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More "Joyless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the pity he had before conceived for Beck increased upon him as he talked and listened. This benighted mind, only illumined by a kind of miserable astuteness and that "cunning of the belly" which is born of want to engender avarice; this joyless temperament; this age in youth; this living reproach, rising up from the stones of London against our social indifference to the souls which wither and rot under the hard eyes of science and the deaf ears of wealth,—had a pathos for his lively ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... as were sufficiently exempt from sorrow or disease. My endeavours were directed towards urging them to their usual attention to their crops, and to the acting as if pestilence did not exist. The mower's scythe was at times heard; yet the joyless haymakers after they had listlessly turned the grass, forgot to cart it; the shepherd, when he had sheared his sheep, would let the wool lie to be scattered by the winds, deeming it useless to provide clothing for another winter. At times however the spirit of ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... little cloud—it floats away Away it goes; away so soon! Alas! it has no power to stay: 30 Its hues are dim, its hues are grey— Away it passes from the moon! How mournfully it seems to fly, Ever fading more and more, To joyless regions of the sky— 35 And now 'tis whiter than before! As white as my poor cheek will be, When, Lewti! on my couch I lie, A dying man for love of thee. Nay, treacherous image! leave my mind— 40 And yet, thou didst not ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... O maidens mine, I am filled full of tears: My heart filled with the beat Of tears, as of dancing feet, A lyreless joyless line, And music meet for ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... at life from the point of view of age about to die. Young though she felt, the heavy weight of joyless days had fallen upon her, and left her broken-spirited and old before her time. With a despairing cry, she asked the world what it could give her in exchange for the love now lost, by which she had lived. She asked herself whether in that vanished love, so chaste and pure, ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... without a smile. His eyes were bent on the ground; there was a joyless contraction of his delicate, dark brows. It was with an evident effort that he suddenly looked up and spoke. "I have an interest in such subjects. I am trying to find pupils myself—or, at least, I ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... many are betrayed by degrees, in order to supply increasing expenses, that might be avoided by strict frugality; for they load the soul with thick clay, are a heavy weight to the most upright, render a man's way doubtful and joyless, and drown many ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... fortune had befel me, And it would have been more happy. Had I not been born and nurtured, And had never grown in stature, 220 Till I saw these days of sorrow, And this joyless time o'ertook me, Had I died in six nights only, Or upon the eighth had perished. Much I should not then have needed, But a shroud a span-long only, And of earth a tiny corner. Little then had wept my mother, Fewer tears had shed my father, And my ...
— Kalevala, Volume I (of 2) - The Land of the Heroes • Anonymous
... was far greater than that of the Roman. Peace was the only boon that death could bring to a pagan, and "Pax tecum aeterna" is among the commonest of the inscriptions. The life beyond the grave was at best an unreal and joyless copy of an earthly existence, and Achilles told Odysseus that he would rather be the serf of a poor man upon earth than Achilles ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... upon the fender, her tired, passive face inclined meditatively, her rusty old black gown drawn back by one hand from the snapping sparks. "No," she said, slowly, joyless resignation mingling with pride in her voice. "I was born here over ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... Sheer off, disseveral, a star, | death blots black out; nor mark Is any of him at all so stark But vastness blurs and time | beats level. Enough! the Resur- rection, A heart's-clarion! Away grief's gasping, | joyless days, dejection. Across my foundering deck shone A beacon, an eternal beam. | Flesh fade, and mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm; | world's wildfire, leave but ash: In a flash, at a trumpet crash, I am all at once what Christ is, ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... talking up hill and down dale, laughing, tossing her head, showing her brilliant teeth. He looked on in silence, now spitting heavily on the floor, now putting his head back and uttering a loud, discordant, joyless laugh. He had a tangle of shock hair, the colour of wool; his mouth was a grin; although as strong as a horse, he looked neither heavy nor yet adroit, only leggy, coltish, and in the road. But it was plain he was in high spirits, thoroughly enjoying his visit; and ...
— The Silverado Squatters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and sightless eyes, she answered meekly and readily to all the questions we put to her. Poor little thing! she was shocking to look at; one of the many innocent beings whose lives are to be rendered sad and joyless by this revolution. The doctor ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... water, eaten grass and given milk for the last time, and their senses have lost all vigour. He who gives these undoubtedly goes to joyless realms. ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... Legree would not permit it, and more than once broke up such attempts, with oaths and brutal execrations,—so that the blessed news had to circulate from individual to individual. Yet who can speak the simple joy with which some of those poor outcasts, to whom life was a joyless journey to a dark unknown, heard of a compassionate Redeemer and a heavenly home? It is the statement of missionaries, that, of all races of the earth, none have received the Gospel with such eager docility ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to accompany Manon's. Doubtless, Heaven did not as yet consider me sufficiently punished, and therefore ordained that I should continue to drag on a languid and joyless existence. I willingly renounced every hope of leading a ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... nightingales? Rather would I believe you shining ran With peaceful floods, where the soft voice prevails Of building doves in lordly trees set high, Trees which enclose a home where love abides — His love and hers, a passioned ecstasy; Your tone has caught its echo and derides My joyless lot, as face down pressed I lie Upon the shifting sand, and hear the reeds Voicing a thin, dissonant threnody Unto the cliff and wind-tormented weeds. As with the faint half-lights of jade toward The shore you come and show a violet hue, I wonder if the face of my ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... puts it into his footnotes. Westcott and Hort, harsher than any of their predecessors, will not, as we have seen, allow it to appear even at the foot of the page. To reproduce all that has been written in disparagement of this precious portion of God's written Word would be a joyless and an unprofitable task. According to Green, 'the genuineness of the passage cannot be maintained[589].' Hammond is of opinion that 'it would be more satisfactory to separate it from its present context, and place it by itself as an appendix to the Gospel[590].' A yet more recent critic 'sums ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... to the door with his eyes. He was not capable of wide sympathies, or of projecting himself into the lives of other people; but he did sympathize with this girl, so lonely in the splendour of her beauty, so joyless ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... it till a year departed— Felt it of all hope bereft; Restless, joyless, broken-hearted, Then the warring bands he left;— Bade on Joppa's sandy shore Seamen hoist the swelling sail; Swift the bark to Europe bore O'er the tide ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... Elizabeth only a day of humiliation and pain. Reclining on her divan, she thought of her despised and joyless past, of ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... annihilation to which lowly birth and lack of fortune condemns so many a loftier mind. And by the side of the poor printer, who loathed a handicraft so closely allied to intellectual work, close to this Silenus, joyless, self-sustained, drinking deep draughts from the cup of knowledge and of poetry that he might forget the cares of his narrow lot in the intoxication of soul and brain, stood Lucien, graceful as some ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... children had lived. I had often sighed to return to England,—with a silly longing. My life in England for twenty-six years from the time of my birth to the day on which I left it, had been wretched. I had been poor, friendless, and joyless. In Ireland it had constantly been happy. I had achieved the respect of all with whom I was concerned, I had made for myself a comfortable home, and I had enjoyed many pleasures. Hunting itself was a great delight to me; and now, as I contemplated a move to England, ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... do not envy you, ye joyless stars, Though fair ye be, and glorious to the sight— The seaman's hope amidst the 'whelming storm, When help from God or man there cometh none. No! for ye love not, nor have ever loved! Through ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... with my Unitarian congregation for about a twelvemonth. My life during that time, save so far as my intercourse with Mrs. Lane, and one other friend presently to be mentioned, was concerned, was as sunless and joyless as it had ever been. Imagine me living by myself, roaming about the fields, and absorbed mostly upon insoluble problems with which I never made any progress, and which tended to draw me away from what enjoyment of life there was which ...
— The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford • Mark Rutherford
... {56} her hopes thus blighted, succeeded in effecting a compromise by inducing his brother Aides to allow Persephone to spend six months of the year with the gods above, whilst during the other six she was to be the joyless companion of her grim lord below. Accompanied by her daughter, the beautiful Persephone, Demeter now resumed her long-abandoned dwelling in Olympus; the sympathetic earth responded gaily to her bright smiles, the corn at once sprang forth from the ground in fullest plenty, the trees, ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... table, "I'm glad of course to be able to give you a passage to 'Frisco; one sailor-man should help another, that's my motto. But when you want a thing in this world, you generally always have to pay for it." He laughed a brief, joyless laugh. "I have no idea of ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Year's night, an old man stood at his window, and looked, with a glance of fearful despair, up the immovable, unfading heaven, and down upon the still, pure, white earth, on which no one was now so joyless and sleepless ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... joyless and a gloomy morn, Wet was the grass, and hung with pearls the thorn; When Damon, who design'd to pass the day With hounds and horns, and chase the flying prey, Rose early from his bed; but soon he found The welkin pitch'd with sullen ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... heart swept clear of lesser loves, if He is to be grasped by our hands, and to dwell in our hearts. More of us than we are willing to believe are kept from entire surrender to Jesus Christ, by money and worldly possessions; and many professing Christians are kept shrivelled and weak and joyless because they love their wealth more than their Lord, and would think it madness to do as this man was bidden to do. When ballast is thrown out, the balloon shoots up. A general unlading of the 'thick clay' which weighs down the Christian life of England, would let thousands soar ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... elaborate books that are far away from the profound and common interests of life. One has, on one side, Mallarme and Huysmans producing this literature; and on the other, Ibsen and Zola dealing with the reality of life in joyless and pallid words. On the stage one must have reality, and one must have joy; and that is why the intellectual modern drama has failed, and people have grown sick of the false joy of the musical comedy, that has been given them in place ...
— The Playboy of the Western World • J. M. Synge
... surprised and happy eyes after the long habit of seeing nothing but dirty lanes and streets. It was a wonder to them—those spacious reaches of open country to run and dance and tumble and frolic in, after their dull and joyless captivity; so they scampered far and wide over the fair regions on both sides of the river, and came back at eventide weary, but laden with flowers and flushed with new health drawn from the fresh country air and the ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc - Volume 1 (of 2) • Mark Twain
... in which three hundred beautiful young fellows are shut up for life. So jealous is the queen, that no female is allowed to approach the walls within one hundred yards. Never beholding any of their race but the queen and a few dried-up and ugly spinsters, the poor creatures vegetate, mindless and joyless. ...
— Niels Klim's journey under the ground • Baron Ludvig Holberg
... honourable to be as convinced of his Resurrection as they were of their own life—but they shewed also a state of mind, a quiet peace, a tranquil cheerfulness, even under suffering, which put to shame the restless and joyless zeal of their persecutor. Could HE have been a false teacher who had adherents such as these? Could that have been a false pretence which gave such rest and security? on the one hand, he saw the new sect, in spite ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... suspicion! thou turnest love divine To joyless dread, and mak'st the loving heart With hateful thoughts to languish and repine, And feed itself with self-consuming smart; Of all the passions of the mind thou ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... be instrumental, as I confidently trust it will, in destroying some medieval superstitions, in dissipating some hampering and cramping errors, in instilling some hope in the hearts of the hopeless, in bringing a little joy into the homes of the joyless, in increasing in however slight a degree the sum total of human happiness, its mission shall ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... other world were dismal to an extreme. The after-life in Hades was believed to be a shadowy, joyless copy of the earthly existence. In Hades the shade of great Achilles exclaims sorrowfully, "Nay, speak not comfortably to me of death. Rather would I live on earth as the hireling of another, even with a landless man who had no great livelihood, than bear sway among all ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... Telemachus thy realm obeys; In sacred groves celestial rites he pays, And shares the banquet in superior state, Graced with such honours as become the great Thy sire in solitude foments his care: The court is joyless, for thou art not there! No costly carpets raise his hoary head, No rich embroidery shines to grace his bed; Even when keen winter freezes in the skies, Rank'd with his slaves, on earth the monarch lies: Deep are his sighs, his visage pale, his dress ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... Rickman. "Rickman," he said, "you shall not go over body and soul to The Museion." He regarded himself as the keeper and lover of Rickman's soul, and would not have been sorry to bring about a divorce between it and Jewdwine. His irregular attentions were to save it from a suicidal devotion to a joyless consort. So that Rickman was torn between Maddox's enthusiasm for him and his own enthusiasm ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... Sumeru were shaken, from heaven there rained showers of flying stones, a whirling tempest rose on every side, the trees were rooted up and fell, heavenly music rose with plaintive notes, whilst angels for a time were joyless. Buddha rising from out his ecstasy, announced to all the world: "Now have I given up my term of years; I live henceforth by power of faith; my body like a broken chariot stands, no further cause of 'coming' or of ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... said that I never had a bad morning, for every morning, even if I am pinched with hunger, I praise God. If it rains, or snows, or hails, whether the day is serene or tempestuous, I am still thankful to God, and therefore I never had a joyless morning. If I am miserable in outward circumstances, and despised, I still praise God; you wished that I might always be fortunate, but I cannot be unfortunate, because nothing befalls me but according to the will of God, and I believe that His will is always good, in whatever He does ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... the promise that if the day ever came when sugar bowls made their appearance once more, filled temptingly with the sweet granules that were "gone but not forgotten," we should put an extra lump or an additional spoonful of sugar into our coffee to help us forget the joyless ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... to pierce the morrow's haze, But for the moment render praise; Nor spurn the dance, nor love's sweet passion, Ere age draws on with its joyless days. ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... After many years of joyless life, the blind grandmother had at last found something to make her happy; her days were no longer passed in weariness and darkness, one like the other without pleasure or change, for now she had always something to which she ...
— Heidi • Johanna Spyri
... lives; no word that man hath made Can tell the hue of their faces, or their rags by filth o'er-laid: For this hath our age invented—these are the sons of the free, Who shall bear our name triumphant o'er every land and sea. Read ye their souls in their faces, and what shall help you there? Joyless, hopeless, shameless, angerless, set is their stare: This is the thing we have made, and what shall help us now, For the field hath been laboured and tilled and the teeth ...
— The Pilgrims of Hope • William Morris
... at Court, she appears at a Meet or in the "Row" in a lady's habit, trigly perfect in fit, and on a side-saddle. In America this is an extreme opinion, and it is only among the most fashionable that a young girl having all her life ridden in a man's saddle, finds the world a joyless place and parents cruel when she is no longer allowed to ride like a boy. But she becomes, in spite of her protests, "another who looks divine on a horse." And you can look divine too, if you choose! On second thoughts the adjective must be qualified. No one looks divine on a horse ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... like soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against hunger ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... furtively from its place, almost as if she were afraid of what she should see. What a list there was of sons of Lord St. Serf! some she had never known, who died young: and Reginald in India, and Hal, who was so kind—what a good laugh he had, she remembered, not a joyless cackle like Mariamne's, a good natural laugh, and a kind light in his eyes: and he had been kind. She could remember ever so many things, nothings, things that made a little difference in the dull, dull cloudy sky of ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... castellan, an old, gloomy man, the more devoted to the young knight from his dark melancholy and wild deeds, hastened to lower the drawbridge. Greetings were exchanged in silence, and in silence did Sintram enter, and those joyless gates closed with a crash behind ...
— Sintram and His Companions • Friedrich de la Motte Fouque
... this, ye pupils of Voltaire! From joyless murmur free; Or, let us know, which character Shall crown you ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... bridegroom sound thy virtues! Have our songs thus quickly vanished, Have our joyful tongues grown silent? Evil then has been the brewing, Then the beer must be unworthy, That it does not cheer the singer, Does not move the merry minstrel, That the golden guests are joyless, And the cuckoo is not singing. Never will these benches echo Till the bench-guests chant thy virtues; Nor the floor resound thy praises Till the floor-guests sing in concord; Nor the windows join the chorus Till the window-guests ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... neither saluted nor welcomed by the once obsequious slaves in the outer lodge. Neither harps nor singing-boys, neither woman's ringing laughter nor man's bacchanalian glee, now woke the echoes in the lonely halls. The pulse of pleasure seemed to have throbbed its last in the joyless being of ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... them. While they wait they still work, yet without pleasantness in their lives. As their homes by neglect have grown shabby and squalid, so their industry has become calculating and sordid. Little remains to them now but their own good temper to keep their life from being quite joyless. ...
— Change in the Village • (AKA George Bourne) George Sturt
... stoops not thy chaste pride. If others seek the love thus thrown aside, Vain were their hopes and labours to obtain; The heart thou spurnest I alike disdain, To thee displeasing, 'tis by me denied. But if, discarded thus, it find not thee Its joyless exile willing to befriend, Alone, untaught at others' will to wend, Soon from life's weary burden will it flee. How heavy then the guilt to both, but more To thee, for thee ...
— The Sonnets, Triumphs, and Other Poems of Petrarch • Petrarch
... but joyless, smile, and after another vague head-shake that thanked, but eluded the question, he said: "They are very indigestible; hot bread is not good for the health. At least, that is what they tell us over here. We keep our bread two days before ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... asceticism? And how much more does this all apply when we see a man who makes himself unhappy, preventing by his very act of existence the happiness of another more equably tempered mortal! Now I believe this is the present case. Drusus, I understand, is leading a spare, joyless, workaday sort of existence, which is, or by every human law should be, to him a burden. So long as he lives, he prevents you from enjoying the means of acquiring pleasure. Now I have Socrates of imperishable memory on my side, when I assert ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... sad to lose a child, and especially a son," sighed Elizabeth, and involuntarily she thought of Anna, that poor mother whom she had robbed of her son, that he might grow up in eternal joyless imprisonment, that he might be morally murdered, and from a man be ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... are"; and when, instead of this, it turns to glorifying its own powers and achievements, or sets up any end apart from such discovery and interpretation, it becomes sickly, feeble, foolish, frivolous, vicious, joyless, and moribund; and meanness, cruelty, sensuality, impiety, and irreligion are the ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... lost in his own thoughts. To win a soul to the Saviour was surely a good work. He knew Melissa's sober, thoughtful nature, and the retired, joyless life she led with her surly old father. So his knowledge of human nature led him to think that she, if any one, might easily be won over to the faith in which he found his chief happiness. Baptism had given ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... painted fool again and kiss my hand With jocund air to Folly's worshippers. So day by day life's bitter bread is earned With lips that smile and frame the mirthless joke, And frailer grows the soul that once was strong,— The joyless soul of one whose trade has turned Life's tragic mantle to a jester's cloak, Life's diapason to a ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... man had alighted there for a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these continually shifting scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a stranger among strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though joyless satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire college and submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but inflexible ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... of childhood, the certainty that they can expand in the sunshine of the love which is their due." Ellen Key, similarly, while pointing out (Ueber Liebe und Ehe, pp. 14, 265) that the tyranny of the old Protestant religious spirit which enjoined on women unlimited submission to joyless motherhood within "the whited sepulchre of marriage" is now being broken, exalts the privileges of voluntary motherhood, while admitting that there may be a few exceptional cases in which women may withdraw themselves from motherhood for the sake of the other demands of their ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... country, to tend it during the alternate fits of stupefaction and raving which precede its dissolution, and to see the symptoms of vitality disappear one by one, till nothing is left but coldness, darkness, and corruption. To this joyless and thankless duty was Machiavelli called. In the energetic language of the prophet, he was "mad for the sight of his eye which he saw," disunion in the council, effeminacy in the camp, liberty extinguished, commerce decaying, national honour sullied, an enlightened and ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... same house with her husband, whose third wife she was, they had long been separated, only meeting at their joyless meals. Mrs. Ready considered her husband a very stupid animal, and did not fail to make both him and her friends acquainted ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie
... the joyless victor sat, Revolving in his altered soul The various turns of chance below; And now and then a sigh he stole, And tears ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... above were imprisoned by her in those gloomy regions. To her came also all those who had died, not on the battlefield, but of old age or disease. And though these were treated kindly enough, theirs was a joyless life in comparison with that of the dead warriors who were feasting and fighting in the halls of Valhalla, under the kindly rule ...
— Told by the Northmen: - Stories from the Eddas and Sagas • E. M. [Ethel Mary] Wilmot-Buxton
... of woods and hedgerows fluttering for an inconsequent moment in the gloom. He came among them, none knew whence he was going, none knew whither. He was conscious of being a creature of mystery. He pitied the fettered youth of these begrimed and joyless towns—slaves, Men with Muckrakes (he had fished up ail old "Pilgrim's Progress" from the lower depths of the van), who obstinately refused to raise their eyes to the glorious sun in heaven. In his childish arrogance he would ask Barney Bill, "Why don't they go away ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... of which the people had been robbed. "We only ask freedom of speech,—the right to exercise all the franchises conferred by the Constitution upon an American. Can you safely deny us these things?" Mingled also with pathetic appeals were joyless pictures of the ravages of war, and cheerless glimpses into the future of a Republic with its bulwarks of liberty torn away. "We stand to-day," he continued, "amid new made graves; we stand to-day in a land filled with mourning, and our soil is saturated with the blood of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... became acquainted with a man of fine intellect and fascinating manners, who won her affections, and afterwards proved unworthy of her. Again the beauty of her life was darkened, and with a weary heart she wore out the tedious years of her joyless existence. She was an angel of charity to the poor and suffering. She grew lovelier through sorrow. A desire to see her brother, her nearest and dearest relative, called her North again, and when our story ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... to her charms, a most accomplished knight And monarch brave that ever yet had bowed to woman's might Was but a poor and joyless slave, compelled to wear a smile And act a part for which she loathed her ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... manifestation of truth without which human society could not last. Now as man could not live in society without truth, so likewise, not without joy, because, as the Philosopher says (Ethic. viii), no one could abide a day with the sad nor with the joyless. Therefore, a certain natural equity obliges a man to live agreeably with his fellow-men; unless some reason should oblige him to sadden them for ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... to rejoice in whatsoever was joyous. He loved beautiful flowers and beautiful women—and he had enough of both and to spare. His gardens were more splendid than the gardens of Soliman the Magnificent, and that his Seraglio was no joyless abode was demonstrated by the fact that so far he was the happy father ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... Ere long, with a joyless mien, looking up towards the poop, the host invited his guest to accompany him there, for the benefit of what little breath ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... Each young man, after purchasing an ivory-headed cane retired to privacy to squint through it undisturbed. Emerging from this privacy the young man would then confer with other young men. What these joyless young men saw when they squinted they never revealed. But among their elders they spread the strong impression that it was the Capital at Washington ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I miss thy smile of light, "Welcome" at morn and kind "good night!" But, when the quiet eve comes on, I feel that thou indeed art gone. That herald of delight to me Is joyless now, for "Where ...
— Heart Utterances at Various Periods of a Chequered Life. • Eliza Paul Kirkbride Gurney
... zeal they sought; In joyless paths they trod— Heedless of praise or blame they wrought, And left the rest to God. The lowliest sphere was not disdained; Where love could soothe or save, They went, by fearless faith sustained, Nor knew their ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... woman can grow without love, and a great deal of it. Why do you suppose I am writing all this—I, who have felt such deep and true love for you? I have no courage—the dampness of the day has settled into my soul—and I shall be joyless until there is no more cursed doubt of you ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... stupid-looking, tow-headed children. It was impossible for Phil to conceive how beautiful Mollie could be a member of such a family. Yet the unfortunate girl had told Phyllis that she had known no other than the hard, joyless ...
— Madge Morton, Captain of the Merry Maid • Amy D. V. Chalmers
... shadow thickening into trouble. "The next best thing to having her with me is to know that she is kindly and lovingly looked after by my married sister, of whom she is very fond. Florence is merrier, if not always happier, with her young cousins than if she were condemned to the repression and joyless routine of a house where the care of the sick is the most engrossing ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... has retreated from the fields. With the Egyptians, as with many peoples of antiquity, the committing of the seed to the earth assumed the character of a solemn and mournful rite. On this subject I will let Plutarch speak for himself. "What," he asks, "are we to make of the gloomy, joyless, and mournful sacrifices, if it is wrong either to omit the established rites or to confuse and disturb our conceptions of the gods by absurd suspicions? For the Greeks also perform many rites which resemble those of the Egyptians and are observed about the same time. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... "could I think of enshrining "An image whose looks are so joyless and dim;— "But yon little god, upon roses reclining, "We'll make, if you please, Sir, a Friendship of him." So the bargain was struck; with the little god laden She joyfully flew to her shrine in the grove: "Farewell," said the sculptor, "you're not the ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... it is sufficient to look around us, and to consider the effects that religion produces on minds really penetrated with its pretended truths. We shall generally find in those who the most sincerely profess and the most exactly practise them, a joyless and melancholy disposition, which announces no contentment, nor that interior peace of which they speak so incessantly, without ever exhibiting any undoubted manifestations of it. Whoever is in the enjoyment of peace within, shows some exterior marks of it; but the internal ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... silent and deserted now. Only his wife and his daughter Eliza lived in it, and they passed their days in dreary loneliness and incessant fear and anguish. Eliza Wallner was alone, all alone and joyless. She had not seen her beloved Elza since the day when she was married. She herself had started the same night with Haspinger for her father's headquarters. Elza had remained with her young husband in Innspruck, where her father died on the following day; and after ...
— Andreas Hofer • Lousia Muhlbach
... happiest. Relating his reminiscences of that period, in reply to the question, "Do you retain pleasant recollections of cadet life?" he remarked, "I have little reason to do so. Without relations or acquaintances in a strange city, we spent a joyless youth. The discipline was strict, even hard, and now, when my judgment of it is unprejudiced, I must say that it was too strict, too hard. The only benefit we received from this treatment was that ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 2 of 8 • Various
... from my mind through a succession of years; and some of those which, perhaps, deeply affected me at the time, are, by the mercy of Heaven, forgotten. But enough remains to enable me to give a faint outline of the causes which have changed me from what I was, to the gloomy joyless being I am at length become. There is one scene ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XIX. No. 540, Saturday, March 31, 1832 • Various
... to food and wine and cheer the name of the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar inn. There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his elbow and the bowl of a Holland clay propped in a ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... almost daily to perambulate that strange region east of Aldgate where uncouth foreign names stare out from the shop signs and almost every public or private notice is in the Hebrew character. Dressed in my shabbiest clothes, I trudged, hour after hour and day after day, through the gray and joyless streets and alleys, looking earnestly into the beady eyes and broad faces of the East-European wayfarers and wondering whether any of them was the ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... plain that she had had another purpose in coming there than to make that speech. Ah, that marriage that her son had insisted on contracting, contrary to her wish, at the mature age of fifty, after twenty years of joyless married life with a shrewish, bony wife; he, who had always until then deferred so to her will, now swayed only by his passion for this gay young widow, lighter than thistle-down! She had promised herself to keep watch over ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... perfect. The artist, if he would prevail, must not be seduced by any temptation, any extraneous desire, any peevish criticism, any well-meant rebuke, into trying a subject that he knows is too large for him. He must be his own severest critic. No artistic effort can be effective, if it is a joyless straining after things falteringly grasped. Joy is the essential quality; it need not always be a present, a momentary joy. There are weary spaces, as when a footsore traveller plods along the interminable road ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... impelled by their own misery to desolate the happy peoples, a vision which grew clearer in the after years. But in that easy-going Eastern life there is a power of resistance, as everybody knows who tries to change it, which may yet defeat the hosts of joyless drudgery. ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... Instead of that, me frantick love detains, 'Mid foes, and dreadful darts, and bloody plains: While you—and can my soul the tale believe, Far from your country, lonely wand'ring leave Me, me your lover, barbarous fugitive! Seek the rough Alps where snows eternal shine, And joyless borders of the frozen Rhine. Ah! may no cold e'er blast my dearest maid, Nor pointed ice thy tender feet ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... And so he managed to be present at prayers, masses for the dead, to confess, make signs of the cross in front of icons, with a quiet mind, without being conscious of the lie, and to continue in the service which gave him the feeling of being useful and some comfort in his joyless family life. Although he believed this, he felt with his entire being that this religion of his, more than all else, was not "the right thing," and that is why ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... ignoring his descendant. But Michael was too wise to put himself into places where he could be pointedly ignored, and the resplendent dinner, with its six footmen and its silver service, was not really more joyless than usual. But his father's majestic displeasure was more apparent when the three men sat alone afterwards, and it was in dead silence that port was pushed round and cigarettes handed. Francis, it is true, made a couple of efforts ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... friends was a joyless pleasure. When Mary arrived in Lisbon, she found Fanny in the last stages of her illness, and before she had time to rest from her journey she began her work as sick-nurse. Four hours after her arrival Fanny's child was born. It had ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... course of the river. The postern by which Skeldergate was formerly approached no longer exists; and the few old houses left in the street are disguised in melancholy modern costume of whitewash and cement. Shops of the smaller and poorer order, intermixed here and there with dingy warehouses and joyless private residences of red brick, compose the present a spect of Skeldergate. On the river-side the houses are separated at intervals by lanes running down to the water, and disclosing lonely little plots of ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... fences, nor was it until April that the ice broke up in Fore River." They were difficult—those days ushered in by the Reverend Joseph Hull. Through long nights and cold winters and an endless round of joyless living, Weymouth expiated well for the sins of her youth. Even as late as 1767 we read of the daughter of Parson Smith, of Weymouth—now the wife of John Adams, of Quincy—scrubbing the floor of her own bed-chamber ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... relief: or, as a French author has neatly observed, "Sans les femmes, les deux extrmits de la vie seraient sans secours, et le milieu sans plaisirs." "Without woman the two extremities of life would be helpless, and the middle of it joyless." ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... paths that had once echoed to the tread of slippered feet, armed sentries paced, their sharp challenges breaking the stillness of the night. Outside its wrecked fences strange men in stranger uniforms strode in and out of the joyless houses; tired pickets stacked their arias on the unswept piazzas, and panting horses nibbled the bark from the withered trees; rank weeds choked the gardens; dishevelled vines clung to the porches, and doors that had always swung wide to the gentle tap of ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... thick the shades of evening close! How pale the sky with weight of snows! Haste, light the tapers, urge the fire, And bid the joyless day retire.— Alas, in vain I try within To brighten the dejected scene, While, roused by grief, these fiery pains Tear the frail texture of my veins; While Winter's voice, that storms around, And yon deep death-bell's ...
— Poetical Works of Akenside - [Edited by George Gilfillan] • Mark Akenside
... had just struck at St. Mary church; the day was dark and gloomy, and the sleet rattled against the windows of the joyless ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... no more of a Canadian winter than what regards the intenseness of its cold, must suppose it a very joyless season: 'tis, I assure you, quite otherwise; there are indeed some days here of the severity of which those who were never out of England can form no conception; but those days seldom exceed a dozen in a whole winter, nor do they come in succession; ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... the hand of the people's shield, Shalt thou have the thing that thou wouldedst when thou broughtest me to birth, And I, the soul of the Wolfings, began to look on earth? Wilt thou play the God, O mother, and make a man anew, A joyless thing and a fearful? Then I betwixt you two, 'Twixt your longing and your sorrow will cast the sundering word, And tell out all the story of that rampart of the sword! I shall bid my mighty father make choice of death in life, Or life in death victorious and the crowned ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... lines of suffering on their faces, aged before their time, and the mere wrecks of what they once were. Men who had gone to that region strong, active, ruddy, enthusiastic, and who, after a few months, returned thus feeble and shattered—some irreparably so; others with perhaps years of joyless life before them; a few with the unmistakable stamp of death ...
— Blue Lights - Hot Work in the Soudan • R.M. Ballantyne
... and joyless as the wide waste lying hushed around me, unblessed with the verdure of a single hope, a single love; and as I looked down the coming years, my way seemed very ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... laughter of his lips Might shrink half startled, like a guilty man Who wrestles with his dream; as some pale shape Gliding half hidden through the dusky stems, Would thrust a hand before the lifted bowl, Whispering: A little space, and thou art mine! It may be on that joyless feast his eye Dwelt with mere outward seeming; he, within, Took measure of his soul, and knew its strength, And by that silent knowledge, day by day, Was calm'd, ennobled, comforted, sustain'd. ...
— Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... turmoil; she was married—that was all she knew—married to somebody she liked but did not love. Married to a man who had been chosen for her partly against her will. She glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes; if she was joyless, no less was he. It was an inauspicious beginning to a married life which would end who knew how? Before the depressing granite facade of the London Safe Deposit the party descended, Mr. Debenham paid the cabman, ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... artist seemed to look triumphantly through the solemn, purplish blue eyes of the young martyr, and Beryl knew that her own heart beat under the pamted folds of the diploidion; that she had epitomized in a symbolic picture, the history of her own joyless youth. ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... horrors. Nothing gives me any joy. I have learned what the bitterness of exile is, in these days; and I never should have known it but for the absence of "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,"—I can perfectly appreciate that line of Goldsmith; for it well expresses my own torpid, unenterprising, joyless state of mind and heart. I am like an uprooted plant, wilted and drooping. Life seems so purposeless as not to be worth the trouble of ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... submit. They may obey in act, but there is no obedience in their wills, nor any cheerfulness in their hearts. The elder brother in the parable could say, 'Neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment,' but his service had been joyless, and he never remembered having received gifts that made him 'merry with ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... girls to meet men of their own class is painfully true, and this desire is not so much the outcome of young women's natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from Stonor House and the joyless existence there. ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... and Buddha himself has no power to answer prayer, since he long ago passed into a realm of inactivity which is practically indistinguishable from non-existence. There is no atonement for past sin nor escape from its consequences, but by the giving up of being. Buddhism is a pessimistic and joyless religion. Hence it suffers deterioration in competition with the more active systems. Close by Boro Budor, where Buddhism reached its culmination, are the temples of Mendoet and Brambanam, which show a reversion in ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... little about it! What! will you sacrifice these glorious tresses to a hard and joyless course of study? For none can study Euclid with me with ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 49, November, 1861 • Various
... what fate has allotted to me has learned to know other gods than those whom the master described as dwelling happily in undisturbed repose. Rather eternal torture in another world, united to the man I love, than painless, joyless mere existence in a desolate, incomprehensible, unknown region! You will be the last to teach the children to yearn for freedom ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... gone forth against him, but because of the pact between them, Murrough of the Kine sped him in peace through Iar Connaught, and at length Brian had won home again with joyless heart. ...
— Nuala O'Malley • H. Bedford-Jones
... fathoms being the average height accorded them. Black and hideous in appearance they are said to stalk around in the darkness and silence of the night. By day they retire to dark thickets, somber caves, and the joyless resting places ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... proved too congenial. We dwelt too much in the happy present to give ourselves up to the historical past; but I do not think one gets the sweetest juices out of Rome unless he gives way to the melancholy vein now and then, and "stalks apart in joyless reverie." ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... upon his whole existence, he seemed to see in a large, clear, cold comprehensiveness, all the wasted days, the fruitless activities, the futilities, the perpetual postponements that had followed his coming to London. He saw it all as a joyless indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and undisciplined desires, as a succession of days that began amiably and weakly, that became steadily more crowded with ignoble and trivial occupations, that had sunken now to indignity and uncleanness. He was overwhelmed by that persuasion, ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. The peasant ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... power, for I have seen it tried. Pains of all sorts thro' every nerve and artery At once it scatters,—burns at once and freezes— Till, by extremity of torture forced, The soul consents to leave her joyless home. ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... perception, be beauty. A fourth assigned this cause; that the Lord took away from the man beauty and elegance of life, and transferred it to the woman; and that hence the man, unless he be re-united with his beauty and elegance in the woman, is stern, austere, joyless, and unlovely; so one man is wise only for himself, and another is foolish; whereas, when a man is united with his beauty and elegance of life in a wife, he becomes engaging, pleasant, active, and lovely, and thereby wise. A fifth said, that women were created beauties, not for the ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... breaking-up of his self-control. She leaned against the heavy mahogany table, clenching a tiny handkerchief between chill little hands. If the months had brought her perfect vengeance on the man who had once failed her in her need, she was finding it, indeed, a joyless victory. ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... since my Sharper is untrue, I joyless make my once adored Alpeu. I saw him stand behind Ombrelia's chair, And whisper with that soft, deluding air, And those feign'd sighs which ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... cool'd The smother'd rancours of rebellious thoughts, Clad with the sable mantles of the night; And like the tree that, robb'd of sun and showers, Mourns desolate withouten leaf or sap, So poor Cornelia, late bereft of love, Sits sighing, hapless, joyless, ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VII (4th edition) • Various
... millstone mechanically revolving. A perpetual round of joyless love-episodes and intoxication without thirst. Do you understand? The life of a courtesan endured by a true woman. My soul is mine, my spirit and my intellect, but these are chained to a body that I abandon to others—whom ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... he remained standing stock still in the dusk. She had already reached the three palms when she heard behind her a loud peal of laughter, cynical and joyless, such as is heard in smoking-rooms at the end of a scandalous story. It made her feel ...
— Within the Tides • Joseph Conrad
... thee down the livelong day, in the Jotuns' courts. To the Hrimthursar's halls, thou shalt each day crawl exhausted, joyless crawl; wail for pastime shalt thou ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... fundamental ideas of the book, but they give but a faint notion of the author's poetic attitude. Most beautifully is this shown in Hal's relation to a young Irish girl, Red Mary. She is poor, and her daily life harsh and joyless, but nevertheless her wonderful grace is one of the outstanding features of the book. The first impression of Mary is that of a Celtic Madonna with a tender heart for little children. She develops into a Valkure of the working-class, ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... picture to see this bowed-down old man; his thin, pale face shaded by a worn-out, three-cornered hat, his dirty uniform strewn with snuff; and his meagre legs encased in high-topped, unpolished boots; his only companion a greyhound, old and joyless as his master. Neither the bust of Voltaire, with its beaming, intelligent face, nor those of his friends, Lord-Marshal Keith and the Marquis d'Argens, could win an affectionate glance from the lonely old king. He whom Europe distinguished as the Great Frederick, whom his subjects ...
— Old Fritz and the New Era • Louise Muhlbach
... Big Business of Life we have the practical philosophy that it is everyone's business to abolish work and turn this world into a playground. Who will not confess that many mortals take their work too seriously, and that to them it is a joyless, cheerless thing? To be able to find happiness, and to find it when we are bending to our duties is to possess the secret of living to the full. And happiness is to be sought within, and not among the things that lie at our feet. The book before us is wholesome ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... the friends was a joyless pleasure. When Mary arrived in Lisbon, she found Fanny in the last stages of her illness, and before she had time to rest from her journey she began her work as sick-nurse. Four hours after her arrival Fanny's child was born. It had been sad enough for Mary ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... He could no longer believe in a God, or how could such things be? Manhood was denied him. The last torture was not denied him—namely, that he saw the full satire of his position, saw that it was his own love that had destroyed them both. Out of his complete ruin he arose joyless, hopeless, but great in a tenderness so vast and selfless that it almost took the place ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... union with this vast central pain of loss. Another while all the multitude of graces, the countless kind providences, which it has wasted pass before it, and generate that undying worm of remorse of which Our Saviour speaks. Then comes a keen but joyless view, a calculation, but only a bankrupt's calculation, of the possibility of gains for ever forfeited, of all the grandeur and ocean-like vastness of the bliss which it has lost. Last of all comes before it the immensity of God, to it so unconsoling and so unprofitable; it is not a picture, ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... fraud and falsehood thou mad'st me thy wife—that shall be forgotten! Five joyless years have I spent in this house— all shall be forgotten from the day when ...
— The Vikings of Helgeland - The Prose Dramas Of Henrik Ibsen, Vol. III. • Henrik Ibsen
... up, and something like a smile passed over his joyless face when he saw Helen Stanley bending ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... the throng with eyes that seemed to see nothing of its frantic frenzy and joyless joy—a stalwart man, who strode along like a giant among midgets, his vacant eyes fixed before him, his strong white face expressionless. Hugh Ritson saw him. They passed within two paces, but without recognition. The one was ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... pale for weariness Of climbing heaven and gazing on the earth, Wandering companionless Among the stars that have a different birth, And ever changing, like a joyless eye That finds no ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... noon, but no Angelus rings; 'Tis evening, but no drops of melody rain from her rose-coloured wings. Ah! where have the angels, poor Paolo, that guarded thy cottage door flown? And why have they left thee to wander thus childless and joyless alone? ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... Enlightened, cultivated, a friend of the arts, a scholar and diplomatist, he seems, unlike many Orientals, to have selected the best in assimilating European influences. Yet when I looked at the tiny creature watching him with those anxious joyless eyes I felt once more the abyss that slavery and the seraglio put between the most Europeanized Mahometan and the western conception of life. The Caid's little black slaves are well-known in Morocco, and behind the sad child leaning in the archway stood all ...
— In Morocco • Edith Wharton
... and feebleness, are there represented and are regularly brought around by the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon, autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took the greater ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... in which the Greeks believed was to some extent one of rewards and punishments. The souls of most of the dead, however, were supposed to descend to the realms of Ha'des, where they remained, joyless phantoms, the mere shadows of their former selves, destitute of mental vigor, and, like the spectres of the North American Indians, pursuing, with dreamlike vacancy, the empty images of their past occupations and enjoyments. So cheerless is the twilight of the nether ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... a year departed— Felt it of all hope bereft; Restless, joyless, broken-hearted, Then the warring bands he left;— Bade on Joppa's sandy shore Seamen hoist the swelling sail; Swift the bark to Europe bore O'er ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 487 - Vol. 17, No. 487. Saturday, April 30, 1831 • Various
... rosy countenance. Then the child would dream that he was sailing aloft over shining forests, and that his mother, beaming with all the beauty of her lost youth, flew before him, showering golden flowers on his path. These were the happiest moments of Brita's joyless life, and even these were not unmixed with bitterness; for into the midst of her joy would steal a shy anxious thought which was the more terrible because it came so stealthily, so soft-footed and unbidden. Had not this child been given her as a punishment ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and Swede,[656] beheld the same objects: they also saw through them that which was contained. And to what purpose? The beauty straightway vanished; they read commandments, all-excluding mountainous duty; an obligation, a sadness, as of piled mountains, fell on them, and life became ghastly, joyless, a pilgrim's progress,[657] a probation, beleaguered round with doleful histories, of Adam's fall[658] and curse, behind us; with doomsdays and purgatorial[659] and penal fires before us; and the heart of the seer and the heart of the listener ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... Shirz. Ah me! my race of threescore years is short, but long enough to pall My sense with joyless joys as these, with Love and Houris, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... funds—the football, the racquet court, the gymnasium; but he saw no reason why he should be taxed for things which he disliked and disapproved. The result of that evening confirmed him in his resolution. It was a scene of drinking, gluttony, secret fear, endless squabbling, and joyless excitement. ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... thoughts. She no longer felt in her heart the bitter resentment toward Olga Vseslavovna that had filled it yesterday. She was conscious of a feeling of sorrow for the helpless woman, of compassion for her empty, shallow life, the fruit of an empty, shallow heart. And she was wondering why such empty, joyless lives should exist in a world where there was such ...
— The Continental Classics, Volume XVIII., Mystery Tales • Various
... deny the truth; he added further fuel to the fires that consumed me, and rekindled such as might be expiring, if, mayhap, there were any such. But the beginning of all this was by no means so cheerful as the ending was joyless, as soon as I was deprived of the sight of this, my beloved, inasmuch as the eyes, being thus robbed of their delight, gave woful occasion of lamentation to the heart, the sighs whereof grew greater in quality as well as in quantity, and desire, ...
— La Fiammetta • Giovanni Boccaccio
... WITHOUT IT.—The wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril, and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... have become hysterical. They will be sent supperless to bed. On the morrow they will have to learn and repeat the chapter about Cain and Abel. A week, at least, will have elapsed before they are out of disgrace. Such are the inevitable consequences of joy in a joyless life. It were well for these children had 'The Visit' never ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... lose a child, and especially a son," sighed Elizabeth, and involuntarily she thought of Anna, that poor mother whom she had robbed of her son, that he might grow up in eternal joyless imprisonment, that he might be morally murdered, and from a man be converted into ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... their surprised and happy eyes after the long habit of seeing nothing but dirty lanes and streets. It was a wonder to them—those spacious reaches of open country to run and dance and tumble and frolic in, after their dull and joyless captivity; so they scampered far and wide over the fair regions on both sides of the river, and came back at eventide weary, but laden with flowers and flushed with new health drawn from the fresh country air and the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... out from his usual field-sports and joyous carouses by the necessity of remaining concealed within the walls of the castle, became a joyless and uninteresting companion. When the Master of Ravenswood would no longer fence or play at shovel-board; when he himself had polished to the extremity the coat of his palfrey with brush, curry comb, and hair-cloth; when he had ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... this life they were living, outwardly peaceful and understanding, deluding the world, but inwardly a place of tears. How she dreaded the night and its recurrent tears, and the hours when she could not sleep, and waited for the joyless morning, as one lost on the moor, blanched with cold, waits for the sun-rise! Night after night at a certain hour—the hour when she went to bed at last after that poignant revelation to Eglington—she wept, as she ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... move, never to know life even in the monotonous, joyless way of the normal worker, they hung there to be dipped into whenever the master that reigned over this inferno, or his immediate underlings, desired some ...
— The Raid on the Termites • Paul Ernst
... her as they sang—a joyless, straggling place, full of people who pretended. When she woke up she knew ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster
... wretch without it is under eternal quarantine; no friend to greet; no home to harbor him, the voyage of his life becomes a joyless peril; and in the midst of all ambition can achieve, or avarice amass, or rapacity plunder, he tosses on the surge, a buoyant pestilence. But let me not degrade into selfishness of individual safety or individual exposure this individual principle; ...
— Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners • B.G. Jefferis
... Kraill had ventilated in his lectures—that they were the vehicles of the race, living for the race but getting all the fun they could out of the preliminary canter, since the race was a rather strenuous, rather joyless thing for them. And it was in men they found the fun. Yet here was Marcella, who was quite different from anything feminine he had ever seen or imagined, suddenly appealing to him not to let her be fickle. Immediately he felt very manly, ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... I was disappointed in love,—for the truth never approached to my ideal. Nursed early in the lap of Romance, enamoured of the wild and the adventurous, the commonplaces of life were to me inexpressibly tame and joyless. And yet indolence, which belongs to the poetical character, was more inviting than that eager and uncontemplative action which can alone wring enterprise from life. Meditation was my natural element. I loved to spend ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... confess, make signs of the cross in front of icons, with a quiet mind, without being conscious of the lie, and to continue in the service which gave him the feeling of being useful and some comfort in his joyless family life. Although he believed this, he felt with his entire being that this religion of his, more than all else, was not "the right thing," and that is why his ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... ever found it a desert, stony place. My heart just aches for the sweet quiet and seclusion of such a home as you could make, Millie. As it is, I have no home. A hollow iceberg could not be more cold and joyless than my present abode. Neither have you a home. It is only in stolen moments like these, liable to interruption, that we can speak of what is in our hearts;" and then, prompted by his feelings, longings, and the apparently friendless condition of the girl whose ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... driving hither and thither in a frolic that knew no law, buffeting either cheek, hustling bewildered vanes, cuffing the patient trees into a dull roar of protest that rose and fell, a sullen harmony, joyless and menacing. The skies were comfortless, and there was a sinister look about the cold grey pall that spoke of winter and the pitiless rain and the scream of the wind in tree-tops, and even remembered ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... deed the resolution begins immediately to express itself in movements which are closely dependent upon bodily actions. Even when I suddenly resolve to face some correctly- supposed disagreeable matter, or to think about some joyless thing, a bodily movement, and indeed quite an energetic one, will ensue upon the resolution—I may push my chair back, raise my elbows, perhaps put my head quickly between my hands, push the chair back again, and then begin to look or to think. Such actions, however, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... unquestionably afford the best and kindest relief: or, as a French author has neatly observed, "Sans les femmes, les deux extrmits de la vie seraient sans secours, et le milieu sans plaisirs." "Without woman the two extremities of life would be helpless, and the middle of it joyless." ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... make people laugh—the clowns, the cheap-jacks, the moveable theatres, the vans with fat women and two-headed calves, the learned pigs, the peepshows, the peripatetic photographers, the weighing-machines, the swings, the merry-go-rounds. And so there are none of the groups of vacant faces, the joyless chawbacons lounging gloomily from stall to stall, the settled inanity and dreariness of the crowd that drifts through an English fair. An English peasant goes to be amused, and the clown finds it wonderfully hard work to amuse him. ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Truth, to "feel the soul of Nature, and see things as they are"; and when, instead of this, it turns to glorifying its own powers and achievements, or sets up any end apart from such discovery and interpretation, it becomes sickly, feeble, foolish, frivolous, vicious, joyless, and moribund; and meanness, cruelty, sensuality, impiety, and irreligion are ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... see That it would be for thy good, What desires so eagerly Thy misguided flesh and blood, He would ne'er thee joyless leave, But ...
— Paul Gerhardt's Spiritual Songs - Translated by John Kelly • Paul Gerhardt
... had done wickedness in the world above were imprisoned by her in those gloomy regions. To her came also all those who had died, not on the battlefield, but of old age or disease. And though these were treated kindly enough, theirs was a joyless life in comparison with that of the dead warriors who were feasting and fighting in the halls of Valhalla, under the ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... existence among the dregs and the scum of the underworld, she, in her refinement and her purity, to exist among the vile and dissolute, in daily, hourly peril of her life, because the weapons that these inhuman vultures had used to rob her, to destroy those she loved, to make of her life a hideous, joyless thing, should not be ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... knock, and have the ordeal ended then and there; but second thought whispered, "To-morrow will soon be here; be patient." She entered her room, and, wearied by the events of the day, fell asleep, dreaming of the new lot in the cemetery, and the lonely, joyless man ...
— Macaria • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... Miss Leech heard the singing, and stopped involuntarily in their conversation. It was a strange sound in that dull and joyless house. ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... got into such a round of pleasures that they have no time." This shows how little Beauclerc was the companion of the poet's mind, or could judge of him below the surface. Reynolds, the kind participator in joyless dissipation, could have told a different story of ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... more does this all apply when we see a man who makes himself unhappy, preventing by his very act of existence the happiness of another more equably tempered mortal! Now I believe this is the present case. Drusus, I understand, is leading a spare, joyless, workaday sort of existence, which is, or by every human law should be, to him a burden. So long as he lives, he prevents you from enjoying the means of acquiring pleasure. Now I have Socrates of imperishable memory on my side, when ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... this time. She was driven to assume the internal management of the household, and found grateful solace in the occupations which the position involved. She once more began to take an interest in the prosaic affairs of everyday life, and became less addicted to looking forward to a solitary, joyless old age. So that, all things considered, this second bereavement was not to be regarded in the light of an affliction absolutely ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... may culminate in a state of mind such as we see extolled in Buddhism, a colorless state, joyless and painless, across which the fleeting splendors of thought pass like stars. Well, the man of the south cares naught for that sort of paradise. The vein of real sensation is freely, perpetually open, open to life. The side that pertains to abstraction, ...
— Frederic Mistral - Poet and Leader in Provence • Charles Alfred Downer
... stood? How could he tell her what he suspected to be true—that in that quiet little Italian town English detectives were watching his every movement, and that at any moment he might be arrested? With her joyless life, and with this new misery closing around her, would it not be well for ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... civil, but joyless, smile, and after another vague head-shake that thanked, but eluded the question, he said: "They are very indigestible; hot bread is not good for the health. At least, that is what they tell us over here. We keep ...
— Aurora the Magnificent • Gertrude Hall
... time for Richard. Now first he began to know what unhappiness was. The seeming loveless weather that hung over the earth and filled the air, was in joyless harmony with his feelings. But had his trouble fallen in a more genial season, it would have been worse. He had never been with Barbara in the winter, and it did not seem so unnatural to be without her ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... ask who may be This woman, that, as in disgrace, O'er the curls of the boy at her knee Bows her beautiful, joyless face, A hundred tongues answer in scorn, A hundred lips teach him to know— "Wife of one of our tyrants, forsworn To her friends in her ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... my heart foreboded that there would be no need of wakening her. And there was not. She was lying there awake, very quiet, with her hand under her cheek, and her big blue eyes fixed on the window, through which a pale, dull light was creeping in—a joyless light it was, and enough to make a body shiver. I felt more like weeping than rejoicing, and my heart took to aching when I saw her there so white and patient, more like a girl who was waiting for a winding-sheet than for a bridal veil. ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... envy you, ye joyless stars, Though fair ye be, and glorious to the sight— The seaman's hope amidst the 'whelming storm, When help from God or man there cometh none. No! for ye love not, nor have ever loved! Through the broad fields of heaven, the eternal hours Lead ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... her. The soil was thick with dust like soot, and the trees were seared and brown. There was no peace in the place, and no loveliness. Eighty thousand folks toiled together in the hopeless Tophet, and swarmed, and struggled, and labored, and multiplied, in joyless and endless wrestling against ...
— Bebee • Ouida
... night, when he had a burning fever, and the grave had half-opened its terrible portals for his entrance. And now he was going to abandon that mother who had loved and cherished him so fondly—leave her all alone, a joyless, childless widow, and for what cause? He choked down the emotion that rose to his mind, and turned hurriedly in another direction. Not more than twenty paces from him, a stream went dancing and bubbling across the road ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... their features or clothes or bearing, which somehow or other is always found upon those who are seekers for new things. Sallow, dissatisfied-looking men; women whose faces spoke, many of them, of a joyless life; people of overtrained minds; and here and there a strong, zealous, brilliant student of the last of ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... act, but there is no obedience in their wills, nor any cheerfulness in their hearts. The elder brother in the parable could say, 'Neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment,' but his service had been joyless, and he never remembered having received gifts that made him 'merry ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... in pieces everywhere: Into the joyless house and in the yard, On narrow streets, and paths, and pathless haunts, Where persecution raves, and menace dumb Chills all away from the pure light and air. The madman's cursed hands hold everything With snares and claws ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... the angel stooped, Whispering, 'Live on! for yet one joyless soul, Void of true faith in human happiness, Waits to be won ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... should see. What a list there was of sons of Lord St. Serf! some she had never known, who died young: and Reginald in India, and Hal, who was so kind—what a good laugh he had, she remembered, not a joyless cackle like Mariamne's, a good natural laugh, and a kind light in his eyes: and he had been kind. She could remember ever so many things, nothings, things that made a little difference in the dull, dull cloudy sky of a ...
— The Marriage of Elinor • Margaret Oliphant
... desultory conversation with his strange guide; and the pity he had before conceived for Beck increased upon him as he talked and listened. This benighted mind, only illumined by a kind of miserable astuteness and that "cunning of the belly" which is born of want to engender avarice; this joyless temperament; this age in youth; this living reproach, rising up from the stones of London against our social indifference to the souls which wither and rot under the hard eyes of science and the deaf ears of wealth,—had a pathos for his lively ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... have known only in a dumb, despairing sort of way that all the foods you like are fattening, and all the advice you read and hear is that you must avoid them as a pestilence. And you settle down to your joyless fatness, realizing that it is beyond human strength to do that forever, and that you would rather die young and fat, anyway, than to have nothing to eat all your life but a little meat, fish, and ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... existence, he seemed to see in a large, clear, cold comprehensiveness, all the wasted days, the fruitless activities, the futilities, the perpetual postponements that had followed his coming to London. He saw it all as a joyless indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and undisciplined desires, as a succession of days that began amiably and weakly, that became steadily more crowded with ignoble and trivial occupations, that had sunken now to indignity and uncleanness. He was overwhelmed by ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... supports life. The manners of the young ladies were equally mild, uncomplaining, and respectable; the only difference was, that Constantia was pensive and dejected, Isabel active and cheerful in adversity. The former seemed to move in a joyless routine of duty; but Isabel was so animated that only the most minute observer could tell that she was not perfectly happy, and hence she gained the character of ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... be like Eden before the Fall; no joyless turbulent passions must enter there"—exclaims the enthusiast RICHARDSON. The home of the literary character should be the abode of repose and of silence. There must he look for the feasts of study, in progressive and alternate ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... man to man. To him, all must end in the "tongueless silence of the dreamless dust," and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air. ...
— Gov. Bob. Taylor's Tales • Robert L. Taylor
... at the portraits of his ancestors, while wholly ignoring his descendant. But Michael was too wise to put himself into places where he could be pointedly ignored, and the resplendent dinner, with its six footmen and its silver service, was not really more joyless than usual. But his father's majestic displeasure was more apparent when the three men sat alone afterwards, and it was in dead silence that port was pushed round and cigarettes handed. Francis, it is true, made a couple of efforts to enliven things, but his remarks produced no ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... the singing, Let the bridegroom sound thy virtues! Have our songs thus quickly vanished, Have our joyful tongues grown silent? Evil then has been the brewing, Then the beer must be unworthy, That it does not cheer the singer, Does not move the merry minstrel, That the golden guests are joyless, And the cuckoo is not singing. Never will these benches echo Till the bench-guests chant thy virtues; Nor the floor resound thy praises Till the floor-guests sing in concord; Nor the windows join the chorus Till the window-guests have spoken; All the tables will keep silence Till the heroes ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... giver or receiver. What is given to error may perhaps be a wrong to virtue. When you would ask others to support a career of blind and selfish extravagance, pause and think over the breadless lips this wasted gold would have fed! the joyless hearts it would have comforted! You talk of repaying me: if the occasion offer, do so; if not—if we never meet again, and you have it in your power, pay it for me to the Poor! ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... retreated from the fields. With the Egyptians, as with many peoples of antiquity, the committing of the seed to the earth assumed the character of a solemn and mournful rite. On this subject I will let Plutarch speak for himself. "What," he asks, "are we to make of the gloomy, joyless, and mournful sacrifices, if it is wrong either to omit the established rites or to confuse and disturb our conceptions of the gods by absurd suspicions? For the Greeks also perform many rites which resemble those of the Egyptians and are observed about the same time. Thus at the festival of ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... sorcery; thou hast deceived And led astray much people; but thou shalt No longer now have power upon such works, For grievous torments are decreed for thee According to thy deeds. With weary heart, Joyless, degraded, thou shalt suffer woes, The bitter pangs of death. My warriors Are ready for the battle; they will soon Deprive thee of thy life by valiant deeds. 1370 What man on earth so mighty that he may Release thee from thy ...
— Andreas: The Legend of St. Andrew • Unknown
... piles of scoria, pitch black shadows, dazzling streaks, like rivers of light breaking over jagged rocks—these are now beneath my eye—these alone I can detect—not a man—not an animal—not a tree. The great American Desert is a land of milk and honey in comparison with the joyless orb over which we are now moving. However, even yet we can predicate nothing positive. The atmosphere may have taken refuge in the depths of the chasms, in the interior of the craters, or even on the opposite side of the Moon, for all ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... bright spirit, of whose power I sing, Electric, deathless energy of mind, Harp of the soul, by genius swept, awake! Inspire my strains, and aid me to portray The base and joyless vanities which man Madly prefers to everlasting bliss!— Come! let us mount gay Fancy's rapid car, And trace through forest and o'er mountain rude The bounding footsteps of the youthful bard, Yet ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... in November, 1883, the very year when the Pall Mall Gazette exposure started "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," and the conscience of England was stirred as never before over this joyless city in the East End of its capital. Even then, vigorous and drastic plans were being discussed, and a splendid program of municipal reforms was already dimly outlined. Of all these, however, I had heard nothing but the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... along the bank of the stream, approaches him. He tells her that he has done nothing but mourn for the loss of his Pearl, and has been indeed a "joyless jeweller" (p.8). However, now that he has found his Pearl, he declares that he is no longer sorrowful, but would be a "joyful jeweller" were he allowed to cross the stream (p.8). The maiden blames her father for his rash speech, tells ...
— Early English Alliterative Poems - in the West-Midland Dialect of the Fourteenth Century • Various
... delivered with spirit, Miss Theodosia turned her back and Elly Precious' back to the intruder. What was left for him to do but retire, vanquished and diminished? The business of the bath went on, but joyless now. There was no further putting off of the horrid, bothery sleeves that Elly Precious abhorred. He set up indignant wails, and Miss ...
— Miss Theodosia's Heartstrings • Annie Hamilton Donnell
... Kriemhild; how sorrowfully he spake, when he perceived aright that she would stay: "Now let us ride joyless home unto our land, now first do ...
— The Nibelungenlied • Unknown
... world, without a word or a thought of thanks for the creature who had worshipped and waited upon him hand and foot; and then I saw her life from day to day unroll its long monotonous folds, all in the same pattern, all drab duty and joyless ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... habit, trigly perfect in fit, and on a side-saddle. In America this is an extreme opinion, and it is only among the most fashionable that a young girl having all her life ridden in a man's saddle, finds the world a joyless place and parents cruel when she is no longer allowed to ride like a boy. But she becomes, in spite of her protests, "another who looks divine on a horse." And you can look divine too, if you choose! On second thoughts the adjective must ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... "I'm glad of course to be able to give you a passage to 'Frisco; one sailor-man should help another, that's my motto. But when you want a thing in this world, you generally always have to pay for it." He laughed a brief, joyless laugh. "I have no idea of ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... Protector, Cromwell. But Cromwell, though in the height of his fame when beheld by De Grammont—though feared at home and abroad—was little calculated to win suffrages from a mere man of pleasure like De Grammont. The court, the city, the country, were in his days gloomy, discontented, joyless: a proscribed nobility was the sure cause of the thin though few festivities of the now lugubrious gallery of Whitehall. Puritanism drove the old jovial churchmen into retreat, and dispelled every lingering vestige of ancient hospitality: long graces and ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 1 • Grace Wharton and Philip Wharton
... of it. She had made a mistake. Her spoilt life—the life of a joyless wife—had culminated in this supreme maternal error. And the worst was that she alone had to bear all the responsibility of the disaster, for both her brother, the Cardinal, and her sister, Donna Serafina, overwhelmed her with reproaches. For consolation she had but the despair of Abbe Pisoni, ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... sacred to the household gods, Wisely regardful of the embroiling sky, In joyless fields and thorny thickets leaves His shivering mates, and pays to trusted ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... attempt to accomplish, is to show my readers, especially those who have been accustomed to look upon the business of teaching as a weary and heartless toil, how it happens, that it is, in any case, so pleasant. The human mind is always, essentially, the same. That which is tedious and joyless to one, will be so to another, if pursued in the same way, and under the same circumstances. And teaching, if it is pleasant, animating, and exciting to one, ...
— The Teacher - Or, Moral Influences Employed in the Instruction and - Government of the Young • Jacob Abbott
... since he had arrived in Littlefield Anstice's walk was no solitary stroll, companioned only by his own moody or rebellious thoughts, but a pleasant interlude in a life which in spite of incessant and often engrossing work, was on the whole a joyless one. ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... it. The newly married couple enjoy a warmth of affection that sweetens their cup of happiness and strews flowers all along their pathway of life. This pleasure lasts while their love lasts; but when love dies, happiness dies with it. This accounts for the joyless, pleasureless life of many married partners. First love, alas! departed; the first fire all burnt out, leaving naught but the dull ashes of cold indifference and burning tears. It sometimes goes somewhat the same way with members coming into the church. They ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... to his indiscreet lips; and out of this grew a deeper and maturer tenderness than his honeymoon love for the sweet little soul that he had at first sought only for the dark eyes through which it looked out upon its joyless world. ...
— The Story of a New York House • Henry Cuyler Bunner
... longer alone, he was no longer joyless! His little friend was there in the great cage among the twittering companions who were indifferent to the little prince. In order to know him at first sight, and always to be able to recognize him, Louis took the rose- colored ribbon from the neck of the automaton, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... passed over to their mercies, words could not be found to express their emotions. Another evening, the old clothes-line that served for a jump-rope, after having bravely rubbed against the pavement many thousand times in its endeavor to lighten the joyless life of the little pack, finally succumbed, worn through the centre and quite beyond hope of further knotting. Then Peter rose, and going to one of the little shops that supplied the district, soon returned with a real jump-rope, ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... years have encompassed with a proletarian suburb, its once noble domain narrowed to the bare acres of a stinted breathing ground, Aston Hall looks forth upon joyless streets and fuming chimneys, a wide welter of squalid strife. Its walls, which bear the dints of Roundhead cannonade, are blackened with ever-driving smoke; its crumbling gateway, opening aforetime upon a stately ...
— Eve's Ransom • George Gissing
... a hope, a blessed hope, More precious and more bright Than all the joyless mockery The ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... required a guide, left to the dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels, in 1809, with a joyless indifference to the world and all that was before me.'—Medwin's ...
— Lady Byron Vindicated • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... sorrow, so wildly blended, which have at intervals diversified my doom, are better than the calm and bloodless tenor of thy solitary way—thou, who lovest nothing, hatest nothing, feelest nothing, and walkest the world with the noiseless and joyless footsteps of a dream!" ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... exhibiting one's self at the Church and the liberty of secluding one's self over the bottle—public opinion sees this, and arrives at the not unreasonable conclusion that the people who submit to such social laws as these are the most stolid, stern and joyless people on the face of the earth. Such are Scotchmen supposed to be, when viewed at a distance. But how do Scotchmen appear when they are seen under a closer light, and judged by the test of personal experience? There are no people ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... hurry of business, and multiplicity of affairs and projects, into which many are betrayed by degrees, in order to supply increasing expenses, that might be avoided by strict frugality; for they load the soul with thick clay, are a heavy weight to the most upright, render a man's way doubtful and joyless, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... with Jews and Judaism, and to his ardent irreverence even the Christian glories of Middleton seemed unspeakably parochial. In Paris he had danced at night on the Boule Miche out of sheer joy of life, and joined in choruses over midnight bocks; and London itself now seemed drab and joyless, though many a gay circle welcomed the wit and high spirits and even the physical graces of this fortunate young man who seemed to shed a blonde radiance all around him. The factories of Middleton, which had manufactured Sir Asher Aaronsberg, ex-M.P., ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... last few moments. Only the world and love seemed to her as a void and make-believe from beginning to end. Even the memory of the protestations of love, which her husband had made to her in days past, brought to her lips a dry, hard, joyless smile, like a sharp cruel knife which had cut through her heart. She was thinking, perhaps, that the love which seemed to fill so much of one's life, which brought in its train such fondness and depth of feeling, ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore
... not, no mirth the banquet knows: Where wine is not, the dance all joyless goes. The man, oppressed with cares, who tastes the bowl, Shall shake the weight of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... food and wine and cheer the name of the favorite inn sounded in the ears of the mariners! It meant the mantle of ease and indolence, a moment in which again to feel beneath one's feet the kindly restful earth. For in those days the voyages were long and joyless, fraught with the innumerable perils of outlawed flags and preying navies; so that, with all his love of the sea, the mariner's true goal was home port and a cozy corner in the familiar inn. There, with a cup of gin or mulled wine at his elbow and ...
— The Grey Cloak • Harold MacGrath
... every thing but time. My banishment expires to-morrow; but I shall never recross the sea. This is my country. Since I set my foot upon its shore I have never had a moment to yawn. In this land of real and substantial life, the spectre that haunted my joyless days dares not be seen—the "hour ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... Paradise-earth, of strife unstrained! untortured with strife. What wyrde hath hither my jewel vayned, destiny: carried off. And done me in this del and great danger? sorrow. Fro we in twain were towen and twayned, since: pulled: divided. I have been a joyless jeweller." ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... his chair, and heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste. The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney's removal of the restrictions laid upon the weed, the familiar blended odors of soaked lemon ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... down the livelong day, in the Jotuns' courts. To the Hrimthursar's halls, thou shalt each day crawl exhausted, joyless crawl; wail for pastime shalt thou ...
— The Elder Eddas of Saemund Sigfusson; and the Younger Eddas of Snorre Sturleson • Saemund Sigfusson and Snorre Sturleson
... nor disputed, but he saw Those ill-created joyless gods, and loathed, And saw them creeping, creeping round the walls, Death breeding death, wile witnessing to wile, And sickened at the dull iniquity Should be rewarded, and for ever breathe Contagion ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... eaten grass and given milk for the last time, and their senses have lost all vigour. He who gives these undoubtedly goes to joyless realms. ...
— The Upanishads • Swami Paramananda
... favourite theologians were James Martineau, Alfred Ainger (whose Life she wrote admirably), and Samuel Barnett, whom she elevated into a mystic and a prophet. The ways of the Church of England did not please her. She had nothing but scorn for "a joyless curate prating of Easter joy with limpest lips," or for "the Athanasian Creed sung in the highest of spirits in a prosperous church" filled with "sealskin-jacketed mammas and blowsy old gentlemen." But the conclusion ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... sighed Lord Arleigh. "You cannot understand my story entirely. Wanting a full explanation, you might fairly ask me why I married with this drawback. I did not know of it, but my wife believed I did. We were both most cruelly deceived, it does not matter now. She is condemned to a loveless, joyless life; so am I. With a wife beautiful loving, young, I must lead a most solitary existence—I must see my name die out for want of heirs—I must see my race almost extinct, my life passed in repining and misery, my heart broken, my days without ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)
... some explanation of this hard, real life; the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others—she wanted ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... sweet figure of the Moabitess beside the heroes of the Book of Judges, and we feel the contrast. But is there anything in its pages more truly heroic than her deed, as she turned her back on the blue hills of Moab, and chose the joyless lot of the widowed companion of a widow aged and poor, in a land of strangers, the enemies of her country and its gods? It is easier far to rush on the spears of the foe, amid the whirl and excitement of battle, than to choose with open eyes so dreary a lifelong path. ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... and shoulders above the tall woman he was dancing with, gazed out over the sea of dancers in all the freshness of his youthful joy, and triumph. He danced well, something he had contrived to learn in the joyless country from which he hailed. But there was no reflection of his joy in the faces of the two men gazing down from the shelter of the curtained box. There were only ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum
... frantic desire of these girls to meet men of their own class is painfully true, and this desire is not so much the outcome of young women's natural tendency to cultivate young men, but because all such men to them are possible husbands, and marriage is the only way out from Stonor House and the joyless existence there. ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... I cried, "make plain This cure of my consuming pain. Open my eyes to understand, And sift the secrets of this sand, And measure by its joyless grains What yet of life ...
— A Celtic Psaltery • Alfred Perceval Graves
... for you. You are no gentleman till you have proved it. Your right level may be the level of the betting publican, or of the sneak-thief, or of things even lower than these. It is nothing to be proud of that your parents are rich enough to keep your hands clean of joyless, killing toil, at an age when many better men are old in slavery. Try to be thankful for it; not proud. Leisure is the most sacred thing life has. A wise man would give his left hand for leisure. You that have ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... at the Addresses of Fribblers, and expose their Children to the ambiguous Behaviour which Melainia complains of, till by the Fondness to one they are to lose, they become incapable of Love towards others, and by Consequence in their future Marriage lead a joyless or a miserable Life. As therefore I shall in the Speculations which regard Love be as severe as I ought on Jilts and Libertine Women, so will I be as little merciful to insignificant and mischievous Men. In order to this, all Visitants ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... analysed so deeply in his Cite antique. They subsisted in all their strength in Assyria, and must have had all the consequences, all the social effects that they had elsewhere, and yet we find mentioned a home for the dead, a joyless country in which they could assemble in their countless numbers; as Egypt had its Ament and Greece her Hades, so Chaldaea and Assyria had their hell, their place of departed ghosts. We know from the narrative of Istar that they looked upon it as an ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... ticket of admission, and what have I to do, when I am being civilised, with a world—the one that's running still and godlike over me? Do I not for days and weeks at a time go about in it, guilty, shut-in, and foolish under it, slinking about—its emptied miracles all around me, mean, joyless, anxious, unable to look the littlest flower in the face—unable——. "Ah, God!" my soul cries out within me. Are not all these things mine? Do they not belong with me and I with them? And I go racing about, making things up in their presence, plodding for ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... and the utmost use she can make of the day is to totter three or four times across the floor by the assistance of her staff. Yet, though we wonder that she is still permitted to cumber the ground, joyless and weary, "the tomb of her dead self," we look at this dry leaf, and think how green it once was, and how the birds sung to it ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... grown old internally—old, despite her two-and-twenty years; she looked upon the life before her as a joyless, desert waste, which she had to traverse with bleeding feet and broken heart; and in the desolation of her soul, she sometimes shuddered at the death-like apathy and quiet of her feelings, broken by no sound, no note, not even the wail ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... desolate the happy peoples, a vision which grew clearer in the after years. But in that easy-going Eastern life there is a power of resistance, as everybody knows who tries to change it, which may yet defeat the hosts of joyless drudgery. ...
— Oriental Encounters - Palestine and Syria, 1894-6 • Marmaduke Pickthall
... parents' feet for hours together, with his little hands patiently folded in each other, and his thin wan face raised towards them. They had seen him pine away, from day to day; and though his brief existence had been a joyless one, and he was now removed to that peace and rest which, child as he was, he had never known in this world, they were his parents, and his loss sank ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... on wealth. All that, however, vanishes like a dream. They that can abandon vast wealth achieve a very difficult feat. As regards ourselves we are unable to abandon that wealth which is even no longer existent.[319] I am divested of prosperity and have fallen into a miserable and joyless plight. Instruct me, O Brahmana, what happiness I may yet strive for.' Thus addressed by the intelligent prince of Kosala, the sage Kalakavrikshiya of great ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... dinner."... "Poor little wretch that I am, ... I feel as if I were already half-buried ... in some intermediate state between the living and the dead.... Oh, so lonely." These are among the suspiria de profundis of a life which her husband compared to "a great joyless stoicism," writing to the brother, whom he had proposed as a third on their first home-coming:—"Solitude, indeed, is sad as Golgotha, but it is not mad like Bedlam; absence of delirium is possible only for me in solitude"; a sentiment almost literally acted on. In his offering of penitential ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... became angered and hostile 35 towards the beings whom he had formerly exalted in beauty and glory: he created for the traitors a marvelous abode as penalty for their action, namely the pangs of Hell, bitter afflictions; Our Lord called forth that 40 abysmal joyless house of punishment to wait for the outcast keepers of souls.[3] When he knew that it was ready, he enveloped it in eternal night and equipped it with torment, filling it with fire and fearful cold, with fume and red flame: then ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... rejoin his father, whom he almost always found in a new residence. The poor man had alighted there for a time, like a bird on a tree; and among these continually shifting scenes, the lad had felt himself more than ever a stranger among strangers; so that he experienced always a secret though joyless satisfaction in returning to the cloisters of the St. Hilaire college and submitting himself to the yoke of the paternal but inflexible ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... the place of his black mother, whom he is much attached to? What white man would have been his brother? What white woman his sister? He had two courses left open to him,—he could either have renounced all natural ties, and have led a hopeless, joyless life among the whites, ever a servant, ever an inferior being; or he could renounce civilisation, and return to the friends of his childhood, and to the habits of his youth. He chose the latter course, and I think that I ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... married—that was all she knew—married to somebody she liked but did not love. Married to a man who had been chosen for her partly against her will. She glanced at him out of the corners of her eyes; if she was joyless, no less was he. It was an inauspicious beginning to a married life which would end who knew how? Before the depressing granite facade of the London Safe Deposit the party descended, Mr. Debenham paid the cabman, and they went down the ...
— The Secret House • Edgar Wallace
... after its river. Then Acragas on the steep, once the breeder of noble horses, displays its massive walls in the distance; and with granted breeze I leave thee behind, palm-girt Selinus, and thread the difficult shoals and blind reefs of Lilybaeum. Thereon Drepanum receives me in its haven and joyless border. Here, so many tempestuous seas outgone, alas! my father, the solace of every care and chance, Anchises is [710-718]lost to me. Here thou, dear lord, abandonest me in weariness, alas! rescued in ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... said, there is to me an indescribable pathos in these sombre pictures of Nature in our old Beowulf here, — these drear marshes, these monster-haunted meres, that boil with blood and foam with tempests, these fast-rooted, joyless woods that overlean the waters, these enormous, nameless beasts that lie along on promontories all day and wreak vengeance on ships at night — have you not seen them, headlands running out into the sea like great beasts with their forepaws extended? And ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Rather would I believe you shining ran With peaceful floods, where the soft voice prevails Of building doves in lordly trees set high, Trees which enclose a home where love abides — His love and hers, a passioned ecstasy; Your tone has caught its echo and derides My joyless lot, as face down pressed I lie Upon the shifting sand, and hear the reeds Voicing a thin, dissonant threnody Unto the cliff and wind-tormented weeds. As with the faint half-lights of jade toward The shore you come and show a violet ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... still lay on a level with the fences, nor was it until April that the ice broke up in Fore River." They were difficult—those days ushered in by the Reverend Joseph Hull. Through long nights and cold winters and an endless round of joyless living, Weymouth expiated well for the sins of her youth. Even as late as 1767 we read of the daughter of Parson Smith, of Weymouth—now the wife of John Adams, of Quincy—scrubbing the floor of her own bed-chamber the afternoon before ...
— The Old Coast Road - From Boston to Plymouth • Agnes Rothery
... captive to her charms, a most accomplished knight And monarch brave that ever yet had bowed to woman's might Was but a poor and joyless slave, compelled to wear a smile And act a part for which she loathed her ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... mentioned once. Nature allows no trifling with her laws; flowers do not bloom in deserts. He has crushed sentiment; he has stifled affection. With a heart by nature kindly, he sits now an image cut in steel. He gazes calmly at his desolate hearth, at his joyless age, and smokes. Man has no power to move him; fate condemned him ...
— Trifles for the Christmas Holidays • H. S. Armstrong
... Hellenistic and Hebraistic. The division is an arbitrary and somewhat misleading one, which has done less than justice both to the Greek and to the Hebrew genius. It has associated Greece with the idea of lawless and licentious paganism, and Israel with that of a forbidding and joyless austerity. Paganism is an interesting word, whose etymology reminds us of a time when Christianity had won the towns, while the villages still worshipped heathen gods. It is difficult to define the word without imparting into our thought of it the idea of the contrast between ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... was a child, and now she turned to him for support. And he took a melancholy pleasure in her prattle, that had no interest for anybody but himself, in her trivial memories of a life that had always been joyless and mediocre, though it seemed to Louisa to be of infinite worth. Sometimes he would try to interrupt her; he was afraid that her memories would make her sadder than ever, and he would urge her to sleep. She would understand what ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... brightness of eye which had of late annoyed him when he looked at his wife. She had borne him a child—a sweet girl baby, with those great black eyes that always have rather a weird look in the face of infancy; and she would fain have clung to the infant as the hope and consolation of her joyless life. But the vulture is not a domestic bird, and a baby would have been an impediment in the rapid hegiras which Captain Paget and his wife were wont to make. The Captain put an advertisement in a daily paper before the child was a week old; and in less than a fortnight after Mary Anne had looked ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... merry Shearer's dance;—or jest retail From festal board, from choral roofs the song; And speak of Masque, or Pageant, to beguile The caustic memory of a cruel wrong?— Thy lips acknowledge this a generous wile, And bid me still the effort kind prolong; But ah! they wear a cold and joyless smile. ...
— Original sonnets on various subjects; and odes paraphrased from Horace • Anna Seward
... strange feeling of desolation, mingled with a strong sense of the novelty of my situation, and a joyless kind of curiosity concerning what was yet unknown, that I awoke the next morning; feeling like one whirled away by enchantment, and suddenly dropped from the clouds into a remote and unknown land, widely and completely isolated from all he had ever seen or known before; ...
— Agnes Grey • Anne Bronte
... cried, "could I think of enshrining "An image whose looks are so joyless and dim;— "But yon little god, upon roses reclining, "We'll make, if you please, Sir, a Friendship of him." So the bargain was struck; with the little god laden She joyfully flew to her shrine in the grove: "Farewell," said the sculptor, "you're not the first maiden "Who came but for Friendship ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... their predecessors, will not, as we have seen, allow it to appear even at the foot of the page. To reproduce all that has been written in disparagement of this precious portion of God's written Word would be a joyless and an unprofitable task. According to Green, 'the genuineness of the passage cannot be maintained[589].' Hammond is of opinion that 'it would be more satisfactory to separate it from its present context, and place it by itself as ...
— The Causes of the Corruption of the Traditional Text of the Holy Gospels • John Burgon
... enjoys the queen thereof; For I am she, and altogether joyless. I can no longer hold ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
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