"Pathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wampum, they took my advice, and prepared to leave their country and people immediately. Their relatives accompanied them a short distance on their journey, and when about to part, their old uncle, the Tall Chief, addressed them in the following pathetic and sentimental speech: ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... drying. Some come from mould. Unfermented cacao is liable to go mouldy, so is germinated or over-ripe cacao with broken shells. Some cacao unfortunately gets wet with sea water. There always seems to me something pathetic in the thought of finely-cured cacao being drowned in sea water as it goes out in ...
— Cocoa and Chocolate - Their History from Plantation to Consumer • Arthur W. Knapp
... burdened with the care of thy favorite puss! It wasn't for nothing that so many goodies were stuffed into thy already crowded valise! It wasn't for nothing that her communications have been so frequent, and contained such tender inquiries after thy health, and such pathetic injunctions to be careful of thyself!" You must be a simpleton, man, to imagine that a benevolent disposition prompted so many manifestations all of a sudden, when the past was so different. "But why not?" thought he, as his charitable heart sought for a better ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... like that; it got caught and lost in the soft eyelashes, and the persons stared at merely thought they were being regarded with a flattering and exquisite attentiveness. And if ever she was out of humour or definitely cross— and who would not be sometimes in such a world?—-she only looked so pathetic that people all rushed to comfort her, if possible by means of kissing. It was more than tiresome, it was maddening. Nature was determined that she should look and sound angelic. She could never be disagreeable or rude ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... breast, and so rapid had been the revulsion from his first sentiments when Borgert had opened the conversation, that what was now uppermost in his mind was gratitude for this discreet and wise friend. He rose, and with a pathetic gesture stretched ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... wife found Jerome much improved. He had become more serious; a certain gravity had taken the place of his youthful bubbling high spirits. He spoke with emotion, respect, and affection of his young wife whose pathetic situation was made even more disturbing by the state of her health. He proposed to throw himself at his brother's feet, and by prayers and supplications to wring from him the consent he desired. "No one can doubt," he says in his Memoirs, "that his heart was torn by ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... girlhood. The chord he had hoped to touch remained mute. In view of the fact that she believed love to be dead between them, this method of stimulating an outworn romance seemed sentimental and insincere. Had he loved her, she might well have thought it boyish and pathetic. What he spoke of as a disguise had seemed so natural as to escape her notice; and this indicated the height from which she had never really descended and could now never descend. He had lost his great opportunity of appearing the mayor in her eyes. It was no part of ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... gentle wind; on every side pleasing trees were massed into shady and grateful woods; overhead the noonday sun lit up a deep-blue sky. Perhaps the sublimity of the scene played upon her softer emotions. Perhaps all intense beauty is pathetic, and makes one think of poor illusions and unavailing dreams. Lady Gray wondered why she could not feel, on this serene morning, the same confidence in Edgar Doe's future, as her friend felt in Archie's; ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... preferred staying quietly at home. Dull care dogged her footsteps; Goddard's pathetic face haunted her memory. Do what she could; go where she would, she could never banish from her mind his halting, passionate words spoken on that never-forgotten day in Winchester. After all, did she ...
— The Lost Despatch • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... "A pathetic story is told in the Vorwaerts by Herr Adolf Koester (who acts as war correspondent for the German Socialist Press) in connection with the recent fighting at Hooge. A German soldier told him of a young Scotsman whom he had killed with a hand-grenade ...
— The World in Chains - Some Aspects of War and Trade • John Mavrogordato
... from head to foot, instead of the white dress of the portrait. She had no knowledge of the conflict, of nothing but that she was called for, that her fate might depend on the next few minutes. In her eyes there was a pathetic question, a line of anxiety in the lids, an innocent appeal in the looks. And the face the same: the same lips, sensitive, ready to quiver; the same innocent, candid brow; the look of a common race, which is more subtle than mere resemblance. ...
— The Open Door, and the Portrait. - Stories of the Seen and the Unseen. • Margaret O. (Wilson) Oliphant
... listened appreciatively, and then some of us took him home, fed him, and we all contributed to his wardrobe. We were all of different sizes and build, and the result was sadly comical. Before he left us he told his story. It was not new or even interesting, but intensely pathetic; one of a large family, fair education, and finally a clerk at L80 a year. A pretty typewriter, marriage, and no help from his father. First the girl wife was dismissed, and then the boy husband. The child was born, and the mother died from lack of proper nourishment and comfort. ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... the ancient Romance and modern Novel. To attain this end, there is required a sufficient degree of the marvellous, to excite the attention; enough of the manners of real life, to give an air of probability to the work; and enough of the pathetic, to engage the ...
— The Old English Baron • Clara Reeve
... could not be stopped, but it might be turned to his own purpose. It would not suffice for him now that he should simply defend the question he had asked. The court was showing its aptitude for pathos, and he also must be pathetic on his own side. He knew well enough that he could not arrest public opinion which was going against him, by shewing that his question was a proper question; but he might do so by proving at once how tender was his ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... progressive efforts by becoming a member. And look at the throngs of people that crowded our private views—eh? ha! ha! what! But what will you!—the question is, after all, purely a parochial one—and here I would stop to wonder, if I do not seem pathetic and out of character, why the Artist is naturally an object of vituperation to the Vestryman?—Why am I—who, of course, as you know, am charming—why am I the ...
— The Gentle Art of Making Enemies • James McNeill Whistler
... us take the contemporary account, which also we have at first hand; which is almost pathetic to read; such a contrast between ruddy morning and the storms of the afternoon! Here are two Letters from Voltaire; fine transparent human Letters, as his generally are: the first of them written directly ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... ago it seemed that Ulster would be his stumbling-block. The War saved him from that, but only to bring him down through more sinister instruments. In his pathetic apology this afternoon he confessed that he had failed to estimate accurately the strength of the Sinn Fein movement. He might have been wrong in not suppressing it before, but his omission to do so was due to a consuming desire to keep Ireland's front ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... we must be careful about: yesterday Mrs. Ruthven had a doll on my bed, and I sat sewing by the window, not noticing what she was doing until I heard her pretty, pathetic little laugh. ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... a parasite-race on the Terrans," Dr. Paula Quinton objected. "You find races like that all through the explored galaxy—pathetic cultural mongrels." ...
— Uller Uprising • Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr
... expected to bring desirable, not undesirable immigrants here, and if they bring people whom we cannot accept, they must take the consequences and bear the expense of deporting them. Our deporting division looks after that, and it is one of the hardest parts of our work. We've a pathetic case there now." ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... Through the dusky atmosphere, Let the wailing of the kildee be the only sound we hear: O sad and sweet and low As the memory may know Is the glad-pathetic song ...
— Riley Love-Lyrics • James Whitcomb Riley
... A pathetic chapter in the history of colonization might be written upon the fate of native races. A great English authority on international law (Phillimore) has dealt with their claims to the proprietorship of American soil in ...
— The Story of Newfoundland • Frederick Edwin Smith, Earl of Birkenhead
... was a pale sturdy fellow with a round and carefully shaven face, stern eyes, and the powerful jaws of a man who compels the adoration of women by terrorising them. He was not deficient in talent, he sang true, and his ringing voice was one of extraordinary penetration and pathetic power. And his repertoire, his "Flowers of the Pavement," completed the explanation of his success; for all the foulness and suffering of the lower spheres, the whole abominable sore of the social hell created by the rich, shrieked aloud in these songs in words of ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... I am greeted with the pensive, almost pathetic not of the wood pewee. The pewees are the true flycatchers, and are easily identified. They are very characteristic birds, have strong family traits and pugnacious dispositions. They are the least ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... philosophic character, and according to the laws of an emperor distinguished by the wisdom and justice of his general administration. The apologies which were repeatedly addressed to the successors of Trajan are filled with the most pathetic complaints, that the Christians, who obeyed the dictates, and solicited the liberty, of conscience, were alone, among all the subjects of the Roman empire, excluded from the common benefits of their auspicious government. The deaths of a few eminent martyrs have been recorded with care; ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... in favor of the young rebel prisoner, and while the President seemed to be deeply pondering the young lady moved to a piano near by and taking a seat commenced to sing 'Gentle Annie,' a very sweet and pathetic ballad which, before the War, was a familiar song in almost every household in the Union, and is not yet entirely forgotten, for ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... the top as if to protect it from the weather, and fenced on each side with open wire-work, looking through which, I beheld a small grave, overspread with mosses, and strewed with fresh-gathered white flowers. It bore no name or inscription, except the following simple but pathetic line; ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... may recall how the gifted Frank Upton—for it is of him I write—was one day in 1863 or 1864 struck down by apoplexy while pleading in the well-known Peterhoff case. Or they may remember subsequently his constant, pathetic effort to maintain his old courtly mien against his resultant paralysis. This was the young man of about thirty, of uncommon masculine beauty and refinement, who sat beside Christian Roselius as an associate in the cause of Sally Miller versus ...
— Strange True Stories of Louisiana • George Washington Cable
... out Porthos, delighted at having been so well represented by D'Artagnan. These several exclamations, uttered at the same moment, made quite a pathetic winding-up of a day which might have finished in a very ridiculous manner. But D'Artagnan was there, and, on every occasion, wheresoever D'Artagnan exercised any control, matters ended only just in the very way he wished and willed. There were general embracings; Truchen, whom the baron's ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... expression of pathetic reproach was as effective as her eyelash play, when seen for the first time, as Stephen knew to his sorrow. But he had seen the one as ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... to letters and presents. In the past few years she had come almost to regard Mr. Pett in the light of a father. Hers was a nature swiftly responsive to kindness; and because Mr. Pett besides being kind was also pathetic she pitied as well as loved him. There was a lingering boyishness in the financier, the boyishness of the boy who muddles along in an unsympathetic world and can never do anything right: and this quality called aloud to the youth in her. She was at the valiant age when we burn to right wrongs ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... the world itself! And one of them, perhaps a priest, certainly a great man, wrought up to eloquence, through the darkness and the terror, puts up this pitiful and pathetic cry to the supreme God for mercy, for protection, for deliverance ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... The brief pathetic life of Powhatan's daughter is well portrayed. (p. 76) This large oblong volume contains ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... common she was not common—not at least flagrantly so—and perhaps also not excellent. At all events she wouldn't be, in appearance at least, a dreary appendage; which in the case of a person "hooking on" was always something gained. Was it because something of a romantic or pathetic interest usually attaches to a good creature who has been the victim of a "long engagement" that this young lady made an impression on me from the first—favoured as I had been so quickly with this glimpse of her history? I ...
— The Patagonia • Henry James
... It was a pathetic monologue that Miss Morrison had chosen for Maudie, supposed to be given by an old woman in a poorhouse. Her husband had died a drunkard and then her only son, "as likely a lad as you ever saw," had also taken to "crooked ways and left ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... cannot laugh at them. I know the long hopes and fears that centre round the hired waiter; the long cost of the cream and the ice jelly ordered the week before from the confectioner's. But to me it is pathetic, not ridiculous. Heroism is not all of one pattern. Dr. Washburn, had the Prince of Wales come to see him, would have put his bread and cheese and jug of beer upon the table, and helped His Royal Highness to half. But my father ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... II,, the best and most just of these (the Norman) princes, * *Peter, of Blois, a judicious and even elegant writer, of that age, gives a pathetic description of the venality of justice, and the oppressions of the poor, * * and he scruples not to complain to the king himself of these abuses. We may judge what the case would be under the government of worse ...
— An Essay on the Trial By Jury • Lysander Spooner
... there be some grand pervading principle—some invisible, yet most distinctly stamped archetypus of the great whole, a poem like the Iliad can never come to the birth. Traditions the most picturesque, episodes the most pathetic, local associations teeming with the thoughts of gods and great men, may crowd in one mighty vision, or reveal themselves in more substantial forms to the mind of the poet; but, except the power to create a grand whole, to which these ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... live forever in my memory. The combination of bestiality and humanity was oftentimes pathetic, and again grotesque or horrible. Beneath the glaring noonday sun, in the sweltering heat of the mesa-top, the huge, hairy creatures leaped in a great circle. They coiled and threw their fiber-ropes; ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... said Churchill, with a solemn, pathetic shake of the head. "Gentlemen and noblemen should consider before they make these low matches to save their studs, or their souls, or their entailed estates. Whatever be the necessity, there can be no apology for outraging all bienseance. Necessity has no law, but it should have some decency. ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... and Torricelli very famous after him. Visitors also were permitted, after approval by a Jesuit supervisor; and under these circumstances many visited him, among them a man as immortal as himself—John Milton, then only twenty-nine, travelling in Italy. Surely a pathetic incident, this meeting of these two great men—the one already blind, the other destined to become so. No wonder that, as in his old age he dictated his masterpiece, the thoughts of the English poet should run on the blind sage of Tuscany, and the reminiscence ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... even with Schiller's at Marbach. Much that came unsought, even to Schiller, Richter had a struggle to come by; much he could never get at all. The place of "Frau Aja" in the development of the child Goethe's fancy was taken at Joditz by the cow-girl. Eagerness to learn Fritz showed in pathetic fulness, but the most diligent search has revealed no trace in these years of that creative imagination with which he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... A pathetic love story of a young girl, Rosemary. The teacher of the country school, who is also master of the vineyard, comes to know her through her desire for books. She is happy in his love till another woman comes into his life. But happiness and emancipation from her ...
— The Peace of Roaring River • George van Schaick
... remorseful about Ralph Rackstraw. But Ralph immediately begins to sing about a nightingale and a moon's bright ray and several other things most inappropriate to the occasion, and winds up with "He sang, Ah, well-a-day," in the most pathetic manner. The other sailors repeat after him, "Ah, well-a-day," also in a very pathetic manner, and Ralph thanks them in the politest, most heartbroken manner, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... volume will reveal the rich variety of the material. Specimens are to be found of folk literature and modern literature, of the romantic, of the realistic, of the crude and naive, of the artistic and sophisticated, of the humorous and the pathetic. The editor has tried to find specimens presenting as many themes, as many interests, as many emotions as possible, characteristic specimens of the most important authors for children, of all the civilizations that have produced literatures which have ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... said haltingly, "have I ever—been intro—" Suddenly his eyes closed, a frown gathered on his forehead. After a minute his eyes opened again, and he gazed with painful, pathetic seriousness at Jo. This grew to a kind of childish terror; then slowly, as a shadow passes, the perplexity, anxiety and terror cleared away, and left his forehead calm, his eyes unvexed and peaceful. The monocle dropped, and he did not heed it. At length he said wearily, and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... something ludicrous as well as pathetic in this cry. It did more for him than the most eloquent pleading could have done. Man, in a crowd, is an unstable being. At any moment he will veer right round and run in an opposite direction. The idea that the condemned man had ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... of the fifteenth century worked for the most part in low relief, giving even to their monumental effigies something of its depression of surface, getting into them by this means a pathetic suggestion of the wasting and etherealisation of death. They are haters of all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly-opposed light and shade, and seek their means of expression among those last refinements of shadow, which are almost invisible except in a strong light, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... Mary Ann opened her eyes, and Lancelot saw that they were large and pathetic. He could not see the colour for the glint of sunshine that touched ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the Italian her wish to purchase bric-a-brac to the extent of a golden goblet, beautiful in design and of early Roman handiwork. A group of statutory, representing Venus and Adonis, at once piquant and charming, with an exquisite painting of the Dying Gladiator pathetic in the extreme. ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... in Edith's narrow bed, two slim young figures delicately flushed with sleep. As pathetic, had they known it, as those other sleepers in their untidy billets across the channel. Almost as hopeless too. Dwellers ...
— Love Stories • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... various tables, the Captain had sidled up, without accident to himself or any of the jugs and glasses round about him, to the table where we sat, and had taken his place near the writer, his old acquaintance. He warbled the refrain of the Colonel's song, not inharmoniously; and saluted its pathetic conclusion with a subdued hiccup and a plentiful effusion of tears. "Bedad, it is a beautiful song," says he, "and many a time I heard poor Harry ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... unaffected, and such as we might expect to meet with, in a well-bred man somewhat advanced in years. His elocution also surprised those who had derived their impressions from the English journals. His voice is a superb tenor, and possesses that pathetic tremble which is so effective in what is called emotive eloquence, while his delivery was as well suited to the communication he had to make as could well have ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... of Waterford on repeal, and an assembly of Quakers, Methodists, and "other sectaries," as he would himself call them, in the city of Cork, on an anti-slavery occasion, with equal effect. His broad-brimmed and sedate audience were as much delighted with his elegant and pathetic eloquence in favour of humanity and natural rights, as his peasant mob were while he discoursed to them upon the certainty and glory of repeal, and declared that "they were the finest peasantry in the world." On the one ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... garden,' he affirmed. 'And there's something pathetic about its appearing on souvenir post cards as a mere adjunct to a blue and ...
— Jerry • Jean Webster
... sad, a. sorrowful, pathetic, plaintive, doleful, piteous, lugubrious, rueful, mournful, dismal, funereal, gloomy, melancholy, disconsolate, dejected, touching; calamitous, deplorable, grievous, dire, afflictive, wretched, saturnine, grave, sober; dull, sombre, subdued; (Colloq.) bad, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... therefore return to Mr. Tupman; merely adding that within some few minutes before twelve o'clock that night, the convocation of worthies of Dingley Dell and Muggleton were heard to sing, with great feeling and emphasis, the beautiful and pathetic national ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... and supported by the 'Trois Rats' and its frequenters. One series in particular, representing a robin overcome by the seduction of a glass of absinthe and passing through all the stages of delirium tremens, had a grim inventiveness, a fecundity of half humorous, half pathetic fancy, which ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... later we find Shakespeare in his conception of Shylock capable of greater things as a student of character. In this pathetic, lonely, vindictive figure, exiled forever from the warm fireside of human friendship by those inherent faults which he can no more change than the tiger can change his claws, the long tragedy which accompanies the survival of the fittest finds a voice. Yet even in Shylock ...
— An Introduction to Shakespeare • H. N. MacCracken
... indeed (cried my uncle) let us hear what the fellow has to say in his own vindication.' He was accordingly summoned, and made his appearance, which was equally queer and pathetic. He seemed to be about twenty years of age, of a middling size, with bandy legs, stooping shoulders, high forehead, sandy locks, pinking eyes, flat nose, and long chin — but his complexion was of a sickly yellow; his looks denoted famine, and the rags that he wore could hardly ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... back to the surface, where he found himself close alongside a mass of top-hamper, consisting of the ship's fore-topmast with all attached, that had torn itself adrift from the wreck when she went down; and to this he had at once swam, and taken refuge upon it. He told a pathetic tale of the despair that had seized him, when, at dawn, he had found himself the sole survivor, as he supposed, of the catastrophe; and of the alternations of hope and despair that had been his throughout the ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... to go to Achilles, and demand the restoration of Hector's body. Mercury is also sent to Priam, whom he guides in safety through the Grecian camp, to the tent of Achilles. A pathetic interview follows, and Priam ransoms the body of his son, and obtains a twelve days' truce, during which he ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... court, yet but little attention was paid his words, and duels continually took place, Though most frequently resorted to as a means of avenging outraged honour, they were occasionally the result of misunderstanding. A pathetic story is told of a fatal encounter, caused by a trifle light as air, which took place in the year 1667 at Covent Garden, between Sir Henry Bellasis and Tom Porter—the same witty soul who wrote a play called "The ...
— Royalty Restored - or, London under Charles II. • J. Fitzgerald Molloy
... a trivial detail) from the teaching of any other of his kind. The solemnity of their discussions and the heat of their dissensions about the minutiae of their creeds would be laughable were it not so pathetic.. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... less expensive arrangement, for children look more picturesque as bridesmaids than the {73} average half-dozen grown-up girls who cannot be chosen for their appearance. Elderly bridesmaids in youthful frocks and girlish hats are ridiculous to the unthinking, but pathetic to those who look ...
— The Etiquette of Engagement and Marriage • G. R. M. Devereux
... seeing his father's charming, pathetic look of pride, told the story to him alone. The others did not care how much they hurt him so long as they could gape in admiration, but in his father he ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... Vestal, one of the most interesting Ballets I ever beheld. Oh! what a mighty magician is the ballet master Vigano, and as for the prima ballerina, Pallerini, what praises can equal her merit? then, the delightful soul soothing music, so harmonious, so pathetic, and the decorations so truly tasteful and classical! I can never forget the impression this fascinating Ballet made on me. It is called La Vestale. It opens with a view of the Circus in ancient Rome, and various gymnastic exercises, combats of gladiators, ...
— After Waterloo: Reminiscences of European Travel 1815-1819 • Major W. E Frye
... incident and suffering which she gives in the present work, will no doubt attract general attention. It would be difficult to point out delineations of fortitude under privation, more interesting or more pathetic than those contained in her ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... which comes upon a man from causes beyond his control ought not to be imputed to him as a fault. The pathetic petition of the Superintendents of Grain[335] informs us that the cargoes which they destined for Gaul have ...
— The Letters of Cassiodorus - Being A Condensed Translation Of The Variae Epistolae Of - Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator • Cassiodorus (AKA Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus Senator)
... There was something pathetic about that smile—something that made Covington's arm ...
— The Triflers • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... adaptation to artillery having been effected some years later. It had been owing to the fact that the —-th Dragoons, in which John Clark had served, happened to be lying there that Selina made his acquaintance. At the time of his death the barracks were occupied by the Scots Greys, but when the pathetic circumstances of the sergeant-major's end became known in the town the officers of the Greys offered the services of their fine reed and brass band, that he might have a funeral marked by due military honours. His body was accordingly ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... seventy—fours, with a squadron of shoes in their wakes, and Wagtail was sitting in the side—berth with his wet night—gown drawn about him, his muscular development in high relief through the clinging drapery, and bemoaning his fate in the most pathetic manner—that can be conceived, our ally Aaron exclaimed, "I say, Tom, how do you like the cut of my Sunday coat, eh?" while our friend Paul Gelid, who it seems had slept through the whole row, was at length startled out of his sleep, and sticking one of his long shanks over the side ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... pathetic in the whole realm of school procedure than the frantic efforts of some teachers to feed their pupils instead of striving to create spiritual hunger. They require pupils to "take" so many problems, con so many words of spelling, turn ...
— The Reconstructed School • Francis B. Pearson
... a vine and fig-tree of her own, so Di had undisputed sway; but if dish-pans and dusters had tongues, direful would have been the history of that crusade against frost and fire, indolence and inexperience. But they were dumb, and Di scorned to complain, though her struggles were pathetic to behold, and her sisters went through a series of messes equal to a course of "Prince Benreddin's" peppery tarts. Reality turned Romance out of doors; for, unlike her favorite heroines in satin and ...
— A Modern Cinderella - or The Little Old Show and Other Stories • Louisa May Alcott
... heavily upon her. "If I were mother of his children," she said to herself, "it would not make so much difference if I did grow old and ugly. He would have the children to give him pleasure." "I don't see what there is left for me to do," she said again and again. Sometimes she made pathetic attempts to change the simplicity of her dress. "Perhaps if I wore better clothes, I should look younger," she thought. But the result was not satisfactory. Her severe style had always been so essentially her own that any departure ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... indentation of the soft red shelving bank! how well he knew the colouring of the cool scene in the rising day, the iridescent light upon the lapping waves, the glistening of the jasper red of the damp beach, and the earthen pinks of the upper cliffs! The sea birds with low pathetic note called out to him concerning their memories of the first dawn in which he had walked there searching for the body of the dead baby. Then the cool tints of dawn passed into the golden sunrise, and the birds went on calling ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... ours is quite different from the outworn "pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... true life, the true education, the fruits of which are the love of men and serenity and growth. I once heard it said that Carlyle, Whitman, Thoreau, Emerson and such men could not be artists in the fiction sense—that their efforts were pathetic, when they tried to enflesh their literary efforts ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... heart began to soften, she one day burst into tears and implored Mr. Ogram to prove his love, not by wildly impossible sacrifice, but simply by sending her to school, so that she might make herself less unworthy to think of him with pathetic devotion, and from a great distance, to the end of her days. To school, in very deed, she had been sent; that is to say, she had all manner of teachers, first in England and then abroad, during the couple of years ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... at last said. "And beside it is Keola, slain ere his time and made into a spear-head for love of the woman whose shin-bone abides near to him. To them, those poor pathetic bones, I owe more than to aught else. I became possessed of them in the period of my culminating adolescence. I know they changed the entire course of my life and trend of my mind. They gave to me a modesty and a humility in ...
— On the Makaloa Mat/Island Tales • Jack London
... something almost comical in this sharp and shrill winding-up of the good woman's pathetic discourse; but Vinnie ...
— The Young Surveyor; - or Jack on the Prairies • J. T. Trowbridge
... XVIII has a somewhat pathetic ring: 'Why are Atheiai'—Atheisms or rejections of God—'permitted, and that God is not injured thereby?' Theos ou blaptetai. 'If over certain parts of the world there have occurred (and will occur more hereafter) rejections of the gods, ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... worried eyes, His wrinkled, shrewd, pathetic face, His shop, and all he sells and ...
— Trees and Other Poems • Joyce Kilmer
... or grottesque dancers, indeed are in possession of a branch of this art, in which they are dispensed from exhibiting the serious or pathetic; however, they may be otherwise as well acquainted with the fundamental principles of the art, as the best masters. But as their success depends chiefly on awakening the risible faculty, they commonly chuse to throw their whole powers of execution into those motions, ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... quell the needless fears of his child, could ever use words more tender and pathetic than these. They flow right from the heart, even from the heart of our Father in heaven. I often think how appropriately they might be addressed to a dying saint. These Egyptians, the temptations from our old nature, which, ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... looked appealingly at his wife through his big spectacles, his eyes looking very large and pathetic through the strong lenses. ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... kinds of voice, the speaking or articulate voice, the singing or melodious voice, and the pathetic or expressive voice, which serves as the language of the passions, and gives life to song and speech. The child has these three voices, just as the man has them, but he does not know how to use them in combination. ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... and moved in the same direction at about the same gait. He wore an old overcoat, running with water; the brim of his straw hat sagged about his head, so that he appeared to be wearing a bucket; he was a sodden and pathetic figure. Noble himself was as sodden; his hands were wet in his very pockets; his elbows seemed to spout; yet he spared a generous pity for the desolate figure ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... more marked, until in the third act the emotion and delight of the spectator were carried almost to frenzy. In this act, played almost solely by Crescentini, this admirable singer communicated to the hearts of his audience all that is touching and, pathetic in a love expressed by means of delicious melody, and by all that grief and despair can ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... eighteen months ago, I was quietly writing in my room at Branshaw when Leonora came to me with a letter. It was a very pathetic letter from Colonel Rufford about Nancy. Colonel Rufford had left the army and had taken up an appointment at a tea-planting estate in Ceylon. His letter was pathetic because it was so brief, so inarticulate, and so business-like. He had ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... lands he'd roved through, I'd begin to say to myself that he must surely be just lying. Then the fellow'd mention some little happening that he'd describe so vividly, would you believe it, I felt the tears in my eyes, for it would be sort of pathetic. So during that whole hour I sat there and changed my mind every ten minutes, now blowing hot, and again cold. I came away in as muddled a state as I went there. His actions seem to stamp him a rogue if ever there was one; and yet, Thad, I seemed to see something different ...
— The Chums of Scranton High Out for the Pennant • Donald Ferguson
... made bold and aggressive efforts to hold Ohio. They defeated in succession the armies of St. Clair and Harmar, but were compelled to yield to the invincible force of General Wayne and his army. It is painful and pathetic to follow the futile efforts of the Indians to hold the northwest, their favorite hunting grounds. They were told that only a little land was wanted for some poor white settlers to keep them from starving. They were offered ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... tried to excite your feelings and sympathies by attempts at pathetic or picturesque descriptions of suffering. But the minister of a just God is bound to proclaim that God demands not SENTIMENT, but JUSTICE. The Bible knows nothing of the "religious sentiments and emotions," ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... it is now, except that women at least had feet to walk upon. We gain some glimpses of excessive taxation and popular misery, forced labour and the press-gang; of callous luxury on the part of the rich, from the pages of Lao-tsz and Mencius; the Book of Odes also tells us much about the pathetic sadness of the people under their taskmasters' hands. In all countries popular habits change slowly; in none more so than in China. We are driven, therefore, by comparison with the life of to-day to conclude ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... remarkable coincidence were pathetic in the extreme, equalled only by the death of my young ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... so, looking about him with a certain pathetic inquisitiveness. Mista Lincoln live here. You his servant? A very fine thing for young girl to be servant ...
— Abraham Lincoln • John Drinkwater
... directly with personal experiences. In all of them the facts are inherently true, by which I mean that they are not only possible but that they have actually happened. For instance, the last story in the volume, the one I call Pathetic, whose first title is Il Conde (misspelt by-the-by) is an almost verbatim transcript of the tale told me by a very charming old gentleman whom I met in Italy. I don't mean to say it is only that. Anybody can see that it is something more than a verbatim report, but where he left off and ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Connecticut parish, that church attendants could not ride down on horseback from the pinnacled meeting-house, but were forced to scramble down, leading their horses, and mount from a horse-block at the foot of the hill. The second Roxbury church was set on a high hill, and the story is fairly pathetic of the aged and feeble John Eliot, the glory of New England Puritanism, that once, as he toiled patiently up the long ascent to his dearly loved meeting, he said to the person on whose supporting arm he leaned (in the Puritan fashion of teaching a lesson from any event and surrounding): "This ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... loves very sincerely and quite hopelessly. There was something very sad in the idea that he perhaps loved Maria Consuelo, at his age, broken down as he was, and old before his time. The contrast between them was so great that it must have been grotesque if it had not been pathetic. ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford
... as pathetic, yet as satisfactory also, since it set him free to fix his mind, without lurking suspicion of indecorum, upon the large promise of the future. He could give rein to his eagerness, to his high sense of expectation, while remaining innocent of impiety ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... lightness in the pensive memories the meeting with Lindau had called up. Was this all that sweet, unselfish nature could come to? What a homeless old age at that meagre Italian table d'hote, with that tall glass of beer for a half-hour's oblivion! That shabby dress, that pathetic mutilation! He must have a pension, twelve dollars a month, or eighteen, from a grateful country. But what else did ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... poor Phoebe going about with drooping eye, and her head hanging "all o' one side," I cannot help calling to mind the pathetic little picture drawn ...
— Bracebridge Hall • Washington Irving
... smiles, and he keeps quite to himself, consorting with no one—he who was so fond of company and so cheery only two months ago. I have seen him passing along several times recently—drooping, forlorn, the spring gone from his step, a pathetic figure. He ...
— A Double Barrelled Detective Story • Mark Twain
... light by which I could see that Leo was lying on the couch, tossing restlessly in his fever, but asleep. At his side, half-lying on the floor, half-leaning against the stone couch, was Ustane. She held his hand in one of hers, but she too was dozing, and the two made a pretty, or rather a pathetic, picture. Poor Leo! his cheek was burning red, there were dark shadows beneath his eyes, and his breath came heavily. He was very, very ill; and again the horrible fear seized me that he might die, ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... little note of eight lines. I believe this to be the last complete letter that ever came from his pen. Miss Beever sent it to me with the wish "that some day I might use it," and I now fulfill that wish by inserting it here as the pathetic close to a correspondence, in which there was so much of a gay and playful nature; commending it to the "memorial sympathy" claimed by him for his earlier letters. The word "Phoca" is a signature often used by him in writing to ...
— Hortus Inclusus - Messages from the Wood to the Garden, Sent in Happy Days - to the Sister Ladies of the Thwaite, Coniston • John Ruskin
... furnished room on the second floor above the ground. At this time his physique was that of a young man of medium height, slight, pale, and nervous, sensitive in disposition, reserved and introspective in habit. His delicate features, his intelligent forehead surmounted by soft chestnut hair, his pathetic blue eyes, his curved, dissatisfied mouth, shaded by a slight, dark moustache, indicated a melancholy, unquiet ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... 'farewell' to her loved ones and dear old Kingsand, and how, wrapping me in a large shawl, she proceeded to Cremyll, a distance of three miles, from whence we were transported across the harbour to Plymouth in the ferry boat. Then came the long and tedious journey to Maryport. Sweet mother! how pathetic to me it all ...
— From Lower Deck to Pulpit • Henry Cowling
... student on midwifery duty in London slums, I had occasion to observe that among the women of the poor, and more especially in those who had lost the first bloom of youth, modesty consisted chiefly in the fear of being disgusting. There was an almost pathetic anxiety, in the face of pain and discomfort, not to be disgusting in the doctor's eyes. This anxiety expressed itself in the ordinary symptoms of modesty. But, as soon as the woman realized that I found nothing disgusting in whatever was proper and necessary ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... have abridged the interesting narrative of Ockley, (tom. ii. p. 170-231.) It is long and minute: but the pathetic, almost always, consists in the detail of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 5 • Edward Gibbon
... fondest memories, revives holiest scenes, makes dearest associations throb with life. Scotland—charming in her romances of love, mighty in her struggles for freedom, pathetic in her sufferings for Christ, and glorious in her oft-renewed covenant with God—Scotland in many respects is incomparable among the nations. The Covenanted Church of Scotland, coming up from the wilderness leaning upon her Beloved in holy dependence ...
— Sketches of the Covenanters • J. C. McFeeters
... in love with you when I thought you were nobody in particular. So I am going to marry this Margaret Hugonin if she will have me; and if she won't, I am going to commit suicide on her door-step, with a pathetic little note in my vest-pocket forgiving her in the most noble and wholesale manner for irrevocably blighting a future so rich in promise. Yes, that is exactly what I am going to do if she does not appreciate her wonderful good fortune. ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... and night, over the fate of Phyllis Carey, to have to stand behind counters, sort drawers full of ribands, tape, and reels of cotton, and wait on her townswomen! May could think of no fitting parallel unless the pathetic one of that miserable young princess apprenticed to the button-maker, dying with her cheek on an open Bible, at the text, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and ...
— A Houseful of Girls • Sarah Tytler
... perfect mastery of the subject. He believed that the rights and liberties of the people were essentially concerned.... There was an unusual solemnity and earnestness on his part in this discussion. He was at times highly impassioned and pathetic. His whole soul was enlisted in the cause, and in contending for the rights of the Jury and a free Press, he considered that he was establishing the surest refuge against oppression.... He never before in my hearing made any effort in which he commanded higher reverence for his principles, nor equal ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... as ashes and hands which shook like palsied hands, he read again that pathetic cry from her whom he now felt he had never ceased to love; aye, whom he loved still, and whom, if he could, he would have taken to his arms so gladly and loved and cherished as the priceless thing he had once thought ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... Fates had marked out for him,—of sacrificing his great mission to the passion of a magnificent woman, and to the prospect of illicit ease and unsanctioned dominion. Heinze is of opinion that Virgil's motive was here a purely artistic one; he wanted an opportunity to introduce the pathetic element into his epic. "There was no lack of models; the latest bloom of Greek poetry had been in nothing more inventive than in dealing with all the phenomena of the passion of love,—its agony, shame, and despair, and the self-immolation of its victims."[893] He enforces this view ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... his living lips. Slight as it is, it conveys the most exquisite and perfect notion of the personal manner and habits of our friend. For the intellectual rest, we lift the veil of its noble modesty, and can even here discern them. Mark its humor, crammed into a few thinking words,—its pathetic sensibility in the midst of contrast,—its wit, truth, and feeling,—and, above all, its fanciful retreat at the close under ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... pathetic shame.] Let me go! I see what's the matter with you, but the reason is no excuse; you've ...
— The Climbers - A Play in Four Acts • Clyde Fitch
... forget their names They should eternize, but the place Where shining souls have passed imbibes a grace Beyond mere earth; some sweetness of their fames Leaves in the soil its unextinguished trace, Pungent, pathetic, sad with nobler aims, That penetrates our lives and heightens them or shames. This insubstantial world and fleet Seems solid for a moment when we stand On dust ennobled by heroic feet 40 Once mighty to sustain a tottering land, And mighty still such burthen to ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... than fear I know not what," Caterina pursued. "Our most Reverend and beloved Patriarch of Venice hath given me this talisman to help me in my new land," there was a little pathetic lingering on the words, which touched her listener, "'Seek to know the truth concerning all thy people. And tell thy perplexity, if there be any, to Christ and the Madonna.' I would know that I may help the ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... something humorously pathetic in the death of the Revolution—that firstborn of Miss Anthony. Mrs. Laura Curtis Bullard generously assumed the care of the troublesome child, and, in order to make the adoption legal, gave the usual consideration—one dollar. The ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... Alsace-Lorraine more forcibly than the outspokenness of its inhabitants regarding Prussian rule. Young and old, rich and poor, wise and simple alike unburden themselves to their chance-made English acquaintance with a candour that is at the same time amusing and pathetic. For the most part no heed whatever is paid to possible German listeners. At the ordinaries of country hotels, by the shop door, in the railway carriage, Alsatians will pour out their hearts, especially the women, who, as two pretty sisters ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... to their school is at times almost pathetic. An American teacher writes, "One moonlight night when I was walking about the grounds talking with some of the oldest girls, one of them caught my hand, and turned me about toward the school, which, even under the ...
— Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India • Alice B. Van Doren
... reins, the horses were brought to a dead stop at the gate, Mr. Sandy arriving a few minutes afterwards. The last run of this coach was in 1862, about nine years before our visit, and there was rather a pathetic scene on that occasion. We afterwards obtained from one of Mr. Elder's ten children a cutting from an old newspaper she had carefully preserved, a copy of which ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... was stunted and slender. He was a dreamy-looking little fellow, and one may easily find his like throughout the Cumberland-paler than his fellows, from staying much indoors, with half-haunted face, and eyes that are deeply pathetic when not cunning; ignorantly credited with idiocy and uncanny powers; treated with much forbearance, some awe, and a little contempt; and suffered to do his pleasure-nothing, or much that ...
— A Cumberland Vendetta • John Fox, Jr. |
