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More "Joyless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is not, no mirth the banquet knows: Where wine is not, the dance all joyless goes. The man, oppressed with cares, who tastes the bowl, Shall shake the weight of sorrow ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... his mother thinks she can't begin to guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then suddenly there was a strange alteration in her face; she gave a smile that was more joyless than her gravity—a conscious, insincere smile, and added, "When one has children, it's a great ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... and wine and cheer the name of the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar inn. There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his elbow and the bowl of a Holland clay propped in a horny ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... o'er with snow, and then demands The fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven, Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence assigns them. One alone, The redbreast, sacred to the household gods, Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky, In joyless fields ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... alone, he was no longer joyless! His little friend was there in the great cage among the twittering companions who were indifferent to the little prince. In order to know him at first sight, and always to be able to recognize him, Louis took the rose- colored ribbon from the neck of the automaton, and tied it ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... Rationalism of the last century, therefore; or to inquire into the causes of the barren lifeless shape into which Theology then, for the most part, threw itself. I have never made that department of Ecclesiastical History my study: and who does not turn away from what is joyless and dreary, to greener meadows, and more fertile fields? It shall only be remarked that when the Credibility of Religion is the thing generally denied, Evidences will of necessity be the form which much of the Theological ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... joyless morning late arose, and found A dreadful desolation reign around— Some buried in the snow, some frozen to the ground. The rest were struggling still with death, and lay The Crows' and Ravens' rights, an undefended ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol I - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... Tregelles puts it into his footnotes. Westcott and Hort, harsher than any of their predecessors, will not, as we have seen, allow it to appear even at the foot of the page. To reproduce all that has been written in disparagement of this precious portion of God's written Word would be a joyless and an unprofitable task. According to Green, 'the genuineness of the passage cannot be maintained[589].' Hammond is of opinion that 'it would be more satisfactory to separate it from its present context, and place it by itself as an appendix to the ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... disagreeable, unpalatable, bitter, distasteful; uninviting; unwelcome; undesirable, undesired; obnoxious; unacceptable, unpopular, thankless. unsatisfactory, untoward, unlucky, uncomfortable. distressing; afflicting, afflictive; joyless, cheerless, comfortless; dismal, disheartening; depressing, depressive; dreary, melancholy, grievous, piteous; woeful, rueful, mournful, deplorable, pitiable, lamentable; sad, affecting, touching, pathetic. irritating, provoking, stinging, annoying, aggravating, mortifying, galling; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... was to have been, what—he more than ever felt as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in—would have been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at that distance—Mr. Waymarsh was for HIS part joyless. ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... and are regularly brought around by the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took the greater hold on the fancy of the scientifically ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... conflicts that had beset the path of Jacob, he thought he would be at rest at last, and then came the loss of Joseph and inflicted the keenest suffering. Verily, few and evil had been the days of the years of Jacob's pilgrimage, for the time spent outside of the Holy Land had seemed joyless to him. Only the portion of his life passed in the land of his fathers, during which he was occupied with making proselytes, in accordance with the example set him by Abraham and Isaac, did he consider worth while having lived,[1] and this happy time was of short duration. When Joseph was ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... opportunity of expressing what you must long ago have suspected. Edna, you know very well that I love you better than every thing else—that I have loved you from the first day of our acquaintance; and I have come to tell you that my happiness is in your dear little hands; that my future will be joyless unless you share it; that the one darling hope of my life is to call you my wife. Do not draw your hand from mine! Dear Edna, let me keep it always. Do I mistake your feelings when I hope that you ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... little cloud—it floats away Away it goes; away so soon! Alas! it has no power to stay: 30 Its hues are dim, its hues are grey— Away it passes from the moon! How mournfully it seems to fly, Ever fading more and more, To joyless regions of the sky— 35 And now 'tis whiter than before! As white as my poor cheek will be, When, Lewti! on my couch I lie, A dying man for love of thee. Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind— 40 And yet, thou didst not ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... thoughts. She no longer felt in her heart the bitter resentment toward Olga Vseslavovna that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world where there was such deep happiness ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... finally died an exclusive, matter-of-fact, joyless death, even as she had lived. Ben came to the funeral. He called on Hattie the next day. Inconstancy was not one of his weaknesses, and the veil of her Commencement beauty had clung to her through these many years, in her old lover's eyes. He was again impetuous and offended ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... mean partner. His handsome face, head and shoulders above the tall woman he was dancing with, gazed out over the sea of dancers in all the freshness of his youthful joy, and triumph. He danced well, something he had contrived to learn in the joyless country from which he hailed. But there was no reflection of his joy in the faces of the two men gazing down from the shelter of the curtained box. There were only concern and ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril; and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... understand my story entirely. Wanting a full explanation, you might fairly ask me why I married with this drawback. I did not know of it, but my wife believed I did. We were both most cruelly deceived, it does not matter now. She is condemned to a loveless, joyless life; so am I. With a wife beautiful loving, young, I must lead a most solitary existence—I must see my name die out for want of heirs—I must see my race almost extinct, my life passed in repining and ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... tireless zeal they sought; In joyless paths they trod— Heedless of praise or blame they wrought, And left the rest to God. The lowliest sphere was not disdained; Where love could soothe or save, They went, by fearless faith sustained, Nor knew their deeds ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... wretched leech of a Mexican, assures me that it will be certain death to attempt the journey. For want of any opposing evidence, I am constrained to believe him. I have no alternative but to adopt the joyless resolve to remain in Santa Fe until the return of ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... happened that my eyes encountered his, I should deny the truth; he added further fuel to the fires that consumed me, and rekindled such as might be expiring, if, mayhap, there were any such. But the beginning of all this was by no means so cheerful as the ending was joyless, as soon as I was deprived of the sight of this, my beloved, inasmuch as the eyes, being thus robbed of their delight, gave woful occasion of lamentation to the heart, the sighs whereof grew greater in quality as well as in quantity, and desire, as if seizing ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... home; but now so well Methinks it is with me, that I am fain To wish they might delay, for thou wilt dwell With me till after they return, and thou Hast set thine eyes upon them. Then,—ah, me! I must sit joyless in my place; bereft, As trees that suddenly have dropped their leaves, And dark as nights that have no moon." She spake: The hope o' the world did hearken, but reply Made none. He left his hand on her fair locks As she lay sobbing; and the quietness Of night ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... COULD he know anything of the black monotony of the life of the man he turned from his door? The "desk's dead wood" and all its hateful slavery, the dull darkened rooms where his mother prosed through endless evenings, the bookless, joyless, hopeless existence that had cramped him all his days rose up before him, as a stretch of unbroken plain may rise before a lost man till ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... heart alone;—so also was the hardness of his conflicts with the temptation to return to the vice of his youth, and seek oblivion for past calamities, and deadness to the present misery of a blighted heart a joyless, friendless life, and a morbidly disconsolate mind, by yielding again to that insidious foe to health, and sense, and virtue, which had so deplorably ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte
... downcast looks the joyless victor sat, Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of chance below; And now and then a sigh he stole, And ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... fire were seen around, the tops of Sumeru were shaken, from heaven there rained showers of flying stones, a whirling tempest rose on every side, the trees were rooted up and fell, heavenly music rose with plaintive notes, whilst angels for a time were joyless. Buddha rising from out his ecstasy, announced to all the world: "Now have I given up my term of years; I live henceforth by power of faith; my body like a broken chariot stands, no further cause of 'coming' or of 'going'; completely freed from the three worlds, I go enfranchised, as a chicken ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... They two were the dearest persons in the world to her; and both were now gone into the mysterious darkness of the next world, meeting there perhaps with all earthly discords forgiven and forgotten more perfectly than they could have been here. She remembered how her father's dull, joyless face used to brighten when Roland was talking to him—talking with slow, unaccustomed fingers, which the dumb man would watch intently, and catch the meaning of the phrase before it was half finished, flashing back an eager ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... the friends was a joyless pleasure. When Mary arrived in Lisbon, she found Fanny in the last stages of her illness, and before she had time to rest from her journey she began her work as sick-nurse. Four hours after her arrival Fanny's child was born. It had been sad enough for Mary ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... earth her shadowy pinion throws. Hail, sleep, restorer of the tortured mind, Balm of the soul, and friend to human kind! The toils and tumults of our earthly scene Subside, and melt into thy sway serene. Life's sweetest cup, with purest blessings fraught, Were, without thee, a vapid joyless thought! My fellow captives all thy pleasures taste; Their fears, their sorrows, all in sleep are past; } Oh! be it peaceful still, for this may be the last! } Now, borne in vision to those airy plains } Where fancy undisturb'd by reason reigns, ...
— Gustavus Vasa - and other poems • W. S. Walker
... from one joyless face to the other, and sat without a word on the chair that Austin placed for her. Her woman's intuition divined a sequel to the afternoon's drama. Some of it she had already learned. For, going earlier into Viviette's room, she had found her white and shaken, still disordered in hair and dress ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... the throng with eyes that seemed to see nothing of its frantic frenzy and joyless joy—a stalwart man, who strode along like a giant among midgets, his vacant eyes fixed before him, his strong white face expressionless. Hugh Ritson saw him. They passed within two paces, but without recognition. The one was wandering aimlessly in his blind misery toward the Convent of St. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... Oxford Street behind her oppressed her even more than Whitechapel had done in her one visit to it with Tom, the year before, to see a loan collection of pictures. Street after street of blank, drab-faced houses—dull, unsmiling houses! She thought of children growing up there, wan and joyless, like plants kept out of the sun. And then two happy-eyed boys came running by with their satchels under their arms, while a door opened and a woman with a smiling mother-face came out to welcome them. And Miss Merivale confessed to herself the mistake ...
— Miss Merivale's Mistake • Mrs. Henry Clarke
... of the castle, Queen Lucifera, whose attendants are Idleness, Gluttony, Lechery, Envy, Avarice, and Wrath. It is while sojourning in this castle that the Red Cross Knight one day sees Sansjoi (Joyless) snatch from his dwarf the shield won from Sansfoi. Angered by this deed of violence, Georgos draws his sword, and he would have decided the question of ownership then and there had not Lucifera decreed he and his opponent should settle their quarrel in the lists on ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... it? That he might realise how unreal was this life they were living, outwardly peaceful and understanding, deluding the world, but inwardly a place of tears. How she dreaded the night and its recurrent tears, and the hours when she could not sleep, and waited for the joyless morning, as one lost on the moor, blanched with cold, waits for the sun-rise! Night after night at a certain hour—the hour when she went to bed at last after that poignant revelation to Eglington—she wept, as she had wept then, heart-broken tears of disappointment, disillusion, loneliness; tears ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... as Saints and Patriarchs us'd. Here Love his golden shafts imploies, here lights His constant Lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard, Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask, or Midnight Bal, Or Serenate, which the starv'd Lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. 770 These lulld by Nightingales imbraceing slept, And on thir naked ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... paradise to their surprised and happy eyes after the long habit of seeing nothing but dirty lanes and streets. It was a wonder to them—those spacious reaches of open country to run and dance and tumble and frolic in, after their dull and joyless captivity; so they scampered far and wide over the fair regions on both sides of the river, and came back at eventide weary, but laden with flowers and flushed with new health drawn from the fresh country air ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... scoria, pitch black shadows, dazzling streaks, like rivers of light breaking over jagged rocks—these are now beneath my eye—these alone I can detect—not a man—not an animal—not a tree. The great American Desert is a land of milk and honey in comparison with the joyless orb over which we are now moving. However, even yet we can predicate nothing positive. The atmosphere may have taken refuge in the depths of the chasms, in the interior of the craters, or even on the opposite side of the Moon, for ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... time before. About her torn skirts were clustered three or four stupid-looking, tow-headed children. It was impossible for Phil to conceive how beautiful Mollie could be a member of such a family. Yet the unfortunate girl had told Phyllis that she had known no other than the hard, joyless life she ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... darksome crypt I left so late, Whose only altar is its rusted grate,— Sepulchral, rayless, joyless as it seems, Shamed by the glare of May's refulgent beams,— While the dim seasons dragged their shrouded train, Its paler splendors were not quite in vain. From these dull bars the cheerful firelight's glow Streamed through the casement o'er the spectral snow; Here, ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... carry his clever brush to the welcome of a wider world, without a word or a thought of thanks for the creature who had worshipped and waited upon him hand and foot; and then I saw her life from day to day unroll its long monotonous folds, all in the same pattern, all drab duty and joyless sacrifice, and hopeless ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... was transferred from his joyless village life to the still worse life of a sailor boy. He went on board a wretched little vessel, to stand by the rudder while the skipper drank. Filthy and disgusting the poor boy looked; starving and benumbed ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... internally—old, despite her two-and-twenty years; she looked upon the life before her as a joyless, desert waste, which she had to traverse with bleeding feet and broken heart; and in the desolation of her soul, she sometimes shuddered at the death-like apathy and quiet of her feelings, broken by no sound, no note, not ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... coy steps in cold Canadia stray, And joyless seasons hold unequal sway, He saw the pine its daring mantle rear, Break the rude blast, and mock the brumal year, Shag the green zone that bounds the boreal skies, And bid all southern vegetation rise. Wild o'er the vast impenetrable ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... wearisome journey (ll. 521-535). On All-hallows day Arthur entertains right nobly the lords and ladies of his court in honour of his nephew, for whom all courteous knights and lovely ladies were in great grief. Nevertheless they spoke only of mirth, and, though joyless themselves, made many a joke to cheer the good Sir Gawayne (ll. 536-565). Early on the morrow Sir Gawayne, with great ceremony, is arrayed in his armour (ll. 566-589), and thus completely equipped for his adventure he first hears mass, ...
— Sir Gawayne and the Green Knight - An Alliterative Romance-Poem (c. 1360 A.D.) • Anonymous
... bestow. The child had sat at his parents' feet for hours together, with his little hands patiently folded in each other, and his thin wan face raised towards them. They had seen him pine away, from day to day; and though his brief existence had been a joyless one, and he was now removed to that peace and rest which, child as he was, he had never known in this world, they were his parents, and his loss sank deep into ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... answers, with a rather joyless smile. "I have received my marching orders. I must join my ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... his illustrations from the facts of life even when they were repellent to him. Here he holds up the joyless life of a Syrian agricultural laborer. After plodding all day in the field, this man comes home, tired and hungry. Is he promptly cared for? No, he must first cook and serve his master's meal. Then he can eat what's left. Does he get any thanks for working ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... "I had never thought to have seen them again! And they were so changed, I should scarcely have known them. Bob, in particular, looked so much taller, and stronger, and oh! so much happier than he had done last year! He was no more the wretched, joyless, hopeless creature, cowering in rags, one that even rats might look on with pity; he had a bright, fearless eye, and hopeful smile; and if ever a face expressed gratitude and affection, it was his when he looked on his ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... the saddening story Of the unanswered love of fair Elaine, The 'faith unfaithful' and the joyless glory Of Lancelot, 'groaning ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... had left within me told me that such a course was entirely out of the question. I could not go away with her. I could do no more than to see her safely on her way to the queer little port on the east coast of Italy. Then I should return to my bleak, joyless castle,—to my sepulchre,—and suffer all the torments of the damned for days and weeks until word came that she was actually safe on the other side ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... my way I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... between the night and day, When the Fairy King has power, That I sunk down in a sinful fray, And 'twixt life and death was snatched away To the joyless Elfin bower. ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... Childe Harold was sore sick at heart,[u] And from his fellow Bacchanals would flee; 'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start, But Pride congealed the drop within his ee:[25] Apart he stalked in joyless reverie,[v] And from his native land resolved to go, And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;[26] With pleasure drugged, he almost longed for woe, And e'en for change of scene would ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... spread with thee! All hail, dark Guest! Who hath so fair a plea Our welcome Guest to be, As thou, whose solemn hall At last shall feast us all In the dim and dismal coast? Long yet be we the Host! And thou, Dead Shadow, thou, All joyless though thy brow, Thou—but our ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... arrived in Littlefield Anstice's walk was no solitary stroll, companioned only by his own moody or rebellious thoughts, but a pleasant interlude in a life which in spite of incessant and often engrossing work, was on the whole a joyless one. ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... know its power, for I have seen it tried. Pains of all sorts thro' every nerve and artery At once it scatters,—burns at once and freezes— Till, by extremity of torture forced, The soul consents to leave her joyless home. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... slowly moving through the woods, they renew their morbid broodings, and ask themselves: How long is this to last? Is the joy of life to end thus? Must we jog on day after day in this cheerless gloom and this joyless duskiness, until we stagger and fall and rot among the toads? Then they disappear into the woods by twos, and threes, and sixes; and after the caravan has passed they return by the trail, some to reach Yambuya and upset the young officers with their tales of woe and war; some to fall sobbing ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... some hours across a flat, joyless country without either man making a move, but as the train neared Gunsight Rimrock rose up and went forward to where ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... of Shiraz. Ah me! my race of threescore years is short, but long enough to pall My sense with joyless joys as these, with Love and Houris, Wine ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... itself, along paths that had once echoed to the tread of slippered feet, armed sentries paced, their sharp challenges breaking the stillness of the night. Outside its wrecked fences strange men in stranger uniforms strode in and out of the joyless houses; tired pickets stacked their arias on the unswept piazzas, and panting horses nibbled the bark from the withered trees; rank weeds choked the gardens; dishevelled vines clung to the porches, and doors that had always swung wide to the gentle ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... for the rest of their life they kept on loving each other, but their passion grew gloomy and joyless, like those funeral cypresses whose roots feed on the decay of the graves and whose black summits in a still evening hour seek in vain to reach the sky. Thrown by the unknown forces of life into each other's embraces, they mingled tears ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... him to Rheims, Where, by the Jesuits' anxious labor, priests Are trained to preach our holy faith in England. There, 'mongst the Scots, I found the noble Morgan, And your true Lesley, Ross's learned bishop, Who pass in France their joyless days of exile. I joined with heartfelt zeal these worthy men, And fortified my faith. As I one day Roamed through the bishop's dwelling, I was struck With a fair female portrait; it was full Of touching wond'rous charms; with magic ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... fundamental ideas of the book, but they give but a faint notion of the author's poetic attitude. Most beautifully is this shown in Hal's relation to a young Irish girl, Red Mary. She is poor, and her daily life harsh and joyless, but nevertheless her wonderful grace is one of the outstanding features of the book. The first impression of Mary is that of a Celtic Madonna with a tender heart for little children. She develops into a Valkure of the working-class, always ready to ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... and simply. Till her last day she remembered her bitter years of frustration and failure, and the meanest of mortals had a share of her holy sympathy; she gained her unexampled conquest by resolutely treading down despair, and her brave story should cheer the many girls who find life bleak and joyless. George Eliot was prepared to bear the worst that could befall her, and it was her frank and gentle acceptance of the facts of life that brought her joy in the end. We must also remember such people as Arkwright, Stephenson, Thomas Edwards the naturalist, and Heine the poet. Arkwright saw his ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... with my Unitarian congregation for about a twelvemonth. My life during that time, save so far as my intercourse with Mrs. Lane, and one other friend presently to be mentioned, was concerned, was as sunless and joyless as it had ever been. Imagine me living by myself, roaming about the fields, and absorbed mostly upon insoluble problems with which I never made any progress, and which tended to draw me away from what enjoyment of life there was ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... time, and the mere wrecks of what they once were. Men who had gone to that region strong, active, ruddy, enthusiastic, and who, after a few months, returned thus feeble and shattered—some irreparably so; others with perhaps years of joyless life before them; a few with the unmistakable stamp of death already on ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... to tell her to go"—this with a joyless little laugh—"she quit work and wouldn't behave herself. So now I'm going on alone." "And you ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... tenement houses, ignorant, blind, stupid, incompetent in every fibre, and yet there as factors in the problem no man has yet solved. If this was civilization, better barbarism with its chance of sunshine and air, free movement and natural growth. What barbarism at its worst could hold such joyless, hopeless, profitless labor, or doom its victims to more lingering deaths? Admitting the almost impossibility of making them over, incased as they are in ignorance and prejudice, this is simply another count against the social order which has accepted ...
— Prisoners of Poverty Abroad • Helen Campbell
... wretched, joyless existence—a never-ending martyrdom, a never-ceasing contest. Amelia stood alone and unloved in her family, feared and avoided by all the merry, thoughtless, pleasure seeking circle. In her sad presence they shuddered involuntarily and felt chilled, as by a blast ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... tell some droll tale, and another would say something comical in order to make him laugh; and laugh he did, he must laugh; it would never do to let those fellows know what was passing in his mind; so he laughed loud as any of them, but what a laugh!—how empty and hollow, how joyless and unreal, how unlike his former bursts of feeling!—a got-up laugh, which shewed plainer than ever something was wrong. Abe knew it, and he felt it was of no use trying any longer to keep up a sham happiness, and all the time be in torments from a guilty conscience; he ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... house was silent and deserted now. Only his wife and his daughter Eliza lived in it, and they passed their days in dreary loneliness and incessant fear and anguish. Eliza Wallner was alone, all alone and joyless. She had not seen her beloved Elza since the day when she was married. She herself had started the same night with Haspinger for her father's headquarters. Elza had remained with her young husband in Innspruck, where her ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... excellent. But still I cherish it—all imperfect as it is—I know not why; and when to-morrow comes, and I must give it up into his reverence's hands, it seems that my life and spirit would depart from me with its loss, and that all around me would be dark and joyless." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... the joyless fleeting Of our primal meeting, And the fateful greeting Of the How and Why! Ah, the Thingness flying From the Hereness, sighing For a love ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume X (of X) • Various
... crew, for all those who had done wickedness in the world above were imprisoned by her in those gloomy regions. To her came also all those who had died, not on the battlefield, but of old age or disease. And though these were treated kindly enough, theirs was a joyless life in comparison with that of the dead warriors who were feasting and fighting in the halls of Valhalla, under the kindly rule of ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... of inactivity which is practically indistinguishable from non-existence. There is no atonement for past sin nor escape from its consequences, but by the giving up of being. Buddhism is a pessimistic and joyless religion. Hence it suffers deterioration in competition with the more active systems. Close by Boro Budor, where Buddhism reached its culmination, are the temples of Mendoet and Brambanam, which show a reversion in the popular mind to Hindu Brahmanism. And when the Moslem came, with ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... condemned to watch the lingering agony of an exhausted country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption. To this joyless and thankless duty was Machiavelli called. In the energetic language of the prophet, he was "mad for the sight of his eye which he saw," disunion in the council, effeminacy in the camp, liberty extinguished, commerce decaying, national honour sullied, an enlightened and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... she can't stay with us!" And Pansy's father gave rather a joyless smile. "Go into the garden, mignonne, and pluck a flower or two for Madame Merle," ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 1 (of 2) • Henry James
... medical student in Germany, and every one laughed except Kate. She could not laugh; the laughter of the others irritated her. His words going up the avenue rang in her ears; the pale, troubled face of the seamstress was before her eyes. Something in the girl's sad, joyless face had interested her from the first. Had Doctor Danton anything to do with that ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... are our occasional attempts to deal with the sex problem on the stage so repulsive and dreary that even those who are most determined that sex questions shall be held open and their discussion kept free, cannot pretend to relish these joyless attempts at social sanitation? Is it not because at bottom they are utterly sexless? What is the usual formula for such plays? A woman has, on some past occasion, been brought into conflict with the law which ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... spite of that faint indefinable flavor of absurdity that pervaded his courtly bearing. She would never love him as she loved Capes, of course, but there are grades and qualities of love. For Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether. Much more temperate; the discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant, condescending wife. She had been quite convinced that an engagement with him and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise which distinguishes the ways of the wise. It would be the wrappered world almost at its best. She saw herself ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... contention declared that sex love between husband and wife—apart from parenthood—was something to prize and cherish for its own sake. The Lambeth Conference, he remarked, "envisaged a love invertebrate and joyless," whereas, in his view, natural passion in wedlock was not a thing to be ashamed of or unduly repressed. The pronouncement of the Church of England, as set forth in Resolution 68 of the Lambeth Conference seems to imply condemnation of sex ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... joy to her joyless life, but she had also added a care and a heavy weight to her heavy load. All her strength was taken now to find food. The burden increased as the offspring grew up big enough to scramble about the boxes, which they did daily during her absence ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... trifling with her laws; flowers do not bloom in deserts. He has crushed sentiment; he has stifled affection. With a heart by nature kindly, he sits now an image cut in steel. He gazes calmly at his desolate hearth, at his joyless age, and smokes. Man has no power to move him; fate condemned him to be ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... sorrows by telling her of the peril in which he stood? How could he tell her what he suspected to be true—that in that quiet little Italian town English detectives were watching his every movement, and that at any moment he might be arrested? With her joyless life, and with this new misery closing around her, would it not be well for ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... hands, and to dwell in our hearts. More of us than we are willing to believe are kept from entire surrender to Jesus Christ, by money and worldly possessions; and many professing Christians are kept shrivelled and weak and joyless because they love their wealth more than their Lord, and would think it madness to do as this man was bidden to do. When ballast is thrown out, the balloon shoots up. A general unlading of the 'thick ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... placed in the hands of creditors, and the owners exiled from their paternal lands. There is an extravagance, I am told, that runs parallel with wealth; a lavish expenditure among the great; a senseless competition among the aspiring; a heedless, joyless dissipation among all the upper ranks, that often beggars even these splendid establishments, breaks down the pride and principles of their possessors, and makes too many of them mere place-hunters, or shifting absentees. It is thus that so many are thrown into the hands of government; and ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... depression or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless, joyless surroundings of sordid poverty. Drink and the sensual pleasures, if viciously indulged, produce (doubtless through physical causes) an intense craving for their gratification. This, however, is not the case with all our pleasures. ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... believe you shining ran With peaceful floods, where the soft voice prevails Of building doves in lordly trees set high, Trees which enclose a home where love abides — His love and hers, a passioned ecstasy; Your tone has caught its echo and derides My joyless lot, as face down pressed I lie Upon the shifting sand, and hear the reeds Voicing a thin, dissonant threnody Unto the cliff and wind-tormented weeds. As with the faint half-lights of jade toward ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress, a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories of Adam's fall and curse behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... of a primitive vowel, preceded by a vowel, should not be changed into i before a suffix; as, joyless. ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... Passages of Joy: In vain their Gifts the bounteous Seasons pour, The Fruit Autumnal, and the Vernal Flow'r, With listless Eyes the Dotard views the Store, He views, and wonders that they please no more; Now pall the tastless Meats, and joyless Wines, And Luxury with Sighs her Slave resigns. Approach, ye Minstrels, try the soothing Strain, And yield the tuneful Lenitives of Pain: No Sounds alas would touch th' impervious Ear, Though dancing Mountains witness'd Orpheus near; Nor Lute nor Lyre ...
— The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) and Two Rambler papers (1750) • Samuel Johnson
... it all, who by rights should be the teachers and who the learners? For those peevish, over-toiled, utilitarian insects, was there no lesson to be derived from the spectacle of Me? Gazing out at me with myriad eyes from their joyless factories, might they not learn at last—might I not finally teach them—a wiser and more generous-hearted way ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... virtues! Have our songs thus quickly vanished, Have our joyful tongues grown silent? Evil then has been the brewing, Then the beer must be unworthy, That it does not cheer the singer, Does not move the merry minstrel, That the golden guests are joyless, And the cuckoo is not singing. Never will these benches echo Till the bench-guests chant thy virtues; Nor the floor resound thy praises Till the floor-guests sing in concord; Nor the windows join the chorus ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... eloquence Fraternal love and friendship can inspire. Tell her thy brother languishes to death, And fades away, and withers in his bloom; That he forgets his sleep, and loathes his food; That youth, and health, and war, are joyless to him; Describe his anxious days, and restless nights, And all the torments that thou see'st ...
— Cato - A Tragedy, in Five Acts • Joseph Addison
... Physicians would have given a name to his mental and physical condition. He had heard these names often—applied to men the strain of whose lives had been like the strain of his own, and had left them as it had left him—jaded, joyless, breaking things. Some of them had been broken and had died or were dragging out bruised and tormented days in their own homes or in mad-houses. He always shuddered when he heard their names, and rebelled with sick fear against the mere mention of them. They had worked ...
— The Dawn of a To-morrow • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... habits. When a man firmly resolves upon some deed the resolution begins immediately to express itself in movements which are closely dependent upon bodily actions. Even when I suddenly resolve to face some correctly- supposed disagreeable matter, or to think about some joyless thing, a bodily movement, and indeed quite an energetic one, will ensue upon the resolution—I may push my chair back, raise my elbows, perhaps put my head quickly between my hands, push the chair back again, and then begin to look or to think. Such actions, however, require comparatively ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... went by. After many years of joyless life, the blind grandmother had at last found something to make her happy; her days were no longer passed in weariness and darkness, one like the other without pleasure or change, for now she had always something to which she could look forward. She listened ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... at Court, she appears at a Meet or in the "Row" in a lady's habit, trigly perfect in fit, and on a side-saddle. In America this is an extreme opinion, and it is only among the most fashionable that a young girl having all her life ridden in a man's saddle, finds the world a joyless place and parents cruel when she is no longer allowed to ride like a boy. But she becomes, in spite of her protests, "another who looks divine on a horse." And you can look divine too, if you choose! On second ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... even the Christian glories of Middleton seemed unspeakably parochial. In Paris he had danced at night on the Boule Miche out of sheer joy of life, and joined in choruses over midnight bocks; and London itself now seemed drab and joyless, though many a gay circle welcomed the wit and high spirits and even the physical graces of this fortunate young man who seemed to shed a blonde radiance all around him. The factories of Middleton, which had manufactured Sir ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... move, never to know life even in the monotonous, joyless way of the normal worker, they hung there to be dipped into whenever the master that reigned over this inferno, or his immediate underlings, desired some ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... unconscious of the change, the life left would scarcely be worth living; but given that there is a consciousness of the change, then must the existence left to live be found by comparison insipid, joyless, a death in life, devoid of life's charm. But indeed, if it is reserved for me to die unjustly, then on those who unjustly slay me lies the shame (since, given injustice is base, how can any unjust ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... with the philistine, in particular, is far from settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? Let him prove it, then, by being as good in the same way as ordinary ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... in pieces everywhere: Into the joyless house and in the yard, On narrow streets, and paths, and pathless haunts, Where persecution raves, and menace dumb Chills all away from the pure light and air. The madman's cursed hands hold everything With snares and claws and stones and knives; they fall On loneliness ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... she might despise him, but that she would actually hate him with the desire for a personal vengeance he had not believed. Was Duggan right? Was Mary Josephine unfair? And should he in self-defense fight to poison his own thoughts against her? His face set hard, and a joyless laugh fell from his lips. He knew that he was facing the inevitable. No matter what had happened, he must go on loving ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... football, the racquet court, the gymnasium; but he saw no reason why he should be taxed for things which he disliked and disapproved. The result of that evening confirmed him in his resolution. It was a scene of drinking, gluttony, secret fear, endless squabbling, and joyless excitement. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... to Our Club, the Van Twiller affair, though it was rather a joyless thing, I fancy, for Van Twiller. To understand the case fully, it should be understood that Ralph Van Twiller is one of the proudest and most sensitive men living. He is a lineal descendant of Wouter Van Twiller, the famous old Dutch governor ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... from on high, to the abyss, The cataract of the Nile falls down and dulls the senses Of the joyless folk to every other sound, So stood I too, with spirit all intent Upon the living light, that lights the world; Dead henceforth to all the lesser splendours, While that light shines, let every other thing Be to the voluntary blind concealed. ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. This largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over other men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit—joyless and domineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons. All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of the ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... proceeding along the bank of the stream, approaches him. He tells her that he has done nothing but mourn for the loss of his Pearl, and has been indeed a "joyless jeweller" (p.8). However, now that he has found his Pearl, he declares that he is no longer sorrowful, but would be a "joyful jeweller" were he allowed to cross the stream (p.8). The maiden blames her father for his rash speech, tells him that his Pearl is not ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... Yes, precious bad business for them, Sir, Whose joyless enslavement you take with such phlegm, Sir, Suppose, to enhance Their small share of ease, such as you, were content, Sir, To lower a trifle your precious "per cent.," Sir, And give ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., December 13, 1890 • Various
... those which M. Fustel de Coulanges has analysed so deeply in his Cite antique. They subsisted in all their strength in Assyria, and must have had all the consequences, all the social effects that they had elsewhere, and yet we find mentioned a home for the dead, a joyless country in which they could assemble in their countless numbers; as Egypt had its Ament and Greece her Hades, so Chaldaea and Assyria had their hell, their place of departed ghosts. We know from ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... trimmed with white swansdown in which Cairn had seen him before. His statuesque ivory face was set in a smile, which yet was no smile of welcome; the over-red lips smiled alone; the long, glittering dark eyes were joyless; almost, beneath the straightly-pencilled brows, sinister. Save for the short, lustreless hair it was the face ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... Before his return, however, he had "got religion" from some quarter, and was confirmed in it by the preaching of one Jonathan Wilkins, as I have heard, a Methodist from "up the country," and a powerful mover of souls. As might have been expected in such a man as my grandfather, this religion was of a joyless and gloomy order, full of anticipations of hell-fire and conviction of the sinfulness of ordinary folk. But it undoubtedly was sincere, for his wife Philippa believed in it, and the master and mistress of Lantrig were alike the glory and strong support of ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... is no loneliness: — no matter where We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends Forsake us in the seeming, we are all At one with a complete companionship; And though forlornly joyless be the ways We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there, Like scattered lamps in ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... kind to such as are my second, In spirit and in truth; Have pity on their helpless age And on their joyless youth. Remember them whene'er you feast, And on your downy bed, For the sake of Him who "had not where On earth ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... undefiled and chaste pronounced, Present, or past, as saints and patriarchs used. Here Love his golden shafts employs, here lights His constant lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of harlots, loveless, joyless, unendeared, Casual fruition; nor in court-amours, Mixed dance, or wanton mask, or midnight ball, Or serenate, which the starved lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. These, lulled by nightingales, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... gift connected with aught but misery. Young man," she said, presenting me with a ring, which I well remembered as one of the few ornaments that Miss Vernon sometimes wore, "this comes from one whom you will never see more. If it is a joyless token, it is well fitted to pass through the hands of one to whom joy can never be known. Her last words were—Let him forget me ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... drunk water, eaten grass and given milk for the last time, and their senses have lost all vigour. He who gives these undoubtedly goes to joyless realms. ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... a state of mind such as we see extolled in Buddhism, a colorless state, joyless and painless, across which the fleeting splendors of thought pass like stars. Well, the man of the south cares naught for that sort of paradise. The vein of real sensation is freely, perpetually open, open to life. The side that pertains to abstraction, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... that he was sailing aloft over shining forests, and that his mother, beaming with all the beauty of her lost youth, flew before him, showering golden flowers on his path. These were the happiest moments of Brita's joyless life, and even these were not unmixed with bitterness; for into the midst of her joy would steal a shy anxious thought which was the more terrible because it came so stealthily, so soft-footed and unbidden. Had not this child been given her as a punishment ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... more of a Canadian winter than what regards the intenseness of its cold, must suppose it a very joyless season: 'tis, I assure you, quite otherwise; there are indeed some days here of the severity of which those who were never out of England can form no conception; but those days seldom exceed a dozen in a whole winter, nor do they come in succession; but at intermediate periods, as the winds ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... without the agency of feeling or sympathy; yet though she obtruded her grief on none, it was equally true that no gleam of returning cheerfulness ever lightened the gloom which enveloped her. A something there was in the hopeless, joyless expression of her beautiful face, which made the heart ache; yet none offered sympathy, or strove to console her, for she seemed unapproachable, with the cold, haughty glance of other days. Painfully perceptible ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... promise that if the day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... more, At least spin dervish-like about (Till giddy rapture almost doubt I fly) through circling sciences, Philosophies and histories Should the whirl slacken there, then verse, Fining to music, shall asperse Fresh and fresh fire-dew, till I strain Intoxicate, half-break my chain! Not joyless, though more favored feet Stand calm, where I want wings to beat The floor. At least ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... bright spirit, of whose power I sing, Electric, deathless energy of mind, Harp of the soul, by genius swept, awake! Inspire my strains, and aid me to portray The base and joyless vanities which man Madly prefers to everlasting bliss!— Come! let us mount gay Fancy's rapid car, And trace through forest and o'er mountain rude The bounding footsteps of the youthful bard, Yet new to life—a stranger ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... eminence which late years have encompassed with a proletarian suburb, its once noble domain narrowed to the bare acres of a stinted breathing ground, Aston Hall looks forth upon joyless streets and fuming chimneys, a wide welter of squalid strife. Its walls, which bear the dints of Roundhead cannonade, are blackened with ever-driving smoke; its crumbling gateway, opening aforetime upon ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... "forgotten women." "Thin and wrinkled in youth from ill-prepared food, clad without warmth or grace, living in untidy houses, working from daylight till bedtime at the dull round of weary duties, the slaves of men of equal slovenliness, the mothers of joyless children—all uneducated if not illiterate." "This sight," Page told his hearers, "every one of you has seen, not in the countries whither we send missionaries, but in the borders of the State of North Carolina, in this ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... the great mass of the native population are compelled by the present commercial system to remain mere peasants. Even so the cheapness and simplicity of the means of life prevent them from being a joyless race. A plantation cooly generally has two days in the week on which ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... inhabitants. The main characteristics of the first two cataracts are repeated with slight variations in the cases of the three which follow,—at Hannek, at Guerendid, and El-Hu-mar. It is Egypt still, but a joyless Egypt bereft of its brightness: impoverished, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... find one who would have filled for him the place of his black mother, whom he is much attached to?—what white man would have been his brother?—what white woman his sister? He had two courses left open to him,—he could either have renounced all natural ties, and have led a hopeless, joyless life amongst the whites,—ever a servant,—ever an inferior being;—or he could renounce civilization, and return to the friends of his childhood, and to the habits of his youth. He chose the latter course, and I think that I should have done ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... admission, and what have I to do, when I am being civilised, with a world—the one that's running still and godlike over me? Do I not for days and weeks at a time go about in it, guilty, shut-in, and foolish under it, slinking about—its emptied miracles all around me, mean, joyless, anxious, unable to look the littlest flower in the face—unable——. "Ah, God!" my soul cries out within me. Are not all these things mine? Do they not belong with me and I with them? And I go racing about, making things up in their presence, plodding for shadows, cutting out paper dolls ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... subtler and more lovely world within. If religion has no word to say upon this it is incomplete, and we wander in the narrow circle of prayers and praise, wondering all the while what is it we are praising God for, because we feel so melancholy and lifeless. Dante had a place in his Inferno for the joyless souls, and if his conception be true the population of that circle will be largely modern Irish. A reaction against this conventional restraint is setting in, and the needs of life will perhaps in the future no longer ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft, In darkness, and amid the many shapes Of joyless day-light; when the fretful stir Unprofitable, and the fever of the world, Have hung upon the beatings of my heart, How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee O sylvan Wye! Thou wanderer through the woods, How often has my spirit turned ...
— Lyrical Ballads, With Other Poems, 1800, Vol. I. • William Wordsworth
... in November, 1883, the very year when the Pall Mall Gazette exposure started "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," and the conscience of England was stirred as never before over this joyless city in the East End of its capital. Even then, vigorous and drastic plans were being discussed, and a splendid program of municipal reforms was already dimly outlined. Of all these, however, I had heard nothing but ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... have learned what the bitterness of exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"—I can perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to be worth the trouble of carrying ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spurt of joyless merriment. Upon that, in the same moment, followed a loud hysterical cry; then sobs and wailing, with movements as if to tear open the clothing that choked her. Sibyl hastened away, and returned with her vinaigrette, which she handed to Rolfe. But already the crisis was over. ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... life. So jealous is the queen, that no female is allowed to approach the walls within one hundred yards. Never beholding any of their race but the queen and a few dried-up and ugly spinsters, the poor creatures vegetate, mindless and joyless. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... society could not last. Now as man could not live in society without truth, so likewise, not without joy, because, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii), no one could abide a day with the sad nor with the joyless. Therefore, a certain natural equity obliges a man to live agreeably with his fellow-men; unless some reason should oblige him to sadden them ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... been something more between these two men than a common brotherhood: there had been the bond of a joyless childhood spent together, and their affection for each other was more than the ordinary love ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the sky o'ercast,"[1] The joyless winter day Let others fear, to me more dear Than all the pride of May: The tempest's howl, it soothes my soul, My griefs it seems to join; The leafless trees my fancy please, Their ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... about noon. Lorchen could hardly come before two or three o'clock. While he was waiting for the trains he walked up and down the platform of the little station. Then he went straight on into the middle of the fields; It was a gray and joyless day giving warning of the approach of winter. The light was dim. The plaintive whistle of a train stopping was all that broke the melancholy silence. Christophe stopped a few yards away from the frontier in ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... the night and day, When the Fairy King has power, That I sunk down in a sinful fray, And, 'twixt life and death, was snatched away 355 To the joyless Elfin bower. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... perhaps, in the present assembly, who repute godliness fanaticism, and the sobriety of Christian peace the gloom of a joyless spirit; but who cannot forbear sighing out, with the prophet of mammon, 'Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his.' If they proceed no further, their wish will not be granted. None shall die the death of the righteous, unless by a rare dispensation of ...
— The Power of Faith - Exemplified In The Life And Writings Of The Late Mrs. Isabella Graham. • Isabella Graham
... reward lie, but in the work itself. If she wins great popularity she is likely to find that there is nothing that shifts so quickly and is such a quicksand. If material wealth is her sole object she will harden into the thing she seeks and add but another joyless barbarian to a modern world congratulating itself that barbarism is a thing of the past, and yet presenting the spectacle of a mammon worship such as has never been seen before. If gold is her end, and not the means to a nobler end, ...
— A Girl's Student Days and After • Jeannette Marks
... is the use of being born if we have to decay into unnatural, heartless, loveless, joyless monsters in four short years? What use are the artists if they cannot bring their beautiful creations to life? I have a great mind to die and have done with it all. [He moves away to the corner of the curved seat farthest from the theatre, and ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... fortune had befel me, And it would have been more happy. Had I not been born and nurtured, And had never grown in stature, 220 Till I saw these days of sorrow, And this joyless time o'ertook me, Had I died in six nights only, Or upon the eighth had perished. Much I should not then have needed, But a shroud a span-long only, And of earth a tiny corner. Little then had wept my mother, Fewer tears had shed my father, ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... by De Grammont—though feared at home and abroad—was little calculated to win suffrages from a mere man of pleasure like De Grammont. The court, the city, the country, were in his days gloomy, discontented, joyless: a proscribed nobility was the sure cause of the thin though few festivities of the now lugubrious gallery of Whitehall. Puritanism drove the old jovial churchmen into retreat, and dispelled every lingering vestige of ancient ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... as they sang—a joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended. When she woke up she knew that ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... him better service. That night, for the first time in ninety-six weary hours, he slept, soundly and dreamlessly, till Alexei came to call him, when he rose with a feeling of great strangeness, of irrevocable change, upon him, as he faced a final joyless day. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... announced that in a council of war it had been decided to abandon the city, there was first dismay, then fury, then despair. The long trains of departing citizens wailed their church hymns with sullen mien and joyless voices. ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... their lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabby and squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Little remains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life from being quite joyless. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... season," while the roses are fresh within your hair, and the wine-cup flashes ruby in your hand. Yonder lies Pluto's meagrely-appointed mansion, and filmy shadows of the dead are waiting for you there, to swell their joyless ranks. To that unlovely region you must go, alas! too soon; but the golden present is yours, so drain it of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... to such as are my second, In spirit and in truth; Have pity on their helpless age And on their joyless youth. Remember them whene'er you feast, And on your downy bed, For the sake of Him who "had not where On earth to lay ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... spirit, of whose power I sing, Electric, deathless energy of mind, Harp of the soul, by genius swept, awake! Inspire my strains, and aid me to portray The base and joyless vanities which man Madly prefers to everlasting bliss!— Come! let us mount gay Fancy's rapid car, And trace through forest and o'er mountain rude The bounding footsteps of the youthful bard, Yet new to life—a stranger to the woes His harp is doomed ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... owners exiled from their paternal lands. There is an extravagance, I am told, that runs parallel with wealth; a lavish expenditure among the great; a senseless competition among the aspiring; a heedless, joyless dissipation among all the upper ranks, that often beggars even these splendid establishments, breaks down the pride and principles of their possessors, and makes too many of them mere place-hunters, or shifting absentees. It is thus that so many are thrown into the hands of government; and a ...
— Bracebridge Hall, or The Humorists • Washington Irving
... be the hands that changed those letters, and be they struck off by the hangman's knife, and handle hell fire for ever; thrice accursed be the cruel hearts that did conceive that damned lie, to part true love for ever; may they sicken and wither on earth joyless, loveless, hopeless; and wither to dust before their time; and burn in eternal fire," He cursed the meat at their mouths and every atom of their bodies, from their hair to the soles of their feet. Then turning from the cowering, shuddering pair, who had almost hid ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... prevail, must not be seduced by any temptation, any extraneous desire, any peevish criticism, any well-meant rebuke, into trying a subject that he knows is too large for him. He must be his own severest critic. No artistic effort can be effective, if it is a joyless straining after things falteringly grasped. Joy is the essential quality; it need not always be a present, a momentary joy. There are weary spaces, as when a footsore traveller plods along the interminable ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... them in pieces everywhere: Into the joyless house and in the yard, On narrow streets, and paths, and pathless haunts, Where persecution raves, and menace dumb Chills all away from the pure light and air. The madman's cursed hands hold everything With snares and claws and stones and knives; they fall On loneliness and on embracings, night ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... Square itself, along paths that had once echoed to the tread of slippered feet, armed sentries paced, their sharp challenges breaking the stillness of the night. Outside its wrecked fences strange men in stranger uniforms strode in and out of the joyless houses; tired pickets stacked their arias on the unswept piazzas, and panting horses nibbled the bark from the withered trees; rank weeds choked the gardens; dishevelled vines clung to the porches, and doors that had always swung wide to the gentle tap of loving fingers were opened timidly to the ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... beneath thy dread expanse, One hopeless, dark idolater of chance, Content to feed, with pleasures unrefined, The lukewarm passions of a lowly mind; Who, mouldering earthward, 'reft of every trust, In joyless union wedded to the dust, Could all his parting energy dismiss, And call ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... Thereupon God became angered and hostile 35 towards the beings whom he had formerly exalted in beauty and glory: he created for the traitors a marvelous abode as penalty for their action, namely the pangs of Hell, bitter afflictions; Our Lord called forth that 40 abysmal joyless house of punishment to wait for the outcast keepers of souls.[3] When he knew that it was ready, he enveloped it in eternal night and equipped it with torment, filling it with fire and fearful cold, with fume and red flame: then he commanded the terrors of suffering to increase ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing, drumming, and tambourining: his life flying by in a flash of excitement, and his death arriving as a climax of triumph. And, if you please, the playgoer despising the Salvationist as a joyless person, shut out from the heaven of the theatre, self-condemned to a life of hideous gloom; and the Salvationist mourning over the playgoer as over a prodigal with vine leaves in his hair, careering outrageously to hell amid the popping of ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... through the throng with eyes that seemed to see nothing of its frantic frenzy and joyless joy—a stalwart man, who strode along like a giant among midgets, his vacant eyes fixed before him, his strong white face expressionless. Hugh Ritson saw him. They passed within two paces, but without recognition. ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... WRETCH WITHOUT IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; it testifies a ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... "and not more at your joyless tones, my fair cousin, than at the coincidence of our thoughts. I dreamed (for I also have had my visions) last night, that some one came to me and whispered in my ear to 'cross the river at the Lower Ford, the Upper being dangerous.' Verily, I shall hereafter treat my dreams ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... of Gunnar the war-king cried out o'er the weeping hall: "Wail on, O women forsaken, for the mightiest woman born! Now the hearth is cold and joyless, and the waste bed lieth forlorn. Wail on, but amid your weeping lay hand to the glorious dead, That not alone for an hour may lie Queen Brynhild's head: For here have been heavy tidings, and the ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... years have encompassed with a proletarian suburb, its once noble domain narrowed to the bare acres of a stinted breathing ground, Aston Hall looks forth upon joyless streets and fuming chimneys, a wide welter of squalid strife. Its walls, which bear the dints of Roundhead cannonade, are blackened with ever-driving smoke; its crumbling gateway, opening aforetime upon a stately avenue of chestnuts, ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... peoples of the earth impelled by their own misery to desolate the happy peoples, a vision which grew clearer in the after years. But in that easy-going Eastern life there is a power of resistance, as everybody knows who tries to change it, which may yet defeat the hosts of joyless drudgery. ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... a dreary time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be without her now. Had it been summer, ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... Protector, Cromwell. But Cromwell, though in the height of his fame when beheld by De Grammont—though feared at home and abroad—was little calculated to win suffrages from a mere man of pleasure like De Grammont. The court, the city, the country, were in his days gloomy, discontented, joyless: a proscribed nobility was the sure cause of the thin though few festivities of the now lugubrious gallery of Whitehall. Puritanism drove the old jovial churchmen into retreat, and dispelled every lingering vestige of ancient hospitality: long graces and long sermons, sanctimonious manners, and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... the 'December' we have the counterpart of the January eclogue, a monologue in which Colin laments his wasted life and joyless, for ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... with her fingers for the gold chain, a mere golden-fleshed, rose-flushed hireling, solid and prosaic. The go-between is dimly seen in the background, but the face of the suitor is a strange, ironic study: past youth, worn, joyless, and bitter, taking his pleasure mechanically and with cynical detachment. The "Storm calmed by S. Mark" (Academy) was, in Mr. ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... by the church, etc. And so he managed to be present at prayers, masses for the dead, to confess, make signs of the cross in front of icons, with a quiet mind, without being conscious of the lie, and to continue in the service which gave him the feeling of being useful and some comfort in his joyless family life. Although he believed this, he felt with his entire being that this religion of his, more than all else, was not "the right thing," and that is why his ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... I live for happiness, Louisa, I live for happiness, my angel. And I find so much happiness in loving, that I would as soon cease to live as cease to love. Some indeed, 'sordid celebutes' for example, seem to exist without love; but it is only a seeming existence, most joyless and imperfect. And they bear the dullness of apathy the better, because they have never known the transports of affection. But with me, my charmer, the case is happily different; for at the moment I first saw those angel eyes, they infused a sweetness into my heart ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... handsome, the colouring so fine, the person that of a finished gentleman; and yet, all this pleasing combination of form and face marred by that cold, cruel, merciless eye. Its expression so dead, so joyless, sent a chill through my whole frame, and I shrank from encountering its icy gaze, and was about quietly to retire by a back door, when my attention was arrested by ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... designs which are handed to them. In spite, however, of this natural aptitude for higher industries, the great mass of the native population are compelled by the present commercial system to remain mere peasants. Even so the cheapness and simplicity of the means of life prevent them from being a joyless race. A plantation cooly generally has two days in the week on which he does ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... adoration of that life are of the same band." Her favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom she elevated into a mystic and a prophet. The ways of the Church of England did not please her. She had nothing but scorn for "a joyless curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips," or for "the Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church" filled with "sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen." But the conclusion of the whole matter was more comfortable—"All the clergymen in the ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... self-restraint and unwearied toil through all previous life; between the expressed subject and sentiment of home violation, and the expressed subject and sentiment of home love; between the sympathy of audience, given in irreverent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the rabidness of a dog, and the sympathy of audience given in an almost appalled humility of intense, rapturous, and yet entirely reasoning and reasonable pleasure; between these two limits of octave, the reader will find he can class, according to its modesty, usefulness ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... men of the time were intent upon pleasure rather than desirous of doing their duty to the human race, they gave all their love and attention to the barren women, while their other wives spent their days like widows, joyless and in gloom. ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... could make her feet go in a one-two-three triangle with approximate accuracy, if she didn't take any liberties with them. She was relieved to find that Todd danced with a heavy accuracy which kept her from stumbling.... But their performance was solemn and joyless, while by her skipped Sam Weintraub, in evening clothes with black velvet collar and cuffs, swinging and making fantastic dips with the lovely Miss Moore, who cuddled into his arms and ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... that, me frantick love detains, 'Mid foes, and dreadful darts, and bloody plains: While you—and can my soul the tale believe, Far from your country, lonely wand'ring leave Me, me your lover, barbarous fugitive! Seek the rough Alps where snows eternal shine, And joyless borders of the frozen Rhine. Ah! may no cold e'er blast my dearest maid, Nor pointed ice ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... toil and travail vain— Ay, now will grant the Trojans victory Who from Achaea now hath reft her shield! Ah me! how shall old Peleus in his halls Take up the burden of a mighty grief Now in his joyless age! His heart shall break At the mere rumour of it. Better so, Thus in a moment to forget all pain. But if these evil tidings slay him not, Ah, laden with sore sorrow eld shall come Upon him, eating out his heart with ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... just supports life. The manners of the young ladies were equally mild, uncomplaining, and respectable; the only difference was, that Constantia was pensive and dejected, Isabel active and cheerful in adversity. The former seemed to move in a joyless routine of duty; but Isabel was so animated that only the most minute observer could tell that she was not perfectly happy, and hence she gained the character of having ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... others brave the flood in quest of gain And beat for joyless months, the gloomy wave. Let such as deem it glory to destroy, Rush into blood, the sack of cities seek; Unpierced, exulting in the widow's wail, The virgin's shriek ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... them,—they are all slaves, they say, in Albion, and will bear to be yoked like oxen if they think they can turn any gold in the furrows—I speak of the people. Of the toiling, weary, agonized, joyless, hapless multitudes who labor on, and on, and on, ever in darkness, that such as you may bask in sunlight and take your pleasures wrung out of the death-sweat of millions of work-murdered poor! What right have you to have your ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... away Away it goes; away so soon! Alas! it has no power to stay: 30 Its hues are dim, its hues are grey— Away it passes from the moon! How mournfully it seems to fly, Ever fading more and more, To joyless regions of the sky— 35 And now 'tis whiter than before! As white as my poor cheek will be, When, Lewti! on my couch I lie, A dying man for love of thee. Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind— 40 And yet, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... a joy to her joyless life, but she had also added a care and a heavy weight to her heavy load. All her strength was taken now to find food. The burden increased as the offspring grew up big enough to scramble about the boxes, which they ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... very well that I love you better than every thing else—that I have loved you from the first day of our acquaintance; and I have come to tell you that my happiness is in your dear little hands; that my future will be joyless unless you share it; that the one darling hope of my life is to call you my wife. Do not draw your hand from mine! Dear Edna, let me keep it always. Do I mistake your feelings when I hope that you ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... frequently through depression or sorrow, which gives men a longing for some keen pleasure in which they can forget themselves; or through the jaded habit of mind and body which excessive work produces, or through the dreary, colourless, joyless surroundings of sordid poverty. Drink and the sensual pleasures, if viciously indulged, produce (doubtless through physical causes) an intense craving for their gratification. This, however, is not the case with all our pleasures. Many are keenly enjoyed when present, yet ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... and a tuft of snow piled on his broad shoulders, a monument of passive endurance. Thus every storm-bound bird seemed more or less uncomfortable, if not in distress. The storm was reflected in every gesture, and not one cheerful note, not to say song, came from a single bill. Their cowering, joyless endurance offered striking contrasts to the spontaneous, irrepressible gladness of the ouzel, who could no more help giving out sweet song than a rose sweet fragrance. He must sing, though the ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... comfort. It was madness to overlook the advantages which my mother's offer gave. She herself, the lovely Anna, as her cares increased, would mourn over the cruel obstinacy of him who might have placed her beyond anxiety and apprehension, but who preferred to keep her poor, dependent, joyless. She was young, and spoke, doubtless, as she felt—but time would dissipate romance, and bitterly would she regret that he who professed to love her had not taken pains to prove that love more thoughtful ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... or neolithic chieftains, and wrought strange weapons underground. The mark, the forest, the hills, were all full for the early Englishman of mysterious and often hostile beings. At length the Weirds or Fates swept him away. Beneath the earth itself, Hel, mistress of the cold and joyless world of shades, at last received him; unless, indeed, by dying a warrior's death, he was admitted to the happy realms of Waelheal. As a whole, the Anglo-Saxon heathendom was a religion of terrorism. Evil spirits surrounded men on every side, dwelt in all solitary places, and stalked ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... Westcott and Hort, harsher than any of their predecessors, will not, as we have seen, allow it to appear even at the foot of the page. To reproduce all that has been written in disparagement of this precious portion of God's written Word would be a joyless and an unprofitable task. According to Green, 'the genuineness of the passage cannot be maintained[589].' Hammond is of opinion that 'it would be more satisfactory to separate it from its present context, and place it by itself as an appendix to the Gospel[590].' ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... I sighed. Joyless, vacant, barren hours prefigured themselves to me, drifting through my brain, till their vacant shapes crowded it into darkness. I must do something! I would go out; a walk would be good for me. Moreover, wishing to purchase a parting gift for Adelaide and Ann, I would go ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... hastened / where he stricken lay, It was in sooth for many / of them a joyless day. Had any aught of honor, / he mourned that day, I ween, And well the same did merit / the knight ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... even more intense whenever it happened that my eyes encountered his, I should deny the truth; he added further fuel to the fires that consumed me, and rekindled such as might be expiring, if, mayhap, there were any such. But the beginning of all this was by no means so cheerful as the ending was joyless, as soon as I was deprived of the sight of this, my beloved, inasmuch as the eyes, being thus robbed of their delight, gave woful occasion of lamentation to the heart, the sighs whereof grew greater in ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... somehow, and arrived at peace. Trust in "the merits of the Redeemer" is, after all, trust in the Immensity beyond Redeemer and redeemed. Of this trust she sang in a voice, like her material voice, fragile, but sweet and true. She sang naively of the "Captive Dove" that makes unheard its "joyless moan", of "the heart that Nature formed to love", pining, "neglected and alone". She sang of the "Narrow Way", "Be it," she ...
— The Three Brontes • May Sinclair
... the last few moments. Only the world and love seemed to her as a void and make-believe from beginning to end. Even the memory of the protestations of love, which her husband had made to her in days past, brought to her lips a dry, hard, joyless smile, like a sharp cruel knife which had cut through her heart. She was thinking, perhaps, that the love which seemed to fill so much of one's life, which brought in its train such fondness and depth of feeling, which made even the briefest separation so ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... glittering splendour; but amid all this ostentatious brilliancy, poor human nature refuses to be comforted with diamonds and pearls, or to acknowledge that happiness consists in gilded galleries, gay equipages, or fashionable parties. They are cold and artificial. The heart longs to discard this joyless pageantry, to surround itself with human affections, and only asks to ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... this aimless, joyless existence as much as he disliked work, and even Dan at times longed for something better. They both wanted to be rich. Godfrey wanted to see his fine plantation, which was now abandoned to briers and cane, cultivated as it used to ...
— The Boy Trapper • Harry Castlemon
... strip away all the clouds of superstition, and demonstrate at once that there has been no sun in the firmament during the whole of a cloudy day! Soar like the strong pinioned eagle, make your tour beyond the mists of error and bring us the joyless tidings that there is no clear sky in the heavens. Can you imagine any thing to be more pleasing than the coming of one that brought good tidings? But let us have the worst of it. Show from undoubted authority ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... is sufficient to look around us, and to consider the effects that religion produces on minds really penetrated with its pretended truths. We shall generally find in those who the most sincerely profess and the most exactly practise them, a joyless and melancholy disposition, which announces no contentment, nor that interior peace of which they speak so incessantly, without ever exhibiting any undoubted manifestations of it. Whoever is in the enjoyment of peace ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... possession of the temple of religion and refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. This largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over other men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit—joyless and domineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons. All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of the immortal souls against the superior ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... mope in joyless plight, While youth and spring bedeck the scene, And scorn the profer'd gay delight, With thankless heart and frowning mien? See Joy with becks and smiles appear, While roses strew the devious way; The feast of life she bids us share, Where'er our ...
— Translations of German Poetry in American Magazines 1741-1810 • Edward Ziegler Davis
... silence of the dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air. ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... manifestation of truth without which human society could not last. Now as man could not live in society without truth, so likewise, not without joy, because, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii), no one could abide a day with the sad nor with the joyless. Therefore, a certain natural equity obliges a man to live agreeably with his fellow-men; unless some reason should oblige him to sadden ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... be the instrument of this miserable plot!" he cried passionately. "Because I lead a lonely, joyless life. I am selected to execute this infamy. Ah, how little do they know me! how slight a knowledge of the human heart have these learned professors! Eckhof in danger, and I remain silent? Eckhof threatened, and I ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... hopes thus blighted, succeeded in effecting a compromise by inducing his brother Aides to allow Persephone to spend six months of the year with the gods above, whilst during the other six she was to be the joyless companion of her grim lord below. Accompanied by her daughter, the beautiful Persephone, Demeter now resumed her long-abandoned dwelling in Olympus; the sympathetic earth responded gaily to her bright smiles, the corn at once sprang forth from the ground in fullest ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... back home to Skernford, to blindness, now known to be inevitable, to her saddened, joyless life. I was going to remain in Elberthal—for what? When I look back I ask myself—was I not as blind as she, in truth? In the afternoon of the day of Miss Hallam's departure, I left Frau Steinmann's house. Clara promised to come and see me sometimes. Frau Steinmann kissed ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... cold. The death of these two leaves us with the thought of a young, bright world for the lovers to enjoy; whilst at the same time it completes the contrast, which the first introduction of the old bedesman suggested, between the old, the poor, and the joyless, and the young, the rich, ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... the evening, not broken up by the bridegroom himself, but sadly and gloomily by the joyless mood of the guests and their forebodings of evil. Bertalda retired with her maidens, and the knight with his attendants; but at this mournful festival there was no gay, laughing train ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... return, however, he had "got religion" from some quarter, and was confirmed in it by the preaching of one Jonathan Wilkins, as I have heard, a Methodist from "up the country," and a powerful mover of souls. As might have been expected in such a man as my grandfather, this religion was of a joyless and gloomy order, full of anticipations of hell-fire and conviction of the sinfulness of ordinary folk. But it undoubtedly was sincere, for his wife Philippa believed in it, and the master and mistress of Lantrig ...
— Dead Man's Rock • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... which M. Fustel de Coulanges has analysed so deeply in his Cite antique. They subsisted in all their strength in Assyria, and must have had all the consequences, all the social effects that they had elsewhere, and yet we find mentioned a home for the dead, a joyless country in which they could assemble in their countless numbers; as Egypt had its Ament and Greece her Hades, so Chaldaea and Assyria had their hell, their place of departed ghosts. We know from the narrative of Istar that they looked upon it as an immense building, ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... and joyless as the wide waste lying hushed around me, unblessed with the verdure of a single hope, a single love; and as I looked down the coming years, my way seemed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... headaches, really given him so much pleasure that he must needs fling it all aside with such bitter anger and harsh regret when the thunderbolt fell and the searching dart stabbed him awake? Outraged, hurt-maddened, he had flung away, as he believed, to outer darkness, and to a joyless, purposeless, colourless ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... very feeling! How many a man whose hours have passed fleetingly at the pleasant tea-table, or by the warm hearth of some old country-house, going forth into the cold and cheerless night, reaches his far-off home only to find it dark and gloomy, joyless and companionless? How often has the hard-visaged look of his old butler, as, with sleepy eyes and yawning face, he hands a bed-room candle, suggested thoughts of married happiness? Of the perils ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... Romans, and still more often of the Greeks, for the joy of the Greek in life was far greater than that of the Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring to a pagan, and "Pax tecum aeterna" is among the commonest of the inscriptions. The life beyond the grave was at best an unreal and joyless copy of an earthly existence, and Achilles told Odysseus that he would rather be the serf of a poor man upon earth than Achilles ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... complexioned man with dark southern eyes and hair comes from the house. Age about 36. Handsome features, but joyless; dark eyebrows drawn towards one another; mouth set grimly; nostrils large and strained: a face set to one tragic purpose. A man of few words, fewer gestures, and much significance. On the whole, interesting, and even attractive, but not friendly. He stands for a moment, saturnine ...
— Captain Brassbound's Conversion • George Bernard Shaw
... bringing down her one sheaf of corn to an old watermill, itself mossy and rent, scarcely able to get its stones to turn. An ill-bred dog stands, joyless, by the unfenced stream; two country boys lean, joyless, against a wall that is half broken down; and all about the steps down which the girl is bringing her sheaf, the bank of earth, flowerless and rugged, testifies only of its malignity; and in the black and sternly rugged etching—no ...
— Lectures on Landscape - Delivered at Oxford in Lent Term, 1871 • John Ruskin
... annoyed him when he looked at his wife. She had borne him a child—a sweet girl baby, with those great black eyes that always have rather a weird look in the face of infancy; and she would fain have clung to the infant as the hope and consolation of her joyless life. But the vulture is not a domestic bird, and a baby would have been an impediment in the rapid hegiras which Captain Paget and his wife were wont to make. The Captain put an advertisement in a daily paper before ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... Jainism considers the world of transmigration as a bondage or journey which the wise long to terminate. But joyless as is its immediate outlook, its ultimate ideas are not pessimistic. Even in the body the soul can attain a beatific state of perfect knowledge[256] and above the highest heaven (where the greatest gods live in bliss for immense periods though ultimately subject to transmigration) ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... strolling along the beach, biting my pencil reflectively, tremendously impressed by the solitude and the solemn thunder of the surf, a thought occurred to me—how unpleasant it would be if I suddenly stumbled on a summer boarder. As this joyless impossibility flitted across my mind, I ...
— In Search of the Unknown • Robert W. Chambers
... till a year departed— Felt it of all hope bereft; Restless, joyless, broken-hearted, Then the warring bands he left;— Bade on Joppa's sandy shore Seamen hoist the swelling sail; Swift the bark to Europe bore O'er the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... As little joy enjoys the queen thereof; For I am she, and altogether joyless. I can no ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... prevails, Thee she by night, and thee by day bewails. Thee in Telemachus thy realm obeys; In sacred groves celestial rites he pays, And shares the banquet in superior state, Graced with such honours as become the great Thy sire in solitude foments his care: The court is joyless, for thou art not there! No costly carpets raise his hoary head, No rich embroidery shines to grace his bed; Even when keen winter freezes in the skies, Rank'd with his slaves, on earth the monarch lies: Deep are his sighs, his visage pale, his dress The garb of woe and ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... had befel me, And it would have been more happy. Had I not been born and nurtured, And had never grown in stature, 220 Till I saw these days of sorrow, And this joyless time o'ertook me, Had I died in six nights only, Or upon the eighth had perished. Much I should not then have needed, But a shroud a span-long only, And of earth a tiny corner. Little then had wept my mother, Fewer tears had shed ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... I left so late, Whose only altar is its rusted grate,— Sepulchral, rayless, joyless as it seems, Shamed by the glare of May's refulgent beams,— While the dim seasons dragged their shrouded train, Its paler splendors were not quite in vain. From these dull bars the cheerful firelight's glow Streamed ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... with radiance and glory. For the traitors, to reward their work, He shaped a house of pain and grim affliction, and lamentations of hell. Our Lord prepared this torture-house of exiles, deep and joyless, for the coming of the angel hosts. Well He knew it lay enshrouded in eternal night, and filled with woe, wrapped in fire and piercing cold, smoke-veils and ruddy flame. And over that wretched realm He spread the brooding terror of torment. They had wrought ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... Paradise-earth, of strife unstrained! untortured with strife. What wyrde hath hither my jewel vayned, destiny: carried off. And done me in this del and great danger? sorrow. Fro we in twain were towen and twayned, since: pulled: divided. I have been a joyless jeweller." ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... manly and stout-hearted optimist than he. He is optimistic of set purpose, and sometimes his cheerfulness costs him a struggle, for he is tender-hearted and clear-sighted, and he is the Columbus of 'the great joyless city' of the East. He has had a double aim—to keep his work recreative and to make it useful. In one respect he has been curiously happy, for he once dreamt aloud a beautiful dream, and has lived to find it a reality. It was his own bright hope which built the People's Palace, ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... knew he had lost her and that she might despise him, but that she would actually hate him with the desire for a personal vengeance he had not believed. Was Duggan right? Was Mary Josephine unfair? And should he in self-defense fight to poison his own thoughts against her? His face set hard, and a joyless laugh fell from his lips. He knew that he was facing the inevitable. No matter what had happened, he must go on ...
— The River's End • James Oliver Curwood
... he writes for another instrument than the pianoforte. The commencement of the first solo is like the opening of a beautiful vista after a long walk through dreary scenery, and every new entry of the orchestra precipitates you from the delectable regions of imagination to the joyless deserts of the actual. Chopin's inaptitude in writing for the orchestra is, however, most conspicuous where he employs it conjointly with the pianoforte. Carl Klindworth and Carl Tausig have rescored ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... termination less added to substantives, makes adjectives signifying want; as, worthless, witless, heartless, joyless, careless, helpless. Thus comfort, ...
— A Grammar of the English Tongue • Samuel Johnson
... asked her bower-maidens why they sat so joyless and downcast. "What has come to you, that ye fare ye as witless women, or what unheard-of ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous
... events long buried. It is not essential, however, that I should weary you with the minutiae of circumstances which many years ago smothered the sunshine in my life, and left me in darkness, a lonely and joyless woman. I have resided here long enough to learn the noble generosity of your character, and to you, as a true Christian gentleman, I come for aid,—premising only that what I am about to say ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... no playmates, and her little life was almost as joyless and as solitary as his own, he would wait with her till the long line of canoes passed by, so that she could see the bronzed, half-naked figures of the paddlers, and the bright gleam and shimmer of the fish as ...
— Rodman The Boatsteerer And Other Stories - 1898 • Louis Becke
... wine is not, no mirth the banquet knows: Where wine is not, the dance all joyless goes. The man, oppressed with cares, who tastes the bowl, Shall shake the weight of sorrow from ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ones as well, shall husbands have, And their young lives from shame thus they will save. No aged maids shall pass from yonder throng With bitterness,—their heart's unuttered song For some dear love to end their joyless woe, And longings unallayed that ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... pass, borne onward by the wind, Palmy Selinus, and the treacherous strand And shoals of Lilybaeum leave behind. Last, by the shore at Drepanum we stand And take the shelter of her joyless land, Here, tost so long o'er many a storm-lashed main, We lose the stay and comfort of our band, Here thou, best father, leav'st me to my pain, Thou, saved from countless risks, ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... extinguished beneath a profound sense of the social annihilation to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind. And by the side of the poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless, self-sustained, drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and of poetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul and brain, stood Lucien, graceful as some ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... turn my love from her, For aye my love were gone. I'd gladly die could I forget The love that haunts my song. So, lonely, joyless, live I on, For love my prayer denies, And, childlike, mocks ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... had entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless, pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thought to have seen them again! And they were so changed, I should scarcely have known them. Bob, in particular, looked so much taller, and stronger, and oh! so much happier than he had done last year! He was no more the wretched, joyless, hopeless creature, cowering in rags, one that even rats might look on with pity; he had a bright, fearless eye, and hopeful smile; and if ever a face expressed gratitude and affection, it was his when he looked on ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
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