"Pitiably" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and such a mode of attempting to turn your back on yourself, to borrow a phrase from your friend Lord Castlereagh's rhetoric, will be pronounced, even by those who do not care a bawbee about the debate, as not only ludicrous, but pitiably shabby. Keep your seat, Mr. Landor, and keep your temper for once in your life. Let us examine into this pretended mistake in your former dialogue about Laodamia. Well, as you are up, do me the favour, sir, to mount the ladder, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... community work. As a matter of fact, social supervision is often so lax that obscene moving pictures and cards that are driven out of the large cities are exhibited without protest in the small towns. Usually the village is overchurched, and consequently divided into pitiably weak factions whose controlling aim is self-preservation. Seldom can a religious, philanthropic, or social organization be developed with sufficient strength to ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... look at him in open-eyed amazement. The big man's terror was pitiably apparent. The copper skin had turned a dirty grey, his lower lip was trembling like a ...
— The Angel of Terror • Edgar Wallace
... vessel seem like an infernal Eolian harp; the thunder rumbled like an indisposed giant, and to make things more agreeable, a gun broke from its lashings, and had it all its own way for about a quarter of an hour. Tom groaned most pitiably. I looked at him, and if I were to live for a thousand years, I shall never forget the expression of his face. His lips were blue, and—no matter, I'm not clever at portrait painting: but imagine an old-fashioned Saracen's Head—not the fine handsome ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 24, 1841 • Various
... Adams became pitiably embarrassed. He stammered, coughed, stammered again, wrinkling his face so deeply he seemed about to weep; but finally he contrived to utter an apologetic laugh. "I ought to do that, of course; but in some way or other I just ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... most heartrending screams—screams that abruptly disturbed the silence of that lonely spot and pierced to the depths of Martha's soul. In an instant she rose, and, dashing on, bounded over stock and stone, tearing herself pitiably, but heeding it not in her intense anxiety to save her child. But the wolf had now increased its speed; the undergrowth was thick, the ground heavier, and soon screams became her only guide. Still on ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... been the work of an Indian artist, native gentlemen out there would simply have smiled pitiably at such ignorance, and given him the gentle admonishment that he was only to make a fool of himself for his pains. There was also a picture of a Diptych, in two portions, with a background of gilt, but the figure of the Diptych himself very ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey
... pitiably weak and helpless. But it was the weakness and helplessness of a happiness too vast for him to measure. It was Nada in her ragged shoes and dress, with the haunting torture of Jed Hawkins' brutality in her eyes and face, that he had expected ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... usually foreign to his dull nature, seemed to divine what manner of man would be Madonna Paola's ideal, and strove to pass himself off as possessed of the attributes of that ideal, with an ardour that was pitiably comical. He became an actor by the side of whom those comedians that played impromptus for his delectation were the merest bunglers with the art. He gathered that Madonna Paola loved the poets and their stately diction, and so, to please her better, he became ...
— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini
... here is detestable, because it is so deliberate. A man may not feel poverty very keenly and may live a quiet self-pleasing life in pure thoughtlessness; but it is quite another matter when he knows thoroughly what the issues are, and yet wails pitiably because he is asked to pay a little more, even if it does fall hardly sometimes, than those who get almost none of the benefit. It is like the healthy child crying because they do not give him a goody, as they have given to his sick ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pitiably inadequate to design anything better for us. I didn't know how. I didn't understand. I, the architect of ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... both men would have felt inclined to risk everything for the sake of a little blood-stimulating tramp back and forth. The danger did not deter them. Only the plainsman's ingrained horror of throwing away a chance held them, shivering pitiably, to their places. ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... life," they yelled in unison, and then, at the same moment each fled from the other, by a different way. At the same instant, Pamina awoke from her swoon, and began to call pitiably for her mother. Papageno heard her and ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... object or the difficulty of toil, not excused or in any way made tolerable by a prospect of sacrificial employment. I had been ill brought up to meet this racking emergency. What had there been, in all my life, fostered in body and happiness, expanding in the indulgent love and pitiably misdirected purpose of my uncle, to fit me for this denial of pure and confident desire? I tried, God knows I tried! summoning to my help all the poor measure of nobility the good Lord had endowed me with and my uncle had cultivated—I tried, God knows! to receive ...
