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More "Melancholy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... admirer of Dick Garstin. She thought him a great painter, but apart from his gift his mind interested her intensely. He had a sort of melancholy understanding of human nature and of life, a strangely sure instinct in probing to the bottom of psychological mysteries, a cruelly sure hand in tearing away the veils which the victims hoped would shroud their ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... his harp,—three times Arose the well-known martial chimes, And thrice their high heroic pride In melancholy murmurs died. 'Vainly thou bidst, O noble maid,' Clasping his withered hands, he said, 'Vainly thou bidst me wake the strain, Though all unwont to bid in vain. Alas! than mine a mightier hand Has tuned my harp, my strings has spanned! I touch the chords of joy, but low And mournful ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... there may be a successor, without being the heir, of the king. And this is so extremely reasonable, that without such a power, lodged somewhere, our polity would be very defective. For, let us barely suppose so melancholy a case, as that the heir apparent should be a lunatic, an ideot, or otherwise incapable of reigning: how miserable would the condition of the nation be, if he were also incapable of being set aside!—It is therefore necessary ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... bravely; nevertheless, her young cheek blanched, and she shivered slightly as she glanced round the place—poor enough, perhaps, but which at least afforded her a peaceful and comfortable home. These signs were not unnoticed by the dying man, and a faint, slow, melancholy smile gathered about ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... ensued, but the majority complied with the demand. Some members in the upper house complained that the message was not sent to both houses of parliament, and this suggestion gave rise to another debate, in which lord Bathurst and others made some melancholy reflections upon the state of insignificance to which the peers of England were reduced. Such remarks, however, were very little minded by the ministry, who had obtained a complete victory over all opposition. The supplies, ordinary and extraordinary, being granted, with every ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... but I am sure it is a noble one," he said. "You see before you one who in his time has been a squire of dames, by Jove! I can't remember 'em. They must number thousands and only one of them was worth two sous. Yes," he shook his head in melancholy, "only one of 'em. By Jove! The rest were"—he ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... gayety, however, there lay a deep-seated Celtic melancholy, and beside his energy was an infinite patience at the service of an exacting artistic conscience. The endless painstaking of his work and the time he took over it were almost proverbial. He was twelve years engaged upon the "Shaw Memorial" and eleven ...
— Artist and Public - And Other Essays On Art Subjects • Kenyon Cox
... remains a region unsmiling and melancholy. A monochrome of sand, darkened everywhere by long blotches of sickly undergrowth or the dull reach of the pines; here and there are cork-trees and alders. The sheen of some slow lagoon is caught in the distance. There is a charm in the very charmlessness of the scene, ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... to every species of enjoyment as melancholy. Gloom, however dressed, however caused, is incompatible with friendship. They cannot have place in the mind at the same time. It is the secret, the malignant foe of ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... be adequately described in the short space available in such a book as this. His externals are well appreciated, his tall figure, his powerful ugliness, his awkward strength, his racy humour, his fits of temperamental melancholy; well appreciated also his firmness, wisdom and patriotism. But if we wish to grasp the peculiar quality which makes him almost unique among great men of action, we shall perhaps find the key in the fact that his favourite private recreation ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... need, George, for you to continue," and then, fixing his glittering eye on Philip: "it is very melancholy for me, having only one son, to know him to be such a brute, such a bearer of false witness, such an impostor as you are. Do you know that I have just seen Mr. Bellamy, the head clerk at the bank, and inquired if he knew anything ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... the plague in his house that sells a drop of claret to kill the poison of it! As many wounds may'st thou have as Caesar had in the senate-house, and get no white wine to wash them with; and to conclude, pine away in melancholy and sorrow, before thou hast the fourth part of a dram of my juice to cheer ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VIII (4th edition) • Various
... and John wandered for hours upon the beach, gazing at the gray melancholy sea, and trying to understand how far he had been to blame. Perhaps it is in the want of pity that the real infernal of Satan consists; for whenever he sees us overwhelmed with sorrow, then he casts into our throbbing heart his ...
— The Hallam Succession • Amelia Edith Barr
... hours the stranger remained alone on the shore, evidently under the influence of recollections which recalled all his past life—a melancholy life doubtless—and the colonists, without losing sight of him, did not attempt to disturb his solitude. However, after two hours, appearing to have formed a resolution, he came to find Cyrus Harding. His eyes were red with the tears he had shed, but he wept no longer. His countenance expressed deep ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... may you have a son endowed with such qualities that you can resign your sceptre to him with as much satisfaction as I give up mine to you!" Charles retired into a monastery, where he died after more than two years passed in deep melancholy, and in practices of devotion inconsistent with sound health, when only between fifty-eight and fifty-nine years of age. His activity and talents had been the theme of universal admiration, the ardor of his ambitious policy had been extreme, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various
... and in doing so, you are aware that I cannot hope to entertain you with a merely humourous or facetious story. Harlequin without his mask is known to present a very sober countenance, and was himself, the story goes, the melancholy patient whom the Doctor advised to go and see Harlequin—a man full of cares and perplexities like the rest of us, whose Self must always be serious to him, under whatever mask or disguise or uniform ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... back in his chair, his handsome face blank and expressionless, the while he stared steadily at his wife, and Bridgie stared back, her distress palpably mingled with complacence. Speak she would not, until Dick had given expression to his surprise. She sat still, therefore, shaking her head in a melancholy mandarin fashion, which had the undesired effect of restoring ...
— The Love Affairs of Pixie • Mrs George de Horne Vaizey
... the negative information expected and desired, though the professional melancholy of his countenance might have been the precursor of the worst possible news. The hospitals on his rapid round had included Charing Cross, St. Thomas's, St. George's, and the Royal Free; but he had telephoned ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... they should undergo, while mourning for their kindred, the deepest privation in a property sense. Everything the loss of which would make them poor was sacrificed on the graves of their relatives or distinguished warriors, and as melancholy because of removal from their old homes caused frequent deaths, there was no lack of occasion for the sacrifices. The widows and orphans of the dead warriors were of course the chief mourners, and exhibited their grief in ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... life? It is evident that for the New Republican to admit that the thing is indeed a dilemma, that there is nothing for it but to make the best of whichever bad thing we have at hand, that we cannot have all we desire but only a greater or a lesser moiety, is a most melancholy and hampering admission. And, certainly, no New Republican will agree without a certain mental struggle, without a thorough and earnest inquiry into the possibility of a ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... dead in Sydney. I was told that he shot himself in a fit of melancholy. He was lying on board the Mahina—and the Mahina is here at anchor in this lagoon. I am the ...
— Edward Barry - South Sea Pearler • Louis Becke
... every object toward which it is turned. This defect in character is more generally the result of vicious or improper habits of mind, than any constitutional idiosyncrasy. It is the result of the indulgence of gloomy thoughts, morbid fancies, inordinate ambition, habitual melancholy, a complaining, fault-finding disposition. It is generally early acquired, not in childhood, but in youth. Childhood is too buoyant, fresh, and free for such indulgences. Early youth—when its passions are developing, ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... dirty old edition of Madame's letters, worked himself up to the notion that he had witnessed the scenes which he described. We were induced, in the course of our walk, to inquire somewhat into his own history, which appeared rather a melancholy one, though common enough in the times through which he had lived. About a week after the pillage and destruction of Chateau Grignan, he was denounced as a royalist, and immured in the prison of Orange, in company with several gentlemen of the ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... dangerous to wish for death, because this desire, generally speaking, is only to be met with in those who have arrived at a very high pitch of perfection, which we dare not think we have reached, or else in persons of a morose and melancholy temperament, and but seldom in those of ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... flower-adorned grave after another, walked hastily on until he reached the highest point, from whence he looked down earnestly, as if his eyes sought to single out some particular object among the wilderness of roofs. At first his countenance was sad, but at last the melancholy look changed to an expression of cheerful surprise, for his eye had found what it was seeking among those once familiar objects. He knew the old house, for memory keeps the record of early days most faithfully, although its appearance ...
— Watch—Work—Wait - Or, The Orphan's Victory • Sarah A. Myers
... the fragrant liquid to froth; pausing only to scold when her servant stained one of the dainty saucers or cups. Poor Rosa did not sing, although the spring attuned her broken spirit to a gentler melancholy than when the winds howled and the fog was cold in her marrow. She had been sentenced by the last Governor, the wise Borica, to eight years of domestic servitude in the house of Don Jose Arguello ...
— Rezanov • Gertrude Atherton
... imperfections of our moral nature; the fact being that the good man was simply worn out by the effort to complete his mysterious picture. He was seated languidly in a large oaken chair of vast dimensions covered with black leather; and without changing his melancholy attitude he cast on Porbus the distant glance of a man ...
— The Hidden Masterpiece • Honore de Balzac
... sir," said Bruno, with a melancholy smile. "You don't unnerstand. They're going t' shoot you. See? Ole John—'member ole ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... Hjalte said to Bjorn, "Why art thou so melancholy, man? Art thou sick, or art thou angry at any one?" Bjorn tells Hjalte his conversation with the king, and says it is a ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... large hall was new and strange to me. Two long rows of prostrate forms—more than forty, in all—and every face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. It was a gruesome spectacle. I watched there six days and nights, and a very melancholy experience it was. There was one daily incident which was peculiarly depressing: this was the removal of the doomed to a chamber apart. It was done in order that the MORALE of the other patients might not be injuriously affected by seeing one of their ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... have been the greatest uplift I ever had. When a body is not even remotely expecting such things, how the surprise takes the breath away! We had been interpreting your stillness to melancholy and depression, caused by that book. This is honest. Why, everything looks brighter now. A check for untold cash could not have made our hearts sing as ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... young ladies would unquestionably have called "horribly ugly," but whom no reflective physiognomist could have observed without interest, entered the room. This person was tall, extremely thin, and somewhat inclining to the left side; the complexion was dark, and the somewhat noble features wore a melancholy expression, which but seldom gave place to a smile of unusual beauty. The forehead elevated itself, with its deep lines, above the large brown extraordinary eyes, and above this a wood of black-brown hair erected itself, under whose thick stiff ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with one hand and grasping his Calvinistical creed with the other, Sawney ran away to the flinty hills, sung his psalm out of tune his own way, and listened to his sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the tallest thistles." But from the graver historian, developing the historic significance of their determined resistance to the insolent claims of ecclesiastical authority, their desperate hardihood elicits a more fitting tribute. "Hunted down," he says, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... later we were left alone. But your father was in you. Do I not know well enough where you got that settled melancholy of yours, that despondency, that somber grief—call it what you like—that marked him all his life, and even in his death? That came from him, your father. I thank God I did not give you that, knowing what life must hold for you in suffering! He suffered, yes, but not as you will. And you must—you ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... indeed incomprehensible. Perhaps no two individuals were ever more unlike in mind and disposition than my brother and myself: as light is opposed to darkness, so was that happy, brilliant, cheerful child to the sad and melancholy being who sprang from the same stock as himself, and was ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... festival Turn from their office to black funeral; Our instruments to melancholy bells; Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast; And all things change them ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... how many clever processes of manipulation he had learnt from you and your father, in his treatment of Oropastes' wounded brother; he reached Babylon at last safe and sound, and there, as we could not get sight of you, owing to the melancholy poisoning of your country-woman, I succeeded in obtaining him a lodging in the royal palace itself. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Marin was followed by a more substantial success. Early in September Abercromby's melancholy camp was cheered with the tidings that the important French post of Fort Frontenac, which controlled Lake Ontario, which had baffled Shirley in his attempt against Niagara, and given Montcalm the means ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... indeed, whilst he spoke all the purple and gold In the west had turn'd ashen, save one fading strip Of light that yet gleam'd from the dark nether lip Of a long reef of cloud; and o'er sullen ravines And ridges the raw damps were hanging white screens Of melancholy mist. "Nunc dimittis?" she said. "O God of the living! whilst yet 'mid the dead And the dying we stand here alive, and thy days Returning, admit space for prayer and for praise, In both these confirm us! ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... way of one not wont to be thwarted, and he had lost her—lost her, whatever might happen. He would get nothing after all by his revenge. Nothing but ashes in the mouth. And so I saw in softer moments something inexpressibly melancholy in that solitary giant-figure ...
— The House of the Wolf - A Romance • Stanley Weyman
... the officers of the police force would look to that, and was assured also that Mounser Green and the other gentlemen in the room would certainly attend the lecture. "I don't suppose I shall be gone by that time," said Mounser Green in a melancholy tone of voice. ...
— The American Senator • Anthony Trollope
... at least that branch of it to which he belonged, had been reduced by the ruin that resulted from the civil wars, and the confiscations peculiar to the times. His father had made a good deal of money abroad in business, but feeling that melancholy longing for his native soil, for the dark mountains and the green fields of his beloved country, he returned to it, and having taken a large farm of about a thousand acres, under a peculiar tenure, which we shall mention ere we close, he devoted ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... here," said he, seeing that the Baron shed a spirit of animation on the little family gathering. "And yet Hortense is not married," he added, noticing a trace of melancholy on his sister-in-law's countenance. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... Wingfield, a "worthy and religious gentleman." He was honorably buried, "having all the ordnance in the fort shot off with many volleys of small shot." If the Indians had known that those volleys signified the mortality of their comrades, the colony would no doubt have been cut off entirely. It is a melancholy picture, this disheartened and half-famished band of men quarreling among themselves; the occupation of the half-dozen able men was nursing the sick and digging graves. We anticipate here by saying, on the authority of a contemporary manuscript in the State Paper office, that when Captain ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... little hours could span The gloom that bound me stark and grim (No melancholy pierced me through Before the 7.32 Had ravished Barbara from view), And yet I brooked it like a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... it, and in front, across the road, there was an old table and an older seat among the trees, down by the swift-flowing river. A charming place for moralising indeed! None of us, however, were much in the style of the "melancholy Jacques," or, with our eyes on some vigorous fisherman higher up the river, we ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... and middle classes of society," says a celebrated writer, "it is a melancholy and distressing sight to observe, not unfrequently, a man of a noble and ingenuous disposition, once feelingly alive to a sense of honour and integrity, gradually sinking under the pressure of his circumstances, making his excuses at first with a blush of conscious shame, afraid to see the faces ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... revolution which occurs at puberty may go beyond its physiological limits in some instances, and become pathological. The vague feelings, blind longings, and obscure impulses which then arise in the mind, attest the awakening of an impulse which knows not its aim; a kind of vague and yearning melancholy is engendered, which leads to an abandonment to poetry of a gloomy, Byronic kind, or to indulgence in indefinite religious feelings and aspirations. There is a want of some object to fill the void in the feelings, to satisfy the undefined yearning—a ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... very long in coming, yet when it did, what with the restless movements of the horses and the melancholy murmur of the stream, it well-nigh took us by surprise. It was Boisrueil who touched my sleeve and made me aware of a low trampling on the road outside, a sound that had scarcely become clearly audible before ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... was sure of it, he crept over to Glenarvan and John Mangles, and startling them from their melancholy thoughts, led them to ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... Such is the melancholy result of this illegal and ill-fated expedition. Thus thoughtless young men have been induced by false and fraudulent representations to violate the law of their country through rash and unfounded expectations of assisting ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Millard Fillmore • Millard Fillmore
... a deception, as her mother said. She was a little, round, soft thing, whom you would have expected to flash over with sunshine. She was not a melancholy girl—as you may have been able to judge—and it was not her blame that anything in her position had developed her into a thoughtful, earnest character. But then she was always fancied younger than she really was; people supposed her as easy as her mother, ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... months ago I was returning to my Hotel in a melancholy humour, having past the evening at the Play-House. The Night was dark, and I was unaccompanied. Plunged in reflections which were far from being agreeable, I perceived not that three Men had followed me from the Theatre; till, on turning into an unfrequented ...
— The Monk; a romance • M. G. Lewis
... luminousness. It grew upwards and began to take form. Swathes of white muslin shaped themselves in the darkness, and there appeared a white face, in among the topmost folds of the muslin, with a Roman nose and a melancholy expression. He was not gay like Pocky, but he was intensely impressive, and spoke some lines in Italian, when asked to repeat a piece of Dante. Mrs Quantock knew they were Italian, because she recognised "notte" and "uno" and "caro," ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... lost his only and dearly loved daughter, and the blow to his sensitive temperament, already hardly tried by political anxiety, was severe. We still have the private letters which he wrote to Atticus after her death from his solitude at Astura on the edge of the melancholy Pomptine marshes;[824] and here, if our minds are sufficiently divested of modern ideas and trained to look on death with Roman eyes, we may be startled to find him thinking of her as still in some sense surviving, and ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... Wallabout, and anchored in the bay, were seen several vessels, decayed, unseaworthy, and repulsive. They were the prison-ships of New York. Here from the year 1776 a large number of American prisoners were confined until the close of the war, and the tragic tales of their sufferings and fate lend a melancholy interest to ...
— Harper's Young People, June 22, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... delicate, as unperceived, yet as effective, as a rich fabric on which a design is woven. It seemed to him as he listened to the talk—the brisk, shrewd remarks of Mr. Garlick; the courteous and rather melancholy answers of his host; as he watched the second priest's eyes looking gently and pleasantly about him; as he ate the plain, good food and drank the country drink, that, in spite of all, his lot was cast in very sweet places. There was not a hint here of disturbance, or of men's passions, or of ...
— Come Rack! Come Rope! • Robert Hugh Benson
... anybody loved her as Miss Inches did, she thought, or discovered such fine things in her character. Ten long years and a half had she lived with Papa and the children, and not one of them had found out that her eyes were full of soul, and an expression "of mingled mirth and melancholy unusual in a childish face, and more like that of Goethe's Mignon than any thing else in the world of fiction!" Johnnie had never heard of "Mignon," but it was delightful to be told that she resembled her, and she made Miss Inches a ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... she loved or been cruelly deceived by him. Though nothing of the kind had happened to her she was regarded in that light, and had even herself come to believe that she had suffered much in life. This melancholy, which did not prevent her amusing herself, did not hinder the young people who came to her house from passing the time pleasantly. Every visitor who came to the house paid his tribute to the melancholy mood of the hostess, and then amused himself with society gossip, ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... and blushes, Absconds and conceals; He creepeth and peepeth, He palters and steals; Infirm, melancholy, Jealous glancing around, An oaf, an ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... autograph written on her hollow cheeks, where the skin clung to the bones as if resisting the chill grasp of death. As she slowly rocked herself, striving to hush the cry of the child, her dry, husky cough formed a melancholy chorus, which seemed to annoy a man who sat before the small table covered with materials for copying music. His cadaverous, sallow complexion, and keen, restless eyes, bespoke Italian origin; and, although engaged in filling some blank ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... presents the usual desolate, disorderly appearance, of such places in this country; the ruined walls to the city; the sandy barren soil, and the odious looking low hills between it and the Sofaid-Koh, present as sad and melancholy a picture as could well be met with. The same desolate, disorderly, dirty appearance is to be met with in most Asiatic capitals, particularly those that have been subjected to independent misrule: while the more distant surrounding ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... The king received him with much graciousness and ordered him to be carried honourably to Witham, and the wretched remnant in the mud flat received him as an angel of God. Well they might do so, for they seemed to have passed a melancholy winter in twig huts, now called "weeps," in a little paled enclosure, not only without the requisites of their order, but with barely bread to their teeth. There was no monastery, not even a plan of one. William FitzJohn and his clayey serfs scowled upon the shivering interlopers, uncertain ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... are the "Hymn to Death," "The Old Man's Funeral," "A Forest Hymn," "The Lapse of Time," "An Evening Reverie," "The Old Man's Counsel," and "The Past." This last is one of the noblest of his productions, full of solemn beauty and melancholy music, and we cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting a few ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... cultivate a taste for the beautiful. We are necessarily compelled to contemplate much moral impurity and degradation. We are so often doomed to disappointment. We are apt to become either callous or melancholy, or, if preserved from these, the constant strain on the sensibilities is likely to injure the bodily health. On this account it seems necessary to cultivate that faculty for the gratification of which God has made such universal provision. See the green earth and blue sky, the lofty mountain and ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... and holy! Meet him in that place; Change his cheerless melancholy Into joy and grace; If thou hast forgiven, vex not; If thou lovest, go, Watching ever by the river, ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold
... a melancholy shake of her head. "No; how should they? It is not very likely that any new residents would come here! The place may suit poor people like me, but would not take the fancy of persons having plenty of money to spend, who can select a house where they like. ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... melancholy reflection, that among our American women who have been educated to better things, there should be found any who are willing to follow the lead of such foreign propagandists as the ringleted, glove-handed exotic, Ernestine L. Rose. We can understand how such men as the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... thence the joy of which it had become barren. My flagging spirits asked for something to speak to the affections; and not finding it, I drooped. Thus, notwithstanding the thoughtless delight that waited on its commencement, the impression I have of my life at Vienna is melancholy. Goethe has said, that in youth we cannot be happy unless we love. I did not love; but I was devoured by a restless wish to be something to others. I became the victim of ingratitude and cold coquetry—then I desponded, and imagined that ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... contrasted with his gay attire. He leant against the open window, carelessly holding in his hand a bouquet of faded jasmine, whilst he gazed with melancholy eyes upon the festive scene before him, and only by a shake of the head and a sad smile replied to the light badinage of the dancers as they passed the window. But now and then his eyes lighted up, and he sighed deeply ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... laying siege to the citadel cautiously, as was his way. Bluff Jack Lorrimer's courage was paralyzed by his love, and he drank deep to dispel his melancholy. Harry Bent—who was already under the spell of Netty Swinton, Dick's sister's—was indifferent, and Carnaby had been rejected three times, despite ...
— The Scarlet Feather • Houghton Townley
... the army that had been summoned appears at the Electran gate. Agave turns to them, and (in blank verse) calls all Thebans to behold the quarry she has taken without the useless weapons of the hunter; it shall be nailed up a trophy before her father's house. Shortly after enters on the right a melancholy procession of Cadmus and his servants bearing the fragments of Pentheus' body, with difficulty discovered and pieced together. In extended parallel dialogue between Cadmus and Evadne the phrensy gradually passes away from her and she recognizes the deed she has ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... and if any other happened to enter the cottage, their harsh manners and rude gait only enhanced to me the superior accomplishments of my friends. The old man, I could perceive, often endeavoured to encourage his children, as sometimes I found that he called them, to cast off their melancholy. He would talk in a cheerful accent, with an expression of goodness that bestowed pleasure even upon me. Agatha listened with respect, her eyes sometimes filled with tears, which she endeavoured to wipe away unperceived; but I generally found that her countenance and tone were more cheerful after ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... suggesting an immeasurable reserve power, it had all its old throbbing magnetism; but a new quality had been added to it. It had always had moments of passionate appeal; now it had gained a sadness, a depth of melancholy which in the past it had been powerless to express. A year before, Thayer could strike the tragic ...
— The Dominant Strain • Anna Chapin Ray
... carriage is exactly that of the King; her body is built to perfection, and were it not for her colour, the black of which diminishes day by day, she would be one of the loveliest persons in France; she is sad and melancholy by temperament, but as I have succeeded in attracting her confidence, and diverting her as much as one can do in a purgatory like this, we dance sometimes in secret, and then you would think you saw Mademoiselle de Nantes ...
— The Memoirs of Madame de Montespan, Complete • Madame La Marquise De Montespan
... Anglesey, as if he thought much of my taking the ayre as I have done; but I care not a turd; but whatever the matter is, I think he hath some ill-will to me, or at least an opinion that I am more the servant of the Board than I am. At noon home to dinner, where my wife still in a melancholy, fusty humour, and crying, and do not tell me plainly what it is; but I by little words find that she hath heard of my going to plays, and carrying people abroad every day, in her absence; and that I cannot help but the storm ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... glories our greatest poets were not ashamed to sing, with the Tudor masterfulness in her, and not a little of the Tudor grossness and passion, and remember the blots that stained her glories. Think of her sister, the morbidly melancholy tool of priests, who goes down the ages branded with an epithet only too sadly earned. Think of another woman that ruled over England in name, the weak instrument of base intrigues. And then turn to this life which we are looking upon to-day. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... spirit he would prove it by singing. He immediately chanted forth his death-song, and then his war-song, and all the songs he knew, "but in a very mournful strain," says Champlain, who was not then aware that all savage music has a melancholy character. The tortures which succeeded, accompanied by all the horrors which we shall mention hereafter, terrified the French, who made every effort to put a stop to them, but in vain. The following night, one ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... A melancholy prelude I would sing To song more drear, while thought soars into gloom. Find me the harbor of the roaming storm, Or end of souls whose doom is life itself! So vague, yet surely sad, the song I dream And utter not. So sends the tide its roll,— Unending chord of horror ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... left her neither strength nor power to exert herself or to interest herself in what was passing. Her sisters meant kindly in claiming no help about the household work from her, but they made a mistake in so doing. Active work, that would have really tired her, and left her no time for melancholy musings, would have been far better for her. As it was, she could apply herself to no employment, not even her favourite reading. Her time, when not immediately under her aunt's eye, was passed in listless wanderings to and fro, or in sitting with folded hands, thinking ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... primitive times to turn utterance into a fine art as now to make aesthetic paces out of mourning or child-birth. Primitive music is indeed a wail and a parturition; magical and suggestive as it may be, for long ages it never bethinks itself to be beautiful. It is content to furnish a contagious melancholy employment to souls without a language and with little interest in the real world. Barbaric musicians, singing and playing together more or less at random, are too much carried away by their performance ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... at him anxiously, and was so shocked that he forgot the strange blithe little farm entirely. For Lionel was as wan and wasted as though he had been through a fever, and his rosy face was white, and his merry eyes were melancholy. And suddenly, as Hobb clasped him, he flung his arms round his big brother's neck and buried his face in his ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... the margins were covered with his notes, which sometimes contradicted my theories and formulations. But the captain remained content with this method of refining my work, and he rarely discussed it with me. Sometimes I heard melancholy sounds reverberating from the organ, which he played very expressively, but only at night in the midst of the most secretive darkness, while the Nautilus slumbered in the wilderness ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... year?' exclaimed Violet. 'O dear! and there have I been telling him all about—about this spring. I would not have done it, if I had known. I thought he looked melancholy sometimes. Oh! I ...
— Heartsease - or Brother's Wife • Charlotte M. Yonge
... judgment serves practically as a sufficient criterion of truth, at least in relation to such extreme one-sidedness of view as approaches the abnormal, that is to say, one of the two poles of irrational exaltation, or "joy-madness," and abject melancholy, which, appear among the phenomena ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... my 'prentice hand in this work on Geri, the beautiful German sheep-dog, who had come into my possession in 1914. This dog—owing to excess of breeding, and also, perhaps, to the impressions imbibed in his youth was unusually shy and melancholy—he lacked all natural energy to "cut a figure" in any way; he had learnt to say "yes" and "no," and I feel sure that he understood me very well, but his nervousness and his constant fear held him back from rapping out anything beyond his yes ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... held on. Her rudder was broken, her wheel carried away; within she was flooded with water from the peccant hawse-pipes; she had just made the signal "fires extinguished," and lay helpless, awaiting the inevitable end. Between this melancholy hulk and the external reef Kane must find a path. Steering within fifty yards of the reef (for which she was actually headed) and her foreyard passing on the other hand over the Trenton's quarter as she rolled, the Calliope sheered between the rival dangers, came to the wind triumphantly, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in the presence of this reawakening of the fields and woods. She gave way to a sweet melancholy and spent hours languidly dreaming. All the tender incidents of her first hours of love came back to her, not that any renewal of affection for her husband stirred her heart; that had been completely destroyed; but the soft breeze which fanned her cheek and the ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893
... magistrate admonished a man and woman placed in the dock before him for this heinous offence of dancing in the street, which gave so much pleasure to my Catalan youths and maidens all last night: "This is not a country in which people can afford to be jovial. You must cultivate a spirit of melancholy if you want to be safe. Go away and be as sad ...
— Impressions And Comments • Havelock Ellis
... alone marched with an air of gaiety. As to the other individuals of the troop, if their clothes showed marked differences, their faces at least and their attitudes wore a uniform expression of ill-fortune. Citizens and peasantry, their faces all bore the imprint of deepest melancholy; their silence had something sullen in it; they all seemed crushed under the yoke of a single thought, terrible no doubt but carefully concealed, for their faces were impenetrable, the slowness of their gait alone betraying their inward communings. From time to time a few of them, noticeable for ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... one," his supervisor, Forester, said, sitting on the side of Eddie's desk. Normally exuberant, he was left melancholy and distracted by the ...
— New Apples in the Garden • Kris Ottman Neville
... first two days of Harry King's absence Madam Manovska relapsed into a more profound melancholy, and the care of her mother took up Amalia's time and thoughts so completely as to give her little for indulging her own anxiety for Harry's safety. Strangely, she felt no fear for themselves, although they were thus alone on the mountain top. She had a sense ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... is pathological. Men overmuch in studies and universities get ill in their livers and sluggish in their circulations; they suffer from shyness, from a persuasion of excessive and neglected merit, old maid's melancholy, and a detestation of all the levities of life. And their suffering finds its vent in ferocious thoughts. A vigorous daily bath, a complete stoppage of wine, beer, spirits, and tobacco, and two hours of hockey in the afternoon would probably ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Judas. The appearance of La Casa on the scene is interesting. He was the celebrated author of the Capitolo del Forno, the author of many sublime and melancholy sonnets, who was now at Venice prosecuting a charge of heresy against Pier Paolo Vergerio, and paying his addresses to a noble lady of the Quirini family. It seems that on the territory of San Marco he made common cause with the exiles ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... when he says: "It is a melancholy reflection, when one is going through the lists of aeroplane fatalities, to think how many might have been avoided. Really the crux of the situation in this connection, as it appears to me, is this: the first men who flew, having had all the drudgery and danger ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... Duerer's. This you will not be able to copy; but you must keep it beside you, and refer to it as a standard of precision in line. If you can get one with a wing in it, it will be best. The crest with the cock, that with the skull and satyr, and the "Melancholy," are the best you could have, but any will do. Perfection in chiaroscuro drawing lies between these two masters, Rembrandt and Duerer. Rembrandt is often too loose and vague; and Duerer has little or no effect of mist or uncertainty. If ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... out on horse-back now; thou lookest pale and emaciated, having lost all animation. I wish to know the disease thou sufferest from, so that I may endeavour to apply a remedy.' Thus addressed by his son, Santanu answered, 'Thou sayest truly, O son, that I have become melancholy. I will also tell thee why I am so. O thou of Bharata's line, thou art the only scion of this our large race. Thou art always engaged in sports of arms and achievements of prowess. But, O son, I am always thinking of the instability of human life. If any danger overtake thee, O child ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... his Royal Highness to Marguerite, as soon as he had caught sight of the rigid figure of the old lady; "Lud love me! she looks very virtuous and very melancholy." ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... could she run for refuge, even from want, and misery, but to the very traitor that had undone her. She was acquainted with none that could or would espouse her cause, a helpless, useless load of grief and melancholy! with child! disgraced! her own relations either unable, ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. IV • Theophilus Cibber
... abuse by taking too much. And therefore in the summer they feed on fruits, because they are moist and juicy and cool, and counteract the heat and dryness. In the winter they feed on dry articles, and in the autumn they eat grapes, since they are given by God to remove melancholy and sadness; and they also make use of scents to a great degree. In the morning, when they have all risen they comb their hair and wash their faces and hands with cold water. Then they chew thyme or rock parsley or fennel, or rub their hands with these plants. The old men make incense, ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... of it than was good for me—as much as 85 degrees, I should think,—and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation. When I got better I labelled them all "Pie-crust," and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with some ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Dane Rollo!' called out Mr. Kingsland as he went by. 'Coffee and pistols at four to-morrow morning!— And if my shot fails, there are ten more to follow. The strong probability is that Miss Kennedy beholds us both for the last time!' Which melancholy statement was honoured with a soft irrepressible laugh that it was a pity Mr. Kingsland would not ...
— Wych Hazel • Susan and Anna Warner
... Sunday, and Thomas locked the church on the inner side, and read the service with Dorcas and Tabitha for sole congregation. It was a melancholy business, for some sense of evil seemed to hang over all three of them, also over everybody else, for the Christians went about with dejected looks and not one person spoke to them. Only Ivana came at night as usual to sleep with Tabitha, ...
— Smith and the Pharaohs, and Other Tales • Henry Rider Haggard
... the nature and origin of those agreeable emotions which are so generally produced by the sight of objects that suggest the ideas of decay and desolation. It is happy for us, that, by the alchemy of poetry, we are able to turn some of our misfortunes into sources of melancholy pleasure, after the poignancy of grief has been assuaged by time. Nature has beneficently provided, also, that many an object, which is capable of communicating no direct pleasure to our senses, shall affect us agreeably through the medium of sentiment. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... answered, recovering himself. "Rather a melancholy place to make acquaintance in, I should think, that Valley you spoke of. I should like ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... to his son-in-law about this distressing event: "July 15. My Brother and very dear Son-in-law,—It is with the greatest satisfaction that I have heard that Your Imperial Majesty, as well as the Empress, my beloved daughter, has escaped the melancholy accidents that occurred at the ball of my Ambassador, Prince Schwarzenberg. I cannot express to you, my brother, my gratitude for the tokens of your interest which you manifested on that occasion, and for your personal ...
— The Happy Days of the Empress Marie Louise • Imbert De Saint-Amand
... returned upon the coroner's inquest, founded upon a friendly examination of all the facts surrounding the melancholy death of this soldier, made at the time of death and in the midst of his neighbors and friends, both by what it contains and by what is omitted, together with the other facts developed, leads me to the conclusion that if a pension is granted in this ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... this. She stood irresolute, gazing now to the right and now to the left, as the major retired in one direction and Dick with Crusoe in another. Suddenly Crusoe, who, although comfortable in body, was ill at ease in spirit, gave utterance to a melancholy howl. The mother's love instantly prevailed. For one moment she pricked up her ears at the sound, and then, lowering them, trotted quietly after her new master, and followed him to his cottage on the margin of ...
— The Dog Crusoe and His Master - A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... made the commencement of each new week as profitable as it was welcome. The recollection, too, of the land they had left was more tender on this quiet day, and past joys and trials were often recalled with a kind of melancholy pleasure, sometimes with an almost regretful feeling that the scenes in which they had laughed and toiled should know them no longer. The green fields—the hawthorn hedges—the cottages and the little gardens, ...
— The Young Emigrants; Madelaine Tube; The Boy and the Book; and - Crystal Palace • Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick
... about the scene where once as a man the old minstrel fled for dear life, there hangs at the dead time of night a sense of mystery and awe. As the chilly wind comes wailing across the everlasting hills, blending its voice with the melancholy dirge of the river, one may almost believe that through the gloom there passes swiftly a bent, hurrying figure. Perhaps it is but the swaying of a branch near by, that so startlingly suggests the waving in the wind ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... meet my engagement at ten in the forenoon. On our way, we could not help noticing the unusual number of foot-sore, travel-soiled people, many of them evidently factory operatives, limping away from the town upon their melancholy wanderings. We could see, also, by the number of decrepid old women, creeping towards Wigan, and now and then stopping to rest by the wayside, that it was relief day at the Board of Guardians. At ten, I met the gentleman who had kindly ...
— Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine • Edwin Waugh
... morning; and as he opened his writing-desk it was with the manner of one entirely satisfied with himself and his own exertions. Still, a generous regret mingled with his triumph. It was a great thing to have destroyed the most pernicious privateer that sailed out of France; and yet it was a melancholy fate to befall seventy or eighty human beings—to perish like so many curling caterpillars, destroyed by fire. Nevertheless, the thing was done; and it must be reported to the authorities above him. The following letter was consequently written to the commanding ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... could muster, cautiously entered my room, where I found everything quiet, there being neither cloud, nor devil, nor anything of the kind to be seen, and getting into bed I slept quietly till morning. The next day I was rather sad and melancholy, but kept all my troubles to myself, through fear of Brown. This happened before my father's sickness, and consequently between the four and six years ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... is that which immediately concerns those who are making proficiency, that which concerns the security of the other two, so that not even in sleep any appearance unexamined may surprise us, nor in intoxication, nor in melancholy. This, it may be said, is above our power. But the present philosophers neglecting the first topic and the second (the affects and duties), employ themselves on the third, using sophistical arguments ([Greek: metapiptontas]), making conclusions from questioning, employing hypotheses, lying. ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... no companions to join you?" "I shall have guides," he answered, and relapsed into meditative silence. Presently I ventured another question: "You go on business, perhaps— not on pleasure?" He turned his melancholy eyes on mine. "Do I look as if I were traveling for pleasure's sake?" he asked gently. I felt rebuked, and hastened to apologise. "Pardon me; I ought not to have said that. But you interest me greatly, and I wish, if possible, ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford
... mother, "very. There are things about her so singular; she isn't like me, now, a particle;" and Marie sighed, as if this was a truly melancholy consideration. ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... lonely and desolate when the door had closed behind her. Jack rose, and roughly shook himself, as if by that means he hoped to throw off the oppression and melancholy that was invading even his light heart. Hundreds of moths were dashing themselves to death against the high glass shade that covered the blowing candles from them. He stood and looked at their hopeless efforts to reach the flame. He had an unpleasant thought; one of those thoughts which have ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... convent where I once had sojourned for a few days with the fanatical monks, its pale, stern inmates in their robes of black, and the grated window from whence I could look out, a forbidden indulgence, upon the melancholy Coliseum and the crumbling ruins of the Eternal City. The mighty glaciers of the Splugen too rose before me, gleaming in the sun like polished silver, and those terrible solitudes, the birthplace of the Rhine, where bursting from the bowels of its native ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... the reader will find traces of a singular superstition, not yet altogether discredited in the wilder parts of Scotland. The lykewake, or watching a dead body, in itself a melancholy office, is rendered, in the idea of the assistants, more dismally awful, by the mysterious horrors of superstition. In the interval betwixt death and interment, the disembodied spirit is supposed to hover around its mortal habitation, and, if provoked by certain rites, retains the ...
— Ballads of Mystery and Miracle and Fyttes of Mirth - Popular Ballads of the Olden Times - Second Series • Frank Sidgwick
... The melancholy intelligence of your sister's death has grieved me more than I can express, and I beg to render you my heartfelt sympathy. Truly we live in a world where solemn shadows are continually falling upon our path—shadows that teach us the insecurity of all temporal blessings, and warn us that ...
— Social Life - or, The Manners and Customs of Polite Society • Maud C. Cooke
... that something had gone wrong, and, under pretence of syringing the orange-trees, he lingered near his master, and peered through the sunny leaves upon Riccabocca's melancholy brows. ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the sense of physical suffering, deep melancholy, and utter despair by the medium of the written word, it was Clive in this passage. He had, it will be remembered, attempted suicide before, as a young man. When the pistol refused to go off, he considered it an omen that he was reserved ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... walks he went up to the window and stood looking out. The gulch always impressed him; it had a solemn melancholy majesty and desolate grandeur that is not easy to define in words: an icy splendour by moonlight, and a horrible gloomy beauty towards the fall of the day. It was at this time that Talbot stood looking out at its rugged edges and ...
— A Girl of the Klondike • Victoria Cross
... and idle kegs, turned to the almost dry bed of the creek. The signs of ante-prohibition days, blistered and faded, were still in place. Light showed in windows where fly-specked useless licenses were displayed. Back of the bars a melancholy array of soda-water advertised lack of interest in soft drinks. The front rooms held no loungers, but the click of chips and murmurs of talk came from ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... how melancholy must be the consideration that any single beau, especially if he have but half a yard of ribbon in his hat, shall weigh heavier in the scale of female affection than twenty Sir Isaac Newtons! How must our reader, who perhaps had wisely ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... the picture she did not like. She looked at it with a growing dissatisfaction. And then she saw what it was. The woman was sinking to melancholy. She bowed under the hand of fate. She did not know why, this night of all others, she should resent that. What did she ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... original is cast in the lira form would compel one to assign this composition to a date not earlier than 1542, when Garcilasso's poems were first published. Nothing, however, could be more remote from Garcilasso's nebulous half-pagan melancholy; we are no less distant from the pseudonymous nymphs of Cetina and Francisco de la Torre: the elegant Amaryllis of the one, the elusive Filis of the other, though destined to be re-incarnated by a tribe ...
— Fray Luis de Leon - A Biographical Fragment • James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
... continually in pious meditation on God, salvation, and eternal life; and must spend their life in prayers and in reading the Word and pious books. But those who renounce the world and live in the spirit in this manner acquire a melancholy life, unreceptive of heavenly joy. To receive the life of heaven a man must by all means live in the world and engage in its duties and affairs and by a moral and civil life ...
— The Gist of Swedenborg • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Commissioner Adam also came to see me, and the meeting, though pleasing, was melancholy. It is the first time we have met since the break up of his hopes in the death of his eldest son on his return from India, where he was Chief in Council and highly esteemed.[129] The Commissioner is not a very early friend of mine, for I scarce knew him till his settlement in Scotland with his ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... told that his niece Bell had accepted Dr Crofts, and he had signified a sort of acquiescence in the arrangement, saying that if it were to be so, he had nothing to say against Dr Crofts. He spoke this in a melancholy tone of voice, wearing on his face that look of subdued sorrow which was now habitual to him. It was to Mrs Dale that he spoke on the subject. "I could have wished that it might have been otherwise," he ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... glance for a moment dispelled the melancholy of her face, and then the old look returned with added ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... chattering, so loud as to attract for a while the most of our attention. There is not a sound in nature so cheering and animating as the song of the purple martin, and none so well calculated to drive away melancholy. Though not one of the earliest voices to be heard, the chorus is perceptibly more loud and effective when this bird ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... choosing to risk their lives in it. There was a very great reluctance felt to going even to remove the body and the wounded man, until several abolitionists and Friends had collected for that object, when others found courage to follow on. The excitement caused by this most melancholy affair is very great among all classes. The abolitionists, of course, mourn the occurrence, while they see in it a legitimate fruit of the Fugitive Slave Law, just such a harvest of blood as they had long feared that the law would produce, and which they had earnestly labored ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... letter to myself, the eminent novelist gives a brief sketch of his mode of life, so interesting that I have secured his permission to translate and print it here:—"Since my wife died," Senor Valdes writes, "my life has continued to be tranquil and melancholy, dedicated to work and to my son. During the winters, I live in Asturias, and during the summers, in Madrid. I like the company of men of the world better than that of literary folks, because the former teach me more. I am given up ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... together with his superlative beauty and his devotion to myself, bred in me as great an affection for him as a man's breast can hold. This passionate love led me oftentimes to delight the lad with music; for I observed that his marvellous features, which by complexion wore a tone of modest melancholy, brightened up, and when I took my cornet, broke into a smile so lovely and so sweet, that I do not marvel at the silly stories which the Greeks have written about the deities of heaven. Indeed, if my boy had lived in those times, he would probably ...
— The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini • Benvenuto Cellini
... over his fine vegetables. He nodded phlegmatically at Anderson. He never smiled. Occasionally his long facial muscles relaxed, but they never widened. He was indefinably serious by nature, yet not melancholy, and absolutely acquiescent in his life conditions. The farmer of New Jersey is not of the stuff which breeds anarchy. He is rooted fast to his red-clinging native soil, which has taken hold of his spirit. He is tenacious, but not revolutionary. He was as adamant on the ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... suddenly face about to the westward, you see before you one vast forest, uninterrupted except by the cultivated openings which have been made by the axe on the summits of some of the loftiest hills, and which tend considerably to diminish those melancholy sensations its gloomy monotony would otherwise inspire. The innumerable undulations in this vast expanse of forest, forcibly remind you of the ocean when convulsed by tempests; save that the billows of the one slumber in a fixed and leaden ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... etc., are those of an ordinary intelligent Englishman of conscientious research, fed on the "Lives of the Poets" and Trafalgar memories. The morality, as in the Essay on Montaigne, is unexceptionable; the following would commend itself to any boarding school: "Melancholy experience has never ceased to show that great warlike talents, like great talents of any kind, may be united with ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... sigh'd to reflect upon his Misfortune in being the occasion of the French Officer's Death, which might have been honourably avoided; yet he laugh'd plentifully, when he heard the Part I had afterwards in that Melancholy Farce; and rally'd me home when I insisted upon Charges and desired to be reimburs'd with Sixty Louis d'Ors, which that Affair had cost me upon his Account; all the Satisfaction I could get was, that he thought I put a greater Value ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... time it is made to sing a song, which, readily awakening the sympathies of the soul, causes the listener to recognize and feel the effects of the intonations of pathos, of passion, of deepest melancholy, or those ...
— Music and Some Highly Musical People • James M. Trotter
... leakage-now it was a nightmare. All he did cost an exhausting price in the effort of decision. Duty and fear had long made a battle-ground of his soul, and when he realized that he had broken down again from "overwork," as they all expressed it, the depression of melancholy was added to the weight he so quietly bore. Yet this man of many responsibilities and interests had never truly worked. Since he left college he had played at work. Effort had been expended never more conscientiously. He was ever ready to give added hours ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... was masculine; and believed in predestination and the final perseverance of the saints. He was rather unequal in his discourses, for he had a tendency to moodiness, and, at times, even to hypochondria. When this temper was upon him he was combative or melancholy; and sometimes, to the disgust of many who came from all parts of London to listen to him, he did not preach in the proper sense of the word, but read a chapter, made a comment or two upon it, caused a hymn to be sung, and then dismissed his congregation with the briefest of prayers. ...
— The Revolution in Tanner's Lane • Mark Rutherford
... these institutions into more complete and prosperous operation, than in plans for changing them, or substituting others in their stead. Were it not that such a course would be unjust to individuals, a long and melancholy catalogue might easily be made out of abortive plans which have sprung up in the minds of young men in the manner I have described, and which, after perhaps temporary success, have resulted in partial or total failure. These failures are of every kind. Some are school-books on ...
— The Teacher • Jacob Abbott
... he was at the house of an Indian trader, in the vicinity of Burlington, when I became acquainted and frequently convened with him in broken English, and through the medium of gestures and pantomine. A deep seated melancholy was apparent in his countenance, and conversation. He endeavored to make me comprehend, on one occasion, his former greatness, and represented that he was once master of the country, east, north, and south ...
— Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk • Black Hawk
... in a slow and melancholy voice, "when comes it? It must first enter into the human heart; and there, there live so many demons, so much disquiet and painful longing—but ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... most solemn book in the world, not excepting Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," or even "Fearne on Contingent Remainders," is an English publication of a half-century or so ago, entitled "Jokes about ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... conversation. The young men—as is generally the case in religious sects of a rigid and clannish character—were by no means handsome. Their faces all bore the stamp of repression, in some form or other, and as they talked their eyes wandered with an expression of melancholy longing and timidity towards the sweet, maidenly faces, whose bloom, and pure, gentle beauty not even their ...
— The Story Of Kennett • Bayard Taylor
... with a costly lace cap, from which wide ribbons of rose- colored satin flowed down on her shoulders. But the countenance of the empress did not correspond to this coquettish and youthful dress. She was young and beautiful, but an expression of profound melancholy overspread her features. Her cheeks were transparently white, and a sad, touching smile quivered round her finely- chiselled, narrow lips; her high, expansive forehead was shaded, as it were, by a cloud of sadness; and her large black eyes shot, from time to time, gloomy flashes which seemed ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... Alexey, tell me how?" she said in melancholy mockery at the hopelessness of her own position. "Is there any way out of such a position? Am I not the wife ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... begging his daily food from house to house, seemed to them a horrible thing. It could never be permitted that a prince should disgrace himself in this way. Every effort must be taken to eradicate such ideas; after all, it was but the melancholy of youth, and it would pass. So stringent orders were given to distract his mind in every way from solemn thoughts, to attempt by a continued round of pleasure and luxury to attract him to more ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... awakening from a long slumber. She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad, beautiful, stern eyes—the only one there was to approve or condemn what she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful reproach on his handsome, melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... brought her to the North Sand Head, and round and outside it to the melancholy spot where, in the waning autumnal light, they could just discern the wreck. They passed through the crowd of Deal boats, and close to the tug-boat; but no one spoke or hailed the other, as all knew what had to be done, and the ...
— Heroes of the Goodwin Sands • Thomas Stanley Treanor
... long days, the mental patients in the psychopathic ward came and peered through my barred door. At night, in the early morning, all through the day there were cries and shrieks and moans from the patients. It was terrifying. One particularly melancholy moan used to keep up hour after hour, with the regularity of a heart beat. I said to myself, "Now I have to endure this. I have got to live through this somehow. I'll pretend these moans are the noise of an elevated train, beginning faintly in the distance and getting ...
— Jailed for Freedom • Doris Stevens
... features, especially the mouth, now showed more plainly even than in earlier life the calm strength acquired by struggles and suffering. The pathos which later portraits have often given to his countenance is not apparent in the earlier ones, but rather an expression of melancholy. The deep glow and energy of his spirit, which even Cranach's pencil has failed wholly to represent, seems to have found chief expression in his dark eyes. These evidently struck the old rector of Wittenberg, Pollich, and the legate Caietan at ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... me of a circumstance that happened some fifteen years ago. I had a letter of introduction to a lady who wished to engage my children to read at a party she was about to give. She received me with an air of melancholy politeness, at the same time informing me that the gathering was postponed, as dear little Fanny was 'real sick.' I saw a wine-glass and teaspoon on the table by the side of the sofa, which had a small blanket on it bound with sky-blue ribbon, covering ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... haply, the origin of the crime be traced, the Superintendent embodies in his report a reccommendation looking to a change in the law, which shall tend to suppress and control the evil. If there be indication that a particular order of crime prevails, or that, unhappily, some new departure in its melancholy category is being practised, it will, again, be his place to represent the situation to the Government, to the end that a healthier state of things may be brought about. He is authorized, in certain cases, to make advances on an individual Indian's account, and, also, on the general ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... (afterwards the Emperor Frederick) was married, with brilliant ceremonial, to the Princess Royal, at the Chapel Royal, St James's, an event marked by general national rejoicings; another event in the private life of the Queen, but one of a melancholy character, was the death of the Duchess of Orleans at the age ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Volume III (of 3), 1854-1861 • Queen of Great Britain Victoria
... appearances to the contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things that would soon ruin us. And he gave me such a detail of misfortunes now existing, or that were soon to exist, that he left me half melancholy. Had I known him before I engaged in this business, probably I never should have done it. This man continued to live in this decaying place, and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for many years to ...
— Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin • Benjamin Franklin
... life, would disappear at once. These human years would be happy; and the eternal ages would roll on in brightness and beauty; and the still, sad music of Humanity, that sounds through the world, now in the accents of grief, and now in pensive melancholy, would change to anthems, sounding to the March of Time, and bursting out from the heart ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... pleasantly. "I hope you had a good time in the holidays. I suppose Silver has told you the melancholy news—that you are to desert us this term? It is a great pity. We shall all be very sorry to lose you. I don't look forward to seeing you bowl us all out in the house-matches next summer," he added, with a smile, "though we shall expect a few full-pitches ...
— The Head of Kay's • P. G. Wodehouse
... This melancholy disaster sets in the strongest relief the (p. 447) gallant devotion of the crews of the two English life-boats, all the members of which risked their lives, while three of them died in the brave effort to save our countrymen. The sorrow ...
— The Medallic History of the United States of America 1776-1876 • J. F. Loubat
... in the story of Thomas is after the resurrection. The first evening the apostles met in the upper room to talk over the strange things which had occurred that day. For some reason Thomas was not at this meeting. We may infer that his melancholy temperament led him to absent himself. He had loved Jesus deeply, and his sorrow was very great. There had been rumors all day of Christ's resurrection, but Thomas put no confidence in these. Perhaps his despondent disposition ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... way home from their walk, become any easier to tell him; but her secret decision to do so before he left gave her a kind of factitious calm and laid a melancholy ecstasy upon the hour. Still skirting the subject that fanned their very faces with its flame, they clung persistently to other topics, and it seemed to Anna that their minds had never been nearer together than in this hour when their hearts were so separate. In the ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... crack, as shown by the decrepit state of the buildings, many of which are broken-backed, twisted, and contorted—although the intermediate earth is about 200 feet in thickness. The place, therefore, has a sort of downcast look, and the streets have a melancholy appearance; whilst the sheds of the brine works, made to appear more murky by contrast with heaps of white salt refuse, suggest the thought that the town has gone into mourning. Exception must be taken to St. Peter's Church, which stands outside the town, ...
— Handbook to the Severn Valley Railway - Illustrative and Descriptive of Places along the Line from - Worcester to Shrewsbury • J. Randall
... Day was too sanguine to be made melancholy by these affairs. She was of a naturally cheerful nature—an attribute she inherited from her father. It took more than the faded-out lady to cause the girl ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... Bolingbroke, in the Tower of London, side by side with his gaolers, he lived and moved in the world of phantasy of the Romance of the Rose. Venus, Cupid, Hope, Fair-Welcome, Pleasure, Pity, Danger, Sadness, Care, Melancholy, Sweet-Looks were around the desk, on which, in the deep embrasure of a window, beneath the sun's rays, he wrote his ballads, as delicate and fresh as an illumination on the page of a manuscript. For him it was the world of allegory that really existed. He wandered in the forest of Long ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... Falls above, where a line of foamy cataracts ridged the river, and the rocks towered gloomily on either hand: and of the city below, with its buildings of pure marble, and the yellow earthworks that crested Arlington Heights. The clouds over the Potomac were gorgeous in hue, but forests of melancholy pine clothed the sides of the hills, and the roar of the river made such beautiful monotone that I almost thought it could be translated to words. Our passes were now demanded by a fat, bareheaded officer, and while he panted through their contents, ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... extolling the two last-named delicacies. We went to the Opera, and there, in a brilliant salle of white and gold, spoilt, however, by the incongruity of bonnets mingling everywhere with full evening toilettes, assisted at a massacre—unmusical and melancholy—of "Lucrezia." We drove out through the crude, unfinished Central Park to Harlem lane, whither the trotters are wont to resort, and saw several teams looking very much like work (though no celebrities), almost all ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... a story told of a certain officer who was going into action for the first time. His legs were shaking so that he could hardly sit his horse. He looked down at them, and with melancholy but decided voice said, 'Ah! you are shaking, are you? You would shake a great deal more if you knew where I was going to take you to-day; ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... feet above the pavement. The eleven steps of the flight before the door, made it still higher. Jehan mounted slowly, a good deal incommoded by his heavy armor, holding his crossbow in one hand, and clinging to a rung with the other. When he reached the middle of the ladder, he cast a melancholy glance at the poor dead outcasts, with which the steps were strewn. "Alas!" said he, "here is a heap of bodies worthy of the fifth book of the Iliad!" Then he continued his ascent. The vagabonds followed him. There was one on every rung. At the sight ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... went off into nonsense verses about gentlemen in the parlour drinking wine and cordial, and ladies in the drawing-room drinking tea and coffee, &c. I have heard that many of the masters and overseers on these plantations prohibit melancholy tunes or words, and encourage nothing but cheerful music and senseless words, deprecating the effect of sadder strains upon the slaves, whose peculiar musical sensibility might be expected to make them especially excitable ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... the Roman parents, rounds of beef, tyrannical uncles and cold hams in England. Tempt me no more, Jerry; Bo'sun, avaunt, and leave me to melancholy and emptiness." ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... looked down at her, at her glistening auburn hair, and slender, white, ringed hand clutching the cushions, at her lissom shaking form, at the shapely legs in the rolled-down silk stockings—and he felt a melancholy happiness in the proof that he had reached her shallow heart, and in the fact that this was ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... hasten to thee; Every month of every year will seek thee; Every week of every month will seek thee." So the maiden listened to her brothers, With the ban she crossed the distant waters: But, behold! O melancholy marvel! God sent down the plague, and all the brothers. All the nine, were swept away, and lonely Stood their miserable ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... imagine a staring succession of eyes, beginning with the dilated pupils of Whitney and passing on to the corpse-like expression of Mendoza, but always ending with the remarkable, piercing, black eyes of the Indian woman with the melancholy- visaged son, as they had impressed me the first time I saw them and, in fact, ever since. Was it a freak of my mind, or was there some reason ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... when the Damiens, in the name of the parliaments, as one party says, in the name of the Jesuits, as the other party says, and, what is more true, in the name—" The king suddenly paused; a deep shade of melancholy settled on his features, his noble head dropped on his bosom. Louis XV remained for some time motionless; at length, "Well," he exclaimed, attempting to force a smile, "well! I will write to the ladies de Grammont, to inform them that they need not give ...
— "Written by Herself" • Baron Etienne Leon Lamothe-Langon
... an altar upon which blazed the undying fires, the putting out of which was supposed to portend so much woe to the nation. Here also was the huge drum, made of serpents' skins, struck only on extraordinary occasions, when it sent forth a melancholy sound that could be heard for miles—a sound of woe to the Spaniards in after times. Montezuma, attended by a high priest, came forward to receive Cortes. After conferring with the priests the emperor conducted the Spaniards into the building, ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... years, in the midst of the fairest pastoral valley of New England, he lived in the contemplation of the ideas that had passed across his mind in the quiet of European galleries, and now became more definite impressions. The secret of those years, with their deep, slow current of refined and melancholy thought, is now sealed with him in eternal sleep; but from the works that remain to us as the matured fruits of his life, we may gain some hint of his experiences. It is not to be questioned that he drew from the New-England soil that he ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... era. Mention has already been made of Ariwara no Narihira, a grandson of the Emperor Heijo and one of the most renowned among Japanese poets. He was a man of singular beauty, and his literary attainments, combined with the melancholy that marked his life of ignored rights, made him a specially interesting figure. He won the love of Taka, younger sister of Fujiwara Mototsune and niece of Yoshifusa. Their liaison was not hidden. But Yoshifusa, in default ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... be the best of the collection; from whence only the two first are taken. They are spoken of differently, either with exaggerated applause or contempt, as the reader's disposition is either turned to mirth or melancholy. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... happy; he hated the rough society of Scotch lawyers, and quarrelled with his father, the Laird of Auchinleck, who seems to have been a tiresome, disagreeable old man. The Laird died in 1782, and seven years later Boswell lost his "valuable wife." His story becomes melancholy: money troubles and family perplexities beset him (he was left with five children); and it may be that what once made him odd, aggravated by his breaking health, now made him gloomy. After his wife's death he came to London for good. Already he ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... away, and, although crowds of monkeys came to examine Zingle in his cage, the poor Prince grew very pale and thin for lack of proper food, while the continuance of his unhappy imprisonment made him sad and melancholy. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... that he caught me once making too free with his throat on a club night, after every body else had retired. But, observe, he shuffles in his story according to his state of civilation. When not far gone, he contents himself with saying that he caught me ogling his throat; and that I was melancholy for some weeks after, and that my voice sounded in a way expressing, to the nice ear of a connoisseur, the sense of opportunities lost—but the club all know that he's a disappointed man himself, and that he speaks querulously ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... nothing was amiss, and disconcerting his preparations for a reconciliation. But the captain's ordinary manner was calculated to cover all such feelings; and as he shook hands, he felt much kindness for Amabel, as an unconscious victim, whose very smiles were melancholy, and plenty of them there were, for she rejoiced sincerely in the meeting, as Guy was pleased, and a home ...
— The Heir of Redclyffe • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the mother of the late owner), a piece of unfinished tapestry, samplers, china vases, books, papers, two or three knots of faded ribbon, all tossed in a corner like a heap of rubbish. The things had evidently been forgotten in the big move, but it looked melancholy. ...
— Chateau and Country Life in France • Mary King Waddington
... older and long gone, scarce conscious of the beggar at his elbow and hardly seeing the half dozen workmen who laboured at their trades almost in the middle of the public way—where all was once aged and silent and melancholy and full of the elder memories—there, at that very corner, he is hustled and jostled by an eager crowd, thrust to the wall by huge, grinding, creaking carts, threatened with the modern death by the wheel of the modern ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... whose top they receive the reward of their good or bad deeds, declare that women who have been guilty of infanticide never reach the top of this mountain at all. They are compelled instead to travel around the scenes of their crimes with branches of trees tied to their legs. The melancholy sounds which are heard in the still summer evenings, and which the ignorance of the white people looks upon as the screams of the goat-suckers, are really, according to my informant, the moanings of these unhappy beings"—Franklin's Journey to ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... if you could have ruled without the Gospel, it would have been doubtful whether the Gospel should be established or not; for now that you are established in your throne by the Gospel, you suffer it to reach no farther than the end of your sceptre limiteth unto it." Of a milder, and more melancholy cast, is the touching language, when the hope of life, but not the firmness of his cause had deserted him. "I look not to live this week to an end. I never took myself for a rebuker, much less for a reformer of states and kingdoms. I never did anything in this cause for contention, vainglory, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... still suffer when I recall her perfidy, I still laugh at her expression of entire conviction and sweet satisfaction that I must die, or at any rate sink into perpetual melancholy," de Marsay went on. "Oh! do not laugh yet!" he said to his listeners; "there is better to come. I looked at her very tenderly after a pause, and said to her, 'Yes, that is what I have been wondering.'—'Well, what will you do?'—'I ...
— Another Study of Woman • Honore de Balzac
... sports, while they serve to keep up the spirits of the men, and make them forget the difficulties they have to go through, produce also the most beneficial influence upon their health; a cheerful man being much more capable of resisting a fit of sickness than a melancholy one. It is the duty of commanders to use every innocent means of maintaining this temper in their crews; for in long voyages, when they are several months together wandering on an element not destined by nature for the residence of man, without enjoying even occasionally the recreations ...
— A New Voyage Round the World in the Years 1823, 24, 25, and 26. Vol. 1 • Otto von Kotzebue
... little share, led her to accept his attentions to a certain point, but the keen man of the world soon saw that his "little game," as in his own vernacular he styled it, would not be successful, and he was the last one to sigh in vain or mope an hour in lovelorn melancholy. While ceasing to press his suit, he continued to be a frequent and familiar visitor at the house, and thus his attention was drawn to Zell, who, though young, had developed early in the stimulating atmosphere in which she lived. At first he petted and played with ...
— What Can She Do? • Edward Payson Roe
... the mild rays of the moon would fall on good and bad alike—would gaze on the beautiful, bright colored path over the dark and fearful abyss they were so soon to follow to the Happy Hunting Ground. The breaking of the waves against the rocks on the shore, the melancholy cry of the night bird, like soft music, partially subdued their tortured spirits, and each recalled with fond longing the memory of a distant home now lying in ashes, and the sound of some voice now silent, whose tones would go with them to ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... there was no intention of sparing him at the time of his trial; in a few days, Renard wrote on the 17th of November, "the archbishop" will be executed; and Mary, triumphant, as she believed herself, on the question nearest to her heart, had told him that the melancholy which had weighed upon her from childhood was rolling away; she had never yet known the meaning of happiness, and she was about to be rewarded ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... his mind had something monstrous about it, applied thus to a young girl. What a suspicion and what a young girl! The preferred friend of his entire winter, she on whose account he had prolonged his stay in Rome, for she was the most graceful vision of delicacy and of melancholy in the framework of a tragical and solemn past. Any other than Dorsenne would not have admitted such an idea without being inspired with horror. But Dorsenne, on the contrary, suddenly began to dive into that sinister hypothesis, to help it forward, to justify it. No one more than he ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... on the happiness I enjoy—my Madeline probably guesses its nature. I regret to see that the blessing of your love must be purchased by the misery of another, and that other, the nephew of my kind friend. You have doubtless observed the melancholy of Walter Lester, and have ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... and discontent. The only steadying influence was the thought of his wife and children, and the responsibility of a husband and a father. He grew despondent occasionally, and would gladly have been at rest, but a wife and children bound him to struggle with the stream. His melancholy blinded him even to the good qualities of his neighbours. The only things he saw in perfection were stupidity and canting. 'Prose they only know in graces, prayers, etc., and the value of these they ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... and before we can get a licence to do anything we shall have to go through an exasperating process of filling in forms innumerable, inconsistent, overlapping and incomprehensible. Finance is the latest victim of this melancholy tendency. Under the guise of an attempt to give greater freedom to it a system has been introduced which makes a Treasury licence necessary, with penalties under the Defence of the Realm Act, for doing many things which have hitherto been possible for those who were prepared ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers
... cannot but perceive that the Manner of placing Ingens has a wonderful Effect; it makes him hear the melancholy Voice groan ...
— Letters Concerning Poetical Translations - And Virgil's and Milton's Arts of Verse, &c. • William Benson
... in this series of attempts was not to be denied. And, now, behold her relations with the Fauvilles' murderers duly established by the little note found in the eighth volume of Shakespeare's plays, while two more deaths were added to the melancholy list: the deaths of Chief Inspector Ancenis and of the chauffeur. How to describe and how to explain the part played, in the midst of all these ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... packet. The loneliness of the scene embraced the trading-points, the river, and the little gasolene launch struggling against the muddy current. It permeated the passengers, and was a finishing touch to Peter Siner's melancholy. ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... last work of Michael Angelo (when eighty-one years of age), an unfinished Pieta, aheroic group, large but not colossal, composed of four figures, those of our Saviour, the Virgin Mary, Joseph, and an Angel. The interest of the piece lies in the melancholy but placid countenance of the Redeemer, and the inclination of the head lacerated by the crown of thorns. The Mask, Michael Angelo's first work, is in the sixth room of the National Museum, along with some other works of the great sculptor. His greatest productions ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... the more recent and fresh-looking coffins they did not examine, because they could not have anything to do with the object of that melancholy visit. ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... summits. Luckily I met no saunterer: the gay vagabonds, it seemed, were all at the assembly, as happy as billiards and chit-chat could make them. It was not an evening to tempt such folks abroad. The air was cool, and the sky lowering; a melancholy cloud shaded the wild hills and irregular woods at a distance. There was something so importunate in their appearance, that I could not help asking their name, and was told they were skirts of the forest ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... and bitter; an iron-gray frost below, a spectral melancholy moon above. I had to ascend the Abbey Hill by a steep, blind lane between high walls. I passed through stately gates, which stood wide open, into the garden ground that surrounded the old Abbots' House. At the end of a short ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... temperaments, is the near neighbour of tears,—served as a diversion to him from more painful vents of bitterness; and the same philosophical calculation which made the poet of melancholy, Young, declare that "he preferred laughing at the world to being angry with it," led Lord Byron also to settle upon the same conclusion; and to feel, in the misanthropic views he was inclined to take of mankind, that mirth often saved him the ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... ship is becoming a floating hospital herself—not an hour passes but brings its fresh sensation, its new disaster, its melancholy tidings. When I think of poor "Shape" and the preacher, both so well when I saw them yesterday evening, I realize that I myself may ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the king for replacing such able clergy as had been silenced for want of conformity to the ceremonies.[*] They also enacted laws for the strict observance of Sunday, which the Puritans affected to call the Sabbath, and which they sanctified by the most melancholy indolence.[**] It is to be remarked, that the different appellations of this festival were at that time known symbols ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... an anxious elder sister grasping the back of his jersey meanwhile. A girl with a pigtail jumped about in a manner calculated to bring an abrupt and watery conclusion to the passage, till forcibly restrained by her melancholy-looking father. A young man announced that it was going to be, "Deuced hot on shore, what?" And a gushing young thing of some forty summers appealed to everyone at intervals to know the hour to the very second it would be necessary to return, since it really would ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... condition of these slaves was not always a melancholy one. Argensola says that they ate at the same table with their masters, and married into their families. The histories fail to record the assassination for motives of vengeance of any master or chief by the natives, as they do of encomenderos. After the conquest the evil ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair
... you bear a melancholy office; I know the purity which guides your zeal, The solid wisdom which informs your speech; And yet I hate this wisdom, when it calls For blood, I hate it in my inmost soul. Think of a milder counsel—Good my Lord Of Shrewsbury, we crave ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... in which the grey old buildings of London assume a more sombre aspect than during the sunny days of summer. The twilight had congealed into darkness after a somewhat foggy day, and mantling its shadows around the homes of the destitute and degraded, tinging the wretched inmates with melancholy, and even making their lives more miserable and less tenacious to the world. The dark streets have been lighted up. The great tide of human beings that have during the day thronged the thoroughfares, has partially subsided; but thousands of pedestrians are ...
— The Black-Sealed Letter - Or, The Misfortunes of a Canadian Cockney. • Andrew Learmont Spedon
... distinct as distant evening bells Tolling, over the sea, a secret chime That breaks and breaks and breaks upon the heart In sorrow rather than in sound, a chime Strange as a streak of sunset to the moon, Strange as a rose upon a starlit grave, Strange as a smile upon a dead man's lips; A chime of melancholy, mute as death But strong as love, uttered in plangent tones Of honeysuckle, jasmine, gilly-flowers, Jonquils and aromatic musky leaves, Lilac and lilies to the ...
— The New Morning - Poems • Alfred Noyes
... suddenly stopped. "Hist!" quoth he, for his ears were as sharp as those of a five-year-old fox. "Hark, lads! Methinks I hear a sound." At this all stopped and listened with bated breath, albeit for a time they could hear nothing, their ears being duller than Stutely's. At length they heard a faint and melancholy sound, ...
— The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood • Howard Pyle
... tremulous lights and shadows; it asks us mysterious questions, and troubles us with the suggestions of our relations to some dim unknown. The sad, blue eyes that gazed into Mary's had that look of calm initiation, of melancholy comprehension, peculiar to eyes made clairvoyant by "great and critical" sorrow. They seemed to say to her, "Fulfil thy mission; life is made for sacrifice; the flower must fall before fruit can perfect itself." A vague shuddering of mystery gave intensity to her reverie. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Biog. Brit. where a summary of Cook's Voyages is given, an observation is made on this melancholy part of the narrative, which the reader may not be displeased to see copied here. "It is probable that these calamitous events, which could not fail of making a powerful impression on the mind of Lieutenant Cook, might give occasion to his turning his ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... and the king caused himself now to be carried there, in order to seek repose. But instead of being cheered by the beautiful scenes that were around him at Chinon, or reinvigorated by the comforts and the attentions which he could there enjoy, he gradually sank into hopeless melancholy, and in a few days he began to feel that he was about to die. As he grew worse his mind became more and more excited, and his attendants from time to time heard him moaning, in his anguish, "Oh, shame! shame! I am a conquered ...
— Richard I - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... to Worcester as mystified as ever, and Maggie was left much alone with Arthur Carrollton, who strove in various ways to win her from the melancholy into which she had fallen. All day long she would sit by the open window, seemingly immovable, her large eyes, now intensely black, fixed upon vacancy, and her white face giving no sign of the fierce struggle within, save when Madam Conway, coming to her side, would lay ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... shaking the few remaining leaves from the trees and blowing them about in rustling dreariness, the frosts had already touched the grass and ferns, and though the place on a bright day would still have been lovely, it looked bare and melancholy ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens
... which Egypt had at first but failed to maintain, as a gift conferred from above, which human powers proved unequal to conserve, then the opening of the history of this religion would be indeed most melancholy. But though monotheism appeared in Egypt so early, there is no necessity to think that it was not attained by human powers. For all we know, it was not an early but a mature product of thought, and was reached after a long development. It is not impossible for the human mind, starting from ...
— History of Religion - A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the Origin and Character of the Great Systems • Allan Menzies
... painful contrast between the robust woman and the pale, dying man, who, with one foot already in the grave, summoned sufficient energy to earn not only enough for the daily bread, but money besides to purchase beautiful dresses. The melancholy jests, which obliging biographers constantly represent as flashes of wit from a husband too much in love not to be profuse, never deluded anybody who visited that home. It is absurd to transform Mme. Heine into an idyllic character, whilst the poet himself never dreamed of representing her ...
— Old Love Stories Retold • Richard Le Gallienne
... was able, so keep it as before. I cannot build my nest within the castle, but I will often come to you at evening and sing, on the bough outside the window, songs that will make you glad, and at the same time sweetly melancholy. I will sing of happiness and sorrow, of the goodness and wickedness that lie close around you. The singing bird loves the fisherman's hut, the peasant's cot, and all that is far removed from palace and court. But I love your soul more than your crown. I will fly to you and sing ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... in a Report which otherwise is melancholy reading is to be found in the consistency of the statesmen of Natal, which is admirable in comparison with the fast degenerating land policy of Cape Statesmen. Ten years ago the Native Affairs Commission reported on the question ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... making peace between its small potentates; in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the West—with ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... under it, Leila. I became depressed and quite foolishly hopeless. Some day I will tell you what helped me out of a morass of melancholy." ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... has, for many years past, been in continual expectation of making a journey to England, which prevented her writing for information concerning this melancholy subject, by giving her hopes of making personal inquiries; but family occurrences have still detained her in France, which country she now sees no prospect of quitting. She has, therefore, lately used her utmost endeavors to obtain a faithful account of whatever related ...
— Evelina • Fanny Burney
... place of another kind, and which has more the air of what it would be, than anything I have yet met with: it was the convent of the Chartreux. All the conveniences, or rather (if there was such a word) all the adaptments are assembled here, that melancholy, meditation, selfish devotion, and despair would require. But yet 'tis pleasing. Soften the terms, and mellow the uncouth horror that reigns here, but a little, and 'tis a charming solitude. It stands on a large space of ground, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole - Volume I • Horace Walpole
... startled to hear him laugh. A slight melancholy little burst; and then a louder one, followed by a full-toned laughter that fell short and showed the heart was not ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... morning Rubineau was to depart. All the happy scenes of the coming week were to be delayed, and the thought that they might be delayed long-ay, forever-came like a shadow of evil to brood in melancholy above ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... to run any risks with, so he folded his arms and talked in a brave, indifferent, bearing-up tone about the London, Brighton, and South Coast Railway, just to cheer the poor woman up a little. And even Mrs. Milton really felt that exalted melancholy to the very bottom of her heart, and tried to show it in a dozen little, ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... string that fastened the eyeglass round his head, and taking a coarse towel from a locker, he spunged poor Paul's face and neck with rum, and then fastened up his lower jaw with the lanyard. Having performed this melancholy office, the poor fellow's feelings could no longer be ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... stated, on her own authority, that she had made the acquaintance of the romanticist, whom she describes as having "something of an exalte in his air, in his open shirt collar, black head, and wild and melancholy look." The dialogue that ensues with the classicist after the disappearance of the other, is quite as ridiculous as the foregoing one, and quite as well calculated to give her Ladyship a fit of the "doubts," though it does not appear that she suffered by them a second time. ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... responded that it would be agreeable to him to qualify himself for the high office to which he had been so unexpectedly called, under such melancholy circumstances, at his rooms at the Kirkwood Hotel; and at 11 o'clock a.m. [15th] the oath of office was administered to him by Chief Justice Chase, of the Supreme Court of the United States, in the presence of nearly all the Cabinet officers; ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents: Lincoln - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 6: Abraham Lincoln • Compiled by James D. Richardson
... that the Campanians might revolt from the Roman alliance; but in this hope he was disappointed. So, retracing his steps, he took the road to Apulia. During all this march of the Carthaginian army the dictator had followed along the heights, and had condemned his soldiers to the melancholy task of looking on with arms in their hands, while the Numidian cavalry plundered the faithful allies far and wide, and the villages over all the plain rose in flames. At length he opened up to the exasperated Roman army the eagerly-coveted opportunity of attacking the enemy. When Hannibal ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... sixteenth year; but to all appearances she was much younger. Unlike others of her years, her cheeks did not display the bloom of maidenhood, and her countenance lacked the vivacity natural to her age. Her features wore an expression of melancholy, which was perfectly in keeping with the pallor of her cheeks, the pearly whiteness of which vied in brilliancy with the ...
— The Home in the Valley • Emilie F. Carlen
... curtailed the burgess- rights of smaller men in the state, and beside whose marble pillars and Greek statues the decaying temples, with their images of the gods still in great part carved of wood, made a melancholy figure. A police-supervision of streets, of river-banks, of fires, or of building was almost unheard of; if the government troubled itself at all about the inundations, conflagrations, and falls of houses which were of yearly occurrence, it was only to ask from the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... dammed-up brain, of this child, than from the smooth-working machine of the motor one. But just for this reason, if the damming-up be liberated, not in the channels of healthy assimilation, and duly correlated growth, but in the forced discharges of violent emotion, followed by conditions of melancholy and by certain unsocial tendencies, then the promise of genius ripens into eccentricity, and the blame ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his verbal memory. These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies. ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... eminence, of gash, and peaks afloat upon swirling mists. It lay, a looming terror, forgotten of heaven and unfriendly to man (as one might readily imagine), haunted for ever with wailing airs and rumours, ghosts calling in the deeps of dusk and melancholy, legends of ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... as a boy reasons who thinks that the world has come to an end for him after his first check, and who has no knowledge as yet of the medicine of time. My mother had but a vexatious life of it with me, for I was silent and melancholy; and though I never, indeed, offended her by uncivil word or deed, yet the sight of my dreary visage must have been a sore trial to her, and the glum despondency with which I accepted all her efforts to cheer me from my humours ...
— Marjorie • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... they were full of cricket and football, Bee did not find them very easy to understand. She was sitting at the nursery-table, thinking what she could say to show Colin she liked to hear about his games, even though the names puzzled her a little, when Fixie came and stood by her, looking rather melancholy. ...
— Rosy • Mrs. Molesworth
... no chance of asking his advice after the trial. The moment sentence had been pronounced, he allowed himself to be helped out of court in a melancholy state of prostration, and the next morning he left for London. I suspect he was afraid to face me, and nervously impatient, besides, to tell Annabella that he had saved the legacy again by another alarming sacrifice. My father and mother, to whom I had written on ...
— A Rogue's Life • Wilkie Collins
... following suddenly on so melancholy a war, endeared the Sabine women still more to their husbands and parents, and above all to Romulus himself. Accordingly, when dividing the people into thirty curiae, he called the curiae after their names. While the number of the women were undoubtedly ...
— Roman History, Books I-III • Titus Livius
... Zurich, for the same purpose, August 28th, after an interval of four years. The same objects were assembled, under precisely the same circumstances: the lake was covered with boats, whose tall sails drooped in pure laziness; the solemn bells startled the melancholy echoes, and the population was abroad, now as then, in holiday guise, or crowding the churches. The only perceptible changes in the scene were produced by the change in our own direction. Then we looked towards the foot of the lake, ...
— A Residence in France - With An Excursion Up The Rhine, And A Second Visit To Switzerland • J. Fenimore Cooper
... gory, from the wheels Released—and no man, not his nearest friends, Could in that mangled corpse have traced Orestes. They laid the body on the funeral pyre, And, while we speak, the Phocian strangers bear, In a small, brazen, melancholy urn, That handful of cold ashes to which all The grandeur of the beautiful hath shrunk. Within they bore him—in his father's land To find that heritage, ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... thing breaking the stillness of the murky air was the melancholy "Chirp, churp! chirp, churp" uttered at intervals by some belated sparrow who had not gone to bed in good time like all sensible bird-folk, and whose plaintive chirp was all the more aggravating from its ...
— Teddy - The Story of a Little Pickle • J. C. Hutcheson
... a man of fortune, who lost his wealth, and chagrin and melancholy got the mastery of him, so that he became an idiot and lost his wit. There abode with him of his wealth about a score of dinars and he used to beg alms of the folk, and that which they gave him he would gather together and lay to the dinars ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... extended, weltering in his blood. He had three wounds in the abdomen and his throat was cut. A hawkbill knife was found near him. A jury of inquest was held and found a verdict that he had destroyed himself. It was a melancholy instance of the effects of intemperance. Mr. McConnell when a youth resided at Fayetteville in my congressional district. Shortly after he grew up to manhood he was at my instance appointed postmaster of that ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... historian asserts, a miracle from heaven changed the king's mind. They expected to be trampled to death in the hippodrome by furious elephants; but after some delay they were released unhurt. The history of their escape, however, is more melancholy than the history of their danger. No sooner did the persecution cease than they turned with Pharisaical cruelty against their weaker brethren who had yielded to the storm; and they put to death three hundred of their countrymen, who in the hour of ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... singing in the sunny hours, and crickets have not yet finished their song. Once in a while I see a caterpillar,—this afternoon, for instance, a red, hairy one, with black head and tail. They do not appear to be active, and it makes one rather melancholy to look at them. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... says her biographer of the moment, "was always absorbed by the present impression, whatever that might happen to be; she passed from joy to despair like a child, and I never knew any house that was either so melancholy or so gay." One evening, however, it would seem that the Hotel d'Abrantes was gayer than usual. Laughter rang loud through the rooms, the company was numerous, and the mistress of the house in unparalleled high spirits. If the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... arrogance be changed into a sentimental humility, O! then 'Liberality' is to call out for him in the best of her hacknied tones; the contest is to cease at the instant when his humour changes from mischief to melancholy; 'affetuoso' is to be the only word; and he is to be allowed his season of sacred torpidity, till the venom, new formed in the shade, make him glisten again in ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... meantime, Fin was very melancholy, and did not know what to do, or how to act at all. Cucullin was an ugly customer to meet with; and, the idea of the "cake" aforesaid flattened the very heart within him. What chance could he have, strong and brave though he was, with a man who could, when put in a passion, ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... incident in the story of Thomas is after the resurrection. The first evening the apostles met in the upper room to talk over the strange things which had occurred that day. For some reason Thomas was not at this meeting. We may infer that his melancholy temperament led him to absent himself. He had loved Jesus deeply, and his sorrow was very great. There had been rumors all day of Christ's resurrection, but Thomas put no confidence in these. Perhaps his despondent disposition made him unsocial, and kept him from meeting ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... strange that, instead of the looked-for lightening of gloom, there was, if possible, in his bearing, his wife being safely dead and buried, an increase of melancholy. ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... some moments absorbed in melancholy thoughts; at last he lifted up his head, and calling one of his servants, said, "Go, to Ebn Thaher's house, and ask some of his domestics if he be gone to Bussorah: run, and come back quickly with the answer." While the servant was gone, ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... title has been cropped away. The printed title-page reads: "Recreation for Ingenious Head-peeces. Or, A Pleasant Grove for their Wits to walke in. Of Epigrams, 630: Epitaphs, 180: Fancies, a number: Fantasticks, abundance, Good for melancholy Humors. Printed by R. Cotes for H. B. London, 1645. 8vo." Two poems of Herrick's occur in the additional "Fancies and Fantasticks," first printed in this edition, viz.: The Description of a Woman (not contained in Hesperides), ...
— The Hesperides & Noble Numbers: Vol. 1 and 2 • Robert Herrick
... afternoon. She came gliding into the room like a ghost, trailing a black negligee that made the whiteness of her skin startling. Her eyelids were heavy and dark, but unreddened. She gazed at him with calm, clear melancholy, and his heart throbbed and ached for her. She seated herself, clasped her hands loosely in her lap, ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... Bourgogne, about twelve o'clock, heard her from the chamber where they were, next to hers, singing opera tunes. A little while after, the King, seeing the Duchesse de Bourgogne very sad in a corner of the room, asked Madame de Maintenon, with surprise, why the said Duchess was so melancholy; set himself to work to rouse her; then played with her and some ladies of the palace he had called in to join in the sport. This was not all. Before rising from the dinner table, at a little after two o'clock, ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... kindness offered her by the lawyer and his wife, and though in his inmost better heart he did not doubt her, it pleased his harder mood to regard himself as being despised and trampled on; there was a certain luxury in the indulgence which afforded him a melancholy pain. By and by, however, better thoughts came, as they always will if we give them the chance they seek. Out of his fearful dejection arose a manlier, nobler spirit, which betrayed itself in his look and manner. He rose from the stool, walked twice across the narrow office floor out to ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... indentation in the mountain-side. The weird vistas across the gorge were visible how, craggy steeps, and deep woods filled with moonlight, with that peculiar untranslated intendment which differentiates its luminosity in the wilderness from the lunar glamour 'of cultivated Scenes—something weird, melancholy, eloquent of a meaning addressed to the soul, but which the senses ...
— Wolf's Head - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... topic is that which immediately concerns those who are making proficiency, that which concerns the security of the other two, so that not even in sleep any appearance unexamined may surprise us, nor in intoxication, nor in melancholy. This, it may be said, is above our power. But the present philosophers neglecting the first topic and the second (the affects and duties), employ themselves on the third, using sophistical arguments ([Greek: metapiptontas]), making conclusions from ...
— A Selection from the Discourses of Epictetus With the Encheiridion • Epictetus
... grief and consternation with which the melancholy news of the capture and cruel fate of Saguntum was received at Rome.(719) Compassion for this unfortunate city, shame for having failed to succour such faithful allies, a just indignation against the Carthaginians, the authors of all these calamities; a strong alarm ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... the nor'-east, the sea runs high, we ship a deal of water, the night is dark and cold, and the shapeless passengers lie about in melancholy bundles, as if they were sorted out for the laundress; but, for my own uncommercial part, I cannot pretend that I am much inconvenienced by any of these things. A general howling, whistling, flopping, gurgling, and scooping, I am aware of, and a general knocking about of ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... board the Mentor we spent a considerable time in Relating to each other ye particular Circumstances of our first being Taken, and also ye various Treatment with which we met on yt occasion, nor was this a disagreeable Entertainment in our Melancholy Situation. * * * Many of the officers and men were almost Destitute of Clothes, several having neither Britches, Stockings or Shoes, many of them when first taken were stripped entirely naked. Corporal ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... hedge-fences even to interrupt the dull monotony of the scene below. A strong wind, and it was high too, whistled around that lofty tower, reminding me of our winter storms when they whistle over the chimney-tops—a music that often makes melancholy hearts home-sick. ...
— The Youthful Wanderer - An Account of a Tour through England, France, Belgium, Holland, Germany • George H. Heffner
... if they were actually betrothed, was broken, and the lawyer-lover was plunged in deep melancholy. He wrote long, morbid letters to his friend Speed, who had returned to Kentucky, and had recently married there. Lincoln even went to Louisville to visit the Speeds, hoping that the change of scene and ...
— The Story of Young Abraham Lincoln • Wayne Whipple
... would take her part, George; and I am sorry," answered Mrs. Hartrick in a melancholy tone; "but I am grieved to tell you that there is something else to follow. That little Irish girl is quite as cheeky, even more cheeky than Molly. I fear I must ask you to say a word to her; I shall require her to ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... the girl, in a voice of gentle melancholy. "I shall come and see it again, perhaps, when ...
— Short Cruises • W.W. Jacobs
... Paschal Feast of the Passover had been quite over, the disciples believed they had a command to return into their own country, and to it accordingly they returned. Perhaps the visions began to abate at Jerusalem. A species of melancholy seized them. The brief appearances of Jesus were not sufficient to compensate for the enormous void left by his absence. In a melancholy mood they thought of the lake and of the beautiful mountains where ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... sat on a green bank, and thought on worldly things; and he said, "Yes, a fine appearance is everything—a fine appearance is what people care about." And then he began chirping his melancholy song from which we have taken this story; and which may or may not be true, although it ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... her eyes with sorrowful skepticism, melancholy contempt. It was the old note of war, and she responded to it. "I know mamma," she said; "I know ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... village street, with its cottages, haystacks, and slumbering willows, a feeling of calm comes over the soul; in this peace, wrapped away from care, toil, and sorrow in the darkness of night, it is mild, melancholy, beautiful, and it seems as though the stars look down upon it kindly and with tenderness, and as though there were no evil on earth and all were well. On the left the open country began from the end of the village; it could ...
— The Wife and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... that we ordained Festiuall, Turne from their office to blacke Funerall: Our instruments to melancholy Bells, Our wedding cheare, to a sad buriall Feast: Our solemne Hymnes, to sullen Dyrges change: Our Bridall flowers serue for a buried Coarse: And all things change them ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Colonel Vavasour, no one who saw his convulsed features, as his brother fell heading a gallant charge of his company at Waterloo, could have doubted for a moment his deep-rooted affection. From that period, a gloomy melancholy hung about him, which, though shaken off in public, gave a shade to his brow, which ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... this mass of smiling verdure and blossom-loaded boughs, appeared the dark funereal cypress, the emblem of death, intruding itself in melancholy contrast with the smiling and cheerful tints by ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... He advocates the introduction of music adapted to the subject: "The music after an act should commence in the tone of the preceding passion, and be gradually varied till it accords with the tone of the passion that is to succeed in the next act," so that "cheerful, tender, melancholy, or animated impressions" may be inspired, as the occasion may need. At the conclusion of the second act of "Gammer Gurton's Needle," 1566, Diccon, addressing himself to the musicians, says simply: "In the meantime, fellows, pipe up your fiddles." But in a later play, the "Two ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... landlord of the hotel, his curses against the English nation were violent for the rest of his natural life. He asked all travellers whether they knew a certain Colonel Lor Crawley—avec sa femme une petite dame, tres spirituelle. "Ah, Monsieur!" he would add—"ils m'ont affreusement vole." It was melancholy to hear his accents as he spoke of ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... was worried? Hadn't she more cause to worry than any one else? For all that, she did not purpose to hide behind the barricaded door of her cabin. If there was a tragedy in the offing it would not fall less heavily because one approached it with melancholy countenance. ...
— The Pagan Madonna • Harold MacGrath
... of news gave Dick further cause for agitation, and his mother's distress grew with his deepening melancholy. She was alarmed for his health, and had been trying ever since the return from Yarraman to induce him to drink copious draughts of her favorite specific, camomile tea, but without success; the boy knew of no ailment and could imagine none that would not be preferable ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... of the Sutlej hurried melancholy and portentous tidings from Aliwal to the Sikhs at Sobraon. The bodies of their slaughtered countrymen rolling down in hundreds, announced, in terms too dismally unequivocal, another tremendous blow of British might. In ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... Editor. 'These verses are in the old style; rather homely in expression; but I honestly profess to stick more to the simplicity of the old poets than the moderns, and to love the philosophical good humor of our old writers more than the sickly melancholy of the Byronian wits. If my verses be not good, they are good humored, and that is something.' With a few verbal changes they were sent to the Athenaeum, and appeared in that paper on July 9, 1831, accompanied by a note of the Editor's, from ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... her as a child, of always playing with the first thing that came to hand whenever any one was talking to her. On this occasion they wandered to the album, and toyed absently about the margin of the little water-colour drawing. The expression of melancholy deepened on her face. She did not look at the drawing, or look at me. Her eyes moved uneasily from object to object in the room, betraying plainly that she suspected what my purpose was in coming to speak to her. Seeing that, I thought it best to get ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... the last Mogul to come out and be led away. The air is thick, and sparkles with blinding dust and glare, and the wind whistles in your ears. Over the bones of dynasties, the hot wind wails and sobs and moans. Aye! if a man seeks for melancholy, I will tell him where to find it—at the top of the ...
— An Essence Of The Dusk, 5th Edition • F. W. Bain
... hand, does not care. He is neither sad nor happy nor anxious. This contrast is revealed not only by the patients' utterances but by their expressions. The stuporous face is empty, that of the other lined with melancholy. The intellectual defect, too, is different. In retarded depression the patient is morbidly aware of difficulty and slowness, but on urging often performs tests surprisingly well. In the stupor, however, one ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... predetermined and willful gayety about Asheville however, that is apt to be present in a watering-place, and gave to it the melancholy tone that is always present in gay places. We fancied that the lively movement in the streets had an air of unreality. A band of musicians on the balcony of the Swannanoa were scraping and tooting and twanging with ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... subject was exhibited in his reply to the Electress, who, immediately after the marriage, entreated that he would not pervert her niece from the paths of the true religion. "She shall not be troubled," said the Prince, "with such melancholy things. Instead of holy writ she shall read 'Amadis de Gaule,' and such books of pastime which discourse de amore; and instead of knitting and sewing she shall learn to dance a galdiarde, and such courtoisies as are ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... written in 1888. They are a very complete expression of his poetic ideas, and contain among their number gems of purest poesy. The poet's lyre has not many strings, and the strains of sadness, of pensive melancholy, are almost absent. Mistral has once, and very successfully, tried the theme of Lainartine's Lac, of Musset's Souvenir, of Hugo's Tristesse d'Olympio; but his poem is not an elegy, it has not the intensity, the passion, the deep ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... is the naturalist. He has no time for melancholy dreams. The earth becomes to him transparent; everywhere he sees significancies, harmonies, laws, chains of cause and effect endlessly interlinked, which draw him out of the narrow sphere of self-interest and self-pleasing, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... pages that repeated that oldest most melancholy cry of the lover, which rang among the deodars, from viking ships, from the moonlit courtyards of Provence, the cry which always sounded about Mr. Wrenn as he walked the deck: "I want you so much; I miss you so unendingly; I am so lonely for you, dear." For no ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis
... His wig was small, and with side rolls well powdered, the queue tied with a lace-bordered red ribbon. In front a full Mechlin lace jabot, with the white wig above, set his regular features and dark skin in a frame, as it were, his paleness and a look of melancholy in the eyes helping the natural beauty and distinction of a face high bred and haughty. The white silk flowered waistcoat, the bunch of gold seals below it, the claret-tinted velvet coat and breeches, the black silk clocked hose ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... No more. Why?" She had withdrawn into a corner of the tiny room—still not far from him—and he wondered remotely what his damned alter ego had been up to. With Jason, there was no telling. Jay raised his eyes with a melancholy smile. ...
— The Planet Savers • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... it off till then. I can tell you, sir, that although I don't mind building this wall in the shallow water, I shall be very careful when the water is up to my knees, for you don't know how bold the sharks are in these latitudes. When I was at St. Helena, not very long ago, we had a melancholy proof of it." ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... the title of keeper of the seals, but the full powers of chancellor.[575] In quiet retirement, the venerable judge and legislator lingered more than four years, unhappy only in being spared to see the melancholy results of the rejection of his prudent counsels, the desolation of his native land, and the transformation of an amiable king into a murderer of his own subjects. Few days in this eventful reign were more lasting ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird
... 1837, he was at the house of an Indian trader, in the vicinity of Burlington, when I became acquainted and frequently convened with him in broken English, and through the medium of gestures and pantomine. A deep seated melancholy was apparent in his countenance, and conversation. He endeavored to make me comprehend, on one occasion, his former greatness, and represented that he was once master of the country, east, north, ...
— Autobiography of Ma-ka-tai-me-she-kia-kiak, or Black Hawk • Black Hawk
... them, if they would, Among their friends in town. He ended by A dozen further lines, explaining why His patient must have change of scene and air— New faces, and the simple friendships there With them, which might, in time, make her forget A grief that kept her ever brooding yet And wholly melancholy and depressed,— Nor yet could she find sleep by night nor rest By day, for thinking—thinking—thinking still Upon a grief beyond the doctor's skill,— The death of her ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... Badeley to Colman, dated 22d August, 1822, confirmed the melancholy intelligence, which he had at first hesitated to believe. It stated that "the decease of Mr. Lowth took place on Sunday evening," the very evening appointed by him for their anticipated happy reunion; and that his remains were to be interred in the family vault at Fulham on Monday ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... cake, baked some bread, mended my riding dress, cleaned up generally, wrote some letters with the hope that some day they might be posted and took a magnificent walk, reaching the cabin again in the melancholy glory which now ...
— A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains • Isabella L. Bird
... the truth," added the Baron, "the lives of literary men, with their hopes and disappointments, and quarrels and calamities, present a melancholy picture of man's strength and weakness. On that very account the scholar can ...
— Hyperion • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... think they would, for they have no room to disagree in. They all four stared at us with awful, almost embarrassing solemnity, and each had a little yellow moustache. I had no idea they lived packed in so—no wonder they looked melancholy. The sight of them, especially of the one who had no room at all, ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... who wrote psychology when he failed to sustain the poetic mood. In the Engadine and at Sils-Maria, brooding in a rocky void wherein he touched the sharp edge of infinity, he sang a Dionysian hymn to life against the melancholy products of German learning and against those Nihilistic snares which he thought lurked in Christian doctrine. There he worked out the mystic idea of "Eternal Recurrence" and his song of Zarathustra with ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... a good appetite, except myself, who, feeling rather melancholy that day, had little desire to eat. I did not, like the others, partake of the pork, but got my dinner entirely off the body of a squirrel which had been shot the day before by a chal of the name of Piramus, who, besides being ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... Neb was wandering, disconsolate, burdened with the melancholy news of the defection of the miserable jockey, looking, everywhere, for Miss Alathea Layson, but without success. He stopped upon a corner, weary of the search and of the woe ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... stead. The half-wild, adventurous life of the soldier suited him better than the humdrum of the farm. From him, as I have said, I get the dash of Celtic blood in my veins—that almost feminine sensibility and tinge of melancholy that, I think, shows in all my books. That emotional Celt, ineffectual in some ways, full of longings and impossible dreams, of quick and noisy anger, temporizing, revolutionary, mystical, bold in words, timid in action—surely that man is in me, ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... Sophia's last advices; but gradually they became silent, and then a little mournful. "I wonder why it is, father?" asked Charlotte; "I'm not at all tired, and how can fresh air and sunshine make one melancholy?" ...
— The Squire of Sandal-Side - A Pastoral Romance • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... achievements seemed to be collected there to do honor to his final exit." Although his mind was actively occupied in plans of conquest, he was haunted by gloomy forebodings and superstitious fancies, and endeavored to dispel his melancholy by indulging freely in the pleasures of the table. Excessive drinking at last brought to a crisis a fever which he had probably contracted in the marshes of Assyria, and which suddenly terminated his life in the thirty-third year of his age, and the thirteenth of his reign ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... but not ungracefully fashioned, covered his head, from beneath which, dropping, in natural clusters over his neck and shoulders, a cloud of raven hair escaped. Subsequently, when his face was more fully revealed, it proved to be that of a young man, of dark aspect, and grave, melancholy expression of countenance, approaching even to the stern, when at rest; though sufficiently animated and earnest when engaged in conversation, or otherwise excited. His features were regular, delicately formed, and might be characterized as singularly handsome, ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... I know why you think my bearing toward you now is melancholy, father,—because she's with you. And good heavens, father, to tell you the truth, I—it does make me miserable; not because I'm not eager to have your wishes gratified; but I love that girl. If it was some other one, I shouldn't mind at ...
— Amphitryo, Asinaria, Aulularia, Bacchides, Captivi • Plautus Titus Maccius
... one of those nights to produce melancholy reflections—a night on which a man would be apt to review his past life, and to look into the hidden recesses of his soul to see if conscience could make a coward of him in the loneliness and stillness ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... now choked with sand, and near it are the remains of edifices supposed to have been the magazines. On an adjoining hill are remnants of three temples and two towers, in almost undistinguishable ruin. We left Selinunte with a lasting but melancholy impression, and were reminded ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... there was a dark, handsome boy, with large, melancholy eyes, named George Marshall, who was not only exceedingly attractive in looks but had many other graces. He was a born artist, and could dance, and act, and sing like an angel; and, best of all, he was as good as he was charming. ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... subdued; at times sad; and the poem ends sadly; but all the figures that were positively hideous were shut out of the court, and painted on the outside walls:—Hatred; Felony; Covetousness; Envy; Poverty; Melancholy, and Old Age. Death did not appear. The passion for representing death in its horrors did not belong to the sunny atmosphere of the thirteenth century, and indeed jarred on French taste always, though ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... the singular sequel to this visit. On the succeeding day M. Daguerre paid me a visit to see the Telegraph and witness its operations. He seemed much gratified and remained with me perhaps two hours; two melancholy hours to him, as they afterwards proved; or while he was with me, his buildings, including his diorama, his studio, his laboratory, with all the beautiful pictures I had seen the day before, were consumed by fire. Fortunately for mankind, matter only ...
— The History and Practice of the Art of Photography • Henry H. Snelling
... approaching man or beast on which it could fasten and gorge itself fat with blood. Certainly a small station on the face of the Himalayas is not a desirable place of residence during the rains, and to persons of melancholy temperament would be conducive to suicide or murder. Fortunately for themselves the two white men in Ranga Duar took life cheerily and ...
— The Elephant God • Gordon Casserly
... one. Yet this makes us not blame Mr Prior for joining his Alma and his Solomon in the same volume; though that admirable poet has succeeded perfectly well in the gaiety of the one, as well as in the melancholy of the other. Even supposing the reader should peruse these two compositions without any interval, he would feel little or no difficulty in the change of passions: Why, but because he considers these ...
— A Treatise of Human Nature • David Hume
... began to become valetudinary; and the hypochondria which tormented him rendered his humor very melancholy. Monsieur Franke, the famous Pietist, founder of the Orphan-house at Halle University, contributed not a little to exaggerate that latter evil. This reverend gentleman entertained the King by raising scruples of conscience about the most innocent matters. He condemned ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... dear goose. Can't you guess, or must I tell you? Sidney and I did the very same, and had just such a melancholy parting last night as I suspect you and Ned ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... contest in favor of the candidate for whom it should pronounce, Marie Antoinette declared for Petion. She knew him to be a Jacobin,[5] but he was so devoid of any reputation for ability that she did not fear him. Nor, except that he had behaved with boorish disrespect and ill-manners during their melancholy return from Varennes, had she any reason for suspecting him of any ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... everything that I have touched has turned to gold, and everyone I have loved,"—he paused, lingering on the word, and again Mollie shivered in sympathetic understanding—"everyone whom I have loved has died!" The wind seemed to take up the word, and repeat it in melancholy echo. "Died! died! died!" wailed the trees, tossing drearily to and fro. "Died!" shivered the ripple over the cold grey lake. The clouds gathered in ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... purpose, and a mere heap of ruins, there was a plan and method in it. It is a history which offers much cause for sorrow and much for joy. Though, as has been before remarked, a period of harrowing doubt in the life of an individual or a nation is a melancholy subject for consideration, yet when it is not induced by immorality, but produced, as in this instance, by the operation of regular causes, and is the result of the attractiveness of new modes of inquiry which invited application to the criticism of old truths, to be accepted or rejected after being ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... this usage is told of Shakespeare. The latter "stood godfather" to the child of a friend; and after the ceremonies of the christening, as the poet seemed much absorbed and serious, the father questioned him as to the cause of his melancholy. The sponsor replied, that he was considering what would be the most suitable gift for him to present to his god-child, and that he had finally decided. "I'll give him," said he, "a dozen good latten spoons, and thou shalt translate them." This was a play upon the word ...
— Over the Border: Acadia • Eliza Chase
... mortals, atrabilious men, beings nourished in melancholy, unceasingly see either nature or its author exasperated against the human race; they suppose that man is the constant object of heaven's wrath; that he irritates it even by his desires: that he renders himself criminal by seeking a felicity which is not made for him: struck ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... "The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the wither'd leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the ...
— The Book of Hallowe'en • Ruth Edna Kelley
... some melancholy weeks, but I plucked up heart and set to reasoning. If my hand were to guard my head it must find some other way of it. My thoughts turned to powder and shot, to the musket and the pistol. Here was a weapon which needed only a stout nerve, a ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... However, he consoled himself and the reader with the assurance, that he would that night catch a moonbeam as it entered through the grating, and, when he had whetted it on the iron knobs of his door, would do wonders with it. In the next page was found a melancholy proof of powerful but prostrated intellect. It contained some insane lines, ascribed to ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... to look you for that, I have much trouble all my life—great deal of war—my son some time since killed in battle." This was accompanied by such a melancholy expression of countenance, that could not fail to excite my compassion, I therefore avoided touching more on the subject of his wars; only observing, "that I hear he be too much for all his enemies, and that he ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... party gained the street, the fourth person, who was provided with materials for the task, painted a red cross of the prescribed size—namely, a foot in length—in the middle of the door; tracing above it, in large characters, the melancholy ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... a dream, without time or place. The poet's tone is very pure; a little subdued; at times sad; and the poem ends sadly; but all the figures that were positively hideous were shut out of the court, and painted on the outside walls:—Hatred; Felony; Covetousness; Envy; Poverty; Melancholy, and Old Age. Death did not appear. The passion for representing death in its horrors did not belong to the sunny atmosphere of the thirteenth century, and indeed jarred on French taste always, though the Church came to insist on it; but Old ...
— Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres • Henry Adams
... are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature. I, whose disease it was to meditate too much and to observe too little, and who upon my first entrance at college was nearly falling into a deep melancholy, from brooding too much on the sufferings which I had witnessed in London, was sufficiently aware of the tendencies of my own thoughts to do all I could to counteract them. I was, indeed, like a person who, according to the old legend, had entered the cave of Trophonius; and ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... scarcely accomplished this task, when a strange, unnatural cry resounded throughout the cellar—a cry so indescribably fearful that it chilled his blood with horror. It was almost instantly followed by a low and melancholy wail, so intense, so solemn, so profoundly expressive of human misery, that Frank was convinced that some unfortunate being was near him, plunged in deepest ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... spirited patriot, who had thus spoken, was applauded and was sure of votes at the elections. All this would have been very right and very dignified, had it not been much more ridiculous. There was a profound justice and a still more profound melancholy in the fact, that Rome, however earnestly she endeavoured to establish the freedom and to earn the thanks of the Hellenes, yet gave them nothing but anarchy and reaped nothing but ingratitude. Undoubtedly ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Edmundo became melancholy, and at last decided to seek his wife. He left his mother and his servant behind, and took with him only a diamond ring of Leonora's, his cat, and his dog. While walking along the seashore, wondering how he could cross the ocean, he saw a huge fish washed up on the sand. The fish ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... ship, though. I don't even like chickens; but we're obliged to put up with them. I'm always glad, though, when they're eaten. I once went a voyage with a cow on deck. They wanted the milk for an officer's lady and her children. That cow used to make me melancholy." ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... to me unexpectedly a face of profound melancholy; his expression had in it, oddly, a trace of sternness; and I was somewhat taken aback by this evidence that he was still bearing vicariously the troubles of his client. So deep had been the thought I had apparently interrupted that he did not ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his sister was twelve, past. These are the ages when children often experience a change of heart, as all "revivalists" know. Robert Browning was swinging off towards atheism. He grew melancholy, irritable and wrote stanzas of sentimental verse. He showed this verse, high-sounding, stilted, bold and bilious, to his mother and then to his father, and finally to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... of "Rosalind and Helen" is, undoubtedly, not an attempt in the highest style of poetry. It is in no degree calculated to excite profound meditation; and if, by interesting the affections and amusing the imagination, it awakens a certain ideal melancholy favourable to the reception of more important impressions, it will produce in the reader all that the writer experienced in the composition. I resigned myself, as I wrote, to the impulses of the feelings which moulded the conception ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... autumn of this year Cicero had himself landed at Brundisium. He remained nearly a year at Brundisium, and it is melancholy to think how sad and how long must have been the days with him. He had no country when he reached the nearest Italian port; it was all Caesar's, and Caesar was his enemy. There had been a struggle for the masterdom between two men, and of the two the one had beaten with whom Cicero had not ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... upper edge of Birs-Nimroud, giving it for one instant a weird effect, as though the ghost of some Babylonian watchman were waving a lit torch from its summit,—but the lurid glare soon faded and a dead gray twilight settled solemnly down over the melancholy landscape. With a sudden feeling of dejection and lassitude upon him, Alwyn, heaving a deep sigh, went onward, and soon perceived, lying a little to the north of the river, a small, roughly erected tenement with a wooden cross on its roof. Rightly concluding ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... that they should be friends. It is monstrous to suppose them lovers. The melancholy of their natures drew them together, and the sympathy of their tastes cemented the bond. To the woman-hating man of genius, this woman was a revelation and a wonder; to the great princess in her perpetual sorrow the greatest of creative minds was a solace ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... rude, robustious, homely heart athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls up Bernard Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend Carlyle—"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of mock—melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of art—the mythic treatment of nature; but he illustrates this "inferior" way with a splendour ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... had complained to me of the dishonorable conduct of a gentleman, who, some years prior, had called on her, expressing an enthusiastic admiration of her brother's genius, and requesting the melancholy pleasure of seeing all the letters, then in her and her mother's possession. The gentleman appeared quite affected when he saw her brother's writings, and begged to be allowed to take them to his inn, that he might read them at ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... L4,000 per ann. well wooded and full of timber.' As for his mother, 'She was of proper personage; of a brown complexion; her eyes and haire of a lovely black; of constitution inclyned to a religious melancholy, or pious sadnesse; of a rare memory and most exemplary life; for oeconomie and prudence esteemed one of the most conspicuous in ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... have formed an adequate idea of the strength of the Latin language. We might have dwelt with pleasure upon the softness, flexibility, richness, and musical tone of that vehicle of thought which could represent with full effect the melancholy tenderness of Tibullus, [Footnote: Albius Tibullus was a poet of singular gentleness and amiability, who wrote verses of exquisite finish, gracefully telling the story of his worldly misfortunes and expressing the fluctuations that marked his indulgence in the tender passion, in which ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... watershed. Almost all the rivers of northern China have become uncontrollable, and very dangerous to the dwellers along their banks, as a direct result of the destruction of the forests. The journey from Pekin to Jehol shows in melancholy fashion how the soil has been washed away from whole valleys, so that they have been converted ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... is a melancholy reflection, that among our American women who have been educated to better things, there should be found any who are willing to follow the lead of such foreign propagandists as the ringleted, glove-handed exotic, Ernestine L. Rose. We can understand how such men as the Rev. Mr. May, or the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... broken down with long years of toil and the beatings of her husband, moved about noiselessly and inclined to one side, as if she were in constant fear of knocking up against something. Her broad oval face, wrinkled and puffy, was lighted up with a pair of dark eyes, troubled and melancholy as those of most of the women in the village. On her right eyebrow was a deep scar, which turned the eyebrow upward a little; her right ear, too, seemed to be higher than the left, which gave her ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... night when he could not shut out from his ears the howling of the wolf. He often wondered, jeering the while at his own grotesque fancy, how his neighbors could sleep with those mournful yet sinister howlings burdening the air, but he became convinced at last that no one heard the melancholy solo but himself. ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... beneath his arm, from which, as he walked, he blew those deep and plaintive sounds which have done much to imprint upon the characters of those who hear them a melancholy and resigned despair. ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... the end of January was there a sign of revolt against the ever-growing, insidious condition of melancholy. As they turned into the last third of their exile, they found heart to rejoice in the thought that release was coming nearer and nearer. The end of March! Eight weeks off! Soon there would be ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... the widow viewed this happening with a kind of trustful resignation, sweetened perhaps by certain ancient memories attuned to a gentle melancholy. I know that she placed on view in her parlor for the first time a crayon portrait of Potts in his early manhood, one made ere life had broken so many of its promises to him, the portrait of one who might conceivably have enchained ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... it was under the influence of some terrible witchcraft. By day it was as beautiful as an angel, but it had a wild, evil disposition; by night, on the contrary, it was an ugly frog, quiet, except for its croaking, and with melancholy eyes. It had two natures, that changed about, both without and within. This arose from the little girl whom the stork had brought possessing by day her own mother's external appearance, and at the same time her father's temper; ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... to Vancouver, thence across the now famous Chilkoot Pass to the Great Lakes and down the Yukon River to the sea, crossing Bering Straits in an American revenue cutter to the Siberian settlement of melancholy memory. From here I hoped to reach the nearest Russian outpost, Anadyrsk, by dog-sled, proceeding thence along the western shores of the Okhotsk Sea to Okhotsk and Yakutsk. The latter is within ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... communicated its saddening influence to his little heart; the low tone in which people spoke in his presence, excited his suspicions. Oppressed by the sense of some painful mystery, he took refuge at first in solitude and tears, and before, long, unable to bear up against the weight of melancholy, he made up his mind to go away altogether from the scene of his troubles. A fortnight before the time appointed for his mother's entrance to the convent, he managed to escape unobserved from the school where he was then a boarder. The discovery of his flight, seemed a signal for general ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... that he now and again raised, brushing his forehead meditatively, had gained much in strength and force. Yet there was something—something different, that brought a slight cloud into her eyes. It came to her now, a certain melancholy in the bearing of the figure, erect and well-balanced as it was. Once the feeling came, the certainty grew. And presently she found a strange sadness in the eyes, something that lurked behind all that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... avenue overshadowed by such old trees as we have described, and which had been bordered at one time by high hedges of yew and holly. But these, having been untrimmed for many years, had run up into great bushes, or rather dwarf-trees, and now encroached, with their dark and melancholy boughs, upon the road which they once had screened. The avenue itself was grown up with grass, and, in one or two places, interrupted by piles of withered brushwood, which had been lopped from the trees cut down in ...
— Kenilworth • Sir Walter Scott
... conversation with John, as with heavy eyes and hectic cheeks, but with a saucy tongue in reserve, specially sharpened, and a chin held at the extreme angle of self-complacency and no toleration of interference from others, I was sailing majestically down-stairs to put my melancholy finger as usual into the pie of the pleasures and pastimes of ...
— The Late Miss Hollingford • Rosa Mulholland
... all our offices down and are going to rebuild and alter them. I am personally in a state of utmost confusion also, for my cruel wife has persuaded me to leave off snuff for a month; and I am most lethargic, stupid, and melancholy in consequence. ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... between its small potentates; in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the West—with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little that is ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... influence of this discouraging confidence, became serious and melancholy. He would take his gun on his shoulder and wade out into the meadow marshes, as if for game, and there would be seen by other gunners sitting on some old pier or perched on some worm fence, looking straight up at the sky, as if it might answer the riddle of his father's hate and his own unreciprocated ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... Illyricum as praetor (El. 8); but afterwards she left Rome for Baiae, and the rest of the Book is full of complaints of her harshness. El. 1, written after the year of separation, introduces the whole Book in a melancholy strain. ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... to bring over a great body of his disciples to the royal side, found himself on a sudden an object of contempt and abhorrence to those who had lately revered him as their spiritual guide, sank into a deep melancholy, and hid himself from the public eye. Deputations waited on several of the London clergy imploring them not to judge of the dissenting body from the servile adulation which had lately filled the London Gazette, and exhorting them, placed as they were in the van of this great fight, ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... reached the bottom of the stairs Philippe Lacroix came out of the ballroom carrying a candle. I saw his melancholy, pale face twist with surprise ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert
... did not know, as Douglass did, that some of the ideas were her own, and so took a melancholy ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... said, "how can you say it? You haven't laughed once. You are melancholy; you are pale, drawn, haggard. You keep muttering. You are not the old Harry. Is it this Nervina? At first I thought she loved you; but she does not. She wanted to know all about you, and about our love. She was so ...
— The Blind Spot • Austin Hall and Homer Eon Flint
... to laugh. Mr. Wogan laughed too. He had good reason, for here was his Eminence in a kindly temper and the Chevalier warming out of his melancholy. And, indeed, while he was still laughing the Chevalier caught him by the arm as a friend might do, and in an outburst of confidence, very rare with him, he said, "I would that I could laugh so. You and Whittington, I do envy you. An honest laugh, there's the purge for melancholy. But ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... Clarendon, Macaulay, the plays of Shakespeare, Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," "The Faerie Queene," Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Bacon's Essays, Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads," FitzGerald's "Omar Khayyam," Wordsworth, Browning, "Sartor Resartus," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Burke's "Letters on a Regicide Peace," "Ossian," "Piers Plowman," Burke's "Thoughts on the Present Discontents," Quarles, Newman's "Apologia", Donne's Sermons, Ruskin, Blake, "The Deserted Village," Manfred, Blair's "Grave," "The ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... from his appearance that he was not a man who took life easily.... He was not of a cheerful disposition.... All the hours which she had spent with him seemed in her recollection as if encompassed by an incomprehensible melancholy. If she only knew all about him! He had told her so little about himself ... nothing, indeed, absolutely nothing!... But how would that have been possible on the very first day that they had met again? Ah! if only he really knew her! If she were only not ...
— Bertha Garlan • Arthur Schnitzler
... evening. The streets of Cambridge were a compound of mud, mist, and melancholy. But in Psmith's rooms the fire burned brightly, the kettle droned, and all, as the proprietor had just observed, was joy, jollity, and song. Psmith, in pyjamas and a college blazer, was lying on the sofa. Mike, who had been playing football, was reclining in ...
— Psmith, Journalist • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... reproached her husband for his ingratitude, and then, throwing herself at his knees, implored that Avenant might be set free. But the king only said, "She loves him!" and refused her prayer. The queen entreated no more, but fell into a deep melancholy. ...
— The Fairy Book - The Best Popular Stories Selected and Rendered Anew • Dinah Maria Mulock (AKA Miss Mulock)
... going to fight everybody that tries to take notice of me you'll have your work cut out," said Miss Jelks, in tones of melancholy resignation, "and I'm sure it's not because I give them any encouragement. And as for the number that ask me to ...
— Salthaven • W. W. Jacobs
... faithlessness here means not a gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was a mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. In this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The child of a wandering tribe, caught young and trained to polite life, if he feels a hereditary yearning, can run away to the old wilds and get his nature into tune. ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... prejudices, uncompromising selfishness, irregular mental activity. The morbid element in his nervous system was also witnessed in the form of epilepsy, from which he suffered, more or less, during his whole life. The "vile melancholy" which Dr. Johnson inherited from his father, and which, to use his own expression, "made him mad all his life, at least not sober," never perverted nor hampered the exercise of his intellectual powers. He heard the voice of his distant mother calling ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... In 1820 she married an engineer, M. Midy de la Greneraye Surville, and from the first the marriage was not very happy, as Honore writes, a month after it took place, to blame Laure for her melancholy at the separation from her family, and to counsel philosophy and piano practice. Possibly Balzac's habits of ascendency over those he loved, and his wonderful gift of fascination —a gift which often provides ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... the miniature down and opened the first packet given me by Lady R—. It contained bank-notes to the amount of one hundred pounds, nearly double the salary due to me. The contents of both these packets only made me feel more melancholy, and I sighed heavily as I put them in my dressing-case; but time ran on, and I had agreed to be at Lady M—'s at one o'clock, when the carriage would be sent for me. I therefore hastened my toilet, closed the remainder of my luggage, and went down to the breakfast ...
— Valerie • Frederick Marryat
... with Charles, and he were to be released, he could not hope to leave the city, Mr. Lorry went out in quest of such a lodging, and found a suitable one, high up in a removed by-street where the closed blinds in all the other windows of a high melancholy square of ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... of it, for if she did, I should have to sit for melancholy, or an angel, or something I'm not fitted ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... think you will run a great risk of having a morbid, melancholy young lady on your hands—a delicate one too—for she is in danger of becoming anemic, unless ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... fully see the form of the building of which we say "This is a Gothic cathedral"—of the picture of which we say "Christ before Pilate"—or of the piece of music of which we say "A cheerful waltz by Strauss" or "A melancholy adagio by Beethoven." Now it is this fragmentary, superficial attention which we most often give to art; and giving thus little, we find that art gives us little, perhaps nothing, in return. For understand: you can be utterly perfunctory ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... "You give yourself strange melancholy airs of late, my dear. All that cheerfulness, which used to delight me whenever I saw you, I am sorry for it, is quite vanished. You and I must shortly have a ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... the history of art. The seed scattered hither and thither, during the stormy and warlike period of the crusades, now sprung up and flourished, bearing diverse fruit. A more contemplative enthusiasm, a superstition tinged with a morbid melancholy, fermented into life and form. In that general "fit of compunction," which we are told seized all Italy at this time, the passionate devotion for the benign Madonna mingled the poetry of pity with that of pain; and assuredly this state of feeling, with its mental and moral requirements, must have ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... revolution is just brought to a happy end with you, yours here is but cleverly under way. For some days I was really melancholy with the apprehension, that arms would be appealed to, and the opposition crushed in its first efforts. But things seem now to wear a better aspect. While the opposition keeps at its highest wholesome ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... sunset at sea, where the bosom of each wavelet that fronted the west was aglow with fiery gold, and the back of each turned eastward was cold green; so that, looking on the one hand all was glory, and on the other all was sober melancholy. So differently does life look to you young people and to us older ones. Every man must buy his own experience for himself, and no preaching nor talking will ever make you see life as we see it. It is neither possible nor desirable that you should; but it is both possible and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... end miserably spent;—his muscular strength and virility worn down to a thread;—his own animal spirits ruffled beyond description,—and that in this sad disorder'd state of nerves, he had lain down a prey to sudden starts, or a series of melancholy dreams and fancies, for nine long, long months together.—I tremble to think what a foundation had been laid for a thousand weaknesses both of body and mind, which no skill of the physician or the philosopher could ever afterwards have set ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... It grew a melancholy pleasure to him to open out his mental resources to the youth, whose attention flattered him, and gradually he began to attach himself to him. He would put by a portion of his supper, and even of his brandy for him, and enjoy seeing him consume it. Once, when Veitel ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... information which had not reached the ears of Dutch, or she may have been prone to take melancholy views of the dangers to which seafaring people are exposed. It was a strange kind of evidence to be admitted against a person in a trial ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... fascinating him. He busied himself over the sick man: he put questions, he felt the pulse, he jested, he grew a little hot and swore: and still, whenever he looked round, there were the brown eyes waiting for his with the same inquiring, melancholy gaze. ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is like clearness of mind, that her darkness and gloom are like a dark and gloomy mood; then, omitting 'like,' we go on to ascribe our qualities directly to her, and say, this neighbourhood, this air, this general tone of colour, is cheerful, melancholy, and so forth. Here we are prompted by an undeveloped dormant consciousness which really only compares, while it seems to take one thing for another. In this way we come to say that a rock projects boldly, that ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... Front Royal the boom of the guns was silent. The glory of the summer brooded undisturbed on hill and forest; and as the escort which followed Ashby to his grave passed down the quiet country roads, the Valley lay still and peaceful in the sunshine. Not a single Federal scout observed the melancholy cortege. Fremont's pursuit had been roughly checked. He was uncertain in which direction the main body of the Confederates had retreated; and it was not till evening that a strong force of infantry, reconnoitring through the woods, struck Jackson's outposts near ...
— Stonewall Jackson And The American Civil War • G. F. R. Henderson
... Gladstone's various devices for obtaining from Ireland a contribution to Imperial services possess now only a melancholy and academical interest, because, without an elaborate manipulation of the accounts, so as to disguise their true significance, no such contribution can possibly be obtained. In 1886 Mr. Gladstone provided for an annual payment from Ireland, fixed in ...
— The Framework of Home Rule • Erskine Childers
... upon the flanks of the Alps, the Apennines, the Pyrenees, and other mountain ranges in Central and Southern Europe, and the progress of physical deterioration has been so rapid that, in some localities, a single generation has witnessed the beginning and the end of the melancholy revolution. ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... hellish hopelessness play around his pages, and vanishing between the lines are the less guilty Elves of the Concord Elms, which Thoreau and Old Man Alcott may have felt, but knew not as intimately as Hawthorne. There is often a pervading melancholy about Hawthorne, as Faguet says of de Musset "without posture, without noise but penetrating." There is at times the mysticism and serenity of the ocean, which Jules Michelet sees in "its horizon rather than in its waters." There is a sensitiveness to supernatural ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... toil; wasting in meagre industry the powers which ought to have been cherished by his country for purposes of national honour. Such is always the course of things. The very stones of Burns' pillars would have made the great poet happy for life, if their price had been given to him to cheer his melancholy fireside. Why has the poetic spirit of England folded its wings, and been content to abandon its brilliant region to the butterflies of albums, but that the spirit of England has suffered itself to be fettered by the red tape of a peddling parsimony? Should we have had a Shakspeare without ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... year, they say, and been everywhere and done everything. Now, I fancy, he wants to marry, for he's much older, you know, than he looks. To hear him talk, you'd think he was a hundred, and broken-hearted into the bargain. For my part, I've no patience with a melancholy man; but then I'm not a young lady. You know him, ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... peaks above us are inaccessible. Descending chains of rocks mingled with flint and lime, we attain a more clement landscape. Kabyle girls crowd around a well called the Mosquitoes' Fountain, a naked boy plays melancholy tunes on a reed, and the signs of a lower level are abundant in the fields of corn and orchards of olive. But the rugged mountains, in whose grasp we have found so many wonders, are not left without regret. The most ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... fellow," said F.F. with his melancholy ardent glance, when Mr. Prohack had replied suitably to his opening question. "I'd no idea you'd been unwell. I hope it ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... howled like a wolf—like a lone wolf that has found no quarry—melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger. There was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a phantom wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes there was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would be a slumber song. Ten times ghastlier than if ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... June, a fortnight before her disappearance, Myrtle strolled off by the river shore, along its lonely banks, and came dome with her hands full of leaves and blossoms. Silence Withers looked at them as if they were a kind of melancholy manifestation of frivolity on the part of the wicked old earth. Not that she did not inhale their faint fragrance with a certain pleasure, and feel their beauty as none whose souls are not wholly shriveled and hardened can help doing, but the world was, in her estimate, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... This melancholy state of things was still further aggravated on the 14th of May by the failure of Donnel, Lawson, & Simpson and Hatch & Foote. On May 15th it was the turn of the Savings Banks of New York, of Piske & Hatch, and of many others. It was impossible to obtain ...
— A Brief History of Panics • Clement Juglar
... conducted by Abdallah, the uncle of his competitor. After an irretrievab defeat, the caliph escaped to Mosul; but the colors of the Abbassides were displayed from the rampart; he suddenly repassed the Tigris, cast a melancholy look on his palace of Haran, crossed the Euphrates, abandoned the fortifications of Damascus, and, without halting in Palestine, pitched his last and fatal camp at Busir, on the banks of the Nile. [37] His speed ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... are the great channels through which the ceaseless interchange of the elements goes on; they unite the heart of the continents and the solitary places of the mountains with the universal sea which washes all shores and beats its melancholy refrain at either pole. Into their currents the hills and uplands pour their streams; to them the little rivulets come laughing and singing down from their sources in the forest depths. A drop falling from a passing shower into the lake of Delolo may be carried eastward, through the Zambesi, ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... his reappearance with no pleasure. But he was uncertain, for he immediately noted that in his absence the whole character of her face had changed. It showed him something momentous had happened. It was no longer self-contained melancholy that he read in her eyes, but grief and agitation which had lately struggled with the passionate love of peace ruling her before all things else, and forced her to know that deep experience is never peaceful. She was pale and had evidently ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... friend, good morrow; How fares the honest partner of my heart? What, melancholy! not a word ...
— Venice Preserved - A Tragedy • Thomas Otway
... the south is Tiverton. Tiverton is a small town, but its story is interesting, and incidents cluster round the castle, church, the well-known school, and the former kersies and wool-market, and, besides, it is filled with memories of the melancholy experiences it has passed through—fires, floods, the plague, and at ...
— Devon, Its Moorlands, Streams and Coasts • Rosalind Northcote
... a pure air; every circumstance points out the country as the proper place for their education; the purity of the air, the variety of rustic sports, the plainness of diet, the simplicity and innocence of manners, all concur to recommend it. It is a melancholy fact, that above half the children born in London, die before they are ...
— A Lecture on the Preservation of Health • Thomas Garnett, M.D.
... when youth's wild ways Knew every phase of harmless folly! Oh, blissful nights whose fierce delights Defied gaunt-featured Melancholy! Gone are they all beyond recall, And I, a shade—a mere reflection— Am forced to feed my spirits' greed ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... from his deputation[79]: and the disappointment chagrined him so much, that he was seized with a violent fever, which had well nigh carried him off. It appeared plainly by the blood taken from him that melancholy was the occasion of his disorder. He was removed to Delft[80], where he found himself better. As he was forbid to do anything which required application, he wrote to Vossius that he was very desirous ...
— The Life of the Truly Eminent and Learned Hugo Grotius • Jean Levesque de Burigny
... All things that we ordained Festiuall, Turne from their office to blacke Funerall: Our instruments to melancholy Bells, Our wedding cheare, to a sad buriall Feast: Our solemne Hymnes, to sullen Dyrges change: Our Bridall flowers serue for a buried Coarse: And all things change ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A dromedary flashing up the sands,—spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the desert." A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... ship, which kept afloat, much to my surprise. Her buoyant cargo supported her, although her hold was full up to the main deck, and the sea washing in and out of her forwards; and, there was I, tied up there in the rigging like a dog, listening to the melancholy sound of the breaking waves. I was, you must recollect, utterly unable to help myself, for my arms were pinioned like my legs, although my hands were loose and I could move them about: but, otherwise, I was powerless and could not stir from the place where I was lashed, the ropes binding ...
— Crown and Anchor - Under the Pen'ant • John Conroy Hutcheson
... stood quietly behind him, looking over his head. At last he got up, patted the neck of the pony (whom, from an exaggerated appreciation of his merits, he had christened "Five Hundred Dollar"), and then mounted with a melancholy air. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... coarsened, her vulgarity had hardened, and her kind heart had withered, through lack of cultivation, to the size of a cherry. And, from having had everything she wanted for so long, she had at last reached that melancholy state of mind when she could think of ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... I had one white man, two half-breeds, and an Indian with me. There was darkness day after day, and because the Esquimaux and Indians hadn't come up to the fort that winter, it was lonely as a tomb. One by one the men got melancholy and then went mad, and I had to tie them up, and care for them and feed them. The Indian was all right, but he got afraid, and wanted to start to a mission station three hundred miles on. It was a bad look-out for me, but I told him to go. I was left alone. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... great Dante in exile, condemned to be burnt alive on false charges of embezzlement. Look at his starved features, gaunt form, melancholy, a poor wanderer; but he never gave up his idea; he poured out his very soul into his immortal poem, ever believing that right would at ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... recalled so vividly to Agnes the parting with Miss Edwards at Brook Farm, that the recollection made her, if possible, still more sad, as she thought the resemblance might be carried out even to the end, and the close of this earthly scene to her might be as melancholy as was that of ...
— Lewie - Or, The Bended Twig • Cousin Cicely
... thinking, or notions which we form from the comparison of things one with another. Thus one and the same thing can be at the same time good, bad, and indifferent. For instance, music is good for him that is melancholy, bad for him that mourns; for him that is deaf, it ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... sin against your dear eyes to speak of them thus! Tilly is as bright and joyous as ever. As for my smiles, if you detect in them one trace of that sadness you talk about, I shall grow as melancholy as yourself, and for as little cause. Come! you shall confess before three days, brother, if you will only help me to be gay, that your sister has the lightest heart ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... and Pigot caused himself to be rowed out to it, introduced himself to Admiral Marin-Dabel, Maritime Prefect of Toulon, who had taken personal charge of the rescue work, and spent half an hour inspecting the melancholy scene. Then he landed again, and listened for a time to the reports of his lieutenants. There was among them not a single ray of light—not the slightest evidence to show that the disaster had been anything but an accident. The fire in the store-room had, it was whispered, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... Ireland once more came upon him, and he ventured a second escape. He was recaptured before he could gain the ship; and under the order of the court, the solitary year of his bondage which remained was increased into five. Under this new blow he sank into a settled state of melancholy, and seemed so likely to die that his new master had pity upon his condition, began to treat him with less austerity, and recommended him to the care of his wife, who often took him into the house, and recommended her daughter Maria to use him with all kindness. The damsel exceeded her ...
— Celebrated Claimants from Perkin Warbeck to Arthur Orton • Anonymous
... into the department of Public Instruction, where bureaucratic servility is less intolerable. The daily duties are certainly scarcely more onerous and he had as chiefs, or colleagues, Xavier Charmes and Leon Dierx, Henry Roujon and Rene Billotte, but his office looked out on a beautiful melancholy garden with immense plane trees around which black circles ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... It is really melancholy to see how this fever of extravagance rages, and how it is sapping the strength of our happy country. It has no bounds; it pervades all ranks, and ...
— The American Frugal Housewife • Lydia M. Child
... temperate, the sky was serene. The silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not describe the first emotion of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." Gibbon died in 1794, about one year ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... did the survivors support life? Some persons would be almost afraid to put the question, or hear the answer. There is nothing, however, to wound our feelings, but much to admire in the admirable conduct of Lieutenant Wilson and his men during these melancholy and miserable twenty days. Showers of rain occasionally fell; they caught some water in their little sail, which they drank, and put some into a small keg that had floated out of the vessel. The sea was almost always breaking over the spars of the raft, which ...
— Our Sailors - Gallant Deeds of the British Navy during Victoria's Reign • W.H.G. Kingston
... the whirlwind of confused harmony, and each, sonorous and distinct, recounted to my enraptured heart some episode in the life of man and nature. And then, when night comes, Madame, to all of these noises of the day succeed others more mysterious, more penetrating, more melancholy. Do you like the hooting of the owl, Madame? But first, I wonder if you have ever heard it. It is a cry— No, it is not a cry, it is a soft, stifled wail; a monotonous and resigned sorrow, which unbosoms itself to the moon and stars. One of these sad birds lodges within two steps of me, in the ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... of piety and the abhorrent thing! Who was it laughed there in the old slave-market—laughed at these white eyeballs glaring from out of the blackness of their dark cattle-pen? What poor departed soul in this House of Melancholy? But there was no ghost when we turned to look—only our old ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... touching minor undertone in the poem, the tragic strain in the half burlesque, which is again so deeply Norwegian. Who that has ever been present at a Norse peasant wedding has failed to be struck with the strangely melancholy strain in the merriest dances? And in Landstad's collection of "Norwegian Ballads" there is the same blending of humor and pathos in such genuine folk-songs as Truls med bogin, Mindre Alf, and scores of others. To this ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... after he was awake in the morning, until the time came for him to rise. The mind, struggling to free itself from the dominion of sleep, had not yet put on the obedience of the day, but seemed to act with a whimsical independence of its own. His thoughts were then most apt to wear a melancholy tinge; a certain apprehensive shadow often lay upon him, a sense of being unequal to the claims of the day, a tendency to rehearse, without hopefulness or spring, the part he would have to play, to exaggerate difficulties and obstacles. ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Edward Howard was the Marcellus of the English Catholics; {021} never did a noble youth raise greater expectations; but he was suddenly taken ill and died after an illness of a few days. On that melancholy occasion the family expressed great pleasure in the recollection of the religious education he ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... was this—perhaps it was the look of the island, with its gray, melancholy woods, and wild stone spires, and the surf that we could both see and hear foaming and thundering on the steep beach—at least, although the sun shone bright and hot, and the shore birds were fishing and crying ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... through which we passed were deserted except by women and very old men; their aspect was most melancholy. The country is sandy and the land not fertile, but the timber ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... painted the frescoes in the smaller Hall of Audience. These are principally scenes from the Life of Camillus. The story of the schoolmaster of Falerii is very spirited, and the Triumph of Camillus varied and pleasing in colouring. Although melancholy and suspicious, often making enemies and losing patronage by misunderstandings, Rossi and Vasari were always faithful to their first boyish friendship, often working together, but never with any spirit of rivalry. Salviati's style was bold and spirited; he was rich in invention, ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... cattle-lifting party can effect, it is not unreasonable to imagine that this was most probably the cause of such utter desolation here. These war-parties lay waste the tracks they visit for endless time. Indeed, until slavery is suppressed in Africa, we may expect to find such places in a similarly melancholy state. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... yearned with no diviner soul, To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. Th' exceeding mystery of the loveliness Sadden'd delight; and with his mournful look Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face 'Twixt his dark flowing locks, he almost seemed Too feeble, or, to melancholy eyes, One that has parted with his soul for pride, And in ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... imperious, and, though of generous impulses, not steadily kind or even amiable." He was a facile scholar and fond of Latin and English poetry. He was nearly always alone, making few friends among his schoolmates, and was of a dignified and reserved disposition and inclined to melancholy. He entered the University of Virginia at the age of seventeen, and it was here that his fatal habit of drinking was first formed. One of ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... tell you, sir, What he did tell me of Nab. It's a strange thing:— By the way, you must eat no cheese, Nab, it breeds melancholy, And that same melancholy breeds worms; but pass it:— He told me, honest Nab here was ne'er at tavern ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... defect in character is more generally the result of vicious or improper habits of mind, than any constitutional idiosyncrasy. It is the result of the indulgence of gloomy thoughts, morbid fancies, inordinate ambition, habitual melancholy, a complaining, fault-finding disposition. It is generally early acquired, not in childhood, but in youth. Childhood is too buoyant, fresh, and free for such indulgences. Early youth—when its passions are developing, when the soul's bubbling springs are opening ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... over it, and often reverted to his brother's declining state. Though he expressed the greatest pity for him, he was almost bitter upon him. He said that poor Frederick—ha hum—drivelled. There was no other word to express it; drivelled. Poor fellow! It was melancholy to reflect what Amy must have undergone from the excessive tediousness of his Society—wandering and babbling on, poor dear estimable creature, wandering and babbling on—if it had not been for the relief ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... used formerly to wear tusks of the wild hog in these holes whenever they went out to encounter strangers or their enemies in war. The gloomy savagery, filth, and poverty of the people in this place made me feel quite melancholy, and I was glad to return to the canoe. They offered us no civilities; they did not even pass the ordinary salutes, which all the semi-civilised and many savage Indians proffer on a first meeting. The men persecuted Penna for cashaca, which they seemed to consider the only good thing the white ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... wonderfully pleased. This was much older still than Queen Mary's rooms. Ellen admired the wild melancholy look of the Gothic pillars and arches springing from the green turf, the large carved window, empty of glass, the broken walls; and, looking up to the blue sky, she tried to imagine the time when the Gothic roof closed overhead, and music sounded ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... have already endeavoured to show, that tho' two or three Salaries might be thought so in general, they did not amount to more than had been allowed, and very considerable Profits arising to the Patentees. But there is a very melancholy Instance, that the Actors Demands is not the Reason of dismissing 'em, but the Will of the Manager alone; since last Season an Actor and Actress returned to Drury-Lane under such Abatements as that Manager thought proper, and such as were in no degree equal to their Merit; and yet, at the ...
— The Case of Mrs. Clive • Catherine Clive
... reflective physiognomist could have observed without interest, entered the room. This person was tall, extremely thin, and somewhat inclining to the left side; the complexion was dark, and the somewhat noble features wore a melancholy expression, which but seldom gave place to a smile of unusual beauty. The forehead elevated itself, with its deep lines, above the large brown extraordinary eyes, and above this a wood of black-brown hair erected itself, under ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... the melancholy story of the warrior queen Wetamoo, who as the companion-in-arms of her sachem sought to avenge her husband's death, as well as to save her country from the foreigner. However, Wetamoo and Philip together dragged the once mighty Narragansetts down. This brings to the ...
— Boys' Book of Indian Warriors - and Heroic Indian Women • Edwin L. Sabin
... scoffing and melancholy, showed how utterly he ignored her answer. He looked at his watch. Then he looked back at the woman. A nervous tug-of-war was taking place between her right and left hand, with a twisted-up pair of ecru ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... rowed away from the melancholy little derelict I saw that near by a narrow gully gave access to the top of the cliff, and I resolved that I would avail myself of this path to visit the Island Queen again. My mind continued to dwell upon the unknown ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... it was one of her old friends. He, at the same time, turning from a poor man to whom he had been talking, recognized her, and on learning her errand, he asked her to accompany him to see one of his patients. "It is a melancholy case, madam," said he, "the girl is afflicted with a species of hysteria, induced by constant pining for a worthless lover, who ran away, not long since, with another woman. She is in a terrible state, weeping incessantly. I think, perhaps, you may be able to comfort her a little; ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... conscious that the morning was cold enough to turn his breath to steam. It was that period of indistinctness moreover when farmers and roosters, he knew, were getting up all over the dawn, but Kenny, with little time and no inclination at all for melancholy rebellion, tip-toed down the stairway with his shoes in his hand. He put them on by the kitchen fire. There was water by the window in a milk-pail. He poured some in a basin, washed his face and hands and found the water cold ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... surface. But there is not the soft play of waves which unite all the coasts of the earth; each wave as it rolls in bringing a message from the remotest and fairest island kingdoms, and again rolling back as it were with an answer, in a sort of love-flowing dance. No; there is here only the melancholy sporting of the hot wind with the faithless dust which ever falls back again into its joyless basin, and never reaches the rest of the solid land with its happy human dwellings. There is here none of the sweet cool sea-breeze ...
— The Two Captains • Friedrich de La Motte-Fouque
... sunset, having reached the top of a gentle rising, I climbed a high tree, from the topmost branches of which I cast a melancholy look over the barren wilderness, but without discovering the most distant trace of a human dwelling. The same dismal uniformity of shrubs and sand everywhere presented itself, and the horizon was as level and uninterrupted as ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... the northeast, St. Patrick, we are told, sat with some friends in the glowing light of a great peat fire, where they warmed themselves at the same time that they told stories of adventure and sang Scottish songs as wild and melancholy as the wind that was scouring the hills. Saint Patrick was now a lad of sixteen, with well knit limbs and a powerful body that made him appear older than he really was, and at the same time gave promise of greater strength to come. He listened keenly to the singing, but at the same ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... said Cosmo. "I made acquaintance with it the last thing as I was growing ill. It looks to me so melancholy! If I were here, I should never rest till I had with my own hands got it ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... baseness of their ingratitude should be apparent even to those who are inclined to sympathize with the red men, and to denounce the alleged severity with which they have been treated. Travelers through the Dakota region find few spots of more melancholy, though marked, interest than the one illustrated in connection ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... fairly wide experience, she was something of a fatalist. That is to say, she believed that her evil destiny might spring upon her unawares at any moment, and she felt something when she was with Harrington that warned her. For the first time in her life she knew what it was to have moods of melancholy; she caught herself asking what was really the end and object of her gay life, whether it amounted to anything worthy in comparison with the trouble one had to take to amuse one's self, whether it would not be far better in the end to live like Miss Schenectady, ...
— An American Politician • F. Marion Crawford
... It is like the sound of a lyre, and the wise man asks in vain from whence it came and whither it goes. There must be some supreme intelligence where we could find rest. If I attained it, I could bring light to man; if I were free myself, I could deliver the world.' The king, who perceived the melancholy mood of the young prince, tried every thing to divert him from his speculations: but all was in vain. Three of the most ordinary events that could happen to any man, proved of the utmost importance in the career of Buddha. We quote the description ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... stiff climb! The sun had set, and the long twilight was giving way to darkness when they came down the trail into the upper end of the camp. Some embryo artist was painfully overworking an accordion, while a dog rendered melancholy by the unmusical noise, occasionally accompanied him with prolonged howls. A belated ore trailer, with the front wagon creaking under the whine of the brakes and the chains of the six horses clanking, lurched down from a road on the far side of the long, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... animal. He lay quietly curled up, and his breathing grew steadily shorter and more violent. Towards eleven o'clock at night he seemed to have fallen asleep under Minna's bed, but when I drew him out he was dead. The effect of this melancholy event upon Minna and myself was never expressed in words. In our childless life together the influence of domestic pets had been very important. The sudden death of this lively and lovable animal acted as the ...
— My Life, Volume II • Richard Wagner
... which was soft as floss silk, hung in luxuriant curls about his face. But oh, what an expression of deep melancholy his countenance wore! so remarkable that I felt certain that the fear of death had nothing to do with it. And I was right. Young as he was, he did not wish to live. He repeatedly said that death was what he most desired; and it was truly dreadful to hear one so young and so beautiful ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... most desolate scene that ever I have seen. At least it would have been the most desolate if I did not chance to have looked on it before, in the drawing-room of Ragnall Castle! There was no doubt about it. Below was the black, melancholy lake, a large sheet of water surrounded by reeds. Around, but at a considerable distance, appeared the tropical forest. To the east of the lake stretched a stony plain. At the time I could make out no ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... did not return to the palace, and all search after her proved utterly vain, the poor old king fell into a state of the deepest melancholy, and spent most of his time in the summer-house, bewailing the mysterious loss of his ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... and mourned alone in the damp shades of Elleray, where he would allow not a twig to be cut from the trees she loved,—the sorrow of each moved them all. Elleray was a gloomy place then, and Wilson never surmounted the melancholy which beset him there; and he wisely parted with it some years before his death. The later depression in his case was in proportion to the earlier exhilaration. His love of Nature and of genial human intercourse ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... let us hope, mademoiselle, that the hour is yet far distant when so melancholy a service will be performed for you. May he who is unborn be the sad announcer of your departure hence![2] May he indicate to those around him many virtues not perhaps yet full-blown in you, and point triumphantly to many faults ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
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