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More "Melancholic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... also educate our dispositions. Some one has said: "Disposition is a lens through which men and things are seen. A fiery temper, like a red glass, gives to all objects a lurid glare; a melancholic temper, like a blue lens, imparts its own hue; through the green spectacles of jealousy every one else becomes an object of distrust and dislike; and he who looks through the black glass of malice, finds others wearing the ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... in the gathering shadows with melancholic despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered garrison ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... at once follows his passion before his reason counsels him. Now the impulse of passion may arise either from its quickness, as in bilious persons [*Cf. I-II, Q. 46, A. 5], or from its vehemence, as in the melancholic, who on account of their earthy temperament are most vehemently aroused. Even so, on the other hand, a man fails to stand to that which is counselled, because he holds to it in weakly fashion by reason of the softness of his temperament, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... the cardinal died, and many gentlemen that served the Red Robe found themselves no longer in esteem, Gonzague passed at once into the circle of the king's most intimate friends. Gonzague, as the comrade of a ruling potentate, proved himself a master of all arts that might amuse a melancholic sovereign newly redeemed from an age-long tutelage, and eager to sate those many long-restrained pleasures that he was at last free to command. Gonzague's ambition appeared to be to play the Petronius part, to be the Arbiter of Elegancies ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... conceding at the time of the poet's death something to the British admiration of him, said he was "rich in temperament." The phrase is well chosen. An English expert on the subject of temperament, who visited Whitman some years ago, said he had all four temperaments, the sanguine, the nervous, the melancholic, and the lymphatic, while most persons have but two ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... tough, hard-fisted men of the world, but to the tender sensibility of a poet it must have been a crushing blow. There can be as little doubt that it brought on the malady that abbreviated his life, as that it gave a melancholic tone to his thought and filled his mind ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... Nay, I remember. When I wrote that sentence I was thinking of Berreo. I loved him, though I took his city. He was a valiant and liberal gentleman, and of a great heart. I mind how I combated his melancholy, for he was most melancholic. But now I have grown like him. Perhaps Sir Edward Coke was right and I have a Spanish heat. I think a man cannot strive whole-heartedly with an enemy unless he have much in common with him, and as the strife goes on he gets liker.... Ah, Jasper, ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... and foil. Six feet and three inches tall, he was long-legged, lantern-jawed and goggle-eyed. Bilious in his constitution, he was melancholic in his temperament, had been crossed in love and soured at twenty, betrayed and bankrupted at thirty, and at forty had turned his back upon the world, forswearing all its amusements but those of the table, which his poor digestion made ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... then shining so brightly, and the sky is so blue, and all is so calm and motherly and safe. She sighs for the peace of that sequestered home; then shudders to think that she shall never see it more. Accused of witchcraft, by her own ascetic melancholic father, she utters no word of denial to the charge; for her heart is dark, it is tarnished by earthly love, she dare not raise her thoughts to Heaven. Parted from her sisters; cast out with horror by the people she had lately saved from despair, she wanders forth, desolate, forlorn, not knowing ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... ease and pleasaunce where, an ye be minded to list to the folly of a rarely foolish fool, I will, with foolish jape and quip, befool thy mind to mirth and jollity, for thou art a sad fool, methinks, and something melancholic!" ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... sixteenth in England, repressed and killed all germinations of free intellectual or social intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament—not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ceremonies. Our ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... nymph of a most wandering and giddy disposition, humorous as the air, she'll run from gallant to gallant, as they sit at primero in the presence, most strangely, and seldom stays with any. She spreads as she goes. To-day you shall have her look as clear and fresh as the morning, and to-morrow as melancholic as midnight. She takes special pleasure in a close obscure lodging, and for that cause visits the city so often, where she has many secret true concealing favourites. When she comes abroad she's more loose and scattering than dust, and will fly from place to place, as she were wrapped with a ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... life with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre in broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are not bound to believe much;—probably no more than ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... Montaigne's daily life, with outward monotony and internal variety, was a pleasant miscellany on which to comment. He was of a middle temperament, "between the jovial and the melancholic"; a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose; choosing bright companions rather than sad; able to be silent, as the mood took him, or to gossip; loyal and frank; a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood; a despiser of empty ceremony; disposed to interpret all things to the ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... you object to the horrible, I will gently slide into the pathetic and melancholic. There is our friend Atticus,—I call him so in public, because it would not do to name Brown right out, when telling his private griefs. Atticus, when he read a book lately, having "A man married is a man marred" ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... poems of his which have been preserved, for his early lampoons on his neighbors have happily been lost, are equal in poetic spirit and metrical art to Whittier's "The Prisoner for Debt," to which they are strikingly similar in melancholic mood. ...
— The Poets' Lincoln - Tributes in Verse to the Martyred President • Various
... a great reputation in melancholic affections. Manardus says it removes sadness and makes him ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... or my honor that the maniac had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not hesitated to end his life—a life which was, no doubt, already threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and the last agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish joy by the thought that he dragged down my life with his. For, so far as I could see at the moment, my ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... down to watch, upon a Bank, With Ivy canopied, and interwove With flaunting Honeysuckle, and beganne, Wrapt in a pleasing Fit of Melancholic, To meditate. ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... disheartened; desponding; chapfallen[obs3], chopfallen[obs3], jaw fallen, crest fallen. sad, pensive, penseroso[It], tristful[obs3]; dolesome[obs3], doleful; woebegone; lacrymose, lachrymose, in tears, melancholic, hypped[obs3], hypochondriacal, bilious, jaundiced, atrabilious[obs3], saturnine, splenetic; lackadaisical. serious, sedate, staid, stayed; grave as a judge, grave as an undertaker, grave as a mustard ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... which time it is good to bleed the choleric; in its third quadrant it is cold and moist, and phlegmatic people may be bled; and in its fourth it is cold and dry, at which time it is well to bleed the melancholic." Whatever the moon's phase may be, let blood be shed! We are reminded here of that sanguifluous theology, which even Christians of a certain temperament seem to enjoy, while they sing of fountains filled with blood: as though a God of love could ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... and when he came to him cried, "Fetch me my Wazir, Ja'afar the Barmaki, without stay or delay." Accordingly, he went out and returned with the Minister who, finding him alone, which was indeed rare, and seeing as he drew near that he was in a melancholic humour, never even raising his eyes, stopped till his lord would vouchsafe to look upon him. At last the Prince of True Believers cast his glance upon Ja'afar, but forthright turned away his head and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... broiled the day before, underwent the operation of frying on the following. Cold meat appeared as hot pie, with many other curious and ingenious devices. Then the wine was so adulterated, compelled, like a melancholic patient, to look old before its time, and fitted, like a pauper, with a ready-made coat perceptibly impregnated with bad brandy, and tasted of every thing but the grape, that, in about six months, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... little lame, but unaffected, warm and obliging. Mrs. Harville, a degree less polished than her husband, seemed to have the same good feelings and cordiality; while Captain Benwick, who was the youngest of the three naval officers and a comparatively little man, had a pleasing face and a melancholic air, just as he ought to have. He had been engaged to Captain Harville's sister, and was now mourning her loss. They had been a year or two waiting for fortune and promotion. Fortune came, his prize-money ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol. I • Various
... mental diseases into two, the maniacal and melancholic. Mania was, however, really a further development of melancholia, and represented a high grade of insanity. Under melancholy he groups not only what we denominate by that term, but also all depressed conditions, and the paranoias, ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... either Monsieur or Madame Perny, I beg you will give them this melancholic proof of my caducity, and tell them that the last time I went to see the boys, I carried the Michaelmas quarterage in my pocket; and when I was there I totally forgot it; but assure them, that I have not the least ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... 1829.—I shall always be glad to have you come to me when saddened. The melancholic does not misbecome you. The lights of your character are wintry. They are generally inspiriting, life-giving, but, if perpetual, would glare too much on the tired sense; one likes sometimes a cloudy day, with its damp and warmer breath,—its gentle, down-looking ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... made her acquaintance, that she was lively even to giddiness, heedless, bold, even coquettish, and appeared to be incapable of a reasonable attachment? However, to-day, you tell me, she has become a serious melancholic; pre-occupied, timid, affected; sentiment has taken the place of mincing airs; at least she appears to so fit in with the character she assumes to-day, that you imagine it to be her true one, and her former one, ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... 'You were always a melancholic soul,' Trombin observed. 'As for me, I cannot but laugh when I think that we shall have to rescue our man from the danger of being hanged as a counterfeiter, in order that we may ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... "Celts of tall stature, with blue eyes, white skins, and blond hair: they are communicative, impetuous, versatile; they pass rapidly from courage to despair. The Bretons are entirely different: they are taciturn, hold strongly to their ideas and usages, are persevering and melancholic; in a word, both in morale and physique they present the type of a southern ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... so detached from everything?... It is not true. Tell me that it pleased you.... It must please you, if only because it pleases me. I don't like you to have a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter is melancholic. That must not be.... It is good that you are more just to others. But that is no reason why you should abase yourself, as you do, by saying that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would applaud you. I tell you ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... naturally runs into the notes peculiar to any of these moods, are likewise in nature hereunto congenerous? C Fa ut may show me to be of an ordinary capacity, though good disposition. G Sol re ut, to be peevish and effeminate. Flats, a manly or melancholic sadness. He who hath a voice which will in some measure agree with all cliffs, to be of good parts, and fit for variety of employments, yet somewhat of an inconstant nature. Likewise from the TIMES: so semi-briefs ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... etiology of mental disease and that no one would count the cerebral symptoms of Bright's disease as mental is no longer held. Ballet enumerates a number of works upon so-called folie brightique which tend to prove that acute or chronic Bright's disease gives rise either to melancholic disorder or alternately to maniacal and melancholic disorder. How the mental disease is produced is doubtful. Ballet holds that all the various psychopathic disorders resulting from Bright's disease are autotoxic. Renal disease like heart disease is only capable ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... naturally feels for a discovery of his own. This kindly feeling (in some cases, at least) extended to the author, who, on the internal evidence of his sketches, came to be regarded as a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic, exceedingly sensitive, and not very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name, the quaintness of which was supposed, somehow or other, to symbolize his personal and literary traits. He is by no ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... the ascendant. But each and every of them concealed his thought and hid all he had seen nor would any return a reply or aught of address would supply; and said they, 'O King of the Age, verily appearances in dreams hit the mark at times and at times fly wide; for when a man is of a melancholic humour he seeth in his sleep things which be terrible and horrible and he waxeth startled thereat: haply this vision thou hast beheld may be of the imbroglios of dreams so do thou commit the reins to Him who all overreigns and the best Worker ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... that beaucheouz weatheh juz at the pwesent? Me, I'm well. Yes, I'm always well, in fact. At the same time nevvatheless, I fine myseff slightly sad. I s'pose 'tis natu'al—a man what love the 'itings of Lawd By'on as much as me. You know, of co'se, the melancholic intelligens?" ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... without speaking or making other advances. He was a hard-working, honest, sober man of quiet habits, a good father to his family and happy at home. He showed not the slightest sign of insanity. But he was taciturn, melancholic and nervous; a sister was an idiot. He was arrested, but on the report of the experts that he committed these acts from a morbid impulse he could not control he was released. (Trochon, Archives de ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... apparent phlegm, from which it would seem impossible to arouse them. This phlegmatic temperament lessens the credit of the men with the females, who uniformly prefer the European, or the still more vivacious negro. "The indigenous Mexican is grave, melancholic, silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors. This gravity is peculiarly remarkable in Indian children, who at the age of four or five years display more intelligence and precocity than the children of whites. The Mexican loves ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... Sir George Goring was caustic and severe; Sir John Finett pleasant and social, delighting in nothing so much as in the happiness and gratification of his friends. But the natural disposition of his thoughts was wild and melancholic, taking its hue from some early impression, that was now fading in ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... the fact that the Professor was evidently again suffering severely. "There is a melancholy," said Goedike, "and it is the most usual, in which the inward depression easily changes to displeasure against every one, and the household of the melancholic suffers thereby intolerably; for the displeasure turns against them,—no one does anything properly, nothing is in its place. How very different is Gellert's melancholy! Not a soul suffers from it but himself, against himself ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... decapitation—and his consequent enthusiasm was so rabid that I was afraid the morbidity of such matters was beginning to pervert his senses. For several years I had become progressively aware of Carse's melancholic attitude, and I had often recommended that he take a vacation from criminal cases. His indefatigable enthusiasm for research was all against my advice, and he had gone relentlessly ahead to the tragic climax which my greatest fears could not have ...
— The Homicidal Diary • Earl Peirce
... no cause. They also weep disproportionately on the occurrence of any real cause of grief. The length of time during which some patients weep is astonishing, as well as the amount of tears which they shed. One melancholic girl wept for a whole day, and afterwards confessed to Dr. Browne, that it was because she remembered that she had once shaved off her eyebrows to promote their growth. Many patients in the asylum sit for a long time rocking themselves backwards and forwards; "and if spoken to, they stop their movements, ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... procured in response to your request, and the governor's instructions to me for a full inquiry into all the circumstances is that since her confinement Miss Vinsolving has been under constant observation. She has been orderly and obedient and except for slightly melancholic tendencies, which might easily be provoked by the nature of her environment, is quite natural in her behavior. I draw the inference, however, that this docility may be merely the forerunner of ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... of S. Peter and S. Paul, wrought with consummate grace and executed with fine mastery. He disposed the works that he made in such a manner that he deserves as much praise for them after death as he did when alive. He was a melancholic and solitary person, ever lost in contemplation; which was perchance the reason that he did not live longer, for he passed to the other life at the age of fifty-eight. His works date ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... she says, 'It is most heartless of Grizel; she does not even ask how you are to-day; one would think she did not know of the accident'; and she says, 'I have a good mind to write her a very stiff letter.' And says he in a noble, melancholic voice, 'We must not hurt Grizel's feelings,' he says. And she says, 'Grizel thinks it was nothing because you bore it so cheerfully; oh, how little she knows you!' she says; and 'You are too forgiving,' she says. And says he, 'If I have anything to forgive Grizel for, I ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... vertiginous papa to bed, and Registrator Heerbrand, in the deepest exhaustion, sank on the sofa, which Veronica had left, taking refuge in her bedroom. Registrator Heerbrand had his blue handkerchief tied about his head; he looked quite pale and melancholic, and moaned out: "Ah, worthy Conrector, not the punch which Mam'sell Veronica most admirably brewed, no! but simply that cursed student is to blame for all the mischief. Do you not observe that he has long been mente caphis? And are you not aware that madness is infectious? ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... his counterpart and foil. Six feet and three inches tall, he was long-legged, lantern-jawed and goggle-eyed. Bilious in his constitution, he was melancholic in his temperament, had been crossed in love and soured at twenty, betrayed and bankrupted at thirty, and at forty had turned his back upon the world, forswearing all its amusements but those of the table, which his poor digestion made more painful than pleasurable, all of its ambitions but those ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... on the head more 'n two thousand year ago, but he felt kind of uncertain, and didn't exactly know what he was driving at. The old heathen made out just four humors, as he called 'em,—the sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. If he'd only made one step more on to the other side of the fence, he'd have cracked the nut, and picked the kernel, certain. Those four different humors are only four different ways of modifying bile ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... front, the open book in his hand; his high forehead and his whole countenance bear the impress of earnest and deep thought. This is the melancholic temperament, which does not shrink from the most profound inquiry. Behind him S. Peter bends over the book, and gazes earnestly at its contents—a hoary head, full of meditative repose. This figure represents the phlegmatic temperament, which reviews its own thoughts in ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... Peter used to retire and stroll about the gardens with his humble favorite, a Polish girl, forgetting the cares of state. This lowly companion, besides great personal beauty, possessed much force of character, and exercised great influence over her melancholic and morose master. Long before her final elevation to the throne, many instances are related of her interference in behalf of mercy, which showed a kind and loving nature. Peterhoff is the favorite summer resort ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... man of the Roman type, of medium height, thick set and naturally melancholic, with thin, straight lips that were clean shaven, straight black hair, a small but aggressively aquiline nose and heavy hands, hairy on the backs of the fingers, between the knuckles. His wife, Sora Nanna, said that he had a fist like a paving-stone. He also looked as though he might have ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... temperament he was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time—as Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show—that Shakespeare ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... rest, much here is out of joint, and far from satisfactory to him. Seven years ago [1st February, 1705.] he lost his own brave Mother and her love; of which we must speak farther by and by. In her stead he has got a fantastic, melancholic, ill-natured Stepmother, with whom there was never any good to be done; who in fact is now fairly mad, and kept to her own apartments. He has to see here, and say little, a chagrined heart-worn Father flickering painfully ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. I. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Birth And Parentage.—1712. • Thomas Carlyle
... is possible to judge the character of the famous Carafa Pope, he was ardent under a melancholic exterior, rigid but ambitious, utterly blind to everything except the matter he had in hand, proud to folly, and severe to cruelty. A chronicler says of him, that his head 'might be compared to the Vesuvius of his native city, since he was ardent in all his actions, wrathful, hard and inflexible, ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... supported his cheekbones, his whole figure was in a slump of misery. Scrutinizing him with surprise, Mayme was shocked to see a glistening drop, detached from his drooping countenance, fall to the pavement, followed by another. At the same time she heard an unmistakable and melancholic sound. ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... consumptive populace-dogs, and all the ill-constituted, sullen brood:—praised be this spirit of all free spirits, the laughing storm, which bloweth dust into the eyes of all the melanopic and melancholic! ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... yeasty workings of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... diseases into two, the maniacal and melancholic. Mania was, however, really a further development of melancholia, and represented a high grade of insanity. Under melancholy he groups not only what we denominate by that term, but also all depressed conditions, and the ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... clear greensward; where the sun is even then shining so brightly, and the sky is so blue, and all is so calm and motherly and safe. She sighs for the peace of that sequestered home; then shudders to think that she shall never see it more. Accused of witchcraft, by her own ascetic melancholic father, she utters no word of denial to the charge; for her heart is dark, it is tarnished by earthly love, she dare not raise her thoughts to Heaven. Parted from her sisters; cast out with horror by the people she had lately saved from despair, she wanders forth, desolate, forlorn, ...
— The Life of Friedrich Schiller - Comprehending an Examination of His Works • Thomas Carlyle
... seen in Figure 100, representing an individual who was exhibited several years ago in Philadelphia. We have in English the expression, "pulling a long lip." Its origin is said to date back to a semimythical hero of King Arthur's time, who, "when sad at heart and melancholic," would let one of his lips drop below his waist, while he turned the other up like a cap on ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the constant growth produces a state much like that of vinous intoxication, and youth is pleasant. Again, men of the melancholic temperament constantly need some remedial process (because the body, from its temperament, is constantly being worried), and they are in a chronic state of violent desire. But Pleasure drives out Pain; not only such Pleasure as is directly contrary to Pain ...
— Ethics • Aristotle
... will grant me sight of them in union fain and free— Roll up the scroll of severance which others would unroll— * Efface my trouble by the grace of meeting's jubilee! And shall I see them homed with me in cup-company, * And change my melancholic ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... work, Mr. Leland has aimed at the defence of that view of life which combines a cheerful earnestness of purpose with manly energy of action, as opposed to the melancholic, whining, lachrymose spirit, which has been affected by certain popular modern poets, and, through their vicious example, has been cherished as one of the essential qualities of genius. Of this style of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... remembered how he had laughed at my gambols with Molly O'Flaherty in the hayfield, and how they amused him, and how he thought my Romping ways might divert My Lady Duchess his Consort, who was a pining, puling, melancholic Temperament, and much afflicted with the Vapours, for want of something to do. So he was pleased to smile upon me again, and to give my mother five pounds, and to promise that I should be well bestowed in his household as a waiting-woman, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... if he should not stay for saving grace, old Foresight, but fall to without the help of a parson, ha? Odd, if he should I could not be angry with him; 'twould be but like me, a chip of the old block. Ha! thou'rt melancholic, old Prognostication; as melancholic as if thou hadst spilt the salt, or pared thy nails on a Sunday. Come, cheer up, look about thee: look up, old stargazer. Now is he poring upon the ground for a crooked pin, or an old horse-nail, with the ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... Oui, monsieur! Yes, sir, very many. I vish dere vas von or two here in de kitchen—ma foi! Dey be all as melancholic as ...
— Nightmare Abbey • Thomas Love Peacock
... That some such melancholic refinements were restless in the brains of many I have no doubt. Probably only Mrs. Widesworth and the undergraduates were wholly undisturbed by them. Yet, in spite of this secret uneasiness, there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... quite a new way." We may also recall the consultation between M. de Pourceaugnac's two doctors: "The arguments you have used are so erudite and elegant that it is impossible for the patient not to be hypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surely become so because of the elegance of the things you have said and the accuracy of your reasoning." We might multiply examples, for all we need do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other. However far, moreover, ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... duties of that officer at the period, to be very strict in executing severity upon such Royalists as fell under his military charge. It appears that the Major, with a maiden sister who had kept his house, was subject to fits of melancholic lunacy, an infirmity easily reconcilable with the formal pretences which he made to a high show of religious zeal. He was peculiar in his gift of prayer, and, as was the custom of the period, was often called to exercise his talent by the bedside ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... most comical look of anxious coyness on her jolly face, and holds her elbows squarer than ever; and a few paces off stands Montezuma, magnificent and melancholic; and Edgar assumed ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... his favoring me so far as to read a few specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious, whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails settled constitutions of government or systems of society, whatever could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its place supplied by unexceptionable ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... gifts which the future held in store for him—many and various—influence, power, mystery, unhappiness, a broken heart. At Claremont his position was a very humble one; but the Princess took a fancy to him, called him "Stocky," and romped with him along the corridors. Dyspeptic by constitution, melancholic by temperament, he could yet be lively on occasion, and was known as a wit in Coburg. He was virtuous, too, and served the royal menage with approbation. "My master," he wrote in his diary, "is the best of all husbands in all the five quarters of ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre in broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are not bound to believe much;—probably no more than of the other black Spectre, ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... his piteous self-reproaches and entreaties to Heaven to remove that woe, which, as he shrieked again and again, was a just judgment on him for his wilfulness and ferocity. The surgeon talked, of course, learnedly about melancholic humors, and his liver's being "adust by the over-pungency of the animal spirits," and then fell back on the universal panacea of blood-letting, which he effected with fear and trembling during a short interval of prostration; encouraged ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... have forgot. Nay, I remember. When I wrote that sentence I was thinking of Berreo. I loved him, though I took his city. He was a valiant and liberal gentleman, and of a great heart. I mind how I combated his melancholy, for he was most melancholic. But now I have grown like him. Perhaps Sir Edward Coke was right and I have a Spanish heat. I think a man cannot strive whole-heartedly with an enemy unless he have much in common with him, and ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... mighty near hitting the nail square on the head more 'n two thousand year ago, but he felt kind of uncertain, and didn't exactly know what he was driving at. The old heathen made out just four humors, as he called 'em,—the sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. If he'd only made one step more on to the other side of the fence, he'd have cracked the nut, and picked the kernel, certain. Those four different humors are only four different ways ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... full of movement as the sixteenth in England, repressed and killed all germinations of free intellectual or social intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament—not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost lay in the Spanish stateliness and the inflexibility of our social ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... it is possible to judge the character of the famous Carafa Pope, he was ardent under a melancholic exterior, rigid but ambitious, utterly blind to everything except the matter he had in hand, proud to folly, and severe to cruelty. A chronicler says of him, that his head 'might be compared to the Vesuvius of ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... but was in a melancholic, dismal and dire mood; and on the 13th December Lamburn, the engineer, stabbed Cartwright, the old harpooner, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... the puzzle of artistic minds: the "Melancholia," "The Knight and the Devil," and "St. Jerome in his Cell." The most reasonable explanation of these weird fancies is that they were intended to represent in allegorical style the three temperaments—the melancholic, the sanguine, and the phlegmatic. The Diet of Augsburg, which was convened in 1518, gave Duerer a passing opportunity to depict the lineaments of the Emperor Maximilian, who gave him several sittings, and who manifested great interest in the painter. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... that by white all the world hath understood joy, gladness, mirth, pleasure, and delight. In former times the Thracians and Cretans did mark their good, propitious, and fortunate days with white stones, and their sad, dismal, and unfortunate ones with black. Is not the night mournful, sad, and melancholic? It is black and dark by the privation of light. Doth not the light comfort all the world? And it is more white than anything else. Which to prove, I could direct you to the book of Laurentius Valla against Bartolus; but an evangelical testimony I hope will ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... nation's dishes, And fatten on a few good wishes! Or, on some venial treason bent, Frame thyself a government, For thy crest a brirnless hat, Poverty's aristocrat! Nonne habeam te tristem, Planet of the human system? Comet lank and melancholic —Orbit shocking parabolic— Seen for a little in the sky Of the world of sympathy— Seldom failing when predicted, Coming most when most restricted, Dragging a nebulous tail with thee Of hypothetic vagrancy— Of vagrants large, and vagrants small, Vagrants ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... there any other of the name," said her father, "except that melancholic uncle of his who never ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to see either Monsieur or Madame Perny, I beg you will give them this melancholic proof of my caducity, and tell them that the last time I went to see the boys, I carried the Michaelmas quarterage in my pocket; and when I was there I totally forgot it; but assure them, that I have not the least ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... of Scots, hearing of this disaster, was astonished; and being naturally of a melancholic disposition, as well as endowed with a high spirit, he lost all command of his temper on this dismal occasion. Rage against his nobility, who, he believed, had betrayed him; shame for a defeat by such unequal numbers; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... more for his taciturnity. Yet not repletion made him sigh, for he sighed consumedly before he began and rather less when he had finished, as though the kindlier juices of our nature had got to work to disperse the melancholic. Angioletto rallied him upon his gloom, but to no purpose. The meal was a silent one; almost the only conversation was that of the minstrel's foot with Bellaroba's under ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... to watch, upon a Bank, With Ivy canopied, and interwove With flaunting Honeysuckle, and beganne, Wrapt in a pleasing Fit of Melancholic, To meditate. ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... danger. It was not only my liberty or my honour that the maniac had undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty, he had not hesitated to end his life; a life which was, no doubt, already threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and the last agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish joy by the thought that he dragged down my life with his. For as far as I could see at the moment my situation was utterly hopeless. If it had been desperate on the assumption ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time—as Burton, and earlier prose-writers, ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... have of late suffered much uneasinesse of speritt concerning my husband. Those fits of ye mopes of w'h I informed you some time back have again come upon him. For awhile I did hope that these melancholic affections were ye fruit put forth by a regenerate soul; but within this month last past it has been my sorrow to discover that these gloomy disorders arise rather from ye promptings of the Evil One. It has pleased Mr. Haygarthe of late to declare that his life is nigh at an end; ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... disappointments of schoolboy life, and the somewhat less childish ones of an uneventful and undistinguished academic career, should not have sufficed to turn me out at one-and-twenty years of age a melancholic, listless idler. Some weakness of my own character may have contributed to the result, but in a greater degree it was due to my having a reputation for bad luck. However, I will not try to analyze the causes of my state, for I should satisfy nobody, ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... one of his sons, called Seti, after his great-grandfather.* Seti II. had doubtless reached middle age at the time of his accession, but his portraits represent him, nevertheless, with the face and figure of a young man.** The expression in these is gentle, refined, haughty, and somewhat melancholic. MU It is the type of Seti I. and Ramses II., but enfeebled and, as it were, saddened. An inscription of his second year attributes to him victories in Asia,*** but others of the same period indicate the existence of disturbances similar to those which had troubled the last ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... headlong on the ground, biting the earth with savage lips, tearing their flesh with knives, one or two falling stone-dead before our very eyes, these poor people in their delirium cried like animals, and filled the whole woods with their melancholic wailing. For ten minutes, it may be, the fit endured; then one by one they sank to the earth in the most fearful contortions of limb and face and body, and, a great silence coming upon the house, we saw them there in that cold, clear light, outposts of the death which ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... Uncle, rheumatic t n | Aunt, rheumatic i d Father, excitable & irritable Mother, died in asylum o n T / Daughter, has had rheumatism and has had heart disease s h | Son, now insane i | Son, died a few days old of convulsions r | Son, now a chronic maniac in an asylum d | Daughter, suicidal, melancholic; died in an asylum. No issue. ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... Eunuch, and when he came to him cried, "Fetch me my Wazir, Ja'afar the Barmaki, without stay or delay." Accordingly, he went out and returned with the Minister who, finding him alone, which was indeed rare, and seeing as he drew near that he was in a melancholic humour, never even raising his eyes, stopped till his lord would vouchsafe to look upon him. At last the Prince of True Believers cast his glance upon Ja'afar, but forthright turned away his head and sat motionless as before. The Wazir descrying naught in the Caliph's aspect ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... magnificence of a former epoch; everywhere, moreover, a Cross,—and nastiness at the foot of it. As the sum of all, there are recollections that kindle the soul, and a gloom and languor that depress it beyond any depth of melancholic sentiment that ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Frederick I, inspired by the sagas of Siegfried and of Charlemagne, or the second Frederick, the "Wonder of the World" to the thirteenth century, and ever alluring, yet ever eluding, the curiosity of the nineteenth; or a Henry VII, ineffectual and melancholic. Such "justice" passes easily by its own excess into the injustice which dispatches Alva's army or finds bizarre expression in the phrase of "le Roi soleil,"—"The State? I am the State." The ideal of modern life, the ideal of which Britain is the ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... are, a reddish colour of the face, verging to duskiness; the expiration begins to be changed, the voice grows hoarse, the hairs become thinned and weaker, and the perspiration and breath incline to foetidity; the mind is melancholic with frightful dreams and nightmare; in some cases scabs, pustules, and eruptions break out over the whole body; disposition of the body begins to become loathsome, but still, while the form and figure are not corrupted, the patient is not to be adjudged for separation; ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... syne she says, 'It is most heartless of Grizel; she does not even ask how you are to-day; one would think she did not know of the accident'; and she says, 'I have a good mind to write her a very stiff letter.' And says he in a noble, melancholic voice, 'We must not hurt Grizel's feelings,' he says. And she says, 'Grizel thinks it was nothing because you bore it so cheerfully; oh, how little she knows you!' she says; and 'You are too forgiving,' she says. And says he, 'If I have anything ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... was evidently again suffering severely. "There is a melancholy," said Goedike, "and it is the most usual, in which the inward depression easily changes to displeasure against every one, and the household of the melancholic suffers thereby intolerably; for the displeasure turns against them,—no one does anything properly, nothing is in its place. How very different is Gellert's melancholy! Not a soul suffers from it but himself, against himself alone his gloomy thoughts turn, and towards ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... of tall stature, with blue eyes, white skins, and blond hair: they are communicative, impetuous, versatile; they pass rapidly from courage to despair. The Bretons are entirely different: they are taciturn, hold strongly to their ideas and usages, are persevering and melancholic; in a word, both in morale and physique they present the type of ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... comes to the adventure at St. Maur. The percipient, M. de S., was a man of twenty-five: his mother seems to have been a visionary, and his constitution is described as 'melancholic'. He was living alone, however, and his mother has no part in the business. The trouble began with loud knocks at his door, and the servant, when she went to open it, found nobody there. The curtains of his bed were drawn, when he was alone in the room, and here, of course, ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... is a sign of the Saudawi or melancholic temperament in which black bile pre-dominates. It is supposed to cause a distaste for society and a longing for solitude, an unsettled habit of mind and neglect of worldly affairs. I remarked that in Arabia students are subject to it, and that ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... predisposed through heredity to unfortunate moods, we can ourselves decide whether we shall give way to them. Temperaments have been classified as sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. The sanguine type is inclined to look on the bright side of things, to be optimistic; the melancholic tends to moodiness and gloom; the choleric is easily irritated, quick to anger; the phlegmatic is not easily aroused to emotion, is cold and sluggish. An individual seldom belongs exclusively to ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... the comic song—quick-timed and full of life—much too full and too comic to appeal to a European, and so fully illustrated that personally, I infinitely preferred the more melancholic ones which ...
— Across Coveted Lands - or a Journey from Flushing (Holland) to Calcutta Overland • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... shall always be glad to have you come to me when saddened. The melancholic does not misbecome you. The lights of your character are wintry. They are generally inspiriting, life-giving, but, if perpetual, would glare too much on the tired sense; one likes sometimes a cloudy day, with its damp ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... patronized, did what was expected; and he was not popular; he was unpopular. Why? But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from its rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud, more agreeable to earth's populations than his pinched appearance of the poor mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day! Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet. Yet his popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge. He did this:—and the mystery puzzling the suspicious was nothing wonderful: in addition to a transparent benevolence, he spread ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that melancholic, dumb, and deaf stupefaction, which benumbs all our faculties, when oppressed with accidents greater than we are able to bear. And, indeed, the violence and impression of an excessive grief must of necessity astonish the soul, and wholly deprive her of her ordinary functions: as ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... The intension or increase of a thing makes it more or greater, but does not make the subject of another kind. Thus the elephantiasis, being an intense scabbiness, is not a new kind; nor is the water-dread distinguished from other melancholic and stomachical affections but only by the degree. And I wonder we did not observe that Homer was acquainted with this disease, for it is evident that he calls a dog rabid from the very same rage with which when men are possessed they are said to ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... still again, at the seemingly melancholic and contemplative face, that strangely reminded her of Duerer's portrait of himself. As she did so there was carried to her memory, and imprinted on it, the picture of a wistful and lonely man, his countenance touched, for all its open Irish smile, with some wordless ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... your success. You only mentioned it by the way. Are you so detached from everything?... It is not true. Tell me that it pleased you.... It must please you, if only because it pleases me. I don't like you to have a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter is melancholic. That must not be.... It is good that you are more just to others. But that is no reason why you should abase yourself, as you do, by saying that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would applaud you. I tell you it is a bad thing. ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... Scots entered Newcastle, and the Earl of Strafford, weak after a sickness, was defeated and retreated to Durham. The king, with his army weakened and the treasury depleted, was in great straits. He was again constrained to call a parliament, which met on November 3, 1640. It had a sad and melancholic aspect. The king himself did not ride with his accustomed equipage to Westminster, but went privately in his barge to the parliament stairs. The king being informed that Sir Thomas Gardiner, not having been returned a member, could not ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... charm of this essay is to be found in the lightness of the touch. It is never heavy, never severe, rarely melancholic. If read without reference to other works, it would leave on the reader's mind the impression that though now and again there had come upon him the memory of a friend who had gone, and some remembrance of changes in the State to which, as an old man, he could not give ...
— The Life of Cicero - Volume II. • Anthony Trollope
... loafers I had bought drinks for. That was what remained of life. Did I want to become like them? A thousand times no; and I wept tears of sweet sadness over my glorious youth going out with the tide. (And who has not seen the weeping drunk, the melancholic drunk? They are to be found in all the bar-rooms, if they can find no other listener telling their sorrows to the barkeeper, who is ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... life-size figures in marble of S. Peter and S. Paul, wrought with consummate grace and executed with fine mastery. He disposed the works that he made in such a manner that he deserves as much praise for them after death as he did when alive. He was a melancholic and solitary person, ever lost in contemplation; which was perchance the reason that he did not live longer, for he passed to the other life at the age of fifty-eight. His works date about the ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... killed on the retreat at the Isle of Ree, upon which he conceived that the company of right ought to have been conferred upon him; and it being refused him by the duke of Buckingham, general of the army, had given up his commission and withdrawn himself from the army. He was of a melancholic nature, and had little conversation with any body, yet of a gentleman's family in Suffolk, of a good fortune, and reputation. From the time that he had quitted the army he resided at London; when the House of Commons, transported with ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... was waging in her heart, but which she had nevertheless resolved should never be made apparent, and no longer having the comfort of seeing and speaking to him for whose sake alone she cared to live, she fell at last into a continuous fever, caused by a melancholic humour which so wrought upon her that the extremities of her body became quite cold, while her inward parts burned without ceasing. The doctors, who have not the health of men in their power, began to grow very doubtful concerning her recovery, by reason of an obstruction that affected ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. III. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... pictures in which one really feels the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking against the impassibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of Water-lilies expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, pheasants, roofs at twilight, dazzling sunflowers, gardens, ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... said that Tommaso was melancholic in temperament and very solitary, but with respect to art devoted and very studious, as it is clearly seen from a panel in the Church of S. Romeo in Florence, wrought by him in distemper with so great diligence and love ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Volume 1, Cimabue to Agnolo Gaddi • Giorgio Vasari
... melancholic friend, Propertius, Hath closed himself up in his Cynthia's tomb; And will by no entreaties be drawn thence. [Enter Albius, introducing CRISPINUS and DEMETRIUS, followed by Tucca. Alb. Nay, good Master Crispinus, pray you bring near the gentleman. [Going Hor. Crispinus! ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... burn brightly, then the man is cheerful and healthy in mind and body; if, on the other hand, he from whom the blood is taken be melancholic or a spendthrift, then it will burn dimly, ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... and drawing back; her whole nature, her secretest heart, her deepest womanhood, perhaps, did not consent. There was something in Septimius, in his wild, mixed nature, the monstrousness that had grown out of his hybrid race, the black infusions, too, which melancholic men had left there, the devilishness that had been symbolized in the popular regard about his family, that made her shiver, even while she came the closer to him for that very dread. And when he gave her the kiss of betrothment her lips grew white. ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Conviction.] The analysis in its fundamentals is perhaps still as doubtful as it was in the fifth century B. C. when Hippocrates formulated the doctrine of the humors, distinguished the sanguine, the melancholic, the choleric, and the phlegmatic dispositions, and ascribed them to the blood, the black bile, the yellow bile, and the phlegm. The latest theories, such as one finds them in Cannon, [Footnote: Bodily Changes in Pleasure, Pain and Anger.] Adler, [Footnote: The Neurotic Constitution.] Kempf, ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... let me hold myself up as the horrid example of what comes of that sort of thing for men who have to work as you are doing and I have done. To be sure you are a "lungy" man and I am a "livery" man, so that your chances of escaping candle-snuff accumulations with melancholic prostration are much better. Nevertheless take care. The pitcher is a very valuable piece of crockery, and I don't want to live to see it cracked by going to the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... right to preside in our sky, is all wrong. It is absolutely wicked, because it casts a baneful influence upon all with whom we associate, and prepares us to go through life like a frowning cloud or a drooping willow, shading the circle of our influence with melancholic gloom. No, better sing with the birds and laugh with the babbling brooklets than be gloomy in Girlhood. Trials and troubles of course will come. We must sometimes weep, and when we do, it should be done with chastened spirits for real sorrow, that we may be the calmer and happier when we recover ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... injurious; and the appearance of a herpetic eruption near the mouth is regarded as an evidence that no internal organ is in danger. There is a good deal in not "giving in" to this disease. He who is low-spirited, and apt to despond at every attack, will die sooner than the man who is not of such a melancholic nature. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... something to the British admiration of him, said he was "rich in temperament." The phrase is well chosen. An English expert on the subject of temperament, who visited Whitman some years ago, said he had all four temperaments, the sanguine, the nervous, the melancholic, and the lymphatic, while most persons have but two ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... St. Paul is the only portion quite finished. The assertion of the writing-master, Johann Neudoerffer, who in his youth had known Duerer, that the four figures are typical of the four temperaments, the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic, and the melancholic,—into which categories an amateurish psychology arbitrarily divided human characters,—is as likely to be correct as it is certain that it adds nothing to the power and beauty of the presentation. Though Duerer in his ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... woke the next morning. There is no exception to the rule that if a man drink heavily at night the next morning will show the other side to his nature. Thus with Mr. Tebrick, for as he had been beastly, merry and a very dare-devil the night before, so on his awakening was he ashamed, melancholic and a true penitent before his Creator. The first thing he did when he came to himself was to call out to God to forgive him for his sin, then he fell into earnest prayer and continued so for half-an-hour upon his knees. Then he got up ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... was a man to rule society with dignity; Mr. Watt, to lead the contemplative life of a deeply introverted and patiently observant philosopher. He was one of the most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was generally bent forward, or leaning on his hand in meditation; his shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in; his limbs lank and unmuscular, and his complexion sallow. His intellectual development ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... Strephon meets repulse, Scoff'd at, despis'd, in melancholic mood Joyless he wastes in sighs the lazy hours, Till reinforc'd by thy most potent aid He storms the breach, and ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... break with the past: critical scruples against tradition did not weigh so heavily on his conscience. His critical faculties, no doubt, were sharpened by the humanistic culture he had acquired. Compared with Luther's peculiar meditative mood, and his half-choleric, half-melancholic temperament, Zwingli evinced, in all his conduct and demeanour, a more clear and sober intelligence, and a far calmer and more easy disposition. His practical policy and conduct was allied with a tendency ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... sorrow, Sailed away all dawns of fleeting joy, Gone the dim sensory mirage. Love, hate, health, disease, life, death, Perished these false shadows on the screen of duality. Waves of laughter, scyllas of sarcasm, melancholic whirlpools, Melting in the vast sea of bliss. The storm of MAYA stilled By magic wand of intuition deep. The universe, forgotten dream, subconsciously lurks, Ready to invade my newly-wakened memory divine. ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... hypnotise with music (—I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards small treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances, loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled him,—the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} A lexicon of Wagner's most intimate phrases—a ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... thou canst slide on blood, And not be tainted with a shameful fall? Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree, Dost think to root thyself in dead men's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... direction of beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is no man but ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... dangerous to allow him to go at large; nor were they subjected to any apparent restraint whatever. Some were engaged in reading, some in exercises and games of skill; of the females some were occupied in sewing, others at work in the kitchen or the laundry; melancholic patients were walking about in silence or sitting gloomily by themselves; idiots were rocking their bodies backward and forward as they sat, but all were peaceable in their demeanor, and the greatest quiet prevailed. No chastisement ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... would be interesting only to Londoners, and I was surprised, ere I had read many pages, to find myself enchained by his pleasant, graceful, easy style, varied knowledge, just views, and kindly spirit. There is something peculiarly anti-melancholic in Leigh Hunt's writings, and yet they are never boisterous. They resemble sunshine, being at once ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... of Hingham, having been long in a sad melancholic distemper near to phrensy, and having formerly attempted to drown her child, but prevented by God's gracious providence, did now again take an opportunity.... And threw it into the water and mud ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... and duration has produced lesions in the kinetic organs. Some passion has immeasurably activated his brain, destroying brain cells which might not be replaced. If he happened to live he might be permanently impaired. He might be neurasthenic, melancholic, insane at times, or even grow permanently so.... It is very sad. He appears to have been a fine young man. But he will die, and that really is best ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... counterpart and foil. Six feet and three inches tall, he was long-legged, lantern-jawed and goggle-eyed. Bilious in his constitution, he was melancholic in his temperament, had been crossed in love and soured at twenty, betrayed and bankrupted at thirty, and at forty had turned his back upon the world, forswearing all its amusements but those of the table, which his poor digestion made more painful ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... used to retire and stroll about the gardens with his humble favorite, a Polish girl, forgetting the cares of state. This lowly companion, besides great personal beauty, possessed much force of character, and exercised great influence over her melancholic and morose master. Long before her final elevation to the throne, many instances are related of her interference in behalf of mercy, which showed a kind and loving nature. Peterhoff is the favorite summer resort ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... of this sort furnishes little matter for conversation, so the Dutchmen of the Cape do not talk very much. They are a rather melancholic people, and they prefer to feel rather than to argue. So little happens, perhaps, that they have nothing to talk about; but what does it matter if the mind is empty when the heart is full, and when the tender emotions of nature can move it without being excited ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... for pelf, Melancholic and thoughtful, his mind Look'd inward and dwelt on itself, Still pensive, pathetic, and kind; Yet oft in despondency drown'd, He from friends, and from converse would fly. In weeping a luxury found, And reliev'd others' woes with ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... what you have just been saying! You have discoursed too well on all the signs, symptoms, and causes of this gentleman's disease. The arguments you have used are so learned and so delicate that it is impossible for him not to be mad and hypochondriacally melancholic; or, were he not, that he ought to become so, because of the beauty of the things you have spoken, and of the justness of your reasoning. Yes, Sir, you have graphically depicted, graphice depinxisti, everything that appertains to this disease. Nothing can be more learnedly, judiciously, ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... missed him. Without wishing Captain Puffin any unpleasant experience, she would have borne with equanimity the news of his settled melancholia, or his permanent dizziness, for Major Benjy with his bright robustness was not the sort of man to prove a willing comrade to a chronically dizzy or melancholic friend. Nor would it be right that he should be so. Men in the prime of life were not meant for that. Nor were they meant to be the victims of designing women, even though Wyses of Whitchurch.... He was saved from that by their most ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... and laughed. 'I'll make one for you. Watch! You are to imagine that she—Gloriana, Belphoebe, Elizabeth—has gone on a progress to Rye to comfort her sad heart (maids are often melancholic), and while she halts at Brickwall House, the village—what was its name?' She ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... four humors colored all the conceptions of disease; upon their harmony alone it was thought that health depended. The four temperaments, sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious and melancholic, corresponded with the prevalence of these humors. The body was composed of certain so-called "naturals," seven in number—the elements, the temperaments, the humors, the members or parts, the virtues or faculties, the operations ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... his thin and sallow cheek, his sunken and sad eye, his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard his querulous, though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his life was an uneasy one, that he was engaged in some inward conflict. His dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing a belief which made him a passenger on board a shipwrecked planet, was yet a most good-humored and companionable gentleman, whose laugh on week-days did one as much good to ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the stupidity of a nervous child when terrified or bullied." "Stupor is frequently one of the stages of alternating insanity following the exalted condition. It is more apt to occur in those where the exalted period is acutely maniacal. The stupor is usually melancholic in form." Since he claims that the anergic is a "very curable form of mental disease," while only 50% of the melancholic cases recover, it seems clear that this division is not prognostically final. The "melancholic" is evidently Newington's "delusional" ...
— Benign Stupors - A Study of a New Manic-Depressive Reaction Type • August Hoch
... servant in the apartment of the Duchess of Urbino. The intention has been to stay disorder and to cure him, rather than to inflict punishment. He suffers under peculiar delusions, believing himself guilty of heresy and dreading poison; which state of mind arises, I incline to think, from melancholic blood forced in upon the heart and vaporing to the brain. A wretched case, in truth, considering his great parts ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies. This was the prison ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... had decreased as soon as they were out of the village but throughout an occasional vicious whack testified to the presence of some devout doctor. Thus it was that the white King-God came to his throne and sat in state upon his bed to smile at the reflections of a melancholic philosopher. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... burro, now obscurely melancholic, grazed in the meadow. Within the cabin, depending from the smoke-polished rafters, a sack of flour, a bag of sugar, a ham, and several sides of bacon were strung, while a pyramid of tins leaned against ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... really getting too serious, philosophic, and melancholic. I had no idea, when I asked you down to the Natural History Society rooms to see the great Megatherium, that I was either to bury or resuscitate you in imagination. But I must have my moral, if I draw it from such a lean text as crumbling ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... was of a settled melancholic turn of mind, having lost in early youth a very peculiar wife. One day, whilst out hunting, he happened to pass a funeral pyre, upon which a Brahman's widow had just become Sati (a holy woman) with the greatest fortitude. On his return ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... Aunt Gainor's large face reappeared, not as melancholic as before, and I added, "Friend Waln has six to care for, and Thomas Scattergood has the Hessian chaplain and a drunken major. The rest of Friends are ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... to grin. For the first time, attired in philosophic melancholy of black silk, Enrico looked a boor and a fool. His close-cropped, rather animal head was common above the effeminate doublet, his sturdy, ordinary figure looked absurd in a melancholic droop. ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... perfectly still, staring at a wavering line made on the floor by a stray sunbeam which had forced its way through the window of her hotel sitting-room. At first she looked unseeingly, with the dull, introspective gaze of the melancholic. Then she began to notice the thing, and to fear it, and to watch for outlines of a quivering human face, and to tremble a little. Surely there had been a face—she thought vaguely, and puckered her brow in an effort to remember. It was half an hour before she realized ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... "that Beacon House is a certain rather singular sort of house—a house with the tiles loose, shall we say? Innocent Smith is only the doctor that visits us; hadn't you come when he called before? As most of our maladies are melancholic, of course he has to be extra cheery. Sanity, of course, seems a very bumptious eccentric thing to us. Jumping over a wall, climbing a tree—that's ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... could not take them home at once, nor that I should wish to see them acquire the good manners that I remembered in the children of this house; I never dreamt of Mr. Belamour heeding the little nursery. He has always been an obstinate melancholic lunatic, confined to his chamber by day, and wandering like a ghost by night, refusing all admission. Moreover my good Aylward had appeared hitherto a paragon of a duenna for discretion, only over starched in her precision. Little did I expect to find my young lady spending all her evenings ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he was twenty-five; by which time he had spent his money, laid in a handsome choice of debts, and acquired (like so many other melancholic and uninterested persons) a habit of gambling. An Austrian colonel—the same who afterwards hanged himself at Monte Carlo—gave him a lesson which lasted two-and-twenty hours, and left him wrecked and helpless. Old Singleton once ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... illustration of which we find an anecdote, related with much vivacity, by Brillat-Savarin, in the "Physiology of Taste." The narrator is a M. Duhagel, who was the prior of a Carthusian monastery, and he thus tells us the story: "We had in the monastery in which I was formerly prior, a monk of melancholic temperament and sombre character, who was known to be a somnambulist. He would sometimes, in his fits, go out of his cell and return into it directly; but at other times he would wander about, until it became necessary to guide him back again. Medical advice was sought, and various remedies ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... clever, simple, well-mannered, and a little, I might say, melancholic in disposition. Though still under forty, he is surfeited with praise. As for his stories, they are—how shall I put it?—pleasing, full of talent, but if you have read Tolstoi or Zola you somehow don't ...
— The Sea-Gull • Anton Checkov
... imagined, was not a little astonished and mortified at hearing from the usher, who returned looking foolish and chop-fallen, of this outbreak on the part of Jack, for whom he had really begun to conceive a sort of sneaking kindness; but knowing of old his fantastical and melancholic turn, he attributed this sally rather to the state of his bowels, which at all times he exceedingly neglected, and which, being puffed up with flatulency and indigestion to an extraordinary degree, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... myself up as the horrid example of what comes of that sort of thing for men who have to work as you are doing and I have done. To be sure you are a "lungy" man and I am a "livery" man, so that your chances of escaping candle-snuff accumulations with melancholic prostration are much better. Nevertheless take care. The pitcher is a very valuable piece of crockery, and I don't want to live to see it cracked by going to the well ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... feeble were his spirits, and so low, And changed so, that no man coulde know His speech, neither his voice, though men it heard. And in his gear* for all the world he far'd *behaviour Not only like the lovers' malady Of Eros, but rather y-like manie* *madness Engender'd of humours melancholic, Before his head in his cell fantastic. And shortly turned was all upside down, Both habit and eke dispositioun, Of him, this woful lover Dan* Arcite. *Lord Why should I all day of his woe indite? When he endured had a year or two This cruel torment, and this pain and woe, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Indian, when not under the influence of intoxicating liquors, is grave, melancholic, and silent. The most violent passions are never depicted in his features; and it is sometimes frightful to see him pass, at once, from a state of apparent repose, to the most violent and unrestrained agitation. It is stated that these Indians have preserved, from their ancestors, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... the horrible, I will gently slide into the pathetic and melancholic. There is our friend Atticus,—I call him so in public, because it would not do to name Brown right out, when telling his private griefs. Atticus, when he read a book lately, having "A man married is a man marred" for a motto, smiled a grim smile, and muttered audibly, "Mrs. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... just been saying! You have discoursed too well on all the signs, symptoms, and causes of this gentleman's disease. The arguments you have used are so learned and so delicate that it is impossible for him not to be mad and hypochondriacally melancholic; or, were he not, that he ought to become so, because of the beauty of the things you have spoken, and of the justness of your reasoning. Yes, Sir, you have graphically depicted, graphice depinxisti, everything that appertains to this disease. Nothing can be more learnedly, ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... pwesent? Me, I'm well. Yes, I'm always well, in fact. At the same time nevvatheless, I fine myseff slightly sad. I s'pose 'tis natu'al—a man what love the 'itings of Lawd By'on as much as me. You know, of co'se, the melancholic intelligens?" ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... was his counterpart and foil. Six feet and three inches tall, he was long-legged, lantern-jawed and goggle-eyed. Bilious in his constitution, he was melancholic in his temperament, had been crossed in love and soured at twenty, betrayed and bankrupted at thirty, and at forty had turned his back upon the world, forswearing all its amusements but those of the table, which his poor digestion made more painful than pleasurable, all of its ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... Grecian, as I have said elsewhere; supplying the poverty of his language by his musical ear, and by his diligence. But to return: our two great poets, being so different in their tempers, one choleric and sanguine, the other phlegmatic and melancholic; that which makes them excel in their several ways is, that each of them has followed his own natural inclination, as well in forming the design, as in the execution of it. The very heroes show their authors; ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... patriotism, and all other high-flown notions, boasted that the world was his country, and was no doubt excellent after-dinner company for the great king. Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of a darker and more melancholic temperament; and while Theodorus contented himself with preaching a comfortable selfishness, and obtaining pleasure, made it rather his study to avoid pain. Doubtless both their theories were popular enough at Alexandria, as they were in France ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... example of how one can hypnotise with music (—I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards small treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances, loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled him,—the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} A lexicon of Wagner's most intimate phrases—a host of short fragments of from five to fifteen bars ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... displaying an apparent phlegm, from which it would seem impossible to arouse them. This phlegmatic temperament lessens the credit of the men with the females, who uniformly prefer the European, or the still more vivacious negro. "The indigenous Mexican is grave, melancholic, silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors. This gravity is peculiarly remarkable in Indian children, who at the age of four or five years display more intelligence and precocity than the children of whites. The Mexican loves to attach mystery even ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... like." And she took no further notice of him that evening. Which he pretended neither to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also, obliterating herself. Mrs. Morel hated her for making her son like this. She watched Paul growing irritable, priggish, and melancholic. For this she put the blame on Miriam. Annie and all her friends joined against the girl. Miriam had no friend of her own, only Paul. But she did not suffer so much, because she despised the triviality of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... procured us an audience. Then he remembered how he had laughed at my gambols with Molly O'Flaherty in the hayfield, and how they amused him, and how he thought my Romping ways might divert My Lady Duchess his Consort, who was a pining, puling, melancholic Temperament, and much afflicted with the Vapours, for want of something to do. So he was pleased to smile upon me again, and to give my mother five pounds, and to promise that I should be well bestowed in his household as a waiting-woman, or ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... not popular; he was unpopular. Why? But why was the sun of this 23rd August, shining from its rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud, more agreeable to earth's populations than his pinched appearance of the poor mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day! Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet. Yet his popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge. He did this:—and the mystery puzzling ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 1 In melancholic fancy, Out of myself, In the vulcan dancy, All the world surveying, Nowhere staying, Just like a fairy elf; Out o'er the tops of highest mountains skipping, Out o'er the hills, the trees, and valleys tripping, Out o'er ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... disease called acromegaly, which is due to a change in the pituitary gland, amongst other things are noted "melancholic tendencies, loss of memory and mental and ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... very different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre in broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are not bound to believe ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... and various—influence, power, mystery, unhappiness, a broken heart. At Claremont his position was a very humble one; but the Princess took a fancy to him, called him "Stocky," and romped with him along the corridors. Dyspeptic by constitution, melancholic by temperament, he could yet be lively on occasion, and was known as a wit in Coburg. He was virtuous, too, and served the royal menage with approbation. "My master," he wrote in his diary, "is the best of all husbands in all the five quarters of the globe; ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... endeavoured generally to make himself understood as far as possible by signs. Hence the kind of isolation in which he wished to pass the last months of his life, an isolation which many people wrongly interpreted—some attributing it to a scornful pride, others to a melancholic temper, the one as well as the other equally foreign to the character of this, ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... spoke sorrowfully of the fact that the Professor was evidently again suffering severely. "There is a melancholy," said Goedike, "and it is the most usual, in which the inward depression easily changes to displeasure against every one, and the household of the melancholic suffers thereby intolerably; for the displeasure turns against them,—no one does anything properly, nothing is in its place. How very different is Gellert's melancholy! Not a soul suffers from it but himself, against himself alone his gloomy thoughts turn, and towards every ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... thereby to express that melancholic, dumb, and deaf stupefaction, which benumbs all our faculties, when oppressed with accidents greater than we are able to bear. And, indeed, the violence and impression of an excessive grief must of necessity astonish the soul, and wholly deprive her of her ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... innocent and simple-hearted enough to enjoy a walk. We have fallen from that state of grace which capacity to enjoy a walk implies. It cannot be said that as a people we are so positively sad, or morose, or melancholic as that we are vacant of that sportiveness and surplusage of animal spirits that characterized our ancestors, and that springs from full and harmonious life,—a sound heart in accord with a sound body. A man must invest himself near at hand and in common things, and be content with a steady ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... Degarchi, are as black as the natives of Canton or Ava. Climate is not, therefore, able to change the colour of a nation; but it seems to have a greater effect on the temperament. Cold can produce a change of temperament from the melancholic and choleric to the phlegmatic and sanguine, and heat acting on the human frame, is capable of producing a contrary revolution. Hence, rosy cheeks and lips are frequently observed among the mountain Hindus of Nepal, although they are ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... sir;—at Pie-corner, Taking your meal of steam in, from cooks' stalls, Where, like the father of hunger, you did walk Piteously costive, with your pinch'd-horn-nose, And your complexion of the Roman wash, Stuck full of black and melancholic worms, Like powder corns ...
— The Alchemist • Ben Jonson
... ABOVE IT.—Cheer up! If you cannot think pleasurably over your misfortune, forget it. You must do this or perish. Your power and influence is too much to blight by foolish and melancholic pining. Your own sense, your self-respect, your self-love, your love for others, command you not to spoil yourself ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... when he sees me looking towards him. So! I have been burrowing in our boilers, testing the scale, inspecting stays and furnace crowns, and the joy of working has come back to me. I was solemn last evening, melancholic and somewhat metaphysical it seems; but let it stand. 'Tis morning, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time—as Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show—that Shakespeare may quite ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... In the Divinity School of Yale College, about the middle of the century, was a solemn, quiet, semi-jocose, semi-melancholic resident graduate—Alexander McWhorter. I knew him well. He had embarked in various matters which had not turned out satisfactorily. Hot water, ecclesiastical and social, seemed his favorite element.[29] He was generally believed ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... are involved in the disintegration of the brain. The difference between the effects of these two causes will hardly be great, but testimony dependent on this altered character of mental activity will have little reliability. Hallucinations, false memories, melancholic accusations of self, particularly, may also be explained in terms of such excitement. We criminalists have frequently to deal with people in above- named conditions, and when we receive intelligent answers from them we must never set them aside, but must carefully ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... books upon books than upon any other subject More brave men been lost in occasions of little moment More solicitous that men speak of us, than how they speak More supportable to be always alone than never to be so More valued a victory obtained by counsel than by force Morosity and melancholic humour of a sour ill-natured pedant Most cruel people, and upon frivolous occasions, apt to cry Most men are rich in borrowed sufficiency Most men do not so much believe as they acquiesce and permit Most of my actions are guided by example, ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Michel De Montaigne • Michel De Montaigne
... sunshine of gladness has the best right to preside in our sky, is all wrong. It is absolutely wicked, because it casts a baneful influence upon all with whom we associate, and prepares us to go through life like a frowning cloud or a drooping willow, shading the circle of our influence with melancholic gloom. No, better sing with the birds and laugh with the babbling brooklets than be gloomy in Girlhood. Trials and troubles of course will come. We must sometimes weep, and when we do, it should be done with chastened spirits for real sorrow, that we may be the ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... Scots, hearing of this disaster, was astonished; and being naturally of a melancholic disposition, as well as endowed with a high spirit, he lost all command of his temper on this dismal occasion. Rage against his nobility, who, he believed, had betrayed him; shame for a defeat by such unequal numbers; regret for the past, fear of the future; ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... End halls are unhappily situated. The dismal Bond Street holds one, another stands cheek by jowl with Marlborough Police Court, and the other two are stuck deep in the melancholic greyness of Wigmore Street. All are absurdly inaccessible. However, when it is a case of Paderewski or Hambourg or Backhaus or Ysayt, people will make pilgrimages to the end of the earth ... or to Wigmore Street. It was at the Bechstein, on a stifling June evening, that ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... 'magnetic vellum, velin magnetique,' of the Sieurs d'Hozier and Petit-Jean, Parlementeers of Rouen. Sweet young d'Hozier, 'bred in the faith of his Missal, and of parchment genealogies,' and of parchment generally: adust, melancholic, middle-aged Petit-Jean: why came these two to Saint-Cloud, where his Majesty was hunting, on the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul; and waited there, in antechambers, a wonder to whispering Swiss, the livelong day; and even waited without ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... an old herbalist, "doth exhilarate, and make the mind glad," almost in the same way as a bracing sojourn by the seaside during an autumn holiday. The flowers possess cordial virtues which are very revivifying, and have been much commended against melancholic depression of the nervous system. Burton, in his [61] Anatomy of Melancholy (1676), wrote with reference to the ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... near hitting the nail square on the head more 'n two thousand year ago, but he felt kind of uncertain, and didn't exactly know what he was driving at. The old heathen made out just four humors, as he called 'em,—the sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. If he'd only made one step more on to the other side of the fence, he'd have cracked the nut, and picked the kernel, certain. Those four different humors are only four different ways ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... retreated to Durham. The king, with his army weakened and the treasury depleted, was in great straits. He was again constrained to call a parliament, which met on November 3, 1640. It had a sad and melancholic aspect. The king himself did not ride with his accustomed equipage to Westminster, but went privately in his barge to the parliament stairs. The king being informed that Sir Thomas Gardiner, not having been returned a member, could not be chosen to be ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... "four temperaments" to the four great "humors" or fluids of the body. Thus the "sanguine" individual was one with a surplus of blood, the "choleric" had a surplus of bile, the "phlegmatic" a surplus of phlegm, and the "melancholic" a surplus of black bile or spleen; and any individual's temperament resulted from the balance of these four. Sometimes a fifth temperament, the nervous, was admitted, ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... intellectual or social intercourse amongst ourselves. One was the national reserve;' and this was strengthened by concurring with a national temperament—not phlegmatic (as is so falsely alleged), but melancholic, dignified, and for that reason, if there had been no other, anti-mercurial. But the main cause of this reserve lay in the infrequency of visits consequent upon the difficulties of local movement. The other frost ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... revolting deformity, such as is seen in Figure 100, representing an individual who was exhibited several years ago in Philadelphia. We have in English the expression, "pulling a long lip." Its origin is said to date back to a semimythical hero of King Arthur's time, who, "when sad at heart and melancholic," would let one of his lips drop below his waist, while he turned the other up like a ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... now a city of dazzling purity topped by steep roofs and domes of gold and azure and water-green, so filling the air with brightness that one minded less the persistent leaden gray of the vault overhead. But cold and grayness are bad companions for the morbid-melancholic; and Ivan took his tone from the clouds, steadily repulsing the gentle efforts of his friends to draw him from his dim retreat into sunny ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... seemed to huddle in the gathering shadows with melancholic despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies. This was the prison in ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... choleric and passionate, and that, added to my birth, may well make my enemies tremble; but I have also a noble and a kindly soul. I am incapable of any base and black deed; and so I am more disposed to mercy than to justice. I am melancholic; I like reading good and solid books; trifles bore me, except verses, and them I like, of whatever sort they may be, and undoubtedly I am as good a judge of such things as if I ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Are you so detached from everything?... It is not true. Tell me that it pleased you.... It must please you, if only because it pleases me. I don't like you to have a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter is melancholic. That must not be.... It is good that you are more just to others. But that is no reason why you should abase yourself, as you do, by saying that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would applaud you. I tell you it is a bad thing. I am not a good Christian. I am a good Italian, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... ask all the tyrants of thy sex if their fools are not known by this party-coloured livery. I am melancholic when thou art absent; look like an ass when thou art present; wake for thee when I should sleep; and even dream of thee when I am awake; sigh much, drink little, eat less, court solitude, am grown very entertaining ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
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