"Joyless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... green meadows seemed paradise to their surprised and happy eyes after the long habit of seeing nothing but dirty lanes and streets. It was a wonder to them—those spacious reaches of open country to run and dance and tumble and frolic in, after their dull and joyless captivity; so they scampered far and wide over the fair regions on both sides of the river, and came back at eventide weary, but laden with flowers and flushed with new health drawn from the fresh country air and ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not destined to accompany Manon's. Doubtless, Heaven did not as yet consider me sufficiently punished, and therefore ordained that I should continue to drag on a languid and joyless existence. I willingly renounced every hope of ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... wanderer's ample shoulder bore A gaping wound, each starting sinew crack'd, And from its socket loosed the strong-knit joint.— The victory was with Beowulf, and the foe, Howling and sick at heart, fled as he might, To seek beneath the mountain shroud of mist His joyless home; for well he knew the day Of death was on him, and his doom ...
— Legends of the Middle Ages - Narrated with Special Reference to Literature and Art • H.A. Guerber
... resentment toward Olga Vseslavovna that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world where there was ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... board, from choral roofs the song; And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they wear a cold and joyless smile. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... feebleness, are there represented and are regularly brought around by the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took the greater ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... annihilation to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind. And by the side of the poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless, self-sustained, drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and of poetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul and brain, stood Lucien, graceful ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... excelled. But indeed, were it possible to remain unconscious of the change, the life left would scarcely be worth living; but given that there is a consciousness of the change, then must the existence left to live be found by comparison insipid, joyless, a death in life, devoid of life's charm. But indeed, if it is reserved for me to die unjustly, then on those who unjustly slay me lies the shame (since, given injustice is base, how can any unjust action whatsoever fail of baseness?) (11) But for me what disgrace is it that ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... empty plates directed an impartial gaze at the portraits of his ancestors, while wholly ignoring his descendant. But Michael was too wise to put himself into places where he could be pointedly ignored, and the resplendent dinner, with its six footmen and its silver service, was not really more joyless than usual. But his father's majestic displeasure was more apparent when the three men sat alone afterwards, and it was in dead silence that port was pushed round and cigarettes handed. Francis, it is ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"—I can perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to be worth the trouble of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... paralleled by others at least equally impressive, displaying emaciation, under-nutrition, anaemia and every other painful and wretched consequence of neglect and insufficiency. These underfed, under-clothed, undersized children are also the backward children; they grow up through a darkened, joyless childhood into a grey, perplexing, hopeless world that beats them down at last, after servility, after toil, after crime it may ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... that of any glorious death by combat, but that of a life (unless no bullet early cut its silver cord in twain) when youth should have fled, and have carried forever with it her numberless graces, and left in its stead that ribaldry-stained, drink-defiled, hardened, battered, joyless, cruel, terrible thing which is unsightly and repugnant to even the lowest among men; which is as the lees of the drunk wine, as the ashes of the burned-out fires, as the discord of the broken and ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... with the promise that if the day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless war days. ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... answers, with a rather joyless smile. "I have received my marching orders. I must join my ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... footnotes. Westcott and Hort, harsher than any of their predecessors, will not, as we have seen, allow it to appear even at the foot of the page. To reproduce all that has been written in disparagement of this precious portion of God's written Word would be a joyless and an unprofitable task. According to Green, 'the genuineness of the passage cannot be maintained[589].' Hammond is of opinion that 'it would be more satisfactory to separate it from its present ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... residence. The poor man had alighted there for a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these continually shifting scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a stranger among strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though joyless satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire college and submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but inflexible ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... rhythm and poetry of life had entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless, pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Though never more the universal shriek Of all that perish thou shalt hear, as when The deep foundations of the guilty earth Were shaken at the voice of God, and man Ceased in his habitations; yet the sea 80 Thy might tempestuous still, and joyless rule, Confesses. Ah! what bloodless shadows throng Ev'n now, slow rising from their oozy beds, From Mete,[188] and those gates of burial That guard the Erythraean; from the vast Unfathomed caverns of the Western main Or stormy ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... "tongueless silence of the dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air. ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... was between the night and day, When the Fairy King has power, That I sunk down in a sinful fray, And, 'twixt life and death, was snatched away 355 To the joyless Elfin bower. ...
— Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... for the first time in ninety-six weary hours, he slept, soundly and dreamlessly, till Alexei came to call him, when he rose with a feeling of great strangeness, of irrevocable change, upon him, as he faced a final joyless day. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... remembered ever after with thankfulness and regret. He would explore it with the same unmeaning curiosity and idle wonder as he would the Regalia in the Tower, or the Botanic Garden in the Tuileries, but not with the fond enthusiasm of an artist. How should he? His is 'casual fruition, joyless, unendeared.' But the painter is wedded to his art—the mistress, queen, and idol of his soul. He has embarked his all in it, fame, time, fortune, peace of mind—his hopes in youth, his consolation in age: and shall he not feel a more intense interest in whatever relates to it ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... between her and her fledged nurslings, and she looks round for some new objects of love and devotion. These she probably finds in another home, another mistress, another baba; her heart begins its course anew; and the ayah lives a second life in the young lives of her children. No joyless existence is hers, no cares without ample compensations; but yet when I see in my own country one of these solitary, strangely-attired, dark-skinned women, I feel attracted towards her by an almost tearful sympathy, and have ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... from one speaker to another. 'We are all agreed, are not we? You are all so good, and fond of Willie, that you are actually ready almost to quarrel for him.' But her little laugh produced no echo, except a very joyless and flushed effort from the attorney, as he looked up ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... thing to having her with me is to know that she is kindly and lovingly looked after by my married sister, of whom she is very fond. Florence is merrier, if not always happier, with her young cousins than if she were condemned to the repression and joyless routine of a house where the care of the sick is the ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... in a state of mind such as we see extolled in Buddhism, a colorless state, joyless and painless, across which the fleeting splendors of thought pass like stars. Well, the man of the south cares naught for that sort of paradise. The vein of real sensation is freely, perpetually open, open to life. The side that pertains to abstraction, to ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... the other? Was nothing ever to penetrate the seven-walled solitude in which the organist chose to intrench herself? Was nobody ever to bid roses bloom on the colorless face of the singer, and bring smiles, the veritable smiles of youth, and of happiness, into those large, steady, joyless eyes? ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... that he must needs fling it all aside with such bitter anger and harsh regret when the thunderbolt fell and the searching dart stabbed him awake? Outraged, hurt-maddened, he had flung away, as he believed, to outer darkness, and to a joyless, purposeless, colourless life. And ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... the joyless victor sat, Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of chance below; And now and then a sigh he stole, And tears ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... for contrast's sake is a very coarse stimulant, and required only by very joyless natures. The real explanation of the charm of the hotel room and its sparse properties and flowers must be sought, I believe, in the fact that the charm of things depends upon our power of extracting it; and that our power in this ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... I sighed. Joyless, vacant, barren hours prefigured themselves to me, drifting through my brain, till their vacant shapes crowded it into darkness. I must do something! I would go out; a walk would be good for me. Moreover, wishing to purchase a parting gift for Adelaide and Ann, I would go alone. ...
— The Morgesons • Elizabeth Stoddard
... soft murmurs go, Up from the cold and joyless earth, Back to the God who bade them flow, Whose moving spirit sent them forth. But as for me, O God! for me, The lowly creature of Thy will, Lingering and sad, I sigh to Thee, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... her charms, a most accomplished knight And monarch brave that ever yet had bowed to woman's might Was but a poor and joyless slave, compelled to wear a smile And act a part for which she loathed her wretched self ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... jealous is the queen, that no female is allowed to approach the walls within one hundred yards. Never beholding any of their race but the queen and a few dried-up and ugly spinsters, the poor creatures vegetate, mindless and joyless. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... and cruelly. He could no longer believe in a God, or how could such things be? Manhood was denied him. The last torture was not denied him—namely, that he saw the full satire of his position, saw that it was his own love that had destroyed them both. Out of his complete ruin he arose joyless, hopeless, but great in a tenderness so vast and selfless that it almost took the place ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... finding {56} her hopes thus blighted, succeeded in effecting a compromise by inducing his brother Aides to allow Persephone to spend six months of the year with the gods above, whilst during the other six she was to be the joyless companion of her grim lord below. Accompanied by her daughter, the beautiful Persephone, Demeter now resumed her long-abandoned dwelling in Olympus; the sympathetic earth responded gaily to her bright smiles, the corn at once sprang ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... pronounc't, Present, or past, as Saints and Patriarchs us'd. Here Love his golden shafts imploies, here lights His constant Lamp, and waves his purple wings, Reigns here and revels; not in the bought smile Of Harlots, loveless, joyless, unindeard, Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask, or Midnight Bal, Or Serenate, which the starv'd Lover sings To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain. 770 These lulld by Nightingales imbraceing slept, ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... real suffering. One is not weaned from this generous wine without discomfort. Impossible to prolong this state of affairs without deepening the shadow round the heads of the younger generations. We must come to their aid. Our children are heirs of a joyless world. We bequeath them cares, hard questions, a life heavy with shackles and complexities. Let us at least make an effort to brighten the morning of their days. Let us interest ourselves in their ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... steps in cold Canadia stray, And joyless seasons hold unequal sway, He saw the pine its daring mantle rear, Break the rude blast, and mock the brumal year, Shag the green zone that bounds the boreal skies, And bid all southern vegetation rise. Wild o'er the vast impenetrable ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... they seem likely to be lavish in is funeral expenses, which come in the wake of leaky shoes and imperfect clothing. These funeral expenses at last swallow all, since nobody can dispute an undertaker's bill. One pities these joyless beings. Economy, instead of a rational act of the judgment, is a morbid monomania, eating the pleasure out of life, and haunting ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... head and shoulders above the tall woman he was dancing with, gazed out over the sea of dancers in all the freshness of his youthful joy, and triumph. He danced well, something he had contrived to learn in the joyless country from which he hailed. But there was no reflection of his joy in the faces of the two men gazing down from the shelter of the curtained box. There were only concern and ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be without her now. Had it been summer, all the forms ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... bright spirit, of whose power I sing, Electric, deathless energy of mind, Harp of the soul, by genius swept, awake! Inspire my strains, and aid me to portray The base and joyless vanities which man Madly prefers to everlasting bliss!— Come! let us mount gay Fancy's rapid car, And trace through forest and o'er mountain rude The bounding footsteps of the youthful bard, Yet new to life—a stranger to the ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... lo, where, sunk in deep despair, Her garments torn, her bosom bare, Impatient Freedom lies! Her matted tresses madly spread, 40 To every sod, which wraps the dead, She turns her joyless eyes. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... of loss. Another while all the multitude of graces, the countless kind providences, which it has wasted pass before it, and generate that undying worm of remorse of which Our Saviour speaks. Then comes a keen but joyless view, a calculation, but only a bankrupt's calculation, of the possibility of gains for ever forfeited, of all the grandeur and ocean-like vastness of the bliss which it has lost. Last of all comes before it the immensity of God, to it so unconsoling and so unprofitable; ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... that all joy had gone out of her life. It was possible that love was still there—she did not know—she was too young to understand the complex sensations which suddenly had made a woman of her ... but it was a joyless love now: and all that she knew of a certainty about her own feelings at the present was that she hoped she would never have to gaze into her lover's face again ... and ... Heaven help her! ... that he might never touch ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... mere millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I abandon to others—whom I have ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... me measure for measure. My life has been a hard one, child; hard and lonely, and loveless and joyless. My son, to whom I devoted myself in the vigour of youth and in the prime of life, never loved me, never repaid me for my love. He spent his days far away from me, when his presence would have gladdened my difficult ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... if there is one thing I loathe, it is the God and His day that were taught to me when I was a child: joyless, hard, cruel. Fire—humph!—and brimstone for all but a few hundred. I remember. Well, I don't know yet if there is any better," with a vague look. "A man shifts for himself in the next chance as well as now, I suppose. Did ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... seen around, the tops of Sumeru were shaken, from heaven there rained showers of flying stones, a whirling tempest rose on every side, the trees were rooted up and fell, heavenly music rose with plaintive notes, whilst angels for a time were joyless. Buddha rising from out his ecstasy, announced to all the world: "Now have I given up my term of years; I live henceforth by power of faith; my body like a broken chariot stands, no further cause of 'coming' or of 'going'; ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... love, with its perception, be beauty. A fourth assigned this cause; that the Lord took away from the man beauty and elegance of life, and transferred it to the woman; and that hence the man, unless he be re-united with his beauty and elegance in the woman, is stern, austere, joyless, and unlovely; so one man is wise only for himself, and another is foolish; whereas, when a man is united with his beauty and elegance of life in a wife, he becomes engaging, pleasant, active, and lovely, and thereby wise. A fifth said, that women were created beauties, not for the sake ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... toil. The fowls of heaven, Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence assigns them. One alone, The redbreast, sacred to the household gods, Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky, In joyless ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... drunk water, eaten grass and given milk for the last time, and their senses have lost all vigour. He who gives these undoubtedly goes to joyless realms. ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... on amidst heartless pleasures and joyless amusements, but Lady Juliana was made neither the wiser nor the better by added years and increased experience. Time had in vain turned his glass before eyes still dazzled with the gaudy allurements of the world, for she took "no note of time" but as the thing that was to take ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... mother, whom he is much attached to? what white man would have been his brother? what white woman his sister? He had two courses left open to him: he could either have renounced all natural ties and have led a hopeless, joyless life amongst the whites, ever a servant, ever an inferior being; or he could renounce civilization and return to the friends of his childhood, and to the habits of his youth. He chose the latter course, and I think that I should have done ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... had befel me, And it would have been more happy. Had I not been born and nurtured, And had never grown in stature, 220 Till I saw these days of sorrow, And this joyless time o'ertook me, Had I died in six nights only, Or upon the eighth had perished. Much I should not then have needed, But a shroud a span-long only, And of earth a tiny corner. Little then had wept my mother, Fewer tears had shed my father, And my ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... and scenery were so glorious that it was possible to think of nothing all day, but just allow oneself passively to drink in sensations of exquisite pleasure. I wish all the hard-worked people at home, who lead joyless lives in sunless alleys, could just have one such day, and enjoy it as I did, that they might know how fair God's earth is, and how far fairer His Paradise must be, if even from this we cannot conceive "of the things which He hath prepared for them that love ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... must sit joyless in my place; bereft As trees that suddenly have dropped their leaves, And dark as nights ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... The newly married couple enjoy a warmth of affection that sweetens their cup of happiness and strews flowers all along their pathway of life. This pleasure lasts while their love lasts; but when love dies, happiness dies with it. This accounts for the joyless, pleasureless life of many married partners. First love, alas! departed; the first fire all burnt out, leaving naught but the dull ashes of cold indifference and burning tears. It sometimes goes somewhat the same way with members coming into the church. They ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... About her torn skirts were clustered three or four stupid-looking, tow-headed children. It was impossible for Phil to conceive how beautiful Mollie could be a member of such a family. Yet the unfortunate girl had told Phyllis that she had known no other than the hard, joyless ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... another from my mind through a succession of years; and some of those which, perhaps, deeply affected me at the time, are, by the mercy of Heaven, forgotten. But enough remains to enable me to give a faint outline of the causes which have changed me from what I was, to the gloomy joyless being I am at length become. There is one scene indelibly impressed upon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... utterly impossible. I live for happiness, Louisa, I live for happiness, my angel. And I find so much happiness in loving, that I would as soon cease to live as cease to love. Some indeed, 'sordid celebutes' for example, seem to exist without love; but it is only a seeming existence, most joyless and imperfect. And they bear the dullness of apathy the better, because they have never known the transports of affection. But with me, my charmer, the case is happily different; for at the moment I first saw those angel eyes, they infused a sweetness ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... reviled me! And yet"—with a most joyless laugh—"for the sake of a woman you cared so little about, that even her death has not caused you a pang, you severed the tie that should have been the closest to you on earth? Well, she is dead. 'Heaven rest her sowl!' as the peasants say. ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... Court, she appears at a Meet or in the "Row" in a lady's habit, trigly perfect in fit, and on a side-saddle. In America this is an extreme opinion, and it is only among the most fashionable that a young girl having all her life ridden in a man's saddle, finds the world a joyless place and parents cruel when she is no longer allowed to ride like a boy. But she becomes, in spite of her protests, "another who looks divine on a horse." And you can look divine too, if you choose! On second thoughts the adjective must be qualified. No one looks divine on a horse ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... itself, along paths that had once echoed to the tread of slippered feet, armed sentries paced, their sharp challenges breaking the stillness of the night. Outside its wrecked fences strange men in stranger uniforms strode in and out of the joyless houses; tired pickets stacked their arias on the unswept piazzas, and panting horses nibbled the bark from the withered trees; rank weeds choked the gardens; dishevelled vines clung to the porches, and doors that had always swung wide to the gentle tap of loving fingers were opened ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... with a joyless mien, looking up towards the poop, the host invited his guest to accompany him there, for the benefit of what little breath of wind might ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... return the rights and liberty of which the people had been robbed. "We only ask freedom of speech,—the right to exercise all the franchises conferred by the Constitution upon an American. Can you safely deny us these things?" Mingled also with pathetic appeals were joyless pictures of the ravages of war, and cheerless glimpses into the future of a Republic with its bulwarks of liberty torn away. "We stand to-day," he continued, "amid new made graves; we stand to-day in a land filled with mourning, and our soil is saturated ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... arts adorn, Betray'd by man, then left for man to scorn; Whose cheek in vain assumes the mimic rose, While her sad eyes the troubled breast disclose; Whose outward splendour is but folly's dress, Exposing most, when most it gilds distress. Here joyless roam a wild amphibious race, With sullen woe display'd in every face; Who, far from civil arts and social fly, And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye. Here too the lawless merchant of the main Draws from his plough th' intoxicated swain; Want only claim'd the ...
— The Village and The Newspaper • George Crabbe
... falsity, and so still be poison, moral poison. Too well I know this Tacitus. In my college-days he came near souring me into cynicism. Yes, I began to turn down my collar, and go about with a disdainfully joyless expression." ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... made anguish a reward, a home In banishment, hell groans, hard pain, and bade That torture house abide the joyless fall. When with eternal night and sulphur pains, Fullness of fire, dread cold, reek and red flames, He knew ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... part of his audience. When the "cat" was passed over to their mercies, words could not be found to express their emotions. Another evening, the old clothes-line that served for a jump-rope, after having bravely rubbed against the pavement many thousand times in its endeavor to lighten the joyless life of the little pack, finally succumbed, worn through the centre and quite beyond hope of further knotting. Then Peter rose, and going to one of the little shops that supplied the district, soon returned with a real jump-rope, with wooden handles! So from time to time, ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... around us, and to consider the effects that religion produces on minds really penetrated with its pretended truths. We shall generally find in those who the most sincerely profess and the most exactly practise them, a joyless and melancholy disposition, which announces no contentment, nor that interior peace of which they speak so incessantly, without ever exhibiting any undoubted manifestations of it. Whoever is in the enjoyment of peace within, shows some exterior ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... spirit of defiance existed between the king and queen. Both were wretched. Such are always the wages of sin. Ten more joyless years passed away. The rupture between the royal pair was such that they could scarcely endure each other. Louis himself was the first to inform the queen of the news so satisfactory to him, so heart-rending to her, ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... be the instrument of this miserable plot!" he cried passionately. "Because I lead a lonely, joyless life. I am selected to execute this infamy. Ah, how little do they know me! how slight a knowledge of the human heart have these learned professors! Eckhof in danger, and I remain silent? Eckhof threatened, and I not warn him? That were a treachery against myself, a crime against ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... rises, and, proceeding along the bank of the stream, approaches him. He tells her that he has done nothing but mourn for the loss of his Pearl, and has been indeed a "joyless jeweller" (p.8). However, now that he has found his Pearl, he declares that he is no longer sorrowful, but would be a "joyful jeweller" were he allowed to cross the stream (p.8). The maiden blames her father for his rash speech, tells him ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... here, Bluster in thy proper sphere; Howl along the naked plain; There exert they joyless reign. Triumph o'er the wither'd flow'r, The leafless shrub, the ruin'd bower; But our cottage come not near, Other Springs inhabit here, Other sunshine decks our board Than they niggard skies afford. Gloomy Winter, hence away, Love and fancy scorn ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... Ah me! my race of threescore years is short, but long enough to pall My sense with joyless joys as these, with Love and Houris, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... laugh—the clowns, the cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The peasant of Italy goes to Carnival to amuse himself ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... sent at the age of twelve, were not of the happiest. Relating his reminiscences of that period, in reply to the question, "Do you retain pleasant recollections of cadet life?" he remarked, "I have little reason to do so. Without relations or acquaintances in a strange city, we spent a joyless youth. The discipline was strict, even hard, and now, when my judgment of it is unprejudiced, I must say that it was too strict, too hard. The only benefit we received from this treatment was that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... was sore sick at heart,[u] And from his fellow Bacchanals would flee; 'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start, But Pride congealed the drop within his ee:[25] Apart he stalked in joyless reverie,[v] And from his native land resolved to go, And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;[26] With pleasure drugged, he almost longed for woe, And e'en for change of scene ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... has such power to lift the poor out of his poverty, the wretched out of his misery, to make the burden-bearer forget his burden, the sick his sufferings, the sorrower his grief, the downtrodden his degradation, as books. They are friends to the lonely, companions to the deserted, joy to the joyless, hope to the hopeless, good cheer to the disheartened, a helper to the helpless. They bring light into ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... why was I forced by a stern necessity to leave you? What heinous crime had I committed, that I, who adored you, should be torn from your sacred bosom, to pine out my joyless existence in a foreign clime? Oh, that I might be permitted to return and die upon your wave-encircled shores, and rest my weary head and heart beneath your daisy-covered sod at last! Ah, these are vain outbursts of feeling—melancholy relapses ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... shall have deer meat to eat," he said, as he spread a soft skin by the fire, for the boy to lie on. Then he turned to place the child on the skin,—but no boy was there. He had no son. Only that strange bird perched, joyless and alone, over the fire, on the pole from ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... the season," while the roses are fresh within your hair, and the wine-cup flashes ruby in your hand. Yonder lies Pluto's meagrely-appointed mansion, and filmy shadows of the dead are waiting for you there, to swell their joyless ranks. To that unlovely region you must go, alas! too soon; but the golden present is yours, so drain ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... one who studies this deeply interesting poet that his mind was in the highest degree reverential. No error could have been more fatal to his enjoyment of that equanimity, whose absence he deplores, than to select a creed, at once so joyless and barren in itself, and so ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... were now gone into the mysterious darkness of the next world, meeting there perhaps with all earthly discords forgiven and forgotten more perfectly than they could have been here. She remembered how her father's dull, joyless face used to brighten when Roland was talking to him—talking with slow, unaccustomed fingers, which the dumb man would watch intently, and catch the meaning of the phrase before it was half finished, flashing ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... that, nigh there, I had borne my bitterest loss—when One who went, came not again; In a joyless hour of discord, in a joyless-hued July there - A ...
— Time's Laughingstocks and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... silent; and even along the streets of London, with so many pretty faces to be spied for and dignitaries to be saluted, his trail was marked by little debts "for wine, pictures, etc.," the true headmark of a life intolerant of any joyless passage. He had a kind of idealism in pleasure; like the princess in the fairy story, he was conscious of a rose-leaf out of place. Dearly as he loved to talk, he could not enjoy nor shine in a conversation when he thought ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... of the liquor traffic, the constant insecurity in the means of subsistence and employment which breaks the heart of many a sober, hard-working man, the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers, and, at the other end, the swift increase of vulgar, joyless luxury—here are the enemies of Britain. Beware lest they shatter the foundations of ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... would be at rest at last, and then came the loss of Joseph and inflicted the keenest suffering. Verily, few and evil had been the days of the years of Jacob's pilgrimage, for the time spent outside of the Holy Land had seemed joyless to him. Only the portion of his life passed in the land of his fathers, during which he was occupied with making proselytes, in accordance with the example set him by Abraham and Isaac, did he consider worth while ...
— The Legends of the Jews Volume 1 • Louis Ginzberg
... that he began his nightly duty—the one joy left in his joyless life. Lady Helena and Inez returned to St. John's Wood. And Sir Victor, from his lodgings in Fenton's Hotel, followed his wife home every evening. It was his first thought when he arose in the morning, the one ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... strange weapons underground. The mark, the forest, the hills, were all full for the early Englishman of mysterious and often hostile beings. At length the Weirds or Fates swept him away. Beneath the earth itself, Hel, mistress of the cold and joyless world of shades, at last received him; unless, indeed, by dying a warrior's death, he was admitted to the happy realms of Waelheal. As a whole, the Anglo-Saxon heathendom was a religion of terrorism. Evil spirits surrounded men ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, overwhelmed her with reproaches. For consolation ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... this desire is not so much the outcome of young women's natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from Stonor House and the joyless existence there. ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... angered and hostile 35 towards the beings whom he had formerly exalted in beauty and glory: he created for the traitors a marvelous abode as penalty for their action, namely the pangs of Hell, bitter afflictions; Our Lord called forth that 40 abysmal joyless house of punishment to wait for the outcast keepers of souls.[3] When he knew that it was ready, he enveloped it in eternal night and equipped it with torment, filling it with fire and fearful cold, with fume and red flame: then he commanded ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... seduced into matrimony from this very feeling! How many a man whose hours have passed fleetingly at the pleasant tea-table, or by the warm hearth of some old country-house, going forth into the cold and cheerless night, reaches his far-off home only to find it dark and gloomy, joyless and companionless? How often has the hard-visaged look of his old butler, as, with sleepy eyes and yawning face, he hands a bed-room candle, suggested thoughts of married happiness? Of the perils of propinquity I have already spoken; the risks ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... powerful, and youthful Electoral Prince the people had just joyfully greeted Brandenburg's future, and now from the window of that gray, gloomy, wretched old palace looked out upon them the hopelessness of Brandenburg's present. Like gazing upon embodied care and joyless resignation it was, to behold the Elector's grave, forbidding aspect, and before it the joyous cry upon the people's lips was silenced. They stared up at the window in dumb horror, and only here ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... soon? Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than a fortnight at a time; and he has now been resident eight weeks. If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... the Asyniur and the Vana, were all casting missiles. The Giants threw too far and the Dwarfs could not throw far enough, while the Asyniur and the Vana threw far and wide of the mark. In the midst of all that glee and gamesomeness it was strange to see one standing joyless. But one stood so, and he was of ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... Greek in life was far greater than that of the Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring to a pagan, and "Pax tecum aeterna" is among the commonest of the inscriptions. The life beyond the grave was at best an unreal and joyless copy of an earthly existence, and Achilles told Odysseus that he would rather be the serf of a poor man upon earth than Achilles ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... sad to lose a child, and especially a son," sighed Elizabeth, and involuntarily she thought of Anna, that poor mother whom she had robbed of her son, that he might grow up in eternal joyless imprisonment, that he might be morally murdered, and from a man be ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... however, of this natural aptitude for higher industries, the great mass of the native population are compelled by the present commercial system to remain mere peasants. Even so the cheapness and simplicity of the means of life prevent them from being a joyless race. A plantation cooly generally has two days in the week on ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... when the angel stooped, Whispering, 'Live on! for yet one joyless soul, Void of true faith in human happiness, Waits to be won by thee, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... trials that we have to endure as beginners is a joyless, flat, ungracious condition; a kind of paralysis of the soul, a dreary torpor. When we would approach God—pray to Him—He is nowhere to be found: He has disappeared, and everything to do with finding Him is ...
— The Prodigal Returns • Lilian Staveley
... the play, Zelma was languid, absent, and more unequal than usual. A strange sense of evil, a vague foreboding, haunted her. It was in vain that she said to herself, "What have I, a lonely, disappointed woman, loveless and joyless, to fear of misfortune more,—since death itself were welcome as change, and doubly welcome as rest?" The nameless fear still clung to her, sending cold thrills along her veins, fiercely grasping and holding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... man as he, separate from all others and alone with his life, but to question the Fate that impelled him, now in this tone and now in that? What remained for such unsatisfied, joyless strength but the stern, wild laughter of fiends that the question could not be answered—and the deep wail of Fate, which also is sung in his music, that such strength should have the ruggedness of endurance but not the gracefulness ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... the externals of Mohammedanism, and are sincere in their practice of piety and the obligations of religion and charity; but they have always indulged in the fancies and ideas of the great school of free-thinking philosopher Sofis, whose observance of the ordinances of severe and joyless life ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... same objects: they also saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... spirits, laughing, joking, singing, rejoicing, drumming, and tambourining: his life flying by in a flash of excitement, and his death arriving as a climax of triumph. And, if you please, the playgoer despising the Salvationist as a joyless person, shut out from the heaven of the theatre, self-condemned to a life of hideous gloom; and the Salvationist mourning over the playgoer as over a prodigal with vine leaves in his hair, careering outrageously ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... self-restraint and unwearied toil through all previous life; between the expressed subject and sentiment of home violation, and the expressed subject and sentiment of home love; between the sympathy of audience, given in irreverent and contemptuous rage, joyless as the rabidness of a dog, and the sympathy of audience given in an almost appalled humility of intense, rapturous, and yet entirely reasoning and reasonable pleasure; between these two limits of octave, the reader will find he can class, according to its modesty, usefulness ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... to the will of the believing? Her reflections were not suggested by a shrewd guess. She knew that the lot had been resorted to, and that the letters had been written to Elise and Albert which acquainted them with the result; and the peace of her prayerful soul was rent by the thought that a joyless surrender of human will to a higher was, perhaps, no better than the poor helpless slave's extorted sacrifice. The happiness of the household seemed to Benigna in her keeping. If they had gone lightly seeking the oracle of God, as they ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, No. 23, February, 1873, Vol. XI. • Various
... cheerless is the morn Unaccompanied by thee: Joyless is the day's return Till thy mercy's beams I see: Till thou inward light impart, Glad my eyes and ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... Bursley, he might have affected a little satisfaction. His mother was somewhat hurt. His behaviour caused her to revert in meditation again and again to the futility of Sophia's career, and the waste of her attributes. She had grown old and hard in joyless years in order to amass this money which Cyril would spend coldly and ungratefully, never thinking of the immense effort and endless sacrifice which had gone to its collection. He would spend it as carelessly as though he had picked it up in the street. As the days went by and Constance realized ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... the sympathetic love and tenderness which is the life of little hearts, deprived of the pleasures suited to its state, yet too immature to turn within itself for comfort in its need, its life without and within a dull, joyless, dreary blank—such was poor Harry's, for a shadow dark and terrible rested on his baby heart and home, a something that darkened and deepened day by day, and grew more and more insupportable as the weary time crept on. What it ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... himself has no power to answer prayer, since he long ago passed into a realm of inactivity which is practically indistinguishable from non-existence. There is no atonement for past sin nor escape from its consequences, but by the giving up of being. Buddhism is a pessimistic and joyless religion. Hence it suffers deterioration in competition with the more active systems. Close by Boro Budor, where Buddhism reached its culmination, are the temples of Mendoet and Brambanam, which show a reversion in the popular mind to Hindu Brahmanism. And when the Moslem came, with his doctrine ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... him when he looked at his wife. She had borne him a child—a sweet girl baby, with those great black eyes that always have rather a weird look in the face of infancy; and she would fain have clung to the infant as the hope and consolation of her joyless life. But the vulture is not a domestic bird, and a baby would have been an impediment in the rapid hegiras which Captain Paget and his wife were wont to make. The Captain put an advertisement in a daily paper before the child was a week old; and in less than a fortnight after Mary Anne ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... away all the clouds of superstition, and demonstrate at once that there has been no sun in the firmament during the whole of a cloudy day! Soar like the strong pinioned eagle, make your tour beyond the mists of error and bring us the joyless tidings that there is no clear sky in the heavens. Can you imagine any thing to be more pleasing than the coming of one that brought good tidings? But let us have the worst of it. Show from undoubted authority that there never was such a man ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou
... flowers of joy in the thorny way of man, he gathers them up with thanks: a cheerful thrill quivers through his heart, like the melody of an Aeolian harp; but the earnest duties of life soon claim his attention and his cares. The melodious thrill dies away, and on he must go; on he goes, joyless, cheerless, and cold, every fibre of his heart bent to the earnest duties of the day. But when the hard work of the day is done, and the stress of mind for a moment subsides, then the heart again claims its right, and the tender fingers of our memory gather up again the violets ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... thunder in her ears; the next moment she had snapped with her fingers the ribbon that was cutting into her throbbing throat. He with the torso and those shoulders was seeking her ... how should he know her in that dreary garret, in those joyless habiliments? He would as soon known his Own in that crimson-bodiced, wire-framed ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... so mystified, so angered by her composure, that I scarcely knew what I did. She even turned, with pretty courtesy, to hold the light for me at the crypt steps,—a service that I accepted perforce and with joyless acquiescence in the irony of it. I knew that I did not believe in her; her conduct as to Pickering was utterly indefensible,—I could not forget that; but the light of her eyes, her tranquil brow, the sensitive ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabby and squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Little remains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life from being quite joyless. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... Egyptians, as with many peoples of antiquity, the committing of the seed to the earth assumed the character of a solemn and mournful rite. On this subject I will let Plutarch speak for himself. "What," he asks, "are we to make of the gloomy, joyless, and mournful sacrifices, if it is wrong either to omit the established rites or to confuse and disturb our conceptions of the gods by absurd suspicions? For the Greeks also perform many rites which resemble those of the Egyptians and are observed about the ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... he worked, and the care with which he conserved every smallest particle of ice, Elmer's motto seemed to be: "Haste not, waste not." But he did not appear to derive any great satisfaction from his task, let alone joy. In fact, Elmer seemed to be a joyless individual; one who habitually looked forward to the worst. On his broad face, of the complexion described in police reports as "pasty," melancholy sat enthroned. His nose was flat and broad, and flat and broad were his cheek bones, too. His hair was cut very short everywhere ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... from taking them home; and have left them delighted with their day, the recollection of which will long make them happy. This morning I was pitying those whose lives are obscure and joyless; now, I understand that God has provided a compensation with every trial. The smallest pleasure derives from rarity a relish otherwise unknown. Enjoyment is only what we feel to be such, and the luxurious man feels no longer: satiety ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... for Mesahchie," grumbled a voice, in tones not altogether joyless, and Peelo shoved his broad-cheeked, jovial face for a moment ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... Though a large place, yet was it overly crowded. In one place they found six knights, an unhappy six, three of whom had been imprisoned for many months, two had been made captives within the fortnight and one had joined this joyless ...
— In the Court of King Arthur • Samuel Lowe
... this, ye pupils of Voltaire! From joyless murmur free; Or, let us know, which character Shall ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... course of the river. The postern by which Skeldergate was formerly approached no longer exists; and the few old houses left in the street are disguised in melancholy modern costume of whitewash and cement. Shops of the smaller and poorer order, intermixed here and there with dingy warehouses and joyless private residences of red brick, compose the present a spect of Skeldergate. On the river-side the houses are separated at intervals by lanes running down to the water, and disclosing lonely little plots of open ground, with the ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... idea of what he had done. How COULD he know anything of the black monotony of the life of the man he turned from his door? The "desk's dead wood" and all its hateful slavery, the dull darkened rooms where his mother prosed through endless evenings, the bookless, joyless, hopeless existence that had cramped him all his days rose up before him, as a stretch of unbroken plain may rise before a lost ...
— A Mountain Woman and Others • (AKA Elia Wilkinson) Elia W. Peattie
... of spur and of bridle I tire of my stall to death: My sail flaps joyless and idle For want of ...
— A Dark Month - From Swinburne's Collected Poetical Works Vol. V • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... the deepening night, the memory came to me of the knight of the sorrowful countenance, Don Quixote, blunderingly trying to remould the world, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal. And in these two Spain seemed to be manifest. Far indeed were they from the restless industrial world of joyless enforced labor and incessant goading war. And I wondered to what purpose it would be, should Don Quixote again saddle Rosinante, and what the good baker of Almorox would say to his wife when he looked up from his kneading trough, holding out hands white with dough, to see the knight errant ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... cheer the name of the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar inn. There, with a cup ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... proper treatment of hoof disease in sheep. I suffered keenly from the horse colic and like troubles and from the many hopes and perils of democracy in my childhood. I found the Bible, however, the most joyless book of all, Samson being, as I thought, the only man in it who amounted to much. A shadow lay across its pages which came, I think, from the awful solemnity of my aunt when she opened them. It reminded me of a dark rainy ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... must go, and it had been made quite clear by the Britisher that he should stay. Always outside the Hotel de Ville at 2.30 of an afternoon was this queue of natives, each waiting his turn to be admitted to the joyless sanctum of the Commissaire, there to receive those illegible documents without which no French home is complete. Never before had a British soldier fallen in with them, and, when requested to dismiss, showed signs ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, March 7, 1917. • Various
... or colts, or like most young creatures of the earth, in fact; but that in its babyhood it is as grave and melancholy as in its old age, born apparently with a deep sense of its own ugliness, and a mournful resignation to a long and joyless career. ...
— Harper's Young People, August 3, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... sung Darius great and good, By too severe a fate Fallen, fallen, fallen, fallen, Fallen from his high estate, And weltering in his blood; Deserted at his utmost need By those his former bounty fed, On the bare earth exposed he lies With not a friend to close his eyes. With downcast looks the joyless victor sate, Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of Chance below And now and then a sigh he stole, ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various
... sea-cloud driven; The tempest hissed through all my outstretched boughs, Hither and thither tossed me in its snows, Beneath the joyless heaven. ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... with her cousin, the son of the Count of Artois, made her the natural object of a warmer sympathy than could attach to either of the brothers of Louis XVI. But adversity had imprinted its lines too deeply upon the features and the disposition of this joyless woman for a moment's light to return. Her voice and her aspect repelled the affection which thousands were eager to offer to her. Before the close of the first days of the restored monarchy, it was felt that the Bourbons had brought back ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... way I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... understand it, she forced her lips to sing aloud the Te Deum. Wogan looked at her in surprise as the first notes were sung, and the woful appeal in her eyes compelled him to as brave a show as he could make of joining in the hymn. But the words faltered, the tune wavered, joyless and hollow in ...
— Clementina • A.E.W. Mason
... afraid there is no more irrefragable proof of the unreality of an enormous proportion of the Christian profession of this day than the joyless lives—in so far as their religion contributes to their joy—of hosts of us. We have religion enough to make us miserable, we have religion enough to make us uncomfortable about doing things that we would like to do. We are always haunted by the feeling that we are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... friends was a joyless pleasure. When Mary arrived in Lisbon, she found Fanny in the last stages of her illness, and before she had time to rest from her journey she began her work as sick-nurse. Four hours after her arrival Fanny's child was born. It had been sad ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... forgotten, but now returning as if from their old graves to warn her to prepare a shroud, or, with purpose almost as unwelcome, to exhibit their wrinkles and infirmity and claim her as their companion by the tokens of her own decay. Many a merry night had she danced with them in youth, and now in joyless age she felt that some withered partner should request her hand and all unite in a dance of death to the music of ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... looked. And for the rest of their life they kept on loving each other, but their passion grew gloomy and joyless, like those funeral cypresses whose roots feed on the decay of the graves and whose black summits in a still evening hour seek in vain to reach the sky. Thrown by the unknown forces of life into each other's embraces, they mingled tears with kisses, voluptuous pleasures ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various
... said, there is to me an indescribable pathos in these sombre pictures of Nature in our old Beowulf here, — these drear marshes, these monster-haunted meres, that boil with blood and foam with tempests, these fast-rooted, joyless woods that overlean the waters, these enormous, nameless beasts that lie along on promontories all day and wreak vengeance on ships at night — have you not seen them, headlands running out into the sea like great beasts ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... horrible punishment: leprosy consumed them to the end of time, and the most painful maladies attacked them, to torture them ceaselessly without any hope of release. Those who were fortunate enough to be spared from her rage, dragged out a miserable and joyless existence. They were continually suffering from the pangs of thirst and hunger, and found nothing to satisfy their appetites but clay and dust. They shivered with cold, and they obtained no other garment to protect them than mantles of feathers—the great ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 3 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in joyless and endless ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... to following literally in Christ's footsteps and turning the back on much of the beauty and the thrill of the world, bewilderment will seize the chooser and at the best he will dedicate himself to a joyless and unattractive puritanism, or surrender himself to a rudderless voyage across the ocean of life. Religion at school must touch with its refining power the impulses, aesthetic and intellectual, that become powerful in late boyhood and early manhood. If, as so often is the case, it ignores ...
— Cambridge Essays on Education • Various
... obliged to go as far as Texas before his return; he might be absent a month. Business of a perplexing nature, which it was impossible to explain then, called him from me, but he would shorten as much as possible the days of absence which would be dreary and joyless to him. I was overwhelmed with grief at the thought of his leaving me; my nerves were still weak, and I wept in all the abandonment of sorrow. I feared for him the dangers that beset the path of the traveller—sickness, death; but I feared not for ...
— Ernest Linwood - or, The Inner Life of the Author • Caroline Lee Hentz
... quickly vanished, Have our joyful tongues grown silent? Evil then has been the brewing, Then the beer must be unworthy, That it does not cheer the singer, Does not move the merry minstrel, That the golden guests are joyless, And the cuckoo is not singing. Never will these benches echo Till the bench-guests chant thy virtues; Nor the floor resound thy praises Till the floor-guests sing in concord; Nor the windows join the chorus Till the window-guests ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... fraud and falsehood thou mad'st me thy wife—that shall be forgotten! Five joyless years have I spent in this house— all shall be forgotten from the day when Sigurd ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... begin to guard him too early." Miss Ambient's head drooped a little to one side, and her eyes fixed themselves on futurity. Then suddenly there was a strange alteration in her face; she gave a smile that was more joyless than her gravity—a conscious, insincere smile, and added, "When one has children, it's ...
— The Author of Beltraffio • Henry James
... for me to resume my old familiar intercourse with Holt and Dart I could never write down here. My two years in the tropics had not been joyless—indeed, considering all things, they had been singularly happy years—still, I had felt like a child shut out from the sunshiny place where his mates are playing. I had become patient, contemplative and resigned, and in study and in studious ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... dwell in our hearts. More of us than we are willing to believe are kept from entire surrender to Jesus Christ, by money and worldly possessions; and many professing Christians are kept shrivelled and weak and joyless because they love their wealth more than their Lord, and would think it madness to do as this man was bidden to do. When ballast is thrown out, the balloon shoots up. A general unlading of the 'thick clay' which weighs down the Christian life of England, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren |
