"Lugubrious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... admire! She was amazed, stunned. She wondered how all this emotional richness could have been tapped. Had she left him too soon, or had her departure developed some richer artistic vein? She tortured her brain and heart. After a big tonal climax followed by the lugubrious monologue of a ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... death-chamber lugubrious: the windows wide open, the night and the wind entering freely from the garden, making a strong draught; a human form on a table; the body, which had just been embalmed; the hollow skull filled with ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... IN AMERICA.—Twelve miles from Dubuque, Ia., there stands in grim isolation, upon a blackened and desolate prairie, a monastery of the fifteenth century pattern. Every morning at 2 o'clock the monks who occupy this lugubrious dwelling-place arise from the hard planks which serve them in lieu of beds, and pray in wooden stalls, so constructed as to compel them either to stand or kneel. Their devotions completed, the next duty is for each to go into the yard and dig a part of his own grave, and ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... the first thing in the morning. Then he condoled with Mrs. Bernard on a mishap to her child that other people avoided speaking of, for the consequences were likely to be very serious, and she had not yet been made fully aware of them. There was a peculiar, low, lugubrious note in his voice which caused it to be audible through the room, and Bessie, who sat opposite to him, between Mr. Cecil Burleigh and Mr. Logger, devoted all her conversation to them to avoid that of the rector. But he had taken note of her at the moment ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... gentry and farmers were rapidly proceeding to ruin in consequence of free-trade, and their vaticinations of frightful calamities to the nation were singular displays of extraordinary hypocrisy, or delusions. Amongst the most doleful prophets and lugubrious friends of agriculture was Benjamin Disraeli. He was also the most acrimonious of advocates, while defending claims ignored by the nation as unjust, denounced by political economists as injurious; and, obviously in the exclusive and selfish interests of a class, he denounced ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... lugubrious tones. "I have a heavy cold, thank you, owing to my having passed the early hours of Christmas Day on a bench, in default of a bed. It is superfluous to inquire as to the health ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... leaving the Board of Monitors[78-1] to set Room 18 to rights with no more direct supervision than an occasional look and word from the stout Miss Blake, whose kingdom lay just across the hall. And as she hurried through the early cold of a November afternoon, her forebodings grew so lugubrious that she was almost relieved at last to learn that Mrs. Mowgelewsky's complaint was a slow-forming cataract, and her supplication, that Miss Bailey would keep a watchful eye upon Morris while his mother was at the hospital ...
— Short Stories of Various Types • Various
... the dining-room. The drawn blinds gave a lugubrious aspect. The Vicar sat at the end of the table at which his wife had always sat and poured out the tea with ceremony. Philip could not help feeling that neither of them should have been able to eat anything, but when he saw ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... turning a long screw, "Jacobs, my boy, do you take the chair to-night?"—"Yes," said Jacobs who was a long lugubrious-looking man, "I do take the chair, if I live over ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... continent. Pop, would go one of the six-inch guns; a small flame would dart and vanish, a little white smoke would disappear, a tiny projectile would give a feeble screech—and nothing happened. Nothing could happen. There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... the commonplace adventures of a priggish little boy and his companions; and straightway the whole dreary and disastrous army of sectarians and dogmatists took up the cry, and have been ringing the lugubrious changes on it ever since. There is really no estimating the mortal wrong that has been done to childhood by Maria Edgeworth's "Frank" and "The Parent's Assistant"; and, for my part, I derive a melancholy joy in availing myself ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... of the Bastille. All lamplit, allegorically decorated: a Tree of Liberty sixty feet high; and Phrygian Cap on it, of size enormous, under which King Arthur and his round-table might have dined! In the depths of the background, is a single lugubrious lamp, rendering dim-visible one of your iron cages, half-buried, and some Prison stones,—Tyranny vanishing downwards, all gone but the skirt: the rest wholly lamp-festoons, trees real or of pasteboard; in the similitude ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... realm of wonder. It was our misfortune not to see the magician who compelled all the marvels on which we looked, but for that very reason, perhaps, we have the clearest sense of his greatness. Everywhere we beheld the evidences of his ingenious but lugubrious fancy, which everywhere tended to a monumental and mortuary effect. A sort of vestibule first received us, and beyond this dripped and glimmered the garden. The walls of the vestibule were covered with inscriptions setting forth the sentiments of the philosophy and piety of all ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... lectern, and the moment he opened his mouth I knew that my time had come, and that there was a very fair chance of victory before me. Whether this clergyman had a toothache, or a headache, or a heavy load on his mind, I cannot say, but his reading was more lugubrious than the wind in an equinoctial gale. I have since observed that he was only a degree worse than many other clerical readers, and that a strange and delightfully mistaken notion seems prevalent that the Bible must be read in a dreary and unnatural ...
— The Autobiography of a Slander • Edna Lyall
... at once the physician and priest of the sick, washing down his boluses with ghostly consolation, and among the sailors went by the name of The Pelican, a fowl whose hanging pouch imparts to it a most chop-fallen, lugubrious expression. ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... Mr. Wright, as Titmouse, thought perhaps that a Cockney dandy could not be caricatured, and he consequently went desperate lengths, but threw in here and there a touch of nature. Mr. Lyon was as energetic as ever in Gammon; Mrs. Yates as lugubrious as is her wont in Miss Aubrey; Mrs. Grattan acted and looked as if she were quite deserving of a man with ten thousand a year. As to her singing, if her husband were in possession of twenty thousand per annum, (would to the gods he were!) it could not have been more charmingly tasteful. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, November 27, 1841 • Various
... being the "Father" of the House of Commons, having sat there uninterruptedly since the General Election of 1880. Perhaps his new dignity sits rather heavily on his youthful spirit, for his speech on the Irish Estimates was painfully lugubrious. He took some comfort from a statement in The Times that "We are all Home Rulers now," but as a veteran journalist he is probably aware that what The Times says to-day it will not necessarily ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 156, April 9, 1919 • Various
... war, I was lunching at the Admiralty with Lord Fisher, who had then been recalled to office. He appeared rather dismal, and to divert him I said, "I've got some good news for you—we are perfectly safe and Germany is beaten." He looked up from his plate and regarded me with lugubrious eyes. I then told him that Lord Kitchener had been down at Knole with the Sackvilles and had spent a whole day in taking blotting-paper impressions of the beautiful mouldings of the doors for his house ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie
... resting-place and invites yet more derision to it. And now we cannot hide our poverty and tatters in the friendly woods, for the city has stretched its withering arms abroad and taken us in, and all that remains of the cheer of our old home is the cluster of lugubrious forest trees that stand, bored and weary of a city life, with their feet in our coffins, looking into the hazy distance and wishing they were there. I ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... part I always try to appear as happy as possible while I am lecturing. I take this to be part of the trade of anybody labelled a humourist and paid as such. I have no sympathy whatever with the idea that a humourist ought to be a lugubrious person with a face stamped with melancholy. This is a cheap and elementary effect belonging to the level of a circus clown. The image of "laughter shaking both his sides" is the truer picture of comedy. Therefore, I say, I always try to appear cheerful at ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... supper she went to a picture show. She was amazed to find there, instead of the accustomed orchestra, a pipe-organ that panted and throbbed and rumbled over lugubrious classics. The picture was about a faithless wife. Terry left ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber
... confusion were seen the splendid apparel of the noble, and the modest garb of the peasant; the shining armour and waving plumes of the Christian warrior, and the gaudy fantastic habiliments of the Moslem. With them appeared the solemn and lugubrious vestments of the ecclesiastical dignitaries, and the coarse habit and ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... first note properly, the rest followed as a matter of course. On the whole, therefore, a spirit of devotion to the master gradually pervaded the orchestra; the violas alone bore him a grudge for a while, and for this reason. In the accompaniment of the lugubrious cantilena of Julia at the end of the second act, he would not put up with the way in which the violas played the horribly sentimental accompaniment. Suddenly turning towards them he called in a sepulchral tone, 'Are the violas dying?' The two pale and incurably melancholy old men who ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... hastened downstairs. "That?" said she, with a look of amusement; "that's frogs." "It may be," I thought, but I followed the sounds till they led me in the darkness to the edge of a swamp. No doubt the creatures were frogs, but of some kind new to me, with voices more lugubrious and homesick than I should have supposed could possibly belong to any batrachian. A week or two later, in the New Smyrna flat-woods, I heard in the distance a sound which I took for the grunting of pigs. I made a note of it, mentally, as a cheerful token, indicative of a probable scarcity ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... colouring of the opening of Siegfried the following evening. I do not mean the orchestral colouring, but the intrinsic thing, the music itself. The tapping of the hammer on steel goes on, and in mock seriousness the orchestra gives out a series of prolonged sighs or groans of the most lugubrious character, reaching a climax as poor miserable Mime at last gives up his job in despair. Mime, we must remember, is a half-comic personage; and were his music allotted to some heroic man facing an impossible task it would be much ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... look out!" And the soldiers of the marine, placed in the topsails, replied to this by, "All's well," pronounced in a drawling, mournful tone. Nothing could be more monotonous or depressing than this continual murmur, this lugubrious mingling of voices all in the same tone, especially as those making these cries endeavored to make ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... much fixtures in the Smyrna scenery as the town pump. Occasionally of an evening the wail of the snuffling accordion wavered out over the village. Buck, his head thrown back and his eyes closed, seemed to get consoling echoes of the past even from this lugubrious assault on Melody, and loungers hovered at a respectful distance. No one dared to ask questions, and in this respect the old men differed from the town pump as features ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... the Honourable Jake pressing closely after him. It was Mr. Crewe who, without pausing to knock, pushed open the door of number nine, which was not quite closed; and it was Mr. Crewe who made the important discovery that the lugubrious division superintendent had a sense of humour. Mr. Manning was seated at a marble-topped table writing on a salmon-coloured card, in the act of pronouncing these words:—"For Mr. Speaker and Mrs. Speaker and all the little Speakers, to ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... lugubrious sobs and rocked themselves back and forth in unison. "'Twar Dad!" Medora moaned, ...
— Who Crosses Storm Mountain? - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... agreed Mary Louise, and turned to go. And as she did so she caught a most lugubrious expression on the face of Uncle Buzz, a gradual lengthening of all the muscles on one side of the face, resolving itself finally into a prodigious wink, deliberate and malign. Fortunately, it passed in the darkness the regard of the partner of his ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... answered, with a lugubrious smile. "However, I'll be as good as I can. And I'll not write. But—when I return from that month of exile, do not be surprised if I appear to claim you for good or for evil, for better ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... describe the pleasure felt by the Frenchmen as they gazed once more on the shores of their own dear country after so long an absence! Even Villemet lost his lugubrious looks, while his friend, brimming over with joy, seemed almost ready to leap into the sea to get there. He sprung about the deck, sang snatches of songs, laughed at every remark Villemet made even when there was nothing to laugh at, in fact, made ...
— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown
... no immunity. Strange to say, on the march south from Assouan, of a thousand and odd only one animal succumbed to sunstroke, and that was a camel that had no sun-bonnet. If anything could have added to the naturally lugubrious expression of those lumbering freight carriers, it was the jaunty poke-bonnets with the attenuated "Oh, let us be joyful" visages grinning beneath. The transport department was managed by Colonel F. W. Kitchener, brother of the Sirdar. His care it was, when ...
— Khartoum Campaign, 1898 - or the Re-Conquest of the Soudan • Bennet Burleigh
... these poor fellows were glad to take service as watchmen of infected houses, or even as bearers and buriers of the dead. At a time when trade was at a standstill, and men feared alike to buy or to sell, this perilous and lugubrious occupation was all that could be obtained, and so there were always men to be found for the task of watching the houses, though at other times it might have ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... cease your wail, lugubrious saint! You fret high Heaven with your plaint. Is this the "Christian's joy" you paint? Is this the Christian's boasted bliss? Avails your ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... to hunt him up the following day, and he quickly noticed Toni's extreme disquietude upon learning that Dona Cinta wished to talk with him. The mate left the boat in lugubrious silence as though he were being taken away to mortal torment: then he began to hum loudly, an indication that ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... raw and chilly from off the snowy slopes of Ararat next morning, and the shivering, half-clad-wretches shuffle off toward the fields and pastures, - with blue noses and unwilling faces, humping their backs and shrinking within themselves and wearing most lugubrious countenances; one naturally falls to wondering what they do in the winter. The independent villagers of the surrounding country have a tough enough time of it, worrying through the cheerless winters of a treeless and mountainous country; but they at least have no domestic authority to obey but ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle V1 • Thomas Stevens
... is fine in outline certainly, but too monotonous to please me, and too lugubrious; and the funny part of it is, there is nothing in her. She looks like a sibyl, but she is the most profoundly stupid ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... of the ill-fated Petrel resumed his lugubrious narrative. I resolved to listen, while the skipper eyed the barometer, and we all rocked back and forth in search of the centre of gravity, looking like a troupe of mechanical blockheads nodding in idiotic unison. All this time the little craft drifted helplessly, "hove to" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... normally, has a stolid expression, redeemed slightly, perhaps, by its exchange often for a lugubrious one. I should feel disposed to predict for him the scoring of an immense success in the personation of such characters as those of the melancholy Dane; or of Antonio, in the Merchant of Venice, after the turn of the tide in his fortunes, when the vengeful figure of the remorseless Shylock rests ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... loaned to the farm To be broken in time without fury or harm, Yet black crows flew past you, shouting alarm, Calling "Beware," with lugubrious singing ... The butterflies there in the bush were romancing, The smell of the grass caught your soul in a trance, So why be a-fearing the spurs and the traces, O broncho that would not ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... the valley. We have hitherto had to struggle against mental anxieties, against fatigues, heat, drought, and thirst: we have now to contend with rain and with floods. Everything is becoming awfully damp, and everybody looks awfully dismal. I can see, from the lugubrious countenances of the Kailouees and the blacks, that the rainy season is their real winter. They go shivering about, and seem as if they were half drowned. Our Bornou gauze-cotton tent still bears up well, however, and keeps out ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... yourself in the bloody rags of the Committee of Public Safety, your are still yourself, you are still Felix Pyat, you are still Ranvier, you have never ceased to be Gerardin; you hope to make yourself obeyed more readily under this lugubrious costume, but you mistake. Command us to go and fight, and we will not budge; pursue us, and we will hardly run away; put us in prison, and we will only laugh. You are no more a Terror, than Gil-Perez the actor is Talma; ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... had avoided looking at the outstretched hand. But now he looked at it, took it and held it for an instant, his bruised and swollen face taking on an expression of lugubrious self-pity. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... and neglect do so much for any of us? This ruinous person was associated with a hand-cart as decrepit as himself, but not nearly so cheerful; for though he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered from far within the wrinkles and the stubble, the cart had preceded him with a very lugubrious creak. It groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans, and I was to learn from the old man that there was, and had been, in his person, for thirteen years, such a thing in the world as a peddler of buttermilk, and that these cans were now filled with ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... so narrow that he could neither turn his body nor put out an arm to lift himself into a sitting posture; and again, when he tried to move his legs, to his horror they were compressed as if between bandages. In his ear there sounded, not six inches away, a low lugubrious moaning. It could not come from a bed-fellow, for he had no bed-fellow. . . . No, it could be ...
— The Mayor of Troy • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... satisfied till I had dived down to see it; which I did, but found it so dark, as Jack had said, that I could scarcely see anything. When I returned, we had a long conversation about it, during which I observed that Peterkin had a most lugubrious expression on ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... The man kept that position while the other witnesses were heard, their testimony arousing murmurs of indignation that were quickly checked. Annouchka had gone to take her place with the others against the wall, in the shadows which more and more invaded the room, at this ending of a lugubrious day. Two windows reaching to the floor let a wan light creep with difficulty through their dirty panes, making a vague twilight in the room. Soon nothing could be seen of the motionless figures against the wall, much as the faces fade ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... Sembrich as a delightfully piquant Rosina, nevertheless moved with leaden feet in many of its scenes, because of the ponderous and lugubrious Stagno, who essayed a part far from his province, when he tried to sing the Count. On November 28th "Don Giovanni" was reached with the finest distribution of women's rles, I dare say, that New York has ever seen, and one that ranked well with the famous London one of Tietjens, Nilsson, ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... whirr which resounded throughout the vicinity of the mill. The sound rose and fell in a sort of rhythmic cadence, which, heard from where we sat, was not unpleasing, and not loud enough to prevent conversation. When the saw started on its second journey through the log, Julius observed, in a lugubrious tone, and with a ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... occurred which was likely to cause a change in the situation of affairs. In the midst of an interval of silence—in which the very stillness itself increased the apprehension of the travellers—was heard the long lugubrious whine of a prairie wolf. Melancholy as was this sound, it was sweet in comparison with the cries of the more formidable animals, ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... afforded me a little relief; moreover, public opinion was so unanimously unfavorable to the colonel that little by little the place lost the lugubrious aspect that had at first struck me. At last I entered into possession of the legacy, which I converted into ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... within the house party. Lord Rufford stood up with Arabella and John Morton with Lady Penwether. Mr. Gotobed selected Miss Penge, and Hampton and Battersby the two Miss Godolphins. They all took their places with a lugubrious but business-like air, as aware that they were sacrificing themselves in the performance of a sad duty. But Morton was not allowed to dance in the same quadrille with the lady of his affections. Lady Penwether explained to him that she and her brother had better divide ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... The morrow's waking was lugubrious enough. Headache and nausea weighed upon him. Worse still, a scrutiny of his pockets showed that he had only the shamefaced change of half-a-crown wherewith to transport himself and his belongings to Twybridge. Now, the railway fare alone was three shillings; the needful ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... burst into a torrent of tears, seeing now nothing in store for him but either to perish there of hunger and fetid odours beside the corpse and among the worms, or, should the tomb be earlier opened, to be taken and hanged as a thief. These most lugubrious meditations were interrupted by a sound of persons walking and talking in the church. They were evidently a numerous company, and their purpose, as Andreuccio surmised, was the very same with which he and ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... 'I wonder what Mr. Rogers will do, now that he's got his leisure, with a fortune and—me!' And at the same moment Rogers, in his deep arm-chair before the fire, was saying to himself, 'I'm glad Minks has come to me; he's just the man I want for my big Scheme!' And then—'Pity he's such a lugubrious looking fellow, and wears those dreadful fancy waistcoats. But he's very open to suggestion. We can change all that. I must look after Minks a bit. He's rather sacrificed his career for me, I fancy. He's got ...
— A Prisoner in Fairyland • Algernon Blackwood
... little pause of breathless silence between them. Then as, without speaking, he would have turned away, a loud, peremptory knock resounded upon the door of the keep and echoed and re-echoed with lugubrious reverberation through the old stone passages ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... known as the "Boschveldt." This is a locality almost filled with black holly bushes, where you can only see the sky overhead and the spot of ground you are standing on. In September the "boschveldt" is usually dry and withered and the scorching heat makes the surroundings seem more lugubrious ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... interdicted, [Footnote: Interdicted: forbidden.] being supposed to have a soothing, tranquillizing quality, and one song, sung by "Man-o'-War Jack," an English sailor, from her majesty's Australian colonies, was quite popular as a lullaby. It was a lugubrious recital of the exploits of "the Arethusa, Seventy-four," in a muffled minor, ending with a prolonged dying fall at the burden of each verse, "On b-o-o-o-ard of the Arethusa." It was a fine sight to see Jack holding The Luck, rocking from side ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... verses to this hymn, and it had a long and lugubrious tune, so that Maggie thought that it would never end, but as it proceeded the words worked their effect on the congregation, and at the last there was much emotion and several women ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... which seemed to come from the depths of her heart, "since poor dear papa died;" and she then passed on mournfully homewards, with Bessie and Seraphine in her wake. Their cheerful faces, as they nodded back and smiled at Horner and myself, contrasted strongly with their mother's lugubrious visage. I wonder if anybody ever saw her laugh? I've got ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... water, the steady tick of chronometers. Jackson, with bare arms crossed, leaned his shoulders against the bulkhead of the cabin. He was bending his head under the deck beam; his fair beard spread out magnificently over his chest; he looked colossal, ineffectual, and mild. There was something lugubrious in the aspect of the cabin; the air in it seemed to become slowly charged with the cruel chill of helplessness, with the pitiless anger of egoism against the incomprehensible form of an intruding pain. We had ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... experience, it so happened that he had never seen Waterbuck, Q.C., before, and, like many Forsytes in the lower branch of the profession, he had an extreme admiration for a good cross-examiner. The long, lugubrious folds in his cheeks relaxed somewhat after seeing him, especially as he now perceived that Soames alone was ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and said nothing. They saw the lights of evening, and heard lugubrious songs coming toward them. And then, like spectres chased by the wind, appeared the black penitents. The crucifix was before them. They were Brothers of Mercy, holding torches, singing psalms on the way to the cemetery. In accordance with the Italian custom, the cortege marched quickly. ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... changes of this chequered, and, in some respects, lugubrious life, Mr. PUNCHINELLO has the perennial consolation of one friendship, which promises to be immortal, and over which time and space hold no sway. Need we say that we are alluding to the tender emotions which crowd our bosom whenever we hear of Mr. GEORGE FRANCIS TRAIN! ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... Dumps, with a gleam of hope lighting up his lugubrious visage. 'Oh, well, it may be a girl, and then you won't want me; or if it is a boy, it may die before ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... to receive consolation was quite as ready as her grief had at first been impetuous; the sobs which seemed to be breaking her heart ceased all at once; new thoughts, more gentle, less lugubrious, took possession of the young queen's mind; the trace of tears vanished, and a smile lit up her liquid eyes like the sun's ray following on rain. This change, anxiously awaited, was soon observed by Joan's chamberwoman: ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... speaker observed, "the new junior does strike one as being downright stunning. She came from New York City, and"—with a lugubrious sigh—"though I've never set eyes on her before, I was informed this morning that she is to be my roommate for the ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... could will life or death, still pulsed on. He saw the two whale-boats land on the beach, and the sick, on stretchers or pick-a- back, groaning and wailing, go by in lugubrious procession. He saw the wind making on the clouded horizon, and thought of the sick in the hospital. Here was something waiting his hand to be done, and it was not in his nature to lie down and sleep, or die, when ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... himself and Katterle. The knight's assurance that he would intercede for him and, if necessary, even appeal to the Emperor's favour, somewhat cheered his servitor's drooping spirits, it is true, but by no means restored his composure, and his tone was lugubrious enough ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... he was placed." He was surprised, but entirely delighted, to discover that this announcement made no difference whatever in Miss Belle's attentions. At the supper hour, however, Miss Belle, moved by Kiddie's lugubrious countenance, yielded her place to Margaret, who continued the operation of giving Mr. Finlayson "the time of his life." But not a word could she extract from him regarding the heresy case, for, with a skill that might have made a Queen's Counsel ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... the lugubrious wife of the happy Jean was inclined to resent Guida's gaiety as unseemly, for Jean's story sounded to her as serious statement of fact; which incapacity for humour probably accounted for Jean's occasional lapses from domestic grace. If Jean had said that he had met a periwinkle ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and, seating myself on the steps of the veranda, fell to contemplating the dull, blurred windows of the Archpriest's house on the other side of the square, and to watching how black shadows kept flitting to and fro behind their panes as the faint, lugubrious notes of a guitar made themselves heard. And a high-pitched, irritable voice kept repeating at intervals: "Allow me. Pray, permit me to speak," and being answered by a voice which intermittently shot into the silence, as into a bottomless sack, ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... commanded by a capital letter and marching on from six to ten lame feet. Doctor Grim inspected these things curiously, and to say the truth most scornfully, before he took them to light his pipe withal; but they told him little as regarded this boy's internal state, being mere echoes, and very lugubrious ones, of poetic strains that were floating about in the atmosphere of that day, long before any now remembered bard had begun to sing. But there were the rudiments of a poetic and imaginative mind within the boy, if its subsequent culture ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... nice cheery motto," commented Trenby lightly. "They must have been a lugubrious lot in ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... the clock could only speak as well as goggle its eyes!" he said, with a mirthless smile. "We should learn something then. What's the idea of it all—the rolling eyes, the moon, the stars, and a verse as lugubrious as a Presbyterian sermon on infant damnation. The whole ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... her head dismally, and went on in a lugubrious tone, "Besides, didn't ye notice the windin' sheet in the candle las' night, an' didn't ye hear the howl o' thet ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... Indian advanced a little farther along the bank, and then came to a pause. A large tree grew upon the edge of the stream, its branches extending outwards. Into this he climbed; and then stretching out his arms over the water, he commenced chaunting a lugubrious measure—a species of Indian invocation, of which Clara could hear the words, but without in the least ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... prattle. She sat in a corner, listlessly turning over the leaves of a novel and taking an extraordinary lack of interest in the general conversation. The usual headache and neuralgia supplied her excuse. She looked pale, ill, and worried; and worry on a baby face is a lugubrious and pitiful spectacle. ...
— Septimus • William J. Locke
... it appears to me, we are paying these honours in a most lugubrious spirit," Mrs. Ormiston broke in. "I wish the baby a long life and a merry one, in defiance of all prophecies and traditions belonging to his paternal ancestry. Go on, Mr. March, you're shamefully neglecting your duty. No ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... within a short distance of our hostelry we saw a crowd gathered around a young man who was standing on a box. He was speaking in a mournful, lugubrious voice and accompanied his words with violent gesticulations. Out of curiosity we stopped to listen, and learned that religion was our ...
— Dorothy Vernon of Haddon Hall • Charles Major
... entirely adequate and dignified house at 6 Grosvenor Square, and soon found that the American Ambassadorship had compensations which were hardly suggested by his first glimpse of the lugubrious Chancery. He brought to this new existence his plastic and inquisitive mind, and his mighty gusto for the interesting and the unusual; he immensely enjoyed his meetings with the most important representatives of all types of British life. The period of his arrival marked a crisis ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... I hardly know whether I had been sleeping or musing, I started wide awake on hearing a vague murmur, peculiar and lugubrious. It ceased, but my heart beat anxiously; my inward tranquillity was broken. The clock, far down in the hall, struck two. Just then my chamber-door was touched as if fingers swept the panels groping a way ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the lugubrious comfort of his own post-mortem revenge he wished that he had left unsaid some of the things he had said. Quelled by the vision of his wife weeping over him and repenting her cruelties, they began to seem less cruel. She was ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... From the next room, by way of opened windows and transoms, came the most lugubrious wails he thought he had ever listened to. "It—it's a ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... wishing it, of those men of the forests who lived here in the ages, in the uncalculated and dark ages, because, suddenly, from a point distant from the shore, a long Basque cry rises from the darkness in a lugubrious falsetto, an "irrintzina," the only thing in this country with which he never could become entirely familiar. But a great mocking noise occurs in the distance, the crash of iron, whistles: a train from Paris to Madrid, ...
— Ramuntcho • Pierre Loti
... firearms in the distance brought a sudden stop to his lugubrious reflections. Five, a dozen—a score of shots were heard. The blood turned cold in the veins of every one in the garden; faces blanched suddenly and all voices were hushed; a form of paralysis seized and held ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... dull and lugubrious to the remainder of the party. The girls seemed to feel that there was something solemn about the coming competition between two such dear friends, which prevented and should prevent them all from being merry. Harry perfectly sympathized in the feeling; and even ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... shocked at the recital, and literally extinguished, as she undoubtedly ought to have been, by the knowledge that her former little peccadillos had come to light, the bright-eyed hostess burst out laughing in the very faces of the lugubrious guests. ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... well pleased with his company as one would be in a pitfall with a tiger. At last it stopped at the door of the lunatic asylum, and the post-boy dismounting from his reeking horses, pulled violently at a large bell, which answered with a most lugubrious tolling, and struck awe into the breast of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... to laugh it off, Mister Haldane," he retorted in his lugubrious way. "But, as I says to ye last night, says I, when that poor chap kicked the bucket as we've just been a-burying on, we ain't seen the end on it yet. I misdoubts the weather, too, sir. There's a great bank of cloud now rising up to win'ard, and I fancies ...
— The Ghost Ship - A Mystery of the Sea • John C. Hutcheson
... make merry with any young fellow in the place, but it went no farther. She was bonne camarade with all the world—no more. Perhaps at bottom some coolness of temperament protected her; nobody, at any rate, suspected that it had anything to do with Isaac, or that she cared a ha'porth for so lugubrious and ...
— Bessie Costrell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... a cat, larger than any I had ever believed could exist. The beast looked at us and gave so hopeless a miau that I shuddered. I had never heard so lugubrious a cry. ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux
... parlor, where, as no one would ever enter it except for a funeral or a wedding, he felt safe from intrusion. There he sank down upon the slippery horsehair lounge, and, staring helplessly at the severe portrait of Mrs. Peaslee, done by a lugubrious artist in crayon, wiped the sweat from his forehead and tried ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... the streets, along which divers tall, sombre-looking countrymen, with faces more lugubrious than those of the mutes of a funeral, were sauntering, with a desperate air of enjoyment; and she shrugged her shoulders, as she muttered to herself, "que ces ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... pleasures which ordinary eyes can hardly see with a magnifying-glass. So it happens that a camp of six thousand sick and wounded, which seems at a distance a concentration of human misery that you cannot bear to behold, when near does not look half so lugubrious as you expected; and you are tempted to accuse the sick men of having entered into a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... thunderstorm, comet, meteoric shower, or extraordinary gleaming of the aurora borealis, startles them as a possible avant courier of the crack of doom. Some of them are said to keep their white robes in their closets all ready for ascension. What a dismal thing it must be to live in such a lurid and lugubrious dream; their best hope for the world the hope that its ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... home except Freddy and his friend, who had to stop their tennis and to entertain her for a solid hour. Cecil and Lucy turned up at four o'clock, and these, with little Minnie Beebe, made a somewhat lugubrious sextette upon the upper ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... were enacting in Holland were going on in Overyssel and Friesland and Groningen; but with a difference. Here it was the Five Points men who were driven into secession, whose barns were nailed up, and whose preachers were mobbed. A lugubrious spectacle, but less painful certainly than the hangings and drownings and burnings alive in the previous century to prevent secession from ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... port-wine and brandy, threatening to deaden with its murky breath all the splendour of the ostrich feathers, and to stifle Milby ingenuousness, not pretending to be better than its neighbours, with a cloud of cant and lugubrious hypocrisy. The alarm reached its climax when it was reported that Mr. Tryan was endeavouring to obtain authority from Mr. Prendergast, the non-resident rector, to establish a Sunday evening lecture in the parish ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... of victory. And now it could do what it pleased with us. We gave ourselves up. We went downstream with frightful rapidity. Great clouds, dirty tattered rags hung about the sky; when the moon was hidden there came lugubrious obscurity. Then we rolled in chaos. Enormous billows as black as ink, resembling the backs of fish, bore us along, spinning us round. I could no longer see either Babet or the children. ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... prison is a vastly different place to the old jail from which it got its melancholy cognomen. To-day there is not the slightest justification for the lugubrious epithet applied to it, but in the old days, when man's inhumanity to man was less a form of speech than a cold, merciless fact, the term "Tombs" described an intolerable and disgraceful condition fairly accurately. Formerly the cells in which the unfortunate prisoners were ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... her dying Son), which also contains twelve movements, and is remarkable for its frequent unconnected changes of key. Melancholy ideas were evidently uppermost in Schubert's mind at this time in connection with music, for the 'Hagar' was followed by another piece of even more lugubrious character, called 'Leichenfantasie' (Corpse-fantasia), a musical setting ...
— Story-Lives of Great Musicians • Francis Jameson Rowbotham
... a depressing thoroughfare. It contains small, cheap flats, and a number of frowsy looking houses which give one the impression of having run to seed. A hostelry of sad aspect occupies a commanding position midway along the street, but inspires the traveler not with cheer, but with lugubrious reflections upon the horrors of inebriety. The odors, unpleasantly mingled, of fried bacon and paraffin oil, are wafted to the wayfarer from the porches of these ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... owl, hooting in the ivy outside—no unaccustomed sound, but harsh and melancholy; once, by a long and mournful howling set up by the mastiff, chained in the yard beyond the wing I occupied. A long-drawn, lugubrious howling was this latter, and much such a note as the vulgar declare to herald a death in the family. This was a fancy I had never shared; but yet I could not help feeling that the dog's mournful moans were sad, and expressive of terror, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne |
