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More "Poignant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... buried in deep sleep close to the garret eaves I heard my mother call me—and something in her voice pierced me, roused me. A poignant note of alarm ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... execution the prisoners are visited by their relatives. The farewell which Serge Golovine takes of his family is rightly considered one of the most poignant and most cleverly constructed scenes that ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... do not love their Mustard overstrong, put equal Quantities of the white and black Mustard-Seed into the Mill, and then the Flour will not be so poignant to the Palate, and will have a brighter Look. If your Mill be set very sharp, the Flour will be so fine, that it ...
— The Country Housewife and Lady's Director - In the Management of a House, and the Delights and Profits of a Farm • Richard Bradley
... hand across her eyes, though there were no tears in them, and stood upright, holding herself tensely as if she were battling for calm; then she replaced the poignant note in its envelope, and went back to the stables. Again she met no one, for those who were down were in ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... this, I think, proceeded in him from indulgence toward human nature rather than from indifference to evil. To his friend the disposition to exalt and glorify co-existed, in a very remarkable manner, with a power of severe analysis of character and poignant exhibition of it,—a power which few possess without exercising it some time or other to their own sorrow and injury. The consequence to Mr. Coleridge was that he sometimes seemed untrue to himself, when he had but brought forward, one after another, ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... weary days. Very different are the idleness of love and the idleness of grief. Very different is it to be alone with your hope and alone with your despair. Lizzie failed to rally her musings. I do not mean to say that her sorrow was very poignant, although she fancied it was. Habit was a great force in her simple nature; and her chief trouble now was that habit refused to work. Lizzie had to grapple with the stern tribulation of a decision to make, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... In this desperate necessity one is often tempted to think that, if all the words of the dictionary were tumbled down in a heap and then all those fortuitous juxtapositions and combinations that made tolerable sense were picked out and pieced together, we might find among them some poignant suggestions towards novelty of thought or expression. But, alas! it is only the great poets who seem to have this unsolicited profusion of unexpected and incalculable phrase, this infinite variety of topic. For everybody else everything has been said before, and said over again after. ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... title to demand that we should be slaves to their guilt and insolence; or that we should serve them in spite of themselves. Minds, sore with the poignant sense of insulted virtue, filled with high disdain against the pride of triumphant baseness, often have it not in their choice to stand their ground. Their complexion (which might defy the rack) cannot go through such a trial. Something ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... pleasure, in order to understand certain allusions in the correspondence of his last years, when his affairs were in the most embarrassed condition, and his absence from Vienna frequently caused by the pressure of creditors. He appears at this time to have experienced moments of poignant self-reproach. His love of dancing, masquerades, masked balls, &c., was so great, that he did not willingly forego an opportunity of joining any one of those assemblies, whether public or private. He dressed handsomely, and wished to make a favourable ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... slender, wasted by sickness, gray before his time, with pale cheeks and wrinkled brow, he seemed at first like a person of no significance—a reed shaken in the wind. But there was a look in his deep-set, poignant eyes, as he gathered all the glances of the multitude to himself, that belied his mean appearance and prophesied power. Hermas knew very well who it was: the man who had drawn him from his father's house, the teacher who was instructing him ...
— The Blue Flower, and Others • Henry van Dyke
... second of them it follows that the life of the average man is overspread with a dull, turbid, uniform gravity; whilst the brow of genius glows with mirth of a unique character, which, although he has sorrows of his own more poignant than those of the average man, nevertheless breaks out afresh, like the sun through clouds. It is when the genius is overtaken by an affliction which affects others as well as himself, that this quality in him is most in evidence; for then ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... into the making of this modern mood of self-complacency. New knowledge has helped, by which disasters, such as once awakened our fathers' poignant sense of sin, are now attributed to scientific causes rather than to human guilt. When famines or pestilences came, our fathers thought them God's punishment for sin. When earthquakes shook the earth or comets hung ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... his diffidence with poignant regret, and, she once more taking alarm, he ventured, as Maria stood near his chair, to approach her lips with a declaration of love. She drew back with solemnity, he hung down his head abashed; but lifting his eyes timidly, they ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... polished shaft need lift its head In lettered eulogy above the sainted dead— His deeds are monuments above the dust whereon we tread! When from its fragile tenement of clay To fairer realms his spirit winged its way, With poignant grief we stood around the bier Which held the lifeless form of one held dear, And broken hearts that knew no comfort then Still mourn the loss of one of ...
— The Old Hanging Fork and Other Poems • George W. Doneghy
... and seeing all things in Him; saturating, as it were, the universe with the thought of God, and recreating his own spirit with communion of friendship to Him; to that man lower goods do first disclose their real sweetness, their most poignant delight, and their most solid satisfaction. To say of a world where God has set us, that it is all 'vanity and vexation of spirit,' goes in flat contradiction to what He said when, creation finished, He looked upon His world, and proclaimed to the waiting seraphim around that 'it ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... malevolent character of the Nausetts had been sufficiently manifested in their repeated and destructive attacks on the settlement, and their willful desecration of the graves of the exiles, to awaken the most poignant fears in her breast. Rodolph, too, was absent, and Brewster was still at the Wampanoge village; and where should she seek ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... hunger that was almost too fierce to be endured assailed him. His was a strong body, demanding much nourishment, and it cried out to him for relief. He tried to forget in sleep that he was famished, but he only dozed a while to awaken to a hunger more poignant than ever. ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... rich! Folly! The hod-carrier and helot who works from dawn to dusk, who goes in rags, who fares on coarsest food, whose wife and children live in squalor, may be considered unhappy, but they never experience real suffering, acute, unasuageable, poignant grief, until they become possessed of money and mansions and modern grandeur, only to find themselves coldly isolated. Sudden wealth has made them too grand for their former friends, it cannot secure them entrance into the society which they ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... before, walking thoughtfully over it. He had had with him two of the Lexington militia who, in the battle, had been near poor Todd, their colonel, while fighting like a lion to the last and bleeding from many wounds. The recollection of it all was very clear now, very poignant: the bright winding river, there broadening at its ford; the wild and lonely aspect of the country round about. On the farther bank the long lofty ridge of rock, trodden and licked bare of vegetation for ages by the countless passing buffalo; blackened by ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... girls rode through the sunshine and shadow-filled forest, their hearts filled with a happiness so poignant it ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... be said generally that his book is merely the theoretical statement and consistent and systematic exposition of the practice prevailing in his time. It is the novel statement of it in a complete theoretical form that lends it such a poignant interest. The same thing, I may remark in passing, applies to the immortal little work of La Rochefaucauld, who, however, takes private and not public life for his theme, and offers, not advice, but observations. The title of this fine little book is ...
— The Essays Of Arthur Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... she and her darkened, flower-scented room wore an air of coolness and settled repose that was a poignant relief after the glaring sunshine outside and the confusion of ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... impotent guard of the upraised arm and clenched fist,—but in those painted eyes, into which, all-fascinated, we ever gazed, reading in them all that crouching terror, all the punishment of that spectral presence, all the poignant consciousness of his fate to whom such things could happen, to whom already ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... But the men who used the word failed to perceive that what justified these qualities in Michelangelo's work was piercing, poignant, spiritual passion, of which their age ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... quite lost her presence of mind, and quaking with shame began to weep. Master abbot surveyed her from head to foot, and seeing that she was fresh and comely, fell a prey, old though he was, to fleshly cravings no less poignant and sudden than those which the young monk had experienced, and began thus to commune with himself:—"Alas! why take I not my pleasure when I may, seeing that I never need lack for occasions of ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio
... sight of a mass of money at that moment, when money was everything to me, roused every lurking demon in my breast) seemed to appall, if it did not frighten her, for she rose, and meeting my eye with a gaze in which shock and some strange and poignant agony totally incomprehensible to me were ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... its origin in the parental instinct, more common, of course, in women than in men. The feeling of affectionate pity and the impulse to rescue from pain are most intense when the distressed thing is a child, and particularly one's own. One of the most poignant instances extant is the speech of Andromache, one of the Trojan women in Euripides's play of that name, to her child who is about to be ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... silence. A sense of poignant embarrassment descended upon those present. No one knew what to say or where to look. Garnett, with a laboured ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... an old admirer until she had secured several new ones, and generally consoled those who had served her by a present of twenty or thirty thousand serfs. On the death of Lanskoi, it is recorded of her that "she gave herself up to the most poignant grief, and remained three months without going out of her palace of Czarsko Selo," thus perpetrating a very curious practical satire upon the holiest of human affections. Her grenadier lover Potemkin, according to the character given ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... zealous Christians and disloyal Jews, and hostile works against Judaism were the order of the day. Most of them, however, like the fabulous snake, vented their poison and died. It was different with McCaul's poignant diatribe against the cause of Judaism and the honor of the Talmud, which had been translated into many languages. Montefiore, while in Russia, urged Levinsohn to defend his people against their traducers, and the bed-ridden sage, almost blind ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... For the time the thought of war inspired Prescott with the most poignant repulsion, since he was taking this girl to the army which he expected ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... followed by the prose dialogues "Operette Morali." In 1833, declining health led Leopardi to withdraw to Naples. One year before his death he brought out a last collection of poems distinguished alike for poignant pessimism and for their high lyric beauty. Characteristic of Leopardi's verse is ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... into chaos, family claims dwindled away before her; she had appropriated all his being to her uses. Rastignac and Delphine found each other at a crisis in their lives when their union gave them the most poignant bliss. Their passion, so long proved, had only gained in strength by the gratified desire that often extinguishes passion. This woman was his, and Eugene recognized that not until then had he loved her; perhaps love is only gratitude for pleasure. This woman, vile ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... nothing but epithets, the cheapest and most contemptible of all species of abuse. Were two men, in your presence, to call each other such names, I think it would excite nothing but disgust in your mind. When the thought is clear and poignant, there is little need to have recourse to mere epithets; indeed, men never use the latter, except when there is a deficiency of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... Indeed she had made up her mind to ask her father to allow her, knowing well that he would consent to that or to any other wholesome wish of hers. But then came the thought that he would be all alone at home; and following that came another thought, and one of more poignant feeling. He was alone now! Already, for many days, she had left him, for the first time in her life! Stephen was quick to act; well she knew that at home there would be no fault found with her for a speedy ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... best, perhaps; the situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe, what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big, girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such exquisite pathos of the poor creature's crazed return to her first meeting with her lover. So clearly did she picture to herself this early scene that we all ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... I should wander homeless on Christmas Eve? Seriously, you cannot expect a man of taste to lend himself to so hackneyed a situation? Besides, I share this apartment with the composer monsieur Nicolas Pitou. Consider how poignant he would find the room's associations if he ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... secret, stealthy, unrequited lover enjoy to the full the presence, the smiles, the bland and cheerful society of her whom his heart is silently worshipping. Even this shall in future hours be a sweet remembrance. By and by, it is true, there will come a season of poignant affliction. But better all this than one uniform, perpetual torpor. He will have felt that mortal man may breathe the air of happiness; he will have learned something of the human heart ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various
... of the poverty and feebleness of mankind, the inveteracy of selfishness, the uncertainty of human impulses and aspirations and promises; what poignant questioning of the necessity, the utility of self-immolation must have tortured the soul of Jesus in that hour! It was His black hour. None can imagine the depth of that darkness but those who have themselves passed through some of its outer shadows, ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... Bordeaux there was St. Martial, thus Metz had St. Clement, Asti and Venice had their guardian saints, Bayeux had St. Vigor, Rouen had St. Romain. The emblem of eternal strife had become a universal allegory acceptable in every place and in all centuries, and so commonly believed, that until some poignant necessity arose for its assertion, it was never—as we shall see—mentioned even by those historians of the life of St. Romain, who might more especially be expected to know the details ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... off, every trace of her momentary heroism had died away. Faint and trembling, recoiling from every harsh word of his as from a blow, she had followed him towards the door, and in her straining eyes and seeking, outstretched hands as she watched him disappear, there was a pathos so true, so poignant, that it laid a spell upon the audience, and the curtain fell amid a breathless silence, which made the roar that ...
— Miss Bretherton • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... suspect that her calm demeanor was assumed, and that some poignant grief was concealed beneath that air of tranquility. For a moment, we were silent and embarrassed. Then ...
— The Extraordinary Adventures of Arsene Lupin, Gentleman-Burglar • Maurice Leblanc
... he could think or reflect, was the rush of a poignant and searching tenderness. This intimate, human sound, heard amid the desolation about them, woke pity. It was so incongruous, so pitifully incongruous—and so vain! Tears—in this vast and cruel wilderness: of what avail? ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... his two acts Mr. Rutherford Mayne has compressed the age-long attitude of Ulster towards the arts.... Light is breaking after the long Arctic night. The very existence of this poignant play pregnantly indicates that the old order is changing and must soon give place to the new.—The ...
— The Turn of the Road - A Play in Two Scenes and an Epilogue • Rutherford Mayne
... the popular songs of America he liked Marching Through Georgia and Dixie best. For Home, Sweet Home he had no liking, perhaps from having heard it during some moment of poignant homesickness. He said that such a song made too brutal an assault upon a man's tenderest feelings, and believed it to be a much greater triumph for a writer to bring a smile to his readers than a tear—partly, perhaps, because it ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... reproached myself for having given that sudden shock and poignant anguish to Her Highness, but I could not have supposed that one who came so barefacedly to impress me with the Cardinal's innocence, could have been less firm in refuting her ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... superiors. I am, in fact, the lineal descendant of Sir Mungo Malagrowther, who makes a figure in the Fortunes of Nigel, and have retained a reasonable proportion of his ill-luck, and, in consequence, of his ill-temper. If, therefore, I should chance to appear too warm and poignant in my observations, you must impute it to the hasty and peevish humour which I derive from my ancestor. But, at the same time, it often happens that this disposition leads me to speak useful, though unpleasant truths, when more prudent men ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... Unfortunately, I indulged in expenses far above my means, owing to my unwillingness to seem poorer than my new friends. I sold or pledged everything I possessed, and I contracted debts which I could not possibly pay. This state of things caused my first sorrows, and they are the most poignant sorrows under which a young man can smart. Not knowing which way to turn, I wrote to my excellent grandmother, begging her assistance, but instead of sending me some money, she came to Padua on the 1st of October, 1739, and, after thanking the doctor and Bettina for all their affectionate ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... stood hesitating, startled by that appeal, angered almost by his heart's response to it, reason and sentiment at grips in his soul. This was not real, his reason postulated; this poignant emotion that she displayed and that he experienced was fantastic. Yet he went. Her arms enfolded him; her wet cheek was pressed hard against his own; her frame, which the years had not yet succeeded in robbing of its grace, was shaken by the ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... unkempt woman with a seamed, leathery face and hard eyes now quite faded to gray, she told Billy Louise a good deal of the bitterness of the years behind; years of hardship and of slavish toil and no love to lighten it. She spoke again of Minervy, and the name brought back to Billy Louise poignant memories of her own lonely childhood and of ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... where the student of mixed character might shine with something of the old supremacy of George Conway's inn at Ballymahon. And there must have been quieter and more chastened resting-places of memory, when, softening towards the home of his youth, with a sadness made more poignant by the death of his brother Henry in May, 1768, he planned and perfected his new poem of ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... done in cold blood, what excesses, what disasters must we not expect of the last convulsions of their rage? Our anguish is all the more poignant in that they are at this moment fighting in the most ancient and most precious portion of Flanders. Above all countries, this is historic and hallowed land. They have destroyed Termonde, Roulers, Charleroi, Mons, Namur, Thielt and more besides; happy, charming little towns, which will rise again ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... poignant pain Will wear away 'neath hail and rain, And rush of winds through branches bare With something still to ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... have sufficed to show that Ina Klosking's heart was all benumbed and deadened; and, with the help of insult, treachery, loss of blood, brain-fever, and self-esteem rebelling against villainy, had outlived its power of suffering poignant torture. ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... sheets of dry dust at the train. She gathered at once what tremendous factors in the Southwest were the sun and the dust and the wind. And her realization made her love them. It was there; the open, the wild, the beautiful, the lonely land; and she felt the poignant call of blood in her—to seek, to strive, to find, to live. One look down that yellow valley, endless between its dark iron ramparts, had given her understanding of her uncle. She must be like him in spirit, as it was claimed she ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... and uncomplicated, and Dr. Laidlaw, as sole executor and residuary legatee, had no difficulty in settling it up. A month after the funeral he was sitting alone in his upstairs library, the last sad duties completed, and his mind full of poignant memories and regrets for the loss of a friend he had revered and loved, and to whom his debt was so incalculably great. The last two years, indeed, had been for him terrible. To watch the swift decay of the greatest combination ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... Mimi had been under the same roof, a prey to the deepest anxiety. The poignant grief which she had felt for the loss of her father had been alleviated for a time by the escape of Claude; but now, since his arrest, and the arrival of the dreaded Cazeneau, it seemed worse than ever; ...
— The Lily and the Cross - A Tale of Acadia • James De Mille
... death, dull and oppressive, came to him. This fear quickly became poignant as he realized that it was no longer a mere matter of freezing his fingers and toes, or of losing his hands and feet, but that it was a matter of life and death with the chances against him. This threw him into a panic, and he turned and ran up the creek-bed along the old, dim trail. The dog ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... on old Jim's knee, however, he leaned in confidence against him, and sighed with a sweet little sound of contentment, as poignant to reinspire a certain ecstasy of sadness in the miner's breast as it was to excite an envy in the ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... reputation that hampered him now just when he needed the confidence of his fellows in order to save their beloved Flying U from slow annihilation. Perhaps his mental suffering could not rightly be called remorse, but a poignant regret it most certainly was, and a sense of complete bafflement which came out ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... to myself: She has found another issue. She wants to forget now. And no wonder. She wants to persuade herself that she had never known such an ugly and poignant minute in her life. "After all," I conceded aloud, "things are not always what ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... in my power to sustain my sister under her sorrow, which is, and long will be, bitter and poignant. We did not love him as a brother merely, but as a man of original mind, and an honour to all about him. Oh! dear friend, forgive me for talking thus. We have had no tidings of Coleridge. I tremble for the moment when ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... though not in the same degree as with Mildred, for here the truth is with us—Pompilia is a living soul, not a puppet of the theatre. Yet even here the same strange errors recur. She has words indeed that reach the inmost heart—poignant, overpowering in tenderness and pathos; but she has, also, words that cause the brows to draw together, the mind to pause uneasily, then to cry "Not so!" Of such is the analysis of her own blank ignorance with regard to the marriage-state. This, wholly ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... bonhour que je n'aie aucun enfant pour recueillir mon horrible heritage et qui soit charge du poids de mon nom!"— [Footnote Extract from the poignant letter to his wife written on this night.—See ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... is hard to get any exact figures yet. After the shooting was over, other civilians were brought out and compelled to bury the dead. My informant says that some of the scenes attending this duty were quite as poignant as the shooting itself, for some buried their own fathers and brothers. One man about to be thrown into the trench was found to be still alive, but the German doctor, after a cursory examination, ordered him buried with the rest. The man had enough ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... the world, its real god, the divinity in which we live, move and have our being, is the great truth, the gospel of International Socialism, the greatest of all movements, the movement which carries the only rational hope for the freeing of mankind from all its unnecessary suffering—and the most poignant sufferings, those imposed by the great trinity of evils: (war, poverty and slavery) are ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... shall feel very awkward," sighed poor Mr Neeld. He might have added that he did feel a sudden and poignant pang of disappointment. Lived there the man who would not have liked to carry that bit of news in his portmanteau when he went out of town? At least that man ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... days I have been feeling the charm of a country lying in autumn sweetness. This peace was troubled yesterday by the poignant sight of a burning village. It is not the first we have seen, and yet we have not grown used ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... officer's face did not lighten, and very soon he turned again to the sea. The time will come, of course, when the tragedy of his mutilation will be less fresh and poignant, when the Order of Leopold on his breast will help to compensate for many things; but that sunny morning, on the deck of the hospital ship, it held small ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... into Mr. Cabell's province. For he has joined many graceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just that lamentable tendency of man to make a mess of even his most immaculate conceivings. When he wrote Chivalry, Mr. Cabell was yet young enough to view the code less with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker than with the ardent eye of an amateur. He knew its value, but he did ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... The physician had said that Elvira would not live another day, and the mother sat down to the sad task of writing the mournful news to her soldier son. Meanwhile beyond the Rappahannock, a scene was on the eve of being enacted, which was destined to inflict upon her a pain as poignant as that she was, now ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... man, from every external point of view, seemed amongst the chosen ones of the world. The contrast was in itself amazing. And then the woman! Francis looked at her but seldom, and when he did it was with a curious sense of mental disturbance; poignant ...
— The Evil Shepherd • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to crying, too, and he comforted me, stroking my back and kissing me all over my face with his quivering lips. Even now, more than twenty years after his death, when I think of my poor father, dumb sobs rise into my throat, and my heart beats as hotly and bitterly and aches with as poignant a pity as if it had long to go on beating, as if there were ...
— The Diary of a Superfluous Man and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... life, he was perfectly able to do so—and he remained thirty years in the deserts. When he came to civilized society, he declared that the rude existence which he described had a secret charm for him which he was unable to define: he returned to it again and again: at length he abandoned it with poignant regret; and when he was at length fixed among the whites, several of his children refused to share his tranquil and easy situation. I saw Tanner myself at the lower end of Lake Superior; he seemed ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... that because I am choosing my words nicely, and playing with metaphor, and putting my commas in their proper places, my sorrow is not really and truly poignant. I write elaborately, for that is my habit, and habits are less easily broken than hearts. I could no more 'dash off' this my cri de coeur than I could an elegy on a broomstick I had never seen. Therefore, reader, bear ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... greater difficulty in actually seeing the Superman, who is now about fifteen years old, and is kept by himself in a quiet room. Even my conversation with the father and mother did not quite clear up the character of this mysterious being. Lady Hypatia, who has a pale and poignant face, and is clad in those impalpable and pathetic greys and greens with which she has brightened so many homes in Hoxton, did not appear to talk of her offspring with any of the vulgar vanity of an ordinary human mother. ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... goes, upon the chivalrous. But that which makes him more conspicuously amiable and interesting is that while he takes the most ardent and active concern in the happiness of mankind, he is himself reduced by the wickedness of others to a state of misery almost of distraction, which awakens the most poignant sympathy for his situation. Deserted, as he imagines, by the object of his dearest affections, Rosalie Summers, who is supposed to have eloped with a villain of high rank of the name of Plastic, he goes to London and ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... head. As he listened to Javert, the first thought which occurred to him was to go, to run and denounce himself, to take that Champmathieu out of prison and place himself there; this was as painful and as poignant as an incision in the living flesh. Then it passed away, and he said to himself, "We will see! We will see!" He repressed this first, generous ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... whistle had faded into the phantom of music and then into silence far up under the maples of Lover's Lane Anne stood under the willows, tasting the poignant sweetness of life when some great dread has been removed from it. The morning was a cup filled with mist and glamor. In the corner near her was a rich surprise of new-blown, crystal-dewed roses. ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... numerous for recapitulation, since there were few families of note in Scotland which did not lose one relative or another, whilst some houses had to weep the death of all. It is from this cause that the sensations of sorrow and national lamentation occasioned by the defeat were peculiarly poignant and lasting—so that to this day few Scotsmen can hear the name of Flodden without a shudder of ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... Almost is rapture poignant; somewhat ails The heart and mocks the morning; somewhat sighs, And those sweet foreigners, the nightingales, Made restless with their love, pay down its price, Even the pain; then all the story unfold Over and over again—yet 't is ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... upon hearing the captain's words. They brought a too vivid picture of the great capital, six miles under their feet, and a too poignant recollection of the disastrous escape of the royal family from ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... of fifty, well made, and supremely well dressed. He was tanned as befits a sportsman; on his face the absence of furrows created by the absence of thought was made up for by the fine wrinkles induced by poignant and continued anxiety about his material comforts. In his figure the vigor of the athlete contended with the comfortable stoutness of the epicure. He had left a discussion in which all his highest faculties had been roused, a discussion ...
— Ladies Must Live • Alice Duer Miller
... Abdicator was the wife of one of the most dissolute of the Grand-Dukes, whose abuses of manhood no ingenuity of his proud wife was able to conceal. Hence Nathalie, herself so intimately acquainted with this poignant form of suffering, was just now very full of her friendship with the beautiful Princess; and she poured into Ivan's half-listening ears all that she knew of this exquisite woman, married at seventeen, left alone in her cold and unapproachable ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... odour hung heavy in the room. Three or four women (much better gowned than Eleanor) and a dozen men applauded from the drawing-room; a strange-looking youth with a shock of auburn hair drew from a violin sounds which it required no knowledge of technique to feel extraordinarily poignant and moving. All but the dancer were smoking, and Molly sat on the floor (in copper-coloured chiffon, too!) her hands clasped about her knees, a cigarette in an amber holder between her lips and ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... back now on that day I find the memory of my suffering has dimmed slightly. The passage of weeks and months has served to soften the harsh outlines of poignant recollection. What now in retrospect most impresses me is the heroism I displayed, the stark fortitude, the grandeur of will power, the triumph for character. Sheer gallantry, ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... the Impromptu began or ended. She sat in the sofa corner reading Robert's letter by the fading light. Mademoiselle had glided from the Chopin into the quivering love notes of Isolde's song, and back again to the Impromptu with its soulful and poignant longing. ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... despoiled of his wealth by Candaules. In all his amorous reveries he had never until then thought of the husband; he had thought of the queen only as of a pure abstraction, without representing to himself in fancy all those intimate details of conjugal familiarity, so poignant, so bitter for those who love a woman in the power of another. Now he had beheld Nyssia's blond head bending like a blossom beside the dark head of Candaules. The very thought of it had inflamed his anger to ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignant memory of still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs by the white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium, because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State—a pitiful remnant of what once had been ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of their son's death, as may well be imagined, was received by Sir Alexander and Lady Moncton with the most poignant grief; and six years elapsed before she and her ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... him we saw poured forth the reality of the thing we had professed to believe in ... He took us to whom religion was a profession, and made it a passion." Christ Church people find these words set up poignant echoes of a day when they sat before Frank Nelson and heard the living ...
— Frank H. Nelson of Cincinnati • Warren C. Herrick
... distrustfulness in Mitya, such lack of confidence even to him, to Alyosha—all this suddenly opened before Alyosha an unsuspected depth of hopeless grief and despair in the soul of his unhappy brother. Intense, infinite compassion overwhelmed him instantly. There was a poignant ache in his torn heart. "Love Ivan!"—he suddenly recalled Mitya's words. And he was going to Ivan. He badly wanted to see Ivan all day. He was as much worried about Ivan as about Mitya, and ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... difference in Jacqueline's voice since she had heard it last in that Song of the Hill; clear and expressionless, then, as a boy's; so throbbing now, so poignant with understanding, that the mother's eyes filled with tears. Jemima's, too, were a little moist, and she blinked them hard, and steeled herself to say to Jacqueline that day what she had ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... the very innermost recesses of his mind. Crane and Dunark scarcely breathed as the three-dimensional picture in the visualizer varied from a blank to the hazy outlines of a giant space-cruiser. It faded out as the unknown exerted himself to withstand that poignant inquisition, only to come back in, clearer than before, as Seaton advanced the potentiometer still farther. Finally, flesh and blood could no longer resist that lethal probe and the picture became sharp and clear. It ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... is. He came in a big grey car and was sitting on the doorstep when Aunt got up. He told her not to disturb you, but of course Aunt thought that you ought to know at once and when she found that you were gone"—a poignant pause! ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... events which even my approaching departure from Cumberland would be powerless to snap asunder—the doubt whether we any of us saw the end as the end would really be—gathered more and more darkly over my mind. Poignant as it was, the sense of suffering caused by the miserable end of my brief, presumptuous love seemed to be blunted and deadened by the still stronger sense of something obscurely impending, something invisibly threatening, that Time was ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... a reproved school boy. What made it worse was that he was beginning to feel that there was no justification for his rage against her. As in the present case, he had been the aggressor and deserved all the scorn she had heaped upon him. But the rage was with him, nevertheless, perhaps the more poignant because he felt its impotency. He looked around at Dade. That young man was trying to appear unconscious of the embarrassing predicament of his fellow workman. He endeavored to lighten the load ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... "How doubly poignant is my smart, Bereaved of my Cen'lin's heart! Exil'd from that deluded breast, Where I had fondly hop'd to rest, With faith undoubting, sweet repose, Till Death should bid my eye-lids close. And sometimes yet will hope arise; Till now he ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham
... be charmed to meet again a man who, whatever might be his errors in youth, on which," added Alain, slightly colouring, "it certainly does not become me to be severe, must have suffered the most poignant anguish a man of honour can undergo,—namely, honour suspected; and who now, whether by years or sorrow, is so changed that I cannot recognize a likeness to the character I have just heard given to him ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... embarrassment drenched him. He could not escape her tender hands without actual force and his poignant shyness made that impossible. She was like a fairy tale, a creature of dreams. He dared not meet her frank pitiful eyes, though he was intensely aware of them. The odor of violets brings to him even to this day a vision of girlish charm and daintiness, together with a memory ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... well-looking, dressed as an Oriental, but with an affected, jerking air, more French than Syrian, moved jauntily about the room, speaking to several persons for a short time, shrugging his shoulders and uttering commonplaces as if they were poignant originalities. This was Hillel Besso, the eldest son of the Besso of Aleppo, and the intended husband of Eva. Hillel, too, had seen the world, passed a season at Pera, where he had worn the Frank dress, and, introduced into the circles by the lady of the Austrian Internuncio, had ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... ethical twist—twist in more senses than one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals, motives—these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere incident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant kind as well. In other words the novella was actually (though still in miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these novelle became, as is generally known, common in ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... wind up &c (strengthen) 159. strike home, into home, hard home; make an impression. Adj. strong, energetic, forcible, active; intense, deep-dyed, severe, keen, vivid, sharp, acute, incisive, trenchant, brisk. rousing, irritation; poignant; virulent, caustic, corrosive, mordant, harsh, stringent; double-edged, double-shotted^, double- distilled; drastic, escharotic^; racy &c (pungent) 392. potent &c (powerful) 157; radioactive. Adv. strongly &c adj.; fortiter in re [Lat.]; with telling ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... the names of the witnesses, we have said why, but the reader will easily recognize the sincere and poignant ...
— Napoleon the Little • Victor Hugo
... we have discovered in artistic expression has been that of delightful and orderly sympathetic vision. This is supplemented from still another source of value. Through artistic expression pent-up emotions find a welcome release. No matter how poignant be the experience expressed, the weight, the sting of it disappears through expression. For through expression, as we have seen, the experience is drawn from the dark depths of the self to the clear and orderly surface of the ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... vanes outside creaked their message to my ears. I remembered whole days that I had spent, whole books that I had read, here in this favorite fastness of my boyhood. The dirty little place, with the dormer window in each of its four sloping sides, became a gallery hung with poignant pictures of the past. And here was I leaving it with my life in my hands and my pockets full of stolen jewels! A superstition seized me. Suppose the conductor came down with me ... suppose I slipped ... and was picked up dead, with the ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... most poignant of all in the bitterness of this lesson that she had learnt, was her understanding of the place she held in the eyes of such men as Devenish. With those who knew of her life, no friendship was possible. One relationship, one only could exist—a relationship, at the thought of which her whole ...
— Sally Bishop - A Romance • E. Temple Thurston
... seemed asleep. The conies crying from their runways suddenly took on poignant pathos. They appeared to be grieving with her; but ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... probably no more graphic and poignant study of the way in which man loses his grip on life, lets his pride, his courage, his self-respect slip from him, and, finally, even ceases to struggle in the mire that has engulfed him. * * * There is more tonic value in Sister Carrie than in ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... absolute madness; Mrs. Morriston's face grew black at the very thought of it. She soon got my father on to her side, and between them I had a hateful time of it. It's the old story, which will be told as long as there are worldly, selfish women on the earth, but it was none the less fresh and poignant to me who had to live ...
— The Hunt Ball Mystery • Magnay, William
... mademoiselle, mademoiselle!" said Maxime de Cliche slowly, impressively, in a tone of the most respectful but most poignant reproach. ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... Police, who had been entrusted with extensive powers; and there was a strong probability of his failing to obtain satisfaction. It was, however, unthinkable that Prescott should escape. Jernyngham's poignant sense of loss and regret for past harshness to his son had merged into an overwhelming desire for vengeance on the man whom he regarded as Cyril's murderer. He was left without an ally; the organized means of justice had signally broken down; but the ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... the most poignant of these experiences, which occurred during the first few months after our landing upon the other side of the Atlantic, was on a Saturday night, when I received an ineradicable impression of the wretchedness of East London, and also saw for the first time the overcrowded ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... so many cabinets full of Dresden china, that it recalled, by the very extremity of the contrast of its bright hideousness, that other ugly, dismal little room, also filled with false gods, of a cheap and very different kind, in which he had had so much poignant happiness. ...
— Love's Shadow • Ada Leverson
... immediately succeeding the fire and the Carringford's poignant trouble, Janice Day had a mental problem to solve which occupied her thoughts a good ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... now that she had found her husband and child, even if it had been admissible for a lieutenant in the British navy to return freed negroes again into slavery, and wound up with bitter lamentations as to his unhappy fate, and expressions of poignant regret that fighting and other desperate means, congenial and easy to his disposition, were not available in the circumstances. After which explosion he subsided, felt ashamed of having thus committed himself, and looked ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... Neidlinger's songs does not forbid a dramatic outburst at the proper time, as in the fine mood, "A Leaf;" or the sombre depth of "Night," "Nocturne," and "Solitude;" or yet the sustainedly poignant anguish of "The Pine-tree." Occasionally the accompaniment is developed with elaborateness, as in the bird-flutings of "The Robin," and "Memories," an extremely rich work, with its mellow brook-music and a hint of nightingale ...
— Contemporary American Composers • Rupert Hughes
... slender flattened skull beneath the long pointed cap brought before Stephen's mind the image of a hooded reptile. The eyes, too, were reptile-like in glint and gaze. Yet at that instant, humbled and alert in their look, they were lit by one tiny human point, the window of a shrivelled soul, poignant ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... to grieve. Don't repress yourself. It is right that you should mourn over your lost ideals. Nothing on earth brings more poignant grief than that. You will never get them back. Do not expect what is impossible. They were false ideals, none the less beautiful and dear to you for being that, but truly they were distorted. You will see this some time. ...
— The Love Affairs of an Old Maid • Lilian Bell
... the sunshine and shadow-filled forest, their hearts filled with a happiness so poignant it ...
— The Outdoor Girls in the Saddle - Or, The Girl Miner of Gold Run • Laura Lee Hope
... with nerves re-charged to the point of torture and a brain intolerably acute. She saw now all the vivid, poignant things which last night she had overlooked. She realized the woman. She divined her secret, her significance, all that she stood for and all that she portended. In the light of that woman (for she spread round her an unbearable illumination) ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... business in life to a satisfactory completion—false mating. It is not a difficulty peculiar to woman. Man knows it as often. It is the heaviest curse society brings on human beings—the most fertile cause of apathy, agony, and failure. If the woman's cry is more poignant under it than the man's, it is because the machine which holds them both allows him a wider sweep, more interests outside of their immediate alliance. "A man, when he is vexed at home," complains Medea, "can go out and find relief among his friends or acquaintances, but we women have none ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... first time in his short life she felt no response in her child. Indeed, she recognized his withdrawal from her, more poignant in its effect upon her because it was unconscious on his part. In that one moment the instinct of motherhood leapt full within her, a sudden bewildering emotion, totally new to her in its aliveness, its ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... Cuckold in Conceit, by Fancy made As mad, as by the common Course of Trade: And more to please ye, and his Worth enhance, He's carbonado'd a la mode de France; Cook'd by Moliere, great Master of his Trade, From whose Receipt this Harrico was made. But if that poignant Taste we fail to take, That something, that a mere Receipt can't make; Forgive the Failure—we're but Copies all, And want ...
— Sganarelle - or The Self-Deceived Husband • Moliere
... career. While wandering, I came upon the town where my father had lived in early youth, and, hunting up his old friends, I met in the house of one who had come over from Scotland with my father a young lady" (how his voice shook, and with what a poignant accent he uttered that beloved name) "in whom I speedily became interested to the point of wishing to marry her. But I had no money, no business, no home to give her, and, as I was fain to acknowledge, ...
— The Circular Study • Anna Katharine Green
... I blunder into Mr. Cabell's province. For he has joined many graceful words in delectable and poignant proof of just that lamentable tendency of man to make a mess of even his most immaculate conceivings. When he wrote Chivalry, Mr. Cabell was yet young enough to view the code less with the appraising eye of a pawnbroker ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... sky above her, the yellow sands stretching to the far-off horizon. She had tempted him willingly, deliberately. Something had compelled her to test her power. Her annoyance at his apparent indifference to her presence had become too poignant to hide any longer. Anger was exhausting her nerves. She was conscious that she had burnt her boats, that ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... of an equivocal Word; which like a Bridge, with two Roads meeting at the End of it, leads to two different Places. Transitions, thus made from the right Course, have indeed the Pretence of being natural; but they ought always to lead us to something brilliant or poignant, in order to justify their Deviation; and not to end only at a ridiculous PUN, void of all Spirit ...
— An Essay towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Railery, Satire, and Ridicule (1744) • Corbyn Morris
... silence broken only by occasional cluckings from the little doctor, and Mr. Caryll stood by, a prey to an anguish more poignant than he had ever known. At last there was a groan from the wounded man. ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... breath. impress &c. (excite the feelings) 824. Adj. feeling &c. v.; sentient; sensuous; sensorial, sensory; emotive, emotional; of feeling, with feeling &c. n. warm, quick, lively, smart, strong, sharp, acute, cutting, piercing, incisive; keen, keen as a razor; trenchant, pungent, racy, piquant, poignant, caustic. impressive, deep, profound, indelible; deep felt, home felt, heartfelt; swelling, soul-stirring, deep-mouthed, heart-expanding, electric, thrilling, rapturous, ecstatic. earnest, wistful, eager, breathless; fervent; fervid; gushing, passionate, warm-hearted, hearty, cordial, sincere, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... cheapest and most contemptible of all species of abuse. Were two men, in your presence, to call each other such names, I think it would excite nothing but disgust in your mind. When the thought is clear and poignant, there is little need to have recourse to mere epithets; indeed, men never use the latter, except when there is a deficiency of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... shrapnel, now that all is over, the armies and the ships withdrawn, and one reflects upon the waste of human life, the gallant hearts that beat no longer, the prodigal expenditure of thought and energy and treasure, there should perhaps mingle with our poignant regret and disappointment no sense of exultation. Yet it surges upward and overcomes all else. For our nature is so molded that it can never cease to admire such doings, the more perhaps if victory be denied ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... judge, Lord Cockburn, writing to the Novelist on the very morrow of reading the memorable fifth number of "Dombey and Son," in which the death of Little Paul is so exquisitely depicted—offering his grateful acknowledgments to the Author for the poignant grief he had caused him—added, "I have felt my heart purified by those tears, and blessed and loved you for making ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... then a topic of such terrible sadness for us that the mention of it, ordinarily, was sufficient to unloose the most poignant recollections. To grandfather, as to us all, it had brought a sable cloud of bereavement. But even thoughts of the War did not now long suffice to remove that grin—longer than till the Old Squire saw ...
— When Life Was Young - At the Old Farm in Maine • C. A. Stephens
... sister, without any wish that she might become your wife. Nay, you may have met with another whom you may love; and considering yourself as bound in honour to Elizabeth, this struggle may occasion the poignant misery which ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... those few minutes alone on the piazza at Rockcrest, overwhelmed by the sensation of contrast between herself on sufferance in her cheap raiment, and the indications all about her of the opposite extreme of luxury—remembered those moments as affording her a poignant unhappiness. ...
— In Apple-Blossom Time - A Fairy-Tale to Date • Clara Louise Burnham
... Muhammad Din from the author's description? Would the destruction of the sand-house be a tragedy to most Western children? Why was it to Muhammad Din? Notice the simple pathos of the ending. Is it made more poignant by being unexpected?] ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... with yellow face and walrus whiskers that emitted a rasping Bueno after every play. There was talk of Paris and possible new volumes of verse, homage to Walt Whitman, Maragall, questioning about Emily Dickinson. About us was a smell of old horsehair sofas, a buzz of the poignant musty ennui of old towns left centuries ago high and dry on the beach of history. The group grew. Talk of painting: Zuloaga had not come yet, the Zubiaurre brothers had abandoned their Basque coast towns, seduced by the bronze-colored people and ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... that the divine afflatus - which had lain almost dormant since his boyish "Address to the Moon" - was again manifested in him by the production of numberless poetical effusions, in which his own poignant anguish and Miss Patty's incomparable attractions were brought forward in verses of various degrees of mediocrity. They were also equally varied in their style and treatment; one being written in a fierce and gloomy Byronic strain, while another followed ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... that in the end the poet's poignant sense of his isolation might allay his excessive conceit. A yearning for something beyond himself might lead him to infer a lack in his own nature. Seldom, however, is this the result of the poet's loneliness. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... numb in her first contact with poignant grief, the girl had taken up her temporary abode at Henry Bailey's fruit ranch, a mile or two out on the Calle Rivera, where his buxom wife, Sallie, mothered her ...
— The Fifth Ace • Douglas Grant
... more extravagant in dress, feasting, and other licentiousness, and being without employment, wasted their time and means on gaming and women; their principal study being how to appear splendid in apparel, and attain a crafty shrewdness in discourse; he who could make the most poignant remark being considered the wisest, and being most respected. These manners derived additional encouragement from the followers of the duke of Milan, who, with his duchess and the whole ducal court, as it was said, to fulfill a ...
— History Of Florence And Of The Affairs Of Italy - From The Earliest Times To The Death Of Lorenzo The Magnificent • Niccolo Machiavelli
... dangers of Jansenism were a continual anxiety to Vincent, and there were other sorrows no less poignant to be borne. Foreign missions had been established in Africa and Madagascar, and in the latter station no less than twenty-seven Mission Priests had lost their lives. Some, it is true, had died the martyr's ...
— Life of St. Vincent de Paul • F.A. [Frances Alice] Forbes
... the time the thought of war inspired Prescott with the most poignant repulsion, since he was taking this girl to the army ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the contrary, she complimented me on what she was pleased to call my ready invention. But when we came next to the order in which the dishes were to be served—" Miss Notman paused in the middle of the sentence, and shuddered over the private and poignant recollections which the order of ...
— The Black Robe • Wilkie Collins
... labouring under a most serious malady, and which gave me grounds for fearing that a fresh misfortune was not far distant. Alas! my forebodings were correct; for eight days afterwards poor Josephine expired in my arms, after the most poignant sufferings. What abundant sources of woe in so short a space of time! It required a constitution strong as mine was to bear up against such a number of sorrows, and not to ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... every bird, But just a crumb to me; I dare not eat it, though I starve, — My poignant luxury To own it, touch it, prove the feat That made the pellet mine, — Too happy in my sparrow chance ...
— Poems: Three Series, Complete • Emily Dickinson
... they are not rich! Folly! The hod-carrier and helot who works from dawn to dusk, who goes in rags, who fares on coarsest food, whose wife and children live in squalor, may be considered unhappy, but they never experience real suffering, acute, unasuageable, poignant grief, until they become possessed of money and mansions and modern grandeur, only to find themselves coldly isolated. Sudden wealth has made them too grand for their former friends, it cannot secure them entrance into the society which ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... at ease and wish for old familiar sights and sounds; but in a colony like Tasmania, and in any new country where there were no remains of antiquity, no links with the past, the feeling would be very much more poignant, and in some scenes and moods would be like that sense of desolation which assails us at the thought of the heartless voids and immensities of ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... could be replaced. Attacking the family in the person of its natural supporter and protector, the octopus system of which the gangs were the tentacles struck at the very foundations of domestic life and brought to thousands of households a poverty as bitter and a grief as poignant as death. ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... vague and ghostly, but to eyes accustomed to northern whiteness it was full of suggestion, full of secrecy; to nostrils accustomed to keen, rarefied air there was something poignant and delicious in the scent of turned earth, the savor of vegetation. He could see little or nothing as the train rocked and the landscape tore past, but the atmosphere spoke to him as it speaks to blind men, penetrating his consciousness. Here were open ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... of Karna's fall and the slaughter of his sons, what, O foremost of regenerate ones, did the king say, after he had been a little comforted? Indeed, poignant was the grief that he experienced, arising from the calamity that befell his sons! Tell me, I ask thee, all that the king said ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... spirit of flame snuffed out by a chance capful of wind from the hills of Carrara; Byron, stung by a fever-gnat on the very threshold of his great adventure—for all these we can feel nothing but poignant unrelieved regret. Alan Seeger, on the other hand, we can very truly envy. Youth had given him all that it had to give; and though he would fain have lived on—though no one was ever less world-weary than he—yet in the plenitude ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... move among swarms of men and escape in darkness. She never had favored her body with soft usage, but it trembled now in every part from muscular strain. She was probably cold and hungry, but her poignant sensation was that she had no friends. It did not matter to Jeannette that history was being made before her, and one of the great battles of the world was about to be fought. It only mattered that she should discern the Fraser plaid as far as eye could follow it. There is no more piteous ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... and for a few poignant weeks his wife's horrible end haunted him. But after a while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from there he came back with his nerves in better order than they ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... old Jim's knee, however, he leaned in confidence against him, and sighed with a sweet little sound of contentment, as poignant to reinspire a certain ecstasy of sadness in the miner's breast as it was to excite an envy in ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... his during the next few minutes can by no means be exaggerated. With such crises the human mind is not fitted adequately to cope; it retains no record of the supreme moment beyond a vague and incoherent impression of poignant, soul-racking suffering. Kirkwood underwent a prolonged interval of semi-sentience, his mind dominated and oppressed by a deathly fear of drowning and a deadening sense of suffocation, with attendant tortures as of being broken on the wheel—limb rending from limb; of compression of ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... the execution the prisoners are visited by their relatives. The farewell which Serge Golovine takes of his family is rightly considered one of the most poignant and most cleverly constructed scenes that Andreyev has ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... and the gleaming marble facade of the house, and the marble balustrade, with the jessamine twining round its columns. The picture was very beautiful—but something was wanting to perfect its beauty; and the name of the something that was wanting sang itself in poignant iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and longed to tell her; and he dared ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... his anxiety about those at home who had no doubt long mourned him as dead grew more poignant, and remembering his uncle's affection for his sister, he regretted not having confided in him and begged him to get a letter conveyed to some point sufficiently civilised to have a post. He tried to find out from Fatima how long he had been laid up at the fakir's residence, and at first ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... or whether it took its character from the prevailing desolation, the cabin in the valley was an unlovely thing. Nor did the cleanliness, the conscientious making the best of things, soften the woful aspect of the place. Rather was the appeal the more poignant to the seeing eye, as the brave makeshift of the self-respecting poor strikes deeper than the beggar's whine. The house was bare but for the few things that Alida could take in the wagon in which they made their flight. And all through ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping it. All that is then taken from abuses seems to uncover what remains, and render the feeling of it more poignant. The evil has become less, it is true, but the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... at the mouth of the cave. Knife in hand, he waited for a horned, glittering-eyed face to stoop or an arrow or hatchet to glance under that low rim, the horizon of his darkness. His chagrin at having taken to a trap and drawn danger on a woman was poignant; the candle had caught him like a moth, and a Sioux would keenly follow. Still, no lightest step betrayed the Sioux's knowledge of his whereabouts. A long time passed before he relaxed to an easy posture and turned to ...
— Marianson - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... clearer. I knew that it was something repulsively, diabolically grotesque, but whether the phantasm of man, or woman, or hellish elemental, I couldn't for the life of me say; and this uncertainty, making my fear all the more poignant, added to my already sublime ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... to knit his brows and look very serious indeed. As he gave the saddle an impatient kick, his eyes rested on the Bologna sausage, one end of which protruded from the holster; then there came over him a poignant recollection of his Lenten supper of the night before and his no breakfast at all of that morning. He seated himself on the saddle, unwrapped the sausage, and proceeded to cut from it ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... breathed to Sabre his own passionate love of England, his own poignant sense of possession in her and by her, his own intolerable aching at the heart at his envisagement of her enormously beset. They reflected his own frightful oppression and they assuaged it, as his letters, she told him, assuaged hers, as burdens are assuaged ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... now; somehow the fact of her distress seemed less poignant. There was a way out of it—stop. No; do not look at the note there on the table. There was a way out, no doubt, but not that one; no, of course not that one. Rosella laughed a little. How easily some one else, less scrupulous, would solve ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... a good run of trade, could not restore. When the news of his sudden death, whilst on a foreign tour for the restoration of his health, was received, there was genuine sorrow among his old business associates, and poignant grief with many who had learned to look on him not merely as a successful merchant, but as a man of tender heart and open hand when suffering and distress appealed to him for ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... utterance and tongue-fence, I have hardly known his fellow. So ready lay his store of knowledge round him, so perfect was his ready utterance of the same,—in coruscating wit, in jocund drollery, in compact articulated clearness or high poignant emphasis, as the case required,—he was a match for any man in argument before a crowd of men. One of the most supple-wristed, dexterous, graceful and successful fencers in that kind. A man, as Mr. Hare has said, "able to ...
— The Life of John Sterling • Thomas Carlyle
... mourning were there and two or three aged men. It is the sorrowful and the old who head the human host in its march toward Paradise: Youth and Happiness loiter far behind and are satisfied with the earth. Isabel looked around with a poignant realization of the broken company over into which she had so ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... in 1771; from materials furnished to the author by the ministry. His description of the miseries of war is most eloquently persuasive, and his invectives against the opposition, and their mysterious champion, abound with the most forcible and poignant satire. In a letter to Mr. Langton, from Johnson, we find that lord North stopped the sale, before many copies had been dispersed. Johnson avowed to his friend, that he did not distinctly know the reason of the minister's conduct; but, in all probability, it was dictated by a dread of ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, Vol. 6 - Reviews, Political Tracts, and Lives of Eminent Persons • Samuel Johnson
... reality she perfectly understood why it was that, instead of forgetting, memory was becoming more and more poignant, more and more persecuting. It was because the searching processes of love were going deeper and deeper into her inmost soul. This good man who loved her, who was going to take her injured life into ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... awful happy. I guess I was soft, but I always wanted to love some one and be loved a whole lot, and I thought that was what was going to happen, but it didn't. I often wonder what he married me for. But," her voice was poignant with wistfulness, "I would have liked to ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... predictions while I awaited the return of the Honourable George. I was only too certain he would come suffering from an acute acid dyspepsia, for I had seen lobster in his shifty eyes as he left me; but beyond this I apprehended nothing poignant, and I gave myself up to meditating profoundly upon ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... stood looking out into the garden. In the lilac bushes over the lawn Isabel's robin was still singing his winter carol, and the atmosphere was saturated with the smell of wet, dead leaves, the poignant, fatal smell of autumn. "There's winter in the air tonight," ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... mail arrived she roused from her apathy, and with trembling fingers sorted out the letters, going over them again and again, and never finding the one she sought. Gradually beneath the poignant grief for her father, came the dull persistent pain of a first disillusion. The belief and loyalty with which she had started out to defend Donald began to weaken before his silence. In his trouble ...
— A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill • Alice Hegan Rice
... Then the poignant thing interpolated. A volley crashed ahead of them some half of a mile away and another volley answered from a still nearer point. Swishing noises which the correspondent had heard in the air he now know to have been from ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... in the way in which the sculptor has taken his task, closely allied to real grandeur. The confident and even careless dependence upon the unaided value of its motive, making hardly any appeal to the fancy on the one hand, and seeking no poignant effect on the other, endues the work with the poise and purity of effortless strength. It conveys to the mind a clear impression of manliness, ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell
... civilizations to shame. Let me illustrate. Go to England or France today and you touch the really tragic aftermath of the war. You see thousands of demobilized officers and men vainly searching for work. Many are reduced to the extremity of begging. It has become an acute and poignant problem, that is not without its echo ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... the mountains; the eye found no point to rest upon, and the level snow emphasized the loneliness. In spite of the thick driving-robe, the cold bit through Charnock's worn-out clothes, but he was conscious of a strange and almost poignant satisfaction. This was not because he was at heart still something of a sybarite and had borne many hardships on the railroad; he was going home and in an hour or two Sadie would welcome him. It was curious, but when he married ...
— The Girl From Keller's - Sadie's Conquest • Harold Bindloss
... Clarinet Quintet. Any familiarity with Mozart's genius is very incomplete which does not comprise the C major Quartet, especially its heavenly Andante Cantabile; likewise the E-flat major Quartet in the slow movement of which are the following poignant dissonances—a striking ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... not to be so easily consoled. He lay awake that night, a prey to poignant self-disgust, remembering in turn his happy childhood at the Mission, his love for the Sitt Hilda, and his recent frowardness, each with a vividness that hurt his brain. Even the patronage of a great Emir seemed nothing worth as compared with the affection ...
— The Valley of the Kings • Marmaduke Pickthall
... metal sheathing to hermetically seal the doors and windows. He was seen by some neighbors to enter the building while the fire was still distant, and his remains were identified by his keys, which were found beneath him. A poignant interest is added to his untimely fate by the circumstance that he was to have been married on the following day to the widow of his late partner, and that he had, at the call of duty, that very evening left a dinner party given to celebrate the last day of his bachelorhood—or, ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... and hard eyes now quite faded to gray, she told Billy Louise a good deal of the bitterness of the years behind; years of hardship and of slavish toil and no love to lighten it. She spoke again of Minervy, and the name brought back to Billy Louise poignant memories of her own lonely childhood ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... situation seemed strained, unreal, and the final shriek a little high for her. But oh, what a lovely creature she was, alone in her cell! What lines her supple figure gave the loose prison robe, what poignant, simple, cruelly deserted grief, poured from her big, girlish eyes! And I do not believe anyone will ever again make such exquisite pathos of the poor creature's crazed return to her first meeting with her lover. ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... But any such mode of treatment would not half so well have served his purpose. His audience were not prepared for any philosophy of exposure, still less for any attack upon the essential principles of the Church; he himself did not see how the successive laxities which he fixes with his poignant satire, or sets in the light of his withering scorn, spring from a vicious conception of Christianity and of the office of the Church. He does what he does, however, with exquisite effect; and the Jesuit Order, many and powerful as have been its opponents, never before nor since felt ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... began, and then stopped suddenly. He saw the expression of his companion's eyes, which were looking him through and through with the most poignant love and yearning mingled in their gaze, and something clutched at his heart that he could ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood
... loveliness. The lake sparkled in the sunshine, and as they shot past its tiny bays and woody headlands, new beauties were every moment revealed to them. But while the scene softened Wyat's feelings, it filled him with intolerable remorse, and so poignant did his emotions become, that he pressed his hands upon his eyes to shut out the lovely prospect. When he looked up again the scene was changed. The skiff had entered a narrow creek, arched over by huge trees, and looking as dark and gloomy as the rest ...
— Windsor Castle • William Harrison Ainsworth
... must rid yourself of what unnerves you so completely. It does no good and only adds to regrets which are poignant enough in themselves." ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... horse, they rode rapidly toward the camp, which was plunged in great sorrow. The whole army is beside itself with grief, but they are altogether wrong in supposing Cliges to be dead: hence their bitter and poignant grief. And for Fenice, too, they are in dismay, thinking never to win her back again. Thus, for her and him the whole army is in great distress. But soon upon their return the whole affair will change its aspect; for now they have reached the camp again, ...
— Four Arthurian Romances - "Erec et Enide", "Cliges", "Yvain", and "Lancelot" • Chretien de Troyes
... turn up, or if Mr. Shuttleworthy wouldn't come in the natural way, and explain his reasons for sending his horse on before. I dare say you have often observed this disposition to temporize, or to procrastinate, in people who are labouring under any very poignant sorrow. Their powers of mind seem to be rendered torpid, so that they have a horror of any thing like action, and like nothing in the world so well as to lie quietly in bed and "nurse their grief," as the old ladies express it—that ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... received from the abbess, and had hitherto preserved with the utmost solicitude. She had scarcely left the room when the bride entered it accompanied by her mother, who casting her eyes on this splendid mantle, surveyed it with feelings of the most poignant remorse, and immediately recognized the testimony of her crime. She questioned the chamberlains, who were unable to explain the appearance of an ornament they had never before beheld; she then interrogated Le Frain, and, at the end of a ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham
... over six hundred people were shot down, but it is hard to get any exact figures yet. After the shooting was over, other civilians were brought out and compelled to bury the dead. My informant says that some of the scenes attending this duty were quite as poignant as the shooting itself, for some buried their own fathers and brothers. One man about to be thrown into the trench was found to be still alive, but the German doctor, after a cursory examination, ordered him buried with the rest. The ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... plates in their laps and either harpooned their food from the frying-pan or ladled it from tin cans, but even so it had a flavor to-night so unaccustomed, so different, that both men grasped the poignant fact that the culinary art is mysteriously wedded to female hands. Mr. Linton voiced this thought ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... when gravely and strenuously repeated, as in Stevenson's case, that it is to be resented, and then mainly on the ground that it does harm to the object of it. But in the case now under review the conditions are not the same. Poor Stevenson, whose early death is still a poignant grief was indubitably a man of genius. Settle the question of stature how you may, there is no denying the species to which such a writer belongs. Mr. Barrie has genius—which is a slightly different thing. But Mr. Crockett in the great rank of letters ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... entitled me to claim, still nothing shall prevent me in a private character following his remains to their last resting place; for though the station and the character may be less ostensible, less prominent, yet the feelings of the heart will not therefore be the less poignant, or the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various
... somewhat grimly, that the young, handsome, and popular poet had excited ardour in many a female breast besides her own. Nevertheless, she permitted herself to return again and again to the belief that he loved her and dreamed of her; and certainly one of his most poignant sonnets had been addressed to the unknown mate whom he had sought ...
— The Gorgeous Isle - A Romance; Scene: Nevis, B.W.I. 1842 • Gertrude Atherton
... superior way, such as was alone possible to such a man, Mr. Derwentwater occasionally talked at Jock. He talked of the pain and grief of seeing a young heart closed to you which once had been open, and of the poignant disappointment which arises in an elder spirit when its spiritual child—its disciple—gets beyond its leading. Jock, occupied with his own ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... his father, mother, relations and servants to die instead of him. None will do it; but his wife, Alkestis, does. Admetos accepts her sacrifice. Her dying, her death, the sorrow of Admetos is described with all the poignant humanity of Euripides. In the meantime Herakles has come on the scene, and Admetos, though steeped in grief, conceals—his wife's death and welcomes his friend to his house. As Alkestis is the heroine of self-sacrifice, Admetos is the hero of hospitality. ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... and variety. Compare, for example, the passion in "The Foster Sister," pure, burning and fatal, with the Black Forest naivete of "The Sabots of Little Wolff." Contrast the touching pathos of "The Substitute," poignant in his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has conquered his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he has fled from that he may save from a like degradation and from an inevitable moral ...
— Ten Tales • Francois Coppee
... the time it grew, it grew on him, that sense of tenderness and absurdity. He found it—that ineffable and poignant quality—in everything about her and in everything she did—in the gravity of her deportment at the Poly.; in her shy essaying of the parallel bars; in the incredible swiftness with which she ran before him in the Maze; ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... her chair like a tragedienne. "It isn't my body, it's my mind!" she cried, with poignant inflection, clasping her head with both her hands; and her look transformed her in the eyes of the young scientist. It was the tragic gaze of one who confronts insanity and death at a time when life should be at its sweetest. For an instant she stood there absorbed in her terror, ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... than even death itself, how do you apply it? Why you propose to sear this brand high upon the forehead, and deep into the heart of your very prince, while you render the scar more visible, and the insult more poignant, by making him the solitary individual, whose hereditary rank must be held and transmitted by the disgraceful tenure which you have stigmatized as the badge of slavery. Freedom of conscience to all subjects, but none to your king! Throw open the portals of legislation, that a Duke of Norfolk ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Marg'ret," and turning abruptly, waded in to his ankles and bent over the log to give it that final impetus which was to set it adrift. In his heart were several things: the desire to make good, fear of the river, and, poignant and bitter, the feeling that Margaret did not understand. He was too young to believe that death might really be near him (almost reckless enough not to care if he had), but keenly aware that his undertaking was perilous enough to warrant a more adequate farewell. So he bent bitterly ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... farm kitchen Railton was sitting moodily by the fire and his wife's face was sternly set. They are not an emotional people in the dales, and her trouble was too deep for useless tears, but as she glanced about the room all she saw wakened poignant memories. The old china in the rack had been her mother's; she had brought it and the black oak meal-chest to Mireside thirty years since. The copper kettles and jelly-pan were wedding presents, and Tom, her son, who ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... ballast in the hold. Through the thin partitions of a summer hotel, a man heard Moody praying God to save him from Moody. Imagine what it must be to lose standing and honor among your fellow men by secret weakness. Imagine also the poignant pain if your disgrace pulls down a cause which you have loved for years and which in purer days you vowed ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... Howe, we turn from the slow moving Herse, to the rapid Chariot-wheels that fly to bring the warm Friend, all glowing with the most poignant lively Grief, to mourn her lost Clarissa. Here again the Description equals the noble Subject. Miss Howe, at the first striking Sight of Clarissa in her Coffin, could only by frantic Actions express the labouring Anguish that ...
— Remarks on Clarissa (1749) • Sarah Fielding
... rendering of life, and the cold intellect of Strindberg had rejected the "symmetrical dialogue" of the French drama in order "to let the brains of men work unhindered." But Hauptmann carries the same methods extraordinarily far and achieves a poignant verisimilitude that rivals the pity and terror of the most ...
— The Dramatic Works of Gerhart Hauptmann - Volume I • Gerhart Hauptmann
... thought—sterile little incidents through which he had moved with automatic gestures—returned like sad little outcasts pleading with him. Faces he could not remember and that were yet familiar peered at him in his sleeplessness with poignant ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... instrument from his grasp, and cast his eye upwards as if appealing to Heaven. But every drop of blood seemed frozen in his frame as he beheld an enormous claw thrust through the roof, member as it seemed of some being too gigantic to be contained in the chamber or the tower itself. Cold, poignant, glittering as steel, it rested upon a socket of the repulsive hue of jaundiced ivory, with no vestige of a foot or anything to relieve its naked horror as, rigid and lifeless, yet plainly with a mighty force behind it, it ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... with a tenderness more poignant than longing. He heard her splashing behind him, and turned again, to see her racing through the water. Those soft yet not narrow shoulders rose and fell sturdily under the wet black wool, her eyes shone, and she was all ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... mind and person: She had an elevated understanding, with all the delicacy, and softness of her own sex. Her voice, however sweet in itself, was still rendered more harmonious by what she said. Her wit was poignant without severity: Her manners were humane, polite, easy and unreserved.— Wherever she came, she attracted attention and esteem. As virtue was her guide in morality, sincerity was her guide in religion. She was constant, but not ostentatious in her devotions: She was remarkably prudent ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... his regard for her was characterized more by boyish adoration than by the deep passion of manhood. To his sanguine spirit the excitement of camp and the responsibilities of his new position formed attractions which took all poignant regret from his leave-taking, and she was glad to recognize this truth. She had failed signally to carry out her self-sacrificing impulse, when he was so ill, to reward his heroism and supplement his life with her own; and she was much relieved ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... settled among them? What of Ireland split into two camps? What of the Germans in Bohemia, in Alsace, in Schleswig-Holstein? Compromise alone is possible in many cases, going by favor of majority. And there will always remain the poignant question of the rights and aspirations of minorities. Let us by all means clear the air by righting glaring wrongs, removing palpable anomalies, redressing obvious injustices, securing so far as possible the independent ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... It was a kind of rhymed diary or waste-book, in which he deposited his every-day thoughts and feelings, without any order or plan,—reminding us of "Tristram Shandy" or of "Don Juan," although not so whimsically delightful as the former, nor so brilliant and poignant ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... was beyond the reach of even the conjectures of passion. She had come to a certain exterior resignation to her fate. The world had lost its poignant interest—it was now a pageant upon which she was looking for the last time, yet she was too tired, too indifferent to lift her hand to stay it in its course even had it been ...
— The Spirit of Sweetwater • Hamlin Garland
... folk-history, Gods and Fighting Men and Cuchulain of Muirthemne, which Mr. Yeats calls masterpieces of prose which one "can weigh with Malory and feel no discontent at the tally."[1] A writer who has produced such range and beauty of works, from very human, characteristic comedy and farce to fine, poignant tragedy, besides writing excellent stories and contributing largely to an important experimental theatre, is secure of her ...
— The Atlantic Book of Modern Plays • Various
... metropolitan city. I thought, "Whatever this is or is not, it is a metropolis, and will rank with the best of 'em." I had lived long in more than one metropolis, and I knew the proud and the shameful unmistakable marks of the real thing. And I was aware of a poignant sympathy with those people and those mysterious generations who had been gradually and yet so rapidly putting together, girder by girder and tradition by tradition, all unseen by me till then, this illustrious, proud organism, with its nobility and its ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... might have to struggle with the only pabulum upon which they had been allowed to expend their gastric juices for over forty-eight hours, and suffering the pangs of remorse, both physical and mental, in the poignant consciousness that the cause of this distress was the undigested portion of some late faithful four-footed friend and companion, for the command for rations had been reduced to horse meat on the hoof. Three hundred miles from the nearest post when their supplies gave ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... that had fallen upon her frail shoulders. She felt that in a measure the catastrophe had brought the Reverend Orme back—nearer to her heart. Her heart, which had seemed to atrophy and shrivel from disuse since the poignant fullness of the last days of Shenton, was suddenly revivified. Love, pity, tender care,—all the discarded emotions,—returned to light up her withered face and give it beauty. Night and day she stayed beside the Reverend Orme, reading ...
— Through stained glass • George Agnew Chamberlain
... next evening they had recovered somewhat, and discussed the story in all its detail, grown the richer and more comprehensive by the silence of the night before. Each one had some little touch, some poignant item, to add to the general outline; and when they separated that night, the shred of gossip had become the completed romance which lived ever afterwards in the traditions of ...
— Colonial Born - A tale of the Queensland bush • G. Firth Scott
... the wonderful crescendo which precedes the appearance of the Knight of the Swan, in Lohengrin, where the sonorities are augmented by gradual additions of voices and instruments until the culminating point is reached. An instance more poignant still is found in the great ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam
... believe it was so long ago; he felt young still! Of all his thoughts, as he stood there counting his cigars, this was the most poignant, the most bitter. With his white head and his loneliness he had remained young and green at heart. And those Sunday afternoons on Hampstead Heath, when young Jolyon and he went for a stretch along the Spaniard's Road to Highgate, to Child's Hill, and back ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... gravelled road as he passed slowly on under the trees. When he faced the first deserted building, he stopped quite still. The campus was deserted and the buildings were as silent as tombs. That loneliness he had known many, many years; but there was a poignant sorrow in it now that was never there before, for only that morning he had turned over the reins of power into a pair of younger hands. The young men and young women would come again, but now they would be his no longer. ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... are full of poignant episodes. For instance, let us take an incident which occurred in his early boyhood when he found out what sort of man his father really was—a sombre event in the life of any boy, much more ...
— Love Conquers All • Robert C. Benchley
... pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house, always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the superficial lotus-charm of Southern life—and he had lived it superficially enough to catch all its poetry rose before him. It caught ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... the yacht-owner. "What are the revolutionists doing and how is—how are things?" Carefully he avoided directing any question to the point on which his eagerness for news was poignant hunger. ...
— The Lighted Match • Charles Neville Buck
... stamped with a badge of social inferiority. Robespierre's worshippers love to dwell on his fondness for birds: with the universal passion of mankind for legends of the saints, they tell how the untimely death of a favourite pigeon afflicted him with anguish so poignant, that, even sixty long years after, it made his sister's heart ache to look back upon the pain of that tragic moment. Always a sentimentalist, Robespierre was from boyhood a devout enthusiast for ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... day he was between waking and sleeping when a queer delusion distracted him. Humming in his ears was the refrain of a song which was both familiar and hauntingly pleasant. It seemed to charm away his poignant anxieties, to lull him with a feeling of safety. He wondered if his troublesome adventures had made him light-headed. He moved not a muscle but listened to this phantom music and noted that it sounded louder and clearer instead ...
— Blackbeard: Buccaneer • Ralph D. Paine
... must have been pitched in unison with this; and if there is anywhere a word that looks another way, the book would be stronger, clearer, and (I had almost said) fuller without it. Life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate. Life imposes by brute energy, like inarticulate thunder; art catches the ear, among the far louder noises of experience, like an air artificially made by a discreet musician. A proposition of geometry ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... represented Agamemnon thus, for a painter, Timanthes, had made a picture of this subject about B.C. 400, and in describing it Quintilian said that "when he had painted Calchas sad, Ulysses sadder, and had represented in the face of Menelaus the most poignant grief that art can express, having exhausted the deepest feelings and finding no means of worthily portraying the countenance of the father, he covered his head and left it to every man's own ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... the hint of this weakness had become the most interesting thing about her. He had come on her that morning in a moment of disarray; her face had been pale and altered, and the diminution of her beauty had lent her a poignant charm. THAT IS HOW SHE LOOKS WHEN SHE IS ALONE! had been his first thought; and the second was to note in her the change which his coming produced. It was the danger-point of their intercourse that he could not doubt the spontaneity of her liking. From whatever ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... by the most wicked and wanton perversion of that genius, he made it the successful instrument of the most base and barbarous purposes. Against all that was great and wise and virtuous he with the most malevolent industry turned the shafts of his poignant wit, his brilliant imagination, and his solid knowledge. Corrupting the comic muse from her legitimate duty he seduced her from the pursuit of her fair game, vice and folly, and made her fasten like a bloodhound ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 4, April 1810 • Various
... that his wretched state demands compassion. Moreover, a nobler side of Richard's character is portrayed. His deeply touching farewell to his loving Queen, as he goes to his solitary confinement, though tinged with almost unmanly meekness of spirit, is yet poignant with true grief. And the last scene of all, in which he dies, vainly yet bravely resisting his murderers, is a gallant end to a life so ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... sick man now cried out, in poignant appeal. "Steve!" To the women it was a name unknown,—unknown as was also this deep inward tide of feeling which he could no longer conceal, being himself no longer. "No, Steve," he said next, and muttering followed. "It ain't so!" he shouted; and then ...
— The Virginian - A Horseman Of The Plains • Owen Wister
... victory made over us, but by the judgment of all, a mere mortal snatches it from you." Ah! that blow is the direst; it pierces my heart, I cannot bear its unequalled severity; the pleasure of my rivals is too great an addition to my poignant grief. My son, if ever my feelings had any weight with you, if ever I have been dear to you, if you bear a heart that can share the resentment of a mother who loves you so tenderly, use here your utmost power to support my ...
— Psyche • Moliere
... spiritual standing, and that might fluctuate, and the old self resume its power; so he is still called by the former appellation, just as, at certain points in his life, the apostle forfeits the right to be 'Peter,' and has to hear from Christ's lips the old name, the use of which is more poignant than many reproachful words; 'Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you.' But in the last death-bed scene, when the patriarch lifted himself in his bed, and with prophetic dignity pronounced his parting benediction on Joseph's sons, the new name reappears ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... occasion was poignant, and, as his excellent judgment furnished him with expedients under all his difficulties, he resolved to endeavour to bring about a peace. Accordingly he despatched a gentleman to the King with his advice to accede to terms, ...
— Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Complete • Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre
... wasn't the child's molar but the child's funds that I was concerned with. "You will recollect that I compensated him for the loss of it with a shilling. It makes it all the more poignant that it was my last shilling. I put it into his money-box, the key of which is accessible to miscreants. That shilling ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 15, 1914 • Various
... interesting and pathetic portraits of Irishwomen are added to our roll at this period! None is more tenderly mournful than that of Sarah Curran, the beloved of Robert Emmet. The graceful prose of Washington Irving, the poignant verses of Moore, have enshrined the memory of her, weeping for him in the shadow of the scaffold, dying of heart-break at last in a far-off land. No more need be said of her, for whom the pity of the whole world has been awakened by song allied to sweetest, saddest ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... Mecklenburg silk, with silver buttons, I give to the friend who expresses in words the most poignant regret. I hold that tears are more genuine than words, for which reason the best weeper has been preferred, and so has received the velvet suit. Nevertheless, the loudest lamenter is not unworthy; and so I repeat that he shall have the silk suit. If there be none who ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... General Kleber. The poniard of Suleyman had slain this great captain the same day that the cannon of Marengo laid low another hero of the army of Egypt. This assassination caused the First Consul the most poignant grief, of which I was an eyewitness, and to which I can testify; and, nevertheless, his calumniators have dared to say that he rejoiced at an event, which, even considered apart from its political relations, caused him to lose ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... objects in floods of it; and this, I think, proceeded in him from indulgence toward human nature rather than from indifference to evil. To his friend the disposition to exalt and glorify co-existed, in a very remarkable manner, with a power of severe analysis of character and poignant exhibition of it,—a power which few possess without exercising it some time or other to their own sorrow and injury. The consequence to Mr. Coleridge was that he sometimes seemed untrue to himself, when he had but brought forward, one after another, perfectly real and sincere ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull
... one-act play of hers, "Journeys End in Lovers' Meeting"—in which I first acted with Johnston Forbes-Robertson and Terriss at a special matinee in 1894—brought about a friendship between us which lasted until her death. Of her it could indeed be said with poignant truth, "She should have died hereafter." Her powers had not nearly reached ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... arrived. And he looked at it and sniffed at it daintily—like a reluctant patient going under the ether—and he tasted of it; and then he put his face down in his hands and burst into low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real thing at all. The stuffing of the turkey defied chemical analysis; and, moreover, the turkey before serving should have been dusted with talcum powder and fitted with dress-shields, it being plainly a crowning work of the art ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... in her thoughts. It was as though his spirit hovered near. She seemed to hear him speak, to feel the touch of his hand upon her brow, soothing her anguish, praying her to wait and be patient. Sometimes the impression of his presence beside her was so poignant that she started up from her chair and looked around the vast room, as though expecting him to appear in the spirit beside her. And then realizing that the illusions were born of her weakness, she would sink back ...
— The Secret Witness • George Gibbs
... Hescott; his tone is so full of poignant anguish that she stops short. "Stay a moment." In his despair he has caught a fold of her gown. To do him fair justice, he honestly believes that she hates her husband, and that she is thoroughly unhappy with him. Unhappy with great cause. "I ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... the arts of the sycophant: The pleasure of the guards was his delight, their displeasure, his poignant grief. He assumed the authority of his rank with us, he reported the slightest of misdemeanours amongst us to the guards and was instrumental in having many punished. These and other things gave him and others of his kidney the run of the main grounds so that they could stretch their legs ...
— The Escape of a Princess Pat • George Pearson
... conceal his disapproval of foreign food. The sorrows of the beef-eating Englishman among the continentals were always poignant. Dallington is only one of the many travellers who, unable to grasp the fact that warmer climes called for light diet, reproached the Italians especially for their "parsimony and thin feeding." In ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... urging would'st thou need To make thee lap Narcissus' mirror up." I was all fix'd to listen, when my guide Admonish'd: "Now beware: a little more. And I do quarrel with thee." I perceiv'd How angrily he spake, and towards him turn'd With shame so poignant, as remember'd yet Confounds me. As a man that dreams of harm Befall'n him, dreaming wishes it a dream, And that which is, desires as if it were not, Such then was I, who wanting power to speak Wish'd ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... shape appeared in the bright opening, the pig saw it. It filled his heart with a quite justifiable horror, which found instant poignant expression. Within those four walls the noise was so startlingly loud that, in spite of himself, the bear drew back—not intending to retreat, indeed, but only to consider. As it chanced, however, seeing out of only one eye, he backed upon the handle of a hay ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... on his arm, and Esther's breathing presence choked him with a sense of the strangeness of things and the poignant suffering in mere life. ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... freely, or was it closed with a combination? The question was poignant. The key turned and the door opened. On a shelf and in a wooden bowl were packages of bank-notes and rolls of gold that he had seen the evening when the bank-clerk came. Roughly, without counting; he thrust them into his pocket, and without closing the safe, he ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... at it, it took on the shape of a glorious, uprooted plant, cut off from the very source of life, its glossy surfaces already beginning to wither and dull in the sure approach of corruption and decay. But what beauties were there to pluck, lovely fading beauties, poignant and exquisite sensations, which she was capable of savoring, which she sadly knew she would live and die without having known, a heritage into which she would never enter; because she had known the unforgettable taste of the other heritage, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... verses?" The demand but feebly expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem existed only by the challenger's invention. Before I leave my faint and unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... imagination was ardent, his feelings rose to violence,— his physical organisation was feeble and sickly! Who can sound the sufferings proceeding from this contrast? They must have been poignant, but he never let ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... of the heroic couplet, and turned eagerly to these hurried verses, that went on their way with the sharp tramp of moss-troopers, and heated the blood like a drum. The meters of Coleridge, subtle, delicate, and poignant, had been passed by with indifference—had not been heard perhaps, for lack of ears trained to hear; but Scott's metrical effects were such as a child could appreciate, and a soldier could ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... exceedingly powerful field-glasses. To my poignant and everlasting regret my camera had been upon the bolting pony, and Ventnor had long been out of films ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... I not! It was one of the most poignant memories of my life. The look she gave him and the look he gave ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... that, despite his brave words, the marriage was indefinitely postponed; indeed, it was more than doubtful if it would ever take place at all. She suffered, dumbly, despairingly; her torments were the more poignant because she realised that the man she loved beyond anything in the world must be acutely distressed at this unexpected confounding of his hopes. Her head throbbed with dull pains which gradually increased in intensity; these, ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... the modern Celtic school. Some critics consider this the most significant tragedy produced in English since Shakespeare. Simple and impressive as a Greek tragedy, it has for its central figure an old mother whose husband and five sons have been lost at sea. The simple but poignant feeling of the drama focuses on the death of Maurya's sixth and last son, Bartley. This tragic episode, simply presented, touches the depths of human sympathy. In old Maurya, Synge created an impressive figure of what Macbeth calls ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... Mendouca was reading in his cabin, my friend Pedro joined me on deck, and, with many expressions of poignant distress at his father's behaviour to me, endeavoured to excuse it upon the plea of irresponsibility already urged by Mendouca himself; the poor lad assuring me that even he was not always safe from the consequences of his father's violence. And during the half-hour's chat ...
— The Pirate Slaver - A Story of the West African Coast • Harry Collingwood
... But it appeared well in the piping times of peace, and I remember it (as I remember others of the collection) with a freshness which only attaches to work that lifts itself out of the common ruck. An almost too poignant intensity of realism, expressed in a distinguished and fastidious idiom, characterises Mr. LAWRENCE'S method. It is a realism not of minutely recorded outward happenings, trivial or exciting, but of fiercely contested agonies of the spirit. None of those ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 16, 1914 • Various
... danger that encompassed her. What a beautiful picture! By skilful manoeuvring the vessel was extricated from an ugly position, and the unhappy first mate who had neglected to put himself into communication with the Deity before the accident happened, became the object of poignant dislike for having broken one of the most important articles of nautical faith ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... a dreary, heartbreaking night of sleepless watching and poignant feeling. Nancy was alone in her prison, a beautiful apartment, the best in the house. Bull Sternford had conducted her thither personally, and, in doing so, had told her the thing he was doing, and of his real desire to save ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
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