"Pathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... administration. Disregarding all half-measures, he declared that in Responsible Government {57} alone could salvation for the colonies be found. In clarion tones he proclaimed that thus alone could the deep, pathetic, and ill-repaid loyalty of the Canadas be preserved. But the report had still to be acted on. Lord John Russell, the ablest man in the government, had succeeded Lord Glenelg, and in 1839 he made a speech which did indeed mark an advance on the views of his predecessor, but which fell far short ...
— The Tribune of Nova Scotia - A Chronicle of Joseph Howe • W. L. (William Lawson) Grant
... after this de Fonvielle, on a visit to England, had a most pathetic interview with the veteran Charles Green, who was living in comfortable retirement at Upper Holloway. The grand old man pointed to a well-filled portfolio in the corner of his room, in which, he said, were accounts of all his travels, that would require a lifetime to peruse ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon
... and knelt on their floors, and prayed what her sad heart wus full of,—for pity and mercy for her boy, and other mothers' boys,—prayed with that fellowship of suffering that made her sweet voice as pathetic as tears, and patheticker, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... earnest and pathetic entreaties were employed by persons in every rank of society, to prevail on O'Reilly to remit or suspend the execution of his sentence till the royal clemency could be implored. He was inexorable; and the only indulgence that could be obtained, was, that death should be inflicted ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... in arriving, by slow stages and with a cruel wealth of pathetic detail, at a realization of what being eight hundred ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... indeed are in possession of a branch of this art, in which they are dispensed from exhibiting the serious or pathetic; however, they may be otherwise as well acquainted with the fundamental principles of the art, as the best masters. But as their success depends chiefly on awakening the risible faculty, they commonly chuse to throw their whole ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... forlorn," defended Winifred. "But I will admit that the unsuspected longings of some of them are pathetic. Here is a case in point. I had a caller this very afternoon—a woman of middle age who used to work for us. She was in distress because she had received an offer of marriage. From a worldly standpoint she is foolish not to accept the man, for he is worthy of her, and could provide a home. ...
— A Man of Two Countries • Alice Harriman
... exchange of words, left the room and shortly returned with Madame. She paused at the door, darted a frightened look at Firmstone, then one of pathetic appeal to the imperturbable Zephyr. Again her eyes timidly sought Firmstone, who, rising, advanced with outstretched hand. Madame's hands were filled with bundled papers. In nervously trying to move them, in order to accept Firmstone's proffered hand, the bundles ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... persons concerned in it stood as in a picture, absolutely motionless and silent as the dead. Sense, if not feeling, was benumbed in them all, as in another moment it was benumbed in the breasts of these new arrivals. Tragedy was there in its most terrible, its most pathetic, aspect. The pathos was given by the victim,—a young and pretty girl lying face upward on the tessellated floor with an arrow in her breast and death stamped unmistakably on every feature,—the terror by the look and attitude of the woman they ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... signs and symbols, in pictures and parables. Stated briefly, stated vividly, it is that behind the pageant of nature, in it and over it, there is a Supreme Mind which initiates, impels, and controls all. That behind the life of man and its pathetic story in history, in it and over it, there is a righteous Will, the intelligent Conscience of the Most High. In short, that the first and last thing in the universe is mind, that the highest and deepest thing is ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... they were most wretched of all; the poor housewives in their pathetic shabbiness, their faces drawn with child-bearing, their features shrunken with the struggling toil that never ceases nor stays; the young girls in their sallow youth that was not youth, with their hollow mirth and their empty faces, ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... sword, and was with great difficulty prevailed upon to spare their lives and take all their property. Kaab, son of Ashraf, was one of the most violent among the Jews against Mahomet. He had been at Mecca, and, with some pathetic verses upon the unhappy fate of those who had fallen at Beder, excited the Meccans to take up arms. Upon his return to Medina he rehearsed the same verses among the lower sort of people and the women. Mahomet, being told of these underhand ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... lines as pathfinders to their nectaries in some cases, lest a visitor try to thrust in his tongue between the petal-like parts while standing on the outside, and so defeat their well-laid plan. It is almost pathetic to see how bright and spotted they are inside, that the visitor may not go astray. Thus we find the chief pollenizers of the Canada and the Turk's cap lilies to be specialized bees, the interesting upholsterers, ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... the log wall and in it lay the shrivelled little figure of Kirsty's mother propped up with pillows. She was bent and twisted with rheumatism, like a little old tree that had been battered by storms. But her face was brave and bright, and from it shone a pair of brown eyes with a pathetic inquiry in them as of a dumb, uncomprehending creature in pain. She wore a stiff white cap on her thin grey hair, a snowy mutch covered her poor crooked shoulders, and everything about her was beautifully neat and clean, ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith
... borne swiftly away on the saving current, he rose from his hiding-place with despairing gestures of appeal, but though every effort was made to reach him it was in vain, and he, poor man, seeing that his situation was hopeless, signalled to them with pathetic heroism to leave him and save themselves while they could. He was killed a few moments later when the Indians, not knowing of the egress into the garden and believing that all the Spaniards were inside the burning building, came ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... and weeks to do. And it suddenly impressed me as something poignant, as something with the Vergilian touch of tears in it. It seemed so full of history, so vocal of the tragic expedients to which men on the prairie must turn. It seemed pathetic. It brought a lump into my throat. Yet that Joseph's Coat of metal was a neatly done bit of work. All it needed was a coat of paint or two, and it would look less like a crazy-quilt solidified into a homestead. And I suddenly remembered Dinky-Dunk's question called out to Olie from the car-end—and ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... foe. The hair of muzzle, head and paws was matted and plastered with some thick liquid, giving him a curious frowsy appearance. He was evidently in a towering rage but it was also apparent that he was suffering great pain, his ferocious growls being interspersed with long, low, pathetic whines. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... volume, and Mrs Yule read the footnote with that look of slow apprehension which is so pathetic when it signifies the heart's good-will thwarted by the ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... but she cannot tell what she has seen; she has felt, but she cannot express her experience so as to enkindle a like experience in others. These poetical utterances of inarticulate poets are sometimes whimsical but oftener pathetic; sometimes they are like the prattle of little children who exercise their vocal organs before they have anything to say; but oftener they seem to me like the beseeching eyes of a dumb animal, full of affection and entreaty ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... work, in which the students verified for themselves facts which they had hitherto heard about and taught to their unfortunate pupils from books alone. The naive astonishment and delight of the more intelligent among them was sometimes almost pathetic. One clergyman, who had for years conducted classes in physiology under the Science and Art Department, was shown a drop of his own blood under the microscope. "Dear me!" he exclaimed, "it's just like the picture in ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... empty cup on the table and leaned closer to her, smiling. She did not smile in response; instead, her eyes fell and there was the faintest, pathetic quiver ...
— His Own People • Booth Tarkington
... never seen a more pathetic figure than that of poor Nick Goodall as he sat there thrumming the strings of which he was a Heaven-born master. I saw him often after that night—a poor, halfwitted creature, who wandered from inn to inn there in the north country, trading music for hospitality. A thoroughly intelligible sentence ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... way declared that he received an impulse from Miss Edgeworth's example as a story-teller. In the general preface to his own final edition of the Waverley Novels he said that "Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact, which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland—something ...
— Murad the Unlucky and Other Tales • Maria Edgeworth
... Superstition influences them greatly, as it does all savage races. In one respect they are at least superior to some of our own people—I refer to their treatment of their children. Their lovingkindness is pathetic. Contact with civilization, as you may discover, develops at first all their bad qualities, for they are apt imitators, so when the pagan Indian meets a trader without a conscience—and there are some, you know—why, he is not slow to adopt the bad ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... she said plaintively, looking up at him with the long pathetic gaze of a gentle helpless ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... him for a moment, then both hands went out in a mock despairing gesture, and she laughed. But the laugh was unmistakably forced, and a keen ear for such things would have detected a pathetic little ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... in the other corner like seventy—fours, with a squadron of shoes in their wakes, and Wagtail was sitting in the side—berth with his wet night—gown drawn about him, his muscular development in high relief through the clinging drapery, and bemoaning his fate in the most pathetic manner—that can be conceived, our ally Aaron exclaimed, "I say, Tom, how do you like the cut of my Sunday coat, eh?" while our friend Paul Gelid, who it seems had slept through the whole row, was at length ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... bit his lip; then looked at the faces of his two companions. In the Prefect's there was plainly a question. Riette flushed crimson; for a moment her dark eyes were cast down; then there was something both roguish and pathetic in them, as she looked up at the man ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... over the heads and speaking to each in a low voice. The tears were running down her cheeks. Those retained concealed their happiness as best they could, and spoke words of sympathy and encouragement to their less fortunate companions. The warrants were received with a stoicism that was more pathetic than tears. From the far end of the room I heard an unaccustomed sound, and turning, I saw the forewoman, who had dropped into a chair at the forget-me-not table, her face buried in her arms, and sobbing like a child. It was the signal that ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... of the column appears an inscription even more pathetic and poetic, to yet another departed favorite, who seems, not like Tommy to have been gathered to his fathers ripe in years and honors but to have been cut down in the bloom of youth by some untimely and tragic fate. He is all the more ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various
... they originally possessed in their free and untrammeled am[oe]boid stage, just as in the industrial community of the world about us. And, although their industry in behalf of and devotion to the welfare of the entire organism is ever to be relied upon, and almost pathetic in its intensity, yet it has its limits, and when these have been transgressed they are as ready to "fight for their own hand," regardless of previous conventional allegiance, as ever were any of their ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... then furtively they glanced at the boys. Just as furtively the boys were exploring into pockets, but though they brought forth a plentiful salvage of the anomalous treasure usually to be found in school-boys' pockets, the display of "change" was pathetic. Raymond had a quarter, and that was more than anyone ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he leaned (in the Puritan fashion ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... original style; and, like the dying swan, he sings the sweeter as he is approaching the land where the voice of his minstrelsy shall no more be heard. There is a calm melancholy in the close of his present ode which is very pathetic, and almost Shakspearian:— ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the rain, came off the sloppy marsh to stand under the trees, and old Ladrone edged close to the big fire to share its warmth. This caused us to bring in the other horses and put them close to the fire under the big branches of the fir tree. It was deeply pathetic to watch the poor worn animals, all life and spirit gone out of them, standing about the fire with drooping heads and half-closed eyes. Perhaps they dreamed, like us, of the beautiful, warm, grassy hills of ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... moonlight scene; but they slacken to moderato when the nights grow cooler, slower, always slower, and fainter as the chill air creeps through the woods. When the north wind filters coldly through the trees their music thins and dims till it sounds pathetic as the tick of a tall clock in a lonely house at night. But it warms up again with the sunshine next day, keeping time and tune with the varying moods of the final days of the summer. When a dreamy, hazy day is followed by a mellow night and little patches of white moonlight lie dreaming beneath ...
— Some Summer Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... the recent electric messages of Holmes, Whittier, and Mrs. Howe, in not being obvious results of vivid events. "Bread and the Newspaper," "The Song of the Negro Boatmen," and "Our Orders" will reproduce for another generation the fervid feelings of to-day. But the pathetic warnings exquisitely breathed in the writings before us will then come to their place as a deep and tender prelude to the voices heard in this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Taylor referred to so frequently was, as I have said, a cousin of Mary's. Her early death in New Zealand gives the single letter I have of hers a more pathetic interest. ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Across thy walls, the shadow and the light; Around thy lofty pillars, tapers white Illuminate, with delicate sharp flames, The brows of saints with venerable names, And in the night erect a fiery wall, A great but silent fervor burns in all Those simple folk who kneel, pathetic, dumb, And know that down below, beside the Rhine— Cannon, horses, soldiers, flags in line— With blare ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... at Lympne ... I've been left with a new man here and I don't know his name. [He is very pathetic.] I told him to put O'Connell in the library there. I thought that either Farrant or I might ...
— Waste - A Tragedy, In Four Acts • Granville Barker
... Massacre of the Innocents. (This also is much ruined.) Vasari says it was the finest of all. It is very unusual to make this terrible and pathetic scene part of the life of ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... that spot, as if our feet had been shod in lead; and we hugged the edge of the cruel ravine, as one keeps by the side of a friend. We must have been grotesque, pathetic, and lonely; like two people newly arisen from a tomb, shrinking before the strangeness of the half-forgotten face of the world. And at the head ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... is a recognized figure in Germany. Prof. Robert F. Arnold in "Das Moderne Drama" (Strassburg, 1908) ranks him next to Hauptmann. His writings are numerous. A vein, satirical and humorous, with a conception of the pathetic, makes him more than an equal to Mark Twain. In addition he is possessed of a message, which he delivers ...
— Moral • Ludwig Thoma
... wanting in concentration. But it was the outpouring of a very beautiful mind, deeply impressed with the realities of failure in the Church and religion, as well as in human life, full of tenderness and pathetic sweetness, and seeking a vent for its feelings, and relief for its trouble, in calling up before itself the images of God's goodness and kingdom of which nature and the world are full. His poetry is a witness to the depth and ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... flits in and out of this salon, whose fine qualities of soul shine so brightly in this morally stifling atmosphere that one forgets her errors in a mastering impulse of love and pity. There is no more pathetic history in this arid and heartless age than that of Mlle. Aisse, the beautiful Circassian, with the lustrous, dark, Oriental eyes, who was brought from Constantinople in infancy by the French envoy, and ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... A pathetic and ghastly figure Tom must have looked to the fugitive, who stood staring at him, lantern in hand, as if Tom were some ghostly scarecrow dropped from ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... as he spoke, for the expression upon the face of Peter John was a study. Consternation, incredulity, and partial unbelief in what Foster had said were all expressed there, and his entire attitude was so indescribably ludicrous as almost to be pathetic. ...
— Winning His "W" - A Story of Freshman Year at College • Everett Titsworth Tomlinson
... heard him moan when she said this, but for a moment he was silent. He seemed half stunned as if by a heavy blow, but one that he was doing his best to bear. "Tell me so again, Leam. Let me be convinced," he then said with pathetic calmness, looking into her face. "You ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... explanation sounded like some wild dream of an imaginative novelist. Not one person in all the gathering could actually realize that his home might yet be waiting for him, though at the same time he felt a pathetic anxiety for the ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... talked quite freely with us on the way over to where Jim Davis and the other girl were. When we got to near where they were Mary looked up and saw us and exclaimed, "Oh! there's Maggie!" and when they met there was the most pathetic scene ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... Kathleen directly, as she shrank back at sight of him. "That man there," pointing to Miller, "is Karl von Mueller, captain in the Secret Service." A low moan broke from Kathleen, and she looked anywhere but at Miller, who had stepped forward to stand between her and the pine table with its pathetic burden. "Von Mueller," continued ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... dashed it into the face of the unconscious man. It had no effect. "Can he be dead?" she asked herself in horror. He was as pale as his bronzed features could become, and her woman's soul was touched that one who looked so strong, who had been so vital a moment before, should now lie there in pathetic and appealing helplessness. Was that fine, manly face the visage of one of the terrible, bloodthirsty, unscrupulous Yankees? Even as she ran to Aun' Jinkey's cottage for help the thought crossed her mind that the world was not ...
— Miss Lou • E. P. Roe
... seen the green face of God's earth; and the answer of the poor gamin in St. Giles's, who, when he was asked what the country was, answered, "The yard where the gentlemen live when they go out of town"—significant that, and pathetic;—then I wondered whether the time would ever come when society would be far enough advanced to open to even such as he a glimpse, if it were only once a year, of the fresh, clean face of God's earth;—and then I became aware of ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... read so spontaneously appealing a story of Irish life. It breathes the frank open nature, the naive humor of Ulster in every line. One could not imagine a more pathetic, yet withal noble figure than ...
— Changing Winds - A Novel • St. John G. Ervine
... Germans exacted, further, an enormous indemnity for the unjustifiable attack which the French had made upon them. This was fixed at five billion francs, and German troops were to occupy France till it was paid. The French people made pathetic sacrifices to hasten the payment of this indemnity, in order that the country might be freed from the presence of the hated Germans. The bitter feeling of the French for the Germans dates from this war, and the longing for revenge still ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... a singular vitality and realism, and also a distinct interest for those who are "in the know," for Boz himself at the time was a dramatic and interesting figure, and this story of his struggle out of a state of squalid misery is truly pathetic. ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... aware that his eyes were tired and that he was irritable. He remembered it was at this table, at which he now sneered and was so often bored, that he had first eaten with civilized beings in what he had imagined was an atmosphere of high culture and refinement. He caught a glimpse of that pathetic figure of him, so long ago, a self-conscious savage, sprouting sweat at every pore in an agony of apprehension, puzzled by the bewildering minutiae of eating-implements, tortured by the ogre of a servant, striving at a leap to live at such ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... him an authority for the belief they so strenuously and so fiercely uphold. They can do no more than point to the Book of Genesis, or some other portion of the Bible. Profoundly interesting, and indeed pathetic, to me are those attempts of the opening mind of man to appease its hunger for a Cause. But the Book of Genesis has no voice in scientific questions. To the grasp of geology, which it resisted for a time, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... pledged in honour to drop, resigned his office and the leadership of the commons. Grey, who could not have remained in office without the support of Althorp's great popularity in the commons, at once resolved to follow his example, and on July 9 took leave of political life in a dignified and pathetic speech. As for Ward's motion, the original cause of Grey's desertion by Stanley and his subsequent fall, it had been rejected by an enormous majority in favour of "the previous question" before Althorp's disappearance from his old position. Meanwhile Stanley availed himself of his ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... the name of wisdom. If I were a man with an art, there is nothing, I think, that I should feel more called to make war upon; it is a very blow in the face of God. Nothing makes me sadder than to see the life that such people live,—to see for instance how pathetic are the things they call their entertainments; and when one knows himself that life is a magic potion, to be drank with rapture and awe,—that every instance of it ought to be a hymn of rejoicing, and the whole of it rich and full of power, like ...
— King Midas • Upton Sinclair
... pathetic figures at the coronation was that of the widowed Queen-Mother, Alexandra, who had come as a beautiful young girl nearly forty years before from over the sea to marry ...
— The Children's Book of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... reconcile him to a great portion of modern readers—and especially of those who condescend to read this account of him—his attachment to the black-letter was marvelously enthusiastic! Witness his pathetic appeal to the English nation, in the 26th section of his preface to Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle, where he almost predicts the extinction of "right good" literature, on the disappearance of the black-letter! And here let us draw towards the close of these ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... value of this last essay is made by the fact that in its pathetic statement of uncertainties and probabilities one can discern something very much resembling a declaration of faith. Though assured that we have yet no foundation for any belief in the persistence of consciousness after the death of ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... before it. They both presented themselves; and the king answered to his name, when called: but the queen, instead of answering to hers rose from her seat, and throwing herself at the king's feet, made a very pathetic harangue, which her virtue, her dignity, and her misfortunes rendered the more affecting. She told him, that she was a stranger in his dominions, without protection, without council, without assistance; exposed to all the injustice which her enemies ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... an empty box toward him by the simple expedient of hooking his toes behind the corner, and sat down. He set his elbows on his thighs and buried his face in his hands. His hat dropped off his head and lay crown down beside him. He made a pathetic figure of miserable manhood, of strength mistreated. His fine, brown hair fell in heavy locks down over his fingers that rested on his forehead. Five minutes so, and he lifted his head and glanced around him apathetically. "Gee-man-ee, I've got a headache!" ...
— Cabin Fever • B. M. Bower
... 1730, while on a visit to Copenhagen, he heard that the Lutheran Missionary Hans Egede, who for years had been laboring single handed to convert the Eskimos of Greenland, was sorely in need of help; and Anthony, the negro body-servant of a Count Laurwig, gave him a most pathetic description of the condition of the negro slaves ...
— The Moravians in Georgia - 1735-1740 • Adelaide L. Fries
... quarter. But still it lives—it grows. It grows wildly, rudely, ungracefully; but it is strong and tough, in consequence of its exposure and its trials. Its vitality increases with every collision which shakes and rends it; until, in the pathetic language of relatives unhappily burdened with such encumbrances, "it ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... possible to take a few, but care has been taken to attempt to show the enormous versatility of Chesterton's mind. It has been said quite wrongly that Chesterton cannot describe pathos. This is certainly untrue. He can so admirably describe humour that he cannot help knowing the pathetic, which is often so akin to humour. I am not sure that this ability to describe the melancholy is not to be seen in one of these essays that narrates how he travelled in a train in which there was a dead man whose ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... party ate breakfast before day, by the light of a candle covering its candlestick with a tallow glacier. It made only a hole of shine in the general duskiness of the big dining-room. The landlady bade them a pathetic good-by. She was sure there were dangers ahead of them. The night stage had got in three hours late, owing to a breakdown, and one calamity she said, is ...
— Old Caravan Days • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... men and women of superb intellectual and physical equipment is one of the sad and serious marvels of human history. What a pathetic and significant roll might be made of those who have been great intellectually and pitiful failures morally! It has often been affirmed that Hannibal might have conquered Rome, and been the master of the world except for the fatal winter ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... as Mather said, they could not endure the yoke; and, indeed, it would seem natural enough that any such wild child of the forests should flee away from the cramped atmosphere of a Puritan household and house. We read pathetic accounts of the desertion of aged colonists by their Indian servants. One writes that he took his "Pecod girle" as a "chilld of death" when but two years old, had reared her kindly, nursed her in sickness, and now she had run away from him when he sorely needed her, and he wished to buy a blackamoor ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... bands, poured in upon him. He burned with angry blushes when his mother, smiling meaningly, passed them over to him. "Put them away, mother; I don't want them," he would growl out, in a distress that was half comic and half pathetic. He would never taste of the tempting viands which were brought to him. "How you act, Thomas!" his mother would say. She was secretly elated by these feminine libations upon the altar of her son. They did not grate upon her sensibilities, ...
— Evelina's Garden • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... about it, and yet it is irresistible. But then Ruskin had the charm, and managed to pour it into all that he wrote. He is always there, that whimsical, generous, perverse, affectionate, afflicted, pathetic creature, even in the smallest scrap of a letter or the dreariest old tag of quotation. But you and I can't play tricks like that. You are sometimes there, I confess, in what you write, while I am never there in anything that I write. What I want ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... as being pathetic," said Lucian, who liked to show that he was not deficient in sensibility. "One can picture the innocent faith of the poor woman in her ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... West met in deadly conflict, when the Roman armies under Sulla defeated the Asiatic hosts of Mithridates. Such was the landscape spread out before me on one of those farewell autumn days of almost pathetic splendour, when the departing summer seems to linger fondly, as if loth to resign to winter the enchanted mountains of Greece. Next day the scene had changed: summer was gone. A grey November mist hung low on the hills which only yesterday had shone resplendent ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... supreme or Christ-like instinct of the human race, and it has been accorded the glory which is its due, but the unsung song of father love is a more pathetic incident of this strenuous age than we are apt to believe. America is building a breed of men with a dual passion, the passion for riches, and the passion to protect. The one is a wrong ideal, the other is a wrong principle. Ask any of the ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol. 3 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... and judgment mixed in thorough other(315) in their complaint. They do not so fix their eyes upon their desolate estate of captivity, as to forget their provocations. Many a man would spend more affection, and be more pathetic in the expression of his misery, when it is pungent, nor he can do when he speaketh of his sins. We would observe, from the nature of this confession, something to be a pattern of your repentance. And it is ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... (I feel no delicacy in alluding to him, for I know that he is not in the room, having got out far short of Birmingham), who expressed himself most mournfully as to the ruinous effects and rapid spread of railways, and was most pathetic upon the virtues of the slow-going old stage coaches. Now I, entertaining some little lingering kindness for the road, made shift to express my concurrence with the old gentleman's opinion, without any great compromise of principle. Well, we got on tolerably ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... received your American Bill of so many pounds sterling for the Revolution Book, with a "pathetic feeling" which brought "tears" to her eyes. From beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. I would only the Book were an Epic, a Dante, or undying thing, that New England might boast in after times of this feat of hers; and put ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the ship to the wharf, in one of the little sailboats then used for the purpose, rather because of later experiences than because of the first one. I have no purpose here to write a history of those busy days, filled as they were with absorbing interest, with much that was pathetic and not a little that was amusing. I have seen that morning picture many times since, but never less beautiful, never less impressive. Nowadays, it is lost to most travellers because the crossing from Key West is made in the daytime, the boat reaching Havana ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... the oppressive rates of the railway and the monopoly of the groups of middlemen who form close combinations where the stream of produce narrows to a neck on its flow to the consumer. The position of the American farmer, crushed between the upper and the nether mill-stone of monopoly, is one of pathetic impotence. ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson
... contract, but a "mystery" of the Christian religion. By the law of God it could not be so annulled as to permit of the re-marriage of the parties. "Our Lord," he says, "has emphatically told us that, at and from the beginning, marriage was perpetual, and was on both sides single." He dwelt with pathetic force on the injustice between man and woman of the proposed legislation, which would entitle the husband to divorce from an unfaithful wife, but would give no corresponding protection to the woman; and predicted the gloomiest consequences to the conjugal ...
— The Grand Old Man • Richard B. Cook
... fighting for the sake of no cause but his own vanity. Most of the action takes place in Brussels—a Brussels placarded with squibs against CARDINAL GRANVILLE; and the final retreat of WILLIAM, ruined in everything except his spirit, to join the army of the PRINCE DE CONDE, has a pathetic significance to-day that not many historical romances can claim. Miss MARJORIE BOWEN has a remarkable gift for the presentation of a number of lifelike portraits against a vivid and gorgeous background, and the successive pictures of ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 25, 1914 • Various
... that Daniel, whom at the outset his contemporaries had praised with wide consent, and who never wrote a loose or unscholarly line, came to pen, in the dedicatory epistle prefixed to his tragedy of "Philotas," these words—perhaps the most pathetic ever uttered by an artist upon ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Manco Inca is one of the most pathetic in South American history. Although our author describes some of the events in the young Inca's life, I will give a brief resume ...
— An Account of the Conquest of Peru • Pedro Sancho
... ebbed, and left me musing on the strange morality of the spectacle. Here was justice unswerving yet compassionate,— forcing knowledge of a crime by the pathetic witness of its simplest result. Here was desperate remorse, praying only for pardon before death. And here was a populace—perhaps the most dangerous in the Empire when angered—comprehending all, touched by all, satisfied with the contrition and the shame, and filled, not with wrath, ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... violoncello—is listened to in profound silence, with a low murmur of applause at the end of each movement. Then perhaps comes a little vocalism—sternly classic though—an aria from Gluck, or a solemn and pathetic song from Mendelssohn: the performer being either a well-known concert-singer, or a young lady—very nervous and a little uncertain—who, it is whispered, is 'an Academy girl;' a pupil, that is, of the institution in question. Sometimes, but not often—for ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... well-loved sister of his college enemy. How will this complication work out? An interesting series of movements and counter-movements immediately becomes possible, and any number of amusing or pathetic circumstances may arise to bring about the denouement—which simply means the ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... A pathetic love story of a young girl, Rosemary. The teacher of the country school, who is also master of the vineyard, comes to know her through her desire for books. She is happy in his love till another woman comes into his ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... of this pathetic appeal. He was holding on to the utmost of his strength. He could not have added another pound to the pull. He dared not even renew either his attitude, or the grip he had upon the rope. The slightest movement he might make would endanger the life ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... so strong was the contagion of this association that cottagers themselves began to throw away their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these plants, so detestable in combination. And to this day one can see often in cottage gardens pathetic imitations of a taste that never was real and which now is discredited among the rich, so that a border of lobelias, calceolarias, and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as it was once one of social superiority. But what it ...
— Progress and History • Various
... the shadows of the woods where the trees grow close and high, we step into charming wild gardens full of lilies, orchids, heathworts, roses, etc., with colors so gay and forming such sumptuous masses of bloom, they make the gardens of civilization, however lovingly cared for, seem pathetic and silly. Around the great fire-mountains, above the forests and beneath the snow, there is a flowery zone of marvelous beauty planted with anemones, erythroniums, daisies, bryanthus, kalmia, vaccinium, cassiope, saxifrages, etc., forming one continuous garden fifty or sixty ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... throngs the stately rooms of the Academy, not to think of the poor lodging and the shabby studio, and the easel, the rejected picture, the subject of so much labour, the spring of so many hopes, which was expected to win bread, if not fame, for the painter." Perfectly true, but oh, how pathetic! to those, like myself, "whose office carries them behind the scenes." It is pleasant to keep friendly with those Royal Academicians and their friends and worshippers—that "festive and fashionable crowd"—and to be on good terms with the givers of banquets and the pets of Society; but I care little ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... however, how much there is in the book to which unstinted admiration can be given! As "Pickwick" first fully exhibited the humorous side of Dickens' genius, so "Oliver Twist" first fully exhibited its tragic side;—the pathetic side was to come somewhat later. The scenes at the workhouse; at the thieves' dens in London; the burglary; the murder of poor Nancy; the escape and death of the horror-haunted Sikes,—all are painted with a master's hand. And the book, like ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... of wit could not produce the least brightening effect upon his saturnine countenance, or the most pathetic burst of eloquence draw the least moisture to his eye, which only became animated when contradicting some well-received opinion, or discussing the merits of an acquaintance, and placing his faults and follies in the ...
— The Monctons: A Novel, Volume I • Susanna Moodie
... on for ten minutes, praising him up to the skies, and ending up with a pathetic appeal that he should manifest his presence. It may be that I puffed him up so that he burst, but, however that may be, he would not condescend to reply, and I ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... cormorants, and has gained the name of "Cormorant Rock." There were three of these birds on it one very rough day, and we saw a scene enacted which—with due apologies to the late Rev. Charles Kingsley for thus adapting his pathetic verses—we have commemorated in the following ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... rises to her nostrils as from a charnel house—her own fate, which she foresees at hand, begins to overpower her—her mood softens, and she enters the palace, about to become her tomb, with thoughts in which frantic terror has yielded to solemn and pathetic resignation: ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... that for the second time the proud little lady before me saw herself left and neglected for the sake of that woman whose presence made even a convent uninhabitable to her; and the bitter wound that her pride suffered was declared in her bearing and in the pathetic effort at dignity which she had summoned up to hide her pain. Yet, although on this account I was sorry for her, I discerned nothing beyond hurt pride, and was angry at the pride for the sake of Marie Delhasse, and when I spoke it was in defense of Marie Delhasse, and not in comfort ...
— The Indiscretion of the Duchess • Anthony Hope
... we laugh at a public speaker who sneezes just at the most pathetic moment of his speech? Where lies the comic element in this sentence, taken from a funeral speech and quoted by a German philosopher: "He was virtuous and plump"? It lies in the fact that our attention is suddenly recalled from the soul to ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... cultivated the gift by diligent practice. As the sight of a tendrilled vine suggests the need and fitness of a trellis, and a stray glove invariably brings to mind the thought of its absent fellow, so every disengaged spinster of marriageable age was an appeal—pathetic and sure—to the dear woman's helpful sympathy, and her whole soul went out in compassion over such "nice" and an appropriated bachelors as crossed her orbit, like blind ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... over the Atlantic in an aeroplane if it were a means of uniting her with the man who was the only masculine human in existence so far as she was concerned—the man whom she had singled out and adopted from among the millions of his kind. When they met the union was pathetic, but it was lovely. To make a woman happy, who loves you like this, should be the consummation of a ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... there by lights, rise against the orange sky, and the president's tall figure, conspicuous in white clothes, in front of the arch. His attendants had vanished, he stood motionless, as if brooding, and Kit thought he looked pathetic and lonely. He afterwards remembered his ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... appeals of the learned gentleman (Mr. Pendleton) are concerned, in his pathetic winding up, I will be willing to take my chance, when we all moulder in the dust. He may have his epitaph written, if it be truly written, 'Here rests the ablest and most pertinacious defender of Slavery, and opponent of Liberty;' and I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... remnants of tower and battlement, which afford footing to the wild vine on the Alpine promontory, form but a small part of the great serration of its rocks; and yet it is just that fragment of their broken outline which gives them their pathetic power, and historical majesty. And this element among the wilds of our own country I found wholly wanting. The Highland cottage is literally a heap of gray stones, choked up, rather than roofed over, with black peat and withered heather; the only approach to an effort at decoration ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... the surrounding country crowding about the man whom they hailed as their deliverer, and in their enthusiastic adoration trying to touch so much as the hem of his garment. The picture is history in showing what actually happened and it is pathetic history in recalling how great were the hopes that came to the coloured people from the success of the North and from the certainty of the end of slavery. It is sad to recall the many disappointments that during the forty years since the occupation of Richmond have hampered the ...
— Abraham Lincoln • George Haven Putnam
... were running swiftly through Time's glass; she had often felt it in these latter days; and, like Giles, she felt it doubly now after the solemn and pathetic reminder in her father's communication. Her freshness would pass, the long-suffering devotion of Giles might suddenly end—might end that very hour. Men were so strange. The thought took away from her all her former reticence, and made her action bold. She started from her seat. ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... remarked, with his usual pointed severity, 'Here is a man telling the world what the world had all his life been telling him.' His 'Monody' expresses real grief in an artificial style, but has some stanzas as natural in the expression as they are pathetic in the feeling. ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... her heart at his words. But he had already seen the blush, and caught that expression of happiness in her blue eyes which suddenly made her look as she did of old—five years ago—before that wan, pathetic expression of resignation had altered her sweet ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... was doled forth, which seemed quite refreshing to Sam's pathetic vein, as he sang in his most ...
— Oldtown Fireside Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... pathetic interest for me," said Reginald: "they remind me of one's childhood that one goes through, wondering what the next course is going to be like—and during the rest of the menu one wishes one had eaten more of the hors d'oeuvres. Don't you love watching the ...
— Reginald • Saki
... complexion, large, unusually lustrous dark eyes, fringed by long soft lashes, an almost dark rose-tint on her cheeks. And in the look which she gave him there was something as soft as her eyes, which were those of a shy animal—something appealing, pathetic. He glanced hastily at her attire—simple, even to plainness—and wondered who she was, and what was her exact status in that big house, which seemed to require the services of a ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... With these pathetic words, which were addressed to something outside the door about two feet six from the ground, Mr. Weller introduced a very small boy firmly set upon a couple of very sturdy legs, who looked as if nothing could ever knock him down. Besides having a very round face ...
— Master Humphrey's Clock • Charles Dickens
... tragedian, with an exquisite intuition of art, made Virginius convey his vague presentiment, not admitted but quickly thrust aside, of some unknown doom of peril and agony. There was, in fact, more heart in that single piece of acting than in any hundred of the most pathetic performances of the "natural" school; and all the time it was maintained at the lofty level of classic grace. It would be impossible to overstate the excellence of all that McCullough did and said, in the forum scene—the noble severity of the poise, the grace of the outlines, ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... rested. She was sitting at the foot of a big elm-tree, with her back resting against its trunk and her hands loosely clasped round her knees. She was very young, and the forlorn droop of her figure and the pathetic expression that was at that moment depicted upon her face made her look even younger than her ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... to us the horrible condition of his mind, which, he said, was nearly distracted: and though he charged us to make him odd solemn promises of secrecy on so strange a subject, yet when we waited on him one morning, and heard him, in the most pathetic terms, beg the prayers of Dr. Delap [the Rector of Lewes] who had left him as we came in, I felt excessively affected with grief, and well remember my husband involuntarily lifted up one hand to shut his mouth, from provocation at hearing a man so widely proclaim ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... times, I fancy. One lump, thanks." There was another, not of sugar, in his throat and he knew it, and his fine blue eyes and thin, sad face were pathetic enough to move any woman's heart had not Miss Ray been ...
— Ray's Daughter - A Story of Manila • Charles King
... home would have been delightful if it had not been for the sad fact that Mrs. Watson had left her parasol in the carriage, and it had been wet, and somewhat stained by the india-rubber blanket which had been thrown over it for protection. Her lamentations were pathetic. ...
— Clover • Susan Coolidge
... the corners of the eyes to the corners of the mouth a deep channel of tears. The snow lighted up the corpse. Winter and the tomb are not adverse. The corpse is the icicle of man. The nakedness of her breasts was pathetic. They had fulfilled their purpose. On them was a sublime blight of the life infused into one being by another from whom life has fled, and maternal majesty was there instead of virginal purity. At the point of one of the nipples was a ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... his best works with the two selections which precede it. Which of the three stories is the most interesting to you? Which sounds the best when read aloud? Which is the most humorous? Which is the most pathetic? ...
— Eighth Reader • James Baldwin
... a patient whose nervous system was in a deplorable state, who had lost almost complete mental control of herself, and who really presented a pathetic spectacle as she told of the fears and worries that enthralled her. In an effort to get to the bottom of this patient's heredity I had a conference with her father, and I learned that this woman, in her childhood days, had been ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... person, to the onlooker, the helplessness of the woman who is at the head of the home, her inability to cope with her domestic difficulties, is often comic, sometimes pathetic, sometimes almost tragic. The publications of the day have caricatured the situation until it has become an outworn jest. The present system of housekeeping can no longer stand. One of two things must occur. Either the housewife must adopt business principles in ruling her ...
— Wanted, a Young Woman to Do Housework • C. Helene Barker
... in a belated appearance this afternoon in order to make a dramatic exit. But the performance lacked spontaneity. Indeed honourable Members, even while they laughed, were, I think, a little saddened by the sight of this elderly gentleman's pathetic efforts ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, August 1, 1917. • Various
... and his friend Horace Walpole, and Horace's friend, Miss Berry - whom by the way I too knew and remember. One saw the 'poor society ghastly in its pleasures, its loves, its revelries,' and the redeeming vision of 'her father's darling, the Princess Amelia, pathetic for her beauty, her sweetness, her early death, and for the extreme passionate tenderness with which her father loved her.' The story told, as Thackeray told it, was as delightful to ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... Socrates was that of a satyr and buffoon, but his soul was all virtue, and from within him came such divine and pathetic things, as pierced the heart, and drew tears from the hearers.—Plato, Symp., ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... wanderings (which had a diameter of, say, three thousand miles), in the same way as an eccentric character is known to a whole countryside. For instance, in Bankok, where he found employment with Yucker Brothers, charterers and teak merchants, it was almost pathetic to see him go about in sunshine hugging his secret, which was known to the very up-country logs on the river. Schomberg, the keeper of the hotel where he boarded, a hirsute Alsatian of manly bearing and an irrepressible retailer of all the scandalous ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... descriptions, expositions, and plot interests they should be tested for their emotional effects. Students should go through their themes, and by making the proper changes give in some cases a humorous and in others a pathetic or tragic effect. These few suggestions are given to emphasize the facts that no one conceives a story in all its details in a moment of inspiration, and that there is a way of proceeding that passes in logical gradations from ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... demanded, for sex-unions, ancestor-worship made the position of the father secure. He alone could pass on the name and inheritance, the family worship and the dutiful service of his forefathers, to the children yet to be. The Greek poem before referred to shows in the pathetic attempt of Electra, the loyal daughter of the slain Agamemnon, to offer the required sacrifices at her father's grave, and her joy that the return of the son could make such sacrifices valid for peace of the ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... would like to hear a few of them there and then, but before I had got well started a hollow Society man came up and suggested supper, and she was compelled to leave me. As she disappeared, however, in the throng, she looked back over her shoulder with a glance half pathetic, half comic, that I understood. It said, "Pity me, I've got to be bored by this vapid, shallow creature," ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... Hospitality! unclose thy bounty-laden hand In generous dealing, where Is gathered in reunion each long-severed household band, And let no vacant chair Show where the strongest, brightest link In love's dear chain is broken— A symbol more pathetic than By language ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... say, to your satisfied soul, "Yes, it is the real thing!" and then all at once a sense of that Northern sky strikes in upon you, and makes the reality a mere picture. The sky is blue, the sun is often fiercely hot; you could not perhaps prove that the pathetic radiance is not an efflux of your own consciousness that summer is but hanging over the land, briefly poising on wings which flit at the first dash of rain, and will soon vanish in long retreat before the snow. But somehow, from without or from within, that ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... poems are:—The Song of the Shirt, The Bridge of Sighs and the Dream of Eugene Aram. In the latter years of his life—which was one of prolonged suffering—he was editor of The New Monthly Magazine. As a punster he is unrivalled, and some of his serious poems are exquisitely tender and pathetic. In all his works a rich current of genial humour runs, and his pleasant wit, ripe observation and sound sense have made him an ornament to English literature. ...
— The Canadian Elocutionist • Anna Kelsey Howard
... environment—and necessity, and of that something else which made of him at times a man with a soul, and at others a brute with the heart of a devil. In this story of Bram, and the girl, and the other man, Bram himself should not be blamed too much. He was pathetic, and yet he was terrible. It is doubtful if he really had what is generally regarded as a soul. If he did, it was hidden—hidden to the forests and the wild things that ...
— The Golden Snare • James Oliver Curwood
... to England was poison to Ireland, and even honest Englishmen, hypnotised by the economists of the day, were unable to perceive this plain truth. Let me give another illustration. The capital exploit of Union Economics was, as has been said, its dealing with the land question, but perhaps its most pathetic fallacy was the policy with which it met the Great Famine. Now the singular thing about this famine is that during it there was no scarcity of food in Ireland; there was ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... dark in the old man's room. He was a small and pathetic figure under the covers. He was utterly defiant. He was irreconcilable, to ...
— Attention Saint Patrick • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... that, after all, some one had guessed and pitied.... And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionate insight, would not have understood that. To the boy, no doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces. But was it really no more? For a long time Archer sat on a bench in the Champs Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... deep was the interest which moved them to speak, and, in a measure, they had my sympathy; yet such interest was mystery rather than fact, theoretical rather than practical. I could fill these pages with pathetic and humorous sayings heard in the camps, for my memory peculiarly exerted itself to retain—or rather, I should say, spontaneously retained—what I saw and heard; saw and heard with the least emotion, perhaps, ever experienced by a soldier. Absorbed in reflections on what I heard, and in fancies ...
— Who Goes There? • Blackwood Ketcham Benson
... fell they could hear old Molly bellowing with pathetic monotony for her calf that had been taken from her. Yesterday she had been so proud, so happy. She had had such a hard time bringing it into the world, too. Martin had been obliged to tie a rope to its protruding legs and ...
— Dust • Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius
... woman's observations about the turkey roaster did prevent a complete and care-free enjoyment of the meal. Certainly there were other turkey roasters in Hooker's Bend than Mrs. Arkwright's. Cissie might very well own a roaster. It was absurd to think that Cissie, in the midst of her almost pathetic struggle to break away from the uncouthness of Niggertown, would stoop to—Even in his thoughts ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling
... as much from the United Liberal Cabinet, but at a cost both to her and to England. Meanwhile we are to have a House of Commons incapable of conducting public business; the tradesmen to whom the Times addressed pathetic condolences on the loss of their season will lose more than one; and we shall be made sensible that we have an enemy in our midst, until a people, slow to think, have taken counsel of their native generosity to put trust in the most generous ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... with the predominating impressionistic character of the gallery. The Puvis de Chavannes gives one a very fine idea of the idealistic outlook of this greatest of all modern decorators. His art is so genuinely decorative that to see one of his pictures in a frame seems almost pathetic, when we think how infinitely more beautiful it would look as part of a wall. Eugne Carrire is very well represented by a stately portrait of a lady with a small dog. Carrire's mellow richness is entirely his own and rarely met with in any ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... childish games. I was a solemn looking little thing and wore my hair bobbed and tied up with a ribbon. I never cried about the things that most children cry over, but I would stand in the wings and weep by the hour over the pathetic parts of the different plays we put on. Father was a character man in a stock company. We lived in New York City and I used to frequently go to the theatre with him. My father wished me to become a professional, but my mother was opposed to it. When ...
— Grace Harlowe's Second Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... letter slowly; it was a very artful letter, most pathetic, and sprinkled with drops which might have been tears. The writer spoke despondingly of her loneliness and her desolation, and the fears she endured when by herself in the house at night, knowing there was a camp of blacks in the corner paddock, and so many rough cattlemen ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... from the stage opened, and in came Nell. There was something sadly beautiful and pathetic in her face. She had enjoyed but now one of the grandest triumphs known to the theatre, and yet she seemed oblivious to the applause and bravas, to the lights and to ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... dear and offers to hug me, and I've got the loveliest relatives in the world—you can ask them if you don't believe me," and Frank managed to look very pathetic ...
— The Outdoor Girls on Pine Island - Or, A Cave and What It Contained • Laura Lee Hope
... was the poor pathetic Louise of Prussia. Bean had already fallen in love with her face, observed in advertisements of the Queen Quality Shoe. He recalled the womanly dignity of the figure descending the shallow steps, the arch accost of the soft eyes, the dimple in the round ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... a year or two past—she glanced at him askance from head to foot, and then she said: "Why, yas. Dat is, I s'pose, of co'se, you's de sample. I'd order a full-size by you in a minute." This was cruel, and seeing the pathetic look come into his face, she instantly repented of it, and walked home from church with him, dismissing a handsome black fellow, and saying only kind things to ...
— The Speaker, No. 5: Volume II, Issue 1 - December, 1906. • Various
... prison. This it was that saddened the souls of the two children with a gloom which no sunshine could dispel. When on Fridays Ephraim returned, fatigued and weary from his work, to the home over which Viola presided with such pathetic housewifely care, no smile of welcome was on her face, no greeting on his. Ephraim, 'tis true, told his sister where he had been, and what he had done, but in the simplest words there vibrated that tone of unutterable ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: German (V.2) • Various
... touched by the unspeakably pathetic monument than any of the others who reverently surrounded it; for he remembered how narrowly he, too, had escaped a fate akin to that of the martyr before whose statue he had unexpectedly wandered. As he followed the path toward the exit from the cemetery, he again saw himself on the ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... of the evening came, when the English guest, in obedience to a call, if not a command, from his host, sang an English ballad. Lancey had a sweet and tuneful voice, and was prone to indulge in slow pathetic melodies. The black Pasha turned out to be intensely fond of music, and its effect on his emotional spirit was very powerful. At the first bar of his guest's flowing melody his boisterous humour vanished: his mouth and eyes partly opened with a look of pleased surprise; ...
— In the Track of the Troops • R.M. Ballantyne
... looked upon the attenuated creature, with a morose reflection of his loss, the latter, with a rebellion which she could not control, selected with trembling fortitude a thick slice of bread, which she buttered liberally and began to devour with pathetic haste, despite the rebuking gleam of the rat eyes opposite, an episode which, added to his already perturbed mind, exasperated his brutal temper to the point of snarling remonstrance, which was fortunately denied its utterance by the opportune arrival of the Sepoy, who ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... student on midwifery duty in London slums, I had occasion to observe that among the women of the poor, and more especially in those who had lost the first bloom of youth, modesty consisted chiefly in the fear of being disgusting. There was an almost pathetic anxiety, in the face of pain and discomfort, not to be disgusting in the doctor's eyes. This anxiety expressed itself in the ordinary symptoms of modesty. But, as soon as the woman realized that I found nothing disgusting in whatever was proper and necessary ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... at first appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... the most pathetic, beautiful, and typical scenes in Irish legend is the return of Ossian from Tir-nan-Og, and his interview with St. Patrick. The old faith and the new, the old order of things and that which replaced it, meet in two of the most ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... "This is pathetic," said Senator Warfield, still speaking to Hawkins. "Her father—if he is her father—is sick and not able to take care of her. We'll have to assume the responsibility ourselves, I'm afraid, Hawkins. She may harm ...
— Sawtooth Ranch • B. M. Bower |
