Diccionario ingles.comDiccionario ingles.com
Synonyms, antonyms, pronunciation

  Home
English Dictionary      examples: 'day', 'get rid of', 'New York Bay'




Melancholia   Listen
noun
Melancholia  n.  (Med.) A kind of mental unsoundness characterized by extreme depression of spirits, ill-grounded fears, delusions, and brooding over one particular subject or train of ideas.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








Advanced search
     Find words:
Starting with
Ending with
Containing
Matching a pattern  

Synonyms
Antonyms
Quotes
Words linked to  

only single words



Share |





"Melancholia" Quotes from Famous Books



... buildings or under weeping trees like the rose-flowered Japanese weeping cherry. It is at home in full sunshine where it will form a broadly rounded, bushy plant about three feet in diameter and, when in full bloom, with its myriad of black-eyed flowers, it can dispel the worst case of melancholia a dyspeptic ever enjoyed. It requires a good open, rather light soil to do itself justice. If lifted when in full bloom, put into a ten-inch pot, well soaked at the roots, and set aside for a few hours away from sun ...
— Making a Garden of Perennials • W. C. Egan

... and of succeeding events, including his arrival at Constantinople, ready draughted, and was impatient to forward it. A word of approval from Mahommed would be to him like a new spirit given. He counted upon it as a cure for his melancholia. ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace

... moment at the top of the hill to look at the sunset, and he sighed again as his thoughts flew to that print of the "Melancholia" which had hung on the stairs in his ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... are hopeless from the start. Few recover after two years of mental aberration. Omitting the hopeless cases, over forty per cent of the cases of insanity recover. About sixty per cent recover of the cases classed as melancholia and mania. Most recoveries occur during the first year of the disease; but depressed patients may emerge and recover ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume II (of VI) • Various

... is housemaid's knee, and painter's colic, so there is millionaire's melancholia. And the Budlongs were enduring the illness without ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes

... cramps, convulsions, paralysies, epilepsies, tremor-cordia, retired nerves, ill vapours of the spleen, stopping of the liver, the stone, the strangury, hernia ventosa, iliaca passio; stops a disenteria immediately; easeth the torsion of the small guts: and cures melancholia hypocondriaca, being taken and applied according to my printed receipt. [POINTING TO HIS BILL AND HIS VIAL.] For, this is the physician, this the medicine; this counsels, this cures; this gives the direction, this works the effect; and, in sum, both together may be termed an abstract ...
— Volpone; Or, The Fox • Ben Jonson

... don't mention it aloud. Mr. Britt is trying with might and main to prove that Bobby and I have hallucinations without end. If I happen to look depressed at breakfast time, he jots it down—spells of depression and melancholia, do you see? ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon

... been affected. The slightest allusion to the terrible incident sent her into delirium, and the arrest of Robert Darzac which followed on the day following the tragic death of the keeper seemed to sink her fine intelligence into complete melancholia. ...
— The Mystery of the Yellow Room • Gaston Leroux

... again it takes the form of hypochondria or chronic blues. The hypochondriac has a chronic, morbid anxiety about personal health and personal welfare. Frequently this state is accompanied by melancholia. ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter

... LUCIUS, a fish called merling, whiting, also smelt; Fr. MERLAN; also blackbird. Platina discussed MERULA, the blackbird, the eating of which he disapproves. "There is little food value in the meat of blackbirds and it increases melancholia," says he. Perhaps because the ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius

... gayety by only watching other people who are gay," I declared. "Paris is not for those who have anxieties, Louis. If ever I were suffering from melancholia, for instance, I should choose some other place for ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... carried away the last remnants of Barstein's melancholia; he saw his imagined statue showering adjectives from its cornucopia. 'It is the cry of a dictionary in distress!' he murmured, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill

... periodicities of the nisus generativus in that sex. Many of the cases in both sexes follow the seasonal periodicity which perhaps in man is merely a reversion to the seasonal generative activities of the majority of the lower animals." He found that among 338 cases of insanity, chiefly mania and melancholia, 46 per cent, of females and 40 per cent, of males showed periodicity,—diurnal, monthly, seasonal, or annual, and more marked in women than in men, and in mania than in melancholia,—and adds: "I found that the younger the patient, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... worth while; all the thousand little trivial things that made up the course of his life and in which he found diversion and amusement palled upon him. A fearful melancholia settled over him, a despair, an abhorrence of living that could not be uttered. This only was during the day. It was that night that Vandover went down into ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... ideals and no sense of the practical, goes off with her to a lonely island, there to fight for her possession and his own life. The stage-setting is magnificent; even a volcano lights the scene. But the clear, hard-blue sky is quite o'erspread by the black bat Melancholia, and the silence is indeed "dazzling." The villains are melodramatic enough in their behaviour, but, as portraits, they are artfully different from the conventional bad men of fiction. The thin chap, Mr. ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... unoccupied gentlemen, have been raised by their assailants to kings and heroes rivalling the demi-gods of Greece and Rome, and the melancholy destruction of the race, have been noticed in a previous volume. [Footnote: Yol. i. chap, ii., Wanderings in West Africa. The modorra, lethargy or melancholia, which killed so many of those Numidian islanders suggests the pining of a wild bird prisoned in a cage.] I here confine myself to the contents of my note-book upon the Guanche collections ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... this the first time during his stay in Africa that this gloomy atmosphere seemed to envelop him. In fact, he was the subject of frequent attacks of melancholia which the many friends that he ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... feared the minister would lose his reason in a helpless melancholia. The children were heart-broken. All their efforts to comfort and distract their father fell down hopeless from the mask of ice, behind which they saw him like a spirit in prison. Daniel and Ruth were ready to give ...
— The Unknown Quantity - A Book of Romance and Some Half-Told Tales • Henry van Dyke

... every day she came over to the camp, and really was almost like a young girl herself, so great was her joy in the sudden restoration of her daughter's health. It developed that the sick girl's case had been one of pure melancholia, following a shock of grief, and that her association with Dorothy and her friends was the one thing she most needed. The second shock, in falling, had ...
— Dorothy Dale's Camping Days • Margaret Penrose

... of the present century—the idea that insanity is brain disease, and that the treatment of it must be gentle and kind. In the sixth century Alexander of Tralles presented still more fruitful researches, and taught the world how to deal with melancholia; and, finally, in the seventh century, this great line of scientific men, working mainly under pagan auspices, was closed by Paul of Aegina, who under the protection of Caliph Omar made still further observations, but, above all, laid stress on the cure of madness ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... I now suffered were insomnia, melancholia, heart irregularity, and a train of mental symptoms and feelings which common words could not begin to describe. It would have required an assortment of the very strongest adjectives and adverbs to have told any one how I felt. For the first time, my stomach was now ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs

... said, "how funny you are. I don't know much about Byron, but I kind of think you're trying to do the old melancholia act: Manfred or what d'you call 'em? You just stand there like old style opera, glowering; if you had a cloak you'd throw ...
— Old Crow • Alice Brown

... truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Durer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that circle of fantastic ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... side. There was no rest with him. All his brilliance, all his brilliant companions were one part, but there was a steady pressure of tragedy about us—from outside. And there was tragic pressure from him. He was subject to the most terrible melancholia. He had enough vision to see the wrong everywhere. It was not mania. There is wrong everywhere, if one looks—in judges and cities, in nations, wars, in the kind of amusements people plunge into—wrong and coarseness and stupidity. ...
— Red Fleece • Will Levington Comfort

... may or may not be aware that what you are pleased to call the blues, or moods, are, in your case, nothing more or less than melancholia. When they are at their worst they are the form known as melancholia attonita. In other words, you are not only steeped in melancholy, but your brain is in, a state of stupor: you are all but comatose. These attacks are not frequent, and are generally the result of a powerful mental shock ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... pinion to buffet with a wind like this, and indeed he was not explicitly called upon to do so. He sat sorrowfully in his study day by day, preparing the weekly sermon,—a gentle, pensive person, inclined in the best of weather to melancholia. If Mr. Langly had gone into arboriculture instead of into the ministry, he would have planted ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... danger is from melancholia, Dick. But what are we to do with the otter? That box is too ...
— Dick in the Everglades • A. W. Dimock

... the four primary humours of the body, viz. blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy (see Burton's Anat. of Mel. i. 1, Sec. ii. 2): "Melancholy, cold and dry, thick, black, and sour, begotten of the more feculent part of nourishment, and purged from the spleen"; Gk. melancholia, black bile. See Sams. Agon. 600, "humours black That mingle with thy fancy"; and Nash's Terrors of the Night (1594): "(Melancholy) sinketh down to the bottom like the lees of the wine, corrupteth the blood, and is the cause ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... concerning which I had read, might also have entered the dream. Aside from these, there is another element which may have been instrumental in causing my wife to be punished by thinking she was a cat. I once saw a woman who was suffering from melancholia who thought she was a cat, and her mental suffering seemed to me to be about the keenest of any that I have ever observed, this possibly caused the dream-making factor to represent her as thinking she was a cat. The hall, window and ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... mother a woman of almost virulent virtue, who kept her son in great order. From the age of eight he was subject to cataleptic or epileptic fits and convulsions. After his novitiate he suffered from severe attacks of melancholia. His 'miracles' attracting attention, he was brought before the Inquisition at Naples, as an impostor. He was sent to an obscure and remote monastery, and thence to Assisi, where he was harshly treated, and fell into Bunyan's Slough of Despond, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang

... generally boss the show—for the sole reason that we belong to the crowd who have the money. Very likely if we had not been born with it we should die from malnutrition, or go to Ward's Island suffering from some variety of melancholia brought on by worry over our inability to make ...
— The "Goldfish" • Arthur Train

... to hunt him up. The waiter returned breathless. The gentleman was nowhere. He had searched the entire house; there was not a trace. Gustavo sent the boot-boy flying down the arbour to search the garden; he was beginning to feel anxious. What if the gentleman in a sudden fit of melancholia had thrown himself into the lake? That would indeed be an ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster

... herb in small doses, mixed in a little soup, will serve to relieve bilious melancholia, and will help to disperse the yellow hue of jaundice ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... parted and the shepherd in the shape of Harut appeared looking, I reflected, the very picture of Abraham softened by a touch of the melancholia of Job, that is, as I have always imagined those patriarchs. He bowed to us with his usual Oriental courtesy, and we bowed back to him. Hans' bow, I may explain, was of the most peculiar nature, more like a skulpat, as the Boers ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard

... opened the carriage door for her, "you've got to rest at my house and have something to eat before you go to Nannie's; besides, you don't suppose I got you on here just to cheer her? You've got to cheer me, too! It's enough to give a man melancholia to live next to that empty house of yours, and you owe it to me to be pleasant—if you can be ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland

... pressed heavily upon him, and Mr. Wace does not think that he was altogether free from occasional intemperance. He had begun life in a comfortable position, he was a man of fair education, and he suffered, for weeks at a stretch, from melancholia and insomnia. Afraid to disturb his family, he would slip quietly from his wife's side, when his thoughts became intolerable, and wander about the house. And about three o'clock one morning, late in August, chance directed him into ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... wore a faded velvet robe which clung to her when she moved and was "cut," as to the neck and sleeves, like the garments of old Italians. She suggested a symbolic picture, something akin even to Durer's Melancholia, and was so perfect an image of a type which I, in my ignorance, supposed to be extinct, that while she rose before me I was almost as much startled as if I had seen a ghost. I afterwards concluded that Miss Ambient wasn't incapable of deriving pleasure from this weird effect, and I now believe ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James

... the Middle Ages." The exercises of St. Ignatius did not appeal in the least to Father Daly, who disapproved of letting one's thoughts brood upon hell; far better think of heaven. Too much brooding on hell engenders a feeling of despair, which was the cause of Sister Teresa's melancholia. Too intense a fear of hell has caused men, so it is said, to kill themselves. It seems strange, but men kill themselves through fear of death. "I suppose it is possible that fear of hell might distract the mind so completely—Well, let us not talk on these subjects. We ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore

... counted rather recklessly upon his keeping his word and marrying her as he had promised. When her trouble came she went quite out of her mind—perfectly harmless, I believe, and with lucid intervals in which she suffered from terrible melancholia. Her child inherits many of her characteristics, I am told, though I've never heard any harm of the girl except that she flirts with all the clowns ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... land recovered from the plagues, but its ruler never. The death of Rameses lay like a heavy sin and torturing remorse on his conscience. He wept till the feeble eyes lost their sight, but not their susceptibility to tears. At last, succumbing to melancholia, he became a child, for whom Hotep reigned and for whom the queen cared with ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... carefully distinguish what are primary from what are secondary symptoms. Two thousand years ago a physician, [Transcriber's note: original reads 'physican'] Areteus, pointed out that mania frequently commenced as melancholia, and he drew attention to the extreme frequency of an initial depression in cases of mental illnesses. But he did not offer any ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various

... [Footnote: Although later in Gould's career it was freely charged that he had been the cause of Leupp's suicide, no facts were officially brought out to prove the charge. The coroner's jury found that Leupp had been suffering from melancholia, superinduced, doubtless, by ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... Elder Gswolt Krel Portrait at Hampton Court Portrait of a Lady Michel Wolgemuth Hans Imhof "Jakob Muffel" Study of a Hound Memento Mei Silver-point Portrait Portrait in Black Chalk Cherub for a Crucifixion Apollo and Diana An Old Castle Melancholia Detail from "The Agony in the Garden" Angel with Sudarium The Small Horse The Great Fortune, or Nemesis Silver-point Drawing St. Michael and the Dragon Detail from "The Meeting at the Golden Gate" Detail from "The Nativity" Duerer's Armorial Bearings Christ haled before ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore

... and expressed as any letters could be. They are written by people living lives very like the lives of us who are called "sane," except that they lift to a higher excitement and fall to a lower depression, and that these extremer phases of mania or melancholia slip the leash of mental consistency altogether and take abnormal forms. They tap deep founts of impulse, such as we of the safer ways of mediocrity do but glimpse under the influence of drugs, or in dreams and rare moments of controllable extravagance. Then ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... beautiful, not even a pretty face. But it might have been one—very easily. The veiled, mournful eyes did not evade his; indeed, they appeared to stare deeply, hopelessly, yearningly. If he could only say and do the right thing to kill that melancholia. She needed to be made to live. Suddenly he had the impulse to kiss her. That, no doubt, was owing to the proximity of her lips. But he must not kiss her. She might care for him some day —it was natural ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey

... ago William Honeywell Robinson became addicted to a patent headache 'dope.' It ended, as such habits do, in insanity. He was confined two years, suffering from psychasthenia, with suicidal melancholia and delusion of persecution. Then he was released, cured, but with a ...
— Average Jones • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... "Yes, I know: a woman named Rambert; age about forty; hallucination that people are persecuting her; anaemic, with alternate crises of excitement and melancholia, punctuated by fits of passion; treatment: rest, ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... the most good has been done have been the cases of agitated melancholia with attacks, more or less clearly periodic, of excitement, during which their delusions take acuter hold of them and drive them to wild extravagance of noisy talk and bodily restlessness. Whether such patients must be put to bed or not one must judge in each instance, taking into account the ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell

... with himself whether it shall be by knife, halter, or poison, and after much questioning is apparently making up his mind to commit suicide. Is not this a manifest case of insanity, in the form known as melancholia? Would not any prudent physician keep such a person under the eye of constant watchers, as in a dangerous state of, at least, partial mental alienation? Yet this is an exact transcript of the mental condition of Christian in "Pilgrim's Progress," and its counterpart ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... bowels and excessive thirst." Q "What are the symptoms of black bile and what hath the patient to fear from it, an it get the mastery of the body?" "The symptoms are false appetite and great mental disquiet and cark and care; and it behoveth that it be evacuated, else it will generate melancholia[FN402] and leprosy and cancer and disease of the spleen and ulceration of the bowels." Q "Into how many branches is the art of medicine divided?" "Into two: the art of diagnosing diseases, and that of restoring the diseased body to health." Q "When is the ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... digestion of the food (page 162). Emotional states are also known to interfere with breathing and with the action of the heart. Such effects are explained through the close relation of the mind to the work of the nervous system in general. While certain emotional states, such as fear, anger, melancholia, and the impulse to worry, interfere seriously with the normal action of the nervous system, others, such as contentment, cheerfulness, and joy, are decidedly beneficial in their effects. How important, then, is the habit of suppressing the states that are harmful and of cultivating those that ...
— Physiology and Hygiene for Secondary Schools • Francis M. Walters, A.M.

... interest in religion, influenced, perhaps, by the untempered zeal of one John Newton, a curate, with whom Cowper worked in the small parish of Olney, and with whom he compiled the famous Olney Hymns. The rest of his life, between intervals of melancholia or insanity, was spent in gardening, in the care of his numerous pets, and in writing his poems, his translation of Homer, and his charming letters. His two best known poems were suggested by a lively and cultivated widow, Lady Austen, who told him the story ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long

... parlor was as good as a temple that morning. The sunlight was on the river and soft air came in through the open window; the walls showed a glorious silent cloud of witnesses—the Virgin soaring amid her cherubic escort; grand Melancholia with her solemn universe; the Prophets and Sibyls; the School of Athens; the Last Supper; mystic groups where far-off ages made one moment; grave Holbein and Rembrandt heads; the Tragic Muse; last-century children at their musings or their play; Italian poets—all were there through ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... is liable to suffer from a schirrus of the liver opposing the progression of the blood, which is absorbed from the intestines. Hence the piles are a symptom of hepatic obstruction, and hence the copious discharges downwards or upwards of a black material, which has been called melancholia, or black bile; but is no other than the blood, which is probably discharged from ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... is needed, trained, untrained, or a member of the family, and the amount of company or entertainment allowed must be decided for the individual patient. The patient must be distinctly individualized and the proper measures taken to give mental and physical rest, to prevent excitement, worry, melancholia and depression, and to improve the general nutrition of the body as well as the condition ...
— DISTURBANCES OF THE HEART • OLIVER T. OSBORNE, A.M., M.D.

... at all addicted to melancholia to-day," said Mary, "you won't be surprised, will you? My mother isn't well—really! When I left her an hour ago, you might have supposed that we were parting for a year. And then, besides I had an ...
— Captivating Mary Carstairs • Henry Sydnor Harrison

... laborious, learned, accurate, elevated in sentiment; Kaulbach's pictures, for instance, are complete treatises upon the theme, both as to the conception and the drawing, grouping, etc.; but it is mostly as treatises that they have interest. So the allegories in Albert Duerer's "Melancholia" are obstructive to it as a work of Art, and just in proportion to their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various

... from the cavities of the chest into the pulmonary vein may be expelled and got rid of with the urine and feces through the left ventricle of the heart and arteries. He quotes the case of a certain person affected with melancholia, and who suffered from repeated fainting fits, who was relieved from the paroxysms on passing a quantity of turbid, fetid and acrid urine. But he died at last, worn out by disease; and when the body came to be opened after ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... of life. My mother in particular, a very cheerful person, seemed to me a perfect paradox in her unconsciousness of danger, which you may well believe I was very careful not to disturb by revelations of my own state of mind (I have always thought that this experience of melancholia of mine had ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... out in a short space of time. Mrs. Critchlow was suffering from melancholia. It appeared that for long she had been depressed by the failing trade of the shop, which was none of her fault. The state of the Square had steadily deteriorated. Even the 'Vaults' were not what they once were. Four ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett

... square is its proximity to Young Street, so long the home of Thackeray. He came to No. 16, then 13, in 1846, aged only thirty-five, but with the romance of his life behind him. A tablet marks the window in which he used to work. Six years previously his wife, whom he had tenderly loved, had developed melancholia, and, soon becoming a confirmed invalid, had had to be placed permanently under medical care. Their married life had been very short, only four or five years, but Thackeray had three little daughters ...
— The Kensington District - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton

... than either Mr. Hamar or Mr. Curtis, but as Mr. Kelson was engaged, she had consulted Mr. Edward Curtis instead. The latter had given her a spell which he had assured her would have the desired effect, but directly she got home, her adored Brutus developed melancholia, and died raving mad, after having bitten her child, who, by the way, had ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell

... attor, poison; also Wall-fern, and formerly in Anglo-Saxon Ever-fern, or Boar-fern. In Germany it is said to have sprung from the Virgin's milk, and is named Marie bregue. The fresh root has been used successfully in decoction, or powdered, for melancholia; [190] also of late for general rheumatic swelling of the joints. By the ancients it was employed as a purgative. Six drachms by weight of the root should be infused for two hours in a pint of boiling ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie

... therefore lived and worked in a continual discord. This may not suffice to account for the unhingement of his reason. I prefer to explain that by the fatigue of intellectual labor and worry acting on a brain predisposed for melancholia and overtasked from infancy. But it does account for the moral martyrdom he suffered, and the internal perplexity to which ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... is criminal to be serious all the time; it kills the real life and leads to melancholia. You would grow morbid through your fears if I did not laugh at them sometimes, and it would never—never do for me ...
— The Bondwoman • Marah Ellis Ryan

... taking place in both the mental and bodily processes results hi a lack of stability—an "unsettledness" that manifests itself in restlessness, nervousness, self-consciousness or morbidness, taking perhaps the form of a persistent melancholia or desire to ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue

... his stay in Paris, when he was weary of everything, afflicted with hypochondria, the prey of melancholia, when his nerves had become so sensitive that the sight of an unpleasant object or person impressed itself deeply on his brain—so deeply that several days were required before the impression could be effaced—the touch ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... kind of man—a man of conspicuous mediocrity, and rising rapidly, therefore, in his profession. He was immensely industrious, and a little given to melancholia in private life. He smoked rather too many cigars, and took his social occasions seriously. He dressed faultlessly, with a scrupulous elimination of style. Unlike Mr. Grant Allen's ideal man, he was not constitutionally a lover; indeed, ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells

... distinguish properly between the Leonardesque manner, in which local color is denied altogether, and the Turneresque, in which local color at its highest point in the picture is merged in whiteness. Thus, Albert Durer's noble "Melancholia" is entirely Leonardesque; the leaves on her head, her flesh, her wings, her dress, the wolf, the wooden ball, and the rainbow, being all equally white on the high lights. But my drawing of leaves, facing page 120, Vol. III., is Turneresque; ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin

... half choking, the dagger at his breast, did not even attempt to call for help; he fell on his knees, begging the empress to save at least the life of his son, who was not yet well from the terrible attack of melancholia that had shaken his reason ever since the catastrophe. Then he painfully dragged himself to the place where he had hidden his treasure, and pointing with ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - JOAN OF NAPLES—1343-1382 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE

... persons who had been bitten by this reptile fell into a state of melancholia and stupefaction. While in this condition they were very susceptible to the influence of music. At the very first tone of a favorite melody, they sprang up, shouting for joy, and danced without intermission until they ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence

... make a man have a little common-sense. That is beyond my skill, but maybe it is not beyond yours. You are Flemming's intimate friend, his fidus Achates. Write to him, write to him frequently, distract his mind, cheer him up, and prevent him from becoming a confirmed case of melancholia. Perhaps he has some important plans disarranged by his present confinement. If he has you will know, and will know how to advise him judiciously. I trust your father finds the change beneficial? I am, my dear ...
— Marjorie Daw • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... you that presentations are much sought after, and are very difficult to get. Julia is a patroness. Marian told her about this child of Marmaduke's; and it happened that a vacancy had just occurred at the Home in consequence of one of the girls dying of melancholia and spinal affection. Julia, who has perhaps more piety than tact, wrote to Marmaduke offering to present his daughter, and expatiating on the advantages of the Home to the poor little lost one. In her desire to ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw

... and her relation to them has become almost daughterly. The three are swayed, to the extent of their several capacities, by what one might call a cult of Elfrida—her death has long ago been explained by the fact that a grandaunt of Mrs. Bell's suffered from melancholia. ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)

... pages with the most recent and interesting sects, and with those that are least known, or perhaps not known at all. Beginning with the doctrines of melancholia, of tenderness, of suffering, of exalted pietism, and of social despair—which, whether spontaneous or inspired, demoniac or divine, undoubtedly embody many of the mysterious aspirations of the ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... diseased, as it is technically called; but at other times it is merely affected by sympathy with some other organ that is physically deranged. A physical cause there is for all mental insanity, and that physical cause determines its kind of mania or melancholia, its duration, its chances of a perfect cure. But what that cause is in a given case is often very hard if not impossible to determine. Besides natural and inherited predispositions—some taint of derangement in the family, often betrayed by fits of epilepsy, hysterics, etc.—exciting ...
— Moral Principles and Medical Practice - The Basis of Medical Jurisprudence • Charles Coppens

... good in all the world for melancholia as walking, and the exercise of the imagination in planning something presently to be done, and soon the wrathful wretchedness had vanished from Mr. Polly's face. He would have to do the thing secretly and elaborately, because otherwise ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells

... night, so I was aware of nothing in connection with the death until late on Christmas Day. Then Mrs. Bensusan was told by Miss Greeb, the landlady of Denzil, that the tenant of No. 13 had been murdered. I fancied that he had killed himself in a fit of melancholia, with the stiletto I had left on his table; but I did not dare to go near the house to find ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume

... achieve, and a preacher of our day modernizes that definition to mean, the "don't-care-feeling" in the presence of duty. The sin is unlisted in modern treatises on Ethics, the writers of which see in its symptoms only indications of melancholia, neurasthenia or pellagra. But according to the scholastic classification still followed in this matter by the Catholic Church, sloth is to be considered as a specific vice opposed to the great commandment to love God with our ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery

... is, in the truest sense, Leonardo's masterpiece, the revealing instance of his mode of thought and work. In suggestiveness, only the Melancholia of Duerer is comparable to it; and no crude symbolism disturbs the effect of its subdued and graceful mystery. We all know the face and hands of the figure, set in its marble chair, in that cirque of fantastic rocks, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... that it had a port-hole of its own through which I could freely admit the local climate. When I first surveyed the contracted proportions of this stateroom, the paucity of its fittings and entire lack of the usual accommodations, I was filled as full of acute melancholia as an egg is of meat and had I not paid the passage money I would have bolted from the Cork out into utter darkness; but I was "in for it," and determined to make the best of the situation; so I got some clothes lines and screw hooks, and with them constructed ...
— A Fantasy of Mediterranean Travel • S. G. Bayne

... things were expected, failed, in 1833, to secure the first degree at the usual public examination. Four years later, when twenty-four years of age, he made another attempt, only, however, to be once more rejected. Chagrin at this second failure brought on melancholia, and he began to see visions; and later on, while still in this depressed state of mind, he turned his attention to some Christian tracts which had been given to him on his first appearance at the examination, but which he had so far allowed to remain unread. In these he discovered what ...
— China and the Manchus • Herbert A. Giles

... at which I, as a special favor, could secure the entire rig. Their prices were all abominably exorbitant, so I decided to hire for a season. The dozen beasts tried in two months, if placed in a row, would cure the worst case of melancholia. Some shied; others were liable to be overcome by "blind staggers"; three had the epizootic badly, and longed to lie down; one was nearly blind. At last I was told of a lady who desired to leave her pet horse and Sargent buggy in some country home during her three ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn

... Kennedy, reading the label to himself. "A remedy from the French Codex, composed, if I remember rightly, of one part phosphorus and fifty parts sulphuric ether. Phosphorus is often given as a remedy for loss of nerve power, neuralgia, hysteria, and melancholia. In quantities from a fiftieth to a tenth or so of a grain free phosphorus is a renovator of nerve tissue and nerve force, a drug for intense and long-sustained anxiety of mind and protracted emotional excitement—in ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve

... namely, that known as manic-depressive. This disorder, in its typical form, is shown by recurring outbursts of uncontrollable mental and physical activity (mania), alternating with attacks of profound depression (melancholia). This form of insanity represents the inability to control an extreme degree of the varied moods to which we all are subject. Long before the modern classification of mental disorders, Burton, in his ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.

... as a Renaissance painter. Yet his art has its dwelling-place in the early Romanesque savageness and strangeness. And the reader remembers Duerer's brooding muse called Melancholia that so obsessed Kipling in The Light that Failed. But the wonder-quality went into nearly all the Duerer wood-cuts and etchings. Rembrandt is a prophet-wizard, not only in his shadowy portraits, but in his etchings of holy scenes even his simplest cobweb lines become ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay

... a daughter's loving care, as it was her custom and her pleasure to do, poor Mrs. Brand roamed about the house looking like a madwoman. Her madness was, however, of a gentle kind: it took the form of melancholia, and manifested itself chiefly by continual restlessness and occasional bursts of ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... at one time suffered extremely from constipation. Walked and talked early. No convulsions. Menstruated first several months ago. Sometimes complains of severe headaches. One observer reported that the girl had been subject to slight melancholia within the last year. Choreic movements have been present off and on for about a year, but have not been marked until a little while previous to the incident which brought her to us. The diagnosis had been made that it was a case of mild St. Vitus dance. During ...
— Pathology of Lying, Etc. • William and Mary Healy

... Mania, or Monomania, also called Melancholia, is a form of the disease in which the patient becomes possessed of some single notion, contradictory alike to ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson

... if I were dead. I wish I could know whether Uncle Peter and Aunt Beulah were married yet. I wish I could know that. There is a woman in this hospital whose suitor married some one else, and she has nervous prostration, and melancholia. All she does all day is to moan and wring her hands and call out his name. The nurses are not very sympathetic. They seem to think that it is disgraceful to love a man so much that your whole life stops as soon as he goes out of it. What ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley

... Americans most grievously neglect. Stated technically, the law is this: that strong feeling about one's self tends to arrest the free association of one's objective ideas and motor processes. We get the extreme example of this in the mental disease called melancholia. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... genuine Melancholy more effective by contrast.[1] Yet, as Mr. Bridges points out, the ode does not hit so hard as one would expect: and it has seemed to me that the composition of Durer's great drawing may have something to do with this. Durer did surround his Melancholia with 'properties,' and he did evoke a figure which all must admit to be not only tremendously impressive but entirely genuine, whatever Keats may say; a figure so haunting, too, that it obtrudes its face between us and Keats's page and scares away ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... life from no fault of their own unnatural, nature who has made them dooms them to despair and doubt. Is there any 'soul,' any 'personality' for the man who is afflicted and weakened with intermittent melancholia? Where is his identity, where his responsibility? And if there is none for him, how does the accident of health bestow them on ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... intensely introspective. This is true also of Lenau, even to a greater extent, and may be taken as generally characteristic of poets of this type. The fact that this introspection is an inevitable symptom in many mental derangements, hypochondria, melancholia and others, indicates a not very remote relation of Weltschmerz to insanity. In Hoelderlin's poems there are not a few premonitions of the sad fate which awaited him. One illustration from the poem "An ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun

... produced, constipation does result in a lowering of the resistance to disease. More frequent fits, colic, foul breath, headache right across the forehead, lost appetite, drowsiness, skin eruptions, irritability, insomnia, melancholia and anaemia (especially the "green sickness" of women, usually connected with menstrual irregularities) are but a few of many ills partly or wholly due to or ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs

... she would certainly have chosen Major Benjy to be the person who missed him. Without wishing Captain Puffin any unpleasant experience, she would have borne with equanimity the news of his settled melancholia, or his permanent dizziness, for Major Benjy with his bright robustness was not the sort of man to prove a willing comrade to a chronically dizzy or melancholic friend. Nor would it be right that he should be so. Men in the prime of life were not meant ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson

... weather was bad, and the whole settlement would sink into melancholia. These people were on the bleak hillside, facing the sea. Back of them, hedging them close, was the forest, dim, dark and mysterious. In this wood were bears, wolves, panthers, which in Winter, lured by the smell of food, would occasionally enter the village to the great danger of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard

... obscure, accepted a peerage and became Lord Chatham and opened the door to cries of corruption and sell-out by the "Great Commoner." More significantly, Chatham was trying to lead a ministry from the House of Lords. He could not bring it off and sank deeper into that melancholia which left him mentally incapacitated during much of ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... while on some such glorious close to his disappointed hopes, and that he thought of razors, pistols, bread-knives, and touching letters to the coroner denouncing his enemies by name, and praying piously for forgiveness. After a time his fierceness gave way to melancholia. He had been married in this very overcoat, in his first and only frock-coat that was buttoned up beneath it. He began to recall their courting along this very walk, his years of penurious saving to get capital, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells

... very different order, and one which lay nearer their hearts. Jean-Marie was plainly not himself. He had fits of hectic activity, when he made unusual exertions to please, spoke more and faster, and redoubled in attention to his lessons. But these were interrupted by spells of melancholia and brooding silence, when the boy was ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson

... socio-psychic dissociation. It is a period of relative disorganization, when the individual is subjected to a great variety of new experiences, when outside influences prevail over the inner impulses of the individual, in which the individual is unsettled and there is a tendency toward pessimism and melancholia. Lamprecht thinks of this state as something transitory, and already as he writes (in 1905) nearing an end. This state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of the ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... paucioribus ignotus, hic jacet Democritus junior, cui vitam dedit & mortem Melancholia. Obiit viii. Id. ...
— English Book Collectors • William Younger Fletcher

... you knew that by inflicting prolonged pain on 100 rabbits you could discover a way to the extirpation of leprosy, or consumption, or locomotor ataxy, or of suicidal melancholia among human beings, dare you refuse to inflict that pain? Now I am quite unable to say that I dare. That sort of daring would seem to me to be extreme moral cowardice, to involve ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... "you're going to get a grip on yourself, mon ami. You're going to get out of this wretched, unkempt state of melancholia at once. Tanrade has told me much. You know as well as I do, the village is a nest of gossip—that they make a mountain out of a molehill; if I were a pirate chief and had captured this vagabond port, I'd have a few of those wagging tongues taken ...
— A Village of Vagabonds • F. Berkeley Smith

... roar with laughter, and certainly it was of a nature to excite the hilarity of a sufferer from confirmed melancholia, which I was far from being. However, I stopped laughing when I saw how the poor count blushed from shame. I kissed him affectionately to calm him, but at last I was cruel enough ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... first time, even in the experience of Dr. Cathcart, that a man had yielded to the singular seduction of the Solitudes and gone out of his mind; Defago, moreover, was predisposed to something of the sort, for he already had a touch of melancholia in his blood, and his fiber was weakened by bouts of drinking that often lasted for weeks at a time. Something on this trip—one might never know precisely what—had sufficed to push him over the line, that was all. And he had gone, gone off into the great wilderness of trees and lakes ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood

... social season she was liable to melancholia. She sat by the window in a charming negligee, paler than a camellia, hardly turning her head when, at twilight, her child was led in ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman

... is contagious. In every big business or school, there is one man's mental attitude that animates the whole institution. Everybody partakes of it. When the leader gets melancholia, the shop has it—the whole place becomes tinted with ultra-marine. The best helpers begin to get out, and the honeycombing process ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard

... have," laughed Mrs. Redfield, "and my cat had a fit too. Hugh says it's the high altitude. I tell him it's melancholia." ...
— Cavanaugh: Forest Ranger - A Romance of the Mountain West • Hamlin Garland

... student who possessed the normal male generative organs, but in whom the simulated function of menstruation was periodically performed. The cause was inexplicable, and the unfortunate victim was the subject of deep chagrin, and was afflicted with melancholia. He had menstruated for three years in this manner: a fluid exuded from the sebaceous glands of the deep fossa behind the corona glandis; this fluid was of the same appearance as the menstrual flux. The quantity ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... glands, like the liver, thyroid, or suprarenal, properly to supply its secretion, which is needed to neutralize the poisons normally produced in the body. This class is very large and very important. It has long been known how surely a disordered liver "predicts damnation"; melancholia, or "black bilious condition," hypochondria, or "under the rib-cartilages" (where the liver lies), are every-day figures of speech. A thorough house-cleaning of the alimentary canal, together with proper stimulation of the skin and kidneys, and an intelligent ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... knowledge of Scott, Dickens, Bulwer, Thackeray, and others of our best writers of fiction. Goethe he particularly admired. Of Cervantes he thought with the rest of us: He had read "Don Quixote," for the first time, when he was eighteen, and during a severe illness accompanied with intense melancholia; and he had laughed himself out of bed, and out of his melancholy. "Don Quixote" was, he said, the only book which he had ever read in solitude—that is, read to himself—which had compelled him to laugh aloud. Works of science, particularly scientific works in the domain ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake

... inside of three years, one very soon after the other, you see. My wife had a nervous tendency which these births brought to a crisis. After the very first child was born, she had an attack of profound melancholia. Her mother had to admit that Angele had been subject to similar attacks from childhood up. After the last child was born, I took her on a two months' trip in Italy. It was a lovely time, and her spirits actually seemed to brighten under ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann

... form except dementia," says the medical superintendent of the Colony. "Acute mania and maniac depressive insanity not infrequently appear as a 'post-convulsive' condition, that generally subsides within a few hours, or at most a few days. Rarely the state may persist a month. Melancholia is extremely infrequent. Delusions of persecution, hallucinations of sight or hearing, systematized in character, are almost ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer



Words linked to "Melancholia" :   melancholic, depression



Copyright © 2024 Diccionario ingles.com