"Pathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... And, say, with that set, hard look in them narrow eyes, and the saggy droop to his mouth corners, he's almost pathetic. For the first time since he'd drifted across my path I didn't feel like pitchin' ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... of babes cannot be determined by the needs of grown-ups. A spiritual malnutrition which starves would soon set in if adult wisdom were imposed on children for their sustenance. The truth is amply illustrated by those pathetic objects of our acquaintance, the men and women who have never ...
— A Study of Fairy Tales • Laura F. Kready
... determined not to put himself in their hands. He desired no other assurance of friendship than his brother had given him, who had already one of his daughters as a pledge, which was sufficient while she lived; "when she dieth he shall have another child of mine." And then he broke forth in pathetic eloquence: "I hold it not a brotherly part of your King, to desire to bereave me of two of my children at once; further give him to understand, that if he had no pledge at all, he should not need to distrust any injury ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... and care-free enjoyment of the meal. Certainly there were other turkey roasters in Hooker's Bend than Mrs. Arkwright's. Cissie might very well own a roaster. It was absurd to think that Cissie, in the midst of her almost pathetic struggle to break away from the uncouthness of Niggertown, would stoop to—Even in his thoughts Peter avoided ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... thought its sympathies are more generous than those of age, because the sorrows it sees are so much greater than any it has known, ever realized in itself or even conceived. So was it now with La Mothe. The pathetic, solitary figure, feeble almost to helplessness, diseased, shrunken, dying, Commines had said, yet with a heart warm in friendliness and a thought for France alone, thrilled him to the very depths. And the dull eyes, watching him from under the heavy ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... and dramatic; and, with Mrs. Flynn's straw lid tilted on one side, and the youngster whimperin' to be let loose among the flowers, and the baby sound asleep with its mouth open, the picture was more or less pathetic. ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... to generalize and apply. The picture is poor, for the child takes only what he is sensible to. And it does seem often, as Sighele pathetically notices on a large social scale, and as the Westminster divines have urged without due sense of the pathetic and home-coming point of it, that he takes more of the bad in us for reproduction than of the good! But, be this as it may, what we give him is all he gets. Heredity does not stop with birth; it is then only beginning. And the pity ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... followed by one line of seven words. These three lines all rhyme, but the rhyme changes with each succeeding triplet. It would be difficult to persuade the English reader that this is a very effective measure, and one in which many a gloomy or pathetic tale has been told. In order to realise how a few Chinese monosyllables in juxtaposition can stir the human heart to its lowest depths, it is necessary to devote some years to the study of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... the wagon with Macdonald, a canteen of water slung over her shoulders. Now and then she moistened his lips with a little of it, and bathed his eyes, closed in pathetic weariness. He was unconscious still from the blow of Saul Chadron's big bullet. As she ministered to him she felt that he would open his eyes on this world's pains and cruel ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... really pathetic in the spasmodic grasp with which he seized the glasses, and as he rose to a sitting posture and lifted them to his ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... little acquainted, sir, with pathetic language, to attempt a description of the people's distresses; but I have a generous soul, sensible of wrongs and swelling for redress. But what can I do? I see their situation, know their danger, and ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... The skirt was rather short, and the waist was a blouse, finished at the throat with a broad collar that turned away from a neck still white in spite of much sunlight. Their months of roughing it had not harmed them, and only the intense sadness in Adam's eyes, the pathetic droop of Robin's mouth, when they thought themselves unobserved, told a story different from ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... his words. Uncle Noah's pathetic story came crowding over her again in the light of Dick's revelation. His father and mother! The stern old Colonel, of whom Dick always spoke with such respectful loyalty in spite of their quarrel, and the dear mother, whose tender eyes gazing from the old-fashioned daguerreotype ...
— Uncle Noah's Christmas Inspiration • Leona Dalrymple
... for his clothes next day, but he did not see Mr. Teak until a month afterwards. His fists clenched and his mouth hardened, but Mr. Teak, with a pathetic smile, held out his hand, and Mr. Chase, after a moment's hesitation, took it. Mr. Teak, still holding his friend's hand, piloted him to ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... followed, so she increased her pace, hopelessly outdistancing the little creature and leaving it to the mercy of the next marauder that chanced to pass that way. Without the guidance of its mother it was a forlorn and pathetic little object left to drift aimlessly through the rain-soaked forest with its numerous watchful eyes and alert ears. Somehow, the other creatures sensed the fawn's helplessness and the news soon spread among ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller
... denied him even mediocrity; Herennus has marked his faults; and Perilius Faustinus has furnished a thick volume with his plagiarisms. Even the author of his apology has confessed, that he has stolen from Homer his greatest beauties; from Apollonius Rhodius, many of his pathetic passages; from Nicander, hints for his Georgies; and this does not terminate ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... mocks our need of warmth and love And all the heartening fervencies thereof, It scarce hath heat enow to warm our thin Pathetic yearnings in. ...
— Green Fields and Running Brooks, and Other Poems • James Whitcomb Riley
... death-bed of his father, received his last blessing, and closed his eyes for the last time!" Mr. Clapp then read parts of Mr. Stanley's will, gave an outline of his client's wanderings, and was very particular with names and dates. The sailor's return was then described in the most pathetic colours. "He brought with him, gentlemen, nothing but the humble contents of a sailor's chest, the hard-earned wages of his daily toil; he, who in justice was the owner of as rich a domain as any ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... we are not able to grasp, but in the light of what we know from revelation we do not doubt of its presence. Even lives that seem obscure and insignificant we feel sure must have a divine meaning; and the pathetic thing about most human life is that it never dreams of its own significance. We are consumed with the notion that God's instruments must be great, while it is on the face of revelation that they are commonly humble and ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... afraid," Wanhope gently returned. "I mean, to match them in graciousness, in loveliness, in all the agile contests of spirit and plays of fancy. There's something pathetic to see them caught up into something more serious in that other game, which they are so ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... huntsmen wound a doe; she looks at them with human eyes, and no one can bring himself to kill her. It's not a bad subject, but dangerous because it is difficult to avoid sentimentality—you must write it like a report, without pathetic phrases, and begin like this: "On such and such a date the huntsmen in the Daraganov forest wounded a young doe...." And if you drop a tear you will strip the subject of its severity and of everything worth attention ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov
... and dexterity. It involves deep systematic study, closely akin to that of the severer sciences. It has a sequence and logic of its own, and excellence in it is unattainable without good sense and strong intellect. It involves great moral and pathetic sensibility, and a ready sympathy with all the joys and sorrows of mankind. And finally, the lightest branch of it is beyond the reach of any but those who are lifted up by strong feelings of reverence and devotion. Handel was a man of sincere piety, who avowed it to be the object ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... tremendous thing to think of, and especially to speak of in Mr. Bradshaw's presence, for the most pathetic image in the world to many women is that of themselves in tears,—that it brought a return of the same overflow, which served as a substitute for conversation until ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... including the young lord Kinalmeaky, one of the five sons whom the Earl of Cork gave to this war. II. In Connaught, Lord Clanrickarde was still enabled to avert a general outbreak. In vain the western Prelates besought him in a pathetic remonstrance to place himself at the head of its injured inhabitants, and take the command of the Province. He continued to play a middle part between the President, Lord Ranelagh, Sir Charles Coote the younger, and Willoughby, Governor of Galway, ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... home from the Cape, and almost lived on the way with Mr. Froude .... It was rather a sad mind, sometimes grand, sometimes pathetic and tender, usually cynical, but often relating with the highest appreciation, and with wonderful beauty of language, some gallant deed of some of his heroes of the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. He seemed ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... jack-knife was a possession so highly desired, so closely treasured in those days when boys had so few belongings, that it is pathetic to read of many a farm lad's struggles and long hours of weary work to obtain a good knife. Barlow knives were the most highly prized for certainly sixty years, and had, I am told, a vast popularity for over a century. May they forever rest in glorious memory, ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... (tefilah lekadma (Tav Pe Lamed He, Lamed Qof Dalet Mem FinalNun) is still more pathetic in its tearful contrition. The last lines even rise to unusual beauty when they point down a shining vista of ...
— Rashi • Maurice Liber
... that? "A Costermonger in this street," says Crabbe, "finding lately that his rope of onions, which he hoped would have brought a shilling, was to go for only sevenpence henceforth, burst forth into lamentation, execration and the most pathetic tears. Throwing up the window, I perceived the other costermongers preparing impatiently to pack this one out of their company as a disgrace to it, if he would not hold his peace and take the market-rate for his onions. I looked better at this Costermonger. To my astonished imagination, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... sad. It appeals deeply to those who live apart in a world of their own, in thoughtful imaginative reverie, but its effects on the mind were deplored even by Amiel himself in words which are acutely pathetic. The pain which consumed him arose from the concentration of self on self. Self was monopolised by self, self-consciousness was produced, though without a ...
— Cobwebs of Thought • Arachne
... of Themistocles and AEschylus. He is conscious of "exhilaration in the air, a sense of walking in new paths, of dawning hopes and untried possibilities, a confidence that all things can be won if only we try hard enough." With him it is never the exhaustion of noon or the pathetic beauty of twilight: always it is the dawn, and ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... retired to the Island of Elba, but was allowed two million five hundred thousand francs a year, the title of emperor, and four hundred soldiers as his body guard. His farewell address to the soldiers of his old guard, at Fontainebleau, was pathetic and eloquent. They retained their attachment amid ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... 'This pathetic remonstrance had such an effect on me, that I was fully resolved to return, like the prodigal son, and implore the forgiveness of him who gave me life; but, alas! Upon inquiry, I found he had paid his debt to nature a month ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... which I wrote when the memory of the incident was vivid in my mind, I said that, to me, this shabby little rag doll typified Belgium. Since then I have seen many sights. Some were dramatic and some were pathetic, and nearly all were stirring; but I still recall quite clearly the little picture of the forks of the Belgian road, with a background of trampled fields and sacked houses, and just at my feet the doll, with its head crushed ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... the grief of a poor child pining for the glorious sunshine, the dews of the valley, and liberty. Werther is the slave of desire; Louis Lambert was an enslaved soul. Given equal talent, the more pathetic sorrow, founded on desires which, being purer, are the more genuine, must transcend the ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... light in her eyes changed. The look there was an appeal, and it expressed confidence, too. Prescott felt a strange tremour. Her glance rested full upon him and it was strangely soft and pathetic. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... that every man or woman of these millions who has reached middle life was born a slave. The great bulk of the population have been brought up practically in the environment of a servile life. While there was much that was tender and pathetic and strong in the mute faith with which thousands of them lived through the dark trials of slavery, looking unto Christ as their deliverer, still the superstitions and degradations of slavery, its breaking of all home ties and life, could but infect the current religion of the ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 4, April 1896 • Various
... harder than I did," the little woman answered, and the tip-tilted nose looked quite pathetic; "for I just hate to be buried right down there in Kentucky! However, Elihu is the sort of man a woman can neither drive nor lead; so we've got to put up with him." And she smiled upon us ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... she received her only with that placid, sincere air which was her habit. Everything about this woman showed an ardent soul, repressed by timidity and by a certain dumbness in the faculties of outward expression; but her eyes had, at times, that earnest, appealing language which is so pathetic in the silence of inferior animals.—One sometimes sees such eyes, and wonders whether the story they intimate will ever ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... them caressingly, these few, pathetic records of a bygone passion, and at length, with hands that shook a little, she removed the ribbon that bound them together. Where it had lain, preserving the strip of paper beneath it from contact with the dust, bands of white traversed the faint discoloration ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... She wondered with sudden fierce bitterness how he could so soon forget certain walks and afternoons they had spent together; and the last note, which she composed in bed, was a very sad and scornful one, and so pathetic as a work of composition that she cried a little over it, and went to sleep full of indignation that she ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... said hastily, in pathetic and pretty broken Spanish, "you, oh, you will not leave us! In the mercy of heaven, tell me that you will not! Ah, seigneur," she sobbed, "mademoiselle will yet lead ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... ended in the hall of Turenne, before the souvenirs of the Duc de Reichstadt, so-called the king of Rome. Poor, little lead soldiers, tarnished and broken; what a pathetic history! Abused, ignored, his childish aspirations trampled on, the name and glory of his father made sport of; worried as cruel children worry a puppy; tantalized; hoping against hope that this night or the next ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... a moment when Miss Wildmere entered alone. To Graydon this appeared pathetic. He did not know that her mother was so worn out from the journey, and so embarrassed by unaided efforts to get settled while still caring for her half-sick child, that she had decided to make a slight and hasty repast in her own room. Miss Wildmere cared little for what took place ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... pathetic matter of my story, and it requires pointing out, because he never could explain what it was that seemed to him so cruel in it, for he was no brilliant son of fortune, he was no great pretender, none of those who are logically ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... whisper. When everything is quiet about him one may often hear an extraordinary performance. Beginning the usual call of "quee-o," in a tender and mournful tone, he will repeat it again and again at short intervals, every time with more pathetic inflection, till the wrought-up listener cannot resist the feeling that the next sound must be a burst of tears. Although his notes seem melancholy to hearers, however, the beautiful bird himself is far from expressing ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... to their defence, and strove during the remainder of the ride to add to Helen's pleasure; and this effort on his part made her eyes shine with joy—a joy almost pathetic in its intensity. ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... hesitate in the expression of any fancy his sickly state might prompt him to make. R—— told him, also, to join the yacht at Cowes when he returned to England. King lived to see the English shores again, and gratefully, in the blunt, pathetic language of a sailor, to thank his amiable benefactor. He fills, at this moment, his ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... Dining Hall to overflowing. With heart hot from disappointment and voice strident with intensity of emotion, he told of the things he had seen and heard in that great new land. Descriptions of scenery, statistics, tales humorous and pathetic, patriotic appeal, and prophetic vision came pouring forth in an overwhelming flood from the great man, whose tall, sinewy form swayed and rocked in his passion, and whose Scotch voice burred through his sonorous ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... houses that lined it but had gaping shell-holes in walls, piles of clattered-down bricks before it, heaps of dust—all mute tokens of the devastation wrought by the enemy airmen during the raid of the night before. But, in the middle of that pathetic and ruined apology for a street the children were playing away, as merrily as if nothing at all had happened, shouting to one another in glee. And the name of that street—as the battered and half obliterated sign on the corner of the caved-in ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... anything of one and eightpence and two shillings, the waiter went out to try if anybody else could; merely casting a helpless backward glance at Bullfinch, in acknowledgement of his pathetic entreaties for our soup-tureen. After a pause, during which Mr. Indignation Cocker read a newspaper and coughed defiant coughs, Bullfinch arose to get the tureen, when the waiter reappeared and brought it,—dropping Mr. Indignation Cocker's ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... around in search of Betty. She was sitting on an upturned tub, a pathetic enough figure as she drooped against the wall of one of the shanties with all her courage quite gone from her. He made his way ...
— The Prodigal Judge • Vaughan Kester
... the distant panorama of the city, the gulf, and its capes spread itself before her eager eyes. The air on this peak enchanted her after two weeks passed without stirring outside of Naples. The harps and violins gave the situation a pathetic thrill and served as a background for conversation, just as the vague murmurs of a hidden orchestra give the effect in the theater of psalmody or of melancholy verses moving the ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... letters, two poetical epistles are still extant, and these, strange to say, the most sceptical critics have so far allowed to pass unquestioned. There is something a little pathetic about their history. Two or three years before Dante's death, a young scholar of Bologna, known from his devotion to the great Latin bard, as Joannes de Virgilio, addressed an extremely prosaic, but highly complimentary, epistle to the old poet, urging ...
— Dante: His Times and His Work • Arthur John Butler
... fringed by sweet long lashes. Her nose and mouth were enough to attract an artist towards her; she was dressed in a lovely pink silk dress and her knob was arrayed by a pink feather. Her name was Margaret and she was known through all Paris as the "sweet young lady with the pathetic blue eyes!" and on the 20th of August (her birthday) not a single person omitted to give her a present. Beatrice thought her lovely and kissed her on both cheeks ...
— Daisy Ashford: Her Book • Daisy Ashford
... made his appearance. His coat was ill-brushed and in place of a hat he was wearing a tweed cap which had seen better days. His expression was almost pathetic. ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pathetic picture of one such widow, trembling and fainting for hunger, obliged, on her way to the well for a can of water, her only drink, to sit down on a 'knowe' and say ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the long line. I pumped and reeled him closer. Reluctantly he came, not yet broken in spirit, though his strength had sped. He rolled at times with a shade of the old vigor, with a pathetic manifestation of the temper that became a hero. I could see the long, slender tip of his dorsal fin, then his broad tail and finally the gleam of his silver side. Closer he came and slowly circled ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... make such charming and plausible excuses for you, that you will really feel quite rewarded for all the trouble you have had in teaching me the ways of society. Look now, I will begin like this;" and Madeleine, who had now got on her dress, curtsied and smiled, and began a most pathetic story about dear Fanny's dreadful headache. Fanny began to laugh, until it gave her head so much pain that she could not help crying out. She, however, allowed herself to be persuaded, ...
— Garman and Worse - A Norwegian Novel • Alexander Lange Kielland
... poetry, at least of English rhyme; but his performances still abound with many faults, and, what is more material, they contain but feeble and superficial beauties. Gayety, wit, and ingenuity are their ruling character: they aspire not to the sublime; still less to the pathetic. They treat of love, without making us feel any tenderness; and abound in panegyric, without exciting admiration. The panegyric, however, on Cromwell, contains more force than we should expect, from the other compositions ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... haltingly, "have I ever—been intro—" Suddenly his eyes closed, a frown gathered on his forehead. After a minute his eyes opened again, and he gazed with painful, pathetic seriousness at Jo. This grew to a kind of childish terror; then slowly, as a shadow passes, the perplexity, anxiety and terror cleared away, and left his forehead calm, his eyes unvexed and peaceful. The monocle dropped, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... gipsy skin and red kerchief to do with her heart and conscience? "Beware, my son, of the pathetic fallacy," he told himself, and as he turned into the carrera San Geronimo, beheld Manuela robed in ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... I were at the University together," he said at length. "He remembers the day I left Jena for good and all. Ah, Stephen, that is the most pathetic thing in life, next to leaving the Fatherland. We dine with our student club for the last time at the Burg Keller, a dingy little tavern under a grim old house, but very dear to us. We swear for the last time to be clean and honorable and patriotic, and to die for the Fatherland, if God so wills. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... could go no where without finding other Bellfleurs; and she might judge, by the danger she had just now so narrowly escaped, of the probability of being involved again in the same:—he represented to her, in the most pathetic terms, that her innocence could have no sure protection but in the arms of a husband, or the walls of a convent; and on his knees beseeched her, for the sake of that virtue which she so justly prized, since ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... apartment, he beheld a sight which filled his heart with gladness, for there, seated on a camp stool, with his back leaning against the dresser, his face lighted up by the blaze of a splendid fire, which burned in a most comfortable-looking kitchen range, and his hands drawing forth most pathetic music from a violin, sat his old friend Joe Dumsby, while opposite to him on a similar camp stool, with his arm resting on a small table, and a familiar black pipe in his mouth, sat that worthy son of Vulcan, ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... was near enough to see, I let the money fall in the mud and went off at my best walk without ever turning round. There is nothing in the story; and yet you will understand how much there is, if one chose to set it forth. You see, she was so ugly; and you know there is something terribly, miserably pathetic in a certain smile, a certain sodden aspect of invitation on such faces. It is so terrible, that it is in a way sacred; it means the outside of degradation and (what is worst of all in life) false position. I hope you understand me rightly. - ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... daughter, of course. [LORD WINDERMERE bites his under lip in anger. MRS. ERLYNNE looks at him, and her voice and manner become serious. In her accents at she talks there is a note of deep tragedy. For a moment she reveals herself.] Oh, don't imagine I am going to have a pathetic scene with her, weep on her neck and tell her who I am, and all that kind of thing. I have no ambition to play the part of a mother. Only once in my life like I known a mother's feelings. That was last night. They ...
— Lady Windermere's Fan • Oscar Wilde
... Mary Tudor, and I had studied everything about her on which I could lay my hands. I did not love her, but I pitied her profoundly, and the Holbein portrait of her seemed to me to indicate a terrible and pathetic secret. I cannot, however, give a complete explanation of her fascination for me. It is impossible to account for the resistless magnetism with which one human being draws another. The elements are too various and are compounded with too much subtlety. Bitter Roman Catholic as Mary was, ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... say that she had gone away. But Calliope's persistent youthfulness gives her a claim upon one, while on this woman whom Doctor June perplexedly regarded, her stifled youth imposed a forlorn aloofness, made the more pathetic ...
— Friendship Village • Zona Gale
... tired," murmured Gaga. He had taken her hand, and held it to his cheek, so that Sally had to lean forward. In this mood he was so like a child that Sally's heart softened. She found him pathetic, and her own strength was ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... knows it. What lovely hair you have! I'll come round early on your wedding-day and do it for you. And what will you wear? It mustn't be a black wedding whatever etiquette may decree. You look too pathetic in black, and it's a barbarous custom anyway. I have warned my husband fairly that if he goes into mourning for me, I'll never speak to him hereafter again. He is coming up to see us next week, and to discuss our fate with the doctor. ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... with redoubled energy and passion against the Pope and the Popedom, of which no mention had been made in the draft. In January 1545 he learned of that Papal letter in which the Holy Father had protested to his son the Emperor, with pathetic indignation, against the decrees of the Diet at Spires. Luther at first took it seriously for a forgery—a mere pasquinade—until he was assured by the Elector of the genuineness of this and another and similar letter, and thus provoked to take public ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... and lofty soul, blameless wife, devoted and pathetic adherent to the fallen fortunes of her ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... National Kitchens in different parts of the town supplying similar meals. Glasses of weak tea were sold at 30 kopecks each, without sugar. My sister had sent me a small bottle of saccharine just before I left Stockholm, and it was pathetic to see the childish delight with which some of my friends ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... of their voices dropped down to her, with the sound of the waves, and of the mysterious cries and creaking shudders that go through labouring ships. And all these noises seemed to her hoarse and pathetic, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... slowly; it was a very artful letter, most pathetic, and sprinkled with drops which might have been tears. The writer spoke despondingly of her loneliness and her desolation, and the fears she endured when by herself in the house at night, knowing there was a ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... to his feet and grappled, disdaining the proffered advantage, and got hurled to the ground, his head striking the earth violently, and making him so dizzy that the brave smile with which he took his fall looked rather sickly and pathetic. ...
— The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come • John Fox
... chief; opposite, on the West Virginia shore, Baker's Bottom, where occurred the treacherous massacre of Logan's family. The tragedy is interwoven with the history of the trans-Alleghany border; and schoolboys have in many lands and tongues recited the pathetic defense of the poor Mingo, who, more sinned against than sinning, was crushed in the inevitable struggle between savagery and civilization. "Who is there ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... hands,—rushing out of the lockup-house scene in all the fervid extasy of a father rejoicing at the escape of his son from destruction. In Crack, Dozey, Nipperkin, and other drunken characters, his drollery was irresistible. His intoxication displayed as much discrimination as his pathetic performances. Who can forget his stare in being detected in his fuddling as Dozey, and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's health:" or his anti-polarity as Nipperkin, when his very legs seemed drunk beneath him; his attempt to set down the keg would ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... brought them back only the disgrace of having tried to plunder. There were those at hand ready to take advantage of the public irritation; they accused him, and obtained his condemnation. We are not claiming for Miltiades the praise of virtue; nor should we make any pathetic appeal in his behalf. He was not free from a moral delinquency; but, so far as the Athenians were concerned, his substantial offence was failure in ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, No. 382, October 1847 • Various
... it for yourself," Douglas answered gently. There was something pathetic in the eagerness of the ...
— Polly of the Circus • Margaret Mayo
... May the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again! Where would any of us be, were there no one willing to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way. ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James
... cried. "May Heaven pardon him as I do. While I have strength left I will pray for him." And she poured forth her supplications for the earl in terms so earnest and pathetic, that the tears flowed down Solomon Eagle's rough cheek. At this juncture, hasty steps were heard in the adjoining passage, and the door opening, admitted the Earl of Rochester, who ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... separated us. Well, sir, next day, here was Hector demanding that I go and apologize to Link. I said I'd as soon apologize to a rattlesnake, and Hector upbraided me in his rhetoric, but with a whole lot of real feeling, too. He was even pathetic about it: put it on the ground that I owed it to morality, by which he meant Hector. I was known to be his most intimate friend; I had done him an irrecoverable injury with the Trimmers, who would extend their retaliation and let him have a share ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington
... I regret—I much regret—to have to inform you that she is already departed for Paris. Her solicitude for you was great, was pathetic. The first words she speak were: 'My husband, do not let him know!' as though she feared that you would be distressed for her. And then she recover quick, quick, and say that she must go—that monsieur ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... he said. "If you keep very quiet I will give you a resume of my most interesting cases," he said, making a pathetic attempt to be flippant, and the girl ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... was expected to spend in the garden, for it was an easy scramble from the stairs to the top of the wall, whence she could survey the world. To be sure the wall was narrow as well as high, but a timorous gait shows off a pretty figure, and slight nervousness adds a pathetic expression to a pretty face; to both of which advantages Dot was not, it is to be believed, altogether indifferent when khaki coats dwelt the other side ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, February 14, 1917 • Various
... vanished dreams of girlhood. The chord he had hoped to touch remained mute. In view of the fact that she believed love to be dead between them, this method of stimulating an outworn romance seemed sentimental and insincere. Had he loved her, she might well have thought it boyish and pathetic. What he spoke of as a disguise had seemed so natural as to escape her notice; and this indicated the height from which she had never really descended and could now never descend. He had lost his great opportunity of appearing ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... since I never experienced it awake), but I speedily came to, and insisted on his "pulling Henry Walsh's red hair for his insolence," which he promised to do instantly. How absurd! Dreams! dreams! That pathetic "Miss Sarah, do you ever dream?" comes vividly back to me sometimes. Dream? Don't I! Not the dreams that he meant; but royal, purple dreams, that De Quincey could not purchase with his opium; dreams that I would ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... newspaper-sellers have become familiar figures in Paris, and their number is increasing steadily as the needs of the army are depriving more and more families of their bread-winners. A pathetic figure seen on the Boulevard des Italiens yesterday afternoon was a woman toiling along under the weight of a sleeping child about five years old, and calling her newspapers gently, so as ...
— Paris War Days - Diary of an American • Charles Inman Barnard
... his finding in the wicker basket on the Nile to his death on Mount Nebo and his burial in an unknown grave; following closely the Scripture account. It contains about 700 lines, beginning with blank verse of the common measure, and changing to other measures, but always without rhyme; and is a pathetic and well-sustained piece. Mrs. Harper recited it with good effect, and it was well received. She is a lady of much talent, and always speaks well, particularly when her subject relates to the condition of her own ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... he remarked, "I shall find some other way to get it off." Returning to Paris, our tourist starts for Italy; but the book ends with his arrival at Moulines (Moulins). Some half a league from this city he encountered Maria, whose pathetic story had been told him by Mr. Shandy. She had lost her goat when Sterne saw her, but had instead a little dog named Silvio, led by a string. She was sitting under a poplar, playing on a pipe her vespers to the Virgin. Poor Maria had been crossed in love, or, to speak more strictly, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... silence pass Across thy walls, the shadow and the light; Around thy lofty pillars, tapers white Illuminate, with delicate sharp flames, The brows of saints with venerable names, And in the night erect a fiery wall, A great but silent fervor burns in all Those simple folk who kneel, pathetic, dumb, And know that down below, beside the Rhine— Cannon, horses, soldiers, flags in line— With blare of trumpets, ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... you to be more as she herself is. I understand her very well. I understand them all, these women. They cannot endure me. They see a meaning in everything I do. I have not a meaning in everything I do," she added, with a pathetic look, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... ends was filled by younger creatures. It was spring with them; their leaflets were yet green and unfallen; all that fell from them was poetry, pathetic in its sadness, bitter in its irony, free of metrical or indeed of any other restraints, and mainly either about how unpleasant had been the trenches in which they had spent the years of the great ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... Allen watching us as we opened our parcels and letters," Beth went on. "I happened to look up once, and such an expression as was on her face, girls! It was pathetic and sad and envious all at once. It really made me feel bad—for ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... with her hands pressed to her heart, her great pathetic eyes dilated with a curious fear. It was a long time before she spoke, though it was easy to see that she had penetrated Berrington's disguise. But then, he had spoken in his natural voice, which made all the difference. It seemed to him that the grey lady would have fallen had ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... two long strings of pearls, the maids each held a small hand- bag, her boy clasped in his arms a forlorn and sleepy fox-terrier, and each of the little girls was embracing a bird-cage. In one was a canary, in the other a parrot. That was all they had saved. In their way they were just as pathetic as the peasants sleeping under the hedges. They were just as homeless, friendless, just as much in need of food and sleep, and in their eyes was the same look of fear and horror. Bernhardi tells his countrymen that war is glorious, heroic, and for a nation ...
— With the Allies • Richard Harding Davis
... his own belief that he loved what he loved not. Had he let the Queen pass, and had he stopped Beatrix's horse instead, she might have been unhurt, and one other brave man might have saved Eleanor at the brink. Indeed, he thought of the sad face with its pathetic little smile, drawn with pain and hot upon the pillow, by his fault; and he thought with greater fear of the danger that some deep hurt might leave the slender frame bent and ...
— Via Crucis • F. Marion Crawford
... perceived that the man had come back. He might have been there some time with his effect of fussing and his pathetic sense of unwelcome. I had not noticed; I only knew that he stood at the half-open door with the knob of it in his hand looking ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... I went to the railings, and I stood where she stood. I looked down. How deep and fathomless it seemed, this running sea! What was it she had dropped there? In my mind's eye I saw a most pathetic little bundle made of love-letters; I pictured them tied with a pretty faded ribbon; there would be dried flowers, each one a momento of some happy occasion. I could fancy the dried roses, the withered forget-me-nots, the violets, with some faint odor lingering still around ...
— The Tragedy of the Chain Pier - Everyday Life Library No. 3 • Charlotte M. Braeme
... snipped out of the papers. There's no order, no sequence about it, and yet it is irresistible. But then Ruskin had the charm, and managed to pour it into all that he wrote. He is always there, that whimsical, generous, perverse, affectionate, afflicted, pathetic creature, even in the smallest scrap of a letter or the dreariest old tag of quotation. But you and I can't play tricks like that. You are sometimes there, I confess, in what you write, while I am never there in anything that I write. What ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... control over him in the deciding days that were to follow. Guided by the duke, and attended by his brothers, but without the ceremonious glories of regality, Lewis XVI. went down to the Assembly and made his submission. In the pathetic solemnity of the scene, the deputies forgot for a moment their righteous anger and their more righteous scorn, and the king returned to the palace on foot, in a sudden procession of triumph, amnestied and escorted ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... exclaimed, smiling half-sarcastically at her. "My poor story, it is but too evident, will never do for Godey or Graham! Only think of your falling asleep at what I hoped the newspaper critics would pronounce a most brilliant, powerful, imaginative, pathetic, and original winding up! Well, the manuscript must serve to light lamps with;—if, indeed, being so imbued with my gentle dulness, it is any longer capable ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... waiting to smooth my hair, hurried back into the sitting-room with Mary. Our visitor, very much amused at our excitement, explained the whole, and sent downstairs for 'Captain,' a magnificent retriever, who, on being told to beg our pardon, looked up with his dear pathetic brown eyes in Mary's face in a way that won her heart at once. His master, it appeared, had been staying at East Hornham the last two nights with an old friend, the clergyman there. Both nights, on going to bed late, he had missed 'Captain,' whose usual ...
— Grandmother Dear - A Book for Boys and Girls • Mrs. Molesworth
... which might come those which Mary Stuart and her maids wrought their dismal hours into pathetic bits of embroidery during the long days of captivity, or the daughter of the sorrowful Marie Antoinette mended the dilapidations of the ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... because such natures see so clearly that they act with less pain than others. Indeed, the more clear those spiritual perceptions, the more poignant are the sufferings which they involve; life can scarcely afford a situation more pathetic ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... from honour, is it merely that she is a victim of momentary intoxication, of stress of passion, of the fever of instinct? No. It is mainly that she is a slave of the sweetest, tenderest, most spiritual and pathetic of all human fallacies—the fallacy that by giving herself to the man she loves she attaches him to herself for ever. This is the real betrayer of nearly all good women that are betrayed. It lies at the root of tens of ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... huge hump upon his back, features of great refinement, a long thin beard, and a forehead unnaturally large, over eyes which, although of a pale blue, mingled with a certain mottled milky gleam, had a pathetic, dog-like expression. Decently dressed in black, he stood with his hands in the pockets of his trowsers, gazing immovably in ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... not choose but let his moist eyes overflow; she was so earnest and pathetic, but he did ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... Carlotta's prayers. The brokenhearted woman besought him on her knees, but his fear of losing an army made all pleadings vain. In fact, as I ascertained by the following cablegram which came into my hands, Napoleon's instructions for the French evacuation were in Mexico at the very time of this pathetic scene between him and Carlotta. The despatch was in cipher when I received it, but was translated by the telegraph operator at my headquarters, who long before had mastered the ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... affairs—so he had to be removed. He held the door shut just as long as he could, and when the crash came, quite naturally he was trampled on, and that is never a pleasant experience. But the whole thing has a pathetic side. I wish it could have been settled ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... I must leave him, for I grow pathetic, Moved by the Chinese nymph of tears, green tea! Than whom Cassandra was not more prophetic; For if my pure libations exceed three, I feel my heart become so sympathetic, That I must have recourse to black Bohea: 'T is pity wine should ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... or three games. It was pathetic to see how Mr Cupples's right hand, while he looked at the cards in his left, would go blindly flitting about the spot where his glass had always used to stand; and how, when he looked up unable to find it, his face shadowed over with disappointment. ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... in the world. She never married and she hasn't much money, and she just loves pretty things, especially pretty colors. And so Madam Kittredge is sending her a rainbow basket. It ought to have seemed pathetic to see her handling the colored things and hear her telling about the pleasure she was sure her friend would take in them, when she couldn't see them herself, but somehow it wasn't. She doesn't seem to think of herself ...
— The Wide Awake Girls in Winsted • Katharine Ellis Barrett
... music, and the tramp of many feet. There are funerals of great men, with gun carriages draped with the flag, and with the Marine Band playing the "Dead March." There are gay cavalcades rushing in from Fort Myer, to escort some celebrity; there are pathetic files of black folk, gorgeous in the insignia of some society which gives to its dead members the tribute of a conspicuousness which they have never known in life. There are circus parades, and suffrage parades, minstrel parades and parades of the boys from the ...
— Contrary Mary • Temple Bailey
... a world of reasonings, not immediately obvious, did the sage of old open to our inquiry, when he said that the pathetic was the truest source ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... sad ones—sentimental an' romantic, with a bad case o' chronic lonesomeness; an' one twilight he told her a pathetic little love story about a girl back in England what had had sense enough to cut him out of her assets when he had trooped over to this country to punch a fortune out o' beef cattle. This had been about five years ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... weary and strained now. A pathetic droop came to the corners of her mouth. The palm of her little hand turned up loosely, as though she had been tired and now was resting. "We must wait," she said, as ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... He stood in an attitude of complete astonishment, and we burst out laughing. There was something so comic in his surprise that it would have taxed all the talents of the poet and the caricaturist to depict his expression of amazement. Therese, who knew how to manage him, cried in a pathetic an affectionate voice,— ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... of our arrival the door was opened and a man—quite obviously a constable in plain clothes—came out. Behind him I observed one whom I took to be the late Sir Marcus's servant, a pathetic and ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... was one of the most remarkable men in the world," that "only his intimate friends could know how remarkable he was"; partly too upon the dog-like capacity of Andrey Vassilievitch to fetch and carry for his friend, to put himself indeed to the greatest inconvenience. It was pathetic to see the flaming pleasure in the man's eyes when Nikitin permitted him to wait upon him, and how ironically, upon such an occasion, would Semyonov watch ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... with an overflowing heart. I did not, like her, see the day-star of hope arising over that second bridal morn, but the sweet pathetic minor tone breathed in my ear the same ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... anger toward the brutal cowboy that was as strong as her sorrow for the loyal old cattleman. And it was when Stillwell gave up that she resolved to take a hand. The persistent faith of Stillwell, his pathetic excuses in the face of what must have been Stewart's violence, perhaps baseness, actuated her powerfully, gave her new insight into human nature. She honored a faith that remained unshaken. And the strange thought came ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... note of pathetic, ominous sadness in her voice. Even in his first study of this lovely face, the doctor's experienced eye told him that here was a case of complicated nervous breakdown. He wondered if she could have had a slight touch of shell shock. What a ghastly thing for a high spirited, ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... so. I might as well have been quite alone on the 'Diana' as with Morton Harland and his daughter, though they were always uniformly kind to me and thoughtful of my comfort. But between us there was 'a great gulf fixed,' though every now and again Catherine Harland made feeble and pathetic efforts to cross that gulf and reach me where I stood on the other side. But her strength was not equal to the task,—her will-power was sapped at its root, and every day she allowed herself to become more and more pliantly ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... possession of him, must be chronicled for a peer of the realm; Bully Bottom, if the period of his translations fell in with the census-taking, must be numbered among the cadgers' "mokes"; nay, if Dogberry himself had encountered the officials at the moment of his pathetic lamentation, he were ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... Chavannes gives one a very fine idea of the idealistic outlook of this greatest of all modern decorators. His art is so genuinely decorative that to see one of his pictures in a frame seems almost pathetic, when we think how infinitely more beautiful it would look as part of a wall. Eugne Carrire is very well represented by a stately portrait of a lady with a small dog. Carrire's mellow richness is entirely his own and rarely met with ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... the pathetic tale without once interrupting the fair narrator, and Edith's heart sank more and more in her bosom as she proceeded, and feared that she was so shocking him by these revelations that his affection for her would die with this expose ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... with the most pathetic gentleness. "You are right, I dare say, from the worldly point of view. I can't take the worldly point of view. The worldly point of view hurts me." She turned, with impressive gravity, to the page. "You know where you will go, Jonathan, if ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... knocked at his door at last. And when he returned to Brackton's he was in an exultant mood. The old storekeeper gave him a nudge and pointed underhand to a young man of ragged aspect sitting gloomily on a box. Slone recognized Joel Creech. The fellow surely made a pathetic sight, and Slone pitied him. He ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... grotesque as you'll look to-morrow morning when you have to go back to town and tell every one you meet that you and Dorothea Pruyn have run away and got married. That's when you'll look foolish and cut a pathetic figure. As things are it could be kept between two or three of us; but if you go on, you'll be in all the papers by to-morrow afternoon. Of ...
— The Inner Shrine • Basil King
... before poor Mr. Plateas had been reading "The Bell" of the poet of Leucadia,—that pathetic picture of the enamored young sailor, who, on returning to his village, throws himself into the sea to reach more speedily the shore, where he hears the tolling knell and sees the funeral procession of his beloved, and ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Polish • Various
... pathetic in the history of these efforts which were made during the progress of secession, to avert, if possible, the coming shock. The great peace conference, assembled by the action of Virginia, belongs to these painful and wasted endeavours. On February 4, the day that delegates from six cotton States ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... something that has struck the attention at the time. The measure of the song varies according to circumstances. It is gay and lively, for the dance; slow and solemn for the enchanter; and wild and pathetic for the mourner. The music is sometimes not unharmonious; and when heard in the stillness of the night and mellowed by distance, is often soothing and pleasing. I have frequently laid awake, after retiring to rest, to listen to it. Europeans, their property, ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... farewell when the tear stole down the manly cheeks of Scott as they wheeled him into his library, when he had come back to Abbotsford to die. Southey, white-haired, a living shadow, sitting stroking and kissing the books he could no longer open or read, is altogether pathetic." ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... soprano—sound as a bell, strong as a trumpet, well-trained, and true to the least shade in intonation. Piero, whose rugged Neptunian features, sea-wrinkled, tell of a rough water-life, boasts a bass of resonant, almost pathetic quality. Francesco has a mezza voce, which might, by a stretch of politeness, be called baritone. Piero's comrade, whose name concerns us not, has another of these nondescript voices. They sat together with their glasses and cigars before ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... eyebrows, a small, pointed Mephistophelian beard, and lines upon his brow and round his eyes as deep as if they had been carved with a penknife. He had grey eyes, weary, hopeless-looking eyes, proud and yet pathetic, eyes which claimed your pity and yet dared you to show it. His back was rounded with study, but otherwise he was as fine a looking man of his age—five-and-fifty perhaps—as any woman would ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... and pathetic beauty in heart-throbbing silence. Thus they came into the presence of the ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... to be an efficient manufacturer of "good, lively rural poems." He neglected even his college-entrance books, the Ruskin whose clots of gilt might have trained him to look for real gold, and the stilted Burke who might have given him a vision of empires and races and social destinies. And for his pathetic treachery he wasn't even rewarded. His club-footed verses were always returned with ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis
... enlarged a thousand times beyond the belief of past ages, are henceforth shrunk into the narrow space which I myself occupy. So it pleases God; it shall, therefore, please me also." His friend, Father Castelli, deplores the calamity in the same tone of pathetic sublimity:—"The noblest eye," says he, "which nature ever made, is darkened; an eye so privileged, and gifted with such rare powers, that it may truly be said to have seen more than the eyes of all that are gone, and to have opened the eyes of all ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster
... complexion, large, unusually lustrous dark eyes, fringed by long soft lashes, an almost dark rose-tint on her cheeks. And in the look which she gave him there was something as soft as her eyes, which were those of a shy animal—something appealing, pathetic. He glanced hastily at her attire—simple, even to plainness—and wondered who she was, and what was her exact status in that big house, which seemed to require the services of a ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... I sat on the night I heard such a one had received a great public honor; by that stool my child knelt for her last evening prayer; here I sat to greet my son as he came back from a sea voyage; that was father's cane; that was mother's rocking chair." What a joyful and pathetic congress of reminiscences! ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... looked appealingly at his wife through his big spectacles, his eyes looking very large and pathetic through ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... and tales where she is put upon the scene with all her poesy, she is nowhere really true but in her garret; elsewhere she is invariably calumniated or over-praised. Rich, she deteriorates; poor, she is misunderstood. She has too many vices, and too many good qualities; she is too near to pathetic asphyxiation or to a dissolute laugh; too beautiful and too hideous. She personifies Paris, to which, in the long run, she supplies the toothless portresses, washerwomen, street-sweepers, beggars, occasionally insolent countesses, admired actresses, applauded singers; ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... of respite from eating care with an almost pathetic eagerness, and set to work once more to make a home in their doll's house. Mrs. Stevenson had what she called a "painting fever," and devised a scheme of Japanese decorations for the doors of the chalet which her husband thought might be made to ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... religion and piety, and such a professed malignant wretch, that when Mr. Cargil was brought in prisoner to Glasgow, July 1681, looking over a stair to him in way of ridicule, cried three times over, Will you give us one word more, (alluding to a word Mr. Cargil sometimes used in his pathetic way of preaching). To whom Mr. Cargil with much regret and concern, said,—"Mock not, lest your bands be made strong. Poor man, the day is coming ere you die, that you shall desire to have one word and shall not have it." Shortly, he was suddenly struck by ...
— Biographia Scoticana (Scots Worthies) • John Howie
... and disconcerted that the party at once rose, and offered to take their leave. Clarke and his friend actually did depart, but Jim still had presence of mind enough left to groan out an entreaty to Charlie and my master that they would remain—an appeal so pathetic that there was no ...
— The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch • Talbot Baines Reed
... we ought never to lose from sight," says Diderot, "is that, if we ever banish a man, or the thinking and contemplative being, from above the surface of the earth, this pathetic and sublime spectacle of nature becomes no more than a scene of melancholy and silence... It is the presence of man that gives its interest to the existence of other beings... Why should we not make him a common centre?... Man is the single term from which we ought ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... receiving back the wampum, they took my advice, and prepared to leave their country and people immediately. Their relatives accompanied them a short distance on their journey, and when about to part, their old uncle, the Tall Chief, addressed them in the following pathetic ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... surpassing splendor and glory Filling the frescos once; and here and there was a figure, Standing apart, and out from the common decay and confusion, Flushed with immortal youth and ineffaceable beauty, Such as that figure of Eve in pathetic expulsion from Eden, Taking—the tourist remembers—the wrath of Heaven al fresco, As is her well-known custom in thousands of acres ...
— Poems • William D. Howells
... than upon the preceding afternoon, although not a whit less attractive to Joel. A pair of faded and much-darned red-and-black striped stockings were surmounted by a pair of soiled and patched moleskin trousers. His crimson jersey had faded at the shoulders to a pathetic shade of pink, and one sleeve was missing, having long since "gone over to the enemy." In contrast to these articles of apparel was his new immaculate canvas jacket, laced for the first time but a moment before. But he looked ...
— The Half-Back • Ralph Henry Barbour
... in the town of Knockimdowny, upon this interesting occasion. In thruth, Ireland ought to be a land of mathemathitians; for I am sure her population is well trained, at all events, in the two sciences of multiplication and division. Before I adventure, however, upon the narration, I must wax pathetic a little, and then proceed with the main body ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... explain some those motives?" She tried to make her voice cold and distant, but only succeeded in making it pathetic. ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... family, hung the framed coffin-plates and faded funeral wreaths of departed dear ones. Now and then there was a wreath of wool flowers, a triumph of domestic art, which encircled the coffin-plate instead of the original funeral garland. Mrs. Jameson set herself to work to abolish this grimly pathetic New England custom with all her might. She did everything but actually tear them from our walls. That, even in her fiery zeal of improvement, she did not quite dare attempt. She made them a constant theme of conversation at sewing circle and during her neighborly calls. She spoke of the custom ...
— The Jamesons • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... recently consulted by a patient whose nervous system was in a deplorable state, who had lost almost complete mental control of herself, and who really presented a pathetic spectacle as she told of the fears and worries that enthralled her. In an effort to get to the bottom of this patient's heredity I had a conference with her father, and I learned that this woman, in her childhood days, had been constantly humored—allowed to have everything ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... When I was younger than she is, my Aunt Annie Bulloch, of Georgia, used to tell me some of the brer rabbit stories, especially brer rabbit and the tar baby. But fond though I am of the brer rabbit stories I think I am even fonder of your other writings. I doubt if there is a more genuinely pathetic tale in all our literature than "Free Joe." Moreover I have felt that all that you write serves to bring our people closer together. I know, of course, the ordinary talk is that an artist should be judged purely by his art; but I am rather a Philistine ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt |
