"Joyless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an excellent hint; but instead of retreating the girl continued to advance, followed by her long-faced brother in his knickerbocker suit, in which he had been singing comic songs for the entertainment of a joyless proletariat. She advanced not as if she had failed to understand—the word 'police' has an unmistakable sound—but rather as if she could not help herself. She did not advance with the free gait and expanding presence of a distinguished amateur anarchist amongst ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... could hardly come before two or three o'clock. While he was waiting for the trains he walked up and down the platform of the little station. Then he went straight on into the middle of the fields; It was a gray and joyless day giving warning of the approach of winter. The light was dim. The plaintive whistle of a train stopping was all that broke the melancholy silence. Christophe stopped a few yards away from the frontier in the deserted country. Before him was a little pond, a clear pool of water, in which ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... so glorious that it was possible to think of nothing all day, but just allow oneself passively to drink in sensations of exquisite pleasure. I wish all the hard-worked people at home, who lead joyless lives in sunless alleys, could just have one such day, and enjoy it as I did, that they might know how fair God's earth is, and how far fairer His Paradise must be, if even from this we cannot conceive "of the things which He hath prepared ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... the saddening story Of the unanswered love of fair Elaine, The 'faith unfaithful' and the joyless glory Of Lancelot, 'groaning ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... different now thy joyless fate, Since first Hesione thy bride, When plac'd aloft in godlike state, The blushing beauty by thy side. Thou sat'st, while reverend Ocean smil'd, And mirthful strains the hours beguil'd; The nymphs and Tritons danc'd around, Nor ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... WRETCH WITHOUT IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... by the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... hours across a flat, joyless country without either man making a move, but as the train neared Gunsight Rimrock rose up and went forward to where ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... their gifts the bounteous seasons pour, The fruit autumnal, and the vernal flow'r; With listless eyes the dotard views the store, He views, and wonders that they please no more; Now pall the tasteless meats, and joyless wines, And luxury with sighs her slave resigns. Approach, ye minstrels, try the soothing strain, [bb]Diffuse the tuneful lenitives of pain: No sounds, alas! would touch th' impervious ear, Though dancing mountains witness'd Orpheus near; Nor lute nor lyre ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... of the dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air. ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... Gladstone's face throughout that long morning sitting of Friday, March 10th. There are some days that live in one's memory, not so much as days as nights—with the ghastly spectres of darkness—nightmares—hauntings of a hideous past—anticipations of a joyless future. Such that Friday remains in my memory—with Mr. Gladstone's face standing out from the surrounding ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... perception, be beauty. A fourth assigned this cause; that the Lord took away from the man beauty and elegance of life, and transferred it to the woman; and that hence the man, unless he be re-united with his beauty and elegance in the woman, is stern, austere, joyless, and unlovely; so one man is wise only for himself, and another is foolish; whereas, when a man is united with his beauty and elegance of life in a wife, he becomes engaging, pleasant, active, and lovely, and thereby wise. A fifth said, that women were created ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... that wherein aforetime I excelled. But indeed, were it possible to remain unconscious of the change, the life left would scarcely be worth living; but given that there is a consciousness of the change, then must the existence left to live be found by comparison insipid, joyless, a death in life, devoid of life's charm. But indeed, if it is reserved for me to die unjustly, then on those who unjustly slay me lies the shame (since, given injustice is base, how can any unjust action whatsoever fail of baseness?) (11) But for me ...
— The Memorabilia - Recollections of Socrates • Xenophon
... that was mobile, none into which the rhythm and poetry of life had entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... merry Shearer's dance;—or jest retail From festal board, from choral roofs the song; And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they wear a cold and joyless smile. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... the fine full bravado as it almost struck him, of her "Mr. Waymarsh!" what was to have been, what—he more than ever felt as his short stare of suspended welcome took things in—would have been, but for herself, his doom. It was already upon him even at that distance—Mr. Waymarsh was for HIS part joyless. ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... help, my dear Valentine—I am miserable. Each joyless morning finds me more wretched than I was the previous night. Oh! what a burden is life to those who are fated to live only for life itself! No sunshine gilds my horizon with the promises of hope—I expect nothing but sorrow. Who can I trust now that my own heart has misled me? When error arose from ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... to lose a child, and especially a son," sighed Elizabeth, and involuntarily she thought of Anna, that poor mother whom she had robbed of her son, that he might grow up in eternal joyless imprisonment, that he might be morally murdered, and from a man be converted ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The peasant ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... angered and hostile 35 towards the beings whom he had formerly exalted in beauty and glory: he created for the traitors a marvelous abode as penalty for their action, namely the pangs of Hell, bitter afflictions; Our Lord called forth that 40 abysmal joyless house of punishment to wait for the outcast keepers of souls.[3] When he knew that it was ready, he enveloped it in eternal night and equipped it with torment, filling it with fire and fearful cold, with fume and red flame: ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... I own my heart has broke your chains. Patient, I bore the painful bondage long, At length my gen'rous love disdains your tyranny; The bitterness and stings of taunting jealousy, Vexations days, and jarring, joyless, nights, Have driv'n him forth to seek some safer shelter, Where he may rest his weary ...
— Jane Shore - A Tragedy • Nicholas Rowe
... wakened into life again. Then, in fierce self-mastery, he rose, stretched his tall form to its full height, and, ascending to the upper deck, began to pace its dimming length with the stern, swift tread of one whose life is a restless, joyless march through a ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... soon as he writes for another instrument than the pianoforte. The commencement of the first solo is like the opening of a beautiful vista after a long walk through dreary scenery, and every new entry of the orchestra precipitates you from the delectable regions of imagination to the joyless deserts of the actual. Chopin's inaptitude in writing for the orchestra is, however, most conspicuous where he employs it conjointly with the pianoforte. Carl Klindworth and Carl Tausig have rescored the ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... streaks, like rivers of light breaking over jagged rocks—these are now beneath my eye—these alone I can detect—not a man—not an animal—not a tree. The great American Desert is a land of milk and honey in comparison with the joyless orb over which we are now moving. However, even yet we can predicate nothing positive. The atmosphere may have taken refuge in the depths of the chasms, in the interior of the craters, or even on the opposite side of the ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... me, And it would have been more happy. Had I not been born and nurtured, And had never grown in stature, 220 Till I saw these days of sorrow, And this joyless time o'ertook me, Had I died in six nights only, Or upon the eighth had perished. Much I should not then have needed, But a shroud a span-long only, And of earth a tiny corner. Little then had wept my mother, Fewer tears had shed my ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... where, sunk in deep despair, Her garments torn, her bosom bare, Impatient Freedom lies! Her matted tresses madly spread, 40 To every sod, which wraps the dead, She turns her joyless eyes. ...
— The Poetical Works of William Collins - With a Memoir • William Collins
... out of her home, and thrown on the world, unprepared for its difficulties; or sent, as a great effort of generosity, or from some regard to propriety, with a small stipend, and an uncultivated mind into joyless solitude. ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... I left so late, Whose only altar is its rusted grate,— Sepulchral, rayless, joyless as it seems, Shamed by the glare of May's refulgent beams,— While the dim seasons dragged their shrouded train, Its paler splendors were not quite in vain. From these dull bars the cheerful firelight's glow Streamed through the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... without pleasantness in their lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabby and squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Little remains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life from being quite joyless. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... first start might have persevered and made its full-fledged rapidity joyless, had it known the errand of its beautiful first-class passenger. For the telegram Gwen had received, that had sent her off on this wild journey to London in the small hours of the morning, was this that follows, neither more ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... of it. She had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, overwhelmed her ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... entirely discontinued. He afterwards suppressed public exhibitions in Byzantium, to save the usual State contribution, to the ruin of an almost countless multitude who found their means of support in these entertainments. Their life, both in public and private, became sad and dejected and utterly joyless, as if some misfortune had fallen upon them from Heaven. Nothing was spoken of in conversation at home, in the streets, or in the churches, except misfortune and suffering. Such was the ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... in his joyless youth, but now, conscious of his strength and expertness in battle, he set himself deliberately to defy his enemies and resent with force of arms every encroachment upon his liberty, every insolence. There was ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... fruit of all his toil. The fowls of heaven, Tamed by the cruel season, crowd around The winnowing store, and claim the little boon Which Providence assigns them. One alone, The redbreast, sacred to the household gods, Wisely regardful of th' embroiling sky, In joyless fields and ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... dear, has she never known a winter? 'Tis the dreary dark time of waitin', the sunless, joyless bit o' all the year, when the singin' birds fly away, the butterflies and flowers die, and the very trees sigh and moan in their bareness and decay. 'Tis an empty bit o' life, when all that makes life sweet falls to ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... them, from laughing at them. She had been a leader of this world until she had denied it, had shut herself away from it. And now she was venturing back—because of a man. As she drove on swiftly through the wintry and dull-looking streets, streets that seemed to grow meaner, more dingy, more joyless, as she drew near to the outskirts of London, she looked back over the past. And she saw always the same reason for the important actions of her life. All of them had been committed because of a man. And now, even at sixty—Presently she saw by the look of the ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... asked myself. "What alienates him from the house? Will he leave it again soon? Mrs. Fairfax said he seldom stayed here longer than a fortnight at a time; and he has now been resident eight weeks. If he does go, the change will be doleful. Suppose he should be absent spring, summer, and autumn: how joyless sunshine and fine ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... him, in spite of that faint indefinable flavor of absurdity that pervaded his courtly bearing. She would never love him as she loved Capes, of course, but there are grades and qualities of love. For Manning it would be a more temperate love altogether. Much more temperate; the discreet and joyless love of a virtuous, reluctant, condescending wife. She had been quite convinced that an engagement with him and at last a marriage had exactly that quality of compromise which distinguishes the ways of the wise. It would be the wrappered world almost at its best. She saw herself building up a life ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... my way I'd burn that to-morrow," Mrs. Flushing laughed. She had a laugh like the cry of a jay, at once startling and joyless. ...
— The Voyage Out • Virginia Woolf
... is not so much the outcome of young women's natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from Stonor House and the joyless ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... he seemed to see in a large, clear, cold comprehensiveness, all the wasted days, the fruitless activities, the futilities, the perpetual postponements that had followed his coming to London. He saw it all as a joyless indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and undisciplined desires, as a succession of days that began amiably and weakly, that became steadily more crowded with ignoble and trivial occupations, that ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... Saviour, and makes salvation personal; and it is only by studying faiths that many have come at last to an indirect and circuitous acquaintance with Christ. By some such misdirection Bunyan was misled. In quest of faith he went a long and joyless journey, and was wearied with the greatness of his way. It was secretly urged upon his mind, that if he had faith he would be able to work miracles; and passages of Scripture were borne in upon his mind, which bespoke the ...
— Life of Bunyan • Rev. James Hamilton
... for social feeling is the malignant boycott, and for prosperity, monopolisation and humiliating display; who seize upon religion and turn it into persecution, and upon beauty to torment it on the altars of some joyless vice. We cannot do with such souls; we have no use for them, and it is very easy indeed to step from that persuasion to the belief that God ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... pains of sense which meet and form a loathsome union with this vast central pain of loss. Another while all the multitude of graces, the countless kind providences, which it has wasted pass before it, and generate that undying worm of remorse of which Our Saviour speaks. Then comes a keen but joyless view, a calculation, but only a bankrupt's calculation, of the possibility of gains for ever forfeited, of all the grandeur and ocean-like vastness of the bliss which it has lost. Last of all comes ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... needs fling it all aside with such bitter anger and harsh regret when the thunderbolt fell and the searching dart stabbed him awake? Outraged, hurt-maddened, he had flung away, as he believed, to outer darkness, and to a joyless, purposeless, colourless life. And ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... from settled. The more lyrical the poet becomes regarding the unity of the good and the beautiful, the more skeptical becomes the plain man. What is this about the irresistible charm of virtue? Virtue has possessed the plain man's joyless fidelity for years, and he has never discovered any charm in her. The poet possesses a peculiar power of insight which reveals in goodness hidden beauties to which ordinary humanity is blind? Let him prove ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... eating, drinking and fornication, which makes him well content to join the "Ragged Regiment." They colour his face with walnut juice so that he looks a "true son of an Egyptian." Hundreds of pages are filled thereafter by tediously dragging in, mostly from other books, joyless and leering adventures of low dishonesty and low lust. Another book of the kind which Borrow knew was the life of Bamfylde Moore-Carew, born in 1693 at a Devonshire rectory. He hunted the deer with some of his schoolfellows from Tiverton ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... hastened / where he stricken lay, It was in sooth for many / of them a joyless day. Had any aught of honor, / he mourned that day, I ween, And well the same did merit / ...
— The Nibelungenlied - Translated into Rhymed English Verse in the Metre of the Original • trans. by George Henry Needler
... struck Ellen as terrifying. She spoke of the gulf between these joyless lives and the beauty through which they hurled physically night and morning, to the conditions which debarred them from ever visiting it spiritually, with exhilaration and a will that it should continue to exist as long as she could help it. "But, ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... of these we must choose not those who would welcome license, but those who long passionately to live by law. It is the condition of such men that I have been just describing. Its characteristics are vain self-reproach, joyless commendation, weary struggle, listless success, general indifference, and the prospect that if matters are going thus badly with them, they will go ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... rejoin his father, whom he almost always found in a new residence. The poor man had alighted there for a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these continually shifting scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a stranger among strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though joyless satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire college and submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but inflexible discipline of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... floods, where the soft voice prevails Of building doves in lordly trees set high, Trees which enclose a home where love abides — His love and hers, a passioned ecstasy; Your tone has caught its echo and derides My joyless lot, as face down pressed I lie Upon the shifting sand, and hear the reeds Voicing a thin, dissonant threnody Unto the cliff and wind-tormented weeds. As with the faint half-lights of jade toward The shore ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... equity, the manifestation of truth without which human society could not last. Now as man could not live in society without truth, so likewise, not without joy, because, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii), no one could abide a day with the sad nor with the joyless. Therefore, a certain natural equity obliges a man to live agreeably with his fellow-men; unless some reason should oblige him to ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... somewhere in these ruins a flower like Jay Jules had once flourished; doubtless somewhere in that graceful nymph herself the germ of this dreary maturity was hidden. Hemmingway welcomed them with a seriousness equal to their own. The supper was partaken with the kind of joyless formality which in the southwest is supposed to indicate deep respect, even the cheerful Jay falling under the influence, and it was with a feeling of relief that at last the young man retired to his fenced-off corner for solitude and repose. He gathered, however, that before "sun up" the ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... large dark eyes. She moved and lived as it were mechanically, without the agency of feeling or sympathy; yet though she obtruded her grief on none, it was equally true that no gleam of returning cheerfulness ever lightened the gloom which enveloped her. A something there was in the hopeless, joyless expression of her beautiful face, which made the heart ache; yet none offered sympathy, or strove to console her, for she seemed unapproachable, with the cold, haughty glance of other days. Painfully perceptible was ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... old, gloomy man, the more devoted to the young knight from his dark melancholy and wild deeds, hastened to lower the drawbridge. Greetings were exchanged in silence, and in silence did Sintram enter, and those joyless gates closed with a crash behind ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... Paradise-earth, of strife unstrained! untortured with strife. What wyrde hath hither my jewel vayned, destiny: carried off. And done me in this del and great danger? sorrow. Fro we in twain were towen and twayned, since: pulled: divided. I have been a joyless jeweller." ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... hope, of liberty, and right, Hath followed wheresoe'er a way was made By the Wind goddess—ruthless, undismayed; And so hath gained at length a prosperous height, Round which the elements of worldly might Beneath his haughty feet like clouds are laid. Oh, joyless power that stands by lawless force Curses are his dire portion, scorn, and hate, Internal darkness and unquiet breath; And if old judgments keep their sacred course, Him from that height shall heaven precipitate By violent or ignominious ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... during the long struggle of the war. Enlightened, cultivated, a friend of the arts, a scholar and diplomatist, he seems, unlike many Orientals, to have selected the best in assimilating European influences. Yet when I looked at the tiny creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most Europeanized Mahometan and the western conception of life. The Caid's little black slaves are well-known in Morocco, and behind the sad child leaning in the archway stood ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... through the throng with eyes that seemed to see nothing of its frantic frenzy and joyless joy—a stalwart man, who strode along like a giant among midgets, his vacant eyes fixed before him, his strong white face expressionless. Hugh Ritson saw him. They passed within two paces, but without recognition. The one was wandering aimlessly in his ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... brave the flood in quest of gain And beat for joyless months, the gloomy wave. Let such as deem it glory to destroy, Rush into blood, the sack of cities seek; Unpierced, exulting in the widow's wail, The virgin's shriek and ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... They were tossed to and fro in her heart on waves of wonder and regret and apprehension. Did Owen really believe that to be happy she must forget him? Did he comprehend that she had long arrived at the conclusion that this loveless, joyless companionship, mocked by the name of marriage, ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... without a smile. His eyes were bent on the ground; there was a joyless contraction of his delicate, dark brows. It was with an evident effort that he suddenly looked up and spoke. "I have an interest in such subjects. I am trying to find pupils myself—or, at least, I hope to find some when I return to ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... villagers who watched them with a certain mingling of critical independence and superior self-righteousness. As the new arrivals walked down the main street, half beach, half thoroughfare, their baggage following them in low trolleys drawn by porters at their heels, like a decorous funeral, the joyless faces of the lookers-on added to the resemblance. Beyond them, in the prolonged northern twilight, the waters of the bay took on a peculiar pewtery brightness, but with the usual mourning-edged border of Scotch seacoast scenery. Low banks of cloud lay on the chill ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... ripe, sensual, and calculating, feeling with her fingers for the gold chain, a mere golden-fleshed, rose-flushed hireling, solid and prosaic. The go-between is dimly seen in the background, but the face of the suitor is a strange, ironic study: past youth, worn, joyless, and bitter, taking his pleasure mechanically and with cynical detachment. The "Storm calmed by S. Mark" (Academy) was, in Mr. Berenson's opinion, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... world,—his world, his home, his tomb,—at once a dwelling and a burial-place, till he were borne to a darker and a narrower one. But Rose was with him in the tomb. He leaned upon her, in his daily passage from the bed to the chair by the fireside, and back again from the weary chair to the joyless bed,—his bed and hers,—their marriage-bed; till even this short journey ceased, and his head lay all day upon the pillow, and hers all night beside it. How long poor Mr. Toothaker was kept in misery! Death seemed to draw near the door, and often to lift the latch, ...
— Edward Fane's Rosebud (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to Elizabeth only a day of humiliation and pain. Reclining on her divan, she thought of her despised and joyless past, of ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... miss thy smile of light, "Welcome" at morn and kind "good night!" But, when the quiet eve comes on, I feel that thou indeed art gone. That herald of delight to me Is joyless now, ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... creed has always been that fiction is a recreative art, and we have no better sample of a manly and stout-hearted optimist than he. He is optimistic of set purpose, and sometimes his cheerfulness costs him a struggle, for he is tender-hearted and clear-sighted, and he is the Columbus of 'the great joyless city' of the East. He has had a double aim—to keep his work recreative and to make it useful. In one respect he has been curiously happy, for he once dreamt aloud a beautiful dream, and has lived to find it a reality. It was his own bright ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... Nay, the pretty child did him better service. That night, for the first time in ninety-six weary hours, he slept, soundly and dreamlessly, till Alexei came to call him, when he rose with a feeling of great strangeness, of irrevocable change, upon him, as he faced a final joyless day. ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... woman can grow without love, and a great deal of it. Why do you suppose I am writing all this—I, who have felt such deep and true love for you? I have no courage—the dampness of the day has settled into my soul—and I shall be joyless until there is no more cursed doubt of you and your ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... changeless night of winter. The sharp snow-covered crests of the mountains rose in white appeal against the darkness of the sky,—the wild north wind tore through the leafless branches of the pine-forests, bringing with it driving pellets of stinging hail. Joyless and songless, the whole landscape lay as though frozen into sculptured stone. The Sun slept,—and the Fjord, black with brooding shadows, seemed silently to ask—where? Where was the great king of Light?—the ...
— Thelma • Marie Corelli
... Doth Nala cling to life; or, day by day, Waste with long yearning? Oh, as I behold Those black locks, and those eyes—dark and long-shaped As are the hundred-petalled lotus-leaves— And watch her joyless who deserves all joy, My heart is sore! When will she overpass The river of this sorrow, and come safe Unto its farther shore? When will she meet Her lord, as moon and moon-star in the sky Mingle? For, ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... idea that he was one of the number of the damned. This delusion took such possession of his soul that he lost his appetite, was unable to sleep, and day by day grew more and more wasted and languid. His tutor and director noticing how his health was affected and how pale, listless, and joyless he had become, often questioned him as to the cause of his dejection and evident suffering, but his tormentor who had filled his mind with this delusion, being what is called a dumb devil, the poor youth could ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... give it up, nor will I part from my lover. Whoever experiences what fate has allotted to me has learned to know other gods than those whom the master described as dwelling happily in undisturbed repose. Rather eternal torture in another world, united to the man I love, than painless, joyless mere existence in a desolate, incomprehensible, unknown region! You will be the last to teach the children to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... kind of ticket of admission, and what have I to do, when I am being civilised, with a world—the one that's running still and godlike over me? Do I not for days and weeks at a time go about in it, guilty, shut-in, and foolish under it, slinking about—its emptied miracles all around me, mean, joyless, anxious, unable to look the littlest flower in the face—unable——. "Ah, God!" my soul cries out within me. Are not all these things mine? Do they not belong with me and I with them? And I go racing about, making things up in their presence, plodding for shadows, cutting out paper dolls ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... desire to hear About our journey and our cheer, Our ships in autumn reach the sound, But long the way to Swedish ground. With joyless weather, wind and raind, And pinching cold, and feet in pain— With sleep, fatigue, and want oppressed, No songs ...
— Heimskringla - The Chronicle of the Kings of Norway • Snorri Sturluson
... Tiralla would sit by her child's bed. She would hold her hand—a small, narrow, delicate-looking hand with blue veins—and they would whisper together about the joys of Paradise. Whilst all around was joyless—the dark night, the lonely farm buried in deep snow, the solitude in which a soul so often gets lost—those two would whisper together about the joys of ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... dwindled away to nothing. Sir Joshua and Goldsmith have got into such a round of pleasures that they have no time." This shows how little Beauclerc was the companion of the poet's mind, or could judge of him below the surface. Reynolds, the kind participator in joyless dissipation, could have told a different story of his companion's ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... night, an old man stood at his window, and looked, with a glance of fearful despair, up the immovable, unfading heaven, and down upon the still, pure, white earth, on which no one was now so joyless and sleepless as he. ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... pitying the disappointment of Demeter at finding {56} her hopes thus blighted, succeeded in effecting a compromise by inducing his brother Aides to allow Persephone to spend six months of the year with the gods above, whilst during the other six she was to be the joyless companion of her grim lord below. Accompanied by her daughter, the beautiful Persephone, Demeter now resumed her long-abandoned dwelling in Olympus; the sympathetic earth responded gaily to her bright smiles, the corn at once sprang forth from the ground ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... to make him laugh; and laugh he did, he must laugh; it would never do to let those fellows know what was passing in his mind; so he laughed loud as any of them, but what a laugh!—how empty and hollow, how joyless and unreal, how unlike his former bursts of feeling!—a got-up laugh, which shewed plainer than ever something was wrong. Abe knew it, and he felt it was of no use trying any longer to keep up a sham happiness, ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell
... jealous is the queen, that no female is allowed to approach the walls within one hundred yards. Never beholding any of their race but the queen and a few dried-up and ugly spinsters, the poor creatures vegetate, mindless and joyless. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... the hero. But beneath the surface of this wintry age there is a new soul of summer beauty, the warm love of suffering humanity, just as beneath the surface of the frozen brook there is an ice-palace of summer beauty. In Part First the gloomy castle with its joyless interior stands as the only cold and forbidding thing in the landscape, "like an outpost of winter;" so in Part Second the same castle with Christmas joys within is the only bright and gladsome object in the landscape. In Part First the castle gates never "might opened be"; in Part Second ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... host which He had crowned before with radiance and glory. For the traitors, to reward their work, He shaped a house of pain and grim affliction, and lamentations of hell. Our Lord prepared this torture-house of exiles, deep and joyless, for the coming of the angel hosts. Well He knew it lay enshrouded in eternal night, and filled with woe, wrapped in fire and piercing cold, smoke-veils and ruddy flame. And over that wretched realm He spread the brooding terror of torment. ...
— Codex Junius 11 • Unknown
... paths that had once echoed to the tread of slippered feet, armed sentries paced, their sharp challenges breaking the stillness of the night. Outside its wrecked fences strange men in stranger uniforms strode in and out of the joyless houses; tired pickets stacked their arias on the unswept piazzas, and panting horses nibbled the bark from the withered trees; rank weeds choked the gardens; dishevelled vines clung to the porches, and doors that had always swung wide to the gentle tap of loving ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... gray and joyless as the wide waste lying hushed around me, unblessed with the verdure of a single hope, a single love; and as I looked down the coming years, my way seemed very solitary, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... powerfully tempted to cross the passage, knock, and have the ordeal ended then and there; but second thought whispered, "To-morrow will soon be here; be patient." She entered her room, and, wearied by the events of the day, fell asleep, dreaming of the new lot in the cemetery, and the lonely, joyless man who ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... of regret, which sink into the heart and bear a rich harvest by the time they meet again. Days and months glide by, and the pains of separation still endure; for they feel how necessary they have become to the happiness of each other, and how cold and joyless existence seems when far ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 18, 1841 • Various
... blooming vase of flowers; They breathe of joy which once hath been, Of gone and faded hours! I cannot love the rose; though rich, Its beauty will not last: Give me—give me the bloom o'er which The early blight hath passed! The yellow buds—give them to rest On my cold brow and joyless breast, When life ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... WITHOUT IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril; and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... restricted to that bare sufficiency which just supports life. The manners of the young ladies were equally mild, uncomplaining, and respectable; the only difference was, that Constantia was pensive and dejected, Isabel active and cheerful in adversity. The former seemed to move in a joyless routine of duty; but Isabel was so animated that only the most minute observer could tell that she was not perfectly happy, and hence she gained the character ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... and, proceeding along the bank of the stream, approaches him. He tells her that he has done nothing but mourn for the loss of his Pearl, and has been indeed a "joyless jeweller" (p.8). However, now that he has found his Pearl, he declares that he is no longer sorrowful, but would be a "joyful jeweller" were he allowed to cross the stream (p.8). The maiden blames her father for his rash speech, tells him that his Pearl is not lost, and that he cannot pass the ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... of the play, Zelma was languid, absent, and more unequal than usual. A strange sense of evil, a vague foreboding, haunted her. It was in vain that she said to herself, "What have I, a lonely, disappointed woman, loveless and joyless, to fear of misfortune more,—since death itself were welcome as change, and doubly welcome as rest?" The nameless fear still clung to her, sending cold thrills along her veins, fiercely grasping and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... trouble—I had been bowled over the brink by some account of horse colic and its remedy, or of the proper treatment of hoof disease in sheep. I suffered keenly from the horse colic and like troubles and from the many hopes and perils of democracy in my childhood. I found the Bible, however, the most joyless book of all, Samson being, as I thought, the only man in it who amounted to much. A shadow lay across its pages which came, I think, from the awful solemnity of my aunt when she opened them. It ...
— The Light in the Clearing • Irving Bacheller
... that shook the hills when he was angry, fell in ordinary talk very pleasantly upon the ear, with a kind of honied, friendly whine, not far off singing, that was eminently Scottish. He laughed not very often, and when he did, with a sudden, loud haw-haw, hearty but somehow joyless, like an echo from a rock. His face was permanently set and coloured; ruddy and stiff with weathering; more like a picture than a face; yet with a certain strain and a threat of latent anger in the expression, like that of a man trained too fine and harassed with perpetual vigilance. He spoke ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the angel stooped, Whispering, 'Live on! for yet one joyless soul, Void of true faith in human happiness, Waits to be won by thee, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... friends was a joyless pleasure. When Mary arrived in Lisbon, she found Fanny in the last stages of her illness, and before she had time to rest from her journey she began her work as sick-nurse. Four hours after her arrival Fanny's child was ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... he said, "you are resolved, and I know that your resolution can in justice be called by no other name than an act of heroic folly: —What then? it is long since life has been bitter to the Varangian exile. Morn has raised him from a joyless bed, which night has seen him lie down upon, wearied with wielding a mercenary weapon in the wars of strangers. He has longed to lay down his life in an honourable cause, and this is one in which the extremity and very essence of honour is implicated. It tallies also ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... some explanation of this hard, real life; the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others—she ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... understand my story entirely. Wanting a full explanation, you might fairly ask me why I married with this drawback. I did not know of it, but my wife believed I did. We were both most cruelly deceived, it does not matter now. She is condemned to a loveless, joyless life; so am I. With a wife beautiful loving, young, I must lead a most solitary existence—I must see my name die out for want of heirs—I must see my race almost extinct, my life passed in repining and misery, my heart broken, ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... soil was thick with dust like soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... charm, A magic, that would keep her race alive. So drives the giantess to seek her mate, Joyless and choiceless, since they are ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... not to be cheated of it. And when it is cheated of it, it is not the child but the community that is robbed of that beside which all its wealth is but tinsel and trash. For men, not money, make a country great, and joyless children do not ...
— The Making of an American • Jacob A. Riis
... no lordling's titled name, Nor miser's hoarded store; I ask to live with those I love, Contented though I 'm poor. From joyless pomp and heartless mirth I gladly will withdraw, And hide me in this lowly vale, Beneath my ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... aught but misery. Young man," she said, presenting me with a ring, which I well remembered as one of the few ornaments that Miss Vernon sometimes wore, "this comes from one whom you will never see more. If it is a joyless token, it is well fitted to pass through the hands of one to whom joy can never be known. Her last words were—Let him ...
— Rob Roy, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... in these days; and I never should have known it but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"—I can perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to be worth the trouble of carrying it ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... is my duty to leave you, so farewell for ever!'—that is what he would have said to her, knowing all the time that life would be utterly joyless to him. Would Cyril, in his hot, untried youth, be capable of a like generosity, or would he cleave to his betrothed with passionate, one-sided fealty, vowing that nothing on earth should separate them as long as they two loved ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... and its surface is never ruffled; but its deep-bosomed placidity seems to cover guilty secrets, and you fancy it in communication with the capricious and treacherous forces of nature. Its very colour is of a joyless beauty, a blue as cold and opaque as a solidified sheet of lava. Streaked and wrinkled by a mysterious motion of its own, it affects the very type of a legendary pool, and I could easily have believed that I had only to sit long enough into the evening to see ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... ever felt the deepest interest in all that has been written and said upon the subject, and the most profound respect and loving sympathy for those heroic women, who, in the face of law and public sentiment, have dared to sunder the unholy ties of a joyless, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... upon this it is incomplete, and we wander in the narrow circle of prayers and praise, wondering all the while what is it we are praising God for, because we feel so melancholy and lifeless. Dante had a place in his Inferno for the joyless souls, and if his conception be true the population of that circle will be largely modern Irish. A reaction against this conventional restraint is setting in, and the needs of life will perhaps in the future ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... gone, His presence and his safe return, still wooes With thousand doleful sighs and mournful Cooes. Or as the loving Mullet that true Fish, Her fellow lost, nor joy nor life do wish, But lanches on that shore there for to dye, Where she her captive husband doth espy, Mine being gone I lead a joyless life, I have a living sphere, yet seem no wife; But worst of all, to him can't steer my course, I here, he there, alas, both kept by force; Return, my Dear, my Joy, my only Love, Unto thy Hinde, thy Mullet and thy Dove, ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... magnificence; and knowing the use of astuteness, he knows also the importance of good faith. He has a sense of the balance of European power, and anticipates Montesquieu in his theory of the influence of climates on peoples. There is something of pity, something of irony, in the view which he takes of the joyless lot of the great ones of the earth. Having ascertained how few of the combinations of events can be controlled by the wisest calculation, he takes refuge in a faith in Providence; he finds God necessary to explain this entangled world; and yet his morality is in great part that which ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... allows no trifling with her laws; flowers do not bloom in deserts. He has crushed sentiment; he has stifled affection. With a heart by nature kindly, he sits now an image cut in steel. He gazes calmly at his desolate hearth, at his joyless age, and smokes. Man has no power to move him; fate condemned him ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... a captive to her charms, a most accomplished knight And monarch brave that ever yet had bowed to woman's might Was but a poor and joyless slave, compelled to wear a smile And act a part for which she loathed her wretched self ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... of Gunnar the war-king cried out o'er the weeping hall: "Wail on, O women forsaken, for the mightiest woman born! Now the hearth is cold and joyless, and the waste bed lieth forlorn. Wail on, but amid your weeping lay hand to the glorious dead, That not alone for an hour may lie Queen Brynhild's head: For here have been heavy tidings, and the Mightiest under shield Is laid on ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs • William Morris
... meat to eat," he said, as he spread a soft skin by the fire, for the boy to lie on. Then he turned to place the child on the skin,—but no boy was there. He had no son. Only that strange bird perched, joyless and alone, over the fire, on the pole from ...
— Stories the Iroquois Tell Their Children • Mabel Powers
... he remained standing stock still in the dusk. She had already reached the three palms when she heard behind her a loud peal of laughter, cynical and joyless, such as is heard in smoking-rooms at the end of a scandalous story. It made her feel positively ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... last few moments. Only the world and love seemed to her as a void and make-believe from beginning to end. Even the memory of the protestations of love, which her husband had made to her in days past, brought to her lips a dry, hard, joyless smile, like a sharp cruel knife which had cut through her heart. She was thinking, perhaps, that the love which seemed to fill so much of one's life, which brought in its train such fondness and depth of feeling, which made even the briefest separation ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... my own work, nor deem it excellent. But still I cherish it—all imperfect as it is—I know not why; and when to-morrow comes, and I must give it up into his reverence's hands, it seems that my life and spirit would depart from me with its loss, and that all around me would be dark and joyless." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various
... predecessors, will not, as we have seen, allow it to appear even at the foot of the page. To reproduce all that has been written in disparagement of this precious portion of God's written Word would be a joyless and an unprofitable task. According to Green, 'the genuineness of the passage cannot be maintained[589].' Hammond is of opinion that 'it would be more satisfactory to separate it from its present context, and place it by itself as ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... Harold was sore sick at heart,[u] And from his fellow Bacchanals would flee; 'Tis said, at times the sullen tear would start, But Pride congealed the drop within his ee:[25] Apart he stalked in joyless reverie,[v] And from his native land resolved to go, And visit scorching climes beyond the sea;[26] With pleasure drugged, he almost longed for woe, And e'en for change of scene would ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... Oddity, with a look of great glee; "I had never thought to have seen them again! And they were so changed, I should scarcely have known them. Bob, in particular, looked so much taller, and stronger, and oh! so much happier than he had done last year! He was no more the wretched, joyless, hopeless creature, cowering in rags, one that even rats might look on with pity; he had a bright, fearless eye, and hopeful smile; and if ever a face expressed gratitude and affection, it was his when he looked on his ...
— The Rambles of a Rat • A. L. O. E.
... joyless face to the other, and sat without a word on the chair that Austin placed for her. Her woman's intuition divined a sequel to the afternoon's drama. Some of it she had already learned. For, going ...
— Viviette • William J. Locke
... his reminiscences of that period, in reply to the question, "Do you retain pleasant recollections of cadet life?" he remarked, "I have little reason to do so. Without relations or acquaintances in a strange city, we spent a joyless youth. The discipline was strict, even hard, and now, when my judgment of it is unprejudiced, I must say that it was too strict, too hard. The only benefit we received from this treatment was that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... eternal, lasted only a few short weeks; and the indifference, which was so far from being included in the bargain, that it was not so much as suspected, follows them through the whole tiresome journey of their insipid, vacant, joyless existence. ...
— Essays on Various Subjects - Principally Designed for Young Ladies • Hannah More
... this word he spake:— "Long time, O Andrew, hast thou been well versed In arts of sorcery; thou hast deceived And led astray much people; but thou shalt No longer now have power upon such works, For grievous torments are decreed for thee According to thy deeds. With weary heart, Joyless, degraded, thou shalt suffer woes, The bitter pangs of death. My warriors Are ready for the battle; they will soon Deprive thee of thy life by valiant deeds. 1370 What man on earth so mighty that he may Release thee from thy bonds, if ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... forbearance. Her mind was in a turmoil; she was married—that was all she knew—married to somebody she liked but did not love. Married to a man who had been chosen for her partly against her will. She glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes; if she was joyless, no less was he. It was an inauspicious beginning to a married life which would end who knew how? Before the depressing granite facade of the London Safe Deposit the party descended, Mr. Debenham paid the ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... to-morrow; but I shall never recross the sea. This is my country. Since I set my foot upon its shore I have never had a moment to yawn. In this land of real and substantial life, the spectre that haunted my joyless days dares not be seen—the "hour too ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... was a colorless, forbidding sort of a place. Only one company was stationed there, and my husband was nearly always scouting in the mountains north of us. The weather was severe, and the winter there was joyless and lonesome. The extreme cold and the loneliness affected my spirits, and ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... our hearts. More of us than we are willing to believe are kept from entire surrender to Jesus Christ, by money and worldly possessions; and many professing Christians are kept shrivelled and weak and joyless because they love their wealth more than their Lord, and would think it madness to do as this man was bidden to do. When ballast is thrown out, the balloon shoots up. A general unlading of the 'thick clay' which weighs down ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... In the same way, the theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. This largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over other men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit—joyless and domineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons. All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of the immortal souls against the superior ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... into matrimony from this very feeling! How many a man whose hours have passed fleetingly at the pleasant tea-table, or by the warm hearth of some old country-house, going forth into the cold and cheerless night, reaches his far-off home only to find it dark and gloomy, joyless and companionless? How often has the hard-visaged look of his old butler, as, with sleepy eyes and yawning face, he hands a bed-room candle, suggested thoughts of married happiness? Of the perils of propinquity I have already spoken; the risks of contrast are also great. Have you never, in strolling ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... volcano; hopes extinguished beneath a profound sense of the social annihilation to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind. And by the side of the poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless, self-sustained, drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and of poetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul and brain, stood Lucien, graceful as some sculptured ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... Father see That it would be for thy good, What desires so eagerly Thy misguided flesh and blood, He would ne'er thee joyless leave, But would ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... sorrow. Polzelli was in the same position as he: she lived unhappily with her spouse. Whether she honestly returned Haydn's love cannot be known. Facts hint that she often abused and took advantage of his good nature. But for all that she beautified his life, so often joyless, by the tenderness which she awoke in him; and the woman who throughout twenty years could do that, deserved well of the man whose friend she was; and she earns our consideration and sympathy besides. From London the master ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... Lodging-Houses Wet the Clay The King's Friend Learning to speak Private Tyrants Margin The Fine Art of Smiling Death-bed Repentance The Correlation of Moral Forces A Simple Bill of Fare for a Christmas Dinner Children's Parties After-supper Talk Hysteria in Literature Jog Trot The Joyless American Spiritual Teething Glass Houses The Old-Clothes Monger in Journalism The Country Landlord's Side The Good Staff of ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... and she saw that he was putting it into some queer place on his queer person. "Well, if I didn't believe you were going to help her to develop," he remarked; and he stopped, while his hands continued to fumble, out of sight, and he treated Olive to his large joyless smile. She assured him that he need have no fear on that score; Verena's development was the thing in the world in which she took most interest; she should have every opportunity for a free expansion. "Yes, that's the great thing," Selah ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... entered. "O for a live face," he thought; and at times he had a memory of Lady Flora; and at times he would study the living gallery before him with despair, and would see himself go on to waste his days in that joyless, pastoral place, and death come to him, and his grave be dug under the rowans, and the Spirit of the Earth laugh out in a thunder-peal at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XIX (of 25) - The Ebb-Tide; Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dispersed early in the evening, not broken up by the bridegroom himself, but sadly and gloomily by the joyless mood of the guests and their forebodings of evil. Bertalda retired with her maidens, and the knight with his attendants; but at this mournful festival there was no gay, laughing ...
— Undine - I • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... sympathetic love and tenderness which is the life of little hearts, deprived of the pleasures suited to its state, yet too immature to turn within itself for comfort in its need, its life without and within a dull, joyless, dreary blank—such was poor Harry's, for a shadow dark and terrible rested on his baby heart and home, a something that darkened and deepened day by day, and grew more and more insupportable as the ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... often of the Greeks, for the joy of the Greek in life was far greater than that of the Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring to a pagan, and "Pax tecum aeterna" is among the commonest of the inscriptions. The life beyond the grave was at best an unreal and joyless copy of an earthly existence, and Achilles told Odysseus that he would rather be the serf of a poor man upon earth ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... Secretly we consoled ourselves with the promise that if the day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... soul of Nature, and see things as they are"; and when, instead of this, it turns to glorifying its own powers and achievements, or sets up any end apart from such discovery and interpretation, it becomes sickly, feeble, foolish, frivolous, vicious, joyless, and moribund; and meanness, cruelty, sensuality, impiety, and irreligion are the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... I ponder on the state of man, Joyless and sad of heart, and consecrate This day of ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... known only in a dumb, despairing sort of way that all the foods you like are fattening, and all the advice you read and hear is that you must avoid them as a pestilence. And you settle down to your joyless fatness, realizing that it is beyond human strength to do that forever, and that you would rather die young and fat, anyway, than to have nothing to eat all your life but a little meat, fish, and sloshy vegetables. ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... what is it? It is to bear the miseries of a people! To hear their murmurs, feel their discontents, And sink beneath a load of splendid care! To have your best success ascribed to Fortune. And Fortune's failures all ascribed to you! It is to sit upon a joyless height, To every blast of changing fate exposed! Too high for hope! too ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... to tell her to go"—this with a joyless little laugh—"she quit work and wouldn't behave herself. So now I'm going on alone." "And you ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... made in November, 1883, the very year when the Pall Mall Gazette exposure started "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," and the conscience of England was stirred as never before over this joyless city in the East End of its capital. Even then, vigorous and drastic plans were being discussed, and a splendid program of municipal reforms was already dimly outlined. Of all these, however, I had heard nothing but the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams |
