"Wretchedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... abandon'd on the world's wide stage, And doom'd in scanty poverty to roam. My tender wife, sweet soother of my care, Struck with sad anguish at the stern decree, Fell, ling'ring fell, a victim to despair, And left the world to wretchedness and me. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... "Wretchedness. Yes, Mademoiselle, my outset in life was hard. I am without relations. Mother Marechal, a kind fruiterer of the Rue Pavee au Marais, found me one morning by the curbstone, rolled in a number of the Constitutionnel, like an old pair of boots. The good woman took me home, brought me ...
— Serge Panine, Complete • Georges Ohnet
... contrasts between persons and in public affairs make their appearance. A king comes on the stage who in the plenitude of enjoyment and power is brought by overhasty confidence in his nearest kin to the extremest wretchedness into which men can fall. We see the heir to a throne who, dispossessed of his rights by his own mother and his father's murderer, is directed by mysterious influences to take revenge. We have before ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... is such evil in the present, it inevitably brings its contingent of wretchedness; and it is therefore the business of all such as could become the forerunners of a better state of things to refuse to follow the lead of their inferiors. Exactly because the majority is still so hopelessly wasteful ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... listen, in spite of his heartache. But he always changed the subject as soon as possible, and he limited his own letters to her to the briefest and most infrequent epistles possible. For, to Jimmy, a Pollyanna that was not his was nothing but a source of pain and wretchedness; and he had been so glad when the time came for him to leave Beldingsville and take up his studies again in Boston: to be so near Pollyanna, and yet so far from her, he had found ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... community. There is a multitude of unobserved influences which the Sabbath exerts upon the temporal welfare of men. It promotes the spirit of good order and harmony; it elevates the poor from want; it transforms squalid wretchedness; it imparts self-respect and elevation of character; it promotes softness and civility of manners; it brings together the rich and the poor upon one common level in the house of prayer; it purifies and strengthens the social affections, and makes the family ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... "Cho-co-co-cao," while a third earnestly exhorted, "Joao corta pao!" ("John, cut wood!"). Tree frogs and crickets clacked and drummed and hoo-hooed, guaribas poured their awful discord into the air, and on one bright breathless night there sounded over and over a call freighted with wretchedness and despair—the wail of that lonely owl known to the bushmen as "the mother of the moon," whose dreadful cry portends evil ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... weak, In all the stages of our mortal round From lisping; infancy to palsied age, By all the ways to human frailty known, Enter that vale of shadows, deep and still, Leaving behind their pomp and power and wealth, Leaving their rags and wretchedness and want, And cast-off bodies, dust to dust returned, By flames consumed or moldering to decay, While here the real character appeared, All shows, hypocrisies and shams cast off, So that a life of gentleness and love Shines through the face and molds ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... importunity was troublesome, and their appearance offensive: the eruptive disease which covered their skin, especially on the legs, most exposed to the heat of their fires, added to their squalor and wretchedness. They are thus described by the Rev. Mr. Horton: he saw them at Pittwater, crouching round their fires, and entirely naked—a ...
— The History of Tasmania , Volume II (of 2) • John West
... cousin, had he exhibited kindness, and generous sympathy for herself, she might still have been won back to duty. But now, Thornton's words and sneers, however deserved she might have felt them to be, caused her to contrast the wretchedness of a continued life with him with what it might be. Thus far she had been agitated by indecision and scruples, they should henceforth trouble her no more. She was fully resolved, even more than when she ...
— Hubert's Wife - A Story for You • Minnie Mary Lee
... resorts, taking their Sunday outing, or in the fourth-class carriages of the railway trains, or their children in the schools, show a high level of comfort in their clothing. There is poverty and wretchedness in Berlin, of which later, but in no great city even in America, does the mass of the people give such an air of being comfortably clothed ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... that had I possessed the advantages bestowed on my cousin and his companion, they would not have prevented delusions, all the more perilous, perhaps, because I should have been more confident. However, at the time of which I am speaking, I was wretched, and believed that my wretchedness was entirely due to deficiencies and weaknesses, from which my friends were free. No sorrow of genius is greater than the daily misery of the man with no gifts, who is not properly equipped, and has desires out of all proportion ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... on in silence for some time. The trees on the quay cast a tracery of shade upon the stones below; the sounds of the street and the river echoed in the joyous air. It was one of those days on which human wretchedness seems ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... brow and the language of such feelings. When afterwards the other face of your calamity was turned upon you, and showed itself in defeat and distress, I shunned you full as much. I felt sorely this variety in our wretchedness; and I did not wish to have the least appearance of insulting you with that show of superiority, which, though it may not be assumed, is generally suspected, in a time of calamity, from those whose previous warnings have been despised. I could not bear to show you a ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. II. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... shall go through, at present there is no longer any one of us who any longer regards life in the role of a blase or critical spectator, but each one of us stands in the very midst of life, and, indeed, in the very midst of a higher life. God has of a sudden brought us out of the wretchedness of the day to a high place to which we have never before spiritually attained. But always where life emerges, a higher life or merely life itself, wherever there is a thirst for life, there is it set close around by death, as at every birth when something new comes to the light of day, and ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... merits, and extenuate the demerits of "God's servant." They would reflect with astonishment and commiseration on their past sufferings. "We considered them," they might exclaim, "as a God- abandoned race, and devoted to wretchedness by him for having crucified their king. But instead of being the victims of God's wrath, they were wounded through our cruelty, they were bruised through our iniquitous treatment. It is we who have sinned more than ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... doubt and wretchedness did she wend her way to school on the Fourteenth Day of February. The drug-store window was full of valentines. But Emmy Lou crossed the street. She did not want to see them. She knew the little girls would ask her ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... that visit us, this is the gloomiest and the worst. The outcast from the land of his fathers, whose voice must never be heard within the walls where his infancy was nurtured, nor his step be free upon the mountains where he gambolled in his youth, this is indeed wretchedness. The instinct of country grows and strengthens with our years; the joys of early life are linked with it; the hopes of age point towards it; and he who knows not the thrill of ecstasy some well-remembered, long-lost-sight-of ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... at hand which must determine whether Americans are to be free men or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness, from which no human efforts will deliver them. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance or the most abject submission. We ...
— From Farm House to the White House • William M. Thayer
... while, were the thoughts and sensations of the hapless maiden, whose fate and fortune seemed to have become so strangely involved in the movements and scenes we have been describing? To her the day had been but a varying scene of gloom and wretchedness—of maidenly terror and painful excitement. And night had come only to be made still more hideous by its accumulated horrors. Shuddering at the strange and appalling sounds, that constantly assailed her recoiling senses from without, and pained and distressed at the ceaseless ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... other words, he wished to see Christians doing the things that Christ did, and using, in matters of the church, the same business sense which they brought to bear upon their own affairs. He thought of the poverty, squalor and wretchedness of some for whom Christ died, and of the costly luxuries of the church into whose hands the Master had given the care of these. He thought of the doors to places of sin, swinging wide before the young, while the doors ...
— That Printer of Udell's • Harold Bell Wright
... touching to behold this protection which had fallen from a being so hideous upon a being so unhappy, a creature condemned to death saved by Quasimodo. They were two extremes of natural and social wretchedness, coming into contact and aiding ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... stealing everywhere and at all hours, you see upon the bright sea-shore, where the waves of the bay sparkle merrily. But, lovers and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with which this gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated! It is not well to find Saint Giles's so repulsive, and the Porta Capuana so attractive. A pair of naked legs and a ragged red scarf, do not make ALL the difference between what is interesting and ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... days before man knew; it has been built according to false laws. This man will have a cell bigger than any other cell; all the other little men shall envy him; a thousand fellow-crawling mites shall slave for him, wear out their lives in wretchedness for him and him alone; all their honey they shall bring to him; he shall gorge while they shall starve. Of what use? He has slept no sounder in his foolishly fanciful cell. Sleep is to tired eyes, not to silken coverlets. We dream in Seven Dials as in Park ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... within reach—first of all, to provide that the people should be able, if they would, to live decently. He had no notion of domestic inspection, or of offering prizes for cleanliness and order. He knew that misery and wretchedness are the right and best condition of those who live so that misery and wretchedness are the natural consequences of their life. But there ought always to be the possibility of emerging from these; and as things were, over the whole country, for many ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... had received his disquisitions on poetry and art on that first unlucky evening. For the most part, however, he, too, was inclined to silences, in which he looked at Elizabeth in the happiness of a lover's wretchedness. The love she had given to Brassfield seemed to him based on the deceitful pretensions of that wretch, and in any case it was not his, and he felt repelled from accepting it. He yearned to show her the soul of Florian Amidon, ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... watched his mother. During the twelve months that he had been a curate in a parish in one of the worst parts of London, he had seen much of the sick and the dying. He had seen poverty, wretchedness, and sin in their most dreadful aspects, and the peace and comfort of his mother's present condition were a great contrast to the riot and squalor of many a death room into which he had sought to carry the gospel message ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... the Don, and mounted on small and hardy horses, alone are occasionally seen following, or searching in the wilds for the herds of savage buffaloes and cattle which pasture the district. The few living beings to be met with at the post-houses, have the squalid melancholy look which attests permanent wretchedness, and the ravages of an ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... out, my dear Sir, if you please, and do not be so very energetic, for it will only put you into a perspiration and do no good whatever. I say,' continued Perker, checking off each position on a different finger, as he laid it down—'I say that nobody but you can rescue her from this den of wretchedness; and that you can only do that, by paying the costs of this suit—both of plaintive and defendant—into the hands of these Freeman Court sharks. Now pray be quiet, my ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... The wretchedness in his eyes would have awakened the compassion of any other man than Captain Johns. But Captain Johns was all agog with triumphant excitement. He was just a little bit frightened, too. He looked at that unbelieving scoffer laid low, and did not even dimly guess at his profound, humiliating distress. ...
— Tales Of Hearsay • Joseph Conrad
... and women, spoke of her with something like devotion, and all said how kind and charitable she was, and as merry as a bird on a bright day; they said she pitied their wretchedness and their troubles, and was still the young girl in spite of her long dresses, and fearing nothing, while even the ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... conduct at Langford: which prove that she does not confine herself to that sort of honest flirtation which satisfies most people, but aspires to the more delicious gratification of making a whole family miserable. By her behaviour to Mr. Mainwaring she gave jealousy and wretchedness to his wife, and by her attentions to a young man previously attached to Mr. Mainwaring's sister deprived an amiable girl ...
— Persuasion • Jane Austen
... when, as there existed little wealth to excite avarice, and little spirit to aggravate the ambition of party, that little remained inviolate, and the miserable cabin, though filled with objects of disgusting wretchedness, was yet the secure covering and castle of its humble owner.—How different his present situation! when in laying down his head at night he fears lest before morning he shall be rouzed by the cries of his family in ...
— The Causes of the Rebellion in Ireland Disclosed • Anonymous
... nature of this vice to cause unhappiness which increases until it becomes positive wretchedness in the miser. Anxiety of mind is followed by hardening of the heart; then injustice in desire and in fact; blinding of the conscience, ending in a general stultification of man before the ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... following a long run of fever, a lost position, and consequent discouragement had brought poverty and wretchedness ...
— Good Cheer Stories Every Child Should Know • Various
... despair, he almost regretted the Tom Jones. Yes, he sighed for the wicked slaver crew, his life of excitement and peril. The dangers and triumphs of those bold pirates whose only care was to heap up money would have been preferable to his present wretchedness. ...
— File No. 113 • Emile Gaboriau
... proletariat. Deeming themselves not wanted in the churches, his converts set up a separate and more militant organization. In 1879 the Army invaded America, landing at Philadelphia, where, as in the Old Country and in other American cities, pitiable sin and wretchedness grovelled in obscurity. In 1894 there were in the United States 539 corps and 1,953 officers, and in the whole world 3,200 corps and 10,788 officers. Without proposing any programme of social or political reform, and without announcing any manifesto of human rights, the ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... were grieved at the tide of wretchedness and protested, they did not think it possible to get on without whisky. Dr. Prime, for so many years editor of the New York Observer, told of the meeting of the family physician and the pastor at his father's home in a case of severe illness. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... stood at the door, and, seating himself in it, he directed the boy who accompanied him to "drive home." Beulah offered no resistance; she hid her face in her hands, and sat quite still, scarcely conscious of what passed. She knew that a firm arm held her securely, and, save her wretchedness, knew nothing else. Soon she was lifted out of the buggy, carried up a flight of steps, and then a flood of light flashed through the fingers upon her closed eyelids. Dr. Hartwell placed his change on a sofa, and rank the bell. The summons was promptly answered by a negro woman ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... reign, so splendid as that of the Sun-King, closed in such darkness and tragedy. The disastrous war of the Spanish Succession had drained France of her strength and her gold. She lay crushed under a mountain of debt—ten thousand million francs; she was reduced to the lowest depths of wretchedness, ruin, and disorder, and it was at this crisis in her life as a nation that fate placed a child of four on her throne, and gave the reins of power into the hands of the most dissolute ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... himself; but who would not have deceived himself in his place? He saw his son lapsed to atheism, to the ESPRIT, to the pleasant frivolity of clever Frenchmen—he saw in the background the great bloodsucker, the spider skepticism; he suspected the incurable wretchedness of a heart no longer hard enough either for evil or good, and of a broken will that no longer commands, is no longer ABLE to command. Meanwhile, however, there grew up in his son that new kind of harder and more dangerous skepticism—who knows TO WHAT EXTENT it was encouraged ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... morning, I was resolute to declare my passion to Dora, and know my fate. Happiness or misery was now the question. There was no other question that I knew of in the world, and only Dora could give the answer to it. I passed three days in a luxury of wretchedness, torturing myself by putting every conceivable variety of discouraging construction on all that ever had taken place between Dora and me. At last, arrayed for the purpose at a vast expense, I went to Miss Mills's, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... husband. She also refused meat and drink and resolved to cast herself into the sea; but the Magian chained her and straitened her and clothed her in a coat of wool and said to her, "I will continue thee in wretchedness and humiliation till thou obey me and accept me." So she took patience and looked for the Almighty to deliver her from the hand of that accursed; and she ceased not travelling with him from country ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... as that was a slight remove from the absolute terrible contact of Arctic Street. But it was in the heart of that miserable quarter; she could reach out her hands and touch and gather in, if it would let her, the wretchedness. She had chosen a place where it was possible for her to make a nook of refuge, not for herself only, or so much, as for those to whom she would fain be neighbor, and ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... not reply. At length he said, in a voice of utter wretchedness, 'Glastonbury, you see before you the most ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... blood rushed to Nina's head, "Don't you love me more than to let me risk a life of wretchedness?" she exclaimed, but the look in her aunt's face brought from the girl an immediate apology, ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... condition of our country: at the poverty and wretchedness of so large a portion of the working classes; at the intellectual and moral evils which certainly exist among the poor, but by no means amongst the poor only; and when we witness the many partial attempts to remedy these evils—attempts benevolent indeed and wise, ...
— The Christian Life - Its Course, Its Hindrances, And Its Helps • Thomas Arnold
... hear the cry of thy most wretched son, yearning to avenge thee—answer me, if thou hast the power. Let me have some token of the truth or falsity of these wild suppositions, that I may wrestle against this demon. But no," added he, in accents of despair, "no ear listens to me, save his to whom my wretchedness is ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... & Co. were in high glee. They drank and played cards with men worth millions; spoke of the inclemency of the season, and expressed great surprise that so much poverty and wretchedness existed, with one breath, and with the next extolled the wines and administered justice to the eatables. Editors were there who had that morning written long "leaders" about the oppression of the poor by the rich, ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... a thing to love or pity?—Nay!— Yet He did stoop, on me, His hand to lay; Touched my dark eyes, and lo! the light was mine; Ope'd my dull ears to harmony divine; Showed me my rags, my wretchedness, my grief, My deadly sickness, and then gave relief; Paid my full ransom-price, warmed, cleansed, and red, And clothed in spotless raiment, me He led Forth from the dungeon of impurity, To the pure air of heaven, made whole, set free! Henceforth ...
— Poems of the Heart and Home • Mrs. J.C. Yule (Pamela S. Vining)
... have just had to make a change of officers in a company which has constantly complained, and with good reason, of neglect and improper treatment. Two excellent officers have been assigned to them; and yet they sent a deputation to me in the evening, in a state of utter wretchedness. "We's bery grieved dis evening, Cunnel; 'pears like we couldn't bear it, to lose de Cap'n and de Lieutenant, all two togeder." Argument was useless; and I could only fall back on the general theory, that I knew what was best for them, which had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... strike probably will be, besides relief to the bakers themselves, which has already been in part conceded, a more wholesome kind of bread, such as will keep fresh and palatable through the day, and cleaner baking; for the wretchedness of the trade has made it vile and filthy, as is the case in other trades besides that of the bakers. Many an article of mere luxury, many a senseless toy, if our eyes could be opened, would be seen to bear the traces ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... prevented men from being prone to errors, without changing the [421] constitution of the best of systems or without employing miracles at every turn. It is true that sin makes up a large portion of human wretchedness, and even the largest; but that does not prevent one from being able to say that men are wicked and deserving of punishment: else one must needs say that the actual sins of the non-regenerate are excusable, because they spring from the first cause of our wretchedness, which is original sin. ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... to the utter wretchedness of both of them," said Lady Laura. "He says," and she pointed to Phineas, "that were I there he would renew his accusation against me. He has not told me all. Perhaps he cannot tell me all. But I certainly will not return ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... changing, she was better enabled to judge how far such a person as Hiram Meeker could ultimately make her happy. Day by day she saw his character more clearly and in a truer light, and could thus fully appreciate the narrow escape she had from a life of wretchedness. ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... equally new and surprising XVIII In which the Rays of Chivalry shine with renovated Lustre XIX Containing the Achievements of the Knights of the Griffin and Crescent XX In which our Hero descends into the Mansions of the Damned XXI Containing further Anecdotes relating to the Children of Wretchedness XXII In which Captain Crowe is sublimed into the Regions of Astrology XXIII In which the Clouds that cover the Catastrophe begin to disperse XXIV The Knot that puzzles human Wisdom, the Hand of Fortune sometimes will ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... upon the enslavement of the world; the peoples now recognize that England's wealth, freedom, and greatness are merely the corollary to their poverty, slavery and wretchedness (p. 20). ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith
... passed. At first Pyetushkov bore up in an extraordinary way. He went out, and visited his comrades, with the exception, of course, of Bublitsyn; but in spite of the exaggerated approbation of Onisim, he almost went out of his mind at last from wretchedness, jealousy, and ennui. Conversations with Onisim about Vassilissa were the only thing that afforded him some consolation. The conversation was always begun, 'scratched up,' ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... Matthew Griffith for his Royalist sermon. He wanted some object of attack, and the very notoriety given to Dr. Griffith's performance by the rebuke of the Council of State recommended it for the purpose despite its intrinsic wretchedness. Accordingly, having had Dr. Griffith's Sermon and its accompaniments read over to him, he dictated what appeared some time in April with this title: "Brief Notes upon a late Sermon, titled 'The Fear of God and the King'; Preach'd, and since published, by Matthew ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson
... it happened, but in her wretchedness the girl swayed toward me ever so slightly. My arms went round her protectingly. For an instant her body came to me in sweet surrender, the soft curves of her supple figure relaxed in weariness. Then she ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... nothing! What a hubbub of questions which waited for no reply, of replies which answered no question! The old woman herself shared in the wild merriment of the little ones! I have always been struck at the ease with which the poor forget their wretchedness. Being used to live only for the present, they make a gain of every pleasure as soon as it offers itself. But the surfeited rich are more difficult to satisfy: they require time and everything to suit before they ...
— An "Attic" Philosopher, Complete • Emile Souvestre
... an unhappy friend, for whom I felt pity," she declared. "I find it difficult to-day to understand my compassion for such a monster. But, some years ago, when I first met him, I became attached to him because of his wretchedness, his physical weakness, and all the symptoms of death which he bore upon him even then. He had the opportunity of doing me a few services; and, though he led a hidden life, which worried me in certain ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... historic, present. To them the degraded Koreish of the desert, who as they believed, and I think believed rightly, had fallen from the old Monotheism of their forefathers Abraham and Ismael, into the lowest fetishism, and with that into the lowest brutality and wretchedness—to them, while they were making idols of wood and stone; eating dead carcases; and burying their daughters alive; careless of chastity, of justice, of property; sunk in unnatural crimes, dead in trespasses and sins; hateful ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... big, red-house is bare and lone The stony garden waste and sere With blight of breezes ocean blown To pinch the wakening of the year; My kindly friends with busy cheer My wretchedness could plainly show. They tell me I am lonely here— What do they know? What ...
— Spirits in Bondage • (AKA Clive Hamilton) C. S. Lewis
... islands, however, the Government had taken the matter in hand, and all the lepers that could be found were torn from their families and carried to a lonely island named Molokai. Here they were outcasts, deserted by their friends and relatives, living in wretchedness and desolation and, in that time, provided only with the barest necessities ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... instant—he a veritable giant, built of great sinews, powerful, in the full tide of his manhood, having all his health, all his wits. How could he now face his home? How could he tell his mother of this catastrophe? And Sidney—the little tad; how could he explain to her this wretchedness—how soften her disappointment? How keep the tears from out her eyes—how keep alive her confidence in him—her faith in ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... of that love are also the delights of wisdom: and know also, that the pleasures of illicit love descend even to the lowest hell, and, both in the way thither and also there, unite with the pleasures of all infernal loves, and thereby enter into their unhappiness, which consists in the wretchedness of all heart-delights; because the pleasures of that love are the pleasures of insanity." After this the husbands departed with their wives, and accompanied the little boy as far as to the way of his ascent into heaven; ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... English, and as the road was often little more than a track, he had great difficulty in keeping his way, and regretted that he had not hired a servant knowing the country before leaving the army. He generally, however, was able to obtain a guide from village to village. The loneliness of the way, the wretchedness of the people, the absence of the brightness and comfort so characteristic of English life, made the journey an oppressive one, and Harry was glad when, five days after leaving Dublin, he approached the end of his ride. ...
— Friends, though divided - A Tale of the Civil War • G. A. Henty
... looked at her oddly, but beyond ordinary greetings no one spoke to her. She did not know that it was solely her utter wretchedness that ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... sinned grievously against you. You have grown grey betimes because of me. But all this shall be atoned for by a death, my death. You never loved me, you drove me away from your house as you would never have driven a dog, you let me perish in want and wretchedness; from my childish years upwards I have never had a good word from you, had it been otherwise things might have been very different. Those whom you loved God took away from you, those you did not love you drove away yourself, and now you are alone in ...
— The Day of Wrath • Maurus Jokai
... all its people along with that of my nearest and dearest of kin. But how to do it was a matter I could not arrange. I felt reluctant to ask either Wauna or her mother. The guileless frankness of Wauna's nature was an impassable barrier to the confidence of crimes and wretchedness. One glance of horror from her dark, sweet eyes, would have chilled me into ...
— Mizora: A Prophecy - A MSS. Found Among the Private Papers of the Princess Vera Zarovitch • Mary E. Bradley
... low voice, "God knows I have suffered since I saw you, but I deserve to suffer for having so far forgotten myself last night. That is not what is troubling me now; it is the thought of the sorrow and wretchedness I have brought into your pure, innocent life,—that you must suffer for my ...
— At the Time Appointed • A. Maynard Barbour
... talk about progress and evolution, behind that veil of business-bustle, which hides its fear and utter despair—but for all that black outlook they are not weaklings enough to mourn and let things go, nor do they belong to that cheap class of society doctors who mistake the present wretchedness of Humanity for sinfulness, and wish to make their patient less sinful and still more wretched. Both Nietzsche and Disraeli have clearly recognised that this patient of theirs is suffering from weakness and not from sinfulness, for which latter some kind of strength may ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... of wealth in the hands of a new industrial class, the peril is obvious. Thus far the nation has patiently borne all changes. relying upon the experience of its past, and trusting implicitly to its rulers. But should wretchedness be so permitted to augment that the question of how to keep from starving becomes imperative for the millions, the long patience and the long trust may fail. And then, to repeat a figure effectively used by Professor ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... shifted across the glorious drama of youth, as by the storms that scattered the fair array into disfigured fragments; and the melancholy that breathes from vanished delight is, perhaps, in its utmost intensity, as unendurable as the wretchedness left by the visitation of calamity. There are spots of sunshine sleeping on the fields of past existence too beautiful, as there are caves among its precipices too darksome to be looked on by the eyes of memory; and to carry on an image borrowed from the analogy ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... began to reflect on the fate of the mothers. For to what shelter can they fly? Only to the arms of their betrayer, which, perhaps, are now no longer open to receive them; and then how quick must be the transition from deluded virtue to shameless guilt, and from shameless guilt to hopeless wretchedness? ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D, In Nine Volumes - Volume the Third: The Rambler, Vol. II • Samuel Johnson
... evidently expected to find the capital a splendid city. Despite the armed bands of roving robbers and soldiers, he reached Ki[o]to safely, only to find streets covered with ruins, rubbish and unburied corpses, and a general situation of wretchedness. He was unable to obtain audience of either the Sh[o]gun or the Mikado. Even in those parts of the city where he tried to preach, he could obtain no hearers in this time of war and confusion. So after two weeks he turned his face again southward to ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... patient companion of the friendless and the slighted—slighted, because poor; the untired listener to long tales of misery—so miserable, that they who told them could not track their dim beginnings, or fix the time in distant childhood when wretchedness was not. I had yet to find him standing at the beggar's pallet, giving encouragement, inciting hope, and adding to the counsel of a guide the solid evidences of a brother's love. With what a zeal did I attempt to follow in my patron's steps—with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... romantic as to have given her name a very wide celebrity. The lives of the virtuous pass smoothly and happily away, but the tale, when told to others, possesses but little interest or attraction; while those of the wicked, whose days are spent in wretchedness and despair, and are thus full of misery to the actors themselves, afford to the rest of mankind a high degree of pleasure, from the ...
— History of Julius Caesar • Jacob Abbott
... right, most men conceitedly assume that it is their duty to repress those individualities, to mould their wives and daughters to a model of their own shaping. The process is a cruel one when it succeeds. When it fails, it means wretchedness all around. Indeed, I think that absolutely all there is of human disagreement of an unpleasant sort, whether between men and women, or between persons of the same sex, is ultimately traceable to a failure duly to recognize and ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... fertility of that province, which is reckoned the poorest in France, conceive the wealth and affluence of the nation in general. Peregrine, amazed as well as disgusted at this infatuation, answered that what he ascribed to industry was the effect of mere wretchedness; the miserable peasants being obliged to plough up every inch of ground to satisfy their oppressive landlords, while they themselves and their cattle looked like so many images of famine; that their extreme poverty was evident from the face of the country, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... from a mob of oppressed individual workers. But what a cost to the family has been often paid! Mothers already overworked and under-nourished still further starved by the "strike relief" that only serves to maintain wretchedness, not to abolish it. The sufferings of children who miss even the meagre family comfort which the too small pay of the father when at work was able to supply. The greater suffering of children shunned and ill-treated ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer
... later the crusaders came in sight of the Holy City, the object of their long pilgrimage, the cause of wretchedness and death to millions. As their eyes rested on the scene hallowed to them through all the associations of their faith, the crusaders passed in an instant from fierce enthusiasm to a humiliation which showed itself in sighs and tears. All fell on their knees, to kiss the sacred earth and to pour ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... this kind. He found that of over five thousand prostitutes, 1441 were influenced by poverty, 1425 by seduction of lovers who had abandoned them, 1255 by the loss of parents from death or other cause. By such an estimate, nearly the whole number are accounted for by wretchedness, that is by economic causes, alone (Parent-Duchatelet, De la Prostitution, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... and his colleague in that great task, closely allied to him, of a noble Austrian family, known to us in later days as H.P.B. When those made their attempt to change the face of Europe, they failed, the time not being ripe; the misery and the wretchedness of the epoch, the degradation of the masses of the population, the horrible poverty, the shameful starvation, all these were the rocks on which split, and was broken up into foam, the spiritual wave of which those two personages were the crest. The karma of that, for the one whom we know of ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant
... got to thinking he must have it, or must make believe he had it; so he spent all he had, and then—oh, dear!—he forged his father's name, and the farm had to be mortgaged to get him out of prison; and then he took to drinking, and went from bad to worse, and finally died in misery and wretchedness. Dear, dear! it almost broke Jacob's heart, that it did. He had tried, if ever man tried, to save his brother; but 'twas of no use. It seemed as if he was bound to ruin himself, and nothing could stop him. When he died, his wife (he married her, ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... swell the league as speedily as possible each of the confederates assembled all his friends, relations, adherents, and retainers. Great banquets were held, which lasted whole days—irresistible temptations for a sensual, luxurious people, in whom the deepest wretchedness could not stifle the propensity for voluptuous living. Whoever repaired to these banquets—and every one was welcome—was plied with officious assurances of friendship, and, when heated with wine, carried away by the example of numbers, and overcome ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... Finally, he remembered his father and his mother, and he could not help but picture himself sitting at home with Kate five years after their marriage, when the first happiness of each other's society had faded, had staled, had turned to the wretchedness of starvation in its state of siege. Or perhaps going out for walks with her, just themselves, always themselves only, they two together, this evening, last evening, and to-morrow evening; through the streets crowded by visitors, down the harbour where the fishermen congregate, across the bridge ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... Fostat: the plundering was unrestrained, and that part of Fostat which Ahmed had built was almost entirely destroyed. The adherents of the reigning family were grossly maltreated, many of them killed, and others sent to Baghdad. The governors changed in rapid succession; disorder, want, and wretchedness existed throughout the entire country west of the caliph's kingdom. At this period the provinces of the empire had already fallen into the hands of the numerous minor princes, who, presuming on the caliph's weakness, had declared themselves independent sovereigns. ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... during which I could count every throb of my heart, and throat, and temples—my whole frame was transfigured into an anvil, on which a thousand tiny hammers seemed to ring. Yet I could not move, nor speak, nor weep—no wretchedness was ever more supreme than this cataleptic seizure. Evelyn was the first ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... greet me nor hold out her hand as acquaintances do. She came straight up to me as if the encounter were the merest matter-of-course, while as I stood there, with the hunger and the wretchedness all gone out of me, the weariness and misery melted in the grace of that radiant smile, she uttered just these words, "I have found the Little House ...
— The Dew of Their Youth • S. R. Crockett
... closely examined. Pythius was one of the most merciless tyrants that ever lived. He held all the people that lived upon his vast estates in a condition of abject slavery, compelling them to toil continually in his mines, in destitution and wretchedness, in order to add more and more to his treasures. The people came to his wife with their bitter complaints. She pitied them, but could not relieve them. One day, it is said that, in order to show her husband the vanity and folly of living only to amass silver and gold, and to convince him how little ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... obliged to sell a part of their furniture, to defray the taxes; it may easily be conceived therefore in what misery they live: they eat scarcely any thing but the worst bread, and oil, or soups made of the wild herbs, of which tyranny cannot deprive them. Notwithstanding the wretchedness in which they are left by the government, they have still to satisfy the greediness of their priests, but these contributions they pay with cheerfulness. Many of the convents indeed are too rich to require their assistance, but those which ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... preparing to descend. As she emerged, the people saw that her dress was magnificent, and her figure dignified, in spite of age and infirmity,—a stately ruin, but with a look, at once, of pride and wretchedness. Her strong and rigid features had an awe about them, unlike that of the white Old Maid, but as of something evil. She passed up the steps, leaning on a gold- headed cane; the door swung open, as she ascended,—and the light of a torch glittered on the embroidery of her dress, and gleamed ...
— The White Old Maid (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dollars, which now gives wealth to many a man engaged in growing, manufacturing, and vending the poison, would be so much capital unemployed; and the means of living would be cut off from many a family,—and bankruptcy, and wretchedness would be the consequent portion of many an individual. This may be true. And it may be true, too, that the like consequences would follow the universal abandonment of intoxicating liquors. But what then? Shall one sixth part of the nation continue ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... blurred, no thought of the future intruded, I accepted without internal questionings whatever was done for me, and lay semi-conscious, incurious and indifferent. Mostly I dozed half-conscious. I was almost in a stupor, at peace with myself and all the world, wretched, yet acquiescing in my wretchedness, not rebellious ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... bravely defending themselves, that is what they do not understand. It is too much like old Blucher's way of doing things, and that is the reason why the learned gentlemen do not like it. Ah! Amelia, when I think of all the wretchedness of Prussia, and that I may have to die without having chastised Bonaparte—without having wrested from him, and flung into his face, the laurels of Jena, Eylau, and Friedland—ah, then I feel like sitting down and crying like a boy. But Heaven cannot be so cruel; it will not let me die before ...
— NAPOLEON AND BLUCHER • L. Muhlbach
... cast" of the future or the past. But it is the special vocation of the doctor to look only upon the shadow; to turn away from the house of feasting and go down to that of mourning; to breathe day after day the atmosphere of wretchedness; to grow familiar with suffering; to look upon humanity disrobed of its pride and glory, robbed of all its fictitious ornaments, —weak, helpless, naked,—and undergoing the last fearful metempsychosis from its erect and godlike image, the living ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... the tide comes back to the ocean, as the stars come with the night. She tried to smother it, but it would not be smothered. At last she resigned herself to the wretchedness of it—as one when, despairing of throwing off a mood, gives way to it and lets it eat its own ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... that unlucky sentence recalled to him his late interview with his employer, and his present destitution. "Knew! And why have you dared to hunt me out, and halloo me down?—why must this insolent tyranny, that assumes the right over these limbs and this free will, betray and expose me and my wretchedness wherever ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... advancement. But I am naturally embittered by the fruitlessness, as well as the uselessness of the misery of Andersonville. There was never the least military or other reason for inflicting all that wretchedness upon men, and, as far as mortal eye can discern, no earthly good resulted from the martyrdom of those tens of thousands. I wish I could see some hope that their wantonly shed blood has sown seeds that will one day blossom, and bear ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... terrible necessity obliges us to sacrifice.' 'It is thus,' continues the writer, 'that deluded men, ungrateful children as well as culpable citizens, exchange all their claims to the benevolence and protection of Government for misfortune and wretchedness; ruin their families; carry into their habitations desolation, conflagrations, and death; change flourishing cities into heaps of ashes—into vast tombs; and bring on their whole country calamities which they ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... women are always fools in these cases—men too, for that matter—or else they would take pattern by me, and continue in a state of single blessedness," then came an aside, "Single wretchedness more likely, nobody to care about one—nothing to love—die in a ditch like a beggar's dog, without a pocket-handkerchief wetted for one—there's single blessedness for you! ride in a hearse, and ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... is all nature, separate From man! There is no whispering of strife Or sorrow here, naught to inform the soul Of man's deep wretchedness and sin. No lust To justify the wretch who binds his soul In the drear darkness of a murky cell, Scraping for gold as beasts do in the earth For carrion, and counting life-time out By ducats; closing house and heart alike To the benignant sunshine. If our hearts Could ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... not. When he came to himself, the fire was gone out, his clothes were wet with the chill and drenching dews; but the dread soul-crisis was past, and, in the joy that filled him, he no longer felt hunger, cold, degradation, disappointment, wretchedness. From his deepest soul, he that hour loosed and parted from every hope in life that now is, and offered his own will an unquestioning sacrifice to the Infinite. Tom looked up to the silent, ever-living stars,—types of the angelic hosts who ever look ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... increase as the days passed. The monotony of prison life fretted us, Joe perhaps less than me, for his life had been harder than mine, and as the days grew shorter, and the nipping cold of winter by degrees overtook us, we began to know what real wretchedness is. By day we could warm ourselves with exercise and active sports in the courtyard, but at night we shivered under our thin coverlets, and I found myself by and by wishing that my bedfellow Runnles had a little more flesh on his bones, for a lean man is no comfort in bed on a bitter night. Joe ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... moral degradation, such as I hardly ever heard of, and it is no wonder, when a great part of the community is plunged into such a condition (and we may fairly suppose that there is a gradually mounting scale, with every degree of wretchedness up to the wealth and splendour which glitter on the surface of society), that there should be so many who are ripe for any desperate scheme of revolution. At Sunderland they say there are houses with 150 inmates, who are huddled five and six in a bed. They are in the lowest state ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... sovereigns, enervated by luxury, corrupted by flattery, depraved through unpunished license, and without talent, morals, or good qualities. . . . Man is wicked not because he is wicked, but because he has been made so."-"Would you know the story, in brief, of almost all our wretchedness? Here it is. There existed the natural man, and into this man was introduced an artificial man, whereupon a civil war arose within him, lasting through life. [3326]. . If you propose to become a tyrant over him,. . . do your best to poison him with a theory of morals ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... profligacy, gambling, and poverty. She became with child of you; was cursed by her own parents at that discovery; though she never upbraided, except by her involuntary tears, and the misery depicted on her countenance, the author of her wretchedness and ruin. ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... awhile. Perhaps we shall witness unlooked-for wretchedness and want. For there are many thirsty creatures wandering hither and thither; and at last they discover the Cigale's private well, betrayed by the oozing sap upon the brink. They gather round it, at first with a certain amount of ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... men round him who in heart loved him; whose life he watched over with rigour yet with love; who were prepared to give their life for him, if need came. It was beautiful; it was human! Man lives not otherwise, nor can live contented, anywhere or any-when. Isolation is the sum-total of wretchedness to man. To be cut off, to be left solitary: to have a world alien, not your world; all a hostile camp for you; not a home at all, of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you are! It is the frightfulest enchantment; ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Batista and S. Fedele in armour, in two niches on either hand of the picture, which had a rich frame; and in the predella are several scenes, with little figures, from the Life of S. Giovanni Gualberto. In all this he acquitted himself very well, because he was assisted in his wretchedness by that Abbot, who took pity on him for the sake of his talents; and in the predella of the panel Raffaellino made a portrait of him from life, together with one of the General who was then ruling his Order. In S. Piero Maggiore, on the right as one enters the church, there is a panel by his hand, ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... congregated to see this lump of mortality put into a hole in the ground. You all know the deceased—a worthless, drunken, good-for-nothing vagabond. He lived in disgrace and infamy, and died in wretchedness. You all despised him—you all know his brother Joe, who lives on the hill? He's not a bit better though he has scrap'd together a little property by cheating his neighbours. His end will be like that ...
— Clotel; or, The President's Daughter • William Wells Brown
... by Anna Buxton, did Elizabeth Fry enter. Nothing was at the first visit done but giving warm clothing to the most destitute; William Forster having told of the wretchedness caused by the severity of the cold that January of 1813. What was then witnessed of the sad and neglected condition of these women and children sank deeply into the heart of the visitors, and Mrs. Fry formed the resolution to devote herself, as soon as circumstances permitted, to ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... mouth, his eyes gleaming through glasses, and heard his sharp, persistent voice which rasped their nerves. His muddy skin, with its sickly tones of green and yellow, expressed the jaundice of his balked ambition, his perpetual disappointments and his hidden wretchedness. He could talk and argue; he was well-informed and shrewd, and was not without smartness and metaphor. Accustomed to look at everything from the standpoint of his own success, he was well fitted for a politician. A man who shrinks from nothing so long as it is legal, ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... What a picture this conjures up of some poor, orphaned and half-starved colonial Oliver Twist, dragged by his master into the presence of pompous justices, and frowned into a hesitating consent to exchange the evils with which he was familiar for a fate whose wretchedness he knew ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... intervenient days, and, perhaps, weeks void of pain, and overflowing with comfort. So that in short, to return to the subject, human life, as far as I can perceive from experience or observation, is not that state of constant wretchedness which Johnson always insisted it was; which misrepresentation, (for such it surely is,) his Biographer has not corrected, I suppose, because, unhappily, he has himself a large portion of melancholy in his constitution, and fancied the portrait ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell
... possess, Who in the credulous hour of tenderness Betrayed, then cast thee forth to Want and Scorn! The world is pitiless: the chaste one's pride 5 Mimic of Virtue scowls on thy distress: Thy Loves and they that envied thee deride: And Vice alone will shelter Wretchedness! O! I could weep to think that there should be Cold-bosom'd lewd ones, who endure to place 10 Foul offerings on the shrine of Misery, And force from Famine the caress of Love; May He shed healing on the sore disgrace, He, the great Comforter that ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... pondering over the question, at times breathing contempt for his son, and again seized with unwonted suspicion of his own wisdom: troubled, much to be pitied, even if he deserved that blow from his son which had plunged him into wretchedness. Richard went straight to Tom Bakewell, roused the heavy sleeper, and told him to have his mare saddled and waiting at the park gates East within an hour. Tom's nearest approach to a hero was to be a faithful slave to his master, and in doing this he acted to his conception of ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... inconceivable the mischiefs that this kind of existence included. Why should I insist upon such aggravations as hunger, beggary, and external wretchedness? These were an inevitable consequence. It was by the desertion of mankind that, in each successive instance, I was made acquainted with my fate. Delay in such a moment served but to increase the evil; and when I fled, meagreness and penury ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... there, though not feeling fit to go. Besides, it was a great load on her mind that she had not told her mamma how she got the chair, nor what was the reason she did not want to go to the meeting. And now she could endure her wretchedness no longer. ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... Linda informed Leon that she was in Madrid with her father, which caused him so much joy that I had fears lest it derange his understanding. But a cloud came over his joy when she told him that such was the surveillance she was under that her life seemed a mere continuation of wretchedness. And while she still declared her love was unchanged, she artfully added that her father had so modified his opinions of foreigners as to press a suit between her and a Spanish Count, of whom it was said that he ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... bolt partly drawn out. Evidently the owner was in the act of reloading his chamber when something happened. The graves were dated second and third months of this year. The poor wooden crosses were made of pieces of ration cases and the names written with an indelible pencil. The wretchedness of this farm, which was flourishing only a short ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... from Dakota—they were not so particular about North and South Dakota, in those days—to take up a claim on Sweetwater, Wyoming. Judith gave scant promise of the beauty that in later life became at once her dower and her misfortune, that which was as likely to bring wretchedness as happiness. In Wyoming she was destined to find an old friend, Mrs. Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had been present at the marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who had always felt a wholly unreasonable sense of guilt at witnessing the ceremony and contributing ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... have been saved had I attended to the precepts and warnings of my kind parent—how much of bitter self-reproach. And I must warn my young friends, that although the adventures I went through may be found very interesting to read about, they would discover the reality to be very full of pain and wretchedness were they subjected to it; and yet I may tell them that the physical suffering I endured was as nothing when compared to the anguish of mind I felt, when, left for hours and days to my own bitter thoughts, ...
— Peter the Whaler • W.H.G. Kingston
... Birmingham to the time of my marriage, she was all in all to me! During some four or five days in the early time of our residence at Florence I thought I was going to lose her, and I can never forget the blank wretchedness of the prospect that ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... while the tears ran freely down her pale cheeks. "I did not spend those long dreadful nights, Dora, without thinking of him; and though ashamed of myself, I ventured to ask him, over and over again, to pity my wretchedness, and love me still. One night—it was not long ago—he seemed to come to me, and say the very same things which you have just said,—that he would not cast me off; that he loved me, ...
— Be Courteous • Mrs. M. H. Maxwell
... deeply than the sight of a crowd submitting to a dire fate they cannot escape. Besides, foreigners could not see so clearly as the Russians how much the Government was responsible for the grinding poverty of the masses; nor could they very well realize the moral wretchedness imposed by that Government upon the whole of educated Russia. But the atrocities committed upon the defenceless prisoners are there in all their baseness, concrete and palpable, admitting of no excuse, no doubt or hesitation, crying out to the heart of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... man should sleep all the term, and think to effect his business the last day. O, Clerimont, this time, because it is an incorporeal thing, and not subject to sense, we mock ourselves the fineliest out of it, with vanity and misery indeed! not seeking an end of wretchedness, but only ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson
... felt no sympathy with his son. It never occurred to him to think of the agony with which those few lines had been written; of the wretchedness of the young heart which had hoped so much and failed so greatly; of the misery which the son felt in disappointing the father. He was a good, kind parent, who spent his long days and longer nights in thinking of his family ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... gave to death, now mourns him dead,— His kinsman I, while yet a boy, Sent by a needy sire to Troy. While he yet stood in kingly state, 'Mid brother kings in council great, I too had power: but when he died, By false Ulysses' spite belied (The tale is known), from that proud height I sank to wretchedness and night, And brooded in my dolorous gloom On that my guiltless kinsman's doom. Not all in silence; no, I swore, Should Fortune bring me home once more, My vengeance should redress his fate, And speech engendered ...
— Journeys Through Bookland - Volume Four • Charles H. Sylvester
... soul does not marvel at its weakness, and the more it perceives its wretchedness, the more it abandons itself to God, and seeks to remain near to Him, knowing how deeply it needs His help. God's own word to us is, "I will instruct thee, and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye" ...
— A Short Method Of Prayer And Spiritual Torrents • Jeanne Marie Bouvires de la Mot Guyon
... attitude for an hour, and no consolation which I endeavoured to afford him seemed to reach his ears, far less his heart. But enough of this sad episode, on which I cannot linger, even after the lapse of so many years, without renewing in my own heart the awful wretchedness of that day. He desired to be left alone, and I was obliged to leave him. I found him on the following morning tranquillized, and with an expression of religious resignation on his features. 'She is more fortunate than we are,' he said; 'besides her position in the world would scarcely ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... do as I choose," she said, and she looked down in crushed wretchedness. "Yes, I suppose they will come ...
— His Hour • Elinor Glyn
... was dead; nineteen years of petulant, helpless, hopeless wretchedness were at last over, and all that his daughter cared to live for was gone; she was an orphan, without near relatives, without friends, old, and tired out. Do not despise me that I say "old," you plump and rosy ladies whose life is in its prime of joy and use at thirty-six. Age is not counted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... renounced him for the Arabian impostor. This was seen especially in the blessings that came to her through the institution of Christian marriage, while others groaned under the debasing influence of a sensual polygamy. The wretchedness this occasioned is a topic too large and too painful to dwell upon here. But the wide gulf that separated the two classes was clearly seen, when on her Sabbath the missionary could speak to the Nestorian of her Saviour out of her Bible, while the Moslem knows nothing beyond her ...
— Woman And Her Saviour In Persia • A Returned Missionary
... young and unripe. Earthquakes shook the world and rent it. Demons and monsters of the under-world fled forth. Creatures became fierce, beasts of prey, and others turned timid, becoming their quarry. Wretchedness and hunger abounded and black magic. Fear was everywhere among them, so the people, in dread of their precious possessions, became wanderers, living on the seeds of grass, eaters of dead and slain things. Yet, ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... plate, with an inscription to commemorate this extraordinary instance of true worth; which should make some people in Scotland blush, while, though mean themselves, they strut about under the protection of great alliance, conscious of the wretchedness of numbers who have lost by them, to whom they never think of making reparation, but indulge themselves and their families in most ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... the Seine in despair, shivering with the cold. At last they found on the quay one of those ancient nocturnal cabs that one sees in Paris only after dark, as if they were ashamed to display their wretchedness during ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... No; but I may tell you this too: when he had his better intervals, it was I who urged him on; it was I who had to drag the whole load when he relapsed into his evil ways, or sank into querulous wretchedness. ...
— Ghosts • Henrik Ibsen
... indifferent way to the above household, but Virgie had read enough, and the letter fell from her nerveless fingers, while she sat staring vacantly before her, her brain almost turned by the heartless words she had just read, her heart broken with its weight of woe, while a feeling of utter wretchedness and desolation made her long for death to steep ...
— Virgie's Inheritance • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... man rich, but his mind. He that can order himself to the law of Nature is not only without the sense but the fear of poverty. O! but to strike blind the people with our wealth and pomp is the thing! What a wretchedness is this, to thrust all our riches outward, and be beggars within; to contemplate nothing but the little, vile, and sordid things of the world; not the great, noble, and precious! We serve our avarice, and, not content with the good of the earth that is offered us, we search and dig for ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... approach of Zalim Singh's troops; and scores of elephants, hundreds of camels, and thousands of horses and ponies perished in the flames, besides twenty-five thousand souls. Only about five thousand persons escaped out of thirty thousand, and these were reduced to beggary and wretchedness by the loss of their dearest relations and their property. At the time the flames first began to spread, an immense crowd of people had assembled under the fortress on the bank of the Sonar river to see the widow of a soldier burn herself. Her husband had been shot by one of Zalim Singh's ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... wish to know even the wretchedness of my life? So be it! But I warn you that it is not very cheerful. For," said she, after a moment's silence,—Sulpice shuddered under her glance,—"it is better to be frank, and if you love me as you say you do, you should know me thoroughly; you can then decide what course to take. For ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... washes orchestras ashore, brings wealth and gaiety to the people, is navigated by promenading officers, and directed by portly, comfortable generals. No suggestion of its bloody side, no roar of artillery reaching your ears, no wounded soldier dragging in his personal wretchedness and so striking a false ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... preternaturally grave expression, and realizing literally Esther's early conception of the theatre. There was a sense of blankness in the wanderer's heart, of unfamiliarity in the midst of familiarity. What had she in common with all this mean wretchedness, with this semi-barbarous breed of beings? The more she looked, the more her heart sank. There was no flaunting vice, no rowdiness, no drunkenness, only the squalor of an oriental city without its quaintness and color. She studied the posters and the shop-windows, ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in vain day after day to be liberated.—After about ten or twelve days my fellow prisoner and I disagreed, and thus we two wretched beings, to increase our wretchedness, spent day after day without conversing together.—I was in prison from December 18th, 1821, till January 12th, 1822, when the keeper came and told me to go with him to the police office. Here I found, that the Commissioner, before whom I had been tried, had first written to my uncle at Brunswick, ...
— A Narrative of Some of the Lord's Dealings with George Mueller - Written by Himself, First Part • George Mueller
... And there would be this further disadvantage: the inhabitants of the city could turn out and kill the tigers, but the human destroyers are protected by the benevolent laws of the very people they are immolating on the altars of wretchedness and vice." ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... jacket and trowsers. They mentioned this to the people of Ashburton, and never without commiserating my change of condition. This tale often repeated, awakened at length the pity of their auditors, and, as the next step, their resentment against the man who had reduced me to such a state of wretchedness. In a large town, this would have little effect, but a place like Ashburton, where every report speedily becomes the common property of all the inhabitants, it raised a murmur which my godfather found himself either unable or unwilling ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... of hard corn-bread, and their lives the forfeit, if they caught but one streak of God's blue sky through those filthy windows,—they have endured there all the horrors of the middle-passage. My soul sickened as I looked on the scene of their wretchedness. If the liberty we are fighting for were not worth even so terrible a price,—if it were not cheaply purchased even with the blood and agony of the many brave and true souls who have gone into that foul den only to die, or to come out the shadows of men,—living ghosts, condemned to walk ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... said the teacher with penitent wretchedness. "It was very careless of me—I am very sorry. What can I do? I'll go down and tell them I made ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... father; let the form of that father rise up before you, and plead in your hearts for his offspring. Perhaps he has a mother, and a home. Think of the lengthened shadow that must have been cast over that home by his absence. Think of his mother, during those hours of wretchedness, when she has felt hope darkening into disappointment, next into anxiety, and from anxiety into despair. How often may she have stretched forth her hands in supplication, and asked, even the winds of heaven, to bring her tidings of him who was away? Let the supplications of that ...
— The Pirates Own Book • Charles Ellms
... We set our streams to work for us, and choke the air with fire, to turn our spinning-wheels—and,—ARE WE YET CLOTHED? Are not the streets of the capitals of Europe foul with sale of cast clouts and rotten rags? Is not the beauty of your sweet children left in wretchedness of disgrace, while, with better honour, nature clothes the brood of the bird in its nest, and the suckling of the wolf in her den? And does not every winter's snow robe what you have not robed, and ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... days of the Tang dynasty China was long happy under the sceptre of a good Emperor, named Sin-Woo. He had overcome the enemies of the land, confirmed the friendship of its allies, augmented the wealth of the rich, and mitigated the wretchedness of the poor. But most especially was he admired and beloved for his persecution of the impious sect of Lao-tsze, which he ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... the advancement of science and the diffusion of information as the best aliment to true liberty; to carry on the benevolent plans which have been so meritoriously applied to the conversion of our aboriginal neighbors from the degradation and wretchedness of savage life to a participation of the improvements of which the human mind and manners are susceptible in a civilized state—as far as sentiments and intentions such as these can aid the fulfillment of my duty, they will be a resource which can ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... of conduct which must inevitably lead to poverty, Christ should hold up a state of poverty as desirable. We read in Matthew v. 3, "Blessed are the poor in spirit" and it is contended that it is poverty only of spirit which Christ blesses; if so, he blesses the source of much wretchedness, for poor-spirited people get trampled down, and are a misery to themselves and a burden to those about them. If, however, we turn to Luke vi. 20, we find the declaration: "Blessed are ye poor," addressed directly to his Apostles, who were anything but poor in spirit (Luke ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... might yet be set to rights, all—unless, unless Gertrude—Oh, why should there arise this new and terrible complication? Gertrude with her youth and beauty and enthusiasm—why must she be drawn into the wretchedness? ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... cloth, several shades darker than the original fabric, and these patches were now all in rags. His coat was several sizes too large for him and hung about him like a dirty ragged sack. He was a pitiable spectacle of neglect and wretchedness as he sat there on an upturned pail, eating his bread and cheese with fingers that, like his clothing, were grimed with ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... uselessness of resisting a hand so hard and strong as that of Aunt Jemima, Marian had lately meditated another way of escape from the wretchedness of her lot. She contemplated an expedient which occurs more readily than any other to the youthful victim of oppression, but which had probably never before presented itself to the mind of a child so young. The expedient ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth
... be a glorious consummation (may it be ours to hasten it) when the destined alliance between religion and learning shall be perfected, and their united influence shall be employed, and shall prevail, to raise a world from ignorance and sin and wretchedness, to the dignity and the privilege of the sons of God. And let us hope, both in regard to this college, whose interests we now cherish, and all other kindred institutions, that amidst the changes of society by which they are occasionally affected, and the adversities by which ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... thought. The royal family was from this time forward greatly wronged by the people; but it was because the people had already been much more wronged by the rich and powerful. They had been so ground down into poverty and wretchedness, that they felt the fiercest envy, the most brutal rage, towards all the wealthy and noble, believing them born to be unboundedly happy, and to make everybody below them as miserable as they pleased. Never, perhaps, were the absurd notions of the privileges ...
— The Peasant and the Prince • Harriet Martineau
... once a week a ration of sorghum molasses. A diminutive ration of meat might possibly come once a month, not oftener. In the stockade, containing the 11,000 men, there was a partial show of tents, not enough for 2000. A large proportion of the men lived in holes in the ground, in the utmost wretchedness. Some froze to death, others had their hands and feet frozen. The rebel guards would occasionally, and on the least pretence, fire into the prison from mere demonism and wantonness. All the horrors that can be named, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... for, as I told you, not a creature besides myself was in the rooms. With a gently raised hand I drew the drapery aside, entered ... and looked before me. There stood the MAGDALEN. There she was, (more correctly speaking) kneeling; in anguish and wretchedness of soul—her head hanging down—contemplating a scull and cross, which were supported by her knees. Her dishevelled hair flowed profusely over her back and shoulders. Her cheeks were sunk. Her eyes were hollow. Her attitude was lowly ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Two • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... utter despair, the recklessness as to the effect her words would produce, is impossible. Every word increased Mrs. Hamilton's bewilderment and misery. To suppose that Ellen did not feel was folly. It was the very depth of wretchedness which was crushing her to earth, but every answered and unanswered question but deepened the mystery, and rendered ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness. He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went toward it, and, when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again so that he could see with them as before. He led her to ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various |
