"Melancholy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... her with a nod and slight lightening of the eyes, which, however, hardly disturbed the habitual sombreness of the face. He was a dark, finely featured man, with grizzled hair, carrying himself with an air of sleepy melancholy. He was much older than his wife, and was a prominent leader in the little Independent chapel of the village. His melancholy could give way on occasion to fits of violent temper. For instance, he had been almost beside himself when Bessie, who had leanings to the ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he now raved enormous folly, Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools, and Graves, 615 'Twould make George Colman melancholy To have heard him, like a male Molly, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... mattered in any situation. His strength in counsel lay in the rare combination of these qualities of the trained lawyer with the gift of intuition, which women claim as their distinguishing characteristic; and it often extorted from Nationalists the melancholy admission that if Carson had been on their side their cause would have triumphed ...
— Ulster's Stand For Union • Ronald McNeill
... King Edward was walking in the park at Windsor with slow and weary steps. His rich dark brown hair and beard were lined with gray, his face was not only grave but worn and melancholy, and more severe than ever. The sorrow of his life, his queen's death, had fallen on him, and with her had gone much of softening influence; the only son who had been spared to him was, though a mere child, grieving him by the wayward frivolities not ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... They know no melancholy, But fashion crowns of holly, And gather sleep within the brake To deck a kingdom when they wake, And bless ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... with all our abilities, when our hearts should be open to information and our hands ready to administer relief, to find distrusts and jealousies taking possession of the mind and a party spirit prevailing affords a most melancholy reflection, and forebodes no good." The hoarse murmur of impending mutiny emphasized strongly the words written on the same day to Duane: "The history of the war is a history of false hopes and temporary expedients. Would to God they ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... melancholy ones thought, 'That won't save us!' and they remained where they were. But the third and merry one jumped up and went into the wood till he found the rock hut. In the hut sat a very old woman, who was the Dragon's grandmother. She ...
— The Yellow Fairy Book • Various
... week; and every time the trader caught her crying he beat her, uttering fearful curses. If he caught her praying, he said, he would "give her hell." Mary was a member of the Methodist Church in Washington. There were several pious people in the company; and at night, when the driver found them melancholy and disposed to pray, he had a fiddle brought, and made them dance in their chains, whipping them till they complied. Mary at length became so weak that she really could travel on foot no further. Her feeble frame was exhausted, and sank beneath accumulated ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... she sat in penance. To complete her misfortunes, something in the paper put Mad. de Coulanges in mind of former times; and she began a long history of the destruction of some fine old tapestry hangings in the Chateau de Coulanges, at the beginning of the Revolution: this led to endless melancholy reflections; and at length tears began to flow from the fine ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... collision. Accordingly when Mr. DILLON had resisted a proposal to fine any visitor to an entertainment who did not pay the Amusements-tax, it was confidently expected that Mr. HEALY would find excellent reasons for asserting that this was the best clause in the whole Bill, and that only a melancholy humbug would oppose it. Instead he vigorously supported his former foe with an argument that I am sure Mr. DILLON would never have thought of. "Was it not a weird proposal," he asked, "that a child who had unwittingly walked; through a turnstile should forthwith become ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... great relief of this half-melancholy feeling, the ladies at his departure made him a present of a waistcoat, upon which he had watched them both for some time past at work, with a silent envy of the fortunate unknown, to whom it was by-and-by to belong. Such a present is the most agreeable which a true-hearted man ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... residence on the spot, and thumbing constantly a dirty old edition of Madame's letters, worked himself up to the notion that he had witnessed the scenes which he described. We were induced, in the course of our walk, to inquire somewhat into his own history, which appeared rather a melancholy one, though common enough in the times through which he had lived. About a week after the pillage and destruction of Chateau Grignan, he was denounced as a royalist, and immured in the prison of Orange, in company with several gentlemen of the neighbourhood, acquaintances of his master. ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... was probably with reference to this that Shakespeare represented poor mad Ophelia hanging her flowers on the "Willow tree aslant the brook" (No. 6), and it is more pointedly referred to in Nos. 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, and 9. The feeling was expressed in a melancholy ditty, which must have been very popular in the sixteenth century, of which Desdemona says a few of the first verses (No. ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... use of an anaesthetic than from the shock of an operation. He liked Miller, wished him well, and would not wittingly wound his feelings. He really thought him too much of a gentleman for the town, in view of the restrictions with which he must inevitably be hampered. There was something melancholy, to a cultivated mind, about a sensitive, educated man who happened to be off color. Such a person was a sort of social misfit, an odd quantity, educated out of his own class, with no possible hope of entrance into that above it. He felt quite sure that ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... princess belonging to those wild and awesome altitudes. The spirit of the region chimed with hers. Her eyes were always turned upon the sombre cliffs, the blue gorges and the snow-clad turrets, looking a sublime melancholy equal to their own. At times on the journey she sang thrilling te deums and misereres that struck the true note of the hills, and made their route seem like a solemn march down a cathedral aisle. The rescued ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... agricultural knowledge to his father's precepts or example. Virgil perhaps had tended his father's flock, as he pictures himself doing under the guise of Tityrus; certainly he spent many hours of youth "patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi" steeping his Celtic soul with the beauty and the melancholy poetry of the Lombard landscape: and so he came to know and to love bird and flower and the external ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... A bitterness and a melancholy I cannot describe was holding me. Of what good my leg and my eye if I am to suffer torment once more? A sense of forsakenness held me. Perhaps I dozed, because I was worn out, when suddenly I was conscious of a closing door, and opening my eye, I saw that ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... he had put on a little weight, and didn't know if she had noticed it! She was oppressed by the eternal melancholy miracle of the fat man who does not realize that he has ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... dervishes, in witnessing whose singular movements one is at a loss whether to sigh or to laugh. To the young the performance suggests that of the circus, and until wearied of the monotony of it, is perhaps as amusing; but to this more thoughtful observer it is melancholy to see men so debase themselves. The ring in which these people whirl about was full of deluded men, on the day of our visit, self-proclaimed disciples. About twenty of them commenced at a signal to turn rapidly about ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... service. As an observance of religion is allowed to be the foundation of virtue, so a neglect of religious duties has ever been acknowledged the forerunner of every wickedness; the confession of malefactors at the place of execution being a melancholy confirmation of this truth. Here we see him, while others are intent on the holy service, transgressing the laws both of God and man, gambling on a tomb-stone with the off-scouring of the people, the meanest of the human species, shoe-blacks, chimney-sweepers, &c. for none but such would deign to ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... a melancholy whimper. Sometimes one of the men would rise, open the window and look out at a passing hamlet, where (p. 027) lights glimmered in the houses and heavy waggons lumbered along the uneven streets, whistle an air into the darkness and close the window again. My mate had an electric ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... Lafcadio Hearn's prose ripened and mellowed consistently to the end. In mere workmanship the present volume is one of his most admirable, while in its heightened passages, like the final paragraph of "The Romance of the Milky Way," the rich, melancholy music, the profound suggestion, are not easily matched from any but the very greatest ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... frequently weeping. I became more and more melancholy. Her parents were beyond expression happy. The eventful day approached, threatening and heavy, like a thundercloud. The evening preceding arrived. I could scarcely breathe. I had carefully filled a large chest with gold, and sat ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... the—Husband! In saying this, he flung out of the Room in spite of her Endeavours to hinder him, and going hastily through a Gallery which had a large Window that look'd into the Garden, he perceiv'd Melliora lying on a green Bank, in a melancholy but a charming Posture, directly opposite to the place where he was; her Beauties appear'd, if possible more to advantage than ever he had seen them, or at least he had more opportunity thus unseen by her, to gaze upon them: he in a moment lost all the Rage of Temper he ...
— The Life and Romances of Mrs. Eliza Haywood • George Frisbie Whicher
... instant of even less importance. I recollect the news coming. The King, having been always in frail health, had never married; seeing clearly but not far, he was a sad man: the fate that struck down his brother increased his natural melancholy; he became almost a recluse, withdrew himself from the capital to a retired residence, and henceforward was little more than a name in which Prince von Hammerfeldt conducted the business of the country. Now and then my mother visited him; once she brought back to me a letter from him, little ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... one. They try to convince themselves that it is so, and all such efforts to sophisticate the conscience, if persisted in, are punished by entire success. The spectacle does not inspire me with hate; it fills me with wonder and profound melancholy. Do these men think that by altering their opinion of right they can alter the nature of things, or make wrong come out right in the great and solemn issues which are before us? We stand where their own great men stood ...
— The Spirit Proper to the Times. - A Sermon preached in King's Chapel, Boston, Sunday, May 12, 1861. • James Walker
... is up on the very tip-top of all, on the tip-top where the wobble is the worst? Our own Columbia! It must be fine to ride around that way all dressed up in a flag. But a sourer lot of faces you never saw in your life. No. I am wrong. For downright melancholy and despondency you must wait till the funny old clown comes along in his little bit of a buggy drawn by a ...
— Back Home • Eugene Wood
... however, he allowed Dauger to act as valet to Fouquet, but with Lauzun, said Louvois, Dauger must have no intercourse. Fouquet had then another prisoner valet, La Riviere. This man had apparently been accused of no crime. He was of a melancholy character, and a dropsical habit of body: Fouquet had amused himself by doctoring him and teaching ...
— The Lock and Key Library/Real Life #2 • Julian Hawthorne
... Green) wrinkled her forehead—that noble, that startling forehead which had been written about in the newspapers of two hemispheres—laid down her American Squeezer pen, and sighed. It was an autumn day, nipping and melancholy, full of the rustle of dying leaves and the faint sound of muffin bells, and Belgrave Square looked sad even to the great female novelist who had written her way into a mansion there. Fog hung about with the policeman on the pavement. The ...
— The Mission Of Mr. Eustace Greyne - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... deported to the wilderness in the back country. Many took refuge within the British lines, especially at New York. Many Loyalists created homes elsewhere. Some went to England only to find melancholy disillusion of hope that a grateful motherland would understand and reward their sacrifices. Large numbers found their way to Nova Scotia and to Canada, north of the Great Lakes, and there played a part in laying the foundation of the Dominion of today. The city of Toronto ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... 'She is a poor melancholy half-crazed creature, I take it,' said the squire; 'at least, that is what I hear. The girl, I should think, would be glad to get away from such a home. But I am afraid you will find a good many obstacles.' After that nothing more was said about the matter at Folking ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... His frame has grown more athletic; his eye, more steadfast and less restless, looks you full in the face. His smile is more open, but there is a melancholy in his expression almost approaching to gloom. His dress is the same as that of Pisistratus and Guy,—white vest and trousers; loose neckcloth, rather gay in color; broad cabbage-leaf hat; his mustache and beard are trimmed ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... live together after all; you shall hear more of this later. Stay with my people till sundown, but you must keep your own counsel, for they are all listeners and blabs. The physician here will now take the melancholy tidings to the unfortunate widow, and then you can talk it all over with her at night. Nothing startling must take place at the house there; and with regard to your master, even his death must remain a secret from every one ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... joy upon seeing that glittering substance knew no bounds, but he overheard one of the servants say in a melancholy undertone: "What a pity his majesty has not a black complexion such as we have! What ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... in the Louvre)—the whole I would, I think, have cheerfully given a pound or two for the privilege of not possessing—so execrable as sign-paintings even! 'Are there worse poets in their way than painters?' Yet the melancholy business is here—that the bad poet goes out of his way, writes his verses in the language he learned in order to do a hundred other things with it, all of which he can go on and do afterwards—but the painter has spent the best of his life in learning even how to produce such monstrosities ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... effacement of countenance that is sometimes a more or less successful disguise for chagrin. On this occasion it seemed to fail, for Mademoiselle Palicsky turned her attention to Lucien and her work again with a slight raising of the eyebrows and a slighter sigh. Her face assumed a gentle melancholy, as if she were pained at the exhibition of a weakness of her sex; yet it was unnecessary to be an acute observer to read there the hope that Lucien's significant phrase had not by any chance ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... How brightly glowed the fire! I wanted to linger for a week, a month, a year,—as I do now, thinking it all over,—and when I strolled to the porch,—hearing the pigeons cooing at the barn; the water streaming down the dam; the melancholy monotony of the pine boughs;—there only lacked the humming mill-wheel, and the strong grip of the miller's hand, to fill the void corner of one's ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... unfurrowed by care, and the matron who, numbering more than double her years, had felt more than treble her sorrows. The youth was deeply moved, as he gazed, and thought he might have robbed that mother of her son, that wife of her husband, that sister of a brother. Those gentle, melancholy beings had never harmed him, and, perhaps, in a moment of passion, he had deprived their existence of half its sweetness, and turned their smiles to tears. It was with an aching, an humbled heart that he bowed ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... honour him, and feigning to be in the last degree enamoured of him. But Salabaetto, being minded to requite her guile with his own, went to her one evening, being bidden to sup and sleep with her, with an aspect so melancholy and dolorous, that he shewed as he had lief give up the ghost. Jancofiore, as she embraced and kissed him, demanded of him the occasion of his melancholy. Whereto he, having let her be instant with him a good while, ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... followed my conductor into his dwelling place; Poverty were depictured in his melancholy face. His bread it was corn dodger, his beef I could not chaw; This was the kind of hash they fed me in ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various
... in her ear, at which both laughed. Evidently I was the cause of their mirth, and my embarrassment increased. At that time I had as mistress a very affectionate and sentimental little person, whose sentiment and whose melancholy letters amused me greatly. I realized the pain I must have given her by what I now experienced, and for five minutes I loved her as no ...
— Camille (La Dame aux Camilias) • Alexandre Dumas, fils
... It was melancholy to see how, after each one of these pauses, each fresh drinking in of the beauty of the landscape and the balmy air, the old man resumed his slow pace, with a long sigh and his eyes cast down. The fairer this beautiful ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... canning factory started up again, and so once more Marija was heard to sing, and the love-music of Tamoszius took on a less melancholy tone. It was not for long, however; for a month or two later a dreadful calamity fell upon Marija. Just one year and three days after she had begun work as a can-painter, she ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... low and tender voice, to sing a Polish song which held Godefroid dumb with admiration and also with sadness. This melody, which greatly resembles the long drawn out melancholy airs of Brittany, is one of those poems which vibrate in the heart long after the ear has heard them. As he listened, Godefroid looked at Vanda, but he could not endure the ecstatic glance of that fragment of a woman, partially insane, ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... so full of sweetness and melancholy; few who had once seen could mistake or forget them; and Barbara Hare, forgetting where she was, looked at them ...
— East Lynne • Mrs. Henry Wood
... five having fallen into our clutches, we stood by and watched the rest. Most of them leaped gloriously to liberty. Some ignominiously wriggled. Others remained in the pool, their nerves so shattered by bluster and assault that they had not the melancholy courage to slip away. In his wrath—for blood still oozed from his forehead— George would have exterminated the skulkers, and, checked in his bloodthirstiness, he showered upon them contemptible titles while he cooked two of those we had ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... didn't matter. King, the driver, looked as if he thought it did, and appeared morose. Is it because coachmen always keep their appointments with society and society never keeps its appointments with coachmen that a settled melancholy seems to brood over them, and their souls seem cankered ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... had found it in Mrs. Jane Stannard, mother of a schoolmate; but the new friend soon died, and for months the grief-stricken boy, it is said, haunted the lonely grave at night and brooded over his loss and the mystery of death—a not very wholesome experience for a lonely and melancholy ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... scale. Schemes of annexation or exchange of territory were for a time indefinitely multiplied. The end, as is well known, was the complete victory of Spain, which, as sword and shield of the counter-reformation, long held Papacy among its other subjects. The melancholy reflections of the philosophers could only show them how those who had called in the barbarians all ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... in the unopened house, with a charwoman to provide her with underdone or burnt chops, and eggs at eighteen a shilling, while the shutters of the front rooms were closed, and dusty desolation reigned. She knew every detail of the melancholy squalor of it, the dragging hours, the nights of lying awake listening to the occasional passing of belated cabs, or the squeaks and nibbling of mice in the ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... gilt-edged saucer with it, was in the act of presenting it to her, with a dancing-school bow, when he unfortunately lodged the contents of the saucer on her pink skirt and lace flounces. Gertrude retired to the dressing-room with the afflicted Miss Jane, offering her all the sympathy that such a melancholy occasion called for. ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... council is held, nominally at least, for the purpose of condolence, and as it necessarily revives the memory of the departed worthies of their republic, it is natural that the ceremonies throughout should be of a melancholy cast. They were doubtless so from the beginning, and before there was any occasion to deplore the decay of their commonwealth or the degeneracy of the age. In fact, when we consider that the founders of the League, with remarkable skill and judgment, managed to compress into a single day the protracted ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... the third or fourth visit this child began to recognise favourites among the pictures, and being somewhat melancholy and mystical by nature, liking trees, beechwood glades, cathedral aisles, and the end of day, he would drag upon his mother's arm when they passed two pictures hanging together in the Dutch room. One was called The Woman taken ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes
... blow to his sensitive temperament, already hardly tried by political anxiety, was severe. We still have the private letters which he wrote to Atticus after her death from his solitude at Astura on the edge of the melancholy Pomptine marshes;[824] and here, if our minds are sufficiently divested of modern ideas and trained to look on death with Roman eyes, we may be startled to find him thinking of her as still in some sense ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... grievously tormented, and was solemnly aware of the vanity of those fears. He could not pretend to any great esteem for his companion, but he made many suitable reflections upon the shears of the Fates and the tenacity of life, in which melancholy occupation he was interrupted by the doctor, who pointed out the necessity of immediate burial. Seven o'clock the next morning was the hour agreed upon, and Mitchelbourne at once searched in Lance's coat pockets for the letters which he carried. There ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... the old man whose head I saw bound in a red handkerchief, was the first noticeable man of the name. He was a scale of enthusiasms, ranging from the melancholy to the sarcastic. When I heard him talked of, it seemed to me that he was born under the influence of the sea, while the rest of the tribe inherited the character of the landscape. Comprehension of life, and comprehension of self, came too ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... Prime Minister had capitulated. His Final Manifesto of Six Points issued on that day to the electorate furnishes a melancholy comparison with his program of three weeks earlier. I ...
— The Economic Consequences of the Peace • John Maynard Keynes
... great sorrow fell upon him that Roschen first felt towards him something more than the passing interest that every maiden reasonably feels in every seemly young man. Her disposition towards him, to be sure, even when thus stimulated by a sympathetic melancholy, was only that of friendliness; but it evidently was a friendliness so cordial and so sincere that it made quite a tolerable foundation upon which Ludwig freely built fine air-castles of hope. For his disposition towards Roschen was altogether that of a lover—as anybody might have known ...
— An Idyl Of The East Side - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... not seen beyond lat. 28 degrees. Nor was it found in a wild state beyond Fort Grey, to the best of my recollection; these miserable and melancholy animals would come to water where we were, unconscious of our presence, and would gain the very bank of the creek before they discovered us, rousing us by as melancholy a howl as jackal ever made; their emaciated bodies standing ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... his model for a hero and a god. The forehead was exceedingly lofty—a rare thing in a Gypsy; the nose less Roman than Grecian—fine yet delicate; the eyes large, overhung with long drooping lashes, giving them almost a melancholy expression; it was only when they were highly elevated that the Gypsy glance peered out, if that can be called glance which is a strange stare, like nothing else in this world. His complexion—a beautiful ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... finger, the student's intellect, the sensualist's passions, all illustrate the law on its one side; and the dying out of faculties and tastes, and even of intuitions and conscience, by reason of simple disuse, are melancholy instances of it on the other. But the solemn words of this condemnation seem to point to a far more awful energy in its working in the future, when everything that has not been consecrated by employment for Jesus shall be taken away, and the soul, stripped of its garb, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... hear the sound," was the favourite song when heaving up the anchor preparatory to pointing homeward. This chanty has a silken, melancholy, and somewhat soft breeziness about it, and when it was well sung its flow went fluttering over the harbour, which re-echoed the joyous tidings until soloist and choristers alike became entranced by the power of their ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purgatory; though his own interior gaiety—of which a word by and by—is so interior, and its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of life; and that ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... John Royce Pederstone's was at its height, Phil Ralston was trudging the hills alone, coming over the ranges from Lumby, a village which lay several miles distant, where he had gone by stage direct from the smithy. He walked in the melancholy enjoyment of his own thoughts. It did him good—and he knew it—to get off in this way when things were not going to his liking. It gave him an opportunity to review himself in the cold blood of retrospect, without interference; and it gave him time quietly to review the conduct of others ...
— The Spoilers of the Valley • Robert Watson
... on her knees, and put up a prayer. On rising, she saw such a crazy expression of joy on her husband's face, that the diabolical suggestion returned, and then Adeline sank into a sort of idiotic melancholy. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... had ceased falling, and the clouds of the last downpour, driven before the wind, were nearing the horizon towards the heights of Pere-Lachaise, which were wrapped in gloom; and against this stormy background Paris, illumined by a uniform clearness, assumed a lonely, melancholy grandeur. It seemed to be uninhabited, like one of those cities seen in a nightmare—the reflex of a world of death. To Jeanne it certainly appeared anything but pretty. She was now idly dreaming of those she ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... and sunken, the grass knee-high about it. There was hardly a sign of life about the place, though I could see an aged man smoking a pipe peacefully in the shade of an apple tree at the back. Everything wore an air of melancholy, desertion and loneliness. ...
— A Village Ophelia and Other Stories • Anne Reeve Aldrich
... dreaded the darkness of the evening, the melancholy feeling of the twilight. Then a flood of sorrow invaded his heart, a torrent of despair which seemed to overwhelm him and drive him mad. He was as afraid of his own thoughts as men are of criminals, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... are to deny ourselves the solace of remembering the mercies which may, perhaps, have gone from us. Memory may be like the calm radiance that fills the western sky from a sun that has set, sad and yet sweet, melancholy and lovely. But he means that we should so forget as, by the oblivion, ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... left them stranded. Irresistible reaction plunged them into listless stupor; they forgot their enthusiasm; they thought no more of the men whom they had to rejoin; they surrendered themselves to the melancholy sweetness of finding themselves alone, hand in hand, in the ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... bridge. It was easy to see that he was on his good behaviour; and from some fragments of conversations I overheard between them when they met in the passage opposite my door, I learned that he was 'doing the melancholy dodge,' as in the vernacular we would express it; and had many harrowing revelations to make as to the manner in which his heart had been trifled ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 435 - Volume 17, New Series, May 1, 1852 • Various
... sun, very pale, had just showed itself, making the knives and forks and the white wine in their glasses gleam faintly. Lunch had not come yet. They sat looking at each other silently. Andrews felt weary and melancholy. He could think of nothing to say. Jeanne was playing with some tiny white daisies with pink tips to their petals, arranging them in circles and crosses on ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... gets his right foot loose," muttered the cochero, stifling another sigh, "I'll give him my horses, and offer him my services even to death, for he'll free us from the Civil Guard." With a melancholy gaze he watched ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance. For Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day. Nature always wears ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... took the shape of Courts of Love, where the bored but literary chatelaine discussed delicate problems of conduct pertaining to the heart. The minstrel about the lady's castle, for his part, sought her favourable notice not only by his songs but also by giving an object lesson of his melancholy condition. One would imagine that his proceedings were not always calculated to further their purpose. A famous singer, for instance, in honour of a lady who was named Lupa, caused himself to be sewn in a wolf's skin, and ran before the hounds till he ...
— French Mediaeval Romances from the Lays of Marie de France • Marie de France
... There was "heroic gaiety" there; only, as usual with gaiety, the passage of a peevish cloud seemed all the chillier. Lit up, in the agitation of speaking, by many a harsh or scornful beam, yet always sinking, in moments of repose, to an expression of high-bred melancholy, it was a face that looked, after all, made for suffering—already half pleading, half defiant—as of a creature you could hurt, but to the last never shake a hair's breadth from its ...
— Giordano Bruno • Walter Horatio Pater
... in a striking manner, the original motif, and somehow expresses in a few words the poignant melancholy of the whole poem. Another advantage in finishing a long poem, such as this would be, in the same way as you began it is that it makes it clear to the reader that he is still reading the same poem. Sometimes, and especially in vers libre of an emotional and digressive character, the reader ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... The melancholy result, though unfortunately too easily explained, excited reports as ingenious as malevolent, to account for its suddenness, but like the injustice to his memory he has received from rivals or successors, who sought to raise a reputation ...
— Memoirs of the Court of George IV. 1820-1830 (Vol 1) - From the Original Family Documents • Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... not go on like this for ever. She, who apparently had no ties, was never free; she had the duties without the joys, and for these few minutes, before a knock came at the door, she allowed herself the relief of melancholy. She was incapable of tears, but she wished she could cry bitterly and for a ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... one after the other by the way. They could hear, in the wide silence, the untiring chirp-chirp of the crickets. They were afraid, both of them, and they were sad; the melancholy of nightfall had entered into their little hearts. All round them was familiar ground, but the things they knew the best looked strange and uncanny. The earth seemed suddenly to have grown too big and too old for them. They were tired, and they began ...
— Child Life In Town And Country - 1909 • Anatole France
... letter from Mrs. Whiting needs no introduction. It bears a melancholy interest from the fact that the beloved writer died shortly afterwards, at Newark, ...
— The Women of the Arabs • Henry Harris Jessup
... unbiased Opinion that London consisted of a vast swarm of melancholy Members of the Middle and Lower Classes of the Animal Kingdom who ate Sponge Cake with Clinkers in it, drank Tea, smoked Pipes and rode by Bus, and thought they ...
— Knocking the Neighbors • George Ade
... wilt be able to distinguish falsehood from truth by means of which knowledge men aim at possible things with greater moderation; and do not veil thyself in ignorance, for the result of this would be that thou wouldst be ineffectual and fall into melancholy and despair. ...
— Thoughts on Art and Life • Leonardo da Vinci
... local traffic, and have set their own price on all provisions, from which some have made great profits. Salazar—who has with good reason been styled "the Las Casas of the Philippines"—enumerates a melancholy list of injuries and opressions inflicted upon the hapless natives by their conquerors, and urges in most forcible and eloquent language that they be protected from injustice and treated as human beings. He cites from the royal decrees the clauses which make such provisions ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803, Volume V., 1582-1583 • Various
... Creeper Cottage who slept that night was Annalise. Priscilla spent it walking up and down her bedroom, and Fritzing on the other side of the wall spent it walking up and down his. They could hear each other doing it; it was a melancholy sound. Once Priscilla was seized with laughter—a not very genial mirth, but still laughter—and had to fling herself on her bed and bury her face in the pillows lest Fritzing should hear so blood-curdling a noise. It was when their steps had fallen steadily together for several turns ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... room. If my life was not so full. You don't know how hard I work from morning to night. What time is there for me to be a Christian? What time is there, what room is there for Christianity in such a life as mine?" But does not it come to seem to us so strange, so absurd, if it was not so melancholy, that man should say such a thing as that? It is as if the engine had said it had no room for the steam. It is as if the tree had said it had no room for the sap. It is as if the ocean had said it had no room for the tide. ...
— Addresses • Phillips Brooks
... fortune, both with his money and his interest, and his industry, and if need were, not by sticking at any wickedness whatsoever that might be useful to them, to bend and turn about his own nature and laveer with every wind, to live severely with the melancholy, merrily with the pleasant, gravely with the aged, wantonly with the young, desperately with the bold, and debauchedly with the luxurious. With this variety and multiplicity of his nature, as he had made a collection ...
— Cowley's Essays • Abraham Cowley
... The 'morbid melancholy,' which was lurking in his constitution, and to which we may ascribe those particularities, and that aversion to regular life, which, at a very early period, marked his character, gathered such strength in his twentieth year, as to afflict him in a dreadful ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... the stomach, not molesting any way, but heating him as a fire doth a kettle, that is put to it. After the first sleep 'tis not amiss to lie on the left side, that the meat may the better descend, and sometimes again on the belly, but never on the back. Seven or eight hours is a competent time for a melancholy man ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... first two days of Harry King's absence Madam Manovska relapsed into a more profound melancholy, and the care of her mother took up Amalia's time and thoughts so completely as to give her little for indulging her own anxiety for Harry's safety. Strangely, she felt no fear for themselves, although they were thus alone on the ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... talked earnestly to Travers Guy Cyril, you will remember him. She looked not unlike Guido's Beatrice; (I don't mean the daubs one sees, but Guido's own), the same soul-full eyes, Grecian nose, and lovely full curved lips. Guy, always melancholy, Vaura, always sympathetic, the reflection of his sad eyes lent to hers a deep tenderness; that he loves her hopelessly, poor fellow, is only too evident, he bid us adieu for a New York trip, thence, he seemed to think, no one cared. And so, lives are parted; one is inclined to quarrel ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... infancy. One was to wander with the stain of murder upon his soul, in frightful physical pain, with a price upon his head and the curse of a world upon his name, until he died a dog's death in a burning barn; the wife was to pass the rest of her days in melancholy and madness; and one of the lovers was to slay the other, and end his ...
— A Short Life of Abraham Lincoln - Condensed from Nicolay & Hay's Abraham Lincoln: A History • John G. Nicolay
... would be rung out in a few hours, in company with our Utopian expectations. All our hopes of a rare New Year were, like our Christmas phantasies, dashed to the ground. The morrow promised to be rare enough in a melancholy sense, but it would not be New Year's Day. There was but one ray of comfort to sustain us, namely, the approach of the hero of Candahar; for although a certain period of waiting had yet to be endured—ere another famous march could be accomplished—the coming of Roberts disposed ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... somewhat melancholy spectacle of an impoverished aristocratic class attempting to maintain some semblance of their former position, though they no longer have the means to do so. They flourished during two or three centuries of almost continuous war, and became ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... attainments do honour to the place where their education and their minds were matured. And even the recollection of most of those, who have been removed from this lower world, is attended with a soothing melancholy, which partakes more of pleasure and thankfulness for having enjoyed their society, than of pain. The memory of the ...
— Advice to a Young Man upon First Going to Oxford - In Ten Letters, From an Uncle to His Nephew • Edward Berens
... cheeks denoted convalescence. But I had no fears of an immediate catastrophe; nay, I persuaded myself that she would ultimately recover. And thus cheerfulness reigned in our little society. Idris conversed with animation on a thousand topics. Her chief desire was to lead our thoughts from melancholy reflections; so she drew charming pictures of a tranquil solitude, of a beauteous retreat, of the simple manners of our little tribe, and of the patriarchal brotherhood of love, which would survive the ruins of the populous nations which had lately existed. We shut out from our thoughts ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... charge, "he is our ideal: morality, economy, everything. But the completion of the Louvre is one of the conditions on which we gave him the crown, and the civil list, which, I admit, had no limits set to it, leaves the heart of Paris in a most melancholy state.—It is because I am so strongly in favor of the middle course that I should like to see the middle of Paris in a better condition. Your part of the town is positively terrifying. You would have been murdered there ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... Angels, the "judgment chapter" in Howie's Scotch Worthies, Byron's Narrative, and the Adventures of Philip Quarll, with a good many other adventures and voyages, real and fictitious, part of a very miscellaneous collection of books made by my father. It was a melancholy little library to which I had fallen heir. Most of the missing volumes had been with the master aboard his vessel when he perished. Of an early edition of Cook's Voyages, all the volumes were now absent save the first; and a very tantalizing ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... new essays of Elia, I could not but feel somewhat indignant that such excellent productions of such an excellent writer should have been "underkept and down supprest" so long. I was as much ravished with these new-found essays of Lamb's as good old Nicholas Gerbelius (see Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Partition II., Section 2, Member 4) was with a few Greek authors restored to light. If I had had one or two loving, enthusiastic admirers of Charles Lamb to enjoy with me the delight of perusing these uncollected Elias, I should have been "all felicity up to the brim." For with me, as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... to continue your studies, to read, write poetry, ramble about the woods and commune with nature, as you so love to do, and not think of assuming the duties of a woman, while you are yet nothing but a child. Oh! it is the most melancholy thing in the world to me, to see a person trying to get beyond their years. You must not do it, Gabriella. I wish I could make you stop thinking for one year. I do not like to see a cheek as young as yours pale with overmuch thought. Do you know you are getting ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... bed for three or four days, and on rising could only sit by the fireside, silent, melancholy. Widdowson indulged his hope, though Monica herself laughed it aside, and even showed annoyance if he return to the subject. Her temper was strangely uncertain; some chance word in a conversation would irritate her beyond endurance, and after ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... you contrasts merely to fit my theories. But there is Duerer's "Knight and Death," his greatest plate; and if I had Lionardo's "Medusa" here, which he painted when only a boy, you would have seen how he was held by the same chain. And you cannot but wonder why, this being the melancholy temper of the great Greek or naturalistic school, I should have called it the school of light. I call it so because it is through its intense love of light that the darkness becomes apparent to it, and through its intense love of truth and form that all mystery becomes attractive ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... that saw the sweet domestic cheer she diffused through the house with her harmless little gossip about this and that, and the artfully artless kindnesses to him she mingled with all, could have blamed him? He was given to melancholy and to musing; his cheek was sometimes pale, and his step languid; and he saw, all too often, troublesome phantoms coming to meet him. This disposition in another would have incited the keenest ridicule in the mind of Jenny Bowen, but in Hobert it was well enough; nay, more, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... entered upon the duties of his office, created a Balia for the reformation of the state, which banished Benedetto Alberti and admonished all the rest of his family except Antonio. Before his departure, Benedetto called them together, and observing their melancholy demeanor, said, "You see, my fathers, and you the elders of our house, how fortune has ruined me and threatened you. I am not surprised at this, neither ought you to be so, for it always happens thus to those who among a multitude of the wicked, ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... moaned hoarsely around the heavy solid walls of "Sunnybank," and the weird sound of the rustling leaves impressed one with thoughts alike weird and melancholy. ...
— Marguerite Verne • Agatha Armour
... place of another kind, and which has more the air of what it would be, than anything I have yet met with: it was the convent of the Chartreux. All the conveniences, or rather (if there was such a word) all the adaptments are assembled here, that melancholy, meditation, selfish devotion, and despair would require. But yet 'tis pleasing. Soften the terms, and mellow the uncouth horror that reigns here, but a little, and 'tis a charming solitude. It stands on a large space of ground, is old and irregular. The chapel ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... and friend of the whites, had smoked many pipes of peace there with Colonel Zane. At a later period, when King Louis Phillippe, who had been exiled from France by Napoleon, had come to America, during the course of his melancholy wanderings he had stopped at Fort Henry a few days. His stay there was marked by a fierce blizzard and the royal guest passed most of his time at Colonel Zane's fireside. Musing by those roaring logs perhaps he saw the ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... severe reprimand. He, however, went to Frey, and asked him boldly why he was so sad and silent. Frey answered, that he had seen a maiden of such surpassing beauty that if he could not possess her he should not live much longer, and that this was what rendered him so melancholy. 'Go, therefore,' he added, 'and ask her hand for me, and bring her here whether her father be willing or not, and I will amply reward thee.' Skirnir undertook to perform the task, provided he might be previously put in possession of Frey's sword, which was of such excellent quality that ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... Lord Melbourne for the position, in which he had allowed the young Queen to be placed, and considered that he had brought discredit on his Government by the circumstances in which he and his colleagues had resumed office. The melancholy death of Lady Flora Hastings following on this overthrow of the ordinary arrangements, intensified the wrath of the Tories, and helped to arouse a sense of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler
... French, under Gen. Berthier, and died in exile. When Berthier entered Rome, many of the cardinals "fled from the city on the wings of terror;" but those who remained "were disposed still to uphold the authority of the Pontiff." Finally, however, "with melancholy voice, they pronounced their absolute renunciation of the temporal government."—Life of Pius VI. His successor resumed his position. But in 1848 Pius IX. fled from his own subjects, and was only restored by French arms. Thus gradually the Babylonish woman became unseated, and fell ...
— A Brief Commentary on the Apocalypse • Sylvester Bliss
... Even so, whatever is spoken of the joy of the Spirit, or the peace of conscience, and whatsoever is seen by the world of abstaining from the pleasures of the world, the natural mind cannot but judge it foolishness, or melancholy, because they do not hear that pleasant and sweet harmony, and concert of the word and Spirit, in the souls of God's children. Else if they heard the sweet Psalmist of Israel piping, they could ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... and Nadyezhda Fyodorovna went into their dark, stuffy, dull rooms. Both were silent. Laevsky lighted a candle, while Nadyezhda Fyodorovna sat down, and without taking off her cloak and hat, lifted her melancholy, guilty eyes to him. ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... this at the time to their being preceded or accompanied by smiles. When five months old, he seemed to understand a compassionate, expression and tone of voice. When a few days over six months old, his nurse pretended to cry, and I saw that his face instantly assumed a melancholy expression, with the corners of the mouth strongly depressed; now this child could rarely have seen any other child crying, and never a grown-up person crying, and I should doubt whether at so early an age he could have reasoned on the subject. Therefore ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... of window. Twice the book dropped off her lap; twice she picked it up and laboriously found the page again. Then she gave it up, and descended to the back door, to see if anyone were about who might give her news. But the town-place was deserted by all save the ducks, the old white sow, and a melancholy crew of cocks and hens huddled under the dripping eaves of the cow-house. Returning to her room, she settled down on the window-seat, and watched the blaze of the bonfire increase as the short ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... touched the upper edge of Birs-Nimroud, giving it for one instant a weird effect, as though the ghost of some Babylonian watchman were waving a lit torch from its summit,—but the lurid glare soon faded and a dead gray twilight settled solemnly down over the melancholy landscape. With a sudden feeling of dejection and lassitude upon him, Alwyn, heaving a deep sigh, went onward, and soon perceived, lying a little to the north of the river, a small, roughly erected tenement with a wooden cross on its roof. Rightly ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... fairest pastoral valley of New England, he lived in the contemplation of the ideas that had passed across his mind in the quiet of European galleries, and now became more definite impressions. The secret of those years, with their deep, slow current of refined and melancholy thought, is now sealed with him in eternal sleep; but from the works that remain to us as the matured fruits of his life, we may gain some hint of his experiences. It is not to be questioned that he drew from the New-England soil that he tilled, and the air that he breathed, an inspiration which ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... tick did, and a week later he was broke. I do not say so much about Tralee being able to support one hundred and sixty liquor shops, because there is a little shipping, but how Cahirciveen can enable fifty publicans to thrive is a melancholy ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... good, Master George, to see the captain coming round as he is. Quite takes to the garden again. But dear, dear! It's in a melancholy state." ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... seems sad and melancholy. I fancy he has got a Monday head (Kipling), but he revives as the day goes on. As we go on, the banks become hills and the broad river, which has been showing sheets of sandbanks in all directions, now ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the head had not a sordid line, while the hand that he now and again raised, brushing his forehead meditatively, had gained much in strength and force. Yet there was something—something different, that brought a slight cloud into her eyes. It came to her now, a certain melancholy in the bearing of the figure, erect and well-balanced as it was. Once the feeling came, the certainty grew. And presently she found a strange sadness in the eyes, something that lurked behind all that he did and all that he was, some ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... overgrown ruins of a battery that had once commanded the entrance; and there were white-roofed houses, with deep verandas, which stood in little clearings with coral cliffs below them. On the opposite shore thick groves of palm-trees rose with their singular, melancholy beauty. Then as the channel narrowed, they passed an old Portuguese fort which carried the mind back to the bold adventurers who had first sailed those distant seas, and directly afterwards a mass of white buildings ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... they returned home. No news yet from Lerici. Lady Annabel grew uneasy again. The pensive and melancholy hour encouraged gloom; but Venetia, who was ...
— Venetia • Benjamin Disraeli
... me," said Camusot in a melancholy voice; "I shall not dine with you. It is my wife's birthday, I ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... and mugs and a farthing candle in the centre. Being right in the eyes of her, as it is termed, we could plainly hear the water slapping against the bends outside of her, as it was divided by the keelson, and borne away by the strong flood tide. It was a melancholy sound; I had never heard it before; and during a pause, as I listened to it, one of the men observed, "Queer sound, boy, ain't it? You'd think that the water was lapping in right among us. But noises aboard ship don't sound as they do on shore; I don't know why." ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... sometimes by reason of their divergencies Christians stand like frowning cliffs that look threateningly at one another across a narrow gorge, but deep below ground they are continuous and the rock is unbroken. In many and melancholy ways 'the unity of faith and knowledge' is contradicted in the existing organisations of the Church, and we are tempted to postpone its coming to the day of the new Jerusalem which is compact together; but the clarion note of this great text may encourage us to hope, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... night, as I am forced to reckon, I rose seasonably.... In reviewing my time from Easter, 1777, I found a very melancholy and shameful blank. So little has been done that days and months are without any trace. My health has, indeed, been very much interrupted. My nights have been commonly not only restless, but painful and fatiguing. ....Some relaxation ...
— Life of Johnson, Volume 6 (of 6) • James Boswell
... second lecture on the "Evidences of Religion afforded by the Phenomena of Nature, and the Consistency of Science with Divine Revelation." We were much pleased. He is the most complete elocutionist I ever heard, and impressed a crowded audience with his sublime subject. What a melancholy loss to England by his one false step, that degraded him in moral society! Walked to the Astor, and took one cigar each, when Mr. B. told me he was collecting charity for the poor widow of H. W——s, who had left her without a ...
— Journal of a Voyage across the Atlantic • George Moore
... howled in an interminable corridor all night. It did not seem to have anything to do with the wind out of doors, but to be a blast that had been casually shut in when the doors were closed behind the last Grand Duke who came hither and departed, and ever since it has been kept prisoner, and makes a melancholy wail along the corridor. The dreamy stupidity of this conceit proves how ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which we style the Madonna di San Sisto; for there she stands—the transfigured woman—at once completely human and completely divine, an abstraction of power, purity, and love, poised on the empurpled air, and requiring no other support; looking out with her melancholy, loving mouth, her slightly dilated, sibylline eyes, quite through the universe, to the end and consummation of all things; sad, as if she beheld afar off the visionary sword that was to reach her heart ...
— A Christmas Faggot • Alfred Gurney
... woman's voice and mild brown eyes. What terrible crime had consigned him to this living tomb? For what past sorrow is he weary of his life? What anguish of remorse has driven him to such a solitude? Yet he looked simple and placid; his melancholy was subdued and calm, as if life were over for him, and he were waiting for death to come with a friend's greeting upon noiseless wings some summer night across the fen-lands in a cloud of soft ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... negro I knew well, who, after having been often thus transported from island to island, at last resided in Montserrat. This man used to tell me many melancholy tales of himself. Generally, after he had done working for his master, he used to employ his few leisure moments to go a fishing. When he had caught any fish, his master would frequently take them from him without paying him; and at other times some other white people would serve him in the same ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... shimmering jewel-like in the steely light of the semi-Arctic evening. Black belts of gloomy pinewoods on the lower slopes of the mountains; the trees snow-burdened, but black with the darkness of night in their melancholy depths. The earth white; snow to the thickness of many feet on all. Life none; not a beast of the earth, nor a fowl of the air, nor the hum of an insect. Solitude. Cold—grey, pitiless cold. Night ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... ardent affection—such an affection as a sister seldom manifests toward a brother. It was rather the attachment of a mother for her child; inasmuch as Nisida studied all his comforts—watched over him, as it were, with the tenderest solicitude—was happy when he was present, melancholy when he was absent, and seemed to be constantly racking her imagination to devise new means to afford ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... themselves; when at length he awakened, and it appeared that the latter vision was in fact realized. The sounds which had at first influenced his dreams, and at length broken his slumbers, were of the most horrible, as well as the most melancholy description. They came from the ranges of pallet-beds, which were closely packed together in a species of military hospital, where a burning fever was the prevalent complaint. Many of the patients were under the influence of a high delirium, ...
— The Surgeon's Daughter • Sir Walter Scott
... 19th, as I went to the Parliament House, the people looked melancholy, dejected, and frightened out of their wits. The members were afraid to open their mouths, and nobody would mention the name of Mazarin except Menardeau Champre, who spoke of him with encomiums, by ...
— The Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, Complete • Jean Francois Paul de Gondi, Cardinal de Retz
... noble brother is a slave, with felons, laboring with the cursed chain-gang in the same city to which we are bound. Now, boys, do you wonder that when I found myself under orders to go again to the scene of all this misery I was affected, and that a melancholy has possessed me which has increased as the voyage has progressed? I did determine at first that I would leave the ship at Gibralter and go home, but I dreaded to part with my shipmates. I shall not go ashore while we lay at Matanzas for many reasons, though I should incur no risk, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various |