— The Cruise of the Shining Light • Norman Duncan
... this, hesitated a moment, twisting her fingers and looking pitiably at him. Then she thought of Conolly; rallied; and said: "I can only say that I am sorry to disagree with you; but I am ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... for Norway; and the game was played out, and the end was come, as the end of such matters generally comes, by gradual decay, petty disaster, and mistake; till the snow-mountain, instead of being blown tragically and heroically to atoms, melts helplessly and pitiably away. ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... battle. These envoys may have taken a despondent view of what would be the fate of the Serene Republic; but when, a short time afterwards, the perfumed and dishevelled citizens, stamping on the masks of last night's ball, were weeping pitiably in their palaces, the Slovenes and the Morlaks, who had fought for them so well, were weeping in the streets. Sadly and solemnly at Zadar—la tanto disputata—the flag of Venice was lowered; at other parts of the Dalmatian ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... so pitiably, you old weeping-willow?" Papa said, laughing. "There are only merry folk ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... poets! Chicago was a huge dirty town on the middle border. Washington a vulgar political camp—only Philadelphia was admitted to have the quality of a real city and her literary and artistic resources were pitiably slender and failing! ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... thwarting the general plans, by his arrogance in refusing to be bound by the decision of the other leaders, and by having made a peace contrary to the interests of the crusaders. The list was a long one; but the evidence adduced was pitiably weak. Beyond the breath of suspicion, no word of real evidence connecting him with the murder of Conrad of Montferat was adduced, and the other charges were supported by no better evidence. Many of the German barons who had been at the crusades themselves came forward ...
— Winning His Spurs - A Tale of the Crusades • George Alfred Henty
... of iniquity, was by Madame Flamingo handed over to the Prince, in exchange for his heart and the title she had been deluded to believe him capable of conferring. Her reverence for Princes and exiled heroes, (who are generally exiled humbugs,) was not one jot less than that so pitiably exhibited by our self-dubbed fashionable society all over this Union. It may be well to add, that this distinguished couple, all smiling and loving, are on their way to Europe, where they are sure of receiving ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... the noonday tragedies haunting their household recesses; which veil was raised only to the gifted eyes of a Cassandra, or to the eyes that, like my own, had experimentally become acquainted with them as facts. Pitiably mean is he that measures the relations of such cases by the scenical apparatus of purple and gold. That which never has been apparelled in royal robes, and hung with theatrical jewels, is but suffering from an accidental fraud, having the same right to them that any similar misery can ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... describe it are probably often speaking the truth as far as their knowledge extends. It is on these planes that "spirits" call into temporary existence their houses, schools, and cities, for these objects are often real enough for the time, though to a clearer sight they may sometimes be pitiably unlike what their delighted creators suppose them to be. Nevertheless, many of the imaginations that take form there are of real though temporary beauty, and a visitor who knew of nothing higher might wander contentedly enough there among forests and ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... I tried an experiment. I offered her my watch; she took it and looked at it for some time; then she began to scream terribly, as if the sight of that little object had suddenly aroused her recollection, which was beginning to grow indistinct. She is pitiably thin now, with hollow cheeks and brilliant eyes, and she walks up and down ceaselessly, like a wild beast does in its cage; I have had bars put to the windows, and have had the seats fixed to the floor, so as to prevent her from looking to see ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... yet what an infinite variety, there is in all the operations and purposes of Nature! She does not grow us men out of our mothers, but babes—helpless, pitiably, tearfully helpless babes!—ignorant; who must grow into the perfect stature and the mature mind of men. Is not this babe also a saurian in its little way? Does a wider gap separate the saurian from the man, than that which separates ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was a bit of emergency work he wanted me for, that only the remnant of a small appropriation was available for it, and that if I took it I would be pitiably paid; but that he wished me to do it, because some day, and that not too far away, it might have to stand the test not of friends, but of enemies. Also he said—let ...
— Sonnie-Boy's People • James B. Connolly
... everything—always with semi-success and brilliant promise; he had even tried the stage, playing the Provinces for an entire season; then, ultimately sinking into mediocrity in all these occupations, he returned to London, a hopelessly useless, a pitiably gifted man. His chilly little aristocratic mother always spoke of him as "poor, dear Charles." His brothers, clubmen all, graciously alluded to him with, "deuced hard luck, poor Charlie." His father never ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... seem reasonable to claim that human behavior may be intelligently controlled or directed only in the light of intimate and exhaustive knowledge of the organism, its processes, and its relations to its environment? If this be true, how pitiably, how shamefully, inadequate is our knowledge even of ourselves! How few are those who have a sound, although meager, knowledge of the laws of heredity, of the primary facts of human physiology, of the principles of hygiene, ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... mistress had died, the day before, of a putrid fever. But—worse than this and most horrible—the servants had ordered the coffin in haste; and, when delivered, it was found to be too short. Upon which, to have done with her, in their terror of infection, they had lopped off the head, which lay pitiably dissevered from the trunk. For three years after the young man travelled as one mad, but at length found solace in his neglected abbacy of Soligny-la-Trappe, and in reviving its extreme ...
— Sir John Constantine • Prosper Paleologus Constantine
... rich and others poor; some having wealth only to corrupt, defile, deprave others therewith, while meritorious poverty struggles and toils for human betterment all unaided. Some gifted with mentality; others pitiably lacking capacity. Some royal-souled from the first naturally, others with brutal, criminal propensities ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka
... God had, as the fact of their possession of salvation showed, chosen Romans and Asiatics together to be heirs of eternal life. By the side of these transcendent blessings which they possessed in common, how pitiably small and insignificant all the causes which kept them apart ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... superstitious, if they could govern all their circumstances by set rules, or if they were always favored by fortune: but being frequently driven into straits where rules are useless, and being often kept fluctuating pitiably between hope and fear by the uncertainty of fortune's greedily coveted favors, they are consequently, for the most part, very prone to credulity. The human mind is readily swayed this way or that in times of doubt, especially when hope and fear are struggling for ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... injurious. Instead of preserving health, they sow innumerable disorders, which can only be cured by substituting a beverage from such salutary native or exotic herbs as are formed for the particular afflictions the former have so pitiably brought upon the too greater ...
— A Treatise on Foreign Teas - Abstracted From An Ingenious Work, Lately Published, - Entitled An Essay On the Nerves • Hugh Smith
... I no reputation to endanger? [Rising—laying the paper aside.] What a pitiably small request! you will ...
— The Gay Lord Quex - A Comedy in Four Acts • Arthur W. Pinero
... cackled, the boy grinned, and Howard, sick and weak with anger and sorrow, turned away and walked down toward the brook. He had tried once more to get near his brother and had failed. O God! how miserably, pitiably! The hot blood gushed all over him as he thought of the ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... She opened her eyes, unclasped her hand, which had been locked round one of the old hag's, and sat up blinking, with a smile which died away very pitiably. ...
— The Laird's Luck • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... the renewing of Bruges will not proceed too zealously, even if Bruges come safely through its present hour of crisis. Perhaps there is no big city in the world—and Bruges, though it has shrunk pitiably, like Ypres, from its former great estate in the Middle Ages, has still more than forty thousand souls—that remains from end to end, in every alley, and square, and street, so wholly unspoilt and untouched by what is bad in the ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... fear, arose a prejudice against the book. That writer who could attempt to palm off an inferior and immature production under cover of one successful effort, must indeed be unduly eager after the secondary and sordid result of authorship, and pitiably indifferent to its true and honourable meed. If reviewers and the public truly believed this, no wonder that they ...
— Charlotte Bronte's Notes on the pseudonyms used • Charlotte Bronte
... a generous instance of a mountain farmhouse. The floors were innocent of mats, and the rooms otherwise pitiably barnlike. Yet an air of largeness distinguished the whole. It was clearly the home of a man of standing in his community, one who lived amply the only life he knew. You felt you already knew the man from his outer ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... fame, unfortunately, are not proof against fate, and most of these notable personages perished as pitiably as the more ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... the considerations under which we read and interpret the conduct of Pope's parents; and they lead us to regard as wise and conscientious a scheme which, under ordinary circumstances, would have been pitiably foolish. And be it remembered, that to these considerations, derived exclusively from the civil circumstances of the family, were superadded others derived from the astonishing prematurity of the individual. That boy who could write at twelve years of age the beautiful and touching ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... they reached the open doorway of Drusilla's bedroom. And seated in a big velvet chair, as usual drawn near the window, though the shade was pulled straight down, pillows heaped all about her, sat Drusilla. Her face seemed small, oh, pitiably small, with bright eyes quite too large for their place. But someway Suzanna, looking in, knew ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... suffering pitiably. The doctor thinks it is typhoid, and he ordered me to remain away from her. You must leave the house. It won't do for all of us to be ill together. I may not be able to see you for days, until the crisis is past. But you must continue the search, and you must ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... unconquerable heartache. Deeply and achingly she was sorry for herself. Never had she felt so pitiably lonely, so bitterly in want of comfort and of sympathy. With another sigh she turned away from the river towards the house, vaguely wondering if, after such a night, she could ever find rest ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... torrent of reproach and argument. Instead, as she stood there against her halo of black, the long regard of her white face fixed on him, her eyes suddenly filled with tears. She didn't acquiesce for a moment, or, for a moment, imply him anything but miserably, pitiably wrong; but in a voice from which every trace of anger had faded she said: "Oh Jack, how you ...
— A Fountain Sealed • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... boys used to go to public-houses and drink more beer than was good for them; Ernest's inner self can hardly have told him to ally himself to these young gentlemen, but he did so at an early age, and was sometimes made pitiably sick by an amount of beer which would have produced no effect upon a stronger boy. Ernest's inner self must have interposed at this point and told him that there was not much fun in this, for he dropped the habit ere it had taken firm hold of him, and never resumed it; but he ...
— The Way of All Flesh • Samuel Butler
... his arrogance in refusing to be bound by the decision of the other leaders, and by having made a peace contrary to the interests of the Crusaders. The list was a long one; but the evidence produced was pitiably weak. Beyond the breath of suspicion, no word of real evidence connecting him with the murder of Conrad of Montferat was adduced, and the other charges were supported by no better evidence. Many of the German barons who had ...
— The Boy Knight • G.A. Henty
... the leper, suffered terribly. He groaned pitiably through the entire night. I had given him one of my wrappers, but his circulation had been badly affected by the intense cold. His face was gray and cadaverous, with deep lines engraved upon it from suffering. His feet were so frozen ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... pitiably small and thin in her deep mourning. If I attached any serious importance to such a perishable trifle as personal appearance, I might be inclined to add that hers was one of those unfortunate complexions which always suffer when not relieved ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... into the wood, and concealed themselves among the bushes, where they perceived the emissaries of the king in conference with some men and women, and the priest of the parish. Four little children were stretched upon the grass, one of them crying pitiably. The mother lifted it up and gave it pap, in order to quiet it; whilst the others crept upon the ground, and played with the flowers. The emissaries counted money into the hands of the husbands; the priest had his share, and the children ...
— Faustus - his Life, Death, and Doom • Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger
... Persian and Indian branches of the Caucasian race, we meet with the squat Mongolian, with his high cheek bones set on a broad face, and his compressed, unintellectual, pig-like eyes; or encounter, in the Indian Archipelago or the Australian interior, the pitiably low Alforian races, with their narrow, retreating foreheads, slim, feeble limbs, and baboon-like faces. Or, finally, passing westward, we find the large-jawed, copper-colored Indians of the New World, vigorous in some of the northern tribes as animals, ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... said pitiably that he wanted—that he wanted very much—to go home; and gave as his reason that New York was too noisy for him. . . . A sudden notion took me at this. 'If that's the trouble,' I answered, 'one voice in this city shall cease its small contribution to the din. . . . We will try,' I said, ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and tenderness aroused by his kisses and passionate sincerity—weakening.] Curt! Curt! [Pitiably.] It won't separate us, dear. Can't you see he will be a link between us—even when we are away from each other—that he will bring us ...
— The First Man • Eugene O'Neill
... suppliant hard, make a diagnosis of each one and then give him advice as to what to do—whether or not to throw over his job, what kind of work he was suited for best. The America he knew was made up of these small human units, some pitiably or absurdly small, but all anxiously straining upward. And they ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... censure their lack of so-called chivalrous woman-worship. That artificial mood of emotion, though glorified by the literary art of greatest poets, has something pitiably unreal, incurably morbid, in its mysticism. But, putting this aside, we are still bound to notice the absence of that far more human self-devotion of man to woman which forms a conspicuous element in the Arthurian romances. The love of Tristram for ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... know what great lesson we should learn from this, and stammered his ignorance pitiably, but Winona, in the throes of some mysterious prepossession, forgot to reprove him, and merely allowed the more gifted Merle to purvey the desired information. So the Wilbur twin was practically free to wriggle on his hard chair, to exchange noiseless greetings with acquaintances in ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... said she felt bad. I just managed to support her to the hotel before she became stiff, and I made some impatient remark (for she nearly dragged me down) which she heard, not being quite unconscious and said half incoherently and very pitiably: "Be kind, oh, be kind!" repeating it after consciousness left her. Her heart had been breaking all day at the prospect of parting, and also, I expect, because I was so ready to part with her. That ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... praise too much. But I am ashamed at alleging pitiable words, being troubled in myself, while thou art not diseased with my ills. But in fact the good man has some reason, even though he be unconnected with them, for assisting the unfortunate. But pity us, for we have suffered pitiably; I, who, in the first place, thinking to have thee for a kinsman, cherished a vain hope.—Moreover, my child, by dying, might perchance become an omen to thy future bridals,[75] which thou must needs avoid. But well didst thou speak both first and last, for, if ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... ancient Jews. Hence there can hardly be a doubt that the inhabitants of these countries, which include nearly the whole civilised world, were once in a barbarous condition. To believe that man was aboriginally civilised and then suffered utter degradation in so many regions, is to take a pitiably low view of human nature. It is apparently a truer and more cheerful view that progress has been much more general than retrogression; that man has risen, though by slow and interrupted steps, from a lowly condition to the highest standard as yet attained ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... said Rex, who could tighten his mind better than his seat in the saddle. And Joel managed the operation, though not without considerable expense of pain to his patient, who turned so pitiably pale while tightening his mind, that Joel remarked, "Ah, sir, you aren't used to it, that's how it is. I's see lots and lots o' joints out. I see a man with his eye pushed out once—that was a rum go as ever I see. You can't have a bit o' fun wi'out such ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... hospital work. The body social was diseased, and he could not make any satisfactory diagnosis of the evil; but at least he should feel better to have done with the privileged assertive classes, to have taken up his part with the less Philistine, more pitiably ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... the morning when Felipe pulled up next day before his little adobe house in the mountain settlement. The journey from the mesa below had been, perforce, slow. The mare was still pitiably weak, and her condition had necessitated many stops, each of long duration. Also, on the way up the canyon the colt had displayed frequent signs of exhaustion, though only with the ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... she supplemented, after she had finished telling her pitiably brief story, "thar's trouble ernough ter ...
— Old Lady Number 31 • Louise Forsslund
... into canaries—I know she does!" the child asserted, still shaking pitiably, but facing Miss Dickinson with accusation in her eyes. "You can tell it by her nose and chin. I—I thought you had gone away and left ...
— Brother Copas • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... I could get away from the place altogether. I shall fly to Agatha's side the very day that the term closes. I suppose it is pitiably weak of me, but this woman gets upon my nerves most terribly. I have seen her again, and I have ...
— The Parasite • Arthur Conan Doyle
... sacred to him. He had preached, through years, in the misery of contradiction with himself. He had rescued his drowning soul in the ark of the most intolerant confessional orthodoxy. In the crisis of his son's life he pitiably concealed these facts. They should have been the bond of sympathy. The son, a sorrowful little motherless boy, was sent to the Moravian school at Niesky, and then to Barby. He was to escape the contamination of the universities, and the woes ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... possible form of intellectual and physical dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its prophets.... Everybody had a Mission (with a capital M) to attend to everybody else's business. No brain but had its private maggot, which must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. Not a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money (unless earned by other people), professing to live on the internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assurance of ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... weak," said the prince, "so pitiably weak! I thought to frighten the woman by starving myself, poor fool that ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... sweated abundantly; his eyes wavered, closed, and opened again; his mouth made the motion of swallowing. He had come back from unconsciousness. He was no longer an enigma, wrapped in supercilious and inflexible calm; but a sick, shrivelled little man, so pitiably prostrate that his condition drew the sympathy out of Leonora with a sharp violent pain, as very cold metal burns the fingers. He could not even whisper; he could only look. Soon afterwards Dr. Hawley returned, explaining that the anxiety of a husband about to be a ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... to do, nothing lo see, no one to talk to. Her dad and the big, heavy-set man whom he called Frank, seemed uncomfortably aware of their deficiencies and were pitiably anxious to make her feel welcome—and failed. They called her "Raine." The other two men did not call her anything at all. They were both sandy-complexioned and they both chewed tobacco quite noticeably, and when they sat down in ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower
... dastardly jests, the cruel mystifications, the malicious tricks of these scoundrels, who were only too happy to make a little martyr of the poor unsophisticated child, ignorant of everything, with the crushed and sickly air, timid and sullen, thin and pale, and pitiably clad in her wretched, countrified gowns. Bewildered, overwhelmed, so to speak, by this hourly torture, she became their drudge. They made sport of her ignorance, they deceived her and abused her credulity by absurd ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... compelled by fear, and they met even if an unjust at least a brave death, in an equal struggle; and in the hope that they might even survive and conquer they fell without grieving. But how might one mourn as they deserve those who were pitiably destroyed in their houses, in the roads, in the Forum, in the senate-chamber even, on the Capitol even, by violence—not only men but also women, not only those in their prime, but also old men ...
— Dio's Rome • Cassius Dio
... conventions of many sorts were flouted; local factions resorted to terrorism against their opponents; legislatures abused their power by confiscating loyalist property and enacting laws for the dishonest promotion of debtor-class interests, and the central government, made pitiably weak by the prevailing jealousy of control, was kept wholly incompetent through the shirking of burdens by states pledged to its financial support. But populism and particularism brought their own cure. The paralysis of government now enabled sober statesmen ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... inception was from the Spanish colonies, already decaying and shrinking within their boundaries to the west and to the southeast, and from a puny little English settlement started only a year before, with a doubtful hold on life, on the bank of the James River. A dozen years later a pitiably feeble company of Pilgrims shall make their landing at Plymouth to try the not hopeful experiment of living in the wilderness, and a settlement of Swedes in Delaware and of Hollanders on the Hudson shall be added to the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... precautions in our interviews, that they have been very few, and far between, indeed. Today, there has been a fracas of some kind. I have no doubt that Marston, poor devil, is jealous. His situation is really pitiably comic—with an intriguing mistress, a saintly wife, and a devil of a jealous temper of his own. I shall meet Mary on reaching town. Has Clavering (shabby dog!) paid his I.O.U. yet? Tell the little opera woman she had better be quiet. She ought ...
— The Evil Guest • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... that the will you serve has dealt Its power on me. O, I hate you not. You and your crying grief should have blown past My heart like wind shaking a fasten'd casement. But I must have you in. Myself I loathe For opening to you, and thereby opening To the demon which had set you on to whine Pitiably in the porches of my spirit. You are but noise; but he is the lust of the world, The infinite wrong the spirit, the virgin spirit, Must fasten against, ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... ready admission that her father's knowledge of mining greatly exceeded his own. And the assertion that he had advanced sums of money for the carrying on of the work sounded plausible enough, for the girl knew that her father's income had been small—pitiably small, but enough, he had always insisted, for his meager needs. Unquestionably, up to that point the man's words had carried the ring of truth. Then came the false notes; the open accusation of Vil Holland, and ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... one evening, at the only inn on the lake, a young German Prince, Karol von Roswald, and his friend the Italian Count Salvator Albani. They are travelling for the Prince's health, he being a sort of spoilt child, pitiably nervous, imperfectly educated, and half paralysed by the recent death of his mother and the earlier one of a fiancee. The inn is good to eat in (or rather out of), but for nothing else; and Salvator, hearing of Lucrezia, whose friend, ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... bars of his cage and stand there, motionless, for an hour at a stretch, his scarred muzzle protruding between two bars, his aching nostrils, hot and dry, drinking in the night air, his eyes robbed of their resentful fire, and pitiably softened by the great tears that stood in them. At the end of such an hour he would sometimes begin to walk softly to and fro, inside the bars, the four paces that his cage allowed him. Thus he would ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... sighed, but said calmly, "You must pay the penalty for loving a parvenu's son. Come, Julia, no peevishness, no more romance, no more vacillation. You have tried Pride and failed pitiably: now I insist on your trying Love! Child, it is the bane of our sex to carry nothing out: from that weakness I will preserve you. And, by-the-bye, we are not going to marry Mr. Richard Hardie, but Mr. Alfred. Now, Mr. Alfred, with all his faults ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... a thin black shawl around her shoulders, but in the icy wind blowing from the lake, she trembled like a wand. Her face was pale, waxen, almost spiritual in its expression, and she looked at me with just the most pitiably sweet smile in ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... fact that the United States owes its independence; men and munitions came freely from overseas and on one momentous occasion, the Battle of the Virginia Capes, the French navy performed its part decisively in action. But on a score of other occasions it failed pitiably on account of the lack of a comprehensive strategic plan and the want of energy and experience on the part of the ...
— A History of Sea Power • William Oliver Stevens and Allan Westcott
... to gathering flowers, and interrogating the past by means of them; for he had studied botany: the past gave him back some pitiably vague ideas. He sighed. "Never mind," said he to Dick, and tapped his forehead: "it is here: it is only ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... be then well prepared for what follows. For later on we shall find the Romans feeling afresh the desire to be in right relation with the Power, discovering that their own highly formalised system is no longer equal to the work demanded of it, and pitiably mistaking their true course in seeking a remedy. Their knowledge of the Divine, always narrow and limited, becomes by degrees blurred and obscured, and their sight begins to fail them. I hope in due course to explain this, and to give you some idea of the sadness of their religious experience ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... were pitiably destitute Of every necessary, every comfort. The winter came. What thinks his Majesty 90 His troops are made of? Arn't we men? subjected Like other men to wet, and cold, and all The circumstances of necessity? O miserable lot of the poor soldier! Wherever he ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... agony in silence. During memorable half-hours, filled with danger and death, many of my gross misjudgments of character were made clear to me. Men whom no one had credited with heroic qualities revealed them. Others failed rather pitiably to live up to one's expectations. It seemed to me that there was strength or weakness in men, quite apart from their real selves, for which they were in no way responsible; but doubtless it had always been there, waiting to be called forth ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... Cathedral and the old stand side by side; the one strong and whole, the other partly torn down, scarred and maimed as a veteran who has survived many wars. Even in its ruin, it is an interesting type of the maritime Provencal church, but so pitiably overshadowed by its successor that the charm of its situation is quite lost, and few will linger to study its three small naves, the defaced fresco of the dome, or even the little chapel of Saint-Lazare, all white marble and carving and small statues, scarcely more than a shallow niche ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... old man listened to me with great composure, but with a marked accession of mysterious importance in his manner. So mediaeval astrologers drew down their brows with a solemn assumption of supernatural wisdom when consulted by some noble client—noble, but pitiably mortal in the presence of their hidden knowledge. He had put his book down as I talked. I noticed that he had been holding it—like ...
— Pieces of Eight • Richard le Gallienne
... wooden bunks built in tiers around the single room, and a group of some six neglected children, frightened by our arrival, were huddled together in one corner. A very sick man was coughing his soul out in the darkness of a lower bunk, while a pitiably covered woman gave him cold water to sip out of a spoon. There was no furniture except a small stove with an iron pipe leading through a hole in ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... a fellow-passenger who came From Calais with us, gaudy in array,— A Negro Woman like a Lady gay, Yet silent as a woman fearing blame; Dejected, meek, yet pitiably tame, She sate, from notice turning not away, But on our proffered kindness still did lay A weight of languid speech, or at the same Was silent, motionless in eyes and face, She was a Negro Woman, driven from France— Rejected, like all others of that race, Not one of whom may now find footing there; ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart
... seemingly fit or half-fit methods, as his poor time and country had to offer him,—not rejecting the said methods till they stood convicted of palpable unfitness and then doing it right gently withal, rather letting them drop as pitiably dead for him, than angrily hurling them out of doors as needing to be killed. By few Englishmen of his epoch had the thing called Church of England been more loyally appealed to as a ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... hire a preacher. What shall we do?" They had no training, save that training they had obtained in the old Baptist churches, or one similar in our own, and now that they were scattered over the great West, and were poor in this world's goods, they were indeed in a pitiably helpless condition. ...
— Personal Recollections of Pardee Butler • Pardee Butler
... has transferred Burke's thought to his own page: but will you not also perceive how pitiably, by dissolving Burke's vivid particulars into smooth generalities, he has enervated its hold ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... to the last page without reserve, I did blame the last pages. You have hurt me, you have literally made me suffer! The punishment is beyond all proportion to the crime; you have created a pitiably frightful death! Assuredly the woman who defiles the marriage bed should expect punishment, but this is horrible; it is a punishment such as I have never seen. You have gone too far; you have done mischief to my nerves. That power ...
— The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert • Various
... communicating with her when they were both in the house. What did such a departure from established habits mean? Had she received her notice of dismissal? Had Lady Janet's quick intelligence found its way already to a suspicion of the truth? Mercy's nerves were unstrung. She trembled pitiably as ...
— The New Magdalen • Wilkie Collins
... cannot tell you how deeply grieved I am that this has happened. He has also told me of the very extraordinary change which that meeting has brought about in Francis' mental condition. Up to this point I can only be truly grateful to you for your kindness and sympathy with one whose life has been so pitiably wrecked, but beyond this—well, it is a very different matter. I understand the doctor has suggested to you that you should allow Francis to remain under this mistake—that you should visit him, and to all intents and purposes be the person he takes ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... these same "few old stones" strike me on a first visit? It was one of the greatest disillusionments I ever experienced. Stonehenge looked small—pitiably small! For it is a fact that mere size is very much to us, in spite of all the teachings of science. We have heard of Stonehenge in our childhood or boyhood—that great building of unknown origin and antiquity, its circles of stones, some still standing, others lying prostrate, like ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... probably will continue to fetter the development of the natives of India for centuries to come. Some simple reforms the English have secured, like the abolition of suttee and the improved condition of the child widows; but their influence on the great mass of the people has been pitiably small. India bears the same relation to the Orient that Italy does to Europe. It is the home of temples, palaces and monuments; it is the land of beautiful art work in many materials. Most of its cities have a splendid historical past that is seen in richly ornamented temples ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... crying behind my veil. My domestic prospect looked so dreary! my unfortunate husband was so hopelessly misguided, so pitiably wrong! The one chance for both of us, and the one consolation for poor Me, was to hold to my desperate resolution more firmly than ever. If I had wanted anything to confirm me in this view, and to arm ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... To see the river flow with ampler range And freer pace; but more, far more, I grieved 500 To see displayed among an eager few, Who in the field of contest persevered, Passions unworthy of youth's generous heart And mounting spirit, pitiably repaid, When so disturbed, whatever palms are won. 505 From these I turned to travel with the shoal Of more unthinking natures, easy minds And pillowy; yet not wanting love that makes The day pass lightly on, when foresight sleeps, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth |
