"Tragic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... arrivals by sidelong peeps, conscious that he was adding the pain of contact with an excommunicated Jew to the sufferings of his brethren, for whose Sabbath his writing-pen was shamelessly expressing his contempt. Many a Sabbath he saw his father, a tragic, white-haired wreck, touched up with a playful whip to urge him faster towards the church door. It was Joseph whom that whip stung most. When the official who was charged to see that the congregants paid attention, and especially that they ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... of which Woodley and Heywood "gouged" the smooth-bore bullet, is also examined, its position noted. Attempts are made to draw inferences therefrom, though with but indifferent success. True, it tells a tale; and, judging by the blood around the bullet-hole, which all of them have seen, a tragic one, though it cannot of ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Summers, "would God that it were not. I have mentioned but one case, yet it is a fact that for every gale that blows dozens of wrecks take place on our coasts, each with its more or less tragic history. You remember the last gale? It is not three weeks since it blew. No fewer than one hundred and ninety-five wrecks took place on the shores of the United Kingdom on that night and the following day, and six hundred and eighty-four lives were lost, many of which ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... was that "Cleopatre" in which Mademoiselle Rachel appeared, after wrangling for some time with the authoress to induce the latter to give Antony some other name, vowing that Antoine was entirely too vulgar to be uttered on the stage. The great tragic actress had never heard of the illustrious Roman, and knew no other Antony but the Antoine who scrubbed her floors and brought her water. It was a woman's tragedy, but written by a woman in man's attire, determined to write a very masculine, vigorous work, but succeeding ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... to tell which will move amidst tragic circumstances of too engrossing a nature to be disturbed by archaeological interests, and shall not, therefore, minutely describe here what I observed in Nuremberg, although no adequate description of that wonderful city has yet fallen in my way. To readers unacquainted with this antique place, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... (written sometimes Thruswall,) of Thirwall Castle, on the Tippal, in Northumberland; and Sir John de Walton, the romantic story of whose love pledge, to hold the Castle of Douglas for a year and day, or surrender all hope of obtaining his mistress's favour, with the tragic consequences, softened in the Novel, is given at length in Godscroft, and has often been pointed out as one of the affecting passages in the chronicles of chivalry. [Footnote: [The reader will find both this story, ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott
... was not without its heady charm for a girl with the facile, the almost tragic, adaptability of seventeen years. True, it was not married life as she had dreamed it; but it was her husband's life. ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... high-street of the onetime village, passing that police-box at which (so far as my part in it was concerned) the first scenes of the drama actually had been laid, I was seized with wonder on reflecting that all these episodes, strange and tragic, had been crowded into so short ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... massiveness and kingly bearing the great Charles himself, who sat now on his chair of gold over which twined a flowering rose vine. In the boughs of the towering pine the birds sang blithely, unconscious of the tragic events planning below them. ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V3 • Charles H. Sylvester
... thinks we are in league against her. What can she mean? Why, I was only repeating some nonsense she said in her sleep last night, and I thought she would be amused to hear an account of it. She came into my room and orated in the most tragic fashion. What does she mean by saying you listened ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann
... must assiduously watch: When he succumbs to sorrow tragic, Some hardbake or a bit of butter-scotch Will work on him like magic. To contradict a character so rich In trusting love were simple blindness— He's one of those exalted natures which Will ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... the sordid hut Of cheerless poverty! How many shake With all the fiercer tortures of the mind, Unbounded passion, madness, guilt, remorse, Whence tumbled headlong from the height of life, They furnish matter for the Tragic Muse! Even in the vale where Wisdom loves to dwell, With Friendship, Peace, and Contemplation join'd, How many, rack'd with honest passions, droop In deep retired distress. How many stand Around the ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various
... board in the days of the elder Adams, would be remembered; while all the subsequent experience of our race, and all the events that brightened or darkened his individual career, had gone over him with as little permanent effect as the passing breeze. The chief tragic event of the old man's life, so far as I could judge, was his mishap with a certain goose, which lived and died some twenty or forty years ago: a goose of most promising figure, but which, at table, proved so inveterately tough, that the carving-knife would make no impression on ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "That would be tragic. Svensen, of all the delegates! One wouldn't mind most of them disappearing a bit. Some of ...
— Mystery at Geneva - An Improbable Tale of Singular Happenings • Rose Macaulay
... barred from heroic poetry.[11] The influence of the genres theories even after Pope's death may be shown by the fact that Pope, for the very reason that he had failed to work in the major genres, was often ranked below such epic or tragic poets as ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... heard the noise and came to the dining-room door. 'Well, what the devil's the matter?' he said. I said: 'I only want to ask you one question, sir. Why are you not in a state of terrible mental agitation over the tragic disappearance of your son?' ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... these senseless and monstrous practices was indeed most difficult. The most pernicious of all was one which was likely to bring about tragic results. They believed firmly in a class of doctors among their people who professed that they could procure the illness of an individual at will, and that by certain incantations they could kill or cure the sick person. Their faith in this superstition ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... grim outer walls the ancient world's sad glories Were recorded in fire; upon its inner stone, Drawn by dead hands, I saw, in tales and tragic stories, The woe and sickness of an age ...
— Alcyone • Archibald Lampman
... been quite a respectable response to this appeal thus far, but again it spent itself and there was a lull when Jordan, folding his arms, and looking intently before him, in several directions apparently, exclaimed in a most tragic tone: ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... mixture of cynicism, spite, and superstition, half redeemed by imperturbable good temper, would not be unworthy of a place in Wycherley's own school of comedy. One could wish that Pope had shown a little more perception of the tragic ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... poets principally occupied with describing the love of the sexes. This, as a rule, is the leading idea of every dramatic work, be it tragic or comic, romantic or classic, Indian or European. It in no less degree constitutes the greater part of both lyric and epic poetry, especially if in these we include the host of romances which have been produced ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Brix[16] in modern times shows that there is no historical ground for the elaborate mythical genealogy in Men. 409 ff. We contend that "Portus Persicus" is pure fiction, as our novelists refer fondly to "Zenda" or "Graustark," while the Men. passage is a patent burlesque of the tragic style.[17] ...
— The Dramatic Values in Plautus • William Wallace Blancke
... a tragic moment. Marian searched her brain for a plan. Flight was now out of the question, yet defense seemed impossible; there was not a ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... perihelion, it can never disappear or greatly diminish. His untiring and exhaustive labors for the Union, the many lovable traits of his unique personality, his unquestionable honesty, his courage, his patriotism, and, above all, his tragic taking off, have unalterably determined his place in the regard of his countrymen. Indeed, so strong is the admiration in which he is held, that it would be vain to attempt to disabuse many, by any amount of proof and argument, of the opinion that African slavery in this country was actually and ...
— The Abolitionists - Together With Personal Memories Of The Struggle For Human Rights • John F. Hume
... the Athenian) he came at last to include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the expression of the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell parallel with his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face, his best work remained somber, almost tragic in spirit. ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... daily, to the disgust of the serious-minded, the mystification of the incredulous, the delight of sensation-mongers, and the baffled fury of Grandier. So far the play, if melodramatic, had not approached the tragic. Sometimes it degenerated to the broadest farce comedy. Thus, on one occasion when the devil was being read out of the mother superior, a crashing sound was heard and a huge black cat tumbled down the chimney and scampered about the room. At once the cry was raised ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... longer; the afternoon was too fine. Stern patriotism unbent, and tragic severity of demeanour was forgotten. The Champs Elysees and the Avenue de la Grande Armee were full of people. Monsieur shone by his absence; he was at the ramparts, or was supposed to be there; but his wife, his children, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... bedchamber scenery, its properties of phials and pill-boxes, its little company of stock actors, its gradual evolution of a very simple plot, its familiar incidents, its emotional alternations, and its denouement, sometimes tragic, ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... slipping into the springhouse, lie down and sleep quietly in its cool moist shade for a quarter of an hour; then, still asleep, sit up and in a startled way, talk earnestly for some time, his features transformed by a look of tragic intelligence, which they did not possess at other times. Then he would lie down again and after a few minutes quiet sleep, awake and ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... accompanied on the harpsichord by the kapellmeister, who was naturally obliged to improvise his part on the spur of the moment, following the caprice of the singer. There was no creating an atmosphere for a tragic or dramatic situation by means of the accompaniment; as soon as the situation arrived, an aria was sung explaining it. Now, as the singer was given much latitude in regard to the melody, and absolute liberty in regard to the ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... tragic letter, the letter of a woman endeavouring to express all the anguish of a torn heart with one of those fountain-pens which suspend the flow of ink about twice in every three words. The gist of it was that she felt she had wronged him; that, ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... conscious of the peace and glory of the night. She looked towards Mittwalden; and above the hill-top, which already hid it from her view, a throbbing redness hinted of fire. Better so: better so, that she should fall with tragic greatness, lit by a blazing palace! She felt not a trace of pity for Gondremark or of concern for Grunewald: that period of her life was closed for ever, a wrench of wounded vanity alone surviving. She had but one clear idea: to flee; - and another, ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... clerk's own words: "For a man too sick to see any one two hours before," said he, "the major had wonderful recuperative powers, but they didn't last. He was in the midst of a letter to the chief quartermaster and had got as far as to say, 'The deplorable and tragic fate of Lieutenant Dean points, of course, to the loss of the large sum intrusted to him,' when I looked up and said, 'Why, Lieutenant Dean ain't dead, major; he got in all right,' and he stared at me a minute ...
— Warrior Gap - A Story of the Sioux Outbreak of '68. • Charles King
... publish it, made it a point, he said, not to publish novels with characters in them that would drink to excess. As for the very fast firm of Blowers & Windspin, celebrated for flooding the country with cheap books of a very tragic character, why, it had work enough on hand for the present. Blowers was blessed with a wife of a literary turn of mind, which was very convenient, inasmuch as all the novels with which the house astonished the world were submitted to her, and what she could not read ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... had promised Denham to say what I did; and not even for your dear sake could I break my word. He was a good man in many ways; but, as you say yourself, it is all over. Let us forget him and his tragic end." ...
— A Coin of Edward VII - A Detective Story • Fergus Hume
... modestly hopes that this book may not only entertain by the love story, the tragic yet happily ended romance within its pages—for there is romance here aside from the great Captain and his exploits—but that in a small way it may serve to set forth not so much the brilliance and splendor and glory of war as the ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... the moon rose upon the tragic scene, and it grew cooler. Before the twilight had quite faded, Kid Wolf and Dave Robbins saw something that made them boil inwardly—the burial of Bill Robbins on ...
— Kid Wolf of Texas - A Western Story • Ward M. Stevens
... tragic way. "I don't quite see through it all, but I do through some of it. Look here, Mr Gordon, sir, you mark my words, he's one of that gang we met at 'Frisco, only he plays the respectable game. He'd got me into their hands, and had me ...
— To The West • George Manville Fenn
... Dante had conceived of the terrible. Sir Joshua Reynolds has exerted his highest genius in depicting the frightful scene described by him, when Ugolino perished of hunger in the tower of Pisa. Alfieri, Metastasio, Corneille, Lope de Vega, and all the great masters of the tragic muse, have sought in his works the germs of their finest conceptions. The first of these tragedians marked two-thirds of the Inferno and Paradiso as worthy of being committed to memory. Modern novelists ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various
... and a peculiar smile plays upon the lips. This complex of symptoms is seen in an exquisite way in lunatic asylums, which always contain some patients who are literally mad with conceit, and whose fatuous expression and absurdly strutting or swaggering gait is in tragic contrast with their lack of any valuable personal quality. It is in these same castles of despair that we find the strongest examples of the opposite physiognomy, in good people who think they have ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... that all these tragic and jealous remarks about A—— were written under the influence of romantic reading, and that I only half believed them while I was writing, exciting myself for the pleasure of it, and I greatly regret ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... the demeanor of one who knows that he is doomed alone to unwritten responsibilities. He lagged, with tragic glances at ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... after the death of M. de la Rochefoucauld, the Chancellor took part in a very tragic scene. A Vice-bailli of Alencon had just lost a trial, in which, apparently, his honour, or his property, was much interested. He came to Pontchartrain's, where the Chancellor was at the moment, and waited until he came out into the court to get into his ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon
... Senator from Louisiana, whose perpetual smile cloaked an intellect that was nimble, keen, and ruthless. Both men were destined to play leading roles in the lofty drama of revolution; each was to experience a tragic ending of his political hope, one in exile, the other in a solitary proscription amid the ruins of the society for which he had sacrificed his all. These men, though often spoken of as mere mouthpieces of Yancey, were in reality quite ...
— Abraham Lincoln and the Union - A Chronicle of the Embattled North, Volume 29 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Nathaniel W. Stephenson
... in which was depicted the infinite lassitude of her soul. On their way to regain the forest path they had to pass through the spot from which the view of the sea could be obtained. The flaming abyss of emptiness, the liquid, undulating glare, the tragic brutality of the light, made her long for the friendly night, with its stars stilled by an austere spell; for the velvety dark sky and the mysterious great shadow of the sea, conveying peace to the day-weary heart. She put her hand to her eyes. Behind her ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... "tragic sound" through rounded opening, with lips protruded, the tongue pendulous in the roof ...
— The Roman Pronunciation of Latin • Frances E. Lord
... unendurable wrong. So the poor creatures go out pallidly angry to vote down that hated thing municipal enterprise, and to make still more scope for that big finance that crushes them in the wine-press of its exploitation. It is a wretched and tragic antagonism, for which every intelligent Socialist must needs have sympathy, which he must meet with patience—and lucid explanations. If the public authority took rent there would be no need of rates; that is the more obvious proposition. But the ampler one is the cruelty, the absurdity and ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... once, and being promised all the tragic parts on the yet unbuilt stage, she felt a deep interest in the project and begged Dan to lose no time in beginning his experiment. Bess also confessed that studies from nature would be good for her, and wild scenery improve her taste, ...
— Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... may recall an episode connected with this home which might have had a tragic ending. Because of the unprotected condition, and the drawer in which the small receipts from the store were kept and unworthy young man, belonging to our village, planned a midnight entrance. Miss Abby heard the window raised, and, ...
— Annals and Reminiscences of Jamaica Plain • Harriet Manning Whitcomb
... as strong as it is in the Oedipus, character-interest is apt to be comparatively weak. Yet in this play every character is interesting, vital, and distinct. Oedipus himself is selected by Aristotle as the most effective kind of tragic hero, because, first, he has been great and glorious, and secondly he has not been "pre-eminently virtuous or just." This is true in its way. Oedipus is too passionate to be just; but he is at least noble in his impetuosity, his devotion, and his absolute truthfulness. It is important ...
— Oedipus King of Thebes - Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes • Sophocles
... forget this visit, this garden, this hour,' he said slowly, and they stood looking at each other. Rose felt herself swept off her feet into a world of tragic mysterious emotion. She all but put her hand into his again, asking him childishly to hope, to be consoled. But the maidenly impulse restrained her, and once more he leant on the gate, burying his face ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... spring as Tarzan discovered the tragic tableau. Numa was almost beneath the branch upon which the ape-man stood, naked and unarmed. There was not even an instant's hesitation upon the part of the latter—it was as though he had not even paused in his swift progress through the trees, so lightning-like his survey and comprehension of ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... friend of Embury, it was characteristic of Elliott that his thoughts should fly to the consequences of the tragic death outside the family circle. He was silent as he realized that the removal of the other candidate left Alvord Hendricks the winner in the race ...
— Raspberry Jam • Carolyn Wells
... expectation of an inexperienced reader. But it is not so. The Csars, throughout their long line, are not interesting, neither personally in themselves, nor derivatively from the tragic events to which their history is attached. Their whole interest lies in their situation—in the unapproachable altitude of their thrones. But, considered with a reference to their human qualities, scarcely one in the whole series can be viewed with a human interest apart ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... always dangerous to send strangers with letters of introduction to Mark Twain. They were so apt to arrive at the wrong time, or to find him in the wrong mood. Howells was willing to risk it, and that the result was only amusing instead of tragic is the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... has hitherto so little troubled its head with the points of doctrine held by a community which contributes in other ways so largely to its amusement, that, before the late mischance of a celebrated tragic actor, it scarce condescended to look into the practice of any individual player, much less to inquire into the hidden and abscondite springs of his actions. Indeed, it is with some violence to the imagination ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various
... than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. A great and fertile genius he certainly possessed, and one enriched equally with a tragic and comic vein; but he ought to be cited as a proof, how dangerous it is to rely on these advantages alone for attaining an excellence in the finer arts.[*] And there may even remain a suspicion, that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... Another tragic tale connected with that place is the story of Hero and Leander. Across that mile of swiftly flowing current, the story says, Leander nightly swam from Abydos to the tower on the opposite shore to visit his beloved Hero, the priestess of Venus. In one of his ...
— A Trip to the Orient - The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise • Robert Urie Jacob
... the first appearance of the Highland soldier in Canada. That appearance was both interesting and tragic. The stories and legends surrounding the campaigns of these brave men have furnished many themes for the poet and novelist. This chapter can only ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie
... would strongly urge a second or third pilgrimage. Come to the Stones on a gloomy day in late October or early March when the surface of the great expanse of the Plain reflects, as water would, the leaden lowering skies. Then perhaps the tragic mystery of the place will fire the imagination as no other scene the wide world over could. Stonehenge is unique whichever way one looks at it. In its age, its uncouth savage strength, and its secretiveness. ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... kept them all in a roar of laughter at his jokes and the stories he told of the genuine Yankees whom he had seen in New England, and the Johnny Bulls he had encountered in England, and whose peculiarities of voice and expression he imitated perfectly. Then he recited poetry, comic and tragic and descriptive; and was so entertaining and brilliant, and so very courteous and gentlemanly in all he did and said, that Bessie was enraptured and showed it in her speaking face, which Neil knew always told the truth, and when at last he retired to ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... made his principal characters as happy as he can, or when a tragic writer hath brought them to the highest pitch of human misery, they both conclude their business to be done, and that their work is come ...
— The History of Tom Jones, a foundling • Henry Fielding
... sinister to Helen as the menace to her own life. Long had she known how cheap life was held in the West, but she had only known it abstractly, and she had never let the fact remain before her consciousness. This cheerful young man spoke calmly of spilling blood in her behalf. The thought it roused was tragic—for bloodshed was insupportable to her—and then the thrills which followed were so new, strange, bold, and tingling that they were revolting. Helen grew conscious of unplumbed depths, of instincts at which ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... possibilities of hell for herself and her children wrought the mother-heart to madness. The religious guides of the people used unsparingly the appeal to fear. The belief in witchcraft, which long had scourged Europe, broke out in a panic of fear and cruelty. It was a tragic culmination of the worst elements,—superstition, malignity, ministerial tyranny. Then came the reaction, and with it a triumph of the wiser sense, the cooler temper, the layman's moderation, which thenceforth were to guide the commonwealth ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... wager that it is the last scene in our third act," replied the artist, placing his candlestick upon the mantel; "it seems that it is to be very tragic. Now listen! I also feel the poetical afflatus coming over me, and, if you like, we will set about devouring paper like two boa-constrictors. Speaking of serpents, have you a rattle? Ah, yes! Here is the bell-rope. I was about to ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... chill went over Bart. He let go of her hand and lay staring bleakly at the wall. He supposed that was his probable fate: remembering the tragic tone of Raynor Three when he said I won't remember you, he gritted his teeth, feeling his face ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley
... misfortune had emptied all her vials, and that I was nerved, because there was nothing more to dread. But the worst is always behind, and this is the irony of fate. You think that merely a rhetorical metaphor, a tragic trope? How should you know? That Christmas card is the solitary dove I sent out to hunt a resting-place for mother and for me, when the flood engulfed us. It was my design sent to Boston, to compete for the prizes offered. How I dreamed, how I toiled! ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... This beautiful cascade is on the Keltie, a mile from Callander. The height of the fall is about fifty feet. "A few years ago a marriage party of Lowland peasants met with a tragic end here, two of them having tumbled into the broken, angry waters, where they had no more chance of life than if they had dropped into the crater of ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... fine nature, expanding in the troublous latter days of a long race bondage, was touched early with the fire of genuine patriotism. He was eleven when the tragic consequences of the Cavite insurrection destroyed any lingering illusions of his people, and stirred in them a spirit that ...
— An Eagle Flight - A Filipino Novel Adapted from Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... reason and the effect very plainly in Thackeray's Barry Lyndon, to take a casual example, where the point of the whole thing is that the man should give himself away unknowingly; in Jane Eyre, to take another, I see neither—but it is hard to throw such a dry question upon tragic little Jane. ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... death. The world, with all its prying curiosity, usually misses the key to the very incidents about which it asks most questions; and of the many who gossiped or mourned concerning Emilia, none knew the tragic complication which her death alone could have solved. The breaking of Hope's engagement to Philip was attributed to every cause but the true one. And when the storm of the great Rebellion broke over the land, its vast calamity absorbed all ...
— Malbone - An Oldport Romance • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... up and glanced over it as I sat there; but, you know, Mag, the heavy-weight plays never appealed to me. I don't go in for the tragic—perhaps I saw too much of the real thing when ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... consider some facts which, while they are rather in the domain of the grave recorder of historical events, than in that of the narrator of personal experiences, are yet essential to the comprehension of the scenes in which Surrey and Francesca took such tragic parts. ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of ...
— Ethan Frome • Edith Wharton
... first-aid-to-the-injured made him hold off to take a look at me, and in this interval I contrived to whisper to him: "Joke! Joke! you idiot! I'm only shamming. I want to see if I can scare Jones and get even with Frank. Help me out! Cry! Get tragic!" ...
— The Last of the Plainsmen • Zane Grey
... agent for a matter colonial, has his tragic tale to tell you of his sad experiences in the Colonial Office; what blind obstructions, fatal indolences, pedantries, stupidities, on the right and on the left, he had to do battle with; what a world-wide jungle of red-tape, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... 1859, when the public mind was still agitated by the John Brown raid and by the tragic affairs succeeding it, and when the excitement of the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue had not wholly subsided, the attention of Judge Willson was called to these matters by the District Attorney, and in his charge to the grand jury he took occasion to ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... slavery, many a Northerner with abolitionist convictions, like the majority of Southerners with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splendid peroration of Webster's "Reply to Hayne" and were willing to "let the Union go." But in the four tragic and heroic years that followed the firing upon the American flag at Fort Sumter the sentiment of Union was made sacred by such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indissoluble ...
— The American Mind - The E. T. Earl Lectures • Bliss Perry
... admonish the humble, not learn from them. Carlyle would have Emerson teach by more definite signs, rather than interpret his revelations, or shall we say preach? Admitting all the inspiration and help that Sartor Resartus has given in spite of its vaudeville and tragic stages, to many young men getting under way in the life of tailor or king, we believe it can be said (but very broadly said) that Emerson, either in the first or second series of essays, taken as a whole, ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... Royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn: While round the armed bands Did clap their ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... at Rome, not only the spirit but the manners of the ancient Romans is exactly shown, and his reading in the ancient historians is no less conspicuous. It is well known at the universities of this country, that on any public examination, be the play either tragic or comic, the students are frequently required to produce parallel passages from the writings of Shakspeare: now it might indeed with some reason be supposed that occasionally the same ideas would present themselves to different minds, and where two writers are equally ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 19, - Issue 552, June 16, 1832 • Various
... authenticity, however; for the style is of that spontaneous quality which no imitation could attain, and which attempted improvement could only mar. The very construction of the whole—for it does appear as a whole—is influenced by the circumstances which made the life of that tragic period. ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... "It's easy enough to see they were wrong now. But at the time millions of people believed in them—felt it was God's voice speaking through them. Joan of Arc! Fancy dying to put a thing like that upon a throne. It would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. You can say she drove out the English—saved France. But for what? The Bartholomew massacres. The ruin of the Palatinate by Louis XIV. The horrors of the French Revolution, ending with Napoleon and all the misery and degeneracy that he bequeathed to Europe. History might have worked itself out so ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... followed this tragic denouement. Wingenund, a cruel and relentless Indian, but never a traitor, pointed to the small bloody hole in the middle of Miller's forehead, and then nodded his head solemnly. The wondering Indians stood aghast. Then with loud yells the braves ran to the cornfield; ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... the germs of their theatre and their fiction. I have seen in a Parisian theatre men, their wives, and their families laughing unrestrainedly at a piece, that if exhibited before an American audience would simply disgust some, and make others morbidly attentive. This kind of literature, comic or tragic, disseminated as it everywhere is among impulsive and passionate Russian readers, has been anything but morally healthful. One might as rationally go about and poison wells. And the Russian youth are sophisticated ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... Very tragic indeed the maiden looked as she tossed off her hat and flung herself face downward on the bed, refusing to cast even a glance at the cell which was to be her hateful prison. "For of course I shall spend my time here!" she said to herself. ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... human love and sympathy, or to excite it to a just and hopeful indignation, for therein is a source of pleasure? The rule of tragedy should be applicable here. Undoubtedly, we receive pleasure from tragic representations. Isolated, barbarism, cruelty would be intolerably disgusting. But in every good tragedy, there are always good and lovely characters with whom we can sympathise. We are bettered by thus uniting ourselves with what is lovely; and are content ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... brother's vehemence. Don Severo's wife, Dona Mercedes, repeats the talk of the town to Teodora, and turns her imagination inward, till it falters in self-questionings. Similarly the great Gallehault,—which is the word of all the world,—whispers unthinkable and tragic possibilities to the poetic and self-searching mind of Ernesto. He resolves to seek release in Argentina. But before he can sail away, he overhears, in a fashionable cafe, a remark which casts a slur on Teodora, and strikes the speaker of the insult in the ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... been tense, dramatic, not because she had tried or thought to make it so—she had never learned not to be genuine—but because of the real and tragic drama in the tale she told, the matter-of-course way in which ...
— In Old Kentucky • Edward Marshall and Charles T. Dazey
... their trail," Dorothy said, with a gesture so tragic that it wrung her mother's heart strings. "He followed it as far as he could, then lost it." In any other case she would have tried to keep the bad news from her mother, because of her nerves, but just now the girl was too distraught to think of any one but the man she loved. "Oh, ...
— Hidden Gold • Wilder Anthony
... Would not they be watching for him? I began to be anxious. Not once, but several times, I had heard of the wounded soldier returning to his home and finding no home: both home and wife had gone. (Those are bitterly tragic tales, which a realist must write some day.) Still, as we came nearer, I saw nobody at the cottage door. "Is th' door open?" asked Briggs. Yes, it was open. When we were at the end of the cabbage-patch, and I could discern the interior of the cottage parlour (into which the door opened ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... in theme, and the tragic passions of pity and fear find an elementary force of utterance. Love is strong as death, jealousy cruel as the grave. Hate, shame, grief, despair speak here ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... which Dr. Callandar spent that tragic Sunday is not clearly on record. We have watched Esther so closely that he has been permitted to escape our observation, and it would be manifestly unfair to expect any coherent account of the day from him. He knows that he went for a walk, early, and that he ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... is it?" his wife demanded of March's share of their common ignorance. A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left three little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Jerry is failing us. You see, I'm telling you all. I have given up. A dream, you have called it. It was a dream; but I can't see him fail without an effort to help him. When a man centers all his hopes in life on one ambition, its failure is tragic. You see I'm humble. It has cost me something to come to you. I hope you ...
— Paradise Garden - The Satirical Narrative of a Great Experiment • George Gibbs
... (the comic poet) had burst forth in an eulogium of the Comic Muse which claimed the title of Good Genius for her—when yielding to this new and over-mastering impulse, he (Aristophanes) checked the coming applause, and demanded that the Tragic Muse and her ministrant Euripides should receive the libation instead; justifying the demand by a noble and pathetic tribute to the memory of the dead poet, and to the great humanities which only the tragic poet ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the War, and wonder incidentally who would come to him first—the postman bringing the reviews of his first book, or the bony old gentleman bringing the scythe. He felt, of course, the mockery of this frustration of his powers. He thought—and, it seemed, with good reason—that he was a tragic failure. But was he? Read his books, and admit that he accomplished a little that is beautiful and enduring, and that he did it obscurely at a time when they who held most of the fearful attention of the world were but working gravely on what ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson
... It is a pride common among sextons. A cabinet-maker does not count his cabinets, nor even an author his volumes, save when they stare upon him from the shelves; but the grave-digger numbers his graves. He would indeed be something different from human if his solitary open-air and tragic labours left not a broad mark upon his mind. There, in his tranquil aisle, apart from city clamour, among the cats and robins and the ancient effigies and legends of the tomb, he waits the continual passage of his contemporaries, falling like minute drops into eternity. As they ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... travel, until his senior year is chiefly given over to the fullest possible development of the special subject. The fad for free electives all along the line was one of those curious phenomena, both humorous and tragic, that grew out of the evolutionary philosophy and the empirical democracy of the nineteenth century, and it wrought disaster, while the ironclad curriculum that preceded it was almost as bad along an opposite line. This project of Dr. Meiklejohn's seems to me to recognize life as a ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... would be tragic if Mahon machines were used to destroy humankind with themselves! Sergeant Bellews would have raged at the thought of training a Mahon unit to guide an atom bomb. It would have to be—in a fashion—deceived. He even disliked the necessity he faced that afternoon while a ...
— The Machine That Saved The World • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... upon the mind of the bishop, as upon most imaginative minds, was to steady and exalt it. Trivialities and exasperations seemed swept out of existence. Men lifted up their eyes from disputes that had seemed incurable and wrangling that promised to be interminable, and discovered a plain and tragic issue that involved every one in a common call for devotion. For a great number of men and women who had been born and bred in security, the August and September of 1914 were the supremely heroic period of their ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... of the hotel and strolled up to where the group was. She was dark, slight, and rather below middle height; her complexion at this moment was a trifle sallow and her eyes listless, but it seemed rather as though she had dressed her face into a tragic cast, the set of the features being naturally mirthful. She acknowledged the men's salutations and sat down with ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age between ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... tell my poor Dick's story to Richard Jennifer, I may not set it down in cold words here for you. It was the age-old tragic comedy of a false friend's treachery and a woman's weakness; a duel, and the wrong man slain. And you may know this; that Falconnet's most merciful role in it was the part he played one chill November morning when he put Richard Coverdale ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... country a girl shifts for herself. If she marries, well and good; if she remains single, well and good too, provided she can earn her living or has means. When she has neither means nor craft and fails to marry, she is one of the most tragic figures in our confused social hierarchy, difficult to help, superfluous. She sets her hand to this and that, but she has no grip on life. To think of her is to invoke the very image of failure and incompetence. She flocks ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... we go, soon to approach the tragic theatre. A crack of the whip, a stretch of the leaders, and now, suddenly, the whole valley comes in view! Before us are the great waters of Minas; yonder Blomidon bursts upon the sight; and below, curving like a scimitar around the edge ...
— Acadia - or, A Month with the Blue Noses • Frederic S. Cozzens
... manuscript of "Die Meistersinger" by allowing a bread-ball to roll over it! Wagner's favorable opinion of Hans and Cosima underwent a great change during their sojourn with him. In a letter, after speaking of Von Buelow's depression owing to poor health, he writes: "Add to this a tragic marriage; a young woman of extraordinary, quite unprecedented, endowment, Liszt's wonderful image, but of ...
— The Loves of Great Composers • Gustav Kobb
... remarkable book in every respect, and curiously interesting from beginning to end. John Brown lived with 'all his might,' and the 'Life' he writes is, in its abundance and variety of tragic and comic ups-and-downs, as good as a play. His experiences partook of all the quick changes and boisterous bustle, and rude humor of an old English fair; and as they are presented in this volume they afford a picture of the times he lived ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... possessing a fund of traditional lore, a just if somewhat encumbered conscience, and the gift of song. This chorus was therefore much like the Christian Church and like that celestial choir of which the church wishes to be the earthly echo. Like the church, the tragic chorus had authority, because it represented a wide, if ill-digested, experience; and it had solemnity, because it spoke in archaic tropes, emotional and obscure symbols of prehistoric conflicts. These sacramental forms retained their power to move in spite ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... these discordances that so often embarrass man during his earthly course. The slightest confusion, arising from a trivial error which may be cleared up unexpectedly and without injury, gives rise to ridiculous situations. The greatest confusion, on the contrary, insoluble or unsolved, offers us the tragic elements. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... looked for a moment at the black Jim, with those steady gray eyes that never wavered even when, six years later, they gazed from a sickbed and waited the attack of a hundred Mexicans in the tragic Alamo. ...
— Boys' Book of Frontier Fighters • Edwin L. Sabin
... her aching head against Mr. Cobb's homespun knee and recounted the history of her trouble. Tragic as that history seemed to her passionate and undisciplined mind, she told it truthfully ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... toward the door, but Lapham stopped him with the tragic humility of his appeal. "Don't go yet! I can't let you. I've disgusted you,—I see that; but I didn't mean to. I—I take ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... financial and economic, while the contributing causes were a remarkable intellectual movement and the War of Independence in America. It is possible that a king with a heart and a brain, and the moral sense which belongs to ordinary humanity, might have averted this tragic outburst, and at least have delayed the event by awakening hope. The Revolution was born of hopeless misery. With the reign of Louis XV. hope died, and his successor fell heir to ...
— A Short History of France • Mary Platt Parmele
... struck down, Fandor would have been full of enthusiasm for the Dollon affair; for its interest was increasing, its mystery deepening! But Fandor was single-handed now! He had had a miraculous escape from the bomb which had blown up Lady Beltham's house on that tragic day when Juve had all ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... was a sort of continuing sensation with us at that time. We discussed it quite freely in all its aspects, humorous and tragic. It was so unexpected a development in the young man's character, and, with all due respect to the discretion and resisting powers of Miss Addison, so ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... brightest ornaments it ever possessed; the charms of a happy home have withdrawn her from public life—but the genius of Miss Adelaide Kemble will not be soon forgotten. Another bright ornament of our stage, however, still remains. Possessing less physical energy and tragic power than her contemporary, Mrs Alfred Shaw is, nevertheless, the most pure, polished, and cultivated English singer we ever heard on the boards of our national theatre. The finish and refinement ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... been assassinated: grown men, old people, women and children. They slaughtered their victims sometimes one by one, sometimes in groups, often in masses. They were not content only with killing. At one place they organised round the massacre such tragic scenes, and at another displayed such refinements of cruelty, that reason falters in face of their acts, and asks what terrible madness has brought this race to such low depths? Is it possible? Yes, it is. ...
— Their Crimes • Various
... horrors of plot. He is never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, confronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights together as "great dramatists,"—as if Shakspeare did not differ from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets some of them were; but though imagination and the power ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... ever filled a throne. In art he probably drew no distinction between creeds and among the pictures ascribed to him and preserved in Japan are some of Buddhist subjects. But like Hsuan Tsung he came to a tragic end, and in 1126 was carried into captivity by the Kin Tartars among ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... our churches, and there in silent patient waiting He craves the love of our hearts and longs for our intimate friendship. He is not content alone to plead for us with God, His Father; He is not content continually to renew in our presence the tragic mystery by which at the end of His earthly labors, He procured us every blessing—no, over and above these sovereign acts of kindest benediction, He wishes to remain among us, and to converse with us, each and all, as a friend would converse with his friend. This is what He meant ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan |
