"Tragic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was, she at once wrote to him a letter which reveals the first healthy human heart-beat that had found expression in Christendom for a thousand years. Thus began a correspondence which, for genuine tragic pathos and human interest, has no equal in the world's literature. In Abelard, the scholarly monk has completely replaced the man; in Heloise, the saintly nun is but a veil assumed in loving obedience to him, to conceal the deep-hearted, faithful, devoted flesh-and-blood ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... The tragic tone stung Tessibel. Teola had promised to tell him. She herself would; it was only right that he should know. She took two impetuous steps forward, opened her lips—but again ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... started up the stairs for her bonnet and the old broche shawl. When she reached the landing, where lay the knitted mat of the three-star pattern, the matron called up to her in tragic tones: ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... natives wound up the bodies of the Frenchmen in native cloth and decently buried them, as they were in the habit of burying their own dead. The only inference which ought to have been drawn from this tragic occurrence was that heathen natives have a keen sense of justice, and that if men will go on the disproportionate principle of a life for a tooth, and shoot a man for a perfect trifle, they must abide by the consequences. It is almost certain ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... name indelibly upon American history. It was almost inevitable that a man of the views, activities, and prominence of Douglass should become acquainted with John Brown. Their first meeting, however, was in 1847, more than ten years before the tragic episode at Harpers Ferry. At that time Brown was a merchant at Springfield, Massachusetts, whither Douglass was invited to visit him. In his Life and Times he describes Brown as a prosperous merchant, who in his home lived with the utmost abstemiousness, in order that he might save money for the ...
— Frederick Douglass - A Biography • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... the French elegant easy manner of telling a story; but if what he has borrowed from that nation be taken from him, scarce anything will be left upon which he can lay any claim to applause in poetry. Rowe was only outdone by Shakespeare and Otway as a tragic writer; he has fewer absurdities than either; and is, perhaps, as pathetic as they; but his flights are not so bold, nor his characters so strongly marked. Perhaps his coming later than the rest may have contributed ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... pomp of law constitute half its force with women and men of Louisa's calibre. I had hardly arranged myself and my materials when the door slowly opened, and she entered. She was alarmed, yet wary. To see a naturally hearty, merry little body subjected for years to this nervous strain, with a tragic idea forced into a brain meant to be busied only with dress, cookery, or babies, appeared to ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... characters, queer combinations of events, surprising revelations of individual and family experiences and an unlimited fund of amusement, especially if he is disposed, perhaps even while he submits to an overpowering conviction that all life is tragic, to summon into prominence those humorous phases of social existence which, as in the best of artificial tragedies, are permitted to appear in real life as the foil of that which is truly sorrowful. To depict events that are simply amusing may not be the ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... battles, conquests, or calamities, contain much that is of interest in the internal development of the Philippine colony; and these documents vividly illustrate the ceaseless play and interaction of human interests and passions—especially in the romantic but tragic love-affair of Fajardo's wife, in which is material for a brilliant novel. The usual conflicts occur between the civil authorities and the friars, and between the governor and the Audiencia; but the records of these controversies furnish an unusual ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XX, 1621-1624 • Various
... Isn't it horrid? I'd lots rather wear girls' clothes, but you see these saved washing, and Lena, who took care of daddy and me, made a fuss about the washing almost every week, so daddy said boys' clothes were pleasanter than arguments. Aunt Kate," her voice was tragic, "I'm 'most eleven years old and I haven't ever had a white dress with a blue sash in all my life. I never ...
— Mary Rose of Mifflin • Frances R. Sterrett
... bedchamber scenery, its properties of phials and pill-boxes, its little company of stock actors, its gradual evolution of a very simple plot, its familiar incidents, its emotional alternations, and its denouement, sometimes tragic, oftener happy. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Mr. SAM LIVESEY'S Ricardo was the nearest, though the primitive savagery of his wooing had to be toned down in the interests of propriety. Mr. GAYER MACKAY made his Jones interesting and plausible in the quieter opening movements. In the intended tragic spasms one felt that he became rather comic than sinister. Not his fault, I think. He had no room or time to work up his part. That should also apply to Mr. GARRY'S Schomberg, though he doesn't seem to have tried to fit himself ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... qualifications requisite to make one, showing him sagacious in foreseeing the wiles of the enemy, eloquent in speech to encourage or restrain his soldiers, ripe in counsel, rapid in resolve, as bold in biding his time as in pressing the attack; now picturing some sad tragic incident, now some joyful and unexpected event; here a beauteous lady, virtuous, wise, and modest; there a Christian knight, brave and gentle; here a lawless, barbarous braggart; there a courteous prince, gallant and gracious; ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... without contrast into the darkened background, yet difficulties only whetted her discoverer's appetite, so that when, after an hour, she had studied out the beginning of the document, she was deep in a world of romance-freighted history. Here was a journal written by a woman in the brave and tragic days of the ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... are written usually in a characteristic form of dramatic, yet lyric recitative. His "Album of Five Songs" contains notable examples of this style, particularly the "Good-Night," "Come to Me in My Dreams," and the supremely tragic climax of "Jealousy." The song, "Evening," with its bell-like accompaniment, is more purely lyric, like the enchanting "At Parting," which was too delicately and fragrantly perfect to escape the wide popularity it has had. His "Declaration" is ravishingly exquisite, and offers ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... plumage. Musical, dramatic, poetic recitations, and tableaux vivants constituted the method of collecting the money, and the selections would have made Rabelais chuckle. We had the most flagitiously erotic passages (rendered in costume) from opera and opera bouffe, living reproductions of the tragic pose of Paolo and Francesca that would hare inspired Cabanel anew; of 'Ginevra Da Siena,' of 'Vivien,'—a carnival of the carnal! where nurseries were robbed to supply the mimic ballet, and where bald-headed clergyman, and white-haired ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... island groups are also disputed, including those at sea and in streams. Nonetheless, many nations are actively cooperating to clarify, delineate, and demarcate their international borders. The tragic aspect of international discord is the impact on the sustenance and welfare of populations caught in the conflict. It is frequently left to members of the world community to cope with enormous refugee situations, and the resultant hunger, disease, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... Of the former, four were three-decked ships, carrying ninety-eight to one hundred guns, a class of vessel of which the French had but one, the "Sans Culottes," of one hundred and twenty, which, under the more dignified name of "L'Orient," afterwards, met so tragic a fate at the Battle of the Nile; but they had, in compensation, three powerful ships of eighty guns, much superior to the British seventy-fours. As, however, only partial engagements followed, the aggregate of force on either side is a matter ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... in his hand, and now he unfolded it. She was surprised to see that his hands trembled slightly as he did so, for she had seen him act in many a tragic scene ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... that mysterious influence which in some diseases leaps forth from one to another till all are in the same pain. With the exception, perhaps, of the infection of fear, which societies have learnt to dread by tragic experience, man still fondly supposes that his emotions are his own, that they must rise and fall within himself, and does not know that they can be taken in full tide from another and imparted again without decrease of force. May God send ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... feet of this great and yet simple man, this exalted yet genial philosopher. I wished to revive and quicken my sick heart at this fountain of wit and wisdom. I come, therefore, not as Voltaire, but as the tragic Scarron of your century, and throughout my whole journey I have called myself the 'Invalid of the King of Prussia.'" [Footnote: Oeuvres ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... around. A law, to the application of which an unlimited extension was given, exposed even the suspicious to the mercy of this revolutionary tribunal. Every day new victims, both in Paris and in the provinces, were sent to the guillotine. Among the more afflicting tragic scenes of these fearful times was the execution of Marie Antoinette. She,—the once all-powerful queen of France, she,—the daughter of Maria Theresa, sister of three emperors, and aunt of one emperor still living,—after she had languished many months in prison, was finally dragged before ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... accepted as honorable in political fighting. So did Abraham Lincoln, who also, as a great Opportunist, was both a powerful and a shrewd political fighter, but pledged to Righteousness. It seems now tragic, but inevitable, that Roosevelt, after beginning and carrying forward the war for the reconciliation between Capital and Labor, should have been sacrificed by the Republican Machine, for that Machine was a special organ of Capital, by which Capital made and administered the laws of the States ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Edward Berge, "Muse Finding the Head of Orpheus," a white marble group of superior elegance and texture, arrests the passerby. A Muse kneels, drooping in exquisite pathos over the head of Orpheus found in the waves. The sculptor has chosen the tragic side of the Orphean myth. The son of Apollo and the Muse Calliope, whose heaven-taught lyre charmed men and beasts, melted rocks and even opened the gates of Erebus, had failed to win from death his bride, Eurydice, lost to him for the ...
— The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition • Stella G. S. Perry
... express is that every now and then I find in very defective art of all kinds that mere look of the real thing which suffices. A few words of poetry glance from the prose body of verse and make us forget the prose. A moment of dramatic motive carries hours of heavy comic or tragic performance. Is any piece of sculpture or painting altogether good? Or isn't the spectator held in the same glamour which involved the artist before he began the work, and which it is his supreme achievement to impart, so that it shall hide all defects? When I read what you wrote the other month, ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... other men at the time of his marriage. The death of his child, to whom he had given as much affection as his nature possessed, the stern arraignment of the neighbor who helped him to his ranch and later brought him the tragic news, and the consciousness of his own responsibility in the accident, all combined to drive him almost immediately away from the scenes which reminded him of it; and as time passed the bitterness turned to resentment against his wife. If she had not left the ranch that day, ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... such chord be thine, Restore the ancient tragic line, And emulate the notes that rung From the wild harp, which silent hung By silver Avon's holy shore, Till twice a hundred years rolled o'er; When she, the bold enchantress, came, With fearless hand and heart on flame! From the pale willow snatched the treasure, And swept it with a kindred ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... face was tragic as she looked at the beautiful girl, so gracefully adjusted to the big chair. She sighed covertly. "You are lovely," she said, "and ...
— The Price She Paid • David Graham Phillips
... on the other hand, though in a way tragic, and capable of being allegorised almost ad infinitum in its sense of some of the riddles of the painful earth, is not in the least sentimental, and is told, till just upon the end, with a certain tender irony. The author called it ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... and she lost no time in beginning to study her subjects. Pamela, she said, she found pretty plain sailing, but Chillington continued to puzzle her. Again, she could not make up her mind whether to have a happy or a tragic ending. In the interests of a tenderhearted public, I ...
— Frivolous Cupid • Anthony Hope
... lie gasping upon that cherry-coloured boudoir carpet, and the fate of the human race and of all earthly life would be complete. For a long time, in a mood which was too solemn for speech, we looked out at the tragic world. ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Cockade' is a novel of events, instinct with the spirit of the eighteenth century and full of stirring romance. The tragic period of the French Revolution forms a frame in which to set the adventures of Adrien du Pont, Vicomte de Saux, and the part he plays in those days of peril has a full measure of dramatic interest.... Mr. Weyman has evidently studied the history of the revolution ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... and, as Sir Bernard Burke remarks, it was in the reign of Queen Anne that the hopes of the house of M'Alister "flourished for the last time, they were blighted for ever." The closing scene of this prophetic curse was equally tragic and romantic; for, whilst espousing the cause of the Pretender, the young and promising heir of the M'Alisters was taken prisoner, and with many others put to death. Incensed at the wrongs of his exiled monarch, and full of fiery impulse, ...
— Strange Pages from Family Papers • T. F. Thiselton Dyer
... Spain. Julius Caesar's conspiracy against the Roman Republic, and his desperate fight with Pompey for the dictatorship, long drenched Spanish soil with blood, and had its final culmination (after Pompey's tragic death in Egypt) in Caesar's victory over Pompey's sons at Munda, in Spain, ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... in hall or bower, When spring-time brings the reveller's hour. Grave it with themes of chaste design, Fit for a simple board like mine. Display not there the barbarous rites In which religious zeal delights; Nor any tale of tragic fate Which History shudders to relate. No—cull thy fancies from above, Themes of heaven and themes of love. Let Bacchus, Jove's ambrosial boy, Distil the grape in drops of joy, And while he smiles ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea, spread the flood. There were many places well back of the lines where fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in unfordable wallows of ...
— The Amazing Interlude • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... uncarpeted—waked hollow echoes, and when they paused the silence which ensued seemed almost menacing. The grim reputation of the mansion, its gloom and silence, appealed powerfully to the latent superstition of Lucian. How much more nearly, then, would it touch the shaken and excited nerves of the tragic drunkard who dwelt ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... states of mind; the plot is forced and unnatural; not only that, but what is worse, in point of effect, it is tediously subjective; and we feel the actions of the piece to be improbable while the feelings are true to nature; yet there is tragic effect in the scenes of the 'denouement'. I understand what it was in Mr. Lloyd's mind which Mr. De Quincey calls 'Rousseauish'. He dwelt a good deal on the temptations to which human nature is subject, when passions, not in themselves unworthy, become, from circumstances, sins if indulged, and ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... Orchestral Strike Advent of the Patti Family Don Francesco Marty y Torrens and His Havanese Company Opera Gowns Fifty Years Ago Edward and William Henry Fry Horace Greeley and His Musical Critic James H. Hackett and William Niblo Tragic Consequences of Canine Interference Goethe and a Poodle A Dog-Show and ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... of this tragic story about the quiet grass- grown hollow, with its fringe of overhanging bushes and ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... the tragic and horrible events connected with Catharine's accession to the throne, and of the strangulation of Peter, in which he took so active a part, Orloff spoke in Rome with the greatest ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... Randal, not heeding the conclusion of this speech, and scarcely hearing the proverb, which the sage delivered in his most emphatic and tragic tone. "Something has occurred! My dear friend, be plainer. What has occurred?" Riccabocca remained silent. "Something that induces you to bestow your daughter on me?" Riccabocca nodded, and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... little procession faced him; they were gaunt, ragged, appallingly dirty, and terrified almost into a state of idiocy. First came the mother, a travesty of womanhood, dehumanized except for her tragic, terrified eyes. ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... the growth of Gnosticism induced in the rabbis of the second and third centuries. They lived at a time when it had been proved that that movement led away from Judaism, and its main tenets had been adopted or perverted by an antagonistic creed. It was a tragic necessity which compelled the severance between the Eastern and Western developments of the religion. In Philo's day the breach was already threatened, through the anti-legal tendencies of the extreme allegorists. His own aim was to maintain the catholic tradition ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... because so frequently men do not know those whom they think they know the best. This same stupid lack of appreciation shadows human lives to-day, and makes us fail to realize the worth of our friends and the value of our opportunities, until it is too late. It even has its tragic bearing upon the present ministry of Christ; some reject him for reasons altogether superficial and foolish, thinking that they know him perfectly because they long have been familiar with his name, while in reality they fail to understand the real beauty of his person and the transforming ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... kept the promise he had made his father. And all being now accomplished, he himself died. And those who stood by saw him die, with prayers and tears, for his friends and his people loved him with their whole hearts. Thus ends the tragic tale of Hamlet, ...
— Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare • E. Nesbit
... the doctor, "that after three years you knew the British temperament better than this. Just go and tell the colonel, politely and firmly, that you refuse to carry out his orders. Then depict Madame de Vauclere's situation in your grandest and most tragic manner. Tell him her family has been living in the chateau for the last two thousand years, that one of her ancestors came over to England with William the Conqueror, and that her grandfather was a friend of Queen Victoria's. Then the colonel will apologize and place a whole wing at the disposal ...
— General Bramble • Andre Maurois
... the well-known tragedian and theatrical manager, died at his residence, near London, on the 29th December. He was fifty-six or fifty-seven years of age, and besides sustaining tragic characters at most of the London and provincial theatres, he has held the reins of management at the Surrey, Sadler's Wells, Covent-Garden, and City of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various
... great favor with the people, was the judgment, afterwards so famous upon the tragic poets. Sophocles, still a young man, had just brought forward his first plays; opinions were much divided, and the spectators had taken sides with some heat. So, to determine the case, Apsephion, who was at that time Archon, would not cast lots who should be judges; but when Cimon, and his brother ...
— The Boys' and Girls' Plutarch - Being Parts of The "Lives" of Plutarch • Plutarch
... wanting. These April creations of my brain—carnival figures, laughing and weeping with equal facility, lacked always and altogether the blood and muscle of human creatures. The mishaps of their lives struck never a tragic note; always the thrill and stir of actual existence were wanting. I would have no more of them. I felt myself capable of other things. I would ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... feminine nature of Miriam. Deeply touching is the representation of the manner in which these two essentially different persons—the woman intelligent, passionate, acquainted with life, and with a tragic element in her own career; the youth ignorant, gentle, unworldly, brightly and harmlessly natural—are equalised and bound together by their common secret, which insulates them, morally, from the rest of mankind. The character of Hilda has always struck me as an admirable invention—one ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... very old, very trite philosophy that can be made to replace such a state of mind. Most young men of twenty-five are gloating over it: feeling themselves sad cynics, suffering from a tragic past. Unbearable to others this stage may be. But it is a pleasant haven to the individual anchored there, safe from the recent storms of disillusionment. By January, poor Vladimir de Windt began to long for the first signs of this state in his companion. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... the heart to do it, and she in such horrid pain? Hark to that, and then laugh if you darst," she said with a tragic gesture, and her black ...
— Eight Cousins • Louisa M. Alcott
... weighed down with the double loss that had come to her, felt, for the first time, as if their condition was utterly hopeless. The mental picture of her brother and her lover meeting their tragic death hand in hand, their youth and beauty, their courage and fidelity, was constantly before her. With all the purity and strength of her true heart, she loved Dare; but she did not for a moment wish that he had taken a different course. "It is just what I should ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... a good daughter to her mother, and an exemplary character in every way, but the odd thing was that few people liked her. This was the more tragic as it was the desire of her heart to be popular. Her appearance was attractive, and strangers usually began acquaintance with enthusiasm, but the attraction rarely survived the first hour's talk. She was like a very well-coloured and delightful-looking apple that is without ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... changed again, freezing to a tragic coldness. She stared straight ahead of her, perceptibly struggling with the tremor of her muscles; and when she had controlled it she flung out a pale-lipped pleasantry. "But you see I've always had ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... her napkin with tragic deliberation. "Very well," she said; "it is not my place to urge it. I can only point out your duty and leave the rest to you. One thing I must speak about, and that is your associating so familiarly with these townspeople. They are impertinent; they take advantages, and ...
— Sandy • Alice Hegan Rice
... he had been struck. Newman and Porter stared dizzily. Only Kut-le stood composed. His eyes with the old look of tragic tenderness ...
— The Heart of the Desert - Kut-Le of the Desert • Honore Willsie Morrow
... brief and sparingly allusive, seems more to cover than to free their sense. This is because, when it fairly comes to not having others to consider, they meet in an air that appears rather anxiously to wait for their words. Such an impression as that was in fact grave, and might be tragic; so that, plainly enough, systematically at last, they settled to a care of what ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... they were—Democritus, Socrates, Epicurus, Christ; so many of them, and so vague in the silvery mist of history that he hardly knew that they were not his own imagining; Lucretius, St. Francis, Voltaire, Rousseau, and how many others, known and unknown, through the tragic centuries; they had wept, some of them, and some of them had laughed, and their phrases had risen glittering, soap bubbles to dazzle men for a moment, and had shattered. And he felt a crazy desire to join the forlorn ones, to throw himself into inevitable defeat, ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... interest in other men, as men, although they are interested in all women. The fact that men are sex animals makes no impression upon other men, whereas the fact that women are sex animals makes an enormous impression. A man would hear of the tragic death of a thousand unknown men with comparative indifference, he declared, but would be distressed to hear of the death of a hundred unknown women. I wonder if that is true. I know that women are intensely conscious that all other ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... [Dubourgay, SCAPIUS.] this the young man has to bear. The innumerable maltreatments, authentically chronicled in Wilhelmina's and the other Books, though in a dateless, unintelligible manner, would make a tragic sum!—Here are two Billets, copied from the Prussian State-Archives, which will show us to what height matters had gone, in this the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... often as not ended with the tears coming into his eyes. He spoke to me once about this. He said that it was a mistake to think he was deeply affected by a quotation. "In fact," he said, "I am not easily affected by passionate or tragic emotion—what does affect me is a peculiar touch of beauty, but it is a luxurious and superficial thing. It would entirely prevent me," he added, "from reading many poems or prose passages aloud which I greatly admire. I simply ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... romantic figure she seemed to her friends; it was a more deadly thing than that. She was vain of the quality of her past love. Too much had been made of it, and she would have been more than human had she succeeded altogether in escaping the temptation to visualise herself as the tragic survivor of a great passion. And to this had she come, although her love had been ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... the sham good, sare?" he asked as he laid a pot of preserve on the table. He was the landlady's son or grandson, and a better boy never lived, but his part, for all his spirit and good humour, was a tragic one. For the greatest misfortune that can come upon an hotel-keeper had crushed this house: Baedeker had excised ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... The tragic fate of President Garfield, following these and other revelations of political corruption, brought public sentiment on civil service reform to a head. A bill prepared by the Civil Service Reform League, and introduced by Senator Pendleton, of Ohio, passed Congress in January, 1883, and ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... arrived just after the—the death. Mr. Cayley and I found the body. Mr. Cayley being busy just now—there are police and doctors and so on in the house—he asked me to tell you. He says that no doubt you would prefer, the house-party having been broken up in this tragic way, to leave as soon as possible." He gave a pleasant apologetic little smile and went on, "I am putting it badly, but what he means, of course, is that you must consult your own feelings in the matter entirely, and please make your own arrangements ...
— The Red House Mystery • A. A. Milne
... spirit of fun is found to a greater or less degree in all of the sketches, but at times the fun borders on the tragic so closely that the dividing line between laughter and tears almost fades ...
— A Manifest Destiny • Julia Magruder
... her tragic fate caused an exaggerated estimate to be made of her both as a woman and an artist. The actual cause of her death is unknown. There have been many theories concerning it. It was very generally believed that she was poisoned, although neither ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... that letters written by Longlade, Indian interpreter at old Mackinack, at and during the era of the massacre of the English garrison, are in the possession of the Greenough family, at Green Bay. They would, perhaps, throw some light on a transaction which is by far the most tragic event of this transition period of our Indian history. By transition, I mean the era of the change ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... quality which no imitation could attain, and which attempted improvement could only mar. The very construction of the whole—for it does appear as a whole—is influenced by the circumstances which made the life of that tragic period. ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... at the beginning, but they could do little. Their own lives were in constant danger from tumbling wreckage, for the rescuers were playing a game of tragic jackstraws. The ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... lances and swords. After they had trampled on his body, they carried his head to the castle of Cufa, and the inhuman Obeidollah struck him on the mouth with a cane. "Alas!" exclaimed an aged Mussulman, "on these lips have I seen the lips of the apostle of God!" In a distant age and climate the tragic scene of the death of Hosein will awaken the sympathy of the coldest reader. On the annual festival of his martyrdom, in the devout pilgrimage to his sepulcher, his Persian votaries abandon their souls to the religious ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... bare of the chaff of petty circumstances which covered them. His stories all contain at least a minor chord of sentiment, but are usually free from the sentimentality which mars some of Harte's sketches. He is not ashamed to employ pathos, but his tragic situations are rarely overstrained and maudlin. He has all the tenderness of Dickens; his Christmas Eve at Topmast Tickle may well be compared with A Christmas Carol. Norman Duncan never married, but few Canadian or American authors have understood women as ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... the last scene, finished, by throwing Dawson's heart into the fire, she drew her head within the carriage, repeated his name, and expired on the spot." This melancholy event was made, by Shenstone, the theme of a tragic ballad:— ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... it in Endicott's Red Cross and Legends of the Province House. Against this dark foil moved in strong relief the figures of Hester {468} Prynne, the woman taken in adultery, her paramour, the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, her husband, old Roger Chillingworth, and her illegitimate child. In tragic power, in its grasp of the elementary passions of human nature and its deep and subtle insight into the inmost secrets of the heart, this is Hawthorne's greatest book. He never crowded his canvas with figures. In the Blithedale Romance and the Marble Faun there is the same ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... not worthy of either of you! (They stare at him, bewildered. He goes on)—Why should you struggle over me? Do not hate each other! For my sake, be friends! Ah, God, that this tragic meeting should have happened! And now I must decide between you.... (He goes to Mrs. Falcington and throws himself on his knees before her.) Forgive and forget! Come back ...
— King Arthur's Socks and Other Village Plays • Floyd Dell
... killed—a wonder there were not more—and all hands were sorry for him; but tragedy and comedy so often bunk together, and men who adventure are more apt to dwell on the humorous than the tragic side of things. There was that about the code-books. The instructions to all ships are to get rid of the code-books if there is ever any likelihood of the enemy capturing the ship. The code-books ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... emotions so painfully. Not the lion; they can see through that: but the Snug within, the human Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old Double; and Argan in his nightcap is the tragic figure of Monomania; and human nature shudders at the petrifaction of the intellect of Mr. F.'s aunt. Et patati, ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... What I have said of the race from which they derive their characteristics should serve as a general explanation of their purport. The second, twelfth and fourteenth rhapsodies are admirable examples of the series. In general these "Hungarian Rhapsodies" open with a few brief bars suggestive of tragic recitative, which leads into a broad yet strongly marked and searching rhythm, upon which is built a slow, stately yet mournful melody, broken in upon here and there by strange weird runs and rapid passages. These latter serve a double purpose. They imitate the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... had been given of his death, yet, notwithstanding this, and the addresses of many royal suitors, she preserved her heart for her Ulysses, who at last triumphed over his enemies, and rescued his faithful queen from the persecution of her wooers.—This play has business, passion, and tragic ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... girls, and they mentally resolved that as long as they were at Lakeview Hall they would do all they could to make life more bearable for the frail and forlorn woman who had been brought into their lives in a way so unexpected and so nearly tragic. ...
— Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach - Or Strange Adventures Among The Orange Groves • Annie Roe Carr
... to turn from summer pic-nics to shipwrecks; but every reader knows how often, even in the midst of the world's pleasures and gaieties, mankind is startled by thrilling stories of the tragic experiences of some of ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... it that this subject becomes part of the Eugenic campaign which will yet dominate and mould the future. For surely the present spectacle has elements in it which would be utterly farcical if they were not so tragic. Here we have life present and life to come being destroyed for lack of knowledge. These horrible diseases, ravaging the guilty and the innocent, equally and indifferently, are at present allowed to do so with scarcely a voice raised against them. Every day husbands infect their wives, who have ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... confusion, arising from a trivial error which may be cleared up unexpectedly and without injury, gives rise to ridiculous situations. The greatest confusion, on the contrary, insoluble or unsolved, offers us the tragic elements. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... lower than that of Andromache, because it does not imply equality of the spouses. Valerius Maximus (fl. 25 A.D.)[1200] gave a chapter to "Conjugal Love." He found a few cases in which spouses, both male and female, had died for or on account of each other. They do not represent the mores. There is a tragic or heroic element in them all. That is the way in which conjugal love would strike the mind of an ancient man in his most serious moments. Apuleius[1201] gives the case of Charites who had intense love for her husband. Her base lover was a victim of erotic ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... tightened resentfully upon his arm. "It isn't funny," she reproved. "It is tragic to be bored ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... dress only)—Ver. 620. By "ornamenta" he means the dress of Tragedy. The dresses of Comedy were essentially different from those of Tragedy. He means to say, "the man is mad; if he had only the Tragic garb on, you might take him for Ajax Telamon in his frenzy." On being refused the arms of Achilles, Ajax became mad, and slaughtered a flock of sheep fancying that they were Ulysses ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... human nature. The closing scenes of his rough and lawless life, in which his latent affection for his faithful wife throws a sunset gleam over his hard and selfish nature, and prevents it from being altogether hateful, are impressively told, and are touched with genuine tragic power. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... formed a league with the thirty cities of Latium, and is said to have taken a census of the people of the city, which was found to have eighty-three thousand inhabitants. To strengthen his power he married his two daughters to two sons of Lucius Tarquinius, a well-intended act which led to a tragic and dreadful deed. ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... to him with a gesture of half-comic, half- tragic despair]. Well, then I can't help it, ...
— Fanny and the Servant Problem • Jerome K. Jerome
... near the Swiss frontier, dependent upon the Duke of Lorraine, similar success and a similarly tragic end were the results of the zealous labors of Wolfgang Schuch, a priest of German extraction. The "good duke" Antoine, having been led to confound the peaceable disciples of Schuch with the revolted peasants, whose ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... could see my way to a tragic plot, the curtain rose on Act II. The women of the village were going to Mass, but Rosina, reduced to ragged misery, fell on the steps, not worthy to enter. The cavaliere came by and offered her money, ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... pass by Glencoe, and Ben Nevis appears sprinkled with snow; the bay becomes narrower, and the mass of water, confined amid barren mountains, assumes a tragic appearance. Human beings have come hither to little purpose. Nature remains indomitable and wild; one feels oneself ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... eyes shining. "Now there'll be something doing." Then he struck a tragic attitude and declaimed, "Little do the treacherous hawks in yonder nest realize that the eagles of the law are about ...
— The Secret Wireless - or, The Spy Hunt of the Camp Brady Patrol • Lewis E. Theiss
... the inner working of nature, drunk with the mysteries of the universe. But he is also an unruly individualist, a reckless despiser of accepted morality; and it is hard to see how his relation with Gretchen, which forms by far the largest part of the Ur-Faust, can lead to anything but a tragic catastrophe. Only Goethe's second Faust conception, which sets in with the end of the nineties of the eighteenth century, opens up a clear view of the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... tragic explanation; but I guess it's true. [Looking at Jack.] And so this is Mr. Bullen. For such a famous revolutionist, I expected to ...
— The Machine • Upton Sinclair
... exceedingly. He admitted that he had never liked Braddock, but explained that he had not expected to hear that the fiery little scientist was such a scoundrel. But, as Don Pedro confessed, it was an ill wind which blew him some good, when the upshot of the whole mysterious tragic business was the restoration of at least one emerald. Sir Frank brought the gem to him on the afternoon of the day succeeding Mrs. Jasher's death, and while the whole village was buzzing with excitement. It was Random who gave all details ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... passed in confronting hard facts. Outside the House he was a working colonist; inside it a practical politician. The only glory he sought was "the glory of going on," and of helping the Colony to go on. When, with tragic suddenness, he died in harness, in the Legislative Council in 1892, there was not alone sincere sorrow among the circle of friends and allies who knew his sterling character, but, inasmuch as however hard he had hit in debate it had never been below the belt, his opponents joined in regretting ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... "And a tragic enough one. We ought to change the old proverb, 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a poor man to marry a rich ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... rejected the red, sullen, thundering river, with its swift, changeful, endless, contending strife—for that was tragic. And she rejected the frowning mass of red rock, upreared, riven and split and canyoned, so grim and aloof—for that was barren. But she accepted the vast sloping valley of sage, rolling gray and soft and beautiful, down to the dim mountains and purple ramparts of the horizon. Lucy did not know ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... 1805, and the Third Napoleon at the height of his power in 1859. In the same way, the Roman Empire possessed merits which, at a distance, and especially at a great distance of time, concern men more deeply than the tragic tyranny which was felt in the neighbourhood of the Palace. The poor had what they had demanded in vain of the Republic. The rich fared better than during the Triumvirate. The rights of Roman citizens were extended to the people of the ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... came at last to include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the expression of the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell parallel with his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face, his best work remained somber, almost tragic in spirit. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... the camp was perfectly still, and the only sounds that broke the silence were the tinkling of a neighbouring rill and the footfall of the sentinels. Van Dyk and Considine were lying uneasily on the bare ground, and thinking of the tragic fate that awaited them on the morrow, when they observed the dim figure of a man approaching from the innermost end of the cavern with a drawn knife in his right hand. Both started up and leant on their elbows; more than this they could not do. They ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... have anticipated modern ideas. He trifles with his genius, and crowds all his chief work into a few tormented years of later life; yet he is so possessed by his genius that he passes unmoved through the most tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... This tragic enumeration only skims the surface of the many and various aspects of a situation that reaches its breaking point in civil war, famine, pestilence ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing
... or five intervening months, commencing with that tragic night in the Ravenscourt Park studio, had wrought a great change in Jack; though it was more internal, perhaps, than external. His old friends would promptly have recognized the returned war-artist, laden with honors that he did not care a jot for. He looked fit, ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... returned accompanied by the Duke. If Angus had ever lost his, he gave no indication of it. The effect on everybody else was literally seismic. The generally accepted view was that Lord Trask's reason had been unhinged by his tragic loss; there might, he conceded, be more than a crumb of truth in that. At first, his cousin Nikkolay raged at him for alienating the barony from the family, and then he learned that Duke Angus was appointing him vicar-baron and giving him Traskon New House for his ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... that she remembered, even remotely, the bearing of that tragic day when her sister had come to announce the Bradley rascality. Soon she began again, this time nearer ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... situation, only yet more to embitter her lot—the kindlier feelings, naturally profuse in the breast of Nydia, were nipped and blighted. Her sense of right and wrong was confused by a passion to which she had so madly surrendered herself; and the same intense and tragic emotions which we read of in the women of the classic age—a Myrrha, a Medea—and which hurried and swept away the whole soul when once delivered to love—ruled, and rioted ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... bone, yet is content and well save for her fatigue, if her children respond to her efforts by success in study and by ambitious efforts of their own. But if the struggling mother is so unfortunate as to have drawn in Nature's lottery an unappreciative or a weak-minded child, then the breakdown is tragic. ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... verdict which assigns him the third place among the workers on the Sacro Monte be reasonably disputed. But this third place must be given rather in respect of quantity than quality, for in dramatic power and highly-wrought tragic action he is inferior to the sculptor, whoever he may be, of the Massacre of the Innocents chapel, to which I will return when I come to the chapel ...
— Ex Voto • Samuel Butler
... supputation of numbers,—the third in the dimension of geometrical quantities,—the fourth in the composition of heroic poems,—the fifth in the jovial interludes of a comic strain,—the sixth in the stately gravity of the tragic vein,—the seventh in the melodious disposition of musical airs,—the eighth in the completest manner of writing histories and books on all sorts of subjects, and—the ninth in the mysteries, secrets, and curiosities of all sciences, faculties, disciplines and arts ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... kings to declare war, for nations to fight and pay. Napoleon III declared war against Russia, and France fought side by side with England in the Crimea, not because the gayest and most tragic of nations had aught to gain, but to ensure an upstart emperor a place among the monarchs of Europe. And that strange alliance was merely one move in a long game played by a consummate intriguer—a game ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman
... Petrea Frank, whilst, with dignified gestures, she took a tragic-comic farewell of the home which she and her family ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... little else spoken of in his book than disguises, false names, false papers, ambushes, kidnappings, attacks on coaches, subterranean passages, prisons, escapes, child spies and female captains! He states himself that the affair of the Forest of Quesnay was "tragic, strange and mysterious!" And at the same time he condemns as "strange" and "romantic" the simplest of all these adventures—that of Moisson! He scoffs at his hiding-places in the roofs of the old chateau, and it is precisely ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... half-serious comments of the Fool, just as the mind under the extreme anguish of a surgical operation vents itself in sallies of wit. The character was also a grotesque ornament of the barbarous times, in which alone the tragic ground-work of the story could be laid. In another point of view it is indispensable, inasmuch as while it is a diversion to the too great intensity of our disgust, it carries the pathos to the highest pitch of which it is capable, by showing the pitiable weakness of the old king's ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... L. E. L., authoress, born in Chelsea; a charming woman, who wrote well both in verse and prose; was Mrs. Hemans's successor; having taken prussic acid by mistake had a tragic end (1802-1838). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... he exclaimed in a tragic tone. I understood that something dreadful must have happened, but I did not care, since, as I fondly supposed, it did not concern me. I pushed out past Alexander Abraham—who was looking as guilty as if he had been caught burglarizing—and came face to face with the man who ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... sitting on his trunk, expecting the ship that was to bear him to an eternity of good or evil—probably evil. They were in no state of mind to enjoy burlesque or comedy, and, so far as tragedy was concerned, their own lives and their own creeds were tragic beyond anything that could by any possibility happen in this world. A broken heart was nothing to be compared with a damned soul; the afflictions of a few years, with the flames of eternity. This, to say the least of it, accounts, in ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... people neither; and as for Jim Clay, he wouldn't think of touchin' a thing—he was too much the other way to get on in the world. An' it ain't any fault of my rarin' that me grandson is hounded down a vagabond," said the old lady in a tragic manner. ...
— Some Everyday Folk and Dawn • Miles Franklin
... the sight, his two associates had turned back to rejoin Stanley's column, while he, the third, had decided to make for the railway. Unless those men, too, had been cut off, the regiment by this time knew of the tragic fate of some of their comrades, but the colonel was mercifully spared all dread that one of the victims ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... audience for the whole action of the play. It was, therefore, to be a scene of which people did not easily tire and that remained interesting, unobtrusive and formally neat. To find such a scene it is necessary to refer back to days when the Comic and the Tragic scenes were architectural and permanent. This I did and, taking Palladio's magnificent scene at Vicenza, by a shameless process of reductio ad absurdum, evolved the scene that is now in use at Hammersmith. Palladio and Gay have ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... the glory of the deep-blue sky, while the flickering shadows of the budding branches played over her like the shadow of the net in which she had entangled herself—she looked the very embodiment of despair. Her face, never joyous, was now infinitely tragic. Her dark eyes were bright with the tears that lay behind them; her proud mouth had drooped at the corners; she was walking as one who neither knows where she is nor sees what is before her, as one for whom there is no sun by day and no stars for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... never having been so spoken to before, at least since her arrival in England, there was something comic in the surprise of her large eyes, as well as something tragic in the dignity of her offended mien. "It is very naughty of you, Miss," continued Leonard in a milder tone, for he was both softened by the eyes and awed by the mien, "and I trust you will ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... piano, and the sound of feet coming down the corridors, and other properties of size and romance—had they any existence? Yet why should Mrs. Alardyce live all alone in this gigantic mansion, and, if she did not live alone, with whom did she live? For its own sake, Katharine rather liked this tragic story, and would have been glad to hear the details of it, and to have been able to discuss them frankly. But this it became less and less possible to do, for though Mrs. Hilbery was constantly reverting to the story, it was always in this tentative and restless fashion, as though ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and most precious relationship is the only one that reconciles a woman to her wrinkles and makes her happy in her grey hairs. Without it she takes to peroxide, smooths out her wrinkles with cream, and what is even more tragic, developes a tendency to pursue the young men of her children's generation. People call it ridiculous, lunatic,—so it would be, if it were not ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... is, that tragedy and comedy, made also originally to be sung, but which, in process of time, upon truer principles of nature, came to be acted and declaimed, were but super-inductions to the choruses, of which, in tragedy especially, the tragic-writers, could not well get rid, as being part ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... unscrewing the mouthpieces of their brass instruments, followed him. There was nobody but the dilettanti left, and they gazed about them with disconsolate looks, whilst the receiver of excise duties exclaimed, with a tragic air, 'O heaven! how mortified I feel!' All my diffidence was gone,—I threw myself in the bandmaster's way, I begged, I prayed, in my distress I promised him six new minuets with double trios for the annual ball. I succeeded in appeasing him. He went ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... blame for it, rather than to be executed and bring lasting disgrace on my family, friends, and, I may add with truth, on Yale. For I reasoned that parents throughout the country would withhold their sons from a university which numbered among its graduates such a despicable being. But from any tragic act I was providentially restrained by the very delusion which gave birth to the desire—in a way which signally appeared on a later and, to me, a ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... and waxing of the tremulous, ruddy glow above the black enmassed leagues of masonry; audible, in the low inarticulate moaning borne eastward across the crests of Norwood. It was then and there that the tragic significance of life first dimly awed and appealed to his questioning spirit: that the rhythm of humanity first touched deeply in him a ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... young man in the knickerbockers. Her lips, at this, parted in a stare; her eyes darkened to the purple of one of the shadow-patches on the sea. She showed for the passing instant the face of some splendid tragic mask, and I remembered for the inconsequence of it what Mrs. Meldrum had said about her sight. I had derived from this lady a worrying impulse to catechise her, but that didn't seem exactly kind; so I substituted another question, inquired who the pretty young man in ...
— Embarrassments • Henry James
... was, hustled and jostled in her role of mother and mistress-of-the-house in servantless America, with the primitive American need to do so much with her own hands, she had not even had the time to know the stupid, tragic thing that was happening to her . . . that she was turning into a slow, vegetating plant instead of a human being. And now she understood the meaning of the strange dejection she had felt the day when little Mark went off to school with the others. How curiously jaded and apprehensive she ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... men, of whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W. Rolleston, seemed always out of place. It was I brought him there, intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young Dublin working men slip out of their workshop to see 'the second Thomas Davis' passing by, and even remember a conspiracy, ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats |
