"Mournfulness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The mournfulness of his spirits, and the gorgeousness of his appearance, might have made him ridiculous, but that his delicacy made him respectable. Little Dorrit learnt ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... at Throckmorton, who, in the distance, was surveying the Archbishop's spy with a sardonic amusement, and a great mournfulness went through her. For there was the traitor and here before her was the betrayed. Throckmorton had told her enough to know that he was conspiring against his master, and Cromwell trusted Throckmorton before ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... melody, which he sang to a sweet and plaintive air, seemed to produce a feeling of mournfulness and sorrow in his spirit, for although the draught he had taken was progressing fast in its operations upon his intellect, still it only assumed a new and more affecting shape, and occasioned that singular form and ease of expression which may be observed ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... whimsical display of pompous ignorance worth seeing once. There was a hideous bier with rude relics of barbarism in the shape of paltry adornments. A native driver, with a tall "chimney pot" hat, full of salaried mournfulness, drove the white team. The bier was headed by a band of music playing a lively march, and followed by a line of carriages containing the relations and friends of the deceased. The burial was almost invariably ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... struck Yevgeny Petrovitch as absurd and naive, but the whole story made an intense impression on Seryozha. Again his eyes were clouded by mournfulness and something like fear; for a minute he looked pensively at the dark window, shuddered, and said, in a ...
— The Cook's Wedding and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... no sound. Her still, upward gaze had a patient, mournfulness which troubled him like a suggestion of an inconceivable depth. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... poet truer to the highest truth of spiritual life than Shakespeare is when he invests with ineffable mournfulness—shadowy as twilight, vague as the remembrance of a dream—those creatures of his fancy who are preordained to suffering and a miserable death. Never was there sounded a truer note of poetry than that which thrills ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... children (all of whom survived her), to seek from the scenes and friends of her early days such consolation as they might minister to a grief which only those who have experienced it can measure. She never brought her own peculiar sorrows before the public; but there is a tone of gentle mournfulness pervading many of her poems, that may be traced to this cause; and there are touching allusions to "one of rare endowments," that no one who remembered her husband's character could fail to recognise. Her intense love of nature happily remained ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... meaning was, naturally, missed by Arabella. The latter, after evincing that she was struck by Sue's avowal, recovered herself, and went on to talk with placid bluntness about "her" boy, for whom, though in his lifetime she had shown no care at all, she now exhibited a ceremonial mournfulness that was apparently sustaining to the conscience. She alluded to the past, and in making some remark appealed again to Sue. There was no answer: Sue ...
— Jude the Obscure • Thomas Hardy
... creature in the world. The greatness of her delight made Mary sad for her. To any thoughtful heart it must be sad to think what a little time the joy of so many mothers lasts—not because their babies die, but because they live; but Mary's mournfulness was caused by the fear that the splendid dawn of mother-hope would soon be swallowed in dismal clouds of father-fault. For mothers and for wives there is no redemption, no unchaining of love, save by the coming of the kingdom—in themselves. ...
— Mary Marston • George MacDonald
... remembrance of what you have been saved from should keep you meek and lowly in spirit, Bessie. I have been grieved to-day, deeply grieved, to see that you already begin to feel uplifted." Mr. Wiley dwelt in unctuous italics on his regret, and waved his head slowly in token of his mournfulness. Bessie turned ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... her with sad surprise. "A got no name, poor—poor—a got no name," then she broke forth, and as if quite overcome with the mournfulness of Mary's condition, the little head burrowed back into the hollow of the supporting arm, that she might the better gaze up and study the face of this object for ...
— The Angel of the Tenement • George Madden Martin
... which was played was such as I had never heard before. Indeed, it could scarcely be called an air. It was the most capricious burden of mournfulness that had ever had its utterance from wo. Fancy a mute—one bereft of the divine faculty of speech, by human, not divine ministration. Fancy such a being endowed with the loftiest desires, moved by the acutest sensibilities, having already felt the ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... long to see Farmer Brown and Mrs. Brown and especially his master, Farmer Brown's boy. Then, when he could stand it no longer, he would open his mouth and send his great voice rolling across to the woods with a tone of mournfulness which never had ...
— Bowser The Hound • Thornton W. Burgess
... The door and window of the vacant room being open, we looked in. It was the room with the dark door to which Miss Flite had secretly directed my attention when I was last in the house. A sad and desolate place it was, a gloomy, sorrowful place that gave me a strange sensation of mournfulness and even dread. "You look pale," said Caddy when we came out, "and cold!" I felt as if the room ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... many hours, sometimes passing into what was either a swoon or a sleep. At last she roused herself, and saw by the shadows that it was quite late in the day. There is great mournfulness in waking thus of one's own accord, and alone; hearing the various noises of the busy mid-day household, and feeling as if all would go on just the same without thought of us, even if we had died in that ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... into my hands an exquisite portrait of Olivia, taken in Florence. There was an expression of quiet mournfulness in the face, which touched me to the core of my heart. I could not put it down and speak indifferently about it. My heart beat wildly, and I felt tempted to run off with the treasure and return ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... pathetic energy she spends the long days of summer, in long, incessant walks, sorrow-pursued, away from the dwellings of men. But, however this be, I think this divine and pure devotion to a first love, though it may have impregnated Hawthorne's mind too keenly with the mournfulness of mortality, was yet one of the most cogent means of entirely clarifying the fine spirit which he inherited, and that he in part owes to this exquisite example his marvellous, unsurpassed spirituality. ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... valleys of the Shadow of Death, air-voyages and promenades in the abysses of the ocean, the duello, the battle, and the siege, the wooing of maidens and the marriage rite. All the splendour and squalor, the beauty and baseness the glamour and grotesqueness, the magic and the mournfulness, the bravery and the baseness, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... "And as for her mournfulness," declared the matter-of-fact young heiress, "well, that's genuinely funny. If I've got a bit of a hump myself, and I hear Aunt Emily, with a face of heroic resignation, say, 'I can bear it,' I begin to feel quite ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... had accepted as Gospel all that she had been taught. She hardly ever went out, and she had very little standard of comparison; she admired her family naively, and believed what they said. She was of an expansive and confiding nature, easily satisfied, and tried to fall in with the mournfulness of her home, and docilely used to repeat the pessimistic ideas which she heard. She was a creature of devotion—always thinking of others, trying to please, sharing anxieties, guessing at what others wanted; she had a great need of loving without demanding anything in return. Naturally ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland |
