DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • More 'Poignancy' Quotes from Famous Books

... never enter, to join in an everlasting chorus of praise and glory to our Lord and Saviour! I grieve for our lost darling as a father only can grieve for a daughter, and my sorrow is heightened by the thought of the anguish her death will cause our dear son and the poignancy it will give to the bars of his prison. May God in His mercy enable him to bear the blow He has so suddenly dealt, and sanctify it to ...

— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son

... do not love their own traits, which they recognize in their children; they shrink from their own features in the reflection presented by these little mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness (such as gives poignancy to the love between the sexes) would excite a livelier affection. Be this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor Grimshawe would have loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse characteristics that he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly such fervor as this beautiful, slender, yet ...

— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... with a strange pleasure I always get out of the poignancy of a despair not my own, "suppose that this isn't all. Suppose that the girl has met some one who has become interested in her, and whom she will have to tell of this ...

— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells

... name; but his position at Court released him from the drudgery of manual labor. He was thus also brought in contact with the luxurious side of life, and became acquainted with those scenes of pleasure which he recalls only to add poignancy to the sorrow with which he contemplates the yesterday of life. Omar's astronomical researches were continued for many years, and his algebra has been translated into French: but his greatest claim to renown is based upon his immortal Quatrains, ...

— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous

... kep' his hold on the bags." I turned aside, for fear that any one should see how white I was. Much too white to be accounted for even by this grisly story. To the rest, these poor bones might indeed bear mute witness to a tragedy, but a tragedy lacking outlines, vague, impersonal, without poignancy. To me, they told with dreadful clearness the last sad chapter of the tale of Peter, Peter who had made me so intimately his confidante, whose love and hopes and solitary strivings I knew all about. Struck down in the moment of his triumph by a great stupid lump of soulless ...

— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... clearly that he thought so. Of his contemporaries, scarcely any had so much of his admiration as Mr. Gifford, who, considered as a poet, was merely Pope, without Pope's wit and fancy, and whose satires are decidedly inferior in vigour and poignancy to the very imperfect juvenile performance of Lord Byron himself. He now and then praised Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge, but ungraciously and without cordiality. When he attacked them, he brought his whole soul to the work. Of the most elaborate ...

— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... time in party politics; though at this time his heart was far away from the Blues and Yellows of Lansmere, sad and forlorn,—yet, forced into action, the eloquence that was natural to his conversation poured itself forth. He had warm blood in his veins; and his dislike to Randal gave poignancy to his wit, and barbed his arguments with impassioned invective. In fact, Leonard could conceive no other motive for Lord L'Estrange's request to take part in the election than that nobleman's desire to defeat the man whom they both regarded as an impostor; and this notion was confirmed ...

— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... back. There was a dangerous glitter in Leonard's eyes. He knew his man and he knew the truth of what he had himself said, and he felt, with all the strength of his base soul, how best he could torture him. In the very strength of Harold's anger, in the poignancy of his concern, in the relief to his soul expressed in his eyes and his voice, his antagonist realised the jealousy of one who honours—and loves. Second by second Leonard grew more sober, and more and better able to carry his own ...

— The Man • Bram Stoker

... terrors of our uncertainty was the figure, seen quite clearly by all of us without any sentiment, of Russia. Certainly Trenchard and I could feel with less poignancy the appeal of her presence, and yet I swear that to us also on that day it was she of whom we were thinking. We had been, until then, her allies; we ...

— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... and a whole melting-pot full of "rare emotional experiences," "art that was almost intuitive in its passion, so subtly did it"—oh, do all sorts of things!—and "handling the plastic outlines of the theme with rare emotional skill and mastery of technique," "purest lyricism lifted to heights of poignancy,"—all that sort of stuff, you know. Next time a writer, or, better still, a fiddler or a pianist comes to your town, look in your home paper the morning ...

— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... call their country. The vision of the High Adventure is not often vouchsafed to one, but it is a good thing to have had it—it carries one through many a night at the shambles. Radzivilow is the only place it came to me. In Belgium one's heart was wrung by the poignancy of it all, its littleness and defencelessness; in Lodz one could see nothing for the squalor and "frightfulness"; in other places the ruined villages, the flight of the dazed, terrified peasants show one of the darkest sides ...

— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan

... done Lady Teazle and Imogen, the Fiammetta of Catulle Mendes and the Salome of Hauptmann; I do not know even the names of half the parts she has played, but I can imagine her playing them all, not with the same poignancy and success, but with a skill hardly varying from one to another. There is no doubt that she has a natural genius for acting. This genius she has so carefully and so subtly trained that it may strike you at first sight ...

— Plays, Acting and Music - A Book Of Theory • Arthur Symons

... arrogance; he caused numbers of the most illustrious senators and others to be put to death, upon the most trifling pretences. One AE'lius La'ma was condemned and executed only for jesting, though there was neither novelty nor poignancy in his humour. Occea'nus was murdered only for celebrating the nativity of O'tho. Pomposia'nus shared the same fate, because it was foretold by an astrologer that he should be emperor. Sallus'tius Lucul'lus his lieutenant in Britain, was destroyed only for having given his name ...

— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith

... come to him in due time, and would have deepened and enriched his vein of song. The first great emotion which found him, when he rallied to the trumpet-call of France and freedom, did, as a matter of fact, lend new reality and poignancy to his verse; but the soldier's life left him small leisure for composition. We must regard his work, then, as a fragment, a mere foretaste of what he might have achieved had his life been prolonged. But, devoted though he ...

— Poems • Alan Seeger

... not yet completely died out. In the end, however, Mr. Moncrieff beat his opponent by sixty-seven votes, a majority so small in proportion to the constituency that the bitterness and humiliation of defeat must have been felt with more than ordinary poignancy. It seemed at that time as if the Conservatives would never have another chance of lifting their heads above water. There were few constituencies in Scotland on which they could place perfect reliance, and the Universities ...

— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans

... and without emotion. But to speak of these things, after so long silence, proved more trying than she had anticipated. The scene in the red drawing-room, the long agony of waiting and of farewell rose up before her after all these years with a vividness and poignancy ...

— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... is the very point about which we are so solicitous. Sorrow shared with affectionate friends is relieved of half its poignancy. ...

— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson

... bitterly for having brought it from New London. "She seems entirely crushed," he continued, when they were driving toward the farmhouse. "For a few hours I trembled for her reason, while the fear that you might reproach her added much to the poignancy of her grief." ...

— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes

... listened while a woman who had been near San Francisco at the time of the earthquake and fire endeavoured to describe what was in truth indescribable, how the very air itself was at that time charged with a poignancy of agony—an impalpable spiritual agony, apart from such physical cause as heat and fire, an agony which arose from the grief of thousands ...

— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... I commenced to fear the nights and this tremendous living, because the happiness and the light and the poignancy and the rapture of it were becoming more than I could bear. I began to wonder secretly if God intended to draw my soul so near to Him that I should die of the splendour of this living, My raptures were not only caused by the sense of the immediate Presence of God—this is a distinctive ...

— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley

... Caryll's grief was overwhelming in its poignancy. His sense of solitude was awful. Gone was the only living man who had stood to him for kith and kin. He was left alone in the world; utterly alone. That was the selfishness of his sorrow—the consideration of Sir Richard's death ...

— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini

... only Frenchmen, but Americans, Argentinians, Australians, etc. etc.... Thousands of little children, without their parents' knowledge, took pen in hand and wrote to tell him their love: most of them called him Our Father. And there was poignancy about their effusions, their adoration, these sighs of deliverance that escaped from thousands of hearts at the defeat of barbarism. To all these naif little souls, Joffre seemed like St. George crushing ...

— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann

... vigils, with bursting heart, beside the corpse of her babe. The noises of the Indian camp, the guttural voices of the men, the chattering of the squaws, rang in her ears, while the cries and prattling of the children, by reminding her of the lost one, served to enhance the poignancy of her grief. What a situation for the desolate mother! All alone with death, far from her mother, husband, home, and friends, surrounded by a troop of barbarous, noisy savages weighed down with grief, ...

— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... with anguish. All unconscious of how soon and how wondrously their sorrow was to be turned into joy, the appalling thought was alone present to them in all its fearfulness—"Lazarus is dead!" When He, the God-man Mediator, with the refined sensibilities of His tender heart, beheld the poignancy of that grief, the pent-up torrent of His own human sympathies could be restrained no longer. His ...

— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff

... name was mentioned, there was a pang; every time she thought of him in solitude, the fear and anxiety gained strength. Consciousness of ignorance added to its poignancy; and young as she was, it would be hard to describe how much suffering she underwent in secret, night after night, as she lay awake, in her perplexed musings on that one absorbing thought. Yet they were like those vague nightly terrors of wolves, darkness, or mysterious horrors, ...

— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... still, in the quiet shadowy room, her eyes closed, her hands crossed over the miniature, the Markborough paper lying on the floor beside her. As the first activity of memory, stirred and goaded by an untoward event, lost its poignancy; as she tried in obedience to Meynell to put away her terrors, with regard to the past, her thoughts converged ever more intensely on the ...

— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... exposure to danger. The extreme vanity of the modern Englishman in making a momentary Stylites of himself on the top of a Horn or an Aiguille, and his occasional confession of a charm in the solitude of the rocks, of which he modifies nevertheless the poignancy with his pocket newspaper, and from the prolongation of which he thankfully escapes to the nearest table-d'hote, ought to make us less scornful of the pride, and more intelligent of the passion, in which the mountain anchorites of Arabia and Palestine condemned themselves to lives ...

— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... her love as certain secret elements become visible in rare intensities of temperature. And in the case of the objects before her, poor shabby witnesses of his days of failure, what they gave out acquired a special poignancy from its contrast to his present cherished state. His shirts were all in round dozens now, and washed as carefully as old lace. As for his socks, she knew the pattern of every pair, and would have liked to see the washerwoman who dared to mislay one, or bring ...

— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton

... the reactions of the wider functioning of brain and muscle which struck me most forcibly was the increased joyfulness of women. They were happy in their work, happy in the thought of rendering service, so happy that the poignancy of individual ...

— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch

... twenty to realize the tragedy of it. Dans un grenier qu'on est bien a vingt ans! To be twenty, in a garret, with the freedom and the joy of it! Yes; the dear poet was right. In those "brave days" the poignancy of life comes not in the garret, but in ...

— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... fell like a wet blanket upon Jose, chilling him to the marrow, for it revived with cruel poignancy the fact that he was still a servant of Rome. In the past few happy days he had dwelt apart from the world in the consciousness of a new heaven and a new earth, revealed by Carmen. This sudden call to duty was ...

— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... purpose are infinite) is, with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, "I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. —— as a great wit." If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... is not to be supposed that Andrew Melville could retain the least personal resentment against Mr. Herbert; whose verses have in them so little of the poignancy of satire, that it is scarce possible to consider them as capable of exciting the anger of him to whom ...

— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton

... and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree. It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes of ...

— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett

... thought that Mr. Allan had plenty of money, and that no severe sacrifice would be needful for the payment of his debts relieved his penitence of much of its poignancy. That Mr. Allan would settle these "debts of honor," as he called them, as the fathers and guardians of boys as reckless as himself had done, he had not the slightest doubt. But, as will be seen, ...

— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard

... the fallen rocks forty to fifty feet below. They seemed to be calling to him. It was almost like a summons from far away—almost like a bugle-call heard in the mists of sleep. Somehow they soothed him, lessening the poignancy of his anguish, checking his wild rebellion, making him aware of ...

— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell

... was on an upper plateau, where questions as to beauty are answered by other than the shallow aspect of a girl. But would Henrietta eclipse her if they were side by side? Fleetwood recalled the strange girl's face. There was in it a savage poignancy in serenity unexampled among women—or modern women. One might imagine an apotheosis of a militant young princess of Goths or Vandals, the glow of blessedness awakening her martial ardours through the languor of the grave:—Woodseer would comprehend and hit ...

— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... us to the conviction of the relative insignificance of all that can change. That will not spoil nor shade any real joy; rather it will add to it poignancy that prevents it from cloying or from becoming the enemy of our souls. But the thought will wondrously lighten the burden that we have to carry, and the tasks which we have to perform. 'But for a moment,' makes all light. There was an old rabbi, long ago, ...

— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... eating, I was performing my ablutions, guess my mortification, when a huge rat running from his hole leaped into the dish which was placed upon the floor. I was near fainting with agony at the sight, and could not refrain from tears; but at length recovering from the poignancy of disappointment, the rays of comfort darted upon my mind, and I reflected that as disgrace and imprisonment had instantaneously followed the fortunate recovery of my cup and ring, so this mortification, a greater than which could not ...

— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous

... alluded to is the celebrated epigram made by Rochester on Charles II. It was composed at the King's request, who nevertheless resented its poignancy. ...

— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... poultry. The ingredients should be so proportioned, that no one flavour predominates; and instead of using the same stuffing for veal, hare, and other things, it is easy to make a suitable variety. The poignancy of forcemeat should be regulated by the savouriness of the viands, to which it is intended to give an additional zest. Some dishes require a very delicately flavoured stuffing, while for others it ...

— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton

... 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 image of the Owl is calculated to awaken the sentiment ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... founded were reasonable, and the prejudices against it on all sides were unreasonable. I do not regret the opposition which I have experienced—the reproaches which I have incurred—the labours I have endured; but I do regret—and every day's reflection adds fresh poignancy to my regrets—that in carrying out a measure which I had hoped would prove an unspeakable blessing to my native country, I have lost so many friends of my youth. No young man in Canada had more friends amongst all Christian denominations than I had when the ...

— The Story of My Life - Being Reminiscences of Sixty Years' Public Service in Canada • Egerton Ryerson

... The poignancy of expression in her voice and words made the man tremble. And yet she did not speak bitterly nor angrily. Her feeling was beyond all passion. It was the expression of a soul that had suffered everything and could no longer feel. That was just it, Tunis told himself. ...

— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper

... have indeed the Pretence of being natural; but they ought always to lead us to something brilliant or poignant, in order to justify their Deviation; and not to end only at a ridiculous PUN, void of all Spirit and Poignancy. ...

— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris

... the taste of whiskey and of blood. If only it had been Dickie's lips that had first touched her own. Blinding tears fell. The memory of Dickie's comfort, of Dickie's tremulous restraint, had a strange poignancy.... Why was he so different from all the rest? So much more like her father? What was there in this pale little hotel clerk who drank too much that lifted him out and up into a sort of radiance? Her memory of Dickie was always white—the whiteness of that ...

— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt

... the death of his wife, she had gone to keep house for her brother small indulgence had been shown to this passion. In the grave of his wife, not only all Sir Francis's heart had been buried, but apparently the love of all that made for the brightness of life. By the time the poignancy of his sorrow had worn off, to be solemn and sad of demeanour, to shun the disturbing effects of social distraction, had become second nature to him. By no wish of his own, but naturally and irresistibly, that habit of melancholy which had fallen on its master seemed ...

— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... from man to man and friend: this is how the dear Lord looked, or acted—see, the words in the Bible are so or so forth. Therefore, there enters into these designs, which contain after all only the same sort of skill which was rife in Italy, so much homeliness at once, and poignancy and sublimity of imagination. The Virgin, they have discovered, is not that grandly dressed lady, always in the very finest brocade, with the very finest manners, and holding a divine infant that has no earthly wants, whom ...

— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... anguish such as he had never known before, but he knew that not a minute was to be lost. Dollie must be found at once or it would be too late. It added a poignancy to his woe to know that in coming down the mountain path, he must have passed close to her, who was in sore need of the help he ...

— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis

... conscience for his grosser desires; nay, should he come to his wished-for yet desolate conclusion, from which the abhorrent nature shrinks and recoils, I do nevertheless firmly think, should the study have been long and deep, that he would wonder to find his desires had lost their poignancy and his objects their charm. He would descend from the Alp he had climbed to the low level on which he formerly deemed it a bliss to dwell, with the feeling of one who, having long drawn in high places an ...

— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... well-known quarters of four continents, to penetrate even to regions where skirts were considered improper and side-saddles were unknown. Even the nearness of Miss Desmond's fiftieth birthday hardly lessened at all the poignancy of his disapproval. Besides, she had not always been fifty, and she had always, in his recollection of her, smoked cigarettes, and travelled alone. Yet he had a certain well-founded respect for her judgment, and for that fine luminous common-sense of hers which had more than ...

— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit

... him injustice. His tales were all literally true, and Uncle Jesse had the gift of the born story-teller, whereby "unhappy, far-off things" can be brought vividly before the hearer and made to live again in all their pristine poignancy. ...

— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... don't want to bother about age. Neither of you has any age. And I'm not imploring you to have her. I'm only telling you that she's there for you if you want her. But doesn't she attract you? Isn't she positively irresistible?" She added with poignancy: "I know if I were a man ...

— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett

... withered heart for a young heart; to smile upon illusions which now I cannot share, to cause happiness in which I should either have no belief, or tremble to lose? I should perhaps respond to his devotion with egoism, should weigh and deliberate while he felt; my memory would resent the poignancy of his happiness. No, if you love once, that love is never replaced, you see. Indeed, who would have ...

— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... collection, not uncommon, in various languages, 1707; the collector and translator was Dr. J. Mapletoft. It must be acknowledged, that although no nation exceeds our own in sterling sense, we rarely rival the delicacy, the wit, and the felicity of expression of the Spanish and the Italian, and the poignancy of some of ...

— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... he reproached her, or perhaps himself, for it seemed, in the poignancy of his tenderness, as if he should have had it burning night and day. He set a match to the kindling and the flame answered it. She had taken one of the chairs at the hearth and he saw, in the leaping light, that she had put the child on the couch and covered him. She ...

— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... tried to persuade himself that he did so. But, after all, these cares and disappointments did not touch the root of his deep resentment against Osborne. There is nothing like wounded affection for giving poignancy to anger. And the squire believed that Osborne and his advisers had been making calculations, based upon his own death. He hated the idea so much—it made him so miserable—that he would not face it, and define it, and meet it with full inquiry and investigation. ...

— Wives and Daughters • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... desperation, and adopted without reflection. No, my Lord; I had, or, at least, I thought I had, better reasons. I remembered that you had once condescended to address me 'candidly, not critically,' that you had even kindly interested yourself on my behalf. I thought that, amid all the keenness and poignancy of your habitual feelings, as powerfully pourtrayed in your writings, I could discern the workings of a heart truly noble. I imagin'd that what to a superficial observer appear'd only the overflowings of misanthropy, ...

— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron

... man leaped to his feet and turned his face westward towards the sea with outstretched arms, and a look and gesture of utter yearning gave poignancy and spirit to the careless, sleepy grace of his face and figure. He seized the boy's arm. "See now," he cried, his voice trembling upon the verge of music, "it is nearly twelve years that I have ...

— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... In a way I got used to it, because after being in the trenches and looking in the face of death as a kind of hobby the feeling of release and lightness that comes over one drives all other troubles clean away. But after a while this feeling seemed to be growing in poignancy. In fact at the end of the first fortnight I mentioned it to ...

— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... blends naturally with the sordid thrift and shrewd, watchful, eager vigilance of the miser. It infuses a terrible grotesqueness into his rage, and curdles one's blood in the piercing, keen irony of his mocking humility to Antonio, and adds poignancy to the ferocity of his hideous revenge. This Kean rendered admirably, and in this my father entirely fails, but it is an important element of ...

— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble

... effulgence of the stars by night—the combination of all that was exciting and voluptuous in this transcending land, by inspiring a quicker spirit of life and an added sensitiveness to every articulation of her frame, only gave edge to the poignancy of her grief. Each long hour was counted, and "He suffers" was the burthen of all her thoughts. She abstained from food; she lay on the bare earth, and, by such mimickry of his enforced torments, endeavoured to hold communion with his ...

— The Last Man • Mary Shelley

... like a May morning on Tooting Common. Beverley would have handled that situation well, no doubt. But could he—could anyone—have achieved the poignancy of that unaffected phrase, "It does not seem very likely"? I said that the depths of Art were unplumbable. True, but Ruby Binns has at least got ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various

... us for not having taken the left-hand road in life instead of the right are our chief mental resources after forty, and they tell me that we men only know half the poignancy of these miserable recollections. Women have a special adaptiveness for this kind of torture—would seem actually to ...

— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever

... of the work. Its language, so simply strong and daring in its homeliness, its free and energetic motion, its fresh fearless touch, its fidelity to nature and to life, the quick succession and sharp brief poignancy of its pictures, its absence of elaboration, and carelessness about minute lights and shades—all combine to prove that the author has an eye, an imagination, and a purpose quite peculiar to himself. ...

— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]

... genuineness of his penitence, he would apply to his church for reinstatement, and ask for an appointment to some difficult mission in a wild and savage country. The Rev. Mr. Calthrop intimated that if he chose to accept rehabilitation on less arduous terms, he might obtain it; but the poignancy of his own sense of failure drove ...

— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... In the poignancy of the moment Lane lost his reserve and told her the truth of his condition, even going so far as to place her hand so she felt the great bayonet hole in his back. Her silence then was more expressive than any speech. She had the look of a woman in whom conscience was a reality. And ...

— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey

... seen death till now. He recognized it clearly enough. He knew that Tara was never going to move again; the instant his sensitive nostrils touched her still, warm body he knew that. But there had been no killing. That was what baffled Finn, and struck a kind of terror into his heart, to lend poignancy to his sorrow. One more look he gave at his mother's sightless face, this time where it rested on the crook of the Master's arm, and then he sat down on his haunches, and with muzzle raised high poured out his ...

— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson

... that one silent evening hour poor Angus was discovered in several different places in the vicinity of Manchester. The same paper of the next day's date stated that eleven out of the twelve who met poor Angus were so overcome by the poignancy of his narrative and the stupendous character of his task, that they promptly gave him financial assistance. I am strongly of the opinion that the twelfth man was entirely without money at the time he ...

— London's Underworld • Thomas Holmes

... little face softens and brightens when he speaks of her, and a sharp pang of jealousy shoots through her heart. The fact that she has never sought to win that heart to herself by kindness, that she has forfeited her child's respect, and never deserved its love, only increases her resentment and adds poignancy to the pang. She feels the slight form start and shiver with a strange, fearful repulsion as she places it on her lap. Would the strong natural affection nature had implanted there, so cruelly crushed out, now nearly if not quite dead, arise anew to life, and grow stronger ...

— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... Catherine's nature was her rapt and absolute perception of the Love of God, as the supreme reality in the universe. This Love, as manifested in creation, in redemption, and in the sacrament of the Altar, is the theme of her constant meditations. One little phrase, charged with a lyric poignancy, sings itself again and again, enlightening her more sober prose: "For nails would not have held God-and-Man fast to the Cross, had love not held Him there." Her conceptions are positive, not negative, and joyous adoration is the substance of ...

— Letters of Catherine Benincasa • Catherine Benincasa

... which incommunicably "makes the difference" in almost all the volumes of M. France familiar to me, but our affair is with this one story. Now in this vivid book we have our fill of color and animation and gallant strangenesses, and a stir of characters who impress us as living with a poignancy unmastered as yet by anybody's associates in flesh and blood. We have, in brief, all that Dumas could ever offer, here utilised not to make drama but background, all being woven into a bright undulating tapestry behind an erudite and battered figure,— a figure of odd medleys, in which the erudition ...

— The Queen Pedauque • Anatole France

... old friend's house," he urged, "So do not watch me, pray!" "Well, I will leave you in peace," said I, "Though of this poignancy You should fight free: ...

— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy

... understood my clanger, and I saw him wringing his hands in his anxiety; yet he saw that he could do nothing to help me. I felt that I had been very foolish; and the poignancy of my regret was heightened when I remembered that I had placed myself in my present predicament without any necessity or an adequate object. I had little time, I own, to indulge in such reflections, for all my thoughts and feelings ...

— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston

... Pompeius, who spoke mostly on their own affairs; and, though far from being Orators of the first distinction, were yet tolerable ones, (if we may credit Philippus, who was himself a man of some Eloquence) and in supporting an evidence, displayed all the poignancy of a prosecutor, with a moderate freedom of Elocution. The rest, who were esteemed our capital Speakers, were then in the magistracy, and I had the benefit of hearing their harangues almost every day. C. ...

— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero

... magnificent waistcoat with a heavy sigh over this philosophical dictum, the poignancy of which was enhanced by his knowledge that the upper housemaid had taken to conversing with a mounted policeman in the ...

— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy

... love of honest earthly life, in their devotion to their friends, their kindness to dependents, and in their obedience to duty. What caused each of them the most pain was the recollection of a past unkindness. The poignancy of Dr. Johnson's grief on one such recollection is historical; and amongst Lamb's letters are to be found several in which, with vast depths of feeling, he bitterly upbraids himself for ...

— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... and that it would be time enough for the boy to see a corpse when he broke his mother's heart—which, following the precedence of all spoilt boys, he was certain to do sooner or later; and this opinion found ready endorsement. The boy suppressed, my case began to look hopeless, and the poignancy of my suspense became such that I thought I should have gone mad. Francois was already persuaded into setting to work with his pick, and, I should most certainly have been speedily interred, had it not been for the timely arrival of a village wag, who, planking ...

— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... own way was an idyl, and it managed to achieve a singular beauty. The absurdity that clung to everything connected with Dirk Stroeve gave it a curious note, like an unresolved discord, but made it somehow more modern, more human; like a rough joke thrown into a serious scene, it heightened the poignancy which all ...

— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham

... unlike him, the rebuke—he had so ardently worshipped her, even her faults, which were like shining endowments in his estimation—that for the first time she felt the full poignancy of his alienation. He was no longer hers, loving, regretting, always yearning after her, the unattainable! Had he not said only to-day that neither of them had aught to regret? Was this what he had really felt through the long years of ...

— The Ordeal - A Mountain Romance of Tennessee • Charles Egbert Craddock

... failings, would never imperil the illusions she had so miraculously preserved. The fact that the girl took her good fortune naturally, and did not regard herself as suddenly snatched from the jaws of death, added poignancy to the situation; for if she missed this way of escape, and was thrown back on her former life, the day of discovery could not be long deferred. It made Garnett shiver to think of her growing old between her mother and Schenkelderff, or such successors of the Baron's as might ...

— The Hermit and the Wild Woman and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among those who actually live and die. The substitute for these excitements, which had lost much of their poignancy by the repeated and injudicious use of them, was the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily taking ...

— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... five." Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are as the poles apart. In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the pathos of it. Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another fashion—pathetic because of the curious sense ...

— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... boy's mind with the swiftness and poignancy of an inspiration. This body of men might be insignificant, but it represented the army of France—a thing of infinite tradition, of infinite romance. The blood mounted to his face, his heart beat faster, and with a strange, half-shy sense of participating in some fine moment, his hand ...

— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... strongly felt the poignancy of this sarcasm, and whose constant and unaffected value of Mrs Delvile by no means deserved it, was again silenced, and again most cruelly depressed: nor could she secretly forbear repining that at the very moment she found herself threatened ...

— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... renascence. Sometimes a play of Ibsen's has another likeness to a tragedy of the Greeks, in that it presents in action before the assembled spectators only the culminating scenes of the story. 'Ghosts' recalls 'OEdipus the King,' not only in the horror at the heart of it and the poignancy of the emotion it evokes, but also in its being a fifth act only, the culmination of a long and complex concatenation of events, which took place before the point at which Sophocles and Ibsen saw fit to begin their plays. In the Greek tragedy, as in the Scandinavian ...

— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... tried to make the best of it, but nature would out, although it was more from indirect remarks than from any positive complaints, that Tournier gathered the true state of the case. Of course it grieved him exceedingly, and added fresh poignancy to his unhappiness. But there was one thing that, for the first two years, her letters always contained in one form or another, that made some sweet amends, and that was that she invariably added how his dear Elise ...

— The French Prisoners of Norman Cross - A Tale • Arthur Brown

... scurrility and abuse was to publish lessons written in imitation of the several styles of his enemies, in which their peculiarities were so closely copied, and their extraneous passages (particularly those of Bach of Hamburgh) so inimitably burlesqued, that they all felt the poignancy of his musical wit, confessed its ...

— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock

... not indeed inherited by her son; he is, on the contrary, conspicuous throughout for the purity of his intentions; and his care and anxiety to escape from the predicted crime, added naturally to the poignancy of his despair, when he found that he had nevertheless been overtaken by it. Awful indeed is his blindness in not perceiving the truth when it was, as it were, brought directly home to him; as, for instance, when he puts the question to Jocasta, How did Laius ...

— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel

... an interview between Borrow and his wife's medical attendant, Dr. Playfair, recorded in Herbert Jenkins's Life, that is full of poignancy. ...

— George Borrow and His Circle - Wherein May Be Found Many Hitherto Unpublished Letters Of - Borrow And His Friends • Clement King Shorter

... arrested by the poignancy of that echo from the past. The typewriter keys fell silent and his eyes stared through the open window, wide and full of suffering. He heard himself declaring with boyhood's assurance, "They may take you to the North Pole and surround you with regiments of soldiers—but ...

— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck

... every thing concurred to make us dear to each other, and therefore to give a greater poignancy to the pain of parting ...

— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke

... character. The orchestra makes, as it were, a tide or ocean, over which the voice, in this manner, floats, now rising high on the crest of the wave, now sinking into the trough of the seas. Sometimes for added poignancy, Wagner makes the voice sing the leitmotif of some idea connected with the idea of the moment. This is ...

— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... it for me!" he answered, wrung again as he had been at her smiles, an hour before, but now with heart-piercing poignancy. "Take it for me, if ...

— The Furnace of Gold • Philip Verrill Mighels

... harshness of his general demeanour. His occasional reproofs of folly, impudence, or impiety, and even the sudden sallies of his constitutional irritability of temper, which have been preserved for the poignancy of their wit, have produced that opinion among those who have not considered that such instances, though collected by Mrs. Piozzi into a small volume, and read over in a few hours, were, in fact, scattered through a long series of years; ...

— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill

... this whole matter he had appeared by no means to advantage. After all his boasting, he had been defeated by a boy younger and smaller than himself. The old grudge which he had against Frank for the success gained over him at school increased and added poignancy to his mortification. He felt that he should never be satisfied until he had "come up" with Frank in some way. The prospect of seeing him ejected from the farm was pleasant, but it was too far off. John did not feel like waiting so long for the gratification ...

— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.

... his youth; or if he hopes, it is but the gleam of delirium, which something sterner than even duty extinguishes in the cold darkness of death. His energy survives but to vent itself in wild gusts of reckless passion, or aimless indignation. There is a touching poignancy in his expression of the bitter melancholy that oppresses him, in the fixedness of misery with which he looks upon the faded dreams of former years, or the fierce ebullitions and dreary pauses of resolution, which now prompts him to retrieve what he has lost, ...

— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle

... had been dismissed to dress with the hasty information that two guests were expected to dinner, but he had had no idea of the last arrival's identity; and to him, too, the meeting brought back with horrible poignancy that last bitter interview in the ...

— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes

... here? Does the author make the scene of the arrival of the Prussians vivid? How is this done? Note the dramatic contrast between the arrival of the Prussians and the actions of the peasants. How has the author drawn the character of Bernadou? By what details does the author give special poignancy to the pathos of her account? What is the significance of the title "A Leaf in ...

— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker

... passionately desiring the adventure of life. One night while the heat, overpowering and enervating, poured into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague effort to immortalize the poignancy of that time. ...

— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... with slashing bells, Mattie drove to Kesota for the doctor. She felt the discord between the joyous jangle of the bells, the stream of sunlight, and the sparkle of snow crystals, but it only added to the poignancy ...

— Other Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland

... first time she recognized the symptoms of infatuation which she had felt incipiently as a child, as a girl in her earliest teens, and later as a young woman. The recognition did not lessen the reality, the poignancy of the revelation by any suggestion or promise of instability. The past was nothing to her; offered no lesson which she was willing to heed. The future was a mystery which she never attempted to penetrate. The present alone was ...

— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin

... touched every part of his body. Regaining his life-breaths, king Dhritarashtra embraced the son of Pandu with his arms and smelled his head. Vidura and others wept aloud in great grief. In consequence, however, of the poignancy of their sorrow, they said nothing to either the old king or the son of Pandu. Gandhari, conversant with every duty, bore her sorrow with fortitude, and loaded as her heart was, O king, said nothing. The other ladies, Kunti among them, became greatly afflicted. ...

— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... the childish tattling of a pert coxcomb who was discontented with our taverns, or the execrations of some bluff sea-captain who was shocked with our manners. The uneasy sense we have of something in our national existence which has not yet been fitly expressed, gives poignancy to the least ridicule launched at faults and follies which lie on the superficies of our life. Every person feels, that a book which condemns the country for its peculiarities of manners and customs, does not pierce into the heart ...

— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various

... delicacy with which it touches female foibles. I may add, that the imitations of Horace by Pope, and of Juvenal by Johnson, are preferable to their originals in the appositeness of their examples, and in the poignancy of their ridicule. Above all, the Lutrin, the Rape of the Lock, the Dispensary and the Dunciad, cannot be parallelled by any works that the wittiest of the ancients can boast of: for, by assuming the form of the epopea, they have acquired a dignity ...

— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton

... could be given to them. Yet in such times as we were living in, the unbelievable is readily believed, and men saw malice in the suppression of what could not long be secret: Ireland had too many dead that day. What made the suggestion more incredible only gave a poignancy to resentment, for Admiral de Robeck was an Irishman, with his home some few miles from the regimental ...

— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... moving, and inconstant; a fever subject to intermissions and paroxysms, that has seized but on one part of us. Whereas in friendship, 'tis a general and universal fire, but temperate and equal, a constant established heat, all gentle and smooth, without poignancy or roughness. Moreover, in love, 'tis no other than frantic desire for that ...

— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne

... able to set her pulse dancing. She had never craved physical nearness to him, so that she ached with the poignancy of that craving. She had been passively contented with him, that was all. And Monohan had swept across her horizon like a flame. Why couldn't Jack Fyfe have inspired in her that headlong sort of passion? She smiled hopelessly. The tears were very close to her eyes. She loved Monohan; ...

— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... verge, brink, border, margin, rim, extremity; sharpness, intensity, zest, poignancy, sting; selvage, selvedge, listing; ...

— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... gratify it. But now, since I have been talking of myself, I think I can go on with my story with a very decent composure. In complying with your request, I cannot say that my own experience warrants, in any degree, the old and commonly received idea that sorrow loses half its poignancy by its revelation to others. It was a humorous opinion of Sterne, that a blessing which ties up the tongue, and a mishap which unlooses it, are to be considered equal; and, indeed, I have known some ...

— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... I had been forgotten. Except from our mother and yourself, I had no welcome. But, apart from this immediate circle, and apart from the deep, comfortable glow experienced at the first sight of the "old country," I found England and the English dull, conventional, and uninspired. There was no poignancy. The habits and the outlook stood precisely where I had left them. The English had not moved. They played golf as of yore, they went to the races at the appointed time and in the appointed garb, they gave heavy dinner-parties, they wrote letters to ...

— The Garden of Survival • Algernon Blackwood

... up very short by the spectacle of five such stallholders as these whom the bigger revue which we call life had left so cold; and not only cold, but so tired and so white, as life loves to do. There was a poignancy in their very placidity, in the folded hands and the incommunicableness of them, that was very searching. There was criticism too. Hardly more sentient than the mummies which were displayed to the guests at Egyptian ...

— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... whisky which in Scotland is always put in circulation on such occasions. All these are ordinary effects of such a scene as Ellangowan now presented; but the moral feeling, that in this case they indicated the total ruin of an ancient and honourable family, gave them treble weight and poignancy. ...

— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... no more. I wondered at this, and almost blamed him, even in his stricken state, for not feeling the peculiar poignancy of our regret for the loss of Schwartz. And then, his face being turned away, I peeped over to see if he slept, and saw where his tears had dropped silently on the piled-up ...

— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... punctual through the sleepy mould The Snowdrop's time to flower, Fair as the rash oath of virginity Which is first-love's first cry; O, Baby Spring, That flutter'st sudden 'neath the breast of Earth A month before the birth; Whence is the peaceful poignancy, The joy contrite, Sadder than sorrow, sweeter than delight, That burthens now the breath of everything, Though each one sighs as if to each alone The cherish'd pang were known? At dusk of dawn, on his dark spray apart, With it the Blackbird breaks the young Day's heart; ...

— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore

... novel as they did in Holland, where many people regarded the Renaissance and more still regarded the Reformation as a new beginning of a better world; but in England and America, which had been drawn, unlike Holland, into the vortex of war, it had the poignancy of a recall to the standards of reasonableness. It will long maintain its place as a historical book and as a work ...

— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga

... the 'meek usurper's holy head,' after his dreary half-century of suffering under the retribution of the ancestral sins of two lines of forefathers. All had been undergone in a deep and holy trust and faith such as could render even his hereditary insanity an actual shield from the poignancy of grief. ...

— The Herd Boy and His Hermit • Charlotte M. Yonge

... was in capital form, and talked freely, with a certain poignancy, being no fool. He told two or three stories verging on the improper, a concession to the company, for his stories were not used to verging. He proposed Irene's health in a mock speech. Nobody drank it, and Winifred said: "Don't be ...

— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... the Procurers to our pleasures run into excess; so it happened here. Strict matters of fact, how delicately soever dressed up, soon grew too simple and insipid to a taste stimulated by the Luxury of Art: They wanted something of more poignancy to quicken and enforce a jaded appetite. Hence the Original of the first barbarous Romances, abounding with this false provocative of uncommon, extraordinary, ...

— Prefaces to Fiction • Various

... (Mr. HOLMAN CLARK). You were not let down at the supreme moment by a hurried shuffle of dimly seen forms or the click of an electrician's gear suggesting too solid flesh. The house was in a queer way stunned by the poignancy of the last scene between the young ghost-mother and the long-sought unrecognised son, and had to shake itself before it could reward with due applause the fine playing of as perfect a cast as I have seen for a long ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various

... picture to yourself, my dear Mr. Copperfield, what the poignancy of my feelings must be, when I inform you that Mr. Micawber is entirely changed. He is reserved. He is secret. His life is a mystery to the partner of his joys and sorrows—I again allude to his wife—and if I should assure you that beyond knowing that it is passed from morning to night ...

— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... regrets in her mind, incipient even before he had quite gone, and now defining themselves momently with added poignancy. A woman who, in her retirement at home, charges herself with the control of a man's conduct abroad, is never likely to be devoid of speculation upon probable disasters to ensue upon any abatement of the activities of her discretion. She was sorry that she had allowed so trifling a matter ...

— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

... out the scheme of life which she appeared to despise, but also to work hard to provide her with the means to fulfil her own aims. She craved money for social advancement. She should have it from him, for there was no other source from which she could obtain it. The poignancy of his own sorrow should not cause him to ignore that she had given up her own career and pursuits in order to become his wife, and was now disappointed and without independent resources. His pride was sorely wounded, his ideals shattered and ...

— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant

... I refer is that which the musician Berlioz called "isolement"—the sense of spiritual isolation, which seizes on those who experience it with a poignancy amounting to awe. Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality affords the locus classicus in the way ...

— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... are enjoying ourselves; but my young guest has developed a new mood of late which gives poignancy to my growing tenderness for the girl. She has kept up wonderfully, with the aid of her bit of a temper, for which I like her none the less. How she will stand this idleness, monotony, and intimacy, with ...

— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... He shuffled his feet uneasily. It was against his grain as a man to see this peerless beauty in trouble and refuse her petition. Her arms apparent in all their white perfection of roundness, her exquisitely poised head and lovely face expressed the poignancy ...

— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.

... be our sorrow in the presence of such a loss, let us resign ourselves to these catastrophes. Let us accept them in their poignancy and severity. It is good perhaps, and necessary, in an epoch like ours, that from time to time a great death should communicate a religious book to minds devoured by doubt and skepticism. Providence knows what it does when it thus ...

— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... profession. But there are few, very few, we suppose, who are not connected by the ties of blood, the bonds of matrimony, or the relation of father to child, who are all affected by such degradation as the gambler visits upon himself, and who feel the bitter poignancy of the stroke with greater force than he whose heart has been gradually but surely abased. While a man has a single relation or friend, he should not gamble; and if he stood alone in the world, with no friend, the fear of the eternal judgment should deter ...

— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green

... a narrative of outward events, the phases through which Tennyson had been passing. Desultory though the method of its production be, and loose 'the texture of its fabric', there is a certain sequence of thought running through the cantos. We see how from the first poignancy of grief, when he can only brood passively over his friend's death, he was led to questioning the basis of his faith, shaken as it was by the claims of physical science—how from those doubts of his own, he was led to think of the universal trouble ...

— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... of his drunken self. Old Mariani tottered back to his buffet, and stood leaning against it, his eyes wandering, with the look of a man demented, to the fire that had devoured his child. There, indeed, if he escaped the madness with which the poignancy of his grief was threatening him, was a tool that might turn its edge against this inhuman monster, this devil, this ...

— The Shame of Motley • Raphael Sabatini

... powers seem to desert him; he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyricks, that, having written, with great vigour and poignancy, his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful only to ...

— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson

... goodness, would seem a mere superstition of originality. The interpretation offered, in what follows, of the existence of these experiences is sufficiently startling to require no assistance from novelty of phrasing to give it interest and poignancy. That our souls are actually able to touch, in the darkness which surrounds us, the souls of super-human beings, and that the vision of such super-human beings is the "eternal vision" wherein the ...

— The Complex Vision • John Cowper Powys

... knew anything of the robbery, which added so much poignancy to the sorrow at Garthowen. Ebben Owens seemed to take his son's disappearance much to heart, and to feel his absence more in sorrow ...

— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine

... ponderous and jocular fragment of drapery. On one terribly brittle shoulder the droll lump of its neckless head ridiculously lived. There was in this complete silent doll a gruesome truth of instinct, a success of uncanny poignancy, an ...

— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings

... while his heirs concentrated desperately on not making the slightest sound. For them, the poignancy of the prospective Big Trip had been dulled somewhat, through having been mentioned by Gramps about once a ...

— The Big Trip Up Yonder • Kurt Vonnegut

... elegance, poignancy, and happiness of expression, or, in a word, that Attic salt and spirit, to which the Roman language could never attain, and for which Aristophanes(202) is more remarkable than any other of the Greek authors. His particular excellence was raillery. None ever touched what was ridiculous in the ...

— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin

... in her swagger. She is slender, with short, dark hair, cropped a la Boutet de Monvel, and she flourishes a cigarette, the smoke from which wreathes upward and obscures—nay makes more subtle—the strange poignancy of her deep blue eyes. Her nose is of a snubness. It is the mome Estelle, and as she passes down the narrow aisle, between the tables, there is a stir of excitement.... The men raise their eyes.... Edouard, le petit, flicks a ...

— The Merry-Go-Round • Carl Van Vechten

... thrill running up and down our spines, the sound of singing, a faint far-off chorus of the loveliest voices that ever fell on mortal ears. The tone had that marvelous silver clang of the woodland thrush with yet a deeper, human poignancy, a note of passionate longing and endearment, shy but assertive, wild, but oh! so alluring. We chinned ourselves expectantly on the edge of ...

— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock

... us by all the providences and events of our changeful lives. Our sorrows by their poignancy, our joys by their incompleteness and their transiency, alike call us to Him in whom alone the sorrows can be soothed and the joys made full and remain. Our duties, by their heaviness, call us to turn ourselves to Him, in whom ...

— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... weeping? What immortal grief hath touched thee With the poignancy of sadness,— Testament ...

— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman

... some awakening moment when he first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then to learn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in this early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noble feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on? In such boyish dreaming the soul ...

— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... upon illusions which now I cannot share, to cause happiness in which I should either have no belief, or tremble to lose? I should perhaps respond to his devotion with egoism, should weigh and deliberate while he felt; my memory would resent the poignancy of his happiness. No, if you love once, that love is never replaced, you see. Indeed, who would have ...

— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac

... throughout. And be it said that it is an epitome not only of the spirit of England but of the United Kingdom, with the emphasis on the united. There is a fine strain of kindness and broad sympathy running through the book, and much of poignancy in the personal dramas glimpsed through ...

— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte

... blotted out in a swirling chaos of ruddy radiance that swept him up and away like a chip upon a tidal wave. There was a long moment during which he seemed to hurtle helplessly through a universe of swirling tinted mists, while great electric waves tingled with exquisite poignancy through every ...

— Devil Crystals of Arret • Hal K. Wells

... elevation of his two rival sons filled him with fear of poison, and, lastly, the violence and recklessness of the popular mourning for the Barmecides,[FN277] whose echo has not yet died away, must have added poignancy to his tardy penitence. The crime still "sticks fiery off" from the rest of Harun's career: it stands out in ghastly prominence as one of the most terrible tragedies recorded by history, and its horrible details make ...

— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... Even before the first scene is opened to our eyes we hear the voice of the multitude in prayer. The Israelites, oppressed by their conquerors and sore stricken at the reflection that their God has deserted them, lament, accuse, protest, and pray. Before they have been heard, the poignancy of their woe has been published by the orchestra, which at once takes its place beside the chorus as a peculiarly eloquent expositor of the emotions and passions which propel the actors in the drama. That mission and that eloquence it maintains from ...

— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... with a fine poignancy, bold and new in the very delicacy of texture, in the sharp impinging of these gentlest sounds. In the depths of the dirge suddenly, though quietly, sounds the herald melody high in the wood, with ever firmer cheer, soon in golden horns, at last ...

— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp

... my horse to receive the greetings of the honest fellow. He had, I found, overcome with the poignancy of his feelings at the thought of my death, been knocked up, and had remained with Kepenau, whose camp he told me was concealed within the wood. He led the way round to a narrow opening, where Manilick dismounted. Proceeding through it, we soon reached an ...

— Afar in the Forest • W.H.G. Kingston

... against his life. But this old affair, scandalous enough to serve as a motive for a Greek tragedy, arose from the similarity of their characters. There are other tragedies, less scandalous and of a subtler poignancy, arising from irreconcilable differences and from that fear of the Incomprehensible that hangs over all our heads—over all ...

— Amy Foster • Joseph Conrad

... had listened while a woman who had been near San Francisco at the time of the earthquake and fire endeavoured to describe what was in truth indescribable, how the very air itself was at that time charged with a poignancy of agony—an impalpable spiritual agony, apart from such physical cause as heat and fire, an agony which arose from the grief of ...

— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... what are the thoughts and feelings of the character. The orchestra makes, as it were, a tide or ocean, over which the voice, in this manner, floats, now rising high on the crest of the wave, now sinking into the trough of the seas. Sometimes for added poignancy, Wagner makes the voice sing the leitmotif of some idea connected with the idea of the moment. This is ...

— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... at its command to impress these thoughts upon the hearer. The number of themes and their key relationship are those of Sonata-form, but instead of the usual development we have a new contrasting theme of great pathos in the major mode. Observe the poignancy of the dissonances, e.g., ...

— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding

... the expedition, were far more anxious to make discoveries, than to extend their importance by the labours of the naturalist. Considering then from whom it comes, a liberal interpreter would concede a little allowance to its poignancy of complaint. Men very naturally attach superior importance to studies which have long and almost exclusively engrossed their own attention, and are exceedingly apt to ascribe to ignorance, or something still more dishonourable, that indifference to them which those who are in power ...

— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... Manchester, to act, and if I have any great difficulty or delay to encounter in finding an engagement in London, I shall probably do so.... The step I am about to take is so painful to me that all petty annoyances and minor vexations lose their poignancy in the contemplation of it (a quelque chose—a bien des choses malheur est bon), and having at length made up my mind to it, smaller repugnancies connected with it have ceased to affect ...

— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble

... admirable serenity, with positive unimpeachable gaiety; and doubtless it was that very note that most evoked for me the poignancy, the unnatural childish tragedy, of his probable reappearance at the end of three months with all this bravado and still more dishonor. It overwhelmed me now that I should never be able to bear that, and it made me let myself go. I threw myself upon him and in the tenderness ...

— The Turn of the Screw • Henry James

... emotional experiences," "art that was almost intuitive in its passion, so subtly did it"—oh, do all sorts of things!—and "handling the plastic outlines of the theme with rare emotional skill and mastery of technique," "purest lyricism lifted to heights of poignancy,"—all that sort of stuff, you know. Next time a writer, or, better still, a fiddler or a pianist comes to your town, look in your home paper the morning after, and you'll ...

— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler

... once he wished that he could have seen Forrest Haviland again before he started. He wished with all the poignancy of man's affection for a real man that he had told Forrest, when they were dining at the Brevoort, how happy he was to be with him. ...

— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... drama, it is not drama at all in the sense in which we have come to understand the term in the West. There is no "construction," no knot tied and untied, no character. Rather there is a succession of scenes selected from a well-known story for some quality of poignancy, or merely of narrative interest. The form, I think, should be called epic or lyric rather than dramatic. And it is in this point that it most obviously differs from the Greek drama. It has no intellectual content, or very little. And, perhaps for that reason, it has had no development, ...

— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... seem the acme of foolish illusion. Indeed, I am not telling of it because it is practical; there is no cash at the end of it. I am reporting it as an experience in life; those who understand will understand. And thus out of my journeys I have words which bring back to me with indescribable poignancy the particular impression of a time or a place. I prize them more highly than almost any other of my possessions, for they come to me seemingly out of the air, and the remembrance of them enables me to recall or live over a past experience ...

— Adventures In Friendship • David Grayson

... some time that his back and shoulders suffered with peculiar poignancy, in spite of the fact that he tried to traverse the distance with all possible speed. He began finally to wonder whether the fault did not lie in his cloak. He examined it thoroughly at home, and discovered that in two places, namely, on the back and shoulders, it had become thin as gauze: the ...

— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol

... the poignancy of Penny's unavailing grief in after years: the innocence of Arthur Spence of any deception (except silence regarding his past), and the fact that she never knew this until he had given his life in his country's service. It was ...

— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett

... confirmed by the event, the penalty of which she is so soon afterwards to inflict upon herself, was not indeed inherited by her son; he is, on the contrary, conspicuous throughout for the purity of his intentions; and his care and anxiety to escape from the predicted crime, added naturally to the poignancy of his despair, when he found that he had nevertheless been overtaken by it. Awful indeed is his blindness in not perceiving the truth when it was, as it were, brought directly home to him; as, for instance, when he puts the question ...

— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black

... as truthful as himself. Nevertheless, he queried in regard to the future with not a little anxiety. In her present distress and poverty she might naturally be glad of the refuge he had offered; but as time passed and the poignancy of bitter memories was allayed, might not her life on the farm seem monotonous and dull, might not weariness and discontent come into her eyes in place of gratitude? "Well, well!" he concluded, "this marrying is a risky experiment at best, but Tom Watterly's talk ...

— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe

... Most Holy Inquisition there was an old phrase whose poignancy has always seemed to me to be but half appreciated. One did not say: He was racked. She was burned. They were flayed alive, or pulled apart with little pincers, or clasped in the arms of the red-hot Virgin. One was too well-bred ...

— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various

... the unjust opinion of the harshness of his general demeanour. His occasional reproofs of folly, impudence, or impiety, and even the sudden sallies of his constitutional irritability of temper, which have been preserved for the poignancy of their wit, have produced that opinion among those who have not considered that such instances, though collected by Mrs. Piozzi into a small volume, and read over in a few hours, were, in fact, scattered through a long series of years; years, in which his time was chiefly ...

— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell

... a demonstration of the unequalled facilities of a European railway carriage for rendering unpleasant things almost intolerable. These people could find no way to alleviate the poignancy of their position. Coleman did not know where to look. Every personal mannerism becomes accentuated in a European railway carriage. If you glance at a man, your glance defines itself as a stare. If you carefully look at nothing, ...

— Active Service • Stephen Crane

... ourselves; but my young guest has developed a new mood of late which gives poignancy to my growing tenderness for the girl. She has kept up wonderfully, with the aid of her bit of a temper, for which I like her none the less. How she will stand this idleness, monotony, and intimacy, with the accent of beauty ...

— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... looked like that?" Then in the poignancy of the moment he saw how disloyal to the moment it was even to hint at what should have been, without snapping the link now into the welding present. He straightened himself and spoke brusquely, but ...

— Different Girls • Various

... forth the needs of the church, the state and the individual. Esther did not hear a word until a sudden dropping of his voice forced a certain phrase upon her attention. He was praying, with an especial poignancy for "that blessing which maketh rich ...

— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... a humourous meaning in that expression, and that this turn, in most cases, gives a delightful poignancy both to your conversation and correspondence; but indeed, my dear, this case will ...

— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson

... and by degrees the poignancy of the widower's grief was blunted, and Aunt Jane's name was seldom mentioned by any one; after all she had not done herself, or anybody connected with her, much credit. And other changes occurred: the stout old Colonel found it incumbent ...

— Archibald Malmaison • Julian Hawthorne

... Pretence of being natural; but they ought always to lead us to something brilliant or poignant, in order to justify their Deviation; and not to end only at a ridiculous PUN, void of all Spirit and Poignancy. ...

— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris

... looking eagerly from one to the other, conquered easily. I do not know if either of the other two were conscious of the new note of life which she seemed to bring with her into our shabby, smoke-smelling room, but to me it came home, even in those first few moments, with wonderful poignancy. An alien note it was, but a wonderfully sweet one. We three men had drifted away from the whole world of our womenkind. She seemed to bring us back instantly into touch with some of the few better and rarer memories round which the selfishness of life is always building a thicker crust. For one ...

— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Blount far excels them both, in the artfulness and delicacy with which it touches female foibles. I may add, that the imitations of Horace by Pope, and of Juvenal by Johnson, are preferable to their originals in the appositeness of their examples, and in the poignancy of their ridicule. Above all, the Lutrin, the Rape of the Lock, the Dispensary and the Dunciad, cannot be parallelled by any works that the wittiest of the ancients can boast of: for, by assuming the form of the epopea, they have acquired a dignity and gracefulness, which all satires ...

— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton

... heart like a flower" ... Unconsciously she pressed her hand against her lips, remembered the taste of whiskey and of blood. If only it had been Dickie's lips that had first touched her own. Blinding tears fell. The memory of Dickie's comfort, of Dickie's tremulous restraint, had a strange poignancy.... Why was he so different from all the rest? So much more like her father? What was there in this pale little hotel clerk who drank too much that lifted him out and up into a sort of radiance? Her memory of Dickie was always white—the whiteness ...

— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt

... Margaret will need to take Dugald over his mathematics, I fear, before he goes up to the entrance." At which remark the painful feeling which the reciting and singing had caused Barney to forget for the time, returned with even greater poignancy. ...

— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor

... in her strange surroundings, that desire was losing its poignancy. It didn't seem quite ...

— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake

... serious and determined hostility. But my endeavours on this head were by no means uniformly successful, even when my plans were the most wittily concocted; for my namesake had much about him, in character, of that unassuming and quiet austerity which, while enjoying the poignancy of its own jokes, has no heel of Achilles in itself, and absolutely refuses to be laughed at. I could find, indeed, but one vulnerable point, and that, lying in a personal peculiarity, arising, perhaps, from constitutional disease, would ...

— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... And Louis met him in congenial spirit. He did not laugh much, but he uttered in the quietest tone the wittiest things. Gravely spoken sentences, marked by unexpected turns and a quite fresh flavour and poignancy, fell easily from his lips. He proved himself to be—what Mr. Hall had said he was—excellent company. Caroline marvelled at his humour, but still more at his entire self-possession. Nobody there present seemed to impose on him a sensation of unpleasant ...

— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... no man knowing whence they have arisen, she mixes various types of obligation in a most instructive fashion; for a superstitious horror at leaving a body unburied—something decidedly of yesterday—gives poignancy in her mind to natural affection for a brother—something indeed universal, yet having a well-known origin. The passionate assertion of right is here, in consequence, more dramatic than spiritual; and even its dramatic force has suffered somewhat by ...

— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... feel in much trouble nor get in any great alarm, for I suppose the severe exertion dulled everything, and robbed my sufferings of their poignancy as I still swam on more and more slowly, with my starting eyes fixed upon the boat still many yards away from me, and growing more and more dim as the water began ...

— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn

... exquisite result in the chorus of "Full fathom five." Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are as the poles apart. In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the pathos of it. Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another fashion—pathetic because of the curious sense of human ...

— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman

... Irish rebels are here. O'Connor alone is an exception; and this he owes to Talleyrand, to General Valence, and to Madame de Genlis; but even he is looked on with a sneer, and, if he ever was respected in England, must endure with poignancy the contempt to which he is frequently exposed in France. When I was in your country I often heard it said that the Irish were generally considered as a debased and perfidious people, extremely addicted to profligacy and drunkenness, and, when once drunk, ...

— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton

... had felt for some time that his back and shoulders were paining with peculiar poignancy, in spite of the fact that he tried to traverse the distance with all possible speed. He began finally to wonder whether the fault did not lie in his cloak. He examined it thoroughly at home, and discovered that in two ...

— Best Russian Short Stories • Various

... attempts. The "effects" were astonishingly well contrived by both author and producer (Mr. HOLMAN CLARK). You were not let down at the supreme moment by a hurried shuffle of dimly seen forms or the click of an electrician's gear suggesting too solid flesh. The house was in a queer way stunned by the poignancy of the last scene between the young ghost-mother and the long-sought unrecognised son, and had to shake itself before it could reward with due applause the fine playing of as perfect a cast as I have seen for a long time. There's ...

— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various

... the echoing office, and the mystery of George Cannon's personal position, somehow gave a strange poignancy ...

— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... in the trenches and looking in the face of death as a kind of hobby the feeling of release and lightness that comes over one drives all other troubles clean away. But after a while this feeling seemed to be growing in poignancy. In fact at the end of the first fortnight I mentioned ...

— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips

... and I was lost in a game where I didn't know the rules. The explanation I thought might get me out alive might be the very one which would bring down instant and painful death. Suddenly, with a poignancy that was almost pain, I wished Rakhal were standing here ...

— The Door Through Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... Snowdrop's time to flower, Fair as the rash oath of virginity Which is first-love's first cry; O, Baby Spring, That flutter'st sudden 'neath the breast of Earth A month before the birth; Whence is the peaceful poignancy, The joy contrite, Sadder than sorrow, sweeter than delight, That burthens now the breath of everything, Though each one sighs as if to each alone The cherish'd pang were known? At dusk of dawn, on his dark spray apart, With it the Blackbird breaks the young Day's heart; ...

— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore

... but, I believe in consequence of A.'s unsuccessful speculations, and of the fact that E. had allowed the use of his name as a surety, both my uncles were obliged to fly from their creditors, and take refuge in Paris. This happened just when our need was the sorest, and this, together with the poignancy of knowing that their sister's devoted labours for them had been all in vain, added to their unhappiness. It was doubtless also the reason why, having left England, they wrote to us no more, carefully ...

— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse

... his poems are several passages in which the passion is treated with similar force and truth. The poem which begins "'Tis said that some have died for love" depicts the enduring poignancy of bereavement with an "iron pathos" that is almost too strong for art. And something of the same power of clinging attachment is shown in the sonnet where the poet is stung with the thought that "even ...

— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers

... O those broken and gasped-out human cries, full of the old poignancy, full of the old enchantment! Shakespeare's poetry is the extreme opposite of any "cult." It is the ineffable expression, in music that makes the heart stop, of the feelings which have stirred every Jack and Jill among ...

— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys

... danger. The extreme vanity of the modern Englishman in making a momentary Stylites of himself on the top of a Horn or an Aiguille, and his occasional confession of a charm in the solitude of the rocks, of which he modifies nevertheless the poignancy with his pocket newspaper, and from the prolongation of which he thankfully escapes to the nearest table-d'hote, ought to make us less scornful of the pride, and more intelligent of the passion, in which the mountain ...

— Our Fathers Have Told Us - Part I. The Bible of Amiens • John Ruskin

... fine porcelain vase is cracked in a furnace—to direct their ideas of the aims of life towards worthy and unselfish ends, to foster true loyalty because of God from whom all authority comes—and this lesson has its pathetic poignancy for us in the history of our English martyrs—to show the claims that our country has upon the devotion of its sons and daughters, and to inspire some feeling of responsibility for its honour, especially to show the supreme worth of character and self-sacrifice, all these things ...

— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart

... the 'Dunciad', and all Swift's lampooning ballads. Whatever their other works may be, these originated in personal feelings, and angry retort on unworthy rivals; and though the ability of these satires elevates the poetical, their poignancy detracts from the personal character ...

— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron

... and resurrections in the seasons allotted for these alternatives, we should enjoy the fruits of the earth indeed, but enjoy them only in common with the animals that feed upon it, or perhaps with less relish than they do, as it is agreed their organs of sensation have a greater share of poignancy than ours.—What is it but curiosity which renders study either pleasing or profitable to us?—The facts we read of would soon slip through the memory, or if they retained any place in it, could be of ...

— Life's Progress Through The Passions - Or, The Adventures of Natura • Eliza Fowler Haywood

... meditated in silence on his conduct in the council. His scruples revived, and the spontaneous censures of his attendants added to the poignancy of his feelings. In great agony of mind he reached Canterbury, where he condemned his late weakness, interdicted himself from the exercise of his functions, wrote to Alexander a full account of the transaction, and solicited absolution from that Pontiff. It was believed that, if he had submitted ...

— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume VI. • Various

... than by many more elegant works of polite literature. For these—and I could add to them dozens of later stories and poems, ephemeral perhaps but showing what may be done when we burst the bourgeois chain—for these are discoveries in the vigor, the poignancy, the color of our ...

— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... he was conscious. He was suffering atrociously. Pain blanketed him. But though the blanket had the poignancy of thin knives, he kept telling himself that ...

— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... in the darkness and the lowered vitality of night caused it to lose its joy, become suffused by a curious, doubting uneasiness. He lay without moving, given up to the strange feeling, not knowing what induced it or from whence it came. It grew in poignancy, clearer and stronger, till it led him like a clew to the body ...

— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner

... as of a misfortune that seems brought about by a peculiarly malignant train of circumstances. The injury in this case not only was irremediable but turned on an accident. Notice also how Maupassant has sharpened the poignancy and bitterness of Madame Loisel's misfortune by making it depend not only on an accident that might so easily not have happened but on a misunderstanding that might so easily have been explained. When Madame ...

— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... first love, filled up in some degree the vacuum left by his loss, who was so prematurely ravished from me in the flower of youth, leaving me a widow at eighteen; and though that loss is one I never can replace or forget, the poignancy of its effect has been in a great degree softened by the kindnesses of my excellent father-in-law, the Duc de Penthievre, and the relations resulting from my situation with, and the never-ceasing attachment ...

— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 4 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe

... or in what manner he exercises it; nor upon what occasions he is contradicted or opposed. The censure of a bad appointment, on account of the uncertainty of its author, and for want of a determinate object, has neither poignancy nor duration. And while an unbounded field for cabal and intrigue lies open, all idea of responsibility is lost. The most that the public can know, is that the governor claims the right of nomination; that TWO out of the inconsiderable number of FOUR men can too often be managed without much ...

— The Federalist Papers

... breath with a strange sound of anguish, forlornness, the terrible crying of a woman with a loving heart, whose heart has never been able to relax. Alvina was hushed. In a second, she became the elder of the two. The terrible poignancy of the woman of fifty-two, who now at last had broken down, silenced the girl of twenty-three, and roused all her passionate tenderness. The terrible sound of "Never now, never now—it is too late," ...

— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... beneath the theatre, Hugh led the way, while with greater poignancy than ever before the young playwright sensed the vulgarity, the immodesty, and the dirt of the world behind and below the scenes. It was all familiar enough to him, for he had several friends among the actors, but the thought of one so sovereign as Helen in the midst of a ...

— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... and propriety of deportment toward us, his associates, have given him a hold upon our affections, which adds poignancy to our ...

— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child

... for her brother small indulgence had been shown to this passion. In the grave of his wife, not only all Sir Francis's heart had been buried, but apparently the love of all that made for the brightness of life. By the time the poignancy of his sorrow had worn off, to be solemn and sad of demeanour, to shun the disturbing effects of social distraction, had become second nature to him. By no wish of his own, but naturally and irresistibly, that habit of melancholy which had fallen ...

— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann

... of his studies, in grave simplicity, in exactness of observation, in general philosophical incredulity with some startling reserves, in elaborate and massive ratiocination, and in the enthusiasm, subdued but not extinguished, which gives zest to his speculations and poignancy and colouring to his style. He who seeks to measure great men in their strength and in their weakness, and what operation of literary analysis is more instructive or delightful, will find ample employment for collation and comparison in this extraordinary book, ...

— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts

... with a kind of innocent simplicity, continually to mistake what it was which first made their husband fond of you. If an esteem for something excellent in your moral character was that which riveted the chain which she is to break, upon any imaginary discovery of a want of poignancy in your conversation, she will cry, "I thought, my dear, you described your friend, Mr. —— as a great wit." If, on the other hand, it was for some supposed charm in your conversation that he first grew to like you, and was content for this to overlook some ...

— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb

... own?—Do you allow her to condemn the only instances of wit that remain to this generation; that dear polite double entendre, which keeps alive the attention, and quickens the apprehension, of the best companies in the world, and is the salt, the sauce, which gives a poignancy to ...

— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson

... which were formerly as certain attributes of fictitious characters as they are of rare occurrence among those who actually live and die. The substitute for these excitements, which had lost much of their poignancy by the repeated and injudicious use of them, was the art of copying from nature as she really exists in the common walks of life, and presenting to the reader, instead of the splendid scenes of an imaginary world, a correct and striking representation of that which is daily ...

— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson

... time it came to the notice of Mrs. Hardy that when the late Mr. Deware had departed this life Mrs. Deware, with her two daughters, had gone on a trip to England to dull the poignancy of their bereavement. The Dewares moved in the best circles, Mr. Deware having amassed a considerable fortune in the brewing business. It was obvious that whatever Mrs. Deware might do under such circumstances would be correct. Upon arrival at this conclusion Mrs. Hardy lost no time ...

— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead

... Russian novel—a name like Leprous Souls—and she asked me if I had read it. By a curious chance I had. It had drifted somehow into our dug-out on the Scarpe, and after we had all stuck in the second chapter it had disappeared in the mud to which it naturally belonged. The lady praised its 'poignancy' and 'grave beauty'. I assented and congratulated myself on my second escape—for if the question had been put to me I should have described it ...

— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan

... more, by the threefold question of unutterable tenderness, "Simon, son of Jonas, lovest thou me?" When Jesus finds His disciples sleeping at the gate of Gethsemane, He rebukes them; but how is the rebuke disarmed of its poignancy by the merciful apology which is added—"The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak!" How different from their unkind insinuation regarding Him, when, in the vessel on Tiberias, "He was asleep"—"Master ...

— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff

... Road-Mender," by "Michael Fairless"—the gleam of the White Gate is seen all along the Road, though the writer strives so bravely to keep it hidden till it must open to let him pass. One of the purest gems of Jefferies—"Hours of Spring"—has a pathos and haunting melody of compelling poignancy. It is like a white violet or ...

— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... Swinnerton, who on his death-bed, when he left his dwelling and all his abstruse manuscripts to his favorite pupil, had particularly directed his attention to this row of shrubs. They had been collected by himself from remote countries, and had the poignancy of torrid climes in them; and he told him, that, properly used, they would be worth all the rest of the legacy a hundred-fold. As the apothecary, however, found the manuscripts, in which he conjectured there was a treatise ...

— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... grief in thus losing the best & most valued friend I ever had on earth, receives additional poignancy from the fact that, although duly impressed with an abiding sense of the imperishable obligation, conferred upon me by my lamented friend, I have been debarred, by my own physical infirmities, from proffering those services which it would ...

— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur

... must grow tighter and more cruelly tight, until—the end. During the years since her marriage Madame Gregoriev had, more than once, wished—nay, prayed for death. But a hopeless desire and the inevitable reality are generally two widely different things. And the clearest possible proof of the poignancy of the mental suffering of her past life lay in the fact that, fully understanding her position, it was a matter of only a few hours before she could accept, with some show of tranquillity, this last incident of, this fitting climax ...

— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter

... border, margin, rim, extremity; sharpness, intensity, zest, poignancy, sting; selvage, selvedge, ...

— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... of it lasted until dinner, then began to die away. Her home and the familiar surroundings pressed upon her attention like live things insisting on recognition. The trivial talk round the table took on the poignancy of matters already in the past. The night before Fong, on his way back from Chinatown, had found a deserted kitten and brought it home announcing his intention to adopt it and call it George Washington. Lorry and Aunt Ellen made merry over it, but Chrystie ...

— Treasure and Trouble Therewith - A Tale of California • Geraldine Bonner

... and the frangipani exhaled by those flowers of Tahiti, to be wafted to the sailor before he sights the scene itself, the breath of Lorelei that spelled the sense of the voyager. No shipwrecked mariner could have felt more poignancy in his search for a hospitable strand than I on the plunging prow of the Noa-Noa in my quest through the bright sunshine of that afternoon for the haven of desire. I strained my eyes to see it, to realize the gossamer ...

— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... arrow had gone home; but when she met the look that was fixed on her after her little shaft was fired, Lucy's resolution faltered. The tears came rushing to her eyes so hot and rapid that she could not restrain them. Some trouble of her own gave poignancy to that outbreak of filial grief. "Papa is so very ill!" she said, with a sob, as a scalding drop fell upon her hand; and then got up suddenly, afraid of the consequences. But the Curate, mortified, wounded, and disheartened as ...

— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant

... there arose, to call off attention from these less dignified objects of the public interest, a long train of gallant cavaliers, restored so capriciously to liberty, in order, as it seemed, to give the greater poignancy and bitterness to the instant renewal of their captivity. This was the very frenzy of despotism in its very moodiest state of excitement. Many began to think the Landgrave mad. If so, what a dreadful fate might be anticipated for the sons or representatives of so many ...

— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... is but too just," replied the weeping girl; "and it is that circumstance which adds to the poignancy of my grief: were he a less estimable character, were he divested of those amiable qualities that render man dear to the eyes of woman, my reasons for refusing his addresses would be unanswerable. In that case, if I were made a victim to parental authority, some ...

— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio

... deserted hamlet pictured by Goldsmith was neither one thing nor the other, but first Irish and then English. Criticism purely aesthetic cannot destroy the poignancy and profoundness of the theme and throughout the ...

— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland

... he, "let England, as an abstraction, fend for itself. But you've a bonny English soul within you, and for that you are fighting. And so had poor Taffy Jones. And I have a bonny Scottish thirst, the poignancy of which both of you have been happily spared. I will leave you, laddie, to seek in slumber ...

— The Rough Road • William John Locke

... fastidious delicacy spoils their sports of fancy: though ten times told, the tale to them never can be tedious; though dull "as the fat weed that grows on Lethe's bank," the jest for them has all the poignancy of satire: on the very offals, the garbage of wit, they can feed and batten. Happy they who can find in every jester the wit of Sterne or Swift; who else can wade through hundreds of thickly-printed pages to obtain for their reward such witticisms ...

— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth

... after him. In this tribe the taboo is not much observed at any time except by the relations of the dead. Similarly the Jesuit missionary Lafitau tells us that the name of the departed and the similar names of the survivors were, so to say, buried with the corpse until, the poignancy of their grief being abated, it pleased the relations "to lift up the tree and raise the dead." By raising the dead they meant bestowing the name of the departed upon some one else, who thus became to all intents ...

— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... feeling not only of entire disagreement, but of almost personal distress. Strange as it may seem to those who have been accustomed to think of that great artist merely as a type of the frigid pomposity of an antiquated age, his music, to ears that are attuned to hear it, comes fraught with a poignancy of loveliness whose peculiar quality is shared by no other poetry in the world. To have grown familiar with the voice of Racine, to have realised once and for all its intensity, its beauty, and its depth, is to have ...

— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey

... with a poignancy, a beauty, that, now that he was to lose it all, was like a wound, the wonder of this Cambridge. Then he had it, the marvellous moment! On the other side of the window the still court, a few twinkling ...

— The Prelude to Adventure • Hugh Walpole

... interior, that join and bind it. In that respect, fully obeying his own genius, he has gone beyond and some times exceeded the genius of language. His concise, vigorous and always forcible style, by its poignancy, emphasises and repeats the meaning. It may be said of his style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor, a style that has only been successfully employed by the French once, by Montaigne himself. If we wanted to imitate him, supposing ...

— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various

... terms—civilisation and barbarism—which convey to most persons the impression of a difference not merely in degree but in kind. Even the Germany has been suspected by some critics of sacrificing fidelity to poignancy of contrast and picturesqueness of narrative. Other histories too, which have been handed down to us among the archives of the people to whose infancy they relate, have been thought distorted by the pride of race or by the religious sentiment ...

— Ancient Law - Its Connection to the History of Early Society • Sir Henry James Sumner Maine

... noises of the Indian camp, the guttural voices of the men, the chattering of the squaws, rang in her ears, while the cries and prattling of the children, by reminding her of the lost one, served to enhance the poignancy of her grief. What a situation for the desolate mother! All alone with death, far from her mother, husband, home, and friends, surrounded by a troop of barbarous, noisy savages weighed down with grief, ...

— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... could see him blazing at both ends of it. A long and endearing familiarity has indeed been ours, melancholy and unsating; and it has given rise to a host of trying associations, conjured up by each new visit after a brief absence from Rome, and now adds poignancy of regret to what we feel must be ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various

... trusted could have procured such intimate, such dramatic photographs. They were as unlike the usual posed portraits of Indian life as is a stage shower unlike an actual thunder storm. There was indeed a subtle passion and poignancy about the pictures that it seemed to Enoch as well as to the President, only a fine mind could have found and captured. He had made the rounds of the little room twice, threading his way abstractedly through the crowd, ...

— The Enchanted Canyon • Honore Willsie Morrow

... what they had endured together in ties closer than those of brotherhood, they clasped each other in a wild embrace, and the kiss that they exchanged at that moment seemed to them to possess a savor and a poignancy such as they had never experienced before in all their life; a kiss such as they never could receive from lips of woman, sealing their undying friendship, giving additional confirmation to the ...

— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... men, Gustavus (though hitherto too idle to learn much himself) did not see why a man should be sneered at for being an accomplished scholar as well. Therefore he had good foundation for being pleased at the proffered friendship of such a man, and remembering the poignancy of Edward's anguish on the foregoing eve, Gustavus generously resolved to see him at once and offer him the hand which a nice sense of feeling made him withhold the night before. Mounting his pony, an hour's smart ...

— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... this was a pathetic picture to him, for ease or pleasure were not discernible between the walls. Nevertheless Mrs. Perch found pleasures therein, and the way in which her face then lit up added, to Sabre, an indescribable poignancy to the pathos of the picture. She never could pass a baby without stopping to adore it, and an astounding tide of rejuvenation would then flood up from mysterious mains, welling upon her silvered cheeks and through her dim eyes, stilling the ...

— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... the hopes that had been entertained gave poignancy to the sudden disappointment and grief, and the home children could not acquiesce in the dispensation with the same quiet reasonableness as those who had been so long separated from them as not to miss the gentle countenance, or the 'sweet toils, sweet cares, ...

— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge

... was to publish lessons written in imitation of the several styles of his enemies, in which their peculiarities were so closely copied, and their extraneous passages (particularly those of Bach of Hamburgh) so inimitably burlesqued, that they all felt the poignancy of his musical wit, confessed its truth, ...

— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock