"Sentimentalism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with sledge-hammer fingers will deaden all sense of his poetry, charm and grace. Whoever approaches him with weak sentimentalism will miss altogether his dignity and strength. It has been said of him that he was Woman in his tenderness and realization of the beautiful; and Man in his energy and force of mind. The highest type of artist and human being is thus represented. To interpret ...
— For Every Music Lover - A Series of Practical Essays on Music • Aubertine Woodward Moore
... liberal tendencies. There was a remarkable article in a Madrid paper of radical, if not socialistic, tendencies, the other day, by one who signed himself "A priest of the Spanish Catholic Church." Lamenting over the sentimentalism of modern religion, and the distance it had travelled from its old models, he says: "Instead of the Virgen being held up to admiration as the Mother of Our Lord, and as an example of all feminine perfection, the ideal woman and mother, the people are called on to worship the ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... hatred is of the devil, and love is of Christ: the Christian is to love even his enemies. In a time of war, that is to say, whenever actual enemies exist, the natural man discovers in such an ideal only an immoral sentimentalism, and the doctrinaire pacificist occasionally uses language which gives colour to the charge. But Christianity has nothing in common with sentimentalism, and Christian is no merely sentimental affection which ignores the reality of evil or explains ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... that I wish to urge is that we should take up the pursuit in an entirely practical way; as Emerson said, with a splendid mixture of common sense and idealism, "hitch our waggon to a star." It is easy enough to lose ourselves in a vague sentimentalism, and to believe that only our cramped conditions have hindered us from developing into something very wonderful. It is easy too to drift into helpless materialism, and to believe that dulness is the natural lot of man. But the realm of thought is a very free citizenship, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... by good, all things English. 'The Welsh language is the curse of Wales. Its prevalence, and the ignorance of English have excluded, and even now exclude the Welsh people from the civilisation of their English neighbours. An Eisteddfod is one of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated. It is simply a foolish interference with the natural progress of civilisation and prosperity. If it is desirable that the Welsh should talk English, it is monstrous folly to encourage them ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... behind for the sake of one man who couldn't be moved and who had the best surgeon in the Hospital and the pick of the nursing-staff to look after him, I think I should have disposed of the idea as sheer sentimentalism. When I was with him to-night I could think of nothing but the wounded in the Couvent de Saint Pierre. And afterwards there had been so ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... and laid bets as to which of the rivals would win. During the anti-Byronic fever of 1840-1860 they were perpetually contrasted as the representatives of the manly and the morbid schools. A later sentimentalism has affected to despise the work of both. The fact therefore that from an early period the men themselves knew each other as they ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... which, as Ruskin had been writing at Vevey in 1854, was poetry. Meanwhile the public and the critic ought to become familiar with the aspects of nature, in order to recognise the difference between the true poetry of painting, and the mere empty sentimentalism which was only the rant and bombast ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... she had feeling," commented Mrs. Tascher mentally as she entered the room and swept across to the vacant seat beside the doctor, dispelling somehow, with her strong presence, the spirit of sentimentalism that pervaded the atmosphere. "Why, Doctor Ebling, are you here?" she asked: "I supposed you had gone to town. Where is ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... seem to have moved him from the even tenor of his way. Yet there was no sentimentalism in his dealings with his tenants, as we find him holding them to a strict accounting for the use ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... through them all, hanging whiningly on the nasal notes in the fashion of the untrained singer. Instead of being a performance typical of the strange woods genius, it was merely an atrocious bit of cheap sentimentalism, ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... tempered, anyhow," I witnessed, "and that's an achievement. I don't think I could ever be content under a bad-tempered, sentimentalism, strenuous Government. That's why I couldn't stand the Roosevelt REGIME in America. One's chief surprise when one comes across these big people for the first time is their admirable easiness and a real personal modesty. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... N. sensibility, sensibleness, sensitiveness; moral sensibility; impressibility, affectibility^; susceptibleness, susceptibility, susceptivity^; mobility; vivacity, vivaciousness; tenderness, softness; sentimental, sentimentality; sentimentalism. excitability &c 825; fastidiousness &c 868; physical sensibility &c 375. sore point, sore place; where the shoe pinches. V. be sensible &c adj.; have a tender heart, have a warm heart, have a sensitive heart. take to heart, treasure up in the heart; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... anonymous "Old lady with a large cap," which are done in the same frank, perspicacious spirit as the very best of his men. He could look into their eyes without trouble; and he was not withheld, by any bashful sentimentalism, from recognising what he saw there and unsparingly putting it down upon the canvas. But where people cannot meet without some confusion and a good deal of involuntary humbug, and are occupied, for as long as they are together, with a very ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with, the incontestable merit of Stirner consists in his having openly and energetically combated the sickly sentimentalism of the bourgeois reformers and of many of the Utopian Socialists, according to which the emancipation of the proletariat would be brought about by the virtuous activity of "devoted" persons of all classes, and especially of those of the ...
— Anarchism and Socialism • George Plechanoff
... my uncle, is a form of sentimentalism, and all sentimentalism is despicable. This is a practical world. Determine the value of what you are after and count the cost. And wherever you can, reduce all items to dollars and cents. "Aha!" cry the hostile ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... desperate socialists and communists are at the same time such incredible skinflints, so avaricious, so keen over property, and, in fact, the more socialistic, the more extreme they are, the keener they are over property... why is it? Can that, too, come from sentimentalism?" I don't know whether there is any truth in this observation of Stepan Trofimovitch's. I only know that Petrusha had somehow got wind of the sale of the woods and the rest of it, and that Stepan Trofimovitch was aware of the fact. I happened, ...
— The Possessed - or, The Devils • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... of aphorisms of the Goethe period was Klinger, a playwriter, who led a curious and varied life in camps and cities, who began with a vehement enthusiasm for the sentimentalism of Rousseau, and ended, as such men often end, with a hard and stubborn cynicism. He wrote Thoughts on different Subjects of the World and Literature, which are intelligent and masculine, if they are not particularly pungent in expression. One of them ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... our poets. If much brooding on them will sometimes create a sentimentalism of the sentiment they inspire, that also, after our manner of developing, leads to finer civilisation; and as her very delicate feelings were not always tyrants over her clear and accurate judgement, they rather tended ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... old customs, costumes, and pomps, their wig and mace, sceptre and crown. A severe decorum rules the court and the cottage. Pretension and vaporing are once for all distasteful. They hate nonsense, sentimentalism, and high-flown expressions; ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and sentimentalism passed off, leaving behind strange and incongruous impressions. True, every one was perhaps glad when silence succeeded that all too appropriate music; true, Mac's apology and subsequent behaviour rather raised him in the ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... religious equality, the probable result would before long have been religious inequality, supremacy of the Catholics in the Church, and supremacy of the Church over the State. The fruits of the forty years' war would have become dust and ashes. It would be mere weak sentimentalism to doubt—after the bloody history which had just closed and the awful tragedy, then reopening—that every spark of religious liberty would have soon been trodden out in the Netherlands. The general ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... theme of his work is an overwhelming love for mankind, a plea for solidarity which too often degenerates into sickly sentimentalism. He imitated Dickens, George Sand, and Victor Hugo—the Hugo of Les Miserables. He hated Turgenieff and caricatured him in The Possessed. It is true that in dialogue he has had few superiors; his men and women talk as they would talk in life and only in ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... may become a morbid feeling. It is a false sentimentalism which lives in the past, and lavishes its tenderness on memory. It is difficult to say what is the dividing line between healthy sorrow and morbid sentiment. It seems a natural instinct, which makes the bereaved care lovingly for the very grave, and which makes the mother ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... sentimentalism, without making it a plea for sympathy; she had better sense, he saw, than to imagine that she could arouse ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... unifying hypothesis, they claim to have constructed—as Marx does in his preface to "Das Kapital"—a veritable natural history of social evolution. Engels speaks in praise of his friend Marx as having discovered the true mainspring of history hidden under the veil of idealism and sentimentalism, and as having proclaimed in the primum vivere the inevitableness of the struggle for existence. Marx himself, in "Das Kapital", indicated another analogy when he dwelt upon the importance of a general technology for the explanation of this psychology:—a history of tools ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... inspiration of these caressing attentions Goethe's muse could not be silent, and in the course of the spring and autumn he threw off a succession of pieces which are the classical expression of the sentimentalism of the period. To the three ladies-in-chief, under the pseudonyms of Urania, Lila, and Psyche (Caroline Flachsland), he successively addressed odes in which he gave them back their own emotions with interest. Their inspiration ...
— The Youth of Goethe • Peter Hume Brown
... recommends himself to Ludovico Sforza, and offers to tell him, for a price, strange secrets in the art of war. It was that Sforza who murdered his young nephew by slow poison, yet was so susceptible of religious impressions that he blended mere earthly passions with a sort of religious sentimentalism, and who took for his device the mulberry-tree—symbol, in its long delay and sudden yielding of flowers and fruit together, of a wisdom which economises all forces for an opportunity of sudden and sure ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... you obtain it." Having seen, they would have added: "You will alter those conditions, and treat your native labour humanely, or we will ban your use of this article," to the grief and anger of those periwig-pated persons who write to the papers about grandmotherly legislation and sickly sentimentalism. ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... its workday homespun. Never was ruler so absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it; for he was the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness touched whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there was no trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action. He seems to have had but one rule of conduct, always that of practical and successful politics, to let himself be guided by events, when they were sure to bring him out where ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... which is not, at the same time, a rather extended description—must serve little other end than to supply a convenient mark of identification. How can we define in a sentence words like renaissance, philistine, sentimentalism, transcendental, Bohemia, pre-Raphaelite, impressionist, realistic? Definitio est negatio. It may be possible to hit upon a form of words which will mark romanticism off from everything else—tell in a clause what it is not; but to add a positive content ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... said Arthur, restraining the impulse to reason with his illogical father whose antiquated sentimentalism was as unfitted to the new conditions of American life as ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... perpetrated on the one side, and on the other the wild men are shot down as pitilessly as beasts of prey, while the travellers and soldiers who live in daily watch and ward against the "wily savage" learn to stigmatize all pity for him as a sort of sentimentalism ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... story called, I think, The Burden of Christopher, published three or four years ago,—a clever book withal and rather well written. The plot is simple. A young man, just from his university, inherits a shoe factory which, being imbued with college-settlement sentimentalism, he attempts to operate in accordance with the new religion. Business is dull and he is hard-pressed by competitive houses. An old lady has placed her little fortune in his hands to be held in trust for her. To prevent the closing down of his factory and the ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... considered it his duty as a repentant husband to stay at home; and at home he stayed, cultivating his emotions. Ah, those emotions! If Tyson had been simply and passionately vicious there might have been some chance for him. But sentimentalism, subtlest source of moral corruption, worked in him like that hectic disease that flames in the colors of life, flouting its wretched victim with an extravagant hope. The deadly taint was spreading, stirred into frightful activity by the shock of his wife's illness. He stayed ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... pedant, with his narrow understanding, his thin purism, and his idyllic sentimentalism, found that the summoning archangel of his paradise proved to be a ruffian with a pike. The shock must have been tremendous. Robespierre did not quail nor retreat; he only revised his notion of the situation. A curious interview once took place between ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... greater or more profound reality than love. Why that reality should be obscured by mere sentimentalism, with all its train of absurdities is incomprehensible. There is no nobler possession than the love of another. There is no higher gift from one human being to another than love. The gift and the possession are true sanctifiers of life, and should be worn as precious ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... say to you that I have the unfortunate patient now under closest observation here in my own apartment. I have given him the room next to the office. And, doctor, you were perfectly right. He shows every symptom of the disease—he is even inclined to sentimentalism; he begins to blush and fidget and look at me—a—in that unmistakable manner—not that he isn't well-bred and charming—indeed he is most attractive, and it grieves me dreadfully to see that he already is beginning ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... Hurl your legions at him and massacre him. Britain? She is a constant menace to the predominancy of Germany in the world. Wrest the trident out of her hands. Ah! more than that. The new philosophy of Germany is to destroy Christianity. Sickly sentimentalism about sacrifice for others—poor pap for German digestion. We will have a new diet. We will force it on the world. It will be made in Germany. A diet of blood and iron. What remains? Treaties have gone; the honour of nations ...
— Selected Speeches on British Foreign Policy 1738-1914 • Edgar Jones
... talking to you? Jonathan Pindar? I wish to God he'd never come to Foxon Falls! I might have known what his opinions would be, with his inheritance. (Reproachfully.) I didn't suppose you could be so easily influenced by sentimentalism, George, I'd ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... where we began. They are always escaping and running back to the mountains. Their every instinct is for barbarism; they have not one for civilization, nor can any be planted whose roots will not trail over the surface. The good Lord intended them to be savages, nothing more; and it is mistaken sentimentalism—However, it is not for me to criticise, and I beg, Don Roldan, that you will not ...
— The Valiant Runaways • Gertrude Atherton
... this show themselves in a habit of mind tolerated in persons of a literary bent, which is a marked contrast to that demanded and exemplified by science. I think that much of our literary impressionism and sentimentalism reveal the ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... and State Governments, nor explanations of the United States Constitution; for she had the whole before her mind with a perfect clearness. Her morality upon the slavery question, too, impressed me as something far higher and deeper than the common sentimentalism of the day. Many of her words surprised me greatly, and gave ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the faith-philosophy were all interested in the human soul, and unwilling to sacrifice it to the demands of a rationalistic science or metaphysics. In seeking to rescue it, the great criticist, piloted by the moral law, steered his course between the rocks of rationalism, sentimentalism, and scepticism. It was his solution of the controversy between the head and the heart that influenced Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher. They differed from Kant and among themselves in many respects, but ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... man upon the ground seems eager to take part in a duty which, under other circumstances, would be not only disagreeable, but disgusting to them. Rough, rude men as most of the Rangers are, little prone to delicate sentimentalism, they are, nevertheless, true to the ordinary instincts of humanity. Accustomed to seeing blood spilled, and not squeamish about spilling it if it be that of a red-skinned foe, it is different when the ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... was to find the fullest joy her nature was capable of in sacrificing herself. But there is no fundamental verity inherent in the idea: the Dutchman's salvation might as well depend on a throw of dice; and all this early nineteenth-century romantic sentimentalism, with one of its main notions—that a woman cannot be better occupied than in "saving" a man—this, grafted on to the stern, relentless old story, makes a compound that is always unreal and sometimes ludicrous. But it gave Wagner three ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... the same sentence with nineteenth century English, be not disturbed; I did it. If the little old fellow grows grandiloquent or garrulous at times—he did that. If you find him growing super-sentimental, remember that sentimentalism was the life-breath of chivalry, just then approaching its absurdest climax in the bombastic conscientiousness of Bayard and the whole mental atmosphere laden ...
— When Knighthood Was in Flower • Charles Major
... on until the sergeant was out of breath; that being one disadvantage of the primitive hand-processes of torture to which American police-officials have been reduced by political sentimentalism. The torturer lost his temper, and began to shake and twist at Jimmie's arms, so that Connor had to warn him—he didn't want to break ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... eye on the subject, which is the essence of directness, discourages, and indeed excludes, conventionality, sentimentalism, fancifulness, which prevent a writer from seeing and recording life as it is. These failings are always with us, and as I have given one instance of their working in Ben Jonson's epigram and have discussed the matter ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... without trying it. I have every reason to doubt whether it does any particular good to those who smoke it, or any good to anybody except those who sell it. In short Mr. Bilge's usefulness consists in being useful to Mr. Bilge, and all the rest is illusion and sentimentalism. But because I know that Bilge is only Bilge, shall I stoop to the profanity of saying that fire is only fire? Shall I blaspheme crimson stars any more than crimson sunsets, or deny that those moons are golden any more than that this grass is green? If a child saw these coloured ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... for passages of this kind be condemned as trivial, and akin to the sentimentalism of the man in Calverley's poem who wept over a box labelled 'This side up,' I will shelter myself behind Carlyle, who was evidently deeply moved, as his review of Boswell's Johnson proves, by the life-history of Mr. F. Lewis, 'of whose birth, death, and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... spirit will be ushered in. What is to be the spirit of that age? Are we to find the forebodings in the dreamy sentimentalism, which boasts so much its flights beyond common material ideas? I trow rather, we may trace the character of the coming age in an increasing estimation of health, knowledge, mental cultivation, intellectual life, and the flow of the social affections, as the prime ...
— The Growth of Thought - As Affecting the Progress of Society • William Withington
... leave them, till we come upon the ashy fruit of which this blooming sentimentalism ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... bold stroke to learn the world, and see her happy, artless dreams vanish like froth from the foaming cup; but if hard, it was salutary—at least with her; and instead of blasting in the bud, as it might have done a frailer flower, it set her reason to work, destroyed the romantic sentimentalism usually attached to females of that excitable age, taught her to rely more upon herself, and less upon others, more upon actions and less upon words, and, in short, made a strong minded woman of her at once. Yet this was not accomplished without many a heart-rending pang, ...
— Ella Barnwell - A Historical Romance of Border Life • Emerson Bennett
... the Sun; and my own fatuity, and that alone, if I could not hear the Stars of Morning singing together, and all the sons of God shouting for you. And it was the truth they were telling; the plain, bald, naked truth;—they have never learned to lie, and do not know what it means. There is no sentimentalism in this; only science. We live in a Universe absolutely soaked through with God,—or with Poetry, which is perhaps a better name for It; a Universe peopled thick with Gods. But it is all very far from our common thoughts and conceptions; that is why ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... which most efficiently conserves the true ends of government, be the form what it may. Anything differing from this is worthless sentimentalism, undeserving of sober regard. And to meet the true ends of government there must be power to enforce obedience, and there must be checks upon that power to secure its subjects against its abuse; for "liberty without obedience is confusion, and obedience without ...
— Luther and the Reformation: - The Life-Springs of Our Liberties • Joseph A. Seiss
... of mere sentimentalism, when put into cold print, are not stimulating to the imagination; moods and states of feeling often approaching the morbid, their oral expression needs the reenforcement of voice, tone, countenance, the whole attitude. They are for this reason most difficult of translation ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... Philip Nolan began six or eight years after the English war, on my first voyage after I was appointed a midshipman. It was in the first days after our Slave-Trade treaty, while the Reigning House, which was still the House of Virginia, had still a sort of sentimentalism about the suppression of the horrors of the Middle Passage, and something was sometimes done that way. We were in the South Atlantic on that business. From the time I joined, I believe I thought Nolan was a sort of lay chaplain—a chaplain with a blue coat. I never asked about him. Everything ...
— Famous Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... in. Christianity requires me to read and interpret my Bible. In it I find such touching paragraphs as, 'Cursed be Canaan!' Canaan is of course the negro slave of our Southern States. Curse him! then, I say. Let us have no weak and illogical attempts to elevate his condition. Such sentimentalism is rank irreligion. I view the negro as a man permanently upon the rack, who is to be punished just as much as he will bear without diminishing his pecuniary value. And the allotted method of punishment is hard work, hard fare, the liberal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... so, it is not only writers of romance or sentimental educators (although they may be zealous opponents of sentimentalism), but sometimes even philosophers, nay, even the severest of all, the Stoics, that have brought in moral fanaticism instead of a sober but wise moral discipline, although the fanaticism of the latter was more heroic, that of the former of an insipid, effeminate ...
— The Critique of Practical Reason • Immanuel Kant
... If any man feels pessimistic about the present, let him study the past and he will feel reassured. Those who maintain that society is not morally better but only more sentimental, beg the question. What they call sentimentalism is greater sensibility, greater sympathy, a keener sense of justice. What is the moral ideal but love? Every advance in the direction of universal love and brotherhood is a moral advance. The sternness of Stoicism or Puritanism was an imperfect morality. The grandeur and impressiveness ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell
... look to ourselves: there is great merit here in the 'duty of staying at home'! And, on the whole, to say truth, I never heard of 'worlds' being 'saved' in any other way. That mania of saving worlds is itself a piece of the Eighteenth Century with its windy sentimentalism. Let us not follow it too far. For the saving of the world I will trust confidently to the Maker of the world; and look a little to my own saving, which I am more competent to!—In brief, for the world's sake, and ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... the captain was more than ready to go, for he had no patience with such credulity, simplicity and sentimentalism. He was Basque, and to be Basque is to lack sentiment and feel none, to play ever for the safe thing, to get without giving, and to mind your own business. It had only been an excessive sense of duty ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as we have seen, something of the remarkable technique of which Poe was a master. The influence of Dickens, especially his sentimentalism, is often apparent in Harte's work. Some have accused him of caricature or exaggeration, but these terms, when applied to his best work, signify little except the use of emphasis and selection, of which Homer and Shakespeare freely availed themselves. ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... Platonists said, we must not make our intellectual faculties Gibeonites, hewers of wood and drawers of water to the will and affections. Wisdom must be sought for its own sake or we shall not find it. Another effect of our misologia is the degradation of reasonable sympathy into sentimentalism, which regards pain as the worst of evils, and endeavours always to remove the effects of folly and wrong-doing, without investigating the causes. That such sentimentalism is often kind only to be cruel, and that it frequently ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... no sentimentalism nor moralizing; spoke not to any man of his "sins," but gave something good to eat, a buoying [Footnote: Buoying: enlivening, cheering.] word, or trifling gift and a look. He appeared with ruddy face, clean dress, with a flower or a green sprig in the lapel of his coat. Crossing the fields ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... was something better. Marriage belonged to the earth. She belonged to the earth; but he belonged to Heaven. The ring did not signify that she was married to him—I think it might have meant that to her, if she had read the shallow sentimentalism of some love stories; but Miss Prudence had kept her from false ideas, and given her the truth; the truth, that marriage was the symbol of the union of Christ and his people; a pure marriage was the type of this union. Linnet's marriage was holier and happier because of Miss Prudence's ...
— Miss Prudence - A Story of Two Girls' Lives. • Jennie Maria (Drinkwater) Conklin
... without too great a strain. He was young enough and ignorant enough of life in Paris to feel no necessity to be upon his guard, no need to keep a watch over his lightest words and glances. The religious sentimentalism, which finds a broadly humorous commentary in the after-thoughts of either speaker, puts the old-world French chat of men and women, with its pleasant familiarity, its lively ease, quite out of the question; they make ...
— The Jealousies of a Country Town • Honore de Balzac
... the book is destined, we believe, to do much more good than harm. Admit all its high-flown sentimentalism to be half-unconscious affectation, such as we pardon in writers of the Great Nation,—admit that the author is wild and fanciful in many of his statements, that he talks of a state of society of which it has been said that the law is that a man shall hate his neighbor and love his neighbor's ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... the endless projection of past into present, and of present into future, are clothed with the sanctity of an inner shrine. We may think that a fox-hunting duke and a racing marquis were very poor centres round which to group these high emotions. But Burke had no puny sentimentalism, and none of the mere literary or romantic conservatism of men like Chateaubriand. He lived in the real world, and not in a false dream of some past world that had never been. He saw that the sporting squires ...
— Burke • John Morley
... not help smiling—it was an answer so like Mrs. Halifax, who never indulged in any verbal sentimentalism. Her part in ...
— John Halifax, Gentleman • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... next witness, deserves, by his position and ability, our very sincere respect; compared with the octogenarian sentimentalism of Jean Kostka, the violence of Signor Margiotta, and the paste-pot of M. de la Rive, one breathes a pleine poitrine in the altitudes of ecclesiastical erudition, artificial as their eminence turns out; the art sacerdotal does not concern itself with preposterous narratives, so that ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... arch-sufferers from this evil; but, pleased at being likened unto angels, they failed to see that the ideal set up for them was false. It is to Mary's glory that she could penetrate the mists of prevailing prejudices and see the clear unadulterated truth. The excess of sentimentalism had given rise to the other extreme of naturalism. In France the reaction against arbitrary laws, empty forms, and the unjust privileges of rank, led to the French Revolution. In England its outcome was a Wesley in religious speculation, ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... Sentimentalism dropped from her like a garment worn for play. It was the spiritual woman only I was seeing, one who faced these real and awful facts of life with the calm, blissful assurance of knowing the truth, of giving her life for humanity because ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... his labour is absolutely necessary, and where, though by his good conduct and his industry he may finally attain a decent subsistence, yet where he will be unable to acquire affluence, and which he will be prevented from leaving for a happier or a richer shore: this will be punishment without sentimentalism, and without vindictiveness."—The Times, 19th ...
— A Letter from Major Robert Carmichael-Smyth to His Friend, the Author of 'The Clockmaker' • Robert Carmichael-Smyth
... "Lord Hailes has shown," he adds, "how little Knox's statements" (in his "History") "are to be relied on even in matters which were within the Reformer's own knowledge." In Scotland there has always been the party of Cavalier and White Rose sentimentalism. To this party Queen Mary is a saintly being, and their admiration of Claverhouse goes far beyond that entertained by Sir Walter Scott. On the other side, there is the party, equally sentimental, which musters under the banner of the Covenant, and ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... incentive to work. Some amiable Socialists have imagined that, when the private capitalist had been eliminated, men would work from a sense of obligation to the community. The Bolsheviks will have none of such sentimentalism. In one of the resolutions of the ninth Communist ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... monotonous succession of religious poems, repeating the old formulas, dry bones of habit and tradition, no longer informed with true poetic, religious spirit. Yet the source of love and humor in Jewish poetry had not run dry. It must be admitted that the sentimentalism of the minneservice, peculiar to the middle ages, never took root in Jewish soil. Pale resignation, morbid despair, longing for death, unmanly indulgence in regret, all the paraphernalia of chivalrous love, extolled ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... to pass that he was deceived; because, in accordance with a not uncommon whim of destiny, he, a man of gentle melancholy, and spiritual in love, encountered in the object of his first passion a woman who held in horror all German sentimentalism. The young man, in consequence, distrusted himself, became dreamy, absorbed in his griefs, complaining of not being understood. Then, as we desire all the more violently the things we find difficult to obtain, ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... had fought in every war in American history, had enlisted in 1917 with neither sentimentalism, enthusiasm, nor resentment. It was idle to vent one's wrath and contempt upon statesmen who could not settle their quarrels with their brains, for the centuries that stood between the present and utter ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... the real text which applied. And he had followed it. Circumstance and his own will had determined, twenty years earlier, that he had had enough of women-kind. His dealings with them had been many and various! But at a given moment he had put an end to them forever. And no false sentimentalism should be allowed to ...
— The Mating of Lydia • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Punch, because it reminds him of the kindred and remarkable speculation on Snooling discussed by him many years ago. The new theory, like the old, deserves to be treated "in no spirit of sedentary sentimentalism, but in its largest and most oleaginous entirety. It is no plan for fixing hat-pegs in a passage, nor is it a mode of treating neuralgia with treacle." How true and appropriate this is. Mutatis mutandis we may add the further statement that it is "the truest and tenderest thesis that ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, October 20, 1920 • Various
... was recognised by the political satirist. While Young was weeping at Welwyn, James Hervey was meditating among the tombs in Devonshire, and soon afterwards gave utterance to the result in language inspired by very bad taste, but showing a love of nature and expressing the 'sentimentalism' which was then a new discovery. It is said to have eclipsed Law's Serious Call, which I have already mentioned as giving, in admirable literary form, the view of the contemporary world which naturally found ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... author's miraculous skill; nor perhaps is there any piece that better shows his faculty of writing like the "gentleman,"[225] which, according to a famous contrast, he was, on a subject almost equally liable to more or less vulgar Paul-de-Kockery, to sloppy sentimentalism, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... of the cruel liar, and the exultation of the righteous when he falls, in words which do indeed belong to the old covenant of retribution, and yet convey an eternal truth which modern sentimentalism finds very shocking, but which is witnessed over and over again in the relief that fills the heart of nations and of individuals when evil men fade: "When the wicked ...
— The Life of David - As Reflected in His Psalms • Alexander Maclaren
... launched forth into a panegyric on the moral influence of woman which certainly demonstrated that if sentimentalism were a bar to voting, as Senators Vest and Reagan had insisted it should be, the senator from Alabama would have to be disfranchised. Part of it ran ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... developed to be Miss Etta; and I had at once a feeling of suffocation and closeness, due not alone, I believe, to the barred windows and the steaming radiator. The family resemblance that Mr. Lin Darton bore to Old Con threw into relief the former's honesty, and made more bearable his heavy sentimentalism, upon which Con had played as surely as on a bagpipe, sounding its narrow range with insistent ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... who, dealing as they constantly are with the most prosaic and intractable material, are yet poets at heart, there appears that other group who, headed perhaps by Mr. Shaw, and kindred in method with Thomas Hardy, are the chief gods of a younger race, as hostile to "sentimentalism" as George Meredith, but without either the power—or the wish—to replace it by the forces of the poetic imagination. Mr. Shaw, whose dramatic work has been the goad, the gadfly of a whole generation, stirring ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... true in connection with our minds. We all see the fallacy of the old-fashioned hustlers' cry, "Make your work your hobby; think of nothing else; let every moment be subordinated to the dominating idea of your career; put aside all sentimentalism, all laziness and self-will, all enthusiasm about things not in your ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... queerly. She was not prone to sarcasm, she had not been given to sentimentalism in the past; she had taken the border-life as it was, had looked it straight between the eyes. She had lived up to it, or down to it, without any fuss, as good as any man in any phase of the life, and the only white woman in this whole West country. It was not in the words, but in the ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... That doubtful and double battle before Waterloo was like the dual personality in a dream. It corresponded curiously to the double mind of the Englishman. We connect Quatre Bras with things romantically English to the verge of sentimentalism, with Byron and "The Black Brunswicker." We naturally sympathise with Wellington against Ney. We do not sympathise, and even then we did not really sympathise, with Blucher against Napoleon. Germany has complained that we passed over lightly the presence of Prussians at the decisive ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... must be created by the obedient writer in order to satisfy him. His sentiment has frequently to be sentimentalized before he will pay for it. And to this fault, which he shares with other modern races, he adds the other heinous sin of sentimentalism, the ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... through that rosepink vapour of Sentimentalism, Philanthropy, and Feasts of Morals, there lies behind it one of the sorriest spectacles. You might ask, What bonds that ever held a human society happily together, or held it together at all, are in force here? It is an unbelieving people; which has suppositions, hypotheses, and froth-systems ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... Professor Barrett, Frederic Myers and Edmund Gurney, the Society for Psychical Research. These men hoped that if the material were treated rigorously, and, as far as possible experimentally, objective truth would be elicited, and the subject rescued from sentimentalism on the one side and dogmatizing ignorance on the other. Like all founders, Sidgwick hoped for a certain promptitude of result; and I heard him say, the year before his death, that if anyone had told him at the outset that after twenty years he would be ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... sensibility, sensibleness, sensitiveness; moral sensibility; impressibility, affectibility[obs3]; susceptibleness, susceptibility, susceptivity[obs3]; mobility; vivacity, vivaciousness; tenderness, softness; sentimental, sentimentality; sentimentalism. excitability &c. 825; fastidiousness &c. 868; physical sensibility &c. 375. sore point, sore place; where the shoe pinches. V. be sensible &c. adj.; have a tender heart, have a warm heart, have a sensitive heart. take to heart, treasure up in the heart; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... another Florentine who seems, for a moment at any rate, to have been bewildered by the influence of Michelangelo, but as a profound conviction saved him from insincerity, so his splendid sensuality preserved his work from sentimentalism. Born about 1475 at Savignano, not far from Prato, his father sent him to Florence, placing him in the care of Cosimo Rosselli, according to Vasari, but more probably, as we may think, under Piero di Cosimo. Here he seems to have come under the influence of Leonardo, and to have been friends ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... success was immediate and immense. The French bourgeoisie accepted it at once as a true picture of its vices and its virtues. The novel might, it is true, savor a little of Parisian cockneyism. Fastidious critics might discover in it some mixture of weak sentimentalism, or a few traces of Dickensian affectation and cheap tricks in story-telling. Young men of the new social school might take exception to that old-fashioned democracy which had its apotheosis in Risler ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... Athalie hotly, "that is all stage twaddle and exaggerated sentimentalism! I don't believe that one girl in a thousand is forced into a ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... stayed to die, there was for us no coming together, no future. And that being so, I had no pity to waste upon the passing moments of her sorrow. I sent her off in tears to fetch Dona Emilia and Don Carlos, too. Their sentiment was necessary to the very life of my plan; the sentimentalism of the people that will never do anything for the sake of their passionate desire, unless it comes to them clothed in the fair robes of ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... Parnassus, where the Muses sit inditing Those pretty poems never known to fail, How quickly would I print (the world delighting) A Grecian, Syrian,[221] or Assyrian tale; And sell you, mixed with western Sentimentalism, Some ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... was of a frivolous, slothful, indolent disposition, and would neither study nor go to school. He was fond of romping about the fields and engaging in bold, dangerous escapades. The characteristic trait of Juan, the younger brother, was a morbid sentimentalism that would overflow in tears upon the ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... sergeant in a flower plot alongside a wrecked cottage bending over, apparently smelling at a clump of tall red geraniums. That he could find time in the midst of that hideous desolation to sniff at the posies struck us as a typically German bit of sentimentalism. Just then, though, he stood erect and we were better informed. He had been talking over a military telephone, the wires of which were buried underground with a concealed transmitter snuggling beneath the geraniums. The flowers even were being made to contribute their help in forwarding the mechanism ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... solemn an institution as the large public house, the Valencourt Arms. It was named after some splendid family that had long gone bankrupt, and whose seat was occupied by a man who had invented a hygienic bootjack; but the unfathomable sentimentalism of the English people insisted in regarding the Inn, the seat and the sitter in it, as alike parts of a pure and marmoreal antiquity. And in the Valencourt Arms festivity itself had some solemnity and decorum; and beer was drunk with reverence, as it ought to be. Into the ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the terrified, riotous city jammed with refugees, reeking with disease, half frantic from famine and the filthy, rising flood of war—if really it all had been merely romantic impulse, ardour born of overwrought sentimentalism, nevertheless, what he had pledged that day to a little Grand Duchess in rags, he had fulfilled to the letter ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert W. Chambers
... these novels, which to thousands of readers have seemed stern and terrible, are in reality terrible chiefly because they are soft—soft with a sentimentalism swathed in folds of piety. The customs of Old Chester stifle its inhabitants, who take a kind of stolid joy in their fetters; and Mrs. Deland, with all her understanding, does not illuminate them. The movements of her imagination ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... hope or chance at all, the surgeon abandons the patient. If it is a case where stimulus is any relief, the nurse gives milk-punch or brandy, or whatever is wanted, ad libitum. There is no fuss made. Not a bit of sentimentalism or whining have I seen about a single death-bed in hospital or on the field, but generally impassive indifference. All is over, as far as any efforts can avail; it is useless to expend emotions or labors. ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... superiors," and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, callous "cash payment." It has drowned the most heavenly ecstacies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable ...
— Manifesto of the Communist Party • Karl Marx
... illustration of the sweeping change brought in by the Journey. In the latter critique we find appreciation of Yorick's characteristics, enthusiastic acceptation of his sentiment, fond and familiar allusions to both Shandy and the Sentimental Journey. In the brief space of two years Sterne's sentimentalism had come ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... he had ascertained that they were composed of young bees, and had not yet got sufficiently colonized to render a new swarming more than a passing accident. With all this kindness of feeling toward his victims, Boden had nothing of the transcendental folly that usually accompanies the sentimentalism of the exaggerated, but his feelings and impulses were simple and direct, though so often gentle and humane. He knew that the bee, like all the other inferior animals of creation, was placed at the disposition ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... it sounds bad," she said stoutly; "but in my young days it would have been thought a piece of posing—of sentimentalism—something indecorous and unfitting—if a girl had put herself in such a position. Marcella ought to be absorbed in her marriage; that is the natural thing. How Mrs. Boyce can allow her to mix herself with such things as this murder—to live ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... life in the woods was an enemy to every sort of sentimentalism—though a more unromantic being than the pioneer can hardly be imagined—yet his character unquestionably took its hue, from the primitive scenes and events of his solitary existence. He was, in many things, as simple as a child: as credulous, as unsophisticated. ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... for mood and temperament, as well as high walls of defence. The social element is too shy and elusive, and will not, like a monkey, perform on demand; therefore our plan abjures all these poetic organizations, which have a great deal of cant and very little good companionship; it has no sentimentalism to offer, proposing an association of purses rather than of persons,—a household on the base of protection rather than of society,—a mere combining for privileges and against prices. It is resolved into a simple matter of business; and the only help women need is that of an organizing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... all I have to say of it is that I do not believe a word of it. Not because I am blinded by any sentimentalism of to-day, which, as in a child's story, brings all right for everyone in the end; but for this very cogent reason that of all created beings Our Lady is the most ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... regiment, the fair face of young Lieutenant Alford seemed to him most gracious. Alford was his soldier ideal, type of the best the battlefield may know. And, even if all this admiration did have in it much of youthful sentimentalism, it took nothing from his efficiency when he came to his ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... yielding to none in "admiration" for the "excellent British Constitution," desiring only to live and die as free citizens under the protecting wing of the mother country. Recalling all this sickening sentimentalism, Mr. Paine uttered a loud and ringing BOSH! Let us clear our minds of cant, he said in effect, and ask ourselves what is the nature of government in general and of the famous British Constitution in particular. Like the Abbe Sieyes, Mr. Paine had completely mastered the science ...
— The Eve of the Revolution - A Chronicle of the Breach with England, Volume 11 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Carl Becker
... found themselves with libel suits on their hands. The Beaubien herself was confronted with a suit for defamation of character, and was obliged to testify before the judge whom Ames owned outright that she had but the latter's word for the charge, and that, years since, in a moment of maudlin sentimentalism, he had confessed to her that, as far as he knew, the wife of his youth was still living. The suit went against her. Ames then took his heavy toll, and retired within himself to sulk and plan future ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... melancholy to attract modern readers, who care little to revel in the luxuries of woe, so relished by those of a former age. We cannot do better than quote the judgment pronounced by Madame Sand herself, thirty years later, on this work of pure sentimentalism—generated by an epoch thrown into commotion by the passionate views of romanticism—the epoch of Rene, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types of desperate men; life weary, but by no means weary of talking. "Jacques," ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... I have been saying is not by way of depreciation. But it seems to me that the Valley is wonderful enough to stand by itself in men's appreciation without the unreality of sickly sentimentalism in regard to imaginary dangers, or the histrionics of playing wilderness ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... rearguard actions that should delay the enemy, until the English might take Tabora and save their women from Belgian hands. For the English, those soft-hearted fools, who had already so well treated the women at Wilhelmstal, could be as easily persuaded to exercise their flabby sentimentalism on the women and children in Tabora. ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... boundless wrath for those who mislead them, and put them out of the right way. All through St. Paul's Epistles, as through our blessed Lord's sayings and doings, you see this wholesome mixture of severity and mercy, of Divine anger and Divine love, very different from the sentimentalism of our own times, when men fancy that, because they dislike the pain and trouble of punishing evil- doers, God is even such a one as themselves, who sits still and takes no heed of the wrong ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley |
