"Lugubrious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... open space furthest from the town has been appropriately fixed upon as the site of various cemeteries. The lugubrious forest is enough to give a man the blue devils, and the ditches and drains into which the sewers, &c., of the town are pumped, dragging their sluggish and all but stagnant course under a broiling summer gun, are sufficient to prepare most mortals for the calm repose towards which the cypress ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... and arched, lugubrious eyebrows bore no little resemblance to the well-known portrait of the conscientious but unlucky Stuart in whose service his ancestor had shed blood and money, receiving in lieu of both, a great ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Astier was 'turning round' under the refreshing shower with great enjoyment; he was getting rid of the dust and fatigue of his wearisome afternoon, as well as of the lugubrious sonorities of Astier-Rehu's Academic regret 'His hour sounded upon the bell'... 'the hand of Loisillon was cold'... 'he had drained the cup of happiness'... &c, &c. Oh Master! Master! oh, respected papa! It took a good deal of water, showers, ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... emulous scholar hears, In every breath that comes to his ears, The rustling of another's laurels! The air of the place is called salubrious; The neighborhood of Vesuvius lends it Au odor volcanic, that rather mends it, And the building's have an aspect lugubrious, That inspires a feeling of awe and terror Into the heart of the beholder. And befits such an ancient homestead of error, Where the old falsehoods moulder and smoulder, And yearly by many hundred hands ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... somet'ing dere," he affirmed, when the rhythmed vagaries of his mind touched the secret chords of Batard's being and brought forth the long lugubrious howl. "Ah pool eet out wid bot' my han's, so, an' so. Ha! ha! Eet is fonee! Eet is ver' fonee! De priest chant, de womans pray, de mans swear, de leetle bird go peep-peep, Batard, heem go yow-yow—an' eet is all de ver' ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... extravagantly so. Mr. Wright, as Titmouse, thought perhaps that a Cockney dandy could not be caricatured, and he consequently went desperate lengths, but threw in here and there a touch of nature. Mr. Lyon was as energetic as ever in Gammon; Mrs. Yates as lugubrious as is her wont in Miss Aubrey; Mrs. Grattan acted and looked as if she were quite deserving of a man with ten thousand a year. As to her singing, if her husband were in possession of twenty thousand per annum, (would to the gods he were!) it could not have been more charmingly tasteful. The pathetics ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... might stop and listen, forming his surmise as the sounds surged to meet him through the heat and silence. He might smile, if he knew San Juan, as he caught the jubilant message tapped swiftly out of the bronze bell which had come, men said, with Coronado; he might sigh at the lugubrious, slow-swelling voice of the big bell which had come hitherward long ago with the retinue of Marco de Niza, wondering what old friend or enemy, perchance, had at last closed his ears to all of Ignacio Chavez's music. Or, at a sudden fury of clanging, the man far out on the ...
— The Bells of San Juan • Jackson Gregory
... distorted legs are his stock in trade waits for the return-tide to enact his shrewd and pantomimic morality-play by a hurried shuffle up and down the pavement. The news-dealers—even the enterprising female who summons mercy to the aid of commerce by her absurdly lugubrious visage—have the paper and the change all ready to thrust into their customer's hand. The scene at the crossing of the street baffles description. Talk of the day of miracles being past! One who can watch this scene of scare and scamper and hair-breadth escape and not believe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... This lugubrious business had failed to infect Mr. Cancut with corresponding deportment. Undertakers are always sombre in dreary mockery of woe. Sextons are solemncholy, if not solemn. I fear Cancut was too cheerful for his trade, and therefore ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... which had been going on below stairs, was peacefully reading a letter he had received that morning from Strachan at Wrykyn, in which the successor to the cricket captaincy which should have been Mike's had a good deal to say in a lugubrious strain. In Mike's absence things had been going badly with Wrykyn. A broken arm, contracted in the course of some rash experiments with a day-boy's motor-bicycle, had deprived the team of the services of Dunstable, ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... invading the very drawing-rooms, mingling itself with the comfortable fumes of port-wine and brandy, threatening to deaden with its murky breath all the splendour of the ostrich feathers, and to stifle Milby ingenuousness, not pretending to be better than its neighbours, with a cloud of cant and lugubrious hypocrisy. The alarm reached its climax when it was reported that Mr. Tryan was endeavouring to obtain authority from Mr. Prendergast, the non-resident rector, to establish a Sunday evening lecture in the parish ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... effect upon the uprightness of the greater part of the company. Having the sanction of authority, several others, the minor spirits it is true, settled down under their chairs without a struggle. The survivors made some lugubrious efforts at a triumph over their less stubborn companions, but the laborious and husky laugh was but a poor apology for the proper performance of this feat. Munro, who to his other qualities added those of a sturdy bon-vivant, ...
— Guy Rivers: A Tale of Georgia • William Gilmore Simms
... gown, giving out the hymn, in a tone to be regretted, but where the obvious remedy was not to dethrone the clerk, but rather to have just suggested the propriety of reading the entire verse, as well as of avoiding a tone lugubrious on the occasion. ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... had managed to tug and jerk his hat clear of his head, and advanced with slight bows at Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so discomposing that for some time he listened, quite unable to make out what that apparition wanted. It spoke in a voice harsh and lugubrious but intrepid, and little by little it dawned upon Archie that this was a development of the Patna case. He says that as soon as he understood who it was before him he felt quite unwell—Archie is so sympathetic and easily upset—but pulled himself together and shouted "Stop! I can't listen to you. ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... the bar and singing the while one of the more lugubrious and monotonous hymns, looked up with his customary ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... on the spirits, lie heavy on the spirits, prey on the spirits; damp the spirits, depress the spirits. Adj. cheerless, joyless, spiritless; uncheerful, uncheery[obs3]; unlively[obs3]; unhappy &c. 828; melancholy, dismal, somber, dark, gloomy, triste[Fr], clouded, murky, lowering, frowning, lugubrious, funereal, mournful, lamentable, dreadful. dreary, flat; dull, dull as a beetle, dull as ditchwater[obs3]; depressing &c. v. "melancholy as a gib cat"; oppressed with melancholy, a prey to melancholy; downcast, downhearted; down in the mouth, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... of it, Mat,' added she, in a lugubrious tone; 'and it's all backbiting, and lying, and mischief-making, and what's worse, by the people who might live quietly and ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... and warm, and the majority so absorbed in bringing them to reason, that nobody went to the window until the vote had passed, and the Gosshawk was a Life and Fire Insurance. Then some of the gentlemen rose and stretched their legs, and detected the lugubrious enormity. "Hallo!" cried Mr. Carden, and rang a bell. Edwards, an old clerk, appeared, and, in reply to Mr. Carden, told him it was one of their losses ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... I always try to appear as happy as possible while I am lecturing. I take this to be part of the trade of anybody labelled a humourist and paid as such. I have no sympathy whatever with the idea that a humourist ought to be a lugubrious person with a face stamped with melancholy. This is a cheap and elementary effect belonging to the level of a circus clown. The image of "laughter shaking both his sides" is the truer picture of comedy. Therefore, ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... Gordon's nephews—a shock of tow hair rising rebellious against an application of soap, stubby, scarred hands, shoes obviously come by in their descent from more mature extremities—who had been audibly snuffling for the past ten minutes, burst into a lugubrious, frightened wail. Through the solemn, appointed periods of the minister cut the sibilant, maternal promise of a ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... wheeled and turned, and their mounts, as the spurs struck their damp sides, broke into a lope. As they galloped, Red Bill burst into a song. A lugubrious, melancholy thing, like most of the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... a woe-begone glance into the mirror, dimly conscious that he was a very heroic young person. He kissed various objects dear to the little maid, and then, in lugubrious unrest, ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... his cell along with him, slept with him during the night, accompanied him to the gallows in the morning, and sat under him when they were adjusting the noose, looking up with feelings of unutterable dismay, as clearly indicated by the lugubrious and woebegone cast of his ragged countenance. But we ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... hitherto had to struggle against mental anxieties, against fatigues, heat, drought, and thirst: we have now to contend with rain and with floods. Everything is becoming awfully damp, and everybody looks awfully dismal. I can see, from the lugubrious countenances of the Kailouees and the blacks, that the rainy season is their real winter. They go shivering about, and seem as if they were half drowned. Our Bornou gauze-cotton tent still bears up well, however, and ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... to receive consolation was quite as ready as her grief had at first been impetuous; the sobs which seemed to be breaking her heart ceased all at once; new thoughts, more gentle, less lugubrious, took possession of the young queen's mind; the trace of tears vanished, and a smile lit up her liquid eyes like the sun's ray following on rain. This change, anxiously awaited, was soon observed by Joan's chamberwoman: she stole to the queen's room, and falling on her knees, ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... converted into rather uncomfortable quarters and set up on the slimy beach. The effect of this unconventional habitation slowly undermined the pale ghost of the Somers' family tradition. They became bohemian. Instead of the lugubrious Sunday feast of thick joints and heavy puddings, they began to make the acquaintance of the can opener. And from can opener to corkscrew it was only a brief step... It was at this point that Helen met Fred Starratt. Quite naturally ...
— Broken to the Plow • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... where the ceremonies were to take place. But as the noisy and impertinent guests showed disposition to undue merriment, the chief shut them all in his wigwam, lest their gentile eyes should profane the mysteries. Here, immured in darkness, they listened to the howls, yelpings, and lugubrious songs that resounded from without. One of them, however, by some artifice, contrived to escape, hid behind a bush, and saw the whole solemnity: the procession of the medicine-men and the bedaubed and befeathered warriors; the drumming, the dancing, the stamping; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his terrible state, of giving all his time to the pious discourses of his confessor and of some of the pious people of the house, and to holy reading; to everything, in fact, which best could prepare him for death. When we saw him, no disorder, nothing lugubrious, no trace of suffering, politeness, tranquillity, conversation but little animated, indifference to what was passing in the world, speaking of it little and with difficulty; little or no morality, still less talk of his state; ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... appears to me, we are paying these honours in a most lugubrious spirit," Mrs. Ormiston broke in. "I wish the baby a long life and a merry one, in defiance of all prophecies and traditions belonging to his paternal ancestry. Go on, Mr. March, you're shamefully neglecting ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... emotional richness could have been tapped. Had she left him too soon, or had her departure developed some richer artistic vein? She tortured her brain and heart. After a big tonal climax followed by the lugubrious monologue of a bassoon the ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... "the new junior does strike one as being downright stunning. She came from New York City, and"—with a lugubrious sigh—"though I've never set eyes on her before, I was informed this morning that she is to be my roommate for ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... splendid apparel of the noble, and the modest garb of the peasant; the shining armour and waving plumes of the Christian warrior, and the gaudy fantastic habiliments of the Moslem. With them appeared the solemn and lugubrious vestments of the ecclesiastical dignitaries, and the coarse habit and shaven ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... "Charles IX.," by Marie Chenier, was at this time the most popular tragedy.—"The French people," says M. Ferieres (I. 35), "went away from its representation eager for vengeance and tormented with a thirst for blood. At the end of the fourth act a lugubrious bell announces the moment of the massacre, and the audience, drawing in its breath sighing and groaning, furiously exclaims silence! silence! as if fearing that the sound of this death-knell had not stirred the heart to ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 3 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 2 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... resounded throughout the vicinity of the mill. The sound rose and fell in a sort of rhythmic cadence, which, heard from where we sat, was not unpleasing, and not loud enough to prevent conversation. When the saw started on its second journey through the log, Julius observed, in a lugubrious tone, and with ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... was running like a mill-race, bending the willows, lapping hungrily at the crumbling shore. The bank was black with groups of people, tearful wives and whimpering children, lugubrious neighbors, pessimistic citizens. Bruce called the men together and assigned each boat its place in line. Beyond explicit orders that no boatman should attempt to pass another and the barges must be kept a safe distance apart, he gave few instructions, for they had only ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... your life—and the cat's—and now leading you all over town to keep those nice white slippers clean! By rights, you oughtn't to dance with anybody else. But I ain't looking for real gratitude. Four or five waltzes is all I'll insist on, but—" His tone was lugubrious in ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... entrance on any religious order prescribed entire and total renunciation of all thought and care for the beautiful in person or apparel, as the first step towards saintship. The costume of the religieuse seemed to be purposely intended to imitate the shroudings and swathings of a corpse and the lugubrious color of a pall, so as forever to remind the wearer that she was dead to the world of ornament and physical beauty. All great Christian preachers and reformers have leveled their artillery against the toilet, from the ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... shining on their moving dark bodies and glittering, baleful eyes, made the place look like a bank of earth set with fireflies. The dogs dashed on, but at the threshold suddenly stopped and snarled, and then, simultaneously lifting their noses, began to howl in most lugubrious fashion. The rats were multiplying in thousands, and we ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... endurance. They assume a very different aspect under a northern sky, where young Absolute, found by his Lydia Languish "in the garden, in the coldest night in January, stuck like a dripping statue," presents a rather lugubrious spectacle. Horace (Odes, III. 7) warns the fair Asterie, during the absence of her husband abroad, to shut her ears against the musical nocturnes ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... up my courage; this lugubrious story would haunt me in spite of myself. Happily the weather soon cleared, and the rays of a bright sun dissipated the clouds which still veiled Mont Blanc, and, at the same time, those which overshadowed ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... tearing himself violently from the chamber where he had just found dead him to whom he came to report the news of the death of Porthos, he uttered sobs so heart-rending that the servants, who seemed only to wait for an explosion of grief, answered to it by their lugubrious clamors, and the dogs of the late comte by their lamentable howlings. Grimaud was the only one who did not lift up his voice. Even in the paroxysm of his grief he would not have dared to profane the dead, or for the first time ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... conscious that a serious and menacing event was approaching in my life. It was a case of real auto-suggestion. Was it so serious because I thought it so? Or had I a presentiment? I do not know. Perhaps, too, after what has happened, all previous events have taken on a lugubrious tint ...
— The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy
... and disheartening ugliness. The long-drawn music of an Old Testament psalm is not without a certain doleful impressiveness, but the human soul needs occasional stimulus, even on Sundays, of something less lugubrious. Certain congregations hate hymns: they consider them carnal and uninspired. As for organ-music in a church, that would be praising God by machinery, a preposterous and intolerable approximation to Popery. Not long ago, a poor crofter ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... miserable sound grated on the ear of night. A lugubrious quail doled forth a grating, dismal note at long but measured intervals, offending the ear and depressing the heart. This was the only sound Nature afforded for hours. The neighboring bush, though crammed with the merriest souls that ever made feathers vibrate ...
— It Is Never Too Late to Mend • Charles Reade
... way to obtain a first impression. I arrived at one in the afternoon and found a place for myself only at ten at night. The once luxurious Hotel Bristol was full to-day, no hope for to-morrow, no, nor for to-morrow week. At the Royal Hotel a lugubrious porter says "l'hotel n'existe plus." The Victoria, which was the first hotel I ever stayed at in Russia, knew me no more. At the Metropole a preoccupied clerk said "Nima" without looking up from the news from the ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... day with the bright tropical moonlight, silvery in the open, pale green in the shadow. The people were still squatting in great rings round the hut, just outside the taboo line, and beating gongs, and sticks and human bones, to keep time to the lilt of their lugubrious litany. ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... best had been capricious company. He was now moody beyond all Cicely's experience of him. His newborn solemnity was the most marked feature of his demeanour, but sometimes it dissolved into pathetic demands for sympathy, and then again froze into profound and lugubrious silence. He said that he was sleeping badly, and the pallor of his face and the darkness beneath his eyes seemed to confirm this. Several times he appeared to be on the point of some peculiarly solemn ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... a full breath and drove it forth, a lugubrious note. With scowling brows and set face he darted the instrument back and forth across his puckered lips. It wailed and shrieked, and out of the noise and discord emerged, at a galloping trot, ...
— Unfinished Portraits - Stories of Musicians and Artists • Jennette Lee
... never presumed to make the slightest advance in Finn's direction, but he had come to realize that the great Wolfhound wished him no harm, and, though his conversation seldom went beyond plaintive complainings and lugubrious assertions of his own complete in offensiveness, Finn liked to sit near the little beast occasionally, and watch his fubsy antics and listen to his plaint. Koala was rather like the Mad Hatter that ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... another side to Villiers' temperament. It was piercing and acute in an altogether different sense—a side of forbidding pleasantry and fierce raillery. No longer was it the paradoxical mystifications of Poe, but a scoffing that had in it the lugubrious and savage comedy which Swift possessed. A series of sketches, les Demoiselles de Bienfilatre, l'Affichage celeste, la Machine a gloire, and le Plus beau diner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... now too late for these lugubrious thoughts; and, bracing herself, she began to frame the new reply to Bishop Helmsdale—the plain, unvarnished tale that was to supplant the undivulging answer first written. She was engaged on this difficult problem till daylight faded in the west, and the broad-faced ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... state of a country's affairs is more prominently before the public than at any other, and preceding the State election in which Grandma Clay was to exercise the rights of full citizenship for the first time, it was a lugubrious statement. ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... again listens intently for Siegfried's horn. Not that, but Hagen's lugubrious Hoiho! comes to her ear: "Hoiho! Awake! Lights! Bright torches! We bring home spoils of the chase!" He appears in advance of the party thus announced. "Up, Gutrune! Welcome Siegfried, the strong ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... afternoon, after having already heard one sermon, which could not in the nature of things have the charm of novelty of presentation to the members of the home circle, and the theology of which was not too clear to tender apprehensions; with three hymns more or less lugubrious, rendered by a village-choir, got into voice by many preliminary snuffles and other expiratory efforts, and accompanied by the snort of a huge bassviol which wallowed through the tune like a hippopotamus, with other exercises of the customary character,—after ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... say, that is good! Why, Moggy, don't you remember how I remonstrated straight through your packing. Never a bit would you listen to me, and here is the result," pulling out a baggage memorandum as he spoke, and reading aloud in a lugubrious tone, "Extra weight of trunks, ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... will not let their husbands endorse other men's notes at the banks. We know about the row the Baptists are having to get rid of the bass singer in their choir, who has sung at funerals for thirty years, until it has reached a point where all good Baptists dread death on account of his lugubrious profundo. Perhaps we should take this tragedy to heart, but we know that the Methodists are having the same trouble with their soprano, who "flats"—and has flatted for ten years, and is too proud to quit the choir "under fire" as she calls it; and we remember what ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... wrote to you the last lugubrious sheet, I have not had time to write you further. When I say that I had not time, that as usual means, that the three demons, indolence, business, and ennui, have so completely shared my hours among them, as not to leave me a five minutes' ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... lives, and so were naturally preoccupied by the new sensation. This sounded reasonable, so we placed them on the ground. There they sat in a circle looking up at our performances, a solemn and mild interest expressing itself in their lugubrious countenances. A dachshund has absolutely no sense of humour or lightness of spirits. ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... spacious and handsomely furnished—being, in fact, the chamber of Mrs. Wilcox, the mother of the little fellow who occupied the wide bed. He lay there in lugubrious state, the rosy face stained with much crying, just showing above the edge of the counterpane; his tangle of yellow curls crushed upon the bolster. Below these was a white mound, stretched along the middle of the bed, just the length of Robby, aged seven ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... fog ushered in the dawn of the following day. Bluebell had been awake for hours. Some men were mending the streets, and, as she listened to the monotonous blows of their pickaxes and hammers, a lugubrious fancy crossed her that just such sounds would a criminal hear when workmen were erecting the gallows that was to close his mortal career. By ten o'clock a new page of her life would be turned over, if, nervous and unstrung as she was, she were able to carry out the first part of the drama. ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... apparently written by an illiterate maniac, headlines such as "Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks"—or "Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois." And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... for of all days to-day was it of the utmost importance that neither one of them should play out. At half past twelve a telephone message had reached me, after having passed through three different channels, that my little girl was sick; and over the wire it had a sinister, lugubrious, reticent sound, as if the worst was held back. Details had not come through, so I was told. My wife was sending a call for me to come home as quickly as I possibly could; nothing else. It was Thursday. The Sunday before I had left wife and child in perfect health. But scarlatina and diphtheria ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... to hear. From out the bowl there was stealing a perfume which overmastered his will and led him captive to the lugubrious glade of the Druids.... ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... only to cross to the mainland. The gift of such sight is sometimes hereditary in a family for generations, but this is not an invariable rule, for it often appears sporadically in one member of a family otherwise free from its lugubrious influence. ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... minor Sonata. In the middle section (in C sharp minor) of the following number (in D flat major), one of the larger pieces, rises before one's mind the cloistered court of the monastery of Valdemosa, and a procession of monks chanting lugubrious prayers, and carrying in the dark hours of night their departed brother to his last resting-place. It reminds one of the words of George Sand, that the monastery was to Chopin full of terrors and phantoms. This C sharp minor portion of No. 15 affects ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... The members of the Convention had re-assembled after their dinner, towards seven o'clock. The hall which had resounded with the shrieks and yells of the furious gladiators of the factions all day, now lent a lugubrious echo to gloomy reports which one member after another delivered from the shadow of the tribune. Towards nine o'clock the members of the two dread Committees came in panic to seek shelter among their colleagues, 'as dejected in their peril,' says an eyewitness, ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... if we did not often halloo, Khalid, like a huntsman pursuing his game, would lose himself in the pathless, lugubrious damp of the forest. If we did not prevent him at times, holding firmly to his coat-tail, he would desperately pursue the ghost of his thoughts even on such precipitous paths to those very depths in which Socrates and Montaigne always felt at home. ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... and they shot glances at each other, uneasy, half-jealous, half-envious glances, as they noted the beauty of the face, and the grace of the figure in its black dress, which, plain as it was, seemed to make theirs still more dowdy and vulgar. In the midst of this lugubrious account of the annoyances and worries of the journey, Mr. Heron ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... the double honour of speaking before the smallest audience and making the best Budget speech for many years. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has two manners. He can be as boisterous, exuberant, and gay, as any speaker in the House, and he can also be as lugubrious as though his life had been spent in the service of an undertaker. He was in the undertaker mood this evening. Slowly, solemnly, sadly, he unfolded his story of the finances of the country. He had taken the trouble to write down every word of what he had to say—an evil habit to which he has ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... proved, unhappily, very infectious. It soon spread its baneful influence among the officers, and was by them communicated to the soldiery. The number of croakers in garrison became perfectly frightful, lugubrious looks and dismal prophecies being encountered every where. The severe losses sustained by H.M.'s 44th under Captain Swayne, on the 4th instant, had very much discouraged the men of that regiment; and it is a lamentable fact that some of those European ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... blissful epoch there lived at the Mission of San Pablo Father Jose Antonio Haro, a worthy brother of the Society of Jesus. He was of tall and cadaverous aspect. A somewhat romantic history had given a poetic interest to his lugubrious visage. While a youth, pursuing his studies at famous Salamanca, he had become enamored of the charms of Dona Carmen de Torrencevara, as that lady passed to her matutinal devotions. Untoward circumstances, hastened, perhaps, by a wealthier ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... him. "He was christened Jeremiah, to be sure, and told me once it was the handiest name on earth, and could be made to express anything, 'from the lugubrious, sir, to the rollicking. In my young days, sir,'—for he had been a soldier in his time—'I was Corporal Jerry. Corporal Jerry Marvin! How's that for a name? Jeremiah I hold in reserve against the blows of destiny or promotion to a better world. But Jeremy, sir, as ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... should all appear to be in the best of spirits." There was a fluttering at the corners of Malcolm Sage's mouth, as he lifted his eyes for a second to the almost lugubrious countenance of Lord Beamdale. "Under no circumstances refer to the robbery, even amongst yourselves. ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... was over, and the old servant had slowly removed his last tray, when they had each got into an arm-chair, and were seated at properly comfortable distances from the fire, Mr. Prendergast began to talk freely; not that he at once plunged into the middle of the old history, or began with lugubrious force to recapitulate the horrors that were now partly over; but gradually he veered round to those points as to which he thought it good that he should speak before setting Herbert at work on ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... his contemplated strategy at Tampico, there had been a most lugubrious botching. The night before, when he started to the fort for aid, Fra Diavolo's little Mexicans had waylaid him, bound him, and dragged him back to the cafe, where Jacqueline that very moment reposed in slumber. ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... dried wings of box-elder seeds and snags of wool from the cotton-woods. A screened porch with pillars of thin painted pine surmounted by scrolls and brackets and bumps of jigsawed wood. No shrubbery to shut off the public gaze. A lugubrious bay-window to the right of the porch. Window curtains of starched cheap lace revealing a pink marble table with a conch shell ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... filled him full of theological hypoes concerning the state of their souls. He was at once the physician and priest of the sick, washing down his boluses with ghostly consolation, and among the sailors went by the name of The Pelican, a fowl whose hanging pouch imparts to it a most chop-fallen, lugubrious expression. ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... were depicted vividly by Adela, and were addressed as a sort of reproach to the lugubrious letters of her sister. She said pointedly once: "Really, if we are to be miserable, I turn Catholic and go into a convent." The strange thing was that Arabella imagined her letters to be rather of a cheerful character. She related the daily events at Brookfield:—the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the very beginning, have been something unreal and uncanny in the girl's situation. The huge old palace, crammed with properties of dead Stuarts and Sobieskis, with its royal throne and dais in the ante-room, its servants in the royal liveries of England, must have been full of rather lugubrious memories. Here James III. of England and VIII. of Scotland had moped away his bitter old age; here, years and years ago, Charles Edward's mother, the beautiful and brilliant grand-daughter of John Sobieski, had pined away, bullied and cajoled ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... Mr. Rogers will do, now that he's got his leisure, with a fortune and—me!' And at the same moment Rogers, in his deep arm-chair before the fire, was saying to himself, 'I'm glad Minks has come to me; he's just the man I want for my big Scheme!' And then—'Pity he's such a lugubrious looking fellow, and wears those dreadful fancy waistcoats. But he's very open to suggestion. We can change all that. I must look after Minks a bit. He's rather sacrificed his career for me, I fancy. He's got high aims. ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... maintained that if one only accentuated the first note properly, the rest followed as a matter of course. On the whole, therefore, a spirit of devotion to the master gradually pervaded the orchestra; the violas alone bore him a grudge for a while, and for this reason. In the accompaniment of the lugubrious cantilena of Julia at the end of the second act, he would not put up with the way in which the violas played the horribly sentimental accompaniment. Suddenly turning towards them he called in a sepulchral tone, 'Are the violas dying?' The two pale and incurably melancholy ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... that he would under no inducement emerge from his castle. Ruth had stated plainly that there was nothing for it but to go home at once, that very night. Hence she arranged to go home, and hence Denry refrained from interfering with her arrangements. Ruth was lugubrious under a mask of gaiety; Nellie was lugubrious under no mask whatever. Nellie was merely the puppet of these betrothed players, her elders. She admired Ruth and she admired Denry, and between them they were spoiling the little thing's ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... before our departure there was a round of simple festivities in the little colony. We were to leave first, but all must scatter soon. To me these entertainments seemed as lugubrious as a prolonged "wake." It was as though we were launching out in the night, and, like children in the dark, we sang aloud ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... the Honourable Jake pressing closely after him. It was Mr. Crewe who, without pausing to knock, pushed open the door of number nine, which was not quite closed; and it was Mr. Crewe who made the important discovery that the lugubrious division superintendent had a sense of humour. Mr. Manning was seated at a marble-topped table writing on a salmon-coloured card, in the act of pronouncing these words:—"For Mr. Speaker and Mrs. Speaker and all the little Speakers, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... downcast even to sing one of his lugubrious hymns or to whistle. Instead he looked at the letter pinned on a beam beside him and dragged from the various piles one half-dozen crow vanes, one half-dozen gull vanes, one dozen medium-sized mills, one dozen small mills, three sailors, etc., etc., as set forth upon ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... them the lugubrious object, still resting on the charger amid the ruins of the feast. One of the ...
— Herodias • Gustave Flaubert
... the next day. "I have news for you," said he, "though somewhat of a lugubrious nature. Lugete Veneres Cupidinesque. You ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... lugubrious saint! You fret high Heaven with your plaint. Is this the "Christian's joy" you paint? Is this the Christian's boasted bliss? Avails your faith no ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Macmillans, with a statement that the work would certainly be a success, and that the author would announce himself on the appearance of the second edition. But the Macmillans, who had published Greater Britain, noted that the proposed little book contained several contumelious references to the "lugubrious speeches" of Sir Charles Dilke and his brother, and refused to have anything to do with it. To pacify them, Sir Charles, from behind his mask, had to excise some of the disagreeable things which he had said about himself. Enough was left to convince ...
— The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke V1 • Stephen Gwynn
... went to a picture show. She was amazed to find there, instead of the accustomed orchestra, a pipe organ that panted and throbbed and rumbled over lugubrious classics. The picture was about a faithless wife. Terry left in the middle ...
— One Basket • Edna Ferber
... in the bloody rags of the Committee of Public Safety, your are still yourself, you are still Felix Pyat, you are still Ranvier, you have never ceased to be Gerardin; you hope to make yourself obeyed more readily under this lugubrious costume, but you mistake. Command us to go and fight, and we will not budge; pursue us, and we will hardly run away; put us in prison, and we will only laugh. You are no more a Terror, than Gil-Perez the actor is Talma; the knocks you receive have pushed aside your false nose; ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... with her work, putting into it a sudden violence inspired by the recollection; but Alice, enlightened, gave utterance to a laugh of lugubrious derision. "Oh, the GLUE factory again!" she cried. "How silly!" ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... go, Plantat, and look for her at the Morgue." Then he fell back again, muttering the lugubrious ...
— The Mystery of Orcival • Emile Gaboriau
... to custom, would be exposure and death to him as well as themselves; while to assist by his passive presence at the horrible sacrifice of his countrymen was too much for even his weak selfishness. Scarcely knowing what he did as the lugubrious procession passed before him, he hurriedly hid his face in his blanket and turned his back upon the scene. There was a dead silence. The warriors were evidently unprepared for this extraordinary conduct of their chief. What might have been their action it was impossible to conjecture, for ...
— A Drift from Redwood Camp • Bret Harte
... cheap restaurants, frequenting clubs, studios, and theatres of every degree; the youthful effervescence of her student-friends venting itself in such collegians' pranks as parading deserted quarters of the town by moonlight, in the small hours, chanting lugubrious strains to astonish the shopkeepers. The only great celebrity whose acquaintance she had made was Balzac, himself the prince of eccentrics. Although he did not encourage Madame Dudevant's literary ambition, he showed himself kindly disposed towards her ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... Agatha," I returned, briskly, for she spoke in a lugubrious voice, and as one sad face is enough beside the family hearth, I assumed a tolerably cheerful aspect. If only Aunt Agatha's eyes would not look at ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII: No. 356, October 23, 1886. • Various
... he answered, with a lugubrious smile. "However, I'll be as good as I can. And I'll not write. But—when I return from that month of exile, do not be surprised if I appear to claim you for good or for evil, for better or ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... small parlour to which I was ushered, sat two gentlemen somewhat advanced in years, who I rightly supposed were my medical confreres. One of these was a tall, pale, ascetic-looking man, with grey hairs, and retreating forehead, slow in speech, and lugubrious in demeanour. The other, his antithesis, was a short, rosy-cheeked, apoplectic-looking subject, with a laugh like a suffocating wheeze, and a paunch like an alderman; his quick, restless eye, and full nether lip denoting more of ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 2 • Charles James Lever
... that dastardly crime, But the victim's intangible shade Can be seen to this day, so the villagers say, In diaphanous garments arrayed. In the gloom of the room where she met with her doom She's appearing once nightly, it seems, And the listener quails as lugubrious wails Are ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... mustard yellow, and a shirt of blue-and-white striped cotton. It was conspicuous, it was cheap, it pointed us out to laughter—we, who were old soldiers, used to arms, and some of us showing noble scars,—like a set of lugubrious zanies at a fair. The old name of that rock on which our prison stood was (I have heard since then) the "Painted Hill." Well, now it was all painted a bright yellow with our costumes; and the dress of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... have here undertaken becomes known to the public, it will be seen how many and how important are the retrenchments to be made from that lugubrious page of our history. Another important circumstance may be appreciated, which appears to me to arise from all these facts. After having weighed my proofs, every one I hope will join me in seeing that the wretches around the scaffold of Bailly were but the refuse of the ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... was turning a long screw, "Jacobs, my boy, do you take the chair to-night?"—"Yes," said Jacobs who was a long lugubrious-looking man, "I do take the chair, if I live over ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... and we were going through our performances by the slight illumination of the stars, without any positive certainty as to where the Captain kept his tinder box and candle, that we might furnish some sort of light upon the lugubrious state of affairs. ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... Siegfried the following evening. I do not mean the orchestral colouring, but the intrinsic thing, the music itself. The tapping of the hammer on steel goes on, and in mock seriousness the orchestra gives out a series of prolonged sighs or groans of the most lugubrious character, reaching a climax as poor miserable Mime at last gives up his job in despair. Mime, we must remember, is a half-comic personage; and were his music allotted to some heroic man facing an impossible task it would be much the same, save that Wagner ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... it was with a sensation of surprise that Sidney first became aware of light-heartedness in the young girl who was a silent hearer of so many lugubrious discussions. Ridiculous as it may sound—as Sidney felt it to be—he almost resented this evidence of happiness; to him, only just recovering from a shock which would leave its mark upon his life ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... masquerade because the mad scene reminded him of the merry day he had spent with Cephyse—that famous breakfast, after a night of dancing, in which the Bacchanal Queen, from some extraordinary presentiment, had proposed a lugubrious toast with regard to this very pestilence, which was then reported to be approaching France. "To the Cholera!" had she said. "Let him spare those who wish to live, and kill at the same moment those ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... suppose, were the first plays I ever saw. Those were pleasant walks to Claverton, and pleasant days at Claverton Hall! I wish Hans Breitmann and his "Avay in die Ewigkeit" did not come in, like a ludicrous, lugubrious burden, to all one's reminiscences of places and people one knew upward of fifty ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... but always amid the same sights and sounds. There were moments when I thought to go mad, wrenching at my cords till my wrists bled, yet with no hope to escape. But in time, by good luck, my wits grew deaden'd to it all, and I march'd on with the rest to a kind of lugubrious singsong that my brain supplied. For hours I went thus, counting my steps, missing ...
— The Splendid Spur • Arthur T. Quiller Couch
... perhaps it will be the faces of the dead and wounded that will live most clearly in the memory, but at present the pictures of the Belgian soldier which stand out sharpest are less lugubrious and more commonplace. ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... barges like my own had flitted by, and the gondoliers had warned each other at every turning with hoarse, lugubrious cries; the lines of balconied palaces had never ended;—here and there at their doors larger craft were moored, with dim figures of men moving uncertainly about on them. At last we had passed abruptly out ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... badly and the penny came down in the waste-paper basket, but it came down heads, and with a little lugubrious grimace, Sangster dipped the pen in the ink again and ...
— The Second Honeymoon • Ruby M. Ayres
... be George Sand's: "Some of them create such vivid impressions that the shades of dead monks seem to rise and pass before the hearer in solemn and gloomy funereal pomp." The work needs no programme. Its serene beginning, lugubrious interlude, with the dominant pedal never ceasing, a basso ostinato, gives color to Kleczynski's contention that the prelude in B minor is a mere sketch of the idea fully elaborated in No. 15. "The foundation of the picture is the drops of rain falling ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... f. force, strength, might. fugaz adj. fleeting. fugitivo, -a fugitive, fleeting, fleeing, flying. flgido, -a bright, resplendent. fulgor m. gleam. fulguroso, -a shining, flashing. fulgurante adj. shining. fnebre adj. funereal, lugubrious, mournful. funeral adj. funeral, funereal, lugubrious. funesto, -a doleful, dismal, sinister, fatal. furia f. rage. furioso, -a furious, mad, raging, violent. furor m. rage, ...
— El Estudiante de Salamanca and Other Selections • George Tyler Northup
... at the recital, and literally extinguished, as she undoubtedly ought to have been, by the knowledge that her former little peccadillos had come to light, the bright-eyed hostess burst out laughing in the very faces of the lugubrious guests. ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... They have been crucifying Othello into an opera (Otello, by Rossini): the music good, but lugubrious; but as for the words, all the real scenes with Iago cut out, and the greatest nonsense instead; the handkerchief turned into a billet-doux, and the first singer would not black his face, for some exquisite reasons assigned in the preface. Singing, dresses, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. IV - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... flamed up whenever the word rebellion was mentioned in their presence, and who, having arrived in South Africa with the firm determination to win the war at all costs, must not be blamed if in some cases they allowed their minds to be poisoned by those who painted the plight of the country in such a lugubrious tint. If, therefore, acts of what appeared to be cruelty were committed by these officers, it would be very wrong to make them alone responsible, because they were mostly done out of a spirit of self-defence against an enemy whom they ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... lugubrious to Dr. Archie, who had a physician's dislike of funerals, but he tried to accept the ...
— Song of the Lark • Willa Cather
... arms toward the earth, as if with that gesture he would like to hold there the broken remains. His voice took on a sinister, even lugubrious tone, which made ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... very good, now do you, Miss Kingston?" asked Clara Ellis, a rather lugubrious individual, who had been put on the committee because she was a "prod" in "English lit.," and not because she had the least bit of ...
— Betty Wales Senior • Margaret Warde
... entirely adequate and dignified house at 6 Grosvenor Square, and soon found that the American Ambassadorship had compensations which were hardly suggested by his first glimpse of the lugubrious Chancery. He brought to this new existence his plastic and inquisitive mind, and his mighty gusto for the interesting and the unusual; he immensely enjoyed his meetings with the most important representatives of all types of British life. The period of his arrival marked a crisis in British ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... morning," said Mrs. Tarbell; and she turned to the office-boy, with whom she began to converse in an undertone. Mrs. Stiles came walking across the floor, slow and lugubrious. She bade Mrs. Tarbell good-day. Mrs. Tarbell bowed her out as quickly as possible, and then waited for a couple of minutes to give her time to get ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... into lugubrious sobs and rocked themselves back and forth in unison. "'Twar Dad!" Medora moaned, ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... eloquent chapters of a modern living Bible. No music of another country is such a true mirror of a nation's racial character, life, passion, blood, struggle, despair and agony, as the Russian. One can almost see in its turbulent-lugubrious or buoyant-hilarious chords the rich colors of the Byzantine style, the half Oriental atmosphere that surrounds everything with a ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is, there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most profoundly stupid person ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... Paul, full of lugubrious visions and suspicions, one day disgraced General Swetchine by removing him from office. But this official dismission did not entail banishment, and was followed by no loss of social caste. The ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... lugubrious pass when an event occurred which materially affected the condition of the prisoners, and considerably altered the ...
— The Fugitives - The Tyrant Queen of Madagascar • R.M. Ballantyne
... a bushranger, apparently, because he no longer hopes or desires to resume his rank in certain aristocratic circles from which, by occasional hints, we are informed that he has fallen. He indulges in no lugubrious moralisings—he is far too agreeable a person for that—but exhibits just the required touch of romance by letting you know that in his past there is a sadness which a career of excitement and danger is necessary to enable him to forget. Having been won over as a sympathiser ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... my overstrained nerves no longer holding my imagination in check, I could already see human forms writhing in agony, and hear the moaning of souls on the brink of Eternity. As though to vivify this hallucination, the dying moon suddenly plunged behind a cloud, lighting the landscape but by strange lugubrious streaks, and in the distance behind us a long low rumble warned me that my dream might soon ...
— My Home In The Field of Honor • Frances Wilson Huard
... armed, excepting the head, followed as chief mourner. A chosen body of squires, men-at-arms, and pages of noble descent, brought up the rear of the procession; while their nakers and trumpets echoed back, from time to time, the melancholy song of the monks, by replying in a note as lugubrious as ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... to the masts, where they stopped and made a concerted clicking with pieces of wood hanging at their sides, simulating perfectly the rattling of dry bones and gnashing of teeth. Twice they went in a circle around the masts, marching in time to low taps on the drums, and then joined in a lugubrious religious chant. Having once more made the concerted rattling of their artificial bones and jaws, they executed some contortions painful ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch
... till I had dived down to see it: which I did, but found it so dark, as Jack had said, that I could scarcely see anything. When I returned, we had a long conversation about it, during which I observed that Peterkin had a most lugubrious ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... devils who leer, writhe, crunch, and tear on the outside of Orvieto Cathedral; and the Giottesques painting those terrible green, macerated Christs, hanging livid and broken from the cross, which abound in Tuscany and Umbria; the artists who produced these loathsome and lugubrious works were indubitably students of the antique; but they had learned from it not a love for beautiful form and noble drapery, but merely the general shape of the limbs and the general fall of the garments: the anatomical science and technical processes of Antiquity were being used to ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... curs of the country. The wind blows raw and chilly from off the snowy slopes of Ararat next morning, and the shivering, half-clad-wretches shuffle off toward the fields and pastures, - with blue noses and unwilling faces, humping their backs and shrinking within themselves and wearing most lugubrious countenances; one naturally falls to wondering what they do in the winter. The independent villagers of the surrounding country have a tough enough time of it, worrying through the cheerless winters of a treeless and mountainous country; ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... York. The ground on which is I trod was hallowed by recollections of the past, and as I slowly wandered through the long alley of poplars, which, like so many birch-brooms standing on end, diffused a melancholy and lugubrious shade, my imagination drew a contrast between the surrounding scenery, and what it was in the classic days of our forefathers. Where the government house by name, but the customhouse by occupation, proudly reared its brick walls and ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... most distinguished citizens." "How do you do, Mr. James?" asked Webster mechanically, as he glanced at a thousand people waiting to take his hand. "The truth is, Mr. Webster," replied Mr. James in a most lugubrious tone, "I am not very well." "I hope nothing serious is the matter," thundered the godlike Daniel, in a tone of anxious concern. "Well, I don't know that, Mr. Webster. I think it's rheumatiz, but my wife——" "Mr. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... apparently have—or are expected to have—his monetary entanglements at their fingers' ends. It is a constant enumeration of novels and tales begun or delivered, revised or bargained for. The tone is always profoundly sombre and bitter. The reader's general impression is that of lugubrious egotism. It is the rarest thing in the world that there is an allusion to anything but Balzac's own affairs, and to the most sordid details of his own affairs. Hardly an echo of the life of his time, of the world he lived in, ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... owl-face! I apprehend nothing; only it will be as well to have Thorne present, for the boy is out of sorts, and his nerves were never very strong. Now look here, Ned Blount! don't put on that lugubrious phiz, I pray you;—and, moreover, don't you ever dare introduce any more of your Freshmen protege's to me; for, I warn you, I'll insult them, and you, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... were so lugubrious that Henry was compelled to laugh under his breath. It did look like an injustice of fate, when hunters so keen as they, were compelled to lie quiet, while wild turkeys in hundreds flew over their heads, and although the shiftless one may have exaggerated ...
— The Keepers of the Trail - A Story of the Great Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to be allowed to enliven the occasion by the instant introduction of a brief double-shuffle. Barry Cornwall told me that when he and Charles Lamb were once making up a dinner-party together, Charles asked him not to invite a certain lugubrious friend of theirs. "Because," said Lamb, "he would cast a damper even over a funeral." I have often contrasted the habitual qualities of that gloomy friend of theirs with the astounding spirits of both Thackeray and Dickens. They ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... upon to dare much, and if he did not begin to show some daring at once, how could he respect himself, or trust to himself for future daring? So he boldly asked for Mrs Mackenzie, and was at once shown into the parlour. There sat the widow, in her full lugubrious weeds, there sat Miss Colza, and there sat Mary Jane, and they were all busy hemming, darning, and clipping; turning old sheets into new ones; for now it was more than ever necessary that Mrs Mackenzie should make money at once by taking in lodgers. When Mr Maguire was ...
— Miss Mackenzie • Anthony Trollope
... lugubrious wife of the happy Jean was inclined to resent Guida's gaiety as unseemly, for Jean's story sounded to her as serious statement of fact; which incapacity for humour probably accounted for Jean's occasional lapses from domestic grace. If Jean had said that he had met a periwinkle ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... scenes that were enacting in Holland were going on in Overyssel and Friesland and Groningen; but with a difference. Here it was the Five Points men who were driven into secession, whose barns were nailed up, and whose preachers were mobbed. A lugubrious spectacle, but less painful certainly than the hangings and drownings and burnings alive in the previous century to prevent secession ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... eyes, white dress, behind the black double bars; the key restored to the Ruota, and engulfed after directions from the mysterious voice; another door, sound of keys and bolts. In all this a predominant and lugubrious impression of keys and bolts. The little portress, Donna Maria Geltude (for these nuns are Benedictines, and have the handle to their names), a wizen, very ugly little woman, in incredibly shabby but spotless dress, white wool ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... lugubrious effort to grin, "Thor's announcement shocked the squad so much that I was not forced to ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... of regret vanquished fatigue, and sadness drove away sleep, then Jack, who compared himself to Peter the Great, when a voluntary exile in the shipyards of Saardam, would endeavor to infuse a little mirth into the lugubrious party. If all his efforts to make them merry failed, all three would join together in a humble prayer to their Heavenly Father, who ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... entered, followed by a cat, larger than any I had ever believed could exist. The beast looked at us and gave so hopeless a miau that I shuddered. I had never heard so lugubrious a cry. ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... A few leisurely dandies, clad in white duck, with flowing neckties, and swinging slim bamboo canes, threaded the grassy by-ways toward the houses of their favoured senoritas. Those who wooed the art of music dragged tirelessly at whining concertinas, or fingered lugubrious guitars at doors and windows. An occasional soldier from the cuartel, with flapping straw hat, without coat or shoes, hurried by, balancing his long gun like a lance in one hand. From every density of the foliage the giant tree frogs sounded their loud and ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... reply, and he resumed; "you cannot have failed to remark, my dear friend, that everyone has his particular kind of drunkenness, sad or gay. My drunkenness is always sad, and when I am thoroughly drunk my mania is to relate all the lugubrious stories which my foolish nurse inculcated into my brain. That is my failing—a capital failing, I admit; but with that exception, I am ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... lease, a fight for bread at times. But wealth was here in this soil and in this sun. And more than wealth. There was health and liberty in it. No heckling social restrictions, no vapid idle piffle at dull teas; no lugubrious pretence of burdensome duties. Here one slept and ate and worked and watched the changing light, and breathed the desert air and lived. It was ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... was standing at order arms at the side of a lane, waiting for the command to march, when suddenly the youth remembered the little packet enwrapped in a faded yellow envelope which the loud young soldier with lugubrious words had intrusted to him. It made him start. He uttered an exclamation and turned ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... wail from the corral and he left suddenly upon one of his unexplained errands, this time without excusing himself. He got back while Janet was still engaged upon the article. When she looked up he was standing beside the fire looking down at her. There was something new in his face, a look half lugubrious, semi-humorous, apologetic. ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart |
