drowns in a deep sea of descriptive eloquence or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... imbedded in my fancy, and in process of time had acquired that subtilest, indefinable fascination which belongs only to imaginative reminiscence. In the future, I suppose, all this existence will have become such a childhood, its earth changed to sky, its dulness sharpened to a tender, delicious poignancy of allurement and suggestion. And were it not bliss enough for an immortality, this boundless deepening and refining of experience through memory and imagination? Only to feel thrilling in one's being ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... Amalia enraged her and inspired her with horror and exasperation. But that of the count, it must be confessed, added poignancy to her grief ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... passages beneath the theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign as Helen ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... a swirling chaos of ruddy radiance that swept him up and away like a chip upon a tidal wave. There was a long moment during which he seemed to hurtle helplessly through a universe of swirling tinted mists, while great electric waves tingled with exquisite poignancy through every ...
— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells
... impression of Justin as of something noble and firm seemed to emanate from the room where he lay and fill the house; in his complete abdication, he dominated as never before. More than that, there seemed to be a peculiar poignancy, a peculiar sweetness, in every little thing done for him; it made ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... poignancy of Aristophanes, as having too much acrimony, is better founded. Such was the turn of a species of comedy, in which all licentiousness was allowed; in a nation which made every thing a subject of laughter, in its jealousy of immoderate liberty, and its enmity, ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson
... indeed the Pretence of being natural; but they ought always to lead us to something brilliant or poignant, in order to justify their Deviation; and not to end only at a ridiculous PUN, void of all Spirit and Poignancy. ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... the part, that blends naturally with the sordid thrift and shrewd, watchful, eager vigilance of the miser. It infuses a terrible grotesqueness into his rage, and curdles one's blood in the piercing, keen irony of his mocking humility to Antonio, and adds poignancy to the ferocity of his hideous revenge. This Kean rendered admirably, and in this my father entirely fails, but it is an important ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... to them. Yet in such times as we were living in, the unbelievable is readily believed, and men saw malice in the suppression of what could not long be secret: Ireland had too many dead that day. What made the suggestion more incredible only gave a poignancy to resentment, for Admiral de Robeck was an Irishman, with his home some few miles from the ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... gaming-table, a duel, and a Roman amphitheatre. The Pagans did well enough; I cordially admire the refinement of their minds; but it has been reserved for a Christian country to attain this extreme, this quintessence, this absolute of poignancy. You will understand how vapid are all amusements to a man who has acquired a taste for this one. The game we play," he continued, "is one of extreme simplicity. A full pack - but I perceive you are about to see the thing in progress. Will you lend ...
— New Arabian Nights • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dead, and listens to the wind and rain sweeping through the high glens about the hut and thinks of "the young growing behind her," and the old passing. Where else will you find cheek by jowl such sardonic humor as this and such poignancy of lament for the passing of youth? Nora speaks as she pours out whiskey ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... healer of all sufferings, all sorrows, can do much, but memory clings with a pertinacity which defies all Time's best efforts. Time may soften the poignancy of deep-rooted sorrow, but it cannot shut out altogether the pain of a mother's grief at the loss of an only son. In spite of all Hervey's crimes he was "the only son of his mother, and she was a widow." The story of his villainies was ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... Strange as it may seem to those who have been accustomed to think of that great artist merely as a type of the frigid pomposity of an antiquated age, his music, to ears that are attuned to hear it, comes fraught with a poignancy of loveliness whose peculiar quality is shared by no other poetry in the world. To have grown familiar with the voice of Racine, to have realised once and for all its intensity, its beauty, and its depth, is to have learnt a new happiness, to have discovered something exquisite ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... know," he began feebly. But she took no notice of the interruption, and as he looked at her he realized that he had never known life in its poignancy—that he stood outside the depths of human suffering, though he had dwelt forever in its shadow, nor had his stern life measured the height of holy, ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... through without capitulating to it. Then I hear of her having done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta of Catulle Mendes and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the names of half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing them all, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardly varying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a natural genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtly trained that it may strike ...
— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons
... Buck, the poignancy of his ancient regret having been modified by his long course of consolation from the lips of Avery, was the first to recover. This faded woman, trying to stay time's ravages by her rouge, displaced the beauteous image he had cherished so long ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Let me go!" cried Stewart; and the poignancy of that cry pierced Madeline's heart. "Let me go, Bill, if you're my friend. I saved your life once—over in the desert. You swore you'd never forget. Boys, make him let me go! Oh, I don't care what Hawe's said or done to me! It was that about her! Are you all a lot of Greasers? How ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... followed, could be heard the tension of feeling produced. But in another moment the quiet voice fell soothingly, expressing a strength of endurance which would fail in no crisis, nor fear to face any depths of pain; yet gathering to itself a poignancy of sweetness, rendered richer by the ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... and the prejudices against it on all sides were unreasonable. I do not regret the opposition which I have experienced—the reproaches which I have incurred—the labours I have endured; but I do regret—and every day's reflection adds fresh poignancy to my regrets—that in carrying out a measure which I had hoped would prove an unspeakable blessing to my native country, I have lost so many friends of my youth. No young man in Canada had more friends amongst all Christian denominations than ...
— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson
... him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyricks, that, having written, with great vigour and poignancy, his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful only ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... fun) rather than into a more serious and determined hostility. But my endeavours on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily concocted; for my namesake had much about him, in character, of that unassuming and quiet austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of its own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely refuses to be laughed at. I could find, indeed, but one vulnerable point, and that, lying in a personal peculiarity, arising, perhaps, from constitutional ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... cherished by the whisky which in Scotland is always put in circulation on such occasions. All these are ordinary effects of such a scene as Ellangowan now presented; but the moral feeling, that in this case they indicated the total ruin of an ancient and honourable family, gave them treble weight and poignancy. ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... imitation of the several styles of his enemies, in which their peculiarities were so closely copied, and their extraneous passages (particularly those of Bach of Hamburgh) so inimitably burlesqued, that they all felt the poignancy of his musical wit, confessed ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... in the poignancy of grief—in the—" Father Anselmo stopped, for a sob at that moment apprised them that they were not alone. Moving aside, in a little alarm, the action discovered the figure of the shrinking Gelsomina, who had entered ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper
... lasted for many days. Of all about him none understood him so well as Bobby Galleon. Bobby had always understood him, and now he felt for him with a tenderness that had both the past and the future to heighten its poignancy. It seemed to Bobby that nothing more tragic than the death of this child could possibly have occurred. It filled him with anxiety for the future, it intensified to a depth that only so simple and affectionate a character as his ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... everlasting chorus of praise and glory to our Lord and Saviour! I grieve for our lost darling as a father only can grieve for a daughter, and my sorrow is heightened by the thought of the anguish her death will cause our dear son and the poignancy it will give to the bars of his prison. May God in His mercy enable him to bear the blow He has so suddenly dealt, and sanctify it to ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... wondrously their sorrow was to be turned into joy, the appalling thought was alone present to them in all its fearfulness—"Lazarus is dead!" When He, the God-man Mediator, with the refined sensibilities of His tender heart, beheld the poignancy of that grief, the pent-up torrent of His own human sympathies could be restrained no ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, "I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. —— as a great wit." If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... which concealed his face beneath the rim of his weather-worn hat. It was evident that he was afraid of being recognized. He had the slinking air of the convict, and his form, so despairing in its lax lines, appealed to Lee with even greater poignancy than his face. "I'm sorry," she said to him, "but it was my ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland
... Queen don't want to bother about age. Neither of you has any age. And I'm not imploring you to have her. I'm only telling you that she's there for you if you want her. But doesn't she attract you? Isn't she positively irresistible?" She added with poignancy: "I know if I were a man I should find ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... we should pay little regard to the childish tattling of a pert coxcomb who was discontented with our taverns, or the execrations of some bluff sea-captain who was shocked with our manners. The uneasy sense we have of something in our national existence which has not yet been fitly expressed, gives poignancy to the least ridicule launched at faults and follies which lie on the superficies of our life. Every person feels, that a book which condemns the country for its peculiarities of manners and customs, does not pierce into the heart of the matter, and is essentially ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... interview between Borrow and his wife's medical attendant, Dr. Playfair, recorded in Herbert Jenkins's Life, that is full of poignancy. ...
— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter
... and a Scotchman, does not refute the unjust opinion of the harshness of his general demeanour. His occasional reproofs of folly, impudence, or impiety, and even the sudden sallies of his constitutional irritability of temper, which have been preserved for the poignancy of their wit, have produced that opinion among those who have not considered that such instances, though collected by Mrs. Piozzi into a small volume, and read over in a few hours, were, in fact, scattered through a long series of years; ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... and its mysteries, and with the eloquence at its command to impress these thoughts upon the hearer. The number of themes and their key relationship are those of Sonata-form, but instead of the usual development we have a new contrasting theme of great pathos in the major mode. Observe the poignancy of ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... glad to be at home again, though this was a home-coming like none other she had ever known. Four months' use had not robbed memory of its poignancy, and the moment of arrival at the House she found unexpectedly painful. However, there came at once the remeeting with papa, and the first and worst hour of reconnection with the old life again was lubricated with ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... London for sixpence sterling, and then disappeared forever. We do not know certainly that Mr. Cook himself was the actual adventurer who suffered the ills described by him "in burlesque verse." Indeed, "Eben: Cook, Gent." may be a myth—a nom de plume. Yet, there is a certain personal poignancy and earnestness about the whole Story that almost forbid the idea of a secondhand narrative. Nay, I think it extremely probable that it was "Eben: Cook, Gent." or, some other equally afflicted gentleman assuming ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... much trouble nor get in any great alarm, for I suppose the severe exertion dulled everything, and robbed my sufferings of their poignancy as I still swam on more and more slowly, with my starting eyes fixed upon the boat still many yards away from me, and growing more and more dim as the water began ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn |
