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More "Melancholy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were trifling as compared with those which confronted him at home when he failed, as he almost invariably did fail, to obtain all that the colony expected. Cotton Mather tells us that Norton died in 1663 of melancholy and chagrin, and that for forty years there was not one agent but met "with some very froward entertainment among his countrymen." No wonder it was always difficult to find men ...
— The Fathers of New England - A Chronicle of the Puritan Commonwealths • Charles M. Andrews
... man with a pointed moustache and an air of having seen all the sorrow and wickedness that there had ever been in the world. He twisted the former and permitted a faint smile to deepen the melancholy of the latter, ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... and affected the brave Hill deeply. General Lee was no less melancholy; it is said that he was both gloomy and restive. It was reported, I know not upon what authority, that when he and General Hill were riding over the field, and Hill essayed to explain the unfortunate affair, the commander-in-chief shook his head, ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... simply because 'C'est le neveu de son oncle!'[184] A curious precedent for a president, certainly; but, oh heavens and earth, what curious things abroad everywhere just now, inclusive of the sea serpent! I agree with you that much of all is very melancholy and disheartening, though holding fast by my hope and belief that good will be the end, as it always is God's end to man's frenzies, and that all we observe is but the fermentation necessary to the new wine, which presently we shall drink pure. Meanwhile, the saddest thing ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... back honest Ben, we felt very melancholy at the dreary prospect before us. Strong as he was, he also appeared utterly worn out with his exertions; and, stretched at full length on the sand, he was soon fast asleep. I had rashly undertaken to keep ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... That melancholy accident had a sequel which must be told in illustration of the greed of the Greeks. The Prince's body was placed in a hogshead of spirits and conveyed to Spetzas, there to be deposited in a convent until the wishes of ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... imagine that this was most probably the cause of such utter desolation here. These war-parties lay waste the tracks they visit for endless time. Indeed, until slavery is suppressed in Africa, we may expect to find such places in a similarly melancholy state. ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... speedy victim to his own unsteadiness and folly. His more friendly neighbors may pity him, but all will decline to connect their fortunes with his; and not a few will seize the opportunity of making their fortunes out of his. One nation is to another what one individual is to another; with this melancholy distinction perhaps, that the former, with fewer of the benevolent emotions than the latter, are under fewer restraints also from taking undue advantage from the indiscretions of each other. Every nation, consequently, ...
— The Federalist Papers
... more conformed to the common sense, if the question be the felicity of age, I fear the first popular judgments will be unfavorable. From the point of sensuous experience, seen from the streets and markets and the haunts of pleasure and gain, the estimate of age is low, melancholy, and skeptical. Frankly face the facts, and see the result. Tobacco, coffee, alcohol, hashish, prussic acid, strychnine, are weak dilutions: the surest poison is time. This cup, which Nature puts to our lips, has a wonderful virtue, surpassing that of any other draught. It opens the senses, adds ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... The melancholy spectacle of the ruined boat made Tom see that his stay on the island might be prolonged even beyond the following day. No sooner had this thought occurred to him than he went over to the articles which he had taken out of the boat, and passed them all in review before him, as though ...
— Lost in the Fog • James De Mille
... sons of Melancholy, To be young and wise is folly. 'Tis the weak Fear to wreak On this clay of life their fancies, Shaping ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... more movable part of the working-classes to consider the propriety of saddling themselves with the ownership of lands and houses. Such, at least, is our opinion, after much consideration of the subject. So many melancholy instances have we seen of working-men being ruined by the want of power or will to leave small heritable possessions in country towns, where employment deserted them, that we entertain a strong feeling against this class of persons investing ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... bigoted and unreasonable, but he must be an optimist whilst pursuing his object. He must believe in life and in the inherent goodness of the earth. He must be a stranger to the dyspeptic melancholy through which Carlyle saw the world as a "noisy inanity" and life as an incomprehensible monstrosity. Macbeth is called to denounce life as "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury," and "signifying nothing." Macbeth must be shunned by the reformer as the monk repels the visits of ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... embowered mansion! I had strongly felt the silence and vacancy of the depriving day on which you vanished. How prone are our hearts perversely to quarrel with the friendly coercion of employment at the very instant in which it is clearing the torpid and injurious mists of unavailing melancholy!' Then follows a sprightly attack before which Johnson may have quailed indeed. 'Is the Fe-fa-fum of literature that snuffs afar the fame of his brother authors, and thirsts for its destruction, to be allowed to gallop unmolested ...
— A Book of Sibyls - Miss Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, Mrs Opie, Miss Austen • Anne Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie)
... be done over again. As soon as men get excited, as is apt to be the case when they find serious blunders made at critical moments, they are not always discreet. The precise manner in which Captain Crutchely met with the melancholy fate that befel him, was never known. It is certain that he jumped down on the anchor-stock, the anchor being a cock-bill, and that he ordered Mr. Hillson off of it. While thus employed, and at an instant when the cable was pronounced bent, and the men were in the act ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... say, ye fair! was ever lively wife, Born with a genius for the highest life, Like me untimely blasted in her bloom, Like me condemn'd to such a dismal doom? Save money—when I just knew how to waste it! Leave London—just as I began to taste it! Must I then watch the early crowing cock, The melancholy ticking of a clock; In a lone rustic hall for ever pounded, With dogs, cats, rats, and squalling brats surrounded? With humble curate can I now retire, (While good Sir Peter boozes with the squire,) And at backgammon mortify my soul, That pants for loo, or flutters ...
— The School For Scandal • Richard Brinsley Sheridan
... of adolescence and the mold of Indiana. The hero of his earliest novel, Harkless in The Gentleman from Indiana, drifts through that narrative with a melancholy stride because he has been seven long years out of college and has not yet set the prairie on fire. But Mr. Tarkington, at the time of writing distant from Princeton by about the same number of years and also not yet famous, could ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... of the scene by Francis Osborne. Dr. Birch says the words used by Elizabeth were, "God may forgive you, but I never can." It was the death-blow to the proud old queen, whose regret for the death of Essex could not be quenched by her pride and belief in his ingratitude. A confirmed melancholy settled upon her; she ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... the traveller joyfully, gazing at the melancholy fields illumined by the early morning light. "For the first time, I see the patrimony which I inherited from my mother. The poor woman used to praise this country so extravagantly, and tell me ...
— Dona Perfecta • B. Perez Galdos
... imperfect were the prevalent notions concerning mental disease. For the most part, our ancestors thought no man insane, whatever his conduct or conversation, who was not actually raving. If the person were quiet, taciturn, apathetic, he was supposed to be melancholy or hypochondriacal. If he were elated and restless, ready for all sorts of undertakings and projects, his condition was attributed to a great flow of spirits. If, while talking very sensibly on many subjects and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... A melancholy result followed upon a worthy endeavour to carry the mails through the snow on the 1st February 1831. The Dumfries coach had reached Moffat, where it became snowed up. The driver and guard procured saddle-horses, and proceeded; ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... starvation. He kept a diary of those days of gradual death, setting out his feelings both of body and mind. No nourishment passed his lips after he had chosen his last resting-place, save a little water, which he dragged himself to a pond to drink. He was not discovered till he was dead; but his melancholy chronicle appeared to have been carried down to very near the time when he became unconscious. I remember its great characteristic appeared to be a sense of utter failure. There seemed to be no passion, none of the bitter desperate resolution ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... "harmonica." A series of strips of hard-wood, slightly hollowed and adjusted in length, are laid across the shins of the operator, who beats upon them with two sticks. But the finest songs are sung without accompaniment and are of the nature of dramatic recitals in the manner of a somewhat monotonous and melancholy recitative. To hear a wild Punan, standing in the midst of a solemn circle lit only by a few torches which hardly seem to avail to keep back the vast darkness of the sleeping jungle, recite with dramatic gesture the adventures of a departing soul on its way to the land of shades, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... and Aboulhusn went out with her and bade her farewell. So she went her way and he returned to his shop, which he opened, and sat down there, according to his wont; but as he sat, he found his bosom straitened and his heart oppressed and was troubled about his case. He ceased not from melancholy thought the rest of that day and night, and on the morrow he betook himself to Ali ben Bekkar, with whom he sat till the folk withdrew, when he asked him how he did. Ali began to complain of passion and descant upon the longing and distraction ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume III • Anonymous
... the earthly matchmaker instead of the divine guidance, and you may some day be led to use the words of Solomon, whose experience in home life was as melancholy as it was multitudinous. One day his palace with its great wide rooms and great wide doors and great wide hall was too small for him and the loud tongue of a woman belaboring him about some of his neglects, and he retreated to the housetop to get relief from the ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... rather, as Dr. Johnson happily describes it, "a depression of mind which enchains the faculties without destroying them, and leaves reason the knowledge of right, without the power of pursuing it." What Johnson has further said on this melancholy subject, shows perhaps more nature and feeling than anything he ever wrote; and yet it is remarkable that among the causes to which the poet's malady was ascribed, he never hints at the most exciting of the whole. He tells us how Collins "loved fairies, genii, giants, and monsters;" how ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous
... glance for a moment dispelled the melancholy of her face, and then the old look returned with added force, as ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... character there was a singular blending of the good and the bad. In what is usually called moral character he was irreproachable. He was a faithful husband, a kind father, and had no taste for any sensual pleasures. In his natural disposition he was melancholy, and so exceedingly reserved, that he lived in his palace almost the life of a recluse. Though he was called the most learned prince of his age, a Jesuitical education had so poisoned and debauched his mind, that while perpetrating the most grievous crimes of perfidy and cruelty, he ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... individual—to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a sovereign state with a sovereign state—tends to true union as well as greatness. "I learned," said the melancholy Pestalozzi,[92] "that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man." Help must come from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... leans up ag'in the front of the post-office an' surveys his hobbles mighty melancholy, while Tutt goes over to the Red Light to look up Texas Thompson. It ain't no time when he's headed back with Texas an' ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... resignation, in 1788, of the chief-justiceship of the King's Bench making a general move in the higher orders of the bar, Scott was appointed solicitor-general, Kenyon being appointed to the chief-justiceship, and the attorney-general, Arden, succeeding to the Rolls. On this occasion he was knighted. A melancholy event soon gave him the most public opportunity for the display of his official faculties. In the autumn of 1788, the king was attacked with disorder of the mind, and the great question of the regency necessarily came before Parliament. The Whigs, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... near setting, and its rays, which still gilded the tree-tops, left the wood below pensive and melancholy. The house stood in a solitary place on the edge of the forest, half a mile from Poissy; and these two things had their effect on my mind. I began to wish that we had brought with us half a troop of horse, or at least two or three gentlemen; and, startled by the thought of the unknown ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... eleven months after my return from Spaceland, I tried to see a Cube with my eye closed, but failed; and though I succeeded afterwards, I was not then quite certain (nor have I been ever afterwards) that I had exactly realized the original. This made me more melancholy than before, and determined me to take some step; yet what, I knew not. I felt that I would have been willing to sacrifice my life for the Cause, if thereby I could have produced conviction. But if I could not convince my Grandson, how could I convince ...
— Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (Illustrated) • Edwin A. Abbott
... not come to their height with him, and I observed he became pensive and melancholy; and in a word, as I thought, a little distempered in his head. I endeavoured to talk him into temper, and to reason him into a kind of scheme for our government in the affair, and sometimes he would be well, and talk with some courage about it; but ...
— The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders &c. • Daniel Defoe
... distinction, in the other he was certain to take a high place, if he should make that an object of his ambition. He was a true patriot, true soldier, and true lover. If the story of his political life is full of melancholy interest, and calculated to awaken profound emotions of reverence for his memory, the story of his affections is not less touching. Truly, "there's not a line but hath been wept upon." So it is, ...
— Speeches from the Dock, Part I • Various
... with him his clothes and bedding, with a gun, some powder, bullets, and a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, and his Bible, besides some mathematical instruments and books. For the first eight months he had great difficulty in bearing up against the melancholy feelings which oppressed him at being left alone in so desert a place. He occupied himself, however, in building two huts with pimento-trees, which he covered with long grass, and lined with the skins of goats ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... raised from the vaults. Carriage, wheels would give her the first intimation of it. Slow, very slow, would imply badly wounded, she thought: dead, if the carriage stopped some steps from the house and one of the seconds of the poor boy descended to make the melancholy announcement. She could not but apprehend the remorselessness of the decree. Death, it would probably be! Alvan had resolved to sweep him off the earth. She could not blame Alvan for his desperate passion, though pitying the victim of it. In any case the instant ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... advocate should rise from reading it to tell people that he has a right to ridicule me for holding that "man is most likely born for a dog's life, and there an end;" absorbs my other feelings in melancholy. I am sure that any candid person, reading that chapter, must see that I was hovering between doubt, hope, and faith, on this subject, and that if any one could show me that a Moral Theism and a Future Life were essentially combined, I should joyfully ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... constantly in the fortunes of old streets and squares, once graced with the beau and the sedan-chair, the very cynosure of the polite and elegant world, but now vocal with the clamorous wrongs of the charwoman and the melancholy appeal of the coster. We see it, too, in the ups and downs of words once aristocratic or tender, words once the very signet of polite conversation, now tossed about amid the very offal of language. We see it when some noble house, an illustrious symbol of heroic honour, the ark of high ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... so very melancholy a tone that it quite melted Gluck's heart. "They promised me one slice to-day, sir," said he; "I can give you that, but ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... How melancholy an object is a "polished front," that vain-glorious and inhospitable array of cold steel and willow shavings, in which the emancipated hearth is annually constrained by careful housewives to signalise the return of summer, and its own consequent degradation from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... the unobtrusive deeds of a modern gentleman. To this day whoever takes the trouble to go down to Silverthorn in Lower Wessex and make inquiries will find existing there almost a superstitious feeling for the moody melancholy stranger who resided in the ...
— The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid • Thomas Hardy
... the little bark stood on its course, when a violent storm threatened a melancholy termination to the voyage. The wind, however, was accompanied by rain, and Botello kept up the spirits of his friends by attributing the storm to St. Francis, who had sent it expressly to save them from dying by thirst. It would have been perhaps more easy to believe in the saint's ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... interesting to banish every other recollection. Sweet Clara! it was quite a month since I had parted from her, but the soft tones of her silvery voice still lingered on my ear—the trustful expression of her bright eyes—the appealing sadness of that mournful smile, more touching in its quiet melancholy, than many a deeper sign of woe, still presented themselves to my imagination with a vividness which was almost painful. I had received a note from her about a week before, in which she told me that Cumberland had been absent from the Priory for some days, and, as long as this was the case, ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... is a melancholy fact that, by reason of uncleanness, we have almost lost regard for the type of puritanic manhood which in the past held aloft the standard of a chaste and holy life; such men in this day are spoken of as "too slow" as "weak-kneed," and "goody-goody" men. Let me recall that word, the fast and indecently-dressed ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... of apprehended danger. 'Tis malice that speaks only of the past. What can I gain by your officiousness? Should your suspicion ripen to full truth, What follows but the pangs of separation, The melancholy triumphs of revenge? But no: you only fear—you feed me with Conjectures vague. To hell's profound abyss You lead me on, then ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... sort of melancholy that you can enjoy," said Lucy. "At least I enjoyed it, and I am a very matter-of-fact girl. But there, we can go to a laughing theatre. Some theatres make you laugh so much that you can scarcely stop. You get almost into hysterics. Anyhow, I mean to go, because Aunt ...
— A Modern Tomboy - A Story for Girls • L. T. Meade
... particular grief nor with mere low spirits, but with the incongruity of the passions and the intellect; and this noble sadness is expressed by Poussin as no other painter has expressed it. He was himself a melancholy man to whom art was the one happiness of life; but he did not use his art to talk of his sorrows. He used it to create a world of clear and orderly design, and satisfied his intellect in the creation of it. In his art he could exercise the composure which actual experience disturbed; he could ...
— Essays on Art • A. Clutton-Brock
... God, suffer from the melancholy of a cellar: my solitude is gay with light and verdure; I attend, whenever I please, the fields' high festival, the Thrushes' concert, the Crickets' symphony; and yet my friendly commerce with the Spider is marked by an even greater devotion than the young typesetter's. I admit her ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... it was light again, which was not till the third day after this melancholy accident, his body was found entire, and without any marks of violence upon it, in the dress in which he fell, and looking more like a man asleep than dead. During all this time my mother and I, who were at Misenum—but this ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... so obstinate that, whenever a wife was talked of, he shook his head and wished himself a hundred miles off; so that the poor King, finding his son stubborn and perverse, and foreseeing that his race would come to an end, was more vexed and melancholy, cast down and out of spirits, than a merchant whose correspondent has become bankrupt, or a peasant whose ass has died. Neither could the tears of his father move the Prince, nor the entreaties of the courtiers soften him, nor the counsel of wise men make him change his mind; in vain they set ...
— Stories from Pentamerone • Giambattista Basile
... of the Theatrical Fund, an office which I hold, are not so frequent or so great as its privileges. He is in fact a mere walking gentleman, with the melancholy difference that he has no one to love. If this advantage could be added to his character it would be one of a more agreeable nature than it is, and his forlorn position would be greatly improved. His duty is to call every half year at the bankers', ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... the minister; but there is considerable danger that the religious enthusiasm of the minister might diminish the serviceableness of the civilian. (The History of Religious Enthusiasm should be written by someone who had a life to give to its investigation; it is one of the most melancholy pages in human records, and one of the most necessary to be studied.) Therefore, as far as good men are concerned, it is better the State should have power over the Clergy than the Clergy ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... persons stricken with it were helpless until relieved by either recovery or death. The malady spread rapidly through France and Holland, and before the close of the century was introduced into England. In his "Anatomy of Melancholy" Burton refers to it, and speaks of the idiosyncrasies of the individuals afflicted. It is said they could not abide one in red clothes, and that they loved music above all things, and also that the magistrates in Germany hired musicians to give them music, and provided them with sturdy ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... satyr, or Celtic ourisk, to the arch-fiend, to any particular resemblance between the character of these deities and that of Satan. On the contrary, the ourisk of the Celts was a creature by no means peculiarly malevolent or formidably powerful, but rather a melancholy spirit, which dwelt in wildernesses far removed from men. If we are to identify him with the Brown Dwarf of the Border moors, the ourisk has a mortal term of life and a hope of salvation, as indeed the same high claim was made by ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... has befallen you! To subside from an eagle-feathered Sachem, eating succatash with an Indian Princess, into a tame civilized gentleman, in a swallow-tailed coat, handing apples to a poor little Yankee girl! I do not wonder you were melancholy and tried ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... that Nature's clearness is like clearness of mind, that her darkness and gloom are like a dark and gloomy mood; then, omitting 'like,' we go on to ascribe our qualities directly to her, and say, this neighbourhood, this air, this general tone of colour, is cheerful, melancholy, and so forth. Here we are prompted by an undeveloped dormant consciousness which really only compares, while it seems to take one thing for another. In this way we come to say that a rock projects boldly, that fire rages furiously over ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... her, Ned!" replied Jack, "what makes you say that?" "Because I am sure it was the case; she lived but in your presence. Why, if you were out of the room, she never spoke a word, but sat there as melancholy as a sick monkey—the moment you came in again, she beamed out as glorious as the sun, and ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... and I said to my Bear shortly after, as I was givin a exhibition in Ohio—I said, "Brewin, are you not sorry the National arms has sustained a defeat?" His business was to wale dismal, and bow his head down, the band (a barrel origin and a wiolin) playing slow and melancholy moosic. What did the grizzly old cuss do, however, but commence darncin and larfin in the most joyous manner? I had a narrer escape from being ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume III. (of X.) • Various
... prevailed; and he made a resolution to indulge himself in such carnal delights and pleasures as he was accustomed to, or that fell in his way. 'His neglecting his business, and following gaming and sports, to put melancholy thoughts out of his mind, which he could not always do, had rendered him very ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... that glittering substance knew no bounds, but he overheard one of the servants say in a melancholy undertone: "What a pity his majesty has not a black complexion such as we have! What ...
— Pinocchio in Africa • Cherubini
... loud-voiced, red-faced man sitting on the sofa beside a somewhat melancholy-looking female dressed in bright green. These twain I discovered to be Uncle and Aunt Gutton. From an observation dropped later in the evening concerning government restrictions on the sale of methylated spirit, and hastily smothered, I gathered that their ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... rests his head upon the lap of earth. A youth to fortune and to fame unknown: Fair science frowned not on his humble birth. And melancholy marked him for ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... consideration. They framed a remonstrance, which they intended to carry to the king. They represented, that the enormous growth of the Austrian power threatened the liberties of Europe; that the progress of the Catholic religion in England bred the most melancholy apprehensions, lest it should again acquire an ascendant in the kingdom; that the indulgence of his majesty towards the professors of that religion had encouraged their insolence and temerity; that the uncontrolled ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... polka dots. Slightly taller than the Czar, the Empress was most affable, girlish in her manner. As she talked the colour came and went on her pale, fair cheeks, and she gave me the impression of being a very sensitive, reserved, exquisitely rare nature. Her smile had a charming yet half melancholy radiance. We all sat down and talked. I remember the little shiver with which the Empress spoke of a race in the Orient ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... said Prospero, "and I will set you free." He then gave orders what further he would have him do; and away went Ariel, first to where he had left Ferdinand, and found him still sitting on the grass in the same melancholy posture. ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb
... blushes, Absconds and conceals; He creepeth and peepeth, He palters and steals; Infirm, melancholy, Jealous glancing around, An oaf, an accomplice, ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... not arrived when she reached the castle. Miss Carew glanced at her melancholy face as she entered, but asked no questions. Presently, however, she put down her book, considered for ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... very sick, and suffered great and constant pain. Her children were all very sad and melancholy, and the large ones often kneeled down together, and prayed that God would restore their mother ...
— No and Other Stories Compiled by Uncle Humphrey • Various
... off from the shore and boarded us. He was a long, melancholy Chinaman, had thirty-five hairs of a beard, and, poor fellow, was dying of consumption. He told us the local news, and then I asked him about the cargo of saints, many more of whom were now visible on the after-deck of their ...
— The Call Of The South - 1908 • Louis Becke
... is in the storage and stockpile business to the melancholy tune of more than $16 billion. We must continue to support farm income, but we should not pile more farm surpluses on top of the $7.5 billion we already own. We must maintain a stockpile of strategic materials, but the $8.5 billion we have ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... it. By the Russian custom of descent, the crown incontestably belonged to the oldest son of Sviatoslaf, and Monomaque, out of regard to his rights, declined the proffered gift. This refusal was accompanied by the most melancholy results. A terrible tumult broke out in the city. There was no arm of law sufficiently powerful to restrain the mob, and anarchy, with all its desolation, reigned for a time triumphant. A deputation of the most influential citizens of Kief was immediately sent to Monomaque, ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... rank grass and weeds, the elysium of reptiles, iguanas, centipedes, and ten thousand poisonous insects. On our left, opposite the falling church, was another ruin; but its vulgar features owned none of the green and mossy dignity of age, which gave a melancholy beauty to the former. It was a glaring pile of naked dust and rubbish, and its shot crumbled walls and riddled doors told the tale of its destruction. The entire front on that side of the plaza was in ruins, with the exception of one stout building on the corner diagonally opposed to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 26, December, 1859 • Various
... Ram Lal, abashed at this cynical embargo upon the melancholy luxury of his rhythms; 'yes, and it is ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder
... belle Barberie!" repeated the young sailor, for such his dress denoted him to be, studying her features with an expression of face, in which pleasure vied with evident and touching melancholy. "Fame hath done no injustice, for here is all that might justify the folly ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... up myself," began Cyrus; but his wife turned upon him, at the word, bundled him into the kitchen, and shut the door upon him. Then she went back to her post in the doorway, and peered after Mrs. Wadleigh's square figure on the dazzling road, with a melancholy determination to stand by her to the last. Only when it occurred to her that it was unlucky to watch a departing friend out of sight, did she shut the door hastily, and go in to reproach Cyrus and prepare ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... the rolling splendours of the moorland proper. There were boulders of rock of unknown age, dark patches of peat land, where even in midsummer the mud oozed up at the lightest footfall, pools and sedgy places, the home and sometimes the breeding place of the melancholy snipe. Of colour there was singularly little. The heather bushes were stunted, their roots blackened as though with fire, and even the yellow of the gorse shone with a dimmer lustre. But in the distance, a flaming carpet of orange and purple stretched almost to the summit ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... that runs through the year from November to April,—these dark, sad days are ever weeping,—or whether it is the tender associations that are linked with the hallowed time and the remembrance of the departed I know not; but some indescribable melancholy seems to hover around and hang down on my spirits at this holy season; and it is emphasized by a foreboding that somewhere in the future this great Christian festival will degenerate into a mere bank holiday, and lose its sacred and tender and thrice-sanctified associations. By the way, is it not ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... Oliver had been recalled by his father's death from a short stay at Cambridge to the little family estate at Huntingdon, which he quitted for a farm at St. Ives. We have seen his mood during the years of personal rule, as he dwelt in "prolonging" and "blackness" amidst fancies of coming death, the melancholy which formed the ground of his nature feeding itself on the inaction of the time. But his energy made itself felt the moment the tyranny was over. His father had sat, with three of his uncles, in the later Parliaments of Elizabeth. Oliver had himself ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... melancholy and most unsatisfactory satisfaction to know that you have made a person uncomfortable. It is folly for you to suppose for a moment that an angry speech of yours will turn a man from a course of which ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... should once break, if the people should in general, or any great portion of them, should come to the conclusion, that there is not justice for the poor, that they exist at the arbitrary will of their task-masters, that, in short, they are not under the protection of the laws, melancholy would be the consequences; such indeed as cannot be contemplated without horror. Who is there that can say what an awful retribution might be exacted! When once such a spirit breaks forth, no one ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... church. The old nuns said that I was certainly labouring under some deep sorrow, of which I had no hope to be cured except through the protection of the Holy Virgin, and the young ones asserted that I was either melancholy or misanthropic. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "you could not have avoided noticing it. It was after that occurrence that I remonstrated with him; and for a few days thereafter he was better. Then he began again, finally giving way altogether, with the melancholy result that you have all witnessed. I knew how injurious to his interests it would be, and how seriously it would weaken discipline if you men should once come to understand that your skipper was a drunkard; so I let it be understood among you that Mr Purchas ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... searching through as many of the lodging-houses as were likely to be chosen by the Spaniards. The third he spent in meandering disconsolately through the cafes. Still there were no signs of them. Upon this Buttons fell into a profound melancholy. In fact it was a very hard case. There seemed nothing left for him to do. How could he ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... shook Mr Pecksniff now; for his lame attempt to seem composed was melancholy in the last degree. His anger changed to meekness, and his ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... evening, we arrived at our destination, and our melancholy deposition had been taken down by the proper authorities, Cameron and I went out for a quiet walk, to endeavour with the assistance of the soothing influence of nature to shake off something of the gloom which paralyzed our ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... every day for a year to some place where her little one played while alive, or to the spot where its body was burned, and milks her breasts into the air. This is accompanied by plaintive mourning and weeping and piteous calling upon her little one to return, and sometimes she sings a hoarse and melancholy chant, and dances with a wild, ecstatic ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... with whom we are acquainted, is reputed to have cured one of the Argonauts of barrenness, by exhibiting the rust of iron dissolved in wine, for the space of ten days. The same physician used hellebore as a purgative on the daughters of King Proteus, who were labouring under hypochondriasis or melancholy. Bleeding was also a remedy of very early origin, and said to have been first suggested by the hypopotamus or sea horse, which at a certain time of the year was observed to cast itself on the sea shore, and to wound itself among the rocks or stones, to relieve its plethora. Podalerius, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... the men. CHALMERS (the host) makes frantic signs to his wife, who (having, somehow, been "squared") affects not to see. A few desperate attempts are made to express a polite joy; but the lunch languishes, and, darkness closet over the melancholy scene. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, November 12, 1892 • Various
... a former work. It never for a moment struck him that the men who had once hailed him "great", should now admonish him as a result of the honest exercise of their critical faculties. No; there was conspiracy against him, and he tortured himself into a pitiable state of wrath and melancholy. A later generation has been less harsh in its judgment. The controversial parts of Lavengro have become less controversial and the magnificent parts have become more magnificent, and it has taken its place as a star of the ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... gravity, with all the causes of it, ever made him a melancholy, a morose, a despairing, or even a desponding man. Far from that. The man of sorrows Himself sometimes rejoiced in spirit. Not sometimes only, but often He lifted up His heart and thanked His Father for the work ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... have Rome Christian, spreader of darkness and of degradation, the Rome of the Popes and the monks. The Latins "were, almost without exception, sunk in the most brutish and barbarous ignorance, so that, according to the unanimous accounts of the most credible writers, nothing could be more melancholy and deplorable than the darkness that reigned in the western world during this century.... In the seminaries of learning, such as they were, the seven liberal sciences were taught in the most unskilful and miserable manner, and that by the monks, who esteemed the arts and sciences no further ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... popularly supposed to dislike wet, but I have seen two of them in a steady rain conduct an interview with all the gravity and deliberation for which these affairs are celebrated. The slow approach, with frequent pauses to sit down and meditate, or "view the landscape o'er," the earnest and musical—if melancholy—exchange of salutations, the almost imperceptible drawing nearer, with the slightly waving tail the only sign of excitement, and at last the instantaneous dash, the slap or scratch (so rapid one can never tell ...
— Upon The Tree-Tops • Olive Thorne Miller
... harmony is so essential, when we should aid and assist each other with all our abilities, when our hearts should be open to information and our hands ready to administer relief, to find distrusts and jealousies taking possession of the mind and a party spirit prevailing affords a most melancholy reflection, and forebodes no good." The hoarse murmur of impending mutiny emphasized strongly the words written on the same day to Duane: "The history of the war is a history of false hopes and temporary expedients. Would to God they were to ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... him with the most ardent affection—such an affection as a sister seldom manifests toward a brother. It was rather the attachment of a mother for her child; inasmuch as Nisida studied all his comforts—watched over him, as it were, with the tenderest solicitude—was happy when he was present, melancholy when he was absent, and seemed to be constantly racking her imagination to devise new means ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... lent the true radiance to all this summer glory. I read Heine and listened to Schumann, and I breathed the subtle penetrating fragrance of the linden blossoms, the wonderful fragrance full of poignant melancholy and sweet longing that does not touch our senses ere love has deeply nestled in our Heart. I had travelled through so many lands and yet had never smelled the perfume of the linden blossoms, so that it was as though the great linden tree had ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... Swift's real happiness ended, and he became more and more possessed by the melancholy which too often accompanies the broadest humour, and which, in his case, was constitutional. It was, no doubt, to relieve it, that he resorted to the composition of the doggerel verses, epigrams, riddles, and trifles exchanged betwixt ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... deepest tragedy also; for the marks of stitches forcibly cut were to be seen under one of the pockets—stitches which must have held something as narrow as an umbrella-band and no longer than the little strip at which Mr. Gryce had been looking one night in a melancholy little short of prophetic. ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green
... And as always happens at such times, a third urge appeared abruptly, an urge momentarily as strong as the other two—the urge to speak, to tell and ask all about it. But even as I started to phrase the first crazily happy greeting, my throat lumped, as I'd known it would, with the awful melancholy of all that was forever lost, with the uselessness of any communication, with the impossibility of recreating the past, our individual pasts, any pasts. And as it always does, the third ...
— The Night of the Long Knives • Fritz Reuter Leiber
... of the word buckle, in the signification of bend, is exceedingly common both among seamen and builders. For its use among the former I can vouch; and among the latter, see the evidence at the coroner's inquest on the late melancholy and mysterious accident at the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various
... bell, That over wood and wild and mountain dell Wanders so far, chasing all thoughts unholy With sounds most musical, most melancholy. Human Life. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... Very sad has been the news that we have had here of your Reverence and of the other fathers, and we were even assured that you had all been killed. Consequently, the news from your Reverence served me as a special source of joy, notwithstanding the melancholy information contained therein of those insurrections. I trust implicitly through God that your person will be kept safe for the service of both Majesties. And I hope that that fleet which I have been able to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... 'and that on the day of the week when he was wont to appear most melancholy, for to-morrow is the Sabbath. He now no longer looks forward to the Sabbath with dread, but appears to reckon on it. What a happy change! and to think that this change should have been produced by a few words, seemingly careless ones, proceeding from ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... flageolets, their plaintive tunes drowned in the din of big bass drums and blatant trumpets. In an eddy in the seething crowd was a placid-faced Aymara, bedecked in the most tawdry manner with gewgaws from Birmingham or Manchester, sedately playing a melancholy tune on a rustic syrinx or Pan's pipe, charmingly made from little tubes ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... SIR:[15] It is my melancholy duty to inform you that the Hon. Timothy O. Howe, Postmaster-General, and lately a Senator of the United States, died yesterday at Kenosha, Wis., at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. By reason of this afflicting event the President directs that the Executive Departments of the Government and the offices ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 2) of Volume 8: Chester A. Arthur • James D. Richardson
... almost universally over Scotland; they appear rather in the spirit than in the plot and scene and characters of the typical Scottish ballad. They supply, unquestionably, a large portion of that feeling of mystery, of over-shadowing fate, and melancholy yearning—that air of another world surrounding and infecting the life of the senses—which seems to distinguish the body and soul of Scottish ballad poetry from the more matter-of-fact budget ...
— The Balladists - Famous Scots Series • John Geddie
... as well as myself were silent during the meal. The lady retired as soon as it was finished. My inexplicable melancholy increased. It did not pass unnoticed by Welbeck, who inquired, with an air of kindness, into the cause of my visible dejection. I am almost ashamed to relate to what extremes my folly transported me. Instead of answering him, I was weak enough to ...
— Arthur Mervyn - Or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 • Charles Brockden Brown
... he, "whether any one expects a feast to-night, from a few unlucky remarks which fell from me this morning; if so, gentlemen, I wish immediately to dispel the pleasing delusion, assuring you of the melancholy fact, that my golden pippins have fallen ...
— Louis' School Days - A Story for Boys • E. J. May
... a melancholy drawling voice from a lanky man who sat doubled up with his long face in his hands and his elbows resting on his knees. "Just brings ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... to Florida, and leads us through scenes of romance, crime, blood and woe—through many Indian tribes, across the continent, to the Mississippi, where he finds his melancholy grave. ...
— Benjamin Franklin, A Picture of the Struggles of Our Infant Nation One Hundred Years Ago - American Pioneers and Patriots Series • John S. C. Abbott
... heavy darkness. The air was thick with unwholesome odours rising from the lake-like swamp beyond the drooping circle of trees. He walked a little way towards the sea, and sat down upon a log. A faint land-breeze was blowing, a melancholy soughing came from the edge of the forest only a few hundred yards back, sullen, black, impenetrable. He turned his face inland unwillingly, with a superstitious little thrill of fear. Was it a coyote calling, or had he indeed heard ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... is cooler towards me than he was before he went home. Martha still declines eating more than enough to keep body and soul together, and sits at the table with the air of a martyr. Her father lives on crackers and stewed prunes, and when he has eaten them, fixes his melancholy eyes on me, watching every mouthful with an air of plaintive regret that I will ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... author; member of the Cenacle, which held its sessions at D'Arthez's home on rue des Quatre-Vents, during the Restoration. He disparaged Leon Giraud's beliefs, went under a Rabelaisian guise, careless, lazy and skeptical, also inclined to be melancholy and happy at the same time; nick-named by his friends the "Regimental Dog." Fulgence Ridal and Joseph Bridau, with other members of the Cenacle, were present at an evening party given by Madame Veuve Bridau, ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... were poison to the Dives, and made them melancholy."[3] You pity them, and they will sneer at you. But what have we here?—"Characters of Imagination—Juliet—Viola;" are these romantic young ladies the pillars which are to sustain your moral edifice? Are they to serve as examples ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... intimate with him in 1618, and the nobleman Carl von Endern, who copied out the entire manuscript of the Aurora. These friends frequently encouraged Boehme to break his enforced silence, and he himself was restless and melancholy, feeling that he was "entrusted with a talent which he ought to put to usury and not return to God singly and without improvement, like the lazy servant." "It was with me," he writes, describing his years of silence, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... looked brilliantly successful, and declared to Mr. Rupert Gunning that nothing made a show so interesting as having something up for it. She even encouraged him to his accustomed jibes at her Connemara speculation, and personally conducted him to stall No. 548, and made merry over its melancholy occupant in a way that scandalised Patsey, and convinced Mrs. Spicer that Fanny's pocket was even harder ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... of the beach began to be cold to our bare feet; the frogs set up their croaking in the marshes, and one solitary owl, from the end of the distant point, gave out his melancholy note, mellowed by the distance, and we began to think that it was high time for "the old man,'' as a shipmaster is commonly called, to come down. In a few minutes we heard something coming towards us. It was a man on horseback. ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... see him as he then was, in his boots and buckskins, his blue coat and waistcoat striped with buff and blue, like a farmer in his Sunday best; the heavy ploughman's figure firmly planted on its burly legs; his face full of sense and shrewdness, and with a somewhat melancholy air of thought, and his large dark eye "literally glowing" as he spoke. "I never saw such another eye in a human head," says Walter Scott, "though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time." With men, whether they were lords or ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... mind his insane vanity," said Arkwright, vaguely uneasy at the expression of her hazel eyes, at once so dark, mysterious, melancholy, so light and frank ...
— The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig • David Graham Phillips
... songs, a thousand times repeated, continued to answer each other from side to side of the glacier. Then we could hear no longer the voice of men, nor the bell of the church of Grindelwald, whose melancholy notes the wind had hitherto wafted to us. We were in the bosom of an immense wilderness, face to face with Heaven and the wonders of Nature. We scaled precipitous blocks of stone, and left behind us the snowy summits. The march became more and more painful. We crawled ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... me a melancholy satisfaction that the humble tribute which I wish to pay to the memory of your lamented son, in attaching his name to the enclosed plant, elicited such kind recognition from yourself. I need not assure you that I ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... with an old, pious, and gloomy aunt, up to the time when the law-student, destined in the first instance to the career in which his father had left an excellent reputation, had found himself introduced to a few judges' drawing-rooms, ancient, melancholy dwellings with faded pier-glasses, where he used to go to make a fourth at whist with venerable shadows. Jenkins's evening party was therefore a debut for this provincial, of whom his very ignorance and his southern adaptability made immediately ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... said Wally, in tones of melancholy. "Every fortune teller I ever saw told me that no ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... he heard the news, but he sank into a morose and enduring melancholy. He neglected his business, avoided his friends, and spent much of his time in the low taverns of the fishermen and seamen. There, amidst riot and devilry, he sat silently puffing at his pipe, with a set face ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... trouble, the probabilities are that your children will have consumption. If you both are of rheumatic proclivities, you may expect a manifestation of the same early in the life of your children. If you both are "nervous" or irritable in temper, both jealously inclined, or are morbid and melancholy, you need not be surprised at an intensifying of these qualities in ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... and as long as we observe no difference in bodily and mental energy after such losses, there is no danger to be apprehended from them. It is well established and attested by the experience of eminent physicians, that certain indispositions, especially those of hypochondriasis and complete melancholy and incurable by any other means, have been happily removed in persons of both sexes, by exchanging ...
— Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs: Three Essays on the Powers of Reproduction • John Davenport
... flambeaux. Down the high street, between the lofty, many-storeyed and balconied houses, where every window, every balcony, every housetop was crammed with a dense mass of spectators, all dressed and masked in fantastic gorgeousness, the procession took its melancholy way. Over the scene flashed and played the shifting cross-lights and shadows from the moving torches: red and blue Bengal lights flared up and died out again; and above the trampling of the horses and the measured ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... notice of these warnings. He loved solitude and was perfectly fearless. No one knew why he was so sad. Certainly he had lately lost his mother, and still wore a badge of crape on his arm. Of course, this had increased his melancholy, but it was not the original cause ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 30, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... suffer from the melancholy of a cellar: my solitude is gay with light and verdure; I attend, whenever I please, the fields' high festival, the Thrushes' concert, the Crickets' symphony; and yet my friendly commerce with the Spider is marked by an even greater devotion than the young typesetter's. ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... she gave him a shadowy, fleeting smile, which vanished almost before it had fully appeared. Her eyes were heavy and dim with unshed tears, and she was as pale as the mist clouds that drifted slowly across the sky and away over the eastern hills. Perhaps it was the melancholy of that smile appealing to his deep love that made Professor Young hurry toward ...
— The Secret of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... Writer" proffered further aid to the aspiring mind. Improvement, stark, blatant Improvement, advertised itself from that culturous and reeking compartment. But just below—Io was tempted to rub her eyes—stood Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy"; a Browning, complete; that inimitably jocund fictional prank, Frederic's "March Hares," together with the same author's fine and profoundly just "Damnation of Theron Ware"; Taylor's translation of Faust; "The [broken-backed] Egoist"; "Lavengro" (Io touched its magic pages with tender ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his harp,—three times Arose the well-known martial chimes, And thrice their high heroic pride In melancholy murmurs died. 'Vainly thou bidst, O noble maid,' Clasping his withered hands, he said, 'Vainly thou bidst me wake the strain, Though all unwont to bid in vain. Alas! than mine a mightier hand Has tuned my harp, my strings has spanned! ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... nor looked flattered; it seemed indeed to Longmore that she took his reappearance with no pleasure. But he was uncertain, for he immediately noted that in his absence the whole character of her face had changed. It showed him something momentous had happened. It was no longer self-contained melancholy that he read in her eyes, but grief and agitation which had lately struggled with the passionate love of peace ruling her before all things else, and forced her to know that deep experience is never peaceful. She was pale and had ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... of Israel, I come to Thine ancient dwelling-place to pour forth the heart of tortured Europe. Why does no impulse from Thy renovating will strike again into the soul of man? Faith fades and duty dies, and a profound melancholy falls upon the world. Our kings cannot rule, our priests doubt, and our multitudes toil and moan, and call in their madness upon unknown gods. If this transfigured mount may not again behold Thee, if Thou ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol III • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the gentlemen to their cigars, Edith was bubbling over with anxiety to confide to Mrs. Morton the joke about the "lady's cheeks coming off," and that gave the married women the chance to express melancholy convictions as to the wickedness of the world, to which ...
— The Vehement Flame • Margaret Wade Campbell Deland
... three hours or so after he went down, and the weather got dirtier and dirtier, and the scud drove by, and the wind sang and hummed through the rigging—it made me melancholy to listen to it. I could think of nothing but the youngster down below, and what I should say to his poor old uncle if anything happened. Well, soon after midnight I went down and turned into his hammock. I didn't go to sleep at once, for I remember very well listening to the creaking of the ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... bowed with a slow and gentle pace, clad always in such sober dress as befitted his ripe years. His face was long, his nose aquiline and his eyes rather large than small. His jaws were large and his lower lip protruded beyond the upper. His complexion was dark and his expression very melancholy and thoughtful. His manners, whether in public or at home, were wonderful, composed and restrained, and in all ways he was more courteous and ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... our legal readers, we feel convinced, that this week's sketch of the late Henry Cooper, the friend companion and intended biographer of the late Lord Erskine, will prove highly acceptable. The unexpected and melancholy event which deprived the bar of one of its most promising ornaments, and cast a shade over the gay and talented circle in which he moved, must be fresh within the memory of our readers. As yet no memoir, no frail tribute to stamp even a fleeting remembrance of his learning, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of the late Henry Cooper - Barrister-at-Law, of the Norfolk Circuit; as also, of his Father • William Cooper
... HENCE loathed Melancholy Of Cerberus, and blackest midnight born, In Stygian Cave forlorn 'Mongst horrid shapes, and shreiks, and sights unholy, Find out som uncouth cell, Where brooding darknes spreads his jealous wings, And the night-Raven sings; ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... her as Miss Inches did, she thought, or discovered such fine things in her character. Ten long years and a half had she lived with Papa and the children, and not one of them had found out that her eyes were full of soul, and an expression "of mingled mirth and melancholy unusual in a childish face, and more like that of Goethe's Mignon than any thing else in the world of fiction!" Johnnie had never heard of "Mignon," but it was delightful to be told that she resembled her, and she made Miss Inches a present of the whole of her ...
— Nine Little Goslings • Susan Coolidge
... did not attend the trials of the Nor'westers at York, and seems to have returned to Britain with his wife and children before the end of the year 1818. He was ill and in a most melancholy state of mind. {136} Unquestionably, he had not secured a full measure of justice in the courts of Canada. A man strong in health might have borne his misfortunes more lightly. As it was, Selkirk let his wrongs prey upon his spirit. ...
— The Red River Colony - A Chronicle of the Beginnings of Manitoba • Louis Aubrey Wood
... here, with a report of Lord Temple's dangerous illness. I called at your brother W. Grenville's to know the particulars, but did not find him. I then learnt from Fitzherbert that the crisis was happily passed, and that you and Lady Buckingham were released from the melancholy alarms which you both had on so dreadful a visitation of Providence. I hope this letter will find you all as well as you can wish or expect. I do not know how far employment and a great situation compensate to you for other ...
— Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of George the Third - From the Original Family Documents, Volume 1 (of 2) • The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos
... had not been without her suspicions that Diana was proving false to the melancholy Byronic hero of her early dreams. But as "things seen are mightier than things heard," or suspected, the realization that it was actually so came to her with almost the shock of perfect surprise. This was succeeded by a queer, little ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of ascending the throne without drawing the sword. [35] His emissaries, dispersed in the capital, assured the guards, that provided they would abandon their worthless prince, and the perpetrators of the murder of Pertinax, to the justice of the conqueror, he would no longer consider that melancholy event as the act of the whole body. The faithless Praetorians, whose resistance was supported only by sullen obstinacy, gladly complied with the easy conditions, seized the greatest part of the assassins, and signified to the senate, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... report by what token of respect and affection it may be proper for the Congress of the United States to express the deep sensibility of the nation to the event of the decease of their late President, James Abram Garfield; and that so much of the message of the President as refers to that melancholy event be ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman
... "And haply I so nimbly might have made Between you, that the stroke I might have caught, And with my head, as with a buckler, stayed: For little ill my dying would have wrought. Anyhow I shall die; and — that debt paid — My melancholy death will profit nought: When, had I died, defending thee in strife, I could not better have ...
— Orlando Furioso • Lodovico Ariosto
... level, well-made road through a barren wind-swept country whence the meager harvest had already been garnered. There were no villages. All around was a houseless land, rolling miles of brown and green, broken and checkered by bits of forest and clumps of dark melancholy pines. The road ran ever and anon right down to where the cold, green waves broke upon the rocky shore. In a few weeks that coast would be ice-bound and snow-covered, and then the silence of the God-forsaken country would ...
— The Czar's Spy - The Mystery of a Silent Love • William Le Queux
... a tailor, and married a young country girl, for whom he had formed a devoted attachment. He established a village library, and debating club, became a diligent reader, a leader in every literary movement in the district, and a writer of poetry of some merit. A poem on the melancholy story of "Fair Helen of Kirkconnel," which he composed at this period, obtained a somewhat extensive popularity. To aid his finances, he became an itinerant seller of cloth,—a mode of life which gave him an opportunity of studying character, and visiting ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... even melancholy in its every aspect, for the scattered denizens of a vast region round about Mancos's principal street was the local Great White Way that furnished all the fun and frolic most of them ever knew. To it flocked miners from their dusky, pine-clad gorges in the north, grangers from the then ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson
... Tuesday evening to say good-bye to Miss Lowther. Early on the Wednesday Mr. Fenwick was to drive her to Westbury, whence the railway would take her round by Chippenham and Swindon to Loring. On the Tuesday morning she was very melancholy. Though she knew that it was right to go away, she greatly regretted that it was necessary. She was angry with herself for not having better known her own mind, and though she was quite sure that were Mr. Gilmore to repeat his offer ...
— The Vicar of Bullhampton • Anthony Trollope
... animals who wallow in the mire and eat corruption. This seems strange to us: much stranger to an Angel is it how any one can take pleasure in any thing so filthy, so odious, so loathsome as sin. Many men, as I have been saying, wonder what possible pleasure there can be in any thing so melancholy as religion. Well: be sure of this,—it is more wonderful to an Angel, what possible pleasure there can be in sinning. It is more wonderful, I say. He would turn away with horror and disgust, both because sin is so base a thing in ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... should be able to bring over a great body of his disciples to the royal side, found himself on a sudden an object of contempt and abhorrence to those who had lately revered him as their spiritual guide, sank into a deep melancholy, and hid himself from the public eye. Deputations waited on several of the London clergy imploring them not to judge of the dissenting body from the servile adulation which had lately filled the London Gazette, and exhorting them, placed as they were in the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... with the mist and the long, flat marshlands about him he confessed to the almighty Hump. And there was the Irish peasant who heard the voice of the Banshee calling through that mist, and heard other queer voices of supernatural beings whispering to the melancholy which had been bred in his brain in the wilds of Connemara. Here was the English mechanic, matter-of-fact, keen on his job, with an alert brain and steady nerves; and with him was the Lowland Scot, hard as nails, with uncouth speech and a savage fighting instinct. Soldiers who had ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... of these days," said Agnes, looking out of the window at the gaunt, dripping trees and gray sky and melancholy monoliths. "You ought to come to London and ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... junction with a greatly more numerous body of militia, which induced him to retrace his steps rapidly to the Ohio (which he recrossed), and arrived at Brandenburg on the very day that we got there. We found him leaning against the side of the wharf-boat, with sleepy, melancholy look—apparently the most listless, inoffensive youth that was ever imposed upon. I do not know what explanation he made General Morgan (of the lively manner in which he had acted under his order), but it seemed to be perfectly satisfactory, and he was ordered to report to Colonel ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke
... ushers. After that we parted and went homewards, it being market day at Brainford [Brentford]. I set my wife down and went with the coach to Mr. Crew's, thinking to have spoke with Mr. Moore and Mrs. Jem, he having told me the reason of his melancholy was some unkindness from her after so great expressions of love, and how he had spoke to her friends and had their consent, and that he would desire me to take an occasion of speaking with her, but ...
— Diary of Samuel Pepys, Complete • Samuel Pepys
... sands had been printed by the last footstep of Columbus. The solemn and sublime nature of the event that had followed, together with the fate and fortunes of those concerned in it, filled the mind with vague yet melancholy ideas. It was like viewing the silent and empty stage of some great drama when all the actors had departed. The very aspect of the landscape, so tranquilly beautiful, had an effect upon me; and as I paced the ...
— The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Vol. II) • Washington Irving
... shallow creek so near her feet. Suddenly the cry of the whip-Will's-widow filled the grove—"whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow! whip-Will's-widow!"—in headlong importunity until the whole air sobbed and quivered with the overcharge of its melancholy passion. Then as abruptly it was hushed, the echoes died, and Barbara, at the grove gate, recalled the other twilight hour, a counterpart of this in all but its sadness, when, on this spot, ...
— John March, Southerner • George W. Cable
... about it, we delight in it for fear it should escape us. A really happy man says little and laughs little; he hugs his happiness, so to speak, to his heart. Noisy games, violent delight, conceal the disappointment of satiety. But melancholy is the friend of pleasure; tears and pity attend our sweetest enjoyment, and great joys call for ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... in advance. In these months he had passed her in the race of life. He felt it, but in many ways was also dimly aware that Leila was less expressively free in word and action, sometimes to his surprise liking to be alone at the age when rare moods of mild melancholy trouble the time of rapid female florescence. There was still between them acceptance of equality, with on his part a certain growth of respectful consideration, on hers a gentle perception of his gain in manliness ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell
... crystallized lime and porphyritic conglomerates, tinted mauve-purple as if by manganese. Further on, the path, striking over broken divides and long tracts of stony ground, became rough riding: it was bordered by the usual monotonous, melancholy hills of reddish and greenish trap, whose slaty and schist-like edges in places stood upright. On the summit of the last Col appeared the ruins of an outwork, a large square and a central heap of boulder-stones. Straight in front rose the block that backs our destination, the Jebel el-Sni', ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... his relation Dunois, walking with a step so slow and melancholy that he seemed to rest on his kinsman and supporter, came Louis Duke of Orleans, the first prince of the Blood Royal (afterwards King, by the name of Louis XII), and to whom the guards and attendants rendered their homage as such. The jealously ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... soul, dwelling exclusively on one only being, grasps in the end the moral elements that surround it, and sees in them the makings of the future. The woman who loves feels the same presentiments that later illuminate her motherhood. Hence a certain melancholy, a certain inexplicable sadness which surprises men, who are one and all distracted from any such concentration of their souls by the cares of life and the continual necessity for action. All true love becomes to a woman an active contemplation, ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... and could not help smiling as his eye fell upon a figure seated on the horse block. He was looking out through the gateway, and did not at first see Philip. The expression of his face was dull and almost melancholy, but as Philip's eye fell on him his attention was attracted by some passing object in the street. His face lit up with amusement. His lips twitched and his eyes twinkled. A moment later and the transient humour passed, and the dull, listless expression ...
— Saint Bartholomew's Eve - A Tale of the Huguenot WarS • G. A. Henty
... their methods of employing the time, which hung heavy on their hands. In all such situations the energy and hopefulness of the individual are the best guaranty for continued good health, whilst ennui, listlessness, and idleness are the pretty sure forerunners of melancholy and homesickness, which lead to serious maladies. It would be hard to find a more salubrious site for a camp than Johnson's Island. Naturally well drained, diversified with grove and meadow, open to the breeze from every quarter, washed by the pure waters of Lake Erie, it is to-day, ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... a plain, bare, interminable plain, an ocean of grass, of wheat, and of oats, without a clump of trees or any rising ground, a striking and melancholy picture of the life which they must be leading in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... has a melancholy story to tell you, for which I crave your sympathy. Will you be so good as ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... the melancholy, woebegone faces of my captain and brother officers on our re-assembling on board. It was really most ludicrous. However, a sea voyage which included several sharp gales of wind soon erased all sad memories; things gradually 'brightened,' and ere many weeks had passed ...
— Sketches From My Life - By The Late Admiral Hobart Pasha • Hobart Pasha
... reminded us of a still more melancholy fact which yet awakened no little mirth. It was in praise of De Wet, who in spite of his blue spectacles, seemed by far the most clear-sighted of all the Boer generals, and who, notwithstanding his illiteracy, ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... She nods to us, without disturbing herself. Like the pioneer, this woman is in the prime of life; her appearance would seem superior to her condition: and her apparel even betrays a lingering taste for dress. But her delicate limbs appear shrunken; her features are drawn in; her eye is mild and melancholy; her whole physiognomy bears marks of a degree of religious resignation, a deep quiet of all passion, and some sort of natural and tranquil firmness, ready to meet all the ills of life, without fearing and without braving them. Her children cluster about her, full of health, turbulence, and energy; ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher
... Our melancholy was immediately dispersed, and its place taken by active anticipations of our journey. The North wind in the trees, instead of blustering dismissal, sounded to our ears like the fluttering of the blue-peter at the masthead of our voyage. Strange heart of man! A day back we were in tears ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne
... accordingly set out with fir, and the little feathery besoms gave a false scale and lent a strange air of a toy-shop to the moors. A great, rooty sweetness of bogs was in the air, and at all seasons an infinite melancholy piping of hill birds. Standing so high and with so little shelter, it was a cold, exposed house, splashed by showers, drenched by continuous rains that made the gutters to spout, beaten upon and buffeted by ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... manifests toward a brother. It was rather the attachment of a mother for her child; inasmuch as Nisida studied all his comforts—watched over him, as it were, with the tenderest solicitude—was happy when he was present, melancholy when he was absent, and seemed to be constantly racking her imagination to devise new means ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... martyr! Strew his bier With the last roses of the year; Shadow the land with sables; knell The harsh-tongued, melancholy bell; Beat the dull muffled drum, and flaunt The drooping banner; let the chant Of the deep-throated organ sob— One voice, one sorrow, one heart-throb, From land to land, from sea to sea— The huge world quires his elegy. Tears, love, and ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. I (of II.), Narrative, Lyric, and Dramatic • Emma Lazarus
... received in particular an enthusiastic greeting from Pope, who wrote on September 23rd: "Welcome to your native soil! Welcome to your friend! Thrice welcome to me! whether returned in glory, blessed with Court interest, the love and familiarity of the great, and filled with agreeable hopes, or melancholy with dejection, contemplative of the changes of fortune, and doubtful for the future—whether returned a triumphant Whig or a desponding Tory, equally all hail! equally beloved and welcome to me! If happy, I am to share in your elevation; if unhappy, you have still a ...
— Life And Letters Of John Gay (1685-1732) • Lewis Melville
... emerged from his solitude; he came forth as a preacher, and his success was unequalled. All Parma, gentle and simple, flocked to hear the famous devotee—slender, ill-clad, so handsome and yet so profoundly melancholy. And ere he began each sermon, Fabrice looked earnestly round his congregation to see if Clelia ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VIII • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... are in the very atmosphere of the brown hills. This was a Spanish gentleman in the best sense of the word, as scrupulous in personal cleanliness as any Englishman, polished, accomplished, bright and fascinating, and yet carrying with him a subtle air of melancholy and romance which lingers still among the men and women of ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... and shipyards to the breaking point, Germany could not catch up with her great rival. The first half of the new year saw no matching of the grand fleets. It did produce a few gallant combats, and was marked by a melancholy succession of German submarine attacks on defenseless craft. The sacrifice of lives among neutrals and the Allies cast a pall ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... not a limb is persuaded, perhaps, he is wise; but was this the purpose wherefor mankind was created? Ours is the choice—whether wisdom shall be the honoured wife of our passions and feelings, our thoughts and desires, or the melancholy bride of death. Let the tomb have its stagnant wisdom, but let there be wisdom also for the hearth where ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... coldness of his address, not more than by the nature of the times that he bade me recall, I was plunged in melancholy. I felt myself surrounded as with deserts of friendlessness, and the delight of my welcome was turned to ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... delightful upon them; its acts and functions are free and lively: there are others who seem to bear their religion as a burden, to drag their duties as a chain—as no vital part of themselves, but rather a cumbrous appendage: this is a decisive and melancholy symptom of a heart alienated from God. There is no genuine religion, no real contact of the heart with the best of beings, unless it makes us continually resort to Him as our chief joy. The psalmist is always expressing his fervent ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... got out, and there, sure enough, one of the rear tires presented itself to her view in a state of melancholy collapse. It had picked up a horseshoe together with the three jagged nails adhering to it, and was patently, hopelessly, irretrievably punctured. Grace had seen a hundred repairs made on the road, but up to now ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... fully see the form of the building of which we say "This is a Gothic cathedral"—of the picture of which we say "Christ before Pilate"—or of the piece of music of which we say "A cheerful waltz by Strauss" or "A melancholy adagio by Beethoven." Now it is this fragmentary, superficial attention which we most often give to art; and giving thus little, we find that art gives us little, perhaps nothing, in return. For understand: you can be utterly perfunctory ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... who was the master's son, was now less forward than I. The first time he spoke to me after we were at Yarmouth, which was not till two or three days, for we were separated in the town to several quarters; I say, the first time he saw me, it appeared his tone was altered, and looking very melancholy, and shaking his head, asked me how I did, and telling his father who I was, and how I had come this voyage only for a trial, in order to go farther abroad; his father turning to me with a very grave and concerned tone, "Young man," says he, "you ought never to ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... "the moving waters at their priest-like task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores"; I will watch the seahorses, with their white crests, in endless rank, charging the shore; I will listen to the sound which Homer heard so long before your Christ was born—the sound so monotonous, so melancholy, yet so soothing and sustaining, which stirs a pulse of poetry in the very dullest and most prosaic brain. But before I go I send you this Easter egg, to show that I do not forget you. Keep it, I pray you; study well its inscriptions; and perhaps, after all, you will ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... not forget you...Thou wilt write me volumes, my dearest love, wilt thou not? No pleasure is at all equal to that I receive from thy letters. The idea of how happy we MIGHT be will sometimes intrude itself and take away the little spirits that thy melancholy situation leaves me. I can write no longer with this confounded pen. I will find a better to-morrow. May the choicest blessings of Heaven go with thee, thou dearest, kindest, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... a long string of wild-fowl flying low over the melancholy-looking water, and they were watched ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the West—with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the earth had come. It was a magnificent spread of loneliness which bore no witness to the fact that it had seen the teeming of life in better ages long ago. The weird, yet beautiful scene, spread in a melancholy panorama before his eyes, drove his thoughts into gloomy abstraction with its dismal, depressing influence. Its funereal, oppressive aspect smote him suddenly with the chill of ...
— The Jameson Satellite • Neil Ronald Jones
... but we do not extend it to paupers. But should a pauper get so close to us as to lay hold of us, vowing he was once our friend, how shake him loose? Tinman foresaw that it might be a matter of five pounds thrown to the dogs, perhaps ten, counting the glass. He put on his hat, full of melancholy presentiments; and it was exactly half-past five o'clock of the spring afternoon when he knocked at ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... telegraph road, not far from his centre, where a shoulder jutting out from the ridge, and now called "Lee's Hill," afforded him a clear view of the city. The destruction of the place, and the suffering of the inhabitants, aroused in him a deep melancholy, mingled with exasperation, and his comment on the scene was probably as bitter as any speech which he uttered during the whole war. Standing, wrapped in his cape, with only a few officers near, he ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... arrived when she reached the castle. Miss Carew glanced at her melancholy face as she entered, but asked no questions. Presently, however, she put down her book, considered for ...
— Cashel Byron's Profession • George Bernard Shaw
... Jones has improved the story, and heightened the incident in the last act, which renders the whole more moving; after the scene of parting between Essex, and Southampton, which is very affecting, Rutland's distress upon the melancholy occasion of parting from her husband, is melting to the last degree. It is in this scene Mr. Barry excells all his cotemporaries in tragedy; he there shews his power over our passions, and bids the heart bleed, in every accent of anguish. After Essex is carried out to execution, Mr. Jones introduces ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... scarcely be admitted as a testimony of their character in the early times of their prosperity; and though a sadness of expression might be observed in the present oppressed population, they can not be considered a grave or melancholy people. Much, indeed, may be learned from the character of the modern Egyptians; and notwithstanding the infusion of foreign blood, particularly of the Arab invaders, every one must perceive the strong resemblance they bear to their ancient predecessors. It is a common error to suppose that the ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... young egotists, who are angry at being deprived of their personal ease and independence; or elderly pensive gentlemen, in public offices and clubs, who are no longer fit for action, and, being denied action, fall into melancholy; or feverish journalists, who live on the proceeds of excitement, who feel the pulse and take the temperature of the War every morning, and then rush into the street to announce their fluttering hopes and fears; or cosmopolitan philosophers, to whom the change from London to Berlin means ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... indication that seriously she would drink no more. And she gave a great sigh. "School over! And the only son going out into the world! How time flies!" And she gave another great sigh, implying an immense melancholy due to this vision of the reality of things. Then she remembered her courage, and the device of leaning hard, and ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... After this melancholy reflection, he prepared to pass the night with as little discomfort as possible. Godfrey went off to the reef to get a new stock of eggs and mollusks, with which he had to be contented, and then, tired out, he came back to the tree and soon fell asleep, while Tartlet, whose ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... it into his head that he had a soul. The soul is a veritable pitfall." However that may be, it was the discovery, or at least suppositious discovery, that he had a soul, a soul in harmony with the melancholy soul of Ireland, that drove Mr. Moore back to Dublin, and, for moments, even farther west to the home country of his family about Lough Gara in Mayo. This discovery was foreshadowed in "Evelyn Innes" (1898), in which Mr. Moore grows curious about the belief in ancestral memory ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... a man of dwarfish stature came towards them. Under the dome of his tiny hat his unshaven face began to smile with pleasure and he was heard to murmur. The eyes were melancholy as ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... His melancholy thoughts were dissipated by a sudden increase in the shouting of the little ones. On regarding them attentively, he observed that they scattered themselves in the direction of the several huts, and ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... ultramarine; and under the reverberating light of the sun, the white facades, the slate roofs, and the granite wharves glowed dazzlingly. In the distance arose a confused noise in the warm atmosphere; and the idleness of Sunday, as well as the melancholy engendered by the summer heat, seemed to shed around ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... recollections; yet we seem to be, in general, little aware that for one solitary incident in our lives, preserved by memory, hundreds have been buried in the silent charnel-house of oblivion. We peruse the past, like a map of pleasing or melancholy recollections, and observe lines crossing and re-crossing each other in a thousand directions; some spots are almost blank; others faintly traced; and the rest a confused and perplexed labyrinth. A thousand feelings ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... hand, whose frank countenance and dreamy, melancholy eyes won every sympathy, was unable to protect himself against the traps laid for him by the judge or to counteract Vaucheray's lies. He burst into tears, talked too much, or else did not talk when he should have talked. Moreover, his counsel, one of the Leaders of ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... the sailing-party, I had a melancholy fit. I was restless, and after dark I put a shawl over my head and went out to walk. I went up a lonesome road, beyond our house. On one side I heard the water washing against the shore with regularity, as if it were breathing. On the other ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... the setting sun were now faintly gleaming on a vast sheet of shallow stagnant water, the Stagna di Biguglia, between the road and the sea, from which it is only separated by a low strip of alluvial soil. It was a solitary, a melancholy scene. A luxuriant growth of reeds fringes the margin of the lagoon, and heat and moisture combine to throw up a rank vegetation on its marshy banks. The peasants fly from its pestiferous exhalations, and ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... Pyramids, from the snows of Moscow, from Waterloo, they gather in one vast array with Ney, McDonald, Masenna, Duroc, Kleber, Murat, Soult, and other marshals in command. Forming, they silently pass in melancholy procession before the Emperor, and are dispersed with 'France' as the pass word and ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... education? Are the best instructed classes the least vicious? Has eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge diminished the power of the Tempter? So far from it, the consequences, hitherto at least, have been melancholy ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844 • Various
... the sunlight. All at once the wind awoke, and began to sing the strange, thin, monotonous Elysian ghost-song of the pine-wood—for she sat in a little grove of pines, and they were all around her. The sweet melancholy of the hour moved her spirit. So close was her heart to that of nature that, when alone with it, she seldom or never longed for her piano; she had the music, and did not need to hear it. When we are very near to God, we do not desire the Bible. When we ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... memory's tablet, while the mists of the "positive philosophy," "the absolute," and "the conditioned," float past unheeded, to the land of forgetfulness. God's prophetic symbols are the glorious embodiments of living truths, while man's philosophic abstractions are the melancholy ghosts ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... indemnity to witnesses, or, in plain words, for a bill to reward all who might give evidence, true or false, against the Earl of Orford. This bill Pitt supported, Pitt, who had himself offered to be a screen between Lord Orford and public justice. These are melancholy facts. Mr. Thackeray omits them, or hurries over them as fast as he can; and, as eulogy is his business, he is in the right to do so. But, though there are many parts of the life of Pitt which it is more agreeable to contemplate, we know none more instructive. What must ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... will come when you, in a melancholy hour, shall reckon up your miseries by your murders in America. Life, with you, begins to wear a clouded aspect. The vision of pleasurable delusion is wearing away, and changing to the barren wild of age and sorrow. The poor reflection of having served your king ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... the train kept getting further and further north, my feelings kept getting more and more mixed. It come to me that I might be steering straight fur a bunch of trouble. The feeling that sadness and melancholy and seriousness was laying ahead of me kept me from really enjoying them dollar-apiece meals on the train. It was Martha that done it. All this past and gone love story I had been hearing about reminded me of Martha. And I was steering straight toward her, and no way out of it. How did ...
— Danny's Own Story • Don Marquis
... is melancholy," I replied; "it is one of those cases which a man requires all his fortitude ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... land of dreams, where even the high noon itself was dreamy; a melting together of earth and air and water in one eternal gentleness of revery! Whence came the melancholy of this? I had seen woods as solitary and streams as silent, I had felt nature breathing upon me a greater awe; but never before such penetrating and quiet sadness. I only know that this is the perpetual mood of those Southern shores, those rivers that wind in from the ocean among their narrowing ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... away, and, although crowds of monkeys came to examine Zingle in his cage, the poor Prince grew very pale and thin for lack of proper food, while the continuance of his unhappy imprisonment made him sad and melancholy. ...
— The Surprising Adventures of the Magical Monarch of Mo and His People • L. Frank Baum
... before alluded to the sad, dejected faces of the natives of North India; the Bengali seemed a trifle more melancholy, as is their reputation. We did not regret our departure, although it meant the loss of our faithful Indian guide, Dalle, and our travelling servant, Jusef, both with their long India bordered shawls artistically ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... day he would be watering his thousands of sheep along its rushing vein. That was John Mackenzie's intent and purpose as he trudged the dusty miles of gray hills, with their furze of gray sage, and their gray twilights which fell with a melancholy silence as chilling as the breath of death. For John Mackenzie was going into the sheeplands to become a master. He had determined it all by ...
— The Flockmaster of Poison Creek • George W. Ogden
... her hand. He held it very lightly, looking at her with his blue eyes, which indeed expressed a profound melancholy. ...
— The Odd Women • George Gissing
... finest collections of hollyhocks anywhere in cultivation, which had been under my special care for eleven years, and up to within a month of my resigning that position I had observed nothing uncommon amongst them; but before taking my final leave of them I had to witness the melancholy spectacle of bed after bed being smitten down, and amongst them many splendid seedlings, which had cost me years of patience and anxiety to produce. And again, upon taking a share and the management of this business, another infected collection fell to my lot, so that I have ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... the idea that the preservation of our liberties, the consummation of our citizenship, must be conserved and matured, not by standing alone and apart, sullen as the melancholy Dane, but by imbibing all that is American, entering into the life and spirit of our institutions, spreading abroad in sentiment, feeling the full force of the fact that while we are classed as Africans, ...
— Black and White - Land, Labor, and Politics in the South • Timothy Thomas Fortune
... first time England was now divided between two great parties. Matters proceeded with constantly increasing friction, and at last the struggle developed into civil war. Macaulay's summary of it, and Knight's picture of its culmination in that most melancholy tragedy, the execution of the King, cover the subject in its essential aspects, without ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... wound and walked across to the house from whence he came, at the door of which he dropped down and expired. Such was the catastrophe. Raja Muda survived his wounds, but being much deformed by them lives a melancholy example of the effects ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... My history and my rearing have been such that had I bowed before them, I had become the most gloomy, melancholy man that steps this gloomy, melancholy world. By now I might have found existence insupportable, and so—who knows? I might have set a term to it. But I had the wisdom to prefer laughter. Humanity is a delectable spectacle ...
— The Lion's Skin • Rafael Sabatini
... AEgean, which he much desired. In the pensive beauties of that delicate land, where perpetual autumn seems to reign, Coningsby found solace. There is something in the character of Grecian scenery which blends with the humour of the melancholy and the feelings of the sorrowful. Coningsby passed his winter at Rome. The wish of his grandfather had rendered it necessary for him to return to England somewhat abruptly. Lord Monmouth had not visited ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... younger boy, Maurice, he suffered a blow which had results more abiding than the melancholy wherewith for a year or two his genial nature was overshadowed. From that day onwards he was never wholly at ease among the pursuits which had been wont to afford him an unfailing resource against whatever troubles. He could no longer ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Louvois refused to let Dauger be put with Lauzun as valet. In 1675, however, he allowed Dauger to act as valet to Fouquet, but with Lauzun, said Louvois, Dauger must have no intercourse. Fouquet had then another prisoner valet, La Riviere. This man had apparently been accused of no crime. He was of a melancholy character, and a dropsical habit of body: Fouquet had amused himself by doctoring him and ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... forth its melancholy song, far down in the black depths beyond. The tide was high, and the breeze freshening every moment. Christian could have crept up to the man's very feet without being detected. Lying still upon the short, dry grass, he ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... to insult me, uncle," and Boris smiled his handsome melancholy smile, "very well, very well. Perhaps we Poles cannot keep our heads and hearts as well in check as you Germans; but that does not prevent us ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... the commission was sold, and the estate bought, what does Fanny do but fall into a deep melancholy? I found her crying one day, in her mother's room, where the two ladies had been at work ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... have become a raging madman. He put to death his niece Agrippina, with her two children, and ruled over the Senate with pitiless cruelty. His companion, Cocceius Nerva, filled with melancholy at the misfortunes of his country, resolved upon suicide; nor could all the entreaties or commands of Tiberius prevail upon him to live. In A.D. 35 Tiberius made his will, dividing his estate between Caius, the youngest son of Germanicus, and Tiberius Gemellus, the son of the second Drusus. ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... the solace, the aider, the familiar spirit of the thinker," cries the apologist; yet Plato the Divine thought without its aid, Augustine described the glories of God's city, Dante sang his majestic melancholy song, Savonarola reasoned and died, Alfred ruled well and wisely without it. Tyrtaeus sang his patriotic song, Roger Bacon dived deep into Nature's secrets, the wise Stagirite sounded the depths of human wisdom, equally unaided by it Harmodius and Aristogeiton twined the myrtle round their ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... Ponsonby thought of the days when she herself had been left to stay with her old uncle and aunt. In this very house while her husband was absent abroad, when she had assisted them to receive the poor young wife, sent home in failing health. She thought of the sad weeks, so melancholy in the impossibility of making an impression, or of leading poor Louisa from her frivolities, she recalled the sorrow of hearing her build on future schemes of pleasure, the dead blank when her prattle on them failed, the tedium of deeper subjects, and yet ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... taken to a house in the neighbourhood, till he was able to be removed to his own habitation. Thither I bent my way with Domingo, and undertook the sad task of preparing Virginia's mother and her friend for the melancholy event which had happened. When we reached the entrance of the valley of the river of Fan-Palms, some negroes informed us that the sea had thrown many pieces of the wreck into the opposite bay. We descended towards it; and ...
— Paul and Virginia • Bernardin de Saint Pierre
... calculated to excite mingled sensations both of a melancholy and pleasing nature. The hand that penned it is now among 'the just made perfect.' Your mother had given you up by faith. Have you ever ratified the vows she made in your behalf? When she bade you a long ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... wake only twenty-four cows had been killed, when but a few years previously ninety-four had been slaughtered on a similar occasion. Perhaps you will permit me to state in your columns that this year the festival, in this particular, has afforded as melancholy and unquestionable proof of distress as the last, while it bore other evidence, which though trivial in itself, is not unworthy of notice. Last year two theatrical shows visited us, displaying their "Red Barn" tragedies, and illuminated ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... saddened on account of her former husband, the Wazir's son, and she rejoiced with exceeding joy when she gazed upon the damsels and their charms; nor was her sire, the Sultan, less pleased and inspirited when he saw his daughter relieved of all her mourning and melancholy and his own vanished at the sight of her enjoyment. Then he asked her, "O my daughter, do these things divert thee? Indeed I deem that this suitor of thine be more suitable to thee than the son of the Wazir; and right soon (Inshallah!), O ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... or in the numerous commercial and industrial enterprises which were springing up at that time. There they have since remained. Their country-houses, if inhabited at all, are occupied only for a few months in summer, and too often present a melancholy spectacle of neglect and dilapidation. In the Black-earth Zone, on the contrary, where the soil still possesses enough of its natural fertility to make farming on a large scale profitable, the estates are in a very different condition. The owners cultivate ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... give a few melancholy dabs at his thighs, just as though they still ached from the long service in the tree; while Bluff managed to emit a ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts - Or, The Struggle for Leadership • George A. Warren
... interested. A melancholy, mysterious hero in a setting of silver-rimmed sand hills and wide blue sweeps of ocean was something that ought to lend piquancy to ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... she of a painter's dream,— Wise only as are artists wise, My artist-friend, Rolf Herschkelhiem, With deep sad eyes of oversize, And face of melancholy guise. ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... from a prattling mite who may herself be fatherless or motherless to-morrow. We think as little as possible of such things, putting them from us with the light comment that they happen daily elsewhere than in besieged towns, and making the best we can of a melancholy situation. ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... in the same week. Frequent changes of wind brought an alternation of mild rainy days and frosty mornings; but every time the wind came afresh from the north-west it was a little colder, a little more remindful of the icy winter blasts. Everywhere is autumn a melancholy season, charged with regrets for that which is departing, with shrinking from what is to come; but under the Canadian skies it is sadder and more moving than elsewhere, as though one were bewailing ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... room, in spite of profuse expenditure and gorgeous furniture, had the same air of discomfort. The servants too, were, with one single exception, from the hard-visaged housekeeper to the Calvinistic footman, a depressing and melancholy race. The only departure from this general rule was Kate's own maid, Rebecca Taylforth, a loudly-dressed, dark-eyed, coarse-voiced young woman, who raised up her voice and wept when Ezra departed for Africa. This damsel's presence was most disagreeable to Kate, ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... with one another, it was clear that I was regarded with some degree of suspicion, for they evidently considered I must have some secret ulterior object in visiting them. The Lapponic language is as liquid as the purest Italian, but it always struck me as being pervaded with a plaintive, melancholy, wailing tone. Anxious to conciliate my Lappish friends, I addressed a few words of Norwegian to one after another, but a shake of the head and a dull, glowering stare was the only answer I got. At length, finding one who appeared a principal man of the commonwealth, who spoke ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... have gone before them out of this life. And indeed, when we are advanced in years, there is not a more pleasing entertainment than to recollect in a gloomy moment the many we have parted with that have been dear and agreeable to us, and to cast a melancholy thought or two after those with whom, perhaps, we have indulged ourselves in whole nights of mirth and jollity. With such inclinations in my heart I went to my closet yesterday in the evening, and resolved ...
— Isaac Bickerstaff • Richard Steele
... is less intolerable. The daily duties are certainly scarcely more onerous and he had as chiefs, or colleagues, Xavier Charmes and Leon Dierx, Henry Roujon and Rene Billotte, but his office looked out on a beautiful melancholy garden with immense plane trees around which black circles ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... counted it as joy to share his hardships and perils. While upon the journey she had undertaken, she chanced to enter in his company, in order to pass the night, a dwelling, the funeral of whose dead master was being conducted with melancholy rites. Here, desiring to pry into the purposes of heaven by the help of a magical espial, she graved on wood some very dreadful spells, and caused Hadding to put them under the dead man's tongue; thus forcing him ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... left the shore, the Indians carried away the dead body of Captain Cook and those of the marines, to the rising ground, at the back of the town, where we could plainly see them with our glasses from the ships. This most melancholy accident appears to have been altogether unexpected and unforeseen, as well on the part of the natives as ourselves. I never saw sufficient reason to induce me to believe, that there was any thing of design, or a pre-concerted plan, on their side, or that ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... than was good for me—as much as 85 degrees, I should think,—and had an indigestion in consequence. While I was suffering from it, I wrote some sadly desponding poems, and a theological essay which took a very melancholy view of creation. When I got better I labelled them all "Pie-crust," and laid them by as scarecrows and solemn warnings. I have a number of books on my shelves that I should like to label with some such title; but, as they have great names on their title-pages,—Doctors ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... uneasy. He did not even enjoy his newspaper as much as he used to. He would put the paper down on his knee after reading it, and sit and stare at the high stool for a long time. There were some marks on the long legs which made him feel quite dejected and melancholy. They were marks made by the heels of the next Earl of Dorincourt, when he kicked and talked at the same time. It seems that even youthful earls kick the legs of things they sit on;—noble blood and lofty lineage do not prevent it. After looking at those marks, Mr. Hobbs would ...
— Little Lord Fauntleroy • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... the precise spot where we had met on my outward journey, but I did not pause there, pushing some twenty miles into the defile where we had seen the man-monkeys before we outspanned for the night. Two days later we passed the grave of the unhappy Siluce, and I had the melancholy satisfaction of seeing that, thus far, it had not been disturbed by wild animals. And on the following day we arrived at the spot where, according to the vision in which Bimbane had revealed to me the route I must follow in order ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... of the little melancholy clock almost from their birth upward, they had dwelt together, Nello and Patrasche, in the little hut on the edge of the village, with the cathedral spire of Antwerp rising in the northeast, beyond the great green plain of seeding grass and spreading corn ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... the feasts of the town; and as comedy arose out of those, so these will give rise to tragedy. For his entrance upon this new stage of his career, his coming into the town, is from the [40] first tinged with melancholy, as if in entering the town he had put off his country peace. The other Olympians are above sorrow. Dionysus, like a strenuous mortal hero, like Hercules or Perseus, has his alternations of joy and sorrow, of struggle and hard-won triumph. It is out of the sorrows ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... as if to read his words before he uttered them. Something in the happy surrender of her gesture, or in the brooding mystery of the Indian summer, when one seemed to hear the earth turn in the stillness, touched Christopher with a sudden melancholy, and it appeared to him when he went on again that a shadow had fallen over the brightness of the autumn fields. Disturbed by the unrest which follows any illuminating vision of ideal beauty, he asked himself almost ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Governor of Mahe and Marquis de Repentigny—for this was he—was a tall, spare man whose complexion the suns of the tropics had browned, whose hair was whitened with foreign service, and whose blue eyes and sensitive, handsome features wore a strange, settled look of melancholy. Evidently some long-standing sorrow threw its ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... not share that spirit," said Mordecai, who had turned a melancholy glance on Pash. "Unless nationality is a feeling, what force can it have ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... scarcely accomplished this task, when a strange, unnatural cry resounded throughout the cellar—a cry so indescribably fearful that it chilled his blood with horror. It was almost instantly followed by a low and melancholy wail, so intense, so solemn, so profoundly expressive of human misery, that Frank was convinced that some unfortunate being was near him, plunged in ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... infecting the air. The prisoners carried, wrapped in linen, the bodies of the newly dead to bury them in the sand beyond the city, where the real charge of the funeral was assumed by hyenas. Above the city hovered flocks of vultures from whose wings fell melancholy shadows upon the illuminated sand. Stas, witnessing all this, thought that the best for him and Nell would be to die ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... going to be drawn down amid the vortex. The people held on tightly for their lives. Tossing violently, however, up it again came to the surface, and floated evenly on the water. Still their condition was melancholy in the extreme. ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... with delight; she, who is always so melancholy, was singing like a bird. Besides, you highness knows how much she detests going out, and also that her character has a ...
— Louise de la Valliere • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... useful as well as the most ordinary plant in the valley is the American aloe, or "Century Plant."[38] It is the largest of all herbs. Not naturally social, it imparts a melancholy character to the landscape as it rises solitary out of the arid plain. Most of the roads are fenced with aloe hedges. While the majority of tropical trees have naked stems with a crown of leaves on the top, the aloe reverses this, and looks like a great chandelier as its ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... awful silence. At length, after consultation, we determined to steer west and by north by compass, the make of the land indicating the existence of a river. We continued to march all day through a country untrodden before by an European foot. Save that a melancholy crow now and then flew croaking overhead, or a kangaroo was seen to bound at a distance, the picture of solitude was complete and undisturbed. At four o'clock in the afternoon we halted near a small pond of water, where we took ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... and though she still did not meet his eye, he accepted the nod with a grim look that passed in a moment into a melancholy laugh. ...
— Simon • J. Storer Clouston
... indecorous to begin to speak of plans and what was to be done afterwards, so long as her dead husband was still master of the oppressed and melancholy house; but her mind, as may be supposed, was occupied by them in the intervals of other thoughts. She was not of the Warrender breed, but a woman of lively feelings; and as soon as the partner of her life was out of her reach she had begun ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... while then. I knew what he meant—that I was to conquer the world, somehow, and the idea seemed to me so absurd I could hardly help laughing as melancholy as ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... knew to be so small. But she had no alternative at the time and trusted that it would not be long before she would be able to procure the situation she had in view, or some other. The tea remained untasted on the table, for Isabel was absorbed by the melancholy thoughts that filled her heart. She tried to feel resigned, but her pride was wounded at the idea of becoming a 'governess.' She had been the spoiled petted daughter of a wealthy merchant of the city of New York, whose chief delight had been to indulge her ...
— Isabel Leicester - A Romance • Clotilda Jennings
... last few days, gave way, and she sunk down into a condition of mind that was almost despair. Towards evening, her husband and son came home drunk, and lay all night stupid. In the morning, they stole off by day-light, and she was left alone with her little ones, to brood over her melancholy prospect. She could not, of course, go to market, for she had nothing to sell, nor anything with which to purchase ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... selection), and the delicate draperies; an open grate full of glowing coals, to temper the sea winds; and in the midst of it, between a landscape by Enneking and an Indian in a canoe in a canyon, by Brush, he saw a somber landscape by a master greater than Millet, a melancholy subject, treated ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... Brother, take a delight to keep and increase your music. You will not believe what a want I find of it, in my melancholy times. ...
— An English Garner - Critical Essays & Literary Fragments • Edited by Professor Arber and Thomas Seccombe
... months? Just because he is too lazy and pleasure-loving to hunt and shoot. He strums the piano, and sketches, and runs after married women, and reads literary books and poems. He actually plays the flute; but I never let him bring it into my house. If he would only—[she is interrupted by the melancholy strains of a flute coming from an open window above. She raises herself indignantly in the hammock]. Randall, you have not gone to bed. Have you been listening? [The flute replies pertly]. How vulgar! ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... companionship may have brought Hood's natural qualities of mind into early growth, and helped them into early ripeness. Striking as the difference was, in some respects, between them, in other respects the likeness was quite as striking. Both were playful in manner, but melancholy by constitution, and in each there lurked an unsuspected sadness; both had tenderness in their mirth, and mirth in their tenderness; and both were born punsters, with more meaning in their puns than met the ear, and constantly bringing into sudden and surprising revelation the wonderful ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... The sight of the boy clinging, sobbing, to his mother aroused within his savage breast a melancholy loneliness. There was none thus to cling to Tarzan, who yearned so for the love ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... who has lost his father, who accuses himself of disobedience and ingratitude to that father, and who has been grievously jilted by a Frenchwoman, arrives in Italy in a large black cloak, the deepest melancholy, and the company of a sprightly though penniless French emigre, the Count d'Erfeuil. After performing prodigies of valour in a fire at Ancona, he reaches Rome just when a beautiful and mysterious poetess, the delight of Roman society, is being crowned on the Capitol. ...
— Corinne, Volume 1 (of 2) - Or Italy • Mme de Stael
... mastered her anger, and answered in a melancholy, plaintive tone, "Ah, good sister Anna! I had a miserable toothache, so that I could not sleep, and I just crept down here into the fresh air, thinking it might do me good. But what are you all doing here by night ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... artistic, visible quality, holds good also as to the imaginative value. Velasquez's Flagellation, if indeed it be his, in our National Gallery, has a pathos, a something that catches you by the throat, in that melancholy weary body, broken with ignominy and pain, sinking down by the side of the column, which is inseparable from the dreary grey light, the livid colour of the flesh—there is no joy in the world where such things can be. But the angel ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... absorbing fact,—how they have planned, and thought, and acted, as though they were to live forever; and yet we have noticed the premonitions of change, the dropping away of friends, the failing of vigor, the deepening of melancholy shadows, and the coming of the end; the business closed, the active curiosity and intermeddling ceased, the familiar haunts abandoned, the home made desolate, the lights put out, the cup fallen beneath the festal board, and all the earnest existence stopped forever. And this, too, ...
— The Crown of Thorns - A Token for the Sorrowing • E. H. Chapin
... bitter, distasteful; uninviting; unwelcome; undesirable, undesired; obnoxious; unacceptable, unpopular, thankless. unsatisfactory, untoward, unlucky, uncomfortable. distressing; afflicting, afflictive; joyless, cheerless, comfortless; dismal, disheartening; depressing, depressive; dreary, melancholy, grievous, piteous; woeful, rueful, mournful, deplorable, pitiable, lamentable; sad, affecting, touching, pathetic. irritating, provoking, stinging, annoying, aggravating, mortifying, galling; unaccommodating, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... said Anne archly, 'that Miss Hazleby did not actually fall into the river, for the sensation caused by Rupert's rescuing her would quite have absorbed all the interest in Fido's melancholy fate.' ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... moment dispelled the melancholy of her face, and then the old look returned with added force, ...
— The Ghost of Guir House • Charles Willing Beale
... destiny of the Australian races, at the same time laying aside all thought of their amalgamation with Europeans, the prospect is most melancholy. Only two cases can arise; either they must disappear before advancing civilization, successively dying off ere the truths of christianity or the benefits of civilization have produced any effect on them, or they must exist in the midst of a superior numerical population, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... women sang that night as usual, The dancers danced in pairs and sets, but music had a fall, A melancholy windy ...
— Goblin Market, The Prince's Progress, and Other Poems • Christina Rossetti
... knees beside his father. His pleasant, youthful face was drawn to mummy-like wanness. His eyes glowed with curious intensity, as they devoured the beloved features of the old man. The rays from the oil lamp cast a melancholy glow over the furniture of a bygone society, in this characteristic parlor of an old Southern mansion. But their effect upon the ghastly features of Colonel Henderson Jarvis presaged only too well the tragedy ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... company with some petty princedoms following France, and blessed with little history and less nationality. 'How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!' might be then, indeed, addressed to England with melancholy truth. Or more plainly (Professor Smyth adds), and in words seemingly almost intended for such a case, and uttered with depressing grief of heart, 'O Israel, thou hast destroyed thyself!'" (Professor Smyth's Life and Work at the Great Pyramid, ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... in the beer-shop. They talked to him, and although he did not understand them, or answer them, they knew he was enjoying himself. And when the landlord rang a big bell, and a pale young man, wearing a high hat, and sitting at a table opposite him, threw into his face an expression of exalted melancholy, and sang a high-pitched song, Mok showed how he appreciated the performance by thumping more vigorously on the table than any of the other people who applauded ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... to be the wickedest of men.' To man himself, moreover, 'the most criminal actions are not more unnatural than most of the virtues.' We need not multiply from poets and divines, from moralists and sages, these grim pictures. The sombre melancholy, the savage moral indignation, the passionate intellectual scorn, with which life and the universe have filled strong souls, some with one emotion and some with another, were all to Emerson in his habitual thinking unintelligible and remote. He admits, indeed, ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley
... in his melancholy mood, he rode away, and remained absent for four days, on what errand Sprot did not know, and during the next fortnight, while Scotland was ringing with the Gowrie tragedy, Sprot saw ...
— James VI and the Gowrie Mystery • Andrew Lang
... however, a melancholy ride, and John felt more down-hearted than ever before in his life as he entered the market square of Capetown. Here all was in confusion, burghers were galloping hither and thither, and every one seemed too busy and excited to notice Colton as he rode wearily towards the Field Cornet's ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... Maka of a secret melancholy; these jubilant extremes could scarce be constantly maintained. He was besides long, and lean, and lined, and corded, and a trifle grizzled; and his Sabbath countenance was even saturnine. On that day we made a procession to the church, or (as I must always call it) the cathedral: Maka (a blot ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... service just yet, which I couldn't, couldn't, couldn't do, my heart's own mistress!' Susan finished with a burst of sorrow, which was opportunely broken by the voice of Mrs Pipchin talking downstairs; on hearing which, she dried her red and swollen eyes, and made a melancholy feint of calling jauntily to Mr Towlinson to fetch a cab and carry ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of boxing except before just relations and intimate friends!" "Relations and intimate friends be somethinged!" cried Juno. "I'm going to box in front of the good old public! And the gate shall go to your Holiday Home for Melancholy Manicurists, mother dear." "My only one, my Melancholy Manicurists are quite quite in funds," urged the duchess; "we want nothing for them." "Don't worry your little head, dear," said Juno; "they've got to be helped and that's ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, June 10, 1914 • Various
... feeling melancholy when he thus brought up Harmer's fate, which had passed out of my mind for the moment. "But you did your ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... eyes fixed upon Him, then, as sure as He is living and is the Truth, He will flood our hearts with blessedness, and His joy will pour into our souls as the flashing tide rushes into some muddy and melancholy harbour, and sets everything dancing that was lying stranded on the slime. If, my brother, you, a professing Christian, know but little of this joy, why, then, it is your fault, and not His. The joyless lives of so many who say that they are His disciples cast no shadow of suspicion ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... in nervous sympathy with his worry; and the negro servants spoke in whispers. From her walk her daughter had returned in a solemn state of mind. Her manner, which had been growing gentler, was now touched with a winsome melancholy, and her eyes appeared to be larger and dreamier. Of late an old minister, who for nearly half a century had worn a tinkling bell in the midst of a devoted flock, had called frequently to talk to her, and in ...
— Old Ebenezer • Opie Read
... of the pathfinders of Russian art, music, literature and poetry was to create beauties that emanated, not from a certain class or school, but directly from the souls of the people. Their ideal was to create life from life. Though profound melancholy seems to be the dominant note in Russian music and art, yet along with the dramatic gloom go also reckless hilarity and boisterous humor, which often whirl one off one's feet. This is explained by the fact that the average Russian is extremely emotional ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... is too melancholy for me here in the open; and I begin to long for the dusk of trees and for the honest scalp yell to cheer me up. One knows what to expect in county Tryon—but ...
— The Hidden Children • Robert W. Chambers
... of her ever-varying grace; by refusing to yield to the charm of her voice. He raised his head more boldly; through her drooping lashes a lazy light shot forth upon him, and the shadow of a smile seemed to say: "That is better. When the mistress is indulgent, a fool should not be unbending. A melancholy jester is ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... various ascetic penitents who have killed themselves by inches.[154] "The fear of death, after all," he says, summing up his case, "will only make cowards; the fear of its alleged consequences will only make fanatics or melancholy pietists, as useless to themselves as to others. Death is a resource that we do ill to take away from oppressed virtue, reduced, as many a time it is, by the injustice of men to desperation." This was the doctrine in which the revolutionary ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... reach Back's Fish River. They struggled along the west coast of King William Land, but failed to reach their destination; disease, and even starvation, gradually lessened their numbers. An old Eskimo woman, who had watched the melancholy procession, afterwards told M'Clintock they fell down ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... as usual, no supper for him, and the cellar was close shut. He peered about, to try and find some cranny under the door to creep out at, but there was none. And he felt so hungry that he could almost have eaten the cat, who kept walking to and fro in a melancholy manner—only she was alive, and he couldn't well eat her alive: besides, he knew she was old, and had an idea she might be tough; so he merely said, politely, "How do you do, Mrs. Pussy?" to which ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... who were going to fight, to die perhaps, but still to do something, and for those who had nothing but their thoughts to be busy with. Pessimistic as this view may seem, it is the true one; the event described as an "enthusiastic send-off" is essentially a melancholy function, and the relief afforded by the antics of a few intoxicated men does not make it less so. It is strange, indeed, how important a part is played by the whisky-bottle in the farewells of the poor. I have seen it passed round family circles at the last moment like some grotesque sacrament; ...
— The Relief of Mafeking • Filson Young
... ladies,[2] in particular, formed a specimen of natural strength of mind, finely modified by Christian feeling, that failed not to attract the notice and admiration of every one who had an opportunity of witnessing it. On the melancholy announcement being made to them that all hope must be relinquished, and that death was rapidly and inevitably approaching, one of the ladies above referred to, calmly sinking down on her knees, and clasping her hands together, said, "Even ...
— The Loss of the Kent, East Indiaman, in the Bay of Biscay - Narrated in a Letter to a Friend • Duncan McGregor
... clapper on his giant side Shall ring no peal for blushing bride, For birth, or death, or new-year-tide, Or festival begun! A nation's joy alone shall be The signal for his revelry; And for a nation's woes alone His melancholy tongue shall moan: ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... Creeper Cottage who slept that night was Annalise. Priscilla spent it walking up and down her bedroom, and Fritzing on the other side of the wall spent it walking up and down his. They could hear each other doing it; it was a melancholy sound. Once Priscilla was seized with laughter—a not very genial mirth, but still laughter—and had to fling herself on her bed and bury her face in the pillows lest Fritzing should hear so blood-curdling a noise. It was when their steps had fallen ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... fell into those day-dreams which are at once the comfort and the crowning despair of prisoners. He gave himself up to the trifles which in such cases seem so important; he counted the hours and the days; he studied the melancholy trade of being prisoner; he became absorbed in himself, and learned the value of air and sunshine; then, at the end of a fortnight, he was attacked by that terrible malady, that fever for liberty, which drives prisoners to ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... ill-health or from violet-powder; but I think the latter had something to do with their pallor, for, after drinking, when they wiped their lips, roses began to bloom, wherever the napkin touched. They lived up to their appearance, natural or applied, they were "mild-eyed, melancholy, lotus-eaters," to whom it was "always afternoon." The gentlemen were equally sad, still and forlorn. But the mutton was good. The feeding left little to be ...
— In Troubadour-Land - A Ramble in Provence and Languedoc • S. Baring-Gould
... often took his bed, received him with great pleasure. But the count was distressed to hear him say that his infirmities would not allow him to return there any more, and that the time of his death was hastening on. To mitigate the grief of such melancholy tidings, he entreated the Saint to leave him some memorial of their friendship; to which Francis replied, that he had nothing to give but the miserable habit he had on, but that he would willingly leave it him, provided ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... Puritan creed as were in sympathy with them. But a far different mind held his place, and had become the leading minister in the Colony. John Norton, who had taken Nathaniel Ward's place at Ipswich, was called after twenty years of service, to the Boston church, and his melancholy temperament and argumentative, not to say pragmatical turn of mind, made him ready to seize upon the ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... sheaves leaned against each other as though fatigued with having brought so large a yield; while the golden fields of stubble lent a softer tone to the sturdy corn, or the less mature hemp and tobacco. It was a season when at morning the harvester's call, or at noon the wood-dove's melancholy note, or at evening the low of Jersey herds, were ...
— Sunlight Patch • Credo Fitch Harris
... man he once was; not because of any flaw that he could see in him—but only because the sufferer appeared somewhat less than perfect to himself. To Bernal's mind, indeed, nothing could have been superior to the noble melancholy with which Cousin Bill J. looked back upon his splendid past. There was a perfect dignity in it. Surely no mere electric belt could bring to him an attraction surpassing this—though Cousin Bill J. insisted that he never expected any real improvement until ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... closed. I got some milk, but some of my comrades, who wanted wine, made a raid into the cellar of an abandoned house, and were jumped upon by an immense negro dressed like a Turco, whom they took for the devil. Glad as we all were to be in Paris, the sight as we marched on was most melancholy. Fighting seemed going on in all directions, especially near the Tuileries and the Place de la Concorde. The Arch of Triumph was not seriously injured. On the top of it were two mortars, and the tricolored flag had been replaced by the drapeau rouge. Detachments were all the ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... a still more melancholy fact which yet awakened no little mirth. It was in praise of De Wet, who in spite of his blue spectacles, seemed by far the most clear-sighted of all the Boer generals, and who, notwithstanding his illiteracy, was beyond all others well versed in the bewildering ways ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry
... must live in England, you know, just to keep the place going. Besides—though, mind you, I dont say it isnt all right from the high art point of view and all that—three weeks of it would drive me melancholy mad. However, I'm glad you told me, because it explains why it is you dont seem to know your way about much in England. I hope, by the way, that everything has given satisfaction to ...
— Fanny's First Play • George Bernard Shaw
... with my own ears. And though I will not presume to estimate them as superior to the heroes and heroines in the works of former ages, yet the perusal of the motives and issues of their experiences, may likewise afford matter sufficient to banish dulness, and to break the spell of melancholy. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... careless wind no more came back; He wanders yet the fields, I deem; But on its melancholy track Complaining went that little stream,— The cheated stream, the hopeless stream, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... Blake in a low voice; but there was a melancholy gleam in her large dark eyes. Then, with an effort to recover her usual manner: 'Audrey, I hope you have forgiven me for troubling you so yesterday. You must not expect me to say I am sorry, or that I repent a word ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... present writer is inclined to agree with M. Serval when he calls this judgment astonishing, since she was a woman who adored her husband and sons, was an author of some moral books for children, and nothing in her suggested either vagueness of soul or melancholy. Madame Carraud herself gives a glimpse of her married life in saying to Balzac that she and her husband are not sympathetic in everything, that being of different temperaments things appear differently to them, but that she knows happiness, and ...
— Women in the Life of Balzac • Juanita Helm Floyd
... to be understood." The universal aspiration with all its profound and melancholy meaning assailed heavily Razumov, who, amongst eighty millions of his kith and kin, had no heart to which he ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad
... is an awful melancholy about Marlowe's "Mephostophilis," perhaps more expressive than the malignant mirth of that fiend in ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... much obliged to you for calling, Mr. Denzil," said Miss Vrain in a deep voice, rather melancholy in its tone. "No doubt you wondered ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... singularly agreeable in being an object of so great interest. Sometimes I had all I could do to preserve my dejected aspect, it was so pleasant to be miserable. I incline to the opinion that people who are melancholy without any particular reason, such as poets, artists, and young musicians with long hair, have rather an enviable time of it. In a quiet way I never enjoyed myself better in my life than when ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... sitting upon a ledge of the old Scarthey wall, in the spare sunshine which this still, winter's noon shone pearl-like through a universal mist, busy mending a net, to the tune of a melancholy, inward whistle, heard up above the licking of the waves all around him and the whimper of the seagulls overhead, the beat of steady oars approaching from ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... Greek religion too has its mendicants, its purifications, its antinomian mysticism, its garments offered to the gods, its statues worn with kissing, its exaggerated superstitions for the vulgar only, its worship of sorrow, its addolorata, its mournful mysteries. Scarcely a wild or melancholy note of the medieval church but was anticipated by Greek polytheism! What should we have thought of the vertiginous prophetess at the very centre of Greek religion? The supreme Hellenic culture is a sharp edge of light across this gloom. The fiery, ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater
... as kind as a mother; at last she fell sick at a place in Lincolnshire, and after a few days died, leaving me her cart and stock in trade, praying me only to see her decently buried, which I did, giving her a funeral fit for a gentlewoman. After which I travelled the country melancholy enough for want of company, but so far fortunate, that I could take my own part when anybody was uncivil to me. At last, passing through the valley of Todmorden, I formed the acquaintance of Blazing Bosville and his wife, with whom I occasionally ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... to share, to drink to the middle of a glass. medida measure. medio half; m. middle, way, mean. mediodia m. midday, south. medir to measure. meditar to meditate. Mediterraneo Mediterranean. mejilla cheek. mejor better, best. mejorar to ameliorate, better. melancolia melancholy. melancolico melancholy. melocoton m. peach. melejo sweet? melodia melody. memoria memory; memorias (a) compliments, regards (to). menester m. necessity. menguar to diminish. ...
— Novelas Cortas • Pedro Antonio de Alarcon
... stationary, and miserable in the declining state. The progressive state is, in reality, the cheerful and the hearty state to all the different orders of the society; the stationary is dull; the declining melancholy. ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... indeed. Fanny, look at that melancholy cat. She wants to come in, but she is afraid to leave her present ...
— Janet's Love and Service • Margaret M Robertson
... other. She was evidently in great perturbation, for at times she forgot to eat altogether and sat with the bread and cheese suspended in her hand while she thought deeply. Her rather large plain features had a dignity of expression which was pleasing, though it betrayed a tendency to melancholy. She had no frown, for her blue eyes were of excellent strength and one does not sit up late in the country. She was tall and rather bony, a ...
— Women of the Country • Gertrude Bone
... grief and despair, then burst from the miserable crowds, as with slow and melancholy steps they turned from the walls to seek again their homes. Zenobia was seen once to clasp her hands, turning her face toward the heavens. As she emerged from the tower and ascended her chariot, the enthusiastic throngs failed not to testify their unshaken confidence and determined ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... his accomplished hoard, The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain, And honey bees have stored The sweets of summer in their luscious cells; The swallows all have wing'd across the main; But here the Autumn melancholy dwells, And sighs her tearful spells Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain. Alone, alone Upon a mossy stone She sits and reckons up the dead and gone With the last leaves for a love-rosary. ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... Dolores spent ten years in America and then returned to France. They had two children, a son and a daughter, the latter named Antoinette, and their life, though always slightly tinged with melancholy, was serene and peaceful. After his return to his native land, Philip rebuilt the Chateau de Chamondrin and took up his permanent abode there, determined to lead the life of a country gentleman and student ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... was in a melancholy, meditative mood, and had been silent for some time. Mrs. Lincoln, who was present, rallied him on his solemn visage and want of spirit. This seemed to arouse him, and, without seeming to notice her sally, he said, in slow ...
— Lincoln's Yarns and Stories • Alexander K. McClure
... enter that house without being struck by the melancholy pervading it. Wrapped in her own pleasures, her own desires and amusements, Annie never cast one thought on her mother, whose declining health it would have been her duty to tend and soothe; indeed ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume I. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes. • Grace Aguilar
... they seemed such worthless possessions to stake one's life against day by day, year after year. The feud of the fence was like a cancerous infection. It spread to and poisoned all that the wind blew on around the borders of that melancholy ranch. ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... accomplish all vast mechanical undertakings, and release souls out of Purgatory. They could influence the passions of the mind, procure the reconciliation of friends or of foes, engender mutual discord, induce mania, melancholy, or direct the force and objects of human affection. Such was the Demonology taught by its orthodox professors. Yet other systems of it were devised, which had their origin in the causes attending the propagation of christianity; for it ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... thus," said Trent in a melancholy tone, at the first sound of which the man within turned round with startling swiftness. "From childhood's hour I've seen my fondest hopes decay. I did think I was ahead of Scotland Yard this time, and now ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... talents made easy to him. He had no large knowledge of any subject, though he had looked into many just far enough to replace absolute unconsciousness of them with measurable ignorance. Never having enjoyed the sense of achievement, he was troubled with unsatisfied aspirations that filled him with melancholy and convinced him that he was a born artist. His wife found him selfish, peevish, hankering after change, and prone to believe that he was attacked by dangerous disease when he ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... in 'The Vicar of Wakefield', 1766, ii. 78 (chap. v). It is there sung by Olivia Primrose, after her return home with her father. 'Do, my pretty Olivia,' says Mrs. Primrose, let us have that little melancholy air your pappa was so fond of, your sister Sophy has already obliged us. Do child, it will please your old father.' 'She complied in a manner so exquisitely pathetic,' continues Dr. Primrose, 'as moved me.' The charm of the words, and the graceful way ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... emotions. He earned the family bread by the labour of his hands and his hand was the servant of his mind, and his mind a tempest of moods. Mary had applied herself to her task with creditable skill. She could always turn his sullenness to a sort of creative melancholy of which he was rather proud; his restlessness to energy and his discontent to something like constructive thinking. How she achieved the miracle he did not know, nor did he inquire. But he was guided by her as a child by ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... within this melancholy view, lies a great and glorious fact. It was the beginning of an "apostolic mission" on the part of a whole people, a mission which will form one of the most moving and significant pages of the ecclesiastical history of the nineteenth century. Every Christian ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud
... reminds me that Eda and your wife are particularly desirous of having breakfast," said Frank. "In fact they sent me specially to lay their melancholy case before you; and I have great fears that Eda will lay violent hands on the raw pork if her morning meal is delayed much longer. As for Chimo, he is rushing about the island in a state of ravenous despair; so pray let us ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne
... said a woman who had just come in at the back door, and begun to drop kisses, as sad as tears, on Flyaway's forehead. "Do you know who this is?" Flyaway looked up with a sweet smile, but her mind had lost all impression of her melancholy friend, Miss Whiting. "Look again," said the sad-eyed stranger, who did not like to have even a little child forget her; "you used to call ...
— Dotty Dimple's Flyaway • Sophie May
... his walks Forster saw a native, who passed his days in being fed by his wives, quietly lying upon a carpet of thick shrubs. This melancholy person, who fattened without rendering any service to society, recalled Sir John Mandeville's anger at seeing "such a glutton who passed his days without distinguishing himself by any feats of arms, and who lived in pleasure, as a pig which one ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... but of the dawning autumn, with its golden presage of days not golden, and of nights heavy with dews and laden with floating leaves,—came in through the lattice, and lay over her soft and wistful melancholy, as she read of hardship, and dust, and blood and death, told truthfully, but always cheerfully, as a soldier tells a thing to a woman he loves and wishes ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... most of any in the world requires comfort and assistance, abandoned it may be to the treatment of an inhuman nurse, (for such are often found at these times about the sick,) and strangers to every thing but the melancholy sight of the progress death makes among themselves, with small hopes of life left to the survivors and those mixed with anxiety and doubt, whether it be not better to die, than to prolong a miserable being, after the loss of their best friends and nearest relations."—Dr. Mead's Medical ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... silence, each replenishing his drinking-horn. The snow beat soft against the window, and from outside, far above them, sounded the melancholy note of the bell ringing ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... had been killed, when but a few years previously ninety-four had been slaughtered on a similar occasion. Perhaps you will permit me to state in your columns that this year the festival, in this particular, has afforded as melancholy and unquestionable proof of distress as the last, while it bore other evidence, which though trivial in itself, is not unworthy of notice. Last year two theatrical shows visited us, displaying their "Red Barn" tragedies, and illuminated ghosts, at threepence ...
— The Economist - Volume 1, No. 3 • Various
... appeared at the head of a great body of fanatic peasants, armed only with slings, and defended his god and his property from the sacrilegious hands of the followers of Zoroaster. [143] But the ruin of Tarsus, and of many other cities, furnishes a melancholy proof that, except in this singular instance, the conquest of Syria and Cilicia scarcely interrupted the progress of the Persian arms. The advantages of the narrow passes of Mount Taurus were abandoned, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... good lady launched upon a recital of melancholy happenings more or less connected with headaches which occupied her attention very pleasantly and prevented any one else from saying anything until the return of the awaited guest. He came in looking as usual and bearing ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... succession of incidents resulting from the mysterious entrance of the warrior of the Fleur de lis into the English fort, be it our task to explain the circumstances connected with the singular disappearance of Captain de Haldimar, and the melancholy murder of ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... Speed was to move him later by more precious charity. We are concerned for the moment with what moved Speed. "I looked up at him," said he, long after, "and I thought then, as I think now, that I never saw so gloomy and melancholy a face in my life." The struggle of ambition and poverty may well have been telling on Lincoln; but besides that a tragical love story (shortly to be told) had left a deep and permanent mark; but these influences worked, we may suppose, upon a disposition quite as prone to sadness as to mirth. ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... prescribed number of hours, and her brain was racked to discover why Laura appeared so little indignant at the barbarous act of despotism. Laura undertook to break the bad news to Merthyr. The parting was as quiet and cheerful as, in the opposite degree, Vittoria had thought it would be melancholy and regretful. "What a Government!" Merthyr said, and told her to let him hear of any changes. "All changes that please my friends ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... gained a decided victory, but the youthful Queen, instead of giving her hand to young King Edward, left the country and married the son of the King of France. She will appear with melancholy prominence in the reign of Elizabeth. Had Mary Queen of Scots married Edward, we should perhaps have been spared that tragedy in which she was called to play both the leading and the losing ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... bird, and watches the propitious moment to spring upon her prey. It was an adagio which the king played upon his flute, and he was indeed a master in the art. Slightly trembling, as if in eternal melancholy, sobbing and pleading, soon bursting out in rapturous and joyful strains of harmony, again sighing and weeping, these melting tones fell like costly pearls upon the summer air. The birds in the odorous bushes, the wind which rustled ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... become religiously mad," said Sir James, with a perplexed look; "well, Aspel, you must take your own way, for I am aware that it is useless to reason with madmen; yet I cannot help expressing my regret that a young fellow of your powers should settle down into a moping, melancholy, ...
— Post Haste • R.M. Ballantyne
... the church, had nearly, with his chattering, destroyed the finest impressions. Henry VIII., Charles I., and Edward IV. are buried here. After all, this church, both within and without, has a most melancholy and dismal appearance. ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... hope that you, who seem driving full sail on the very rock on which I was wrecked for ever, will take warning by the tale I have to tell. Enough, if you are willing to listen, I am willing to tell you who the melancholy inhabitant of the Foljambe apartments really is, and why she resides here. It will serve, at least, to while away the time until Monna Paula shall bring us ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... her plan of emotion. To reproach Dick? O no, no. "I am in great trouble," said she, taking what was intended to be a hopelessly melancholy survey of a few small apples lying under the tree; yet a critical ear might have noticed in her voice a tentative tone as to the effect of the words upon Dick ...
— Under the Greenwood Tree • Thomas Hardy
... Daryushka or picking over the buckwheat grain, seemed to him interesting. On Saturdays and Sundays he went to church. Standing near the wall and half closing his eyes, he listened to the singing and thought of his father, of his mother, of the university, of the religions of the world; he felt calm and melancholy, and as he went out of the church afterwards he regretted that the service was so soon over. He went twice to the hospital to talk to Ivan Dmitritch. But on both occasions Ivan Dmitritch was unusually excited and ill-humoured; ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... are well depicted. The scene at the funeral of poor Demis, with its harrowing and denunciatory sermon over the corpse of the innocent girl, is powerful and true. The character of the 'help,' Debby, is drawn from life, and is admirably conceived and sustained. The book is, however, melancholy and monotonous. So many young and generous hearts beating themselves forever against the sharp stones of the baldest utilitarianism; so many bright minds drifting into despair in the surrounding chaos of obstinate, stolid, and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... explanations might, however, also be offered. It might be suggested that half-barbaric countries, like Russia or Norway, which have always lain, to say the least of it, on the extreme edge of the circle of our European civilization, have a certain primal melancholy which belongs to them through all the ages. It is highly probable that this sadness, which to us is modern, is to them eternal. It is highly probable that what we have solemnly and suddenly discovered in scientific text-books and philosophical magazines they ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... these strange streets, with their frame-houses filled with the latest conveniences and surrounded with the latest litter, till he could see approaching down the long perspective that long ungainly figure, with the preposterous stove-pipe hat and the rustic umbrella and deep melancholy eyes, the humour and the hard patience and the heart that fed ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a very loud call, and utters a melancholy cry when one of the flock is killed. The Wild Swans of Hudson's Bay furnish the finest quills used for writing. Swans and their eggs are still protected by several statutes, and to steal the ...
— Mamma's Stories about Birds • Anonymous (AKA the author of "Chickseed without Chickweed")
... revolution as a British spy. The house or hut in which he was kept in confinement had only very lately gone into ruins. It was then a tavern, and its landlord, now extremely old, still resides close by, and recites the melancholy tale with much affection and feeling. He witnessed the gentlemanly manners and equanimity of this heroic soldier, while in his house, under the most trying circumstances, and from its threshold to the fatal spot. In his room the prisoner could ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, No. - 480, Saturday, March 12, 1831 • Various
... yourself, Ivan Grigorievitch. I am fifty years old, yet never in my life had been ill, except for an occasional carbuncle or boil. That is not a good sign. Sooner or later I shall have to pay for it." And he relapsed into melancholy. ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... of the other battleships, and Pigot caused himself to be rowed out to it, introduced himself to Admiral Marin-Dabel, Maritime Prefect of Toulon, who had taken personal charge of the rescue work, and spent half an hour inspecting the melancholy scene. Then he landed again, and listened for a time to the reports of his lieutenants. There was among them not a single ray of light—not the slightest evidence to show that the disaster had been anything but an accident. The fire in the store-room had, it was ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... they may be called, are mercurial, consequently poisonous, consequently ruinous in time to the constitution. The Miss B—— above mentioned was a miserable witness of this truth, it being certain that her flesh fell from her bones before she died. Lady Coventry was hardly a less melancholy proof of it; and a London physician perhaps, were he at liberty to blab, could publish a bill of female mortality, of a length that would ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... the supposition or assumption that the personality and personal views and opinions of a poet are necessarily reflected in his dramatic work. It protests, at the same time, against the sham melancholy and pseudo-despair which Byron made fashionable ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... turning on to the Quai Bourbon, on the Isle of St. Louis, a sharp flash of lightning illumined the straight, monotonous line of old houses bordering the narrow road in front of the Seine. It blazed upon the panes of the high, shutterless windows, showing up the melancholy frontages of the old-fashioned dwellings in all their details; here a stone balcony, there the railing of a terrace, and there a garland sculptured on a frieze. The painter had his studio close by, under the eaves of the old Hotel du Martoy, ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... Snitchey and Craggs sat at opposite corners, with the blue bag between them for safety; the Doctor took his usual position, opposite to Grace. Clemency hovered galvanically about the table, as waitress; and the melancholy Britain, at another and a smaller board, acted as Grand Carver of a round of beef and ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
... it, and proceeded down the mountain. It proved a very different business travelling along down hill on that magnificent pathway with full stomachs from what it was travelling uphill over the snow quite starved and almost frozen. Indeed, had it not been for melancholy recollections of poor Ventvoegel's sad fate, and of that grim cave where he kept company with the old Dom, we should have felt positively cheerful, notwithstanding the sense of unknown dangers before us. Every mile we walked the atmosphere grew softer and balmier, and the country ...
— King Solomon's Mines • H. Rider Haggard
... Celtic literature is essentially and eternally melancholy,—a belief which persisted down to the time of Matthew Arnold, also drew its strength from the poems of Ossian. Here again theory showed the way to practice. The melancholy of the Ossianic poems is not the melancholy of the Celt, but a melancholy compounded ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... may be fair without the aid of splendor in dress. We therefore accept the invitation, Woronzow. Announce that to the regent's messenger. But still it is sad and humiliating," continued Elizabeth after a pause, a cloud passing over her usually so cheerful countenance, "yes it is still a melancholy circumstance for the daughter of the great Peter to be so poor that she is not able to dress herself suitably to her rank. Ah, how humiliating is the elevation of my high position, when I cannot even properly reward you, my friends, for ...
— The Daughter of an Empress • Louise Muhlbach
... enough joking. This defection of yours, melancholy Eynhardt, combines obstinacy with wisdom, like Balaam's ass! Well! may you rest in peace. And ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... leaving England, my plans became, from various causes, altered. The Earl of Auckland* [It is with a melancholy satisfaction that I here record the intentions of that enlightened nobleman. The idea of turning to public account what was intended as a scientific voyage, occurred to his lordship when considering my application for official leave to proceed to India; and from the hour of my accepting the ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... for its godmother the Duchess de Bouillon, and who received the name of Charles de Paris; the child of the Fronde, handsome, talented, and brave; who during his life was the troublesome hope, the melancholy joy of his mother, and the cause of her greatest grief in 1672, when he perished, at the passage of the Rhine, by the side ...
— Political Women (Vol. 1 of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... "Rebelliad," which was spoken in the year 1819, and was first published in the year 1842. Of it the editor has well remarked: "It still remains the text-book of the jocose, and is still regarded by all, even the melancholy, as a most happy production of humorous taste." Its author was Dr. Augustus Pierce, who died ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... you hear?" said Miss Dimpleton, trying to withdraw the attention of the mother from her melancholy abstraction; "they will not take away your husband—the ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... was not sad and melancholy. They loved God and His service, and rejoicing in their mutual regard and affection were happy in their love and work. Orderic Vitalis writes, "I have borne for forty-two years with happiness the sweet yoke of the Lord." Moreover they shed happiness on ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... felt a depression of spirits such as I never experienced before. Fortunately for me, my old friend Mr. Fraser, a gentleman of a gay and lively disposition, arrived soon after, and continued with me for the remainder of the season, and his company soon drove melancholy away. ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean
... without helping her. The bridegroom's feathers in his hat all drooped, one of his shoes had lost an heel. In short, he was in his whole person and dress so extremely soused, that there did not appear one inch or single thread about him unmarried.[140] Pardon me, that the melancholy object still dwells upon me so far, as to reduce me to punning. However, we attended to the chapel, where we stayed to hear the irrevocable words pronounced upon our old servant, and made the best of our way to town. I took a resolution to forbear all married persons, or any, in ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... England just before meeting her, when he was recovering from a similar orgy; it had made a dint on his brain similar to the impression left by the French girl earlier. In the same way he explained his morbid tales of Chinese tortures—once, in a fit of melancholy, he had attempted suicide, and after his recovery had gone to the seaside with his mother to recuperate; in the boarding-house had been a collection of books on atrocities. It seemed that everything ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... repeated, with a melancholy emphasis upon the word. "But be it so—whatever is near you is dear and valued to me, and I value their approbation accordingly. Of our success I am not sanguine. Our numbers are so few, that I dare not hope for so speedy, so bloodless, or so safe an end of this ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Vienna, the foremost musical critic there wrote of him: "From the outset Chopin took place in the front rank of masters. The perfect delicacy of his touch, his indescribable mechanical dexterity, the melancholy tints in his style of shading, and the rare clearness of his delivery are in him qualities which bear the stamp of genius. He must be regarded as one of the most remarkable meteors blazing on the musical horizon." In Paris he gave a concert at Pleyel's house. His reception ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... suffering of the women and children on that march can never be told. Acts of heroism on the part of the men and of fortitude on the part of the women that are almost incredible, marked every step of the way. The Senora sat in her wagon, speechless, and lost in a maze of melancholy anguish. She did not seem to heed want, or cold, or wet, or the utter misery of her surroundings. Her soul had concentrated all its consciousness upon the strand of hair she continually smoothed through ...
— Remember the Alamo • Amelia E. Barr
... spatters. Evidently, he had worn no overcoat. Both his side pockets had been, apparently, strained to the utmost to accommodate what looked like a bunch of pasteboard-bound note-books, now far on the way to their original pulp, and lopped despondently outward. A melancholy pool had already ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... which was the day before the picnic, Mary-'Gusta walking alone in the field which separated the Gould-Hamilton property from that of Abner Bacheldor, Jimmie's father—Mary-'Gusta, walking in that field, was depressed and melancholy. Her state of mind was indicated by the fact that she had left all her dolls, even Rose and Rosette, at home. She felt guilty and wicked and conscience-stricken. She had been a bad girl; only one other knew how ...
— Mary-'Gusta • Joseph C. Lincoln
... digging potatoes in the patch of garden or plucking colewort there, climbing the stairs with backets of peat or wood, shaking a table-cloth to the breeze; and in the salle the dark and ruminating master indulging his melancholy by rebuilding the past in the red ash of the fire, or looking with pensive satisfaction from his window upon the coast, a book upon his knee—that was Doom as Count Victor was ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... particular notice. Should any of my readers ever go to Bombay, he will find two of these dakhmas, or Temples of Silence, in a secluded part of Malabar Hill, though admittance is denied within the walls enclosing the melancholy structures to aught but Parsees. The interior is fitted up with stages or stories of stone pavement, slanting down to a circular opening, like a well, covered with a grating, into which the bones are swept, after the ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... State they were members, but especially in our's) who held their authority and reputation, either for their military or political services, without interruption: and the sole remembrance of them, in our present melancholy situation, was a pleasing relief to me, when we lately happened to mention them ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... attempt to escape, though quite unable to imagine any way in which such escape could be possible. Harry, attracted by this singular figure, looked at him, and recognized him at once, and the effect upon him was so strong that, in spite of his melancholy, he burst into a ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... verdure from the land mingled with the breeze from the sea. But Caius was not happy; he was brooding over the misery suggested by what he had just seen, breathing his mind after its unusual rush of emotion, and indulging its indignant melancholy. It did not occur to him to wonder much why the object of his pity had made that quick errand to the cellar in the chine, or why she had taken interest in the height of the tide. He supposed her to be inwardly distracted ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... what that circle might comprise. She had left him before his more prosperous days began to dawn, and she continued therefore to picture him to herself as the struggling journalist in murky lodgings—"the melancholy literary man" who smoked strong tobacco far into the night, and talked of things in which she had no interest at all. If matters were changed with Caspar Brooke since then, Lady Alice did not ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... was melancholy. I found something strangely sorrowful and submissive in the sleepers all about me, those men who had marched so far, who had left all the established texture of their lives behind them to come upon this mad campaign, this ...
— The World Set Free • Herbert George Wells
... most melancholy person present, perhaps, was Mr Walcot. He knew that the whole family of the Rowlands remained in Deerbrook from Mrs Rowland's ostentation of confidence in his skill. He knew that Mr Rowland would have removed his ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... had once done service in a dusting-brush. He also had a gun, and the weight of it was about as much as he could stagger under when he tried to carry it over his shoulder, so he dragged it along behind him, very much as a person of Hamlet's melancholy temperament would have been likely to do. He also could sit down, which was no ...
— Left Behind - or, Ten Days a Newsboy • James Otis
... I awoke the room was lighted only by the rays of an expiring lamp in the chimney corner. No one was moving; not a sound was heard except the loud breathing of the inmates, who, their wonted rest having been interrupted by this melancholy interlude, had buried their ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... complained of thirst, he stopped for a moment to ladle out a dipperful of water from the wooden pail he carried upon his left arm, while now and then he stopped to hear some complaint of a weary man, to promise aid or seek to jest away the prisoner's melancholy. ...
— The New Land - Stories of Jews Who Had a Part in the Making of Our Country • Elma Ehrlich Levinger
... was deserted, he was certain of that—the melancholy wreckage of a vanished and resplendent time. Its small principality, flourishing when commerce and communication had gone by water, was one of the innumerable victims of progress and of the concentration ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... me, I confess, a morbid view. There are many no doubt on whom the effect of natural beauty is to intensify feeling, to deepen melancholy, as well as to raise the spirits. As Mrs. W. R. Greg in her memoir of her husband tells us: "His passionate love for nature, so amply fed by the beauty of the scenes around him, intensified the emotions, ...
— The Beauties of Nature - and the Wonders of the World We Live In • Sir John Lubbock
... yet she deemed it a duty to be governed by the advice of her parent. These things I explained to her, and when her conscience was appeased by the facts which I demonstrated, her peace in some measure returned, but she was still subject to occasional melancholy reflections. Perhaps she thought of me—how my heart had suffered (for, young as I was, the occurrence brought premature gray hairs; and even now, although my head is white, I have seen but little more than forty years)—and ...
— Wild Western Scenes • John Beauchamp Jones
... immeasurably removed from that dark gulf of self which had made his winter a nightmare. And when he stood erect again it seemed that the old earth had a stirring, electrifying impetus for his feet. Something black, bitter, melancholy, and morbid, always unreal to him, had passed away forever. The great moment had been forced upon him. He did not believe Roy Beeman's preposterous hint regarding Helen; but he had gone back or soared onward, as if by magic, to ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... catch this mirrored glimpse of Virginia, her inhabitants, and her resources of primitive nature, before she was contaminated by the residence and monopoly of the white man. It may have been best in the long run that the European races should displace the aborigines of the New World, but it is a melancholy reflection upon ' go ye into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature,' that no tribe of American Indians has yet been absorbed into the body politic. Many a white man has let himself down into savage life and habits, but no tribe of aborigines has yet come up to the requirements, ...
— Thomas Hariot • Henry Stevens
... blushes t' match an' assist the roguish loveliness o' the big eyes that was forever near trappin' the heart of a man. Dang it, she was fair anyhow! What was rosy cheeks, after all. They faded like roses. Ah, she was a wonderful dear wee thing! 'Twas a melancholy pity that she was t' be wed so young. Not yet seventeen! Mm-m—'twas far too young. Dang it, Charlie Rush would be home afore long with the means in his pocket for a weddin'! Dang it, they'd be wed when he come! An' then pretty Peggy Lacey ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... it," Esther replied indifferently. He might have taken advantage of this confession to give her a lecture on poetry, if the millpool and the melancholy wood had not been so affecting as to make the least attempt at ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... we heard the ghosts, Who jibber in low melancholy sounds, With wide-stretch'd nostrils snort, and on themselves Smite with their palms. Upon the banks a scurf From the foul steam condens'd, encrusting hung, That held sharp combat ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... howled like a wolf—like a lone wolf that has found no quarry—melancholy, mean, grown reckless with his hunger. There was a pause of nearly a minute. Then in the hideous darkness a phantom wolf-pack took up the howl in chorus, and for three long minutes there was din beside which the voice of living wolves at war would ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy
... usual prayer this whisper: "I give Thee thanks for my senses, O Lord. In all of us, keep them bright, and grateful for beauty." Then he remained motionless, prey to a sort of happy yearning very near, to melancholy. Great beauty ever had that effect on him. One could capture so little of it—could never enjoy it enough! Who was it had said not long ago: "Love of beauty is really only the sex instinct, which nothing but complete union satisfies." ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... thoughts and recollections on this melancholy event you will permit me only to say that I have seen him in the days of adversity, in some of the scenes of his deepest distress and most trying perplexities; I have also attended him in his highest elevation and most prosperous felicity, with uniform admiration of ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 2 (of 4) of Volume 1: John Adams • Edited by James D. Richardson
... to Clonbrony. Clonbrony was now a melancholy scene. The houses, which had been built in a better style of architecture than usual, were in a ruinous condition; the dashing was off the walls, no glass in the windows, and many of the roofs without slates. ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... leaning against the rock, and looking dreamily across the Clyde towards Largs. It was still two hours before midnight, and believing that he was soon to encounter his enemy Roderic in a hand-to-hand combat, he felt a gloomy, melancholy spirit come upon him. If Roderic should overcome him in the fight, how would it be with the people of Bute? They would never be happy under the tyrannical rule of the bold sea rover. What would become ...
— The Thirsty Sword • Robert Leighton
... narrow escape, he plunged in and secured it. The canoe was thrown up on the beach, not much the worse, and the two paddles were saved. "I'm afraid there's little chance of our finding our ammunition," said Tom in a melancholy voice, not a bit minding the wetting, "and unless we can manage to knock down the birds with our firearms, we shall have to go back after all without any game ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... the reader, indeed incomprehensible. Perhaps no two individuals were ever more unlike in mind and disposition than my brother and myself. As light is opposed to darkness, so was that happy, brilliant, cheerful child to the sad and melancholy being who sprang from the same stock as himself, and was nurtured ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... escort of two triremes from the fleet at Misenum. It so happened that with these he touched at Cythnus. The rebels lost no time in appealing to the ship's captains in the name of Nero. The pretender, assuming an air of melancholy, appealed to 'the loyalty of his former soldiers', and begged them to establish him in Syria or Egypt. The captains either from sympathy or guile alleged that they must talk to their men, and would come back when they had prepared all their minds. However, they faithfully made a full ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... its surroundings, however, Fredrika's childhood was not a happy one. Her mother was severe and impatient of petty faults, and the child's mind became embittered. Her father was reserved and melancholy. Fredrika herself was restless and passionate, although of an affectionate nature. Among the other children she was the ugly duckling, who was misunderstood, and whose natural development was continually checked and frustrated. ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... had believed. He discovered now that such was not the case; certain incidents of those forgotten days recurred with poignant effect. He had experienced the dawn of a father's love, a father's pride; he lost himself in a melancholy consideration of what might have been had not that dawn been darkened. How different, how full, how satisfying, if—As he looked down upon the fair, fever- flushed face of this girl he felt an unaccustomed heartache, a throbbing pity and a yearning tenderness. The hand with ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... dropped into the Alden kitchen frequently of an evening to glean a melancholy satisfaction from the morbid details of Uncle Peter's lingering betwixt life and death. Whenever—which was frequent—there was an upheaval in the Alden's domestic arrangements, Janet filled in the gaps, spoke ...
— Little Miss By-The-Day • Lucille Van Slyke
... thoughts from this melancholy subject, Quentin frankly told her the treachery of the Maugrabin, which he had discovered in the night quarter near Namur, and which appeared the result of an agreement betwixt the King and William de la Marck. Isabelle shuddered with horror, and then ...
— Quentin Durward • Sir Walter Scott
... with melancholy conviction. "Well, this is a bad night altogether for them that have done well in their time; and if I were ever such a dab at the hautboy or tenor-viol, I shouldn't have the heart to ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... young dogs from town To join us in our folly, Whose mirth, I thought, might serve to drown My sister's melancholy: The lively Jones, the sportive Brown, And Robinson ...
— Phantasmagoria and Other Poems • Lewis Carroll
... presented to the reader's notice, before the curtain can be permitted to fall over the scene on which this monarch played his part. The massacre of Merindol and Cabrieres and the execution of the "Fourteen of Meaux" are the melancholy events that mark the close of a reign opening, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... in Caltanissetta one Saturday evening and saw the funeral of two who had been killed in this way that morning. First came a band playing a funeral march, that was all the more melancholy because the instruments were distressingly discordant, as though in their grief the men had not had time to tune them. Then came comrades carrying candles, and comrades bearing first one coffin, then ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... witch-demon mastered her anger, and answered in a melancholy, plaintive tone, "Ah, good sister Anna! I had a miserable toothache, so that I could not sleep, and I just crept down here into the fresh air, thinking it might do me good. But what are you all doing here by ...
— Sidonia The Sorceress V2 • William Mienhold
... something of that sort, when all deductions are made. He will have the moiety when I die, and if you and he can be satisfied to wait for that event,—which may not perhaps be very long—'. Then there was another pause, indicative of the melancholy natural to such a suggestion, during which Clara looked at Lady Aylmer, and made up her mind that her ladyship would live for the next twenty-five years at least. 'If you can wait for that,' she continued, it may be all very well, and though you will be poor people, in Frederic's rank of ...
— The Belton Estate • Anthony Trollope
... its small potentates; in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for a while, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumor brings him to the West—with probability to Paris, more doubtfully ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... who, from their own interest, would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing; by all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions; would easily dissipate, in the greater part of them, that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm. Public diversions have always been the objects of dread and hatred to all the fanatical promoters of those popular frenzies. The gaiety and good humour ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... indeed the years that followed that first happy day at Moor Court seem to me now, on looking back upon them, a good deal mixed up together—till, that is to say, a change, a melancholy one for me, came over my happy friendship with ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... accent of unusually deep melancholy in the Count's voice which struck Herrera, and caused him for an instant to imagine that he had already received intelligence of his cousin's treachery, and of Rita's captivity. Convinced, however, by a moment's ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 366, April, 1846 • Various
... vowel sounds on both the highest and lowest notes he can reach. This elementary drill should be followed by practice in reading and declaiming selections requiring the extreme notes of the compass. For practice on the low notes, passages should be selected expressing deep solemnity, awe, horror, melancholy, or deep grief. The following fine simile affords an excellent example for ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... combinations of disjointed things, And forms impalpable and unperceived Of others' sight familiar were to hers. And this the world calls frenzy; but the wise Have a far deeper madness, and the glance Of melancholy is a fearful gift; What is it but the telescope of truth, Which strips the distance of its fantasies, And brings life near in utter nakedness, Making the cold ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... spectacles I wore prevented him from noticing the searching scrutiny of my fixed gaze. His face was shadowed by a faint tinge of melancholy; his eyes were ...
— Vendetta - A Story of One Forgotten • Marie Corelli
... traveller, don't you know? He is a most capital fellow—full of life and fun, desperately facetious, delighting in practical jokes: altogether a wonderful creature. You begin to think you are in another generation—before England became melancholy—the generation, for example, that roared over the adventures of Tom ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... out of their houses to me, according to some superstition, which was not explained till morning; and, being unable to go to bed, I took a blanket and lay down beneath a dry arch of the bridge, and the Aydyr, as swiftly as a spectre gliding, hushed me with a melancholy song. ...
— George Bowring - A Tale Of Cader Idris - From "Slain By The Doones" By R. D. Blackmore • R. D. Blackmore
... is sad to hack into the roots of things, They are so much intertwisted with the earth; So that the branch a goodly verdure flings, I reck not if an acorn gave it birth. To trace all actions to their secret springs Would make indeed some melancholy mirth; But this is not at present my concern, And I refer you ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... Patch-Eye is melancholy—almost sentimental at times. He would stab a man, but grieve upon a sparrow. At heart we fear he is a coward, and stupid. The Duke, on the contrary, is shrewd and he does a lot of thinking. He has heavy eyebrows. He is the kind of thinker that ...
— Wappin' Wharf - A Frightful Comedy of Pirates • Charles S. Brooks
... children and a beloved sister, who was domesticated with the family, there are probably no living witnesses. It will never be forgotten, by those who saw it, how the late dreary train of afflictions was met. For many years Wordsworth's sister Dorothy was a melancholy charge. Mrs. Wordsworth was wont to warn any rash enthusiasts for mountain-walking by the spectacle before them. The adoring sister would never fail her brother; and she destroyed her health, and then her reason, by ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... east; this river has been occasionally called Dog river, under a mistaken opinion that its French name was Chien, but its true appellation is Chayenne, and it derives this title from the Chayenne Indians: their history is the short and melancholy relation of the calamities of almost all the Indians. They were a numerous people and lived on the Chayenne, a branch of the Red river of Lake Winnipeg. The invasion of the Sioux drove them westward; in their progress they halted on the southern side of the Missouri ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... sorrowful, and have tears in your eyes. Better take me for a model, who, as a consumptive, have far more reason to be melancholy than you have." ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume I (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... and its phrases had a deftness which was hardly native. He looked, if not a sad young man, then one conscious always of sufficient reasons for sadness, but one came, after a time, to see that the mood beneath was not melancholy. It had even its sprightly side, which shone out irregularly in his glance and talk, from a ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... own good pleasure, disclose herself spontaneously, though gradually. This seems to be the inner meaning of the episodic tale, Hyacinth and Rose-Blossom. The rhythmic prose Hymns to Night exhale a delicate melancholy, moving in a vague haze, and yet breathing a peace which comes from a knowledge of the deeper meanings of things, divined rather than experienced. Their stealing melody haunts the soul, however dazed the mind may be with their vagueness, and their exaltation of death above ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... applying a light whisk-broom to the coat, she hummed one of the songs her father taught her when he was in his buoyant or in his sentimental moods, and that was a fair proportion of the time. It used to perplex her the thrilling buoyancy and the creepy melancholy which alternately mastered her father; but as a child she had become so inured to it that she was not surprised at the alternate pensive gaiety and the blazing exhilaration of the particular man whose coat ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... knew everything. He was sad and melancholy, and would not eat, and went every morning and every evening to the river, and there wandered about the banks, and cried, "Baa, baa," and was answered by the sighing of the wind in the ...
— Old Peter's Russian Tales • Arthur Ransome
... little slip of a girl with a small-featured face and a certain pale prettiness. There was an appealing tinge of melancholy in her eyes notwithstanding they were eager and alert. Her dress was plain, ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... As the council is held, nominally at least, for the purpose of condolence, and as it necessarily revives the memory of the departed worthies of their republic, it is natural that the ceremonies throughout should be of a melancholy cast. They were doubtless so from the beginning, and before there was any occasion to deplore the decay of their commonwealth or the degeneracy of the age. In fact, when we consider that the founders of the League, with remarkable skill and ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... received rules and necessary restraints of society) and do not trouble ourselves about the consequences resulting from them, for no mischievous consequences do result. Sir John is old as well as fat, which gives a melancholy retrospective tinge to the character; and by the disparity between his inclinations and his capacity for enjoyment, makes it still more ludicrous ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... Execrable! Mr. Boadley died a few days ago. Madame of course was invisible. Ann Stuart will, most likely, marry P. C.—very well. She is very pretty. Mary Rush just married Manners, a captain in the British army. She looked quite melancholy, being on the point of setting off for Niagara, where her husband is stationed. Binney and Keene look better than I ever saw them. Keene is learning the harp. They are at lodgings in town, and, happening to be near my quarters, I saw them two ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... rests his head upon the lap of Earth, A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair Science[19] frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him ...
— Selections from Five English Poets • Various
... the President. Dick had never beheld a more striking contrast. The President was elderly, of great height, his head surmounted by a high silk hat which made him look yet taller, while his face was long, melancholy, and wrinkled deeply. His collar had wilted with the heat and the tails of his long black ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Little is attempted in the way of modifying the harmony of the theme except to carry it through several different keys, nor is there much accessory matter employed as filling. It is practically a song,—an ode if you like,—of a melancholy, grieving character. Its structure will be understood by aid of the following analysis: It begins with a prelude of four measures, after which the leading idea enters in the key of C-sharp minor, closing in E-major, four measures. After a measure of accompaniment the subject ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews
... and sturdy. His complexion was dark, his features oriental, his face oval, framed by a coal black flowing beard, which gave him an appearance at once imposing and attractive. His large black eyes shone with the lustre of intelligence. A deep and melancholy calm seemed fixed in their commanding gaze. His quiet countenance and stately form, his black clerical garments, his sedate step and thoughtful mien added to the impressive effect of his appearance. His beauty, ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... little easy; I have a Thought shall soon set all Matters again to rights. Why so melancholy, Polly? since what is done cannot be undone, we must all endeavour to make the ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... awful quiet of these desolate scenes had little impressed him, and now it came upon him heavily. The shrilling of a solitary locust somewhere in the gums, the brisk crackle of dry bark and twigs as he trod, the melancholy sighing of the wind-stirred leafage, offered him those inexplicable contrasts that give stress ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... Princes, than the spectacle of their equals dying. Everybody is occupied about them while ill—but as soon as they are dead, nobody mentions them. The King frequently talked about death—and about funerals, and places of burial. Nobody could be of a more melancholy temperament. Madame de Pompadour once told me that he experienced a painful sensation whenever he was forced to laugh, and that he had often begged her to break off a droll story. He smiled, and that was all. In general, he had the most gloomy ideas concerning almost all events. When there ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... yourself, and let us by sentiments of piety, endeavour to purify ourselves from an involuntary crime." In this manner did he talk to her, but all his love and tenderness made no impression on her mind—-she answered him only by her endeavours to snatch away the sword, and stab him. During this melancholy struggle their attendants arrived; they had also lost themselves, and having sought their master all over the forest, the noise of their horses, though then at a distance, had frighted the robbers, and saved ...
— The Princess of Ponthieu - (in) The New-York Weekly Magazine or Miscellaneous Repository • Unknown
... secure by his diligence and good conduct; and the attention I received from Mr Evelyn, and also the head clerk, who had an idea that I was to be a partner and consequently would become his superior, made him very melancholy and unhappy—for I believe that then he was quite as much in love with Miss Evelyn as I was myself; and I must tell you, that my love for her was unbounded, and she well deserved it. But all these happy prospects were overthrown by my own folly. As soon as it was known that I had ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... this friendly advice, felt very far from keeping up his pecker. But he did his best, and worked his face into a melancholy ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... springs, the beauty of little waves, the bright thoughts of stars. Sometimes in certain modes, they could be sad, but it was the sadness of lonely homeless things, old dreaming spirits of wind and wave, not the sadness of such things as had known love and lost what they had loved, but the melancholy of such forlorn beings as by their nature were shut out from the love that dwells about the firelit hearth and the old roofs of homesteads. It was the sadness of the wind that wails in desolate places, knowing ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of Paris under the English is a melancholy one. Despite the coronation of the young king at Notre Dame and the rigid justice and enlightened policy of Bedford's regency, they failed to win the affection of the Parisians. Rewards to political friends, punishments ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... feminine regard and captivate the female heart, my boy—I'm married and I know! But your dress is a thought too sombre, I think, considering your youth, though I'll admit it suits you and there's a devilish tragic melancholy Danish-air about ye as should nail ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... condescend to answer, but went to Smallbones and raised his head. The lad revived. He was terribly bitten about the face and neck, and what with the wounds in front, and the lashing from the cat, presented a melancholy spectacle. ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... It was the hollow, melancholy, wild beast-howl of a fog-horn. We were drifting upon a tragic coast, where the great waves slipped up the cliffs noiselessly, to disappear upon the other side. At the time, I was talking to a person who had just ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips
... tenant-farmers, and farm-labourers." In support of this motion Mr. Cobden endeavoured to prove the existence of distress among the farmers; asserting that half of them were in a state of insolvency, and that the other half were paying rents out of their capital, and were fast hastening to the same melancholy condition. Mr. Cobden next contended that there was a want of security in tenure, and that this fact not only prevented the application of capital, but that it also kept the land in a bad state of cultivation. The farmer without a lease was afraid that if he made any improvement in his farm, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... Biog. Brit. where a summary of Cook's Voyages is given, an observation is made on this melancholy part of the narrative, which the reader may not be displeased to see copied here. "It is probable that these calamitous events, which could not fail of making a powerful impression on the mind of Lieutenant Cook, might give occasion to his turning his thoughts more zealously ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr
... eighteenth-century rhymester, merely Greek ladies draped in flowing raiment; to him they were realities, intensely focussed in himself. Watts was giving of himself, of his knowledge and observation of what Love is and does, and how Death appears so variously; and who but a man who knew the melancholy of despair ...
— Watts (1817-1904) • William Loftus Hare
... slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the indistinguishable person in whose "integrity and abilities he had reposed such special confidence" as to have appointed him consul for Venice and the ports ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... Omnipotent God only. But, omitting these, I would here ask this one Question. Whether by the use of this Universal Medicine, the pristine Nature of Man may be converted into New, so as a Slothful Man may degenerate into a Diligent, or stirring Man, and a Man, who before was by Nature Melancholy and Sad, afterward became Jovial, Chearful, and full of Joy, or like alterations, reformations, permutations, or vicissitudes happen in the Nature ...
— The Golden Calf, Which the World Adores, and Desires • John Frederick Helvetius
... the boat, and attempt our relief. The workmen looked steadfastly upon the writer, and turned occasionally towards the vessel, still far to leeward.[14] All this passed in the most perfect silence, and the melancholy solemnity of the group made an impression never to be effaced from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... with gray moss, the abandoned cotton-gins and disused negro quarters. As I did so a feeling of homesickness and depression came upon me, and my disgraceful failure at the Point, the loss of my grandfather, and my desertion of Beatrice, for so it began to seem to me, filled me with a bitter melancholy. ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis
... below them, rises the melancholy and discordant clamour of our performance. Quickly, the voices of the night awake in earnest protest against it. Roosting shags and waterfowl fly screaming away. In the swamp a bittern booms; and strange wailing cries come from the depths of the bush. On the farm dogs bark energetically, cattle ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... this time the complexion becomes dull, the breath stronger, digestion more laborious, while there is sometimes disturbance of the urine, together with general malaise, in which the temper takes part; ideas are formed with more difficulty, and there is a tendency to melancholy, with unusual irascibility and mental inertia, lasting a few days. More recently Stephenson, who established the cyclical wave-theory of menstruation, argued that it exists in men also, and is really "a general ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... preacher could really do nothing, because Byronism was an appeal that lay in the regions of the mind only accessible by one with an eye and a large poetic feeling for the infinite whole of things. It was not the rebellion only in Manfred, nor the wit in Don Juan, nor the graceful melancholy of Childe Harold, which made their author an idol, and still make him one to multitudes of Frenchmen and Germans and Italians. One prime secret of it is the air and spaciousness, the freedom and elemental grandeur of Byron. Who has not felt this to be one of the glories of Mr. ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... back. She could see nothing else, think of nothing else. Not that it was so very handsome—though no other had ever approached it in its power over her imagination—but because of its expression of haunting melancholy,—a melancholy so settled and so evidently the result of long-continued sorrow that her interest had been reached and her heartstrings shaken as never before ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... and become his partner in the shop. I agreed to this and went in to my wife and applied me to the shop. But I was broken in heart and spirit, and grief was manifest upon me; and the grocer used to drink and invite me thereto, but I refrained for melancholy. I abode on this wise two years till, one day, as I sat in the shop, behold, there passed by a parcel of people with meat and drink, and I asked the grocer what was the matter. Quoth he, This is the day of the pleasure-makers, when all the musicians and dancers of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 9 • Richard F. Burton
... distinguish—nothing but the distant hum of the myriad voices of the dark mingling in one ceaseless inarticulate sound. It was well I had not time to dwell on it, or I might have reached some spiritually-disturbing melancholy. ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... cascade of silver. It was not the manner of the young as yet to argue with their elders, and though I might have been a little fluttered by the comely gallant's lofty talk and gaze of daring melancholy, I said good-bye to him in my heart, as I kissed my noble father. Shall I ever cease to thank the Lord that I proved ...
— Slain By The Doones • R. D. Blackmore
... he is led imperceptibly into a soft melancholy, which peculiar elegance of expression renders extremely agreeable in the end of this poem. There is a fine stroke of this kind in his Ode to Septimus, with whom he was going to fight against the Cantabrians. He figures out a poetical recess for his ...
— An Essay on the Lyric Poetry of the Ancients • John Ogilvie
... considerable design of planting; many acres were accordingly set out with fir, and the little feathery besoms gave a false scale and lent a strange air of a toy-shop to the moors. A great, rooty sweetness of bogs was in the air, and at all seasons an infinite melancholy piping of hill birds. Standing so high and with so little shelter, it was a cold, exposed house, splashed by showers, drenched by continuous rains that made the gutters to spout, beaten upon and buffeted by all the winds of heaven; and the prospect ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... George Osborne a very nice young man. His whiskers had made an impression upon her, on the very first night she beheld them at the ball at Messrs. Hulkers; and, as we know, she was not the first woman who had been charmed by them. George had an air at once swaggering and melancholy, languid and fierce. He looked like a man who had passions, secrets, and private harrowing griefs and adventures. His voice was rich and deep. He would say it was a warm evening, or ask his partner to take an ice, with a ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... corner slept a heap of half-clothed blacks. Going on the underground railroad to Canada. Stolid, sensual wretches, with here and there a broad, melancholy brow and desperate jaws. One little pickaninny rubbed its sleepy eyes and laughed ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 09, No. 51, January, 1862 • Various
... to the children of men. That most valuable author, Lucretius, who has supplied us and others with an almost inexhaustible supply of metaphors on this topic, ever dwells on the life of his gods with a sad and melancholy feeling that no such life was possible on a crude and cumbersome earth. In general, the two opposing agencies are marriage and lack of money; either of these breaks the lot of literary and refined inaction at once and forever. The first of these, as we have seen, Cowper had escaped; ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... Margaret, softening. "And so you've had a fit of melancholy! What a long one, too! All the same, I ought to reproach you for not believing in our sympathy. Well, I suppose now I may tell mamma not to be afraid to send you a card ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... dreaming over dreams of war and slaughter, another of love and wedded joys, one in fancy grasping the spear and the war-club, another and a younger the bosom of a dusky maiden of his tribe. Over their heads the tall forest tree waved in the night wind, giving the melancholy music of sighing branches; beside them ran the clear waters of the river, slightly murmuring as they rolled away to the land, which our nation gave to their good brother Miquon[C]. All was so hushed in the camp of the Unamis that the lowest note of the ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 1 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... dead was none other than his own son! The great wave had caught the frail craft on its crest, and, sweeping it along with lightning speed for a short distance, had hurled it on the deck of the Sunshine with such violence as to completely stun the whole crew. Even Spinkie lay in a melancholy little heap in the ...
— Blown to Bits - The Lonely Man of Rakata, the Malay Archipelago • R.M. Ballantyne
... up against the current. Damp and cold clouds, of a monotone pallor, enveloped the steamer from all sides and drowned all sounds, dissolving them in their troubled dampness. The brazen roaring of the signals came out in a muffled, melancholy drone, and was oddly brief as it burst forth from the whistle. The sound seemed to find no place for itself in the air, which was soaked with heavy dampness, and fell downward, wet and choked. And the splashing of the ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... the gang burned keenly and found voice in Ren de Montigny, who asked what ailed him with commendable solicitude. Villon shook his head, applied himself again to the cannakin, and emerged from it with a most melancholy expression of countenance. "You behold in me, friends," he sighed, "a victim of love," and his visage showed so lugubrious that it sorely tempted Louis to laugh, and hotly moved Huguette to anger, for ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... and Sanford? Yes, and rather a melancholy affair. The worst part of it is, that the foolish young man has been embezzling the money ...
— Home Lights and Shadows • T. S. Arthur
... relapses into the playful mood which his more serious reflections have scarcely interrupted. He thinks of the removable paintings which lie hidden in cloister or church, and which a sympathizing purchaser might rescue from decay; and he reproaches those melancholy ghosts for not guiding such purchasers to them. He, for instance, does not aspire to the works of the very great; but a number of lesser lights, whose name and quality he recites, might, he thinks, have lent themselves ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... mind from the delusions of its charms. He should separate the exercises of the understanding from the tendencies of the fancy or of the heart. He should be prepared to follow the light of evidence, though it should lead him to conclusions the most painful and melancholy. He should train his mind to all the hardihood of abstract and unfeeling intelligence. He should give up every thing to the supremacy of argument and he able to renounce without a sigh all the tenderest possessions[fn 2] of infancy, the moment ...
— Five Pebbles from the Brook • George Bethune English
... brother," said the Abbot, listening with melancholy acquiescence to the detail of his own merits, "that I caused to be built that curious screen, which secureth the cloisters from the north-east wind.—But all these things avail nothing—As we read in holy Maccabee, Capta est civitas per voluntatem ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... and near it are the remains of edifices supposed to have been the magazines. On an adjoining hill are remnants of three temples and two towers, in almost undistinguishable ruin. We left Selinunte with a lasting but melancholy impression, and were reminded of ...
— Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, March 1844 - Volume 23, Number 3 • Various
... at Boston for murdering her own daughter a child of three years old. She had been a member of the church of Salem, and of good esteem for goodliness, but, falling at difference with her husband, through melancholy or spiritual delusions, she sometime attempted to kill him, and her children, and herself, by refusing meat.... After much patience, and divers admonitions not prevailing, the church cast her out. Whereupon she grew worse; so ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... be, with demons, who impair The strength of better thoughts, and seek their prey In melancholy bosoms, such as were Of moody texture from their earliest day, And loved to dwell in darkness and dismay, Deeming themselves predestin'd to a doom Which is not of the pangs that pass away; Making the sun like blood, the earth a tomb, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. XVII. No. 469. Saturday January 1, 1831 • Various
... custom, which demanded that they should undergo, while mourning for their kindred, the deepest privation in a property sense. Everything the loss of which would make them poor was sacrificed on the graves of their relatives or distinguished warriors, and as melancholy because of removal from their old homes caused frequent deaths, there was no lack of occasion for the sacrifices. The widows and orphans of the dead warriors were of course the chief mourners, and exhibited their grief in many peculiar ways. I remember one in ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... and emaciated, having lost all animation. I wish to know the disease thou sufferest from, so that I may endeavour to apply a remedy.' Thus addressed by his son, Santanu answered, 'Thou sayest truly, O son, that I have become melancholy. I will also tell thee why I am so. O thou of Bharata's line, thou art the only scion of this our large race. Thou art always engaged in sports of arms and achievements of prowess. But, O son, I am always thinking of the instability of human life. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... helm the very instant a sailing-ship is perceived. Our pace is rather rapid, particularly in light winds, and it is probable that the steamer misjudged her distance from us. The more voyages I make the more I feel that the melancholy little paragraphs one only too often sees, headed 'Lost with all hands,' or 'Missing,' are nearly always the result of accidents caused by a bad look-out and careless steering. I often tell Tom it is ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... was very moody and downcast, with bent brows and eyes upon the pommel of his saddle. Edricson and Terlake rode behind him in little better case, while Ford, a careless and light-hearted youth, grinned at the melancholy of his companions, and flourished his lord's heavy spear, making a point to right and a point to left, as though he were a paladin contending against a host of assailants. Sir Nigel happened, however, to turn himself in his saddle-Ford instantly became ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... burning young socialist and another friend, and all I had in my pocket was thru'pence. They piloted me to the Whitechapel Workhouse, at which I peered from around a friendly corner. It was a few minutes past five in the afternoon but already a long and melancholy line was formed, which strung out around the corner of the ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... its strangeness and picturesqueness would not fail to compensate an imaginative youth for the want of order and comfort. The strong contrast of wealth and poverty, of luxury and distress, that gave to the whole country so melancholy an appearance, was, as it were, focussed in its capital. Mr. Coxe, who visited Warsaw not long before ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... as a youth danced in one of the ballets at St. Germain, it is said at the desire of Richelieu, who was an expert in spectacle. It appears that he was encouraged in these amusements to remedy fits of melancholy. ...
— The Dance (by An Antiquary) - Historic Illustrations of Dancing from 3300 B.C. to 1911 A.D. • Anonymous
... green gooseberries "cureth all inflammations," while the red gooseberry is good for bilious subjects. But it has been said that gooseberries are not good for melancholy persons. ...
— Food Remedies - Facts About Foods And Their Medicinal Uses • Florence Daniel
... plentiful sum of royalties; and in his brain a hundred floating ideas. Moreover, the pretty town held two good friends of his: Kashkine and Balakirev, each one hard at his own work; but delighted at the opportunity of drawing Ivan a little out of his melancholy. In time, indeed, they came to think it banished, and the young man at peace. He was merely gathering strength to renew his battle: that intangible fight against circumstance and his own nature that has been waged by every fine and sensitive soul since the world began, and Abel bethought ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... that something came to cheer us just then; for what with the death of Dennis and of our two poor Indians, and our own hurts, and the melancholy feeling that must oppress men always—save those of cruel and hardened natures—when a fight is ended in which they have spilled freely human blood, we all were oppressed ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... blackness on his cold, knit brow, That he might rush with tenfold furious rage, And all the elements in war engage, To strip the trees of all their splendors bare And make sweet Nature a stern aspect wear! Such thoughts at times filled him with melancholy, Which then, shook off, were looked upon as folly And after-thoughts brought in their joyous train Pleasures prospective, during Winter's reign. The fleecy snow's wild dancing through the air; The clean, white ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... you love the poet's song, And here is one for your regard. You know the "melancholy bard," Whose grief is ...
— Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2 • George MacDonald
... lead," he wrote, "suits no one; it wearies relatives and friends alike. All leave my melancholy home. . . . It is impossible for me to work amidst the petty tiffs aroused by surroundings of discord; and my activity has waned during the past year. . . . You were in a tolerable situation. I had a trustworthy ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... dusk of evening when Tom Walker reached the old fort, and he paused there awhile to rest himself. Any one but he would have felt unwilling to linger in this lonely, melancholy place, for the common people had a bad opinion of it, from the stories handed down from the times of the Indian wars, when it was asserted that the savages held incantations here and made sacrifices to the ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... full extent of his severity. Many thousands of the citizens perished in a promiscuous slaughter, and there were few obnoxious persons in Egypt who escaped a sentence either of death or at least of exile. [44] The fate of Busiris and of Coptos was still more melancholy than that of Alexandria: those proud cities, the former distinguished by its antiquity, the latter enriched by the passage of the Indian trade, were utterly destroyed by the arms and by the severe order of Diocletian. [45] The character of the Egyptian ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... your Aunt Gwen's health failed, and she lost interest in everything; finally after the death of your uncle Harry, she went into a complete melancholy, and retired to the seclusion of the tower room, with an attendant. In all of these seven years since the tragedy, she has remained there; only at night sometimes, she wanders around the old gardens. Perhaps if Janey ...
— The Quest of Happy Hearts • Kathleen Hay
... say: the facts related, with some regretted omissions, by which my story has so skeleton a look, are those that led to the lamentable conclusion. But the melancholy, the pathos of it, the heart of all England stirred by it, have been—and the panting excitement it was to every listener—sacrificed in the vain effort to render events as consequent to your understanding ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... pressing backward the blind, fell off and bounced its hard felt on the floor, which at the edges was uncarpeted. The noise of the hat and the general stir of George's infraction disturbed Marguerite, who awoke and looked up. The melancholy which she was exhaling suddenly vanished. Her steady composure in ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... the north, to quarrel with the aristocratic Caepio, who was now serving as proconsul in those regions, and to share in the crushing disaster which this dissension drew upon their heads. The search for genius had to be renewed at the close of this melancholy year.[1224] Another "new man" was found in Caius Flavius Fimbria, a product of the forensic activity of the age, a clever lawyer, a bitter and vehement speaker, but with a power that secured his efforts a transitory circulation as types of literary oratory.[1225] He is not known to have shown any ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... Berta leaned back and drew a long and melancholy sigh from the bottom of her boots. "Girls," she turned to the others who were still lingering over their breakfast, "she asks why I don't go to hear grand opera. And it costs two dollars railroad fare even on a commutation ticket, and seats are three dollars up, and I have precisely thirty-seven ...
— Beatrice Leigh at College - A Story for Girls • Julia Augusta Schwartz
... stay in that part of the country, I never failed to urge my cousin to narrate the events which had brought Coote-down to its present melancholy plight. But it was not till I called to take leave of her, perhaps for ever, that she complied. On that occasion, she placed in my hands a neatly-written manuscript in her own handwriting, which she said contained all the particulars I required. Circumstances have since occurred that ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... laid knives under his pillow] He recounts the temptations by which he was prompted to suicide; the opportunities of destroying himself, which often occurred to him in his melancholy moods. ...
— Notes to Shakespeare, Volume III: The Tragedies • Samuel Johnson
... she descends in her little scale of dignities and becomes an ouvriere. If she loses it, she is unclassed entirely, and enters the half-world. The porter's wife with her dubious mob-cap, and the hard, flaunting grisette with her melancholy feathers and determined chapeau, are equally removed from the white cap of the "young person." To maintain it in its vestal candor and proud sincerity is not always an easy task in a land where every careless ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various
... Hudson's fate, little or no punishment was visited on them and some of them even took part in later expeditions. And so perished by base treachery one of the bravest and most brilliant sailors that the world has ever seen, for Hudson died either in the melancholy reaches of Hudson Bay or on some bleak shore where he was cast away. But though he died miserably he still lives, ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... of visiting Maria Osgood almost daily, to ask questions about her, and perhaps with a secret expectation of their meeting her at the house of her friend. The gay trifling of Miss Osgood aided greatly both in cooling his spleen and removing his melancholy, till in the course of a month he even proceeded so far as to make her the confidant of what she already knew, though only by conjecture and inference. Delafield at this time was so urgent, and secretly so determined to prevail, in order that his pride ...
— Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart • James Fenimore Cooper
... a man only too ready to think well of others, and to do them a kindness if possible, so he willingly promised, and observed Birt closely that he might know him again. He was a slight young fellow of about twenty, with delicate features and large melancholy eyes which he bent on the ground; so shame-faced and sad looking, and such a contrast in his bearing to the recklessness of many of the other men, that my father's heart was at once touched with pity ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... demon Hatred; and have continued to the present day to receive an unholy worship from blinded bigots, who hope to obtain Heaven's patronage and assistance for thoughts and wishes which they would be ashamed to breathe to man. Three Aves repeated with devotion at this odious and melancholy shrine are firmly believed to have the power to cause, within the year, the certain death of the person against whom the assistance of Our Lady of Hatred has been invoked. And it is said that even yet occasionally, in the silence ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... wind blew over a glassy sea. The sound of the rippling water on the reef of rocks and on the sandy beach had a weird, melancholy effect. Then came the dull noise of muffled oars commingling with the cawing of the gull and hollow surging of the waters into the Fairy Rocks. There was neither moon nor stars visible, but in the bay the experienced eye could discern the ...
— Looking Seaward Again • Walter Runciman
... But her melancholy was not of long duration. The colt was in high spirits, and the task of impressing him with the fact that he had now reached a responsible age and must behave like a horse, with something else before him in life than kicking ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... plants and animals. Thus, swine when affected with the spleen are supposed to resort to the spleen-wort, and according to Coles, in his "Art of Simpling," the ass does likewise, for he tells us that, "if the asse be oppressed with melancholy, he eates of the herbe asplemon or mill-waste, and eases himself of the swelling of the spleen." One of the popular names of the common sow-thistle (Sonchus oleraceus) is hare's-palace, from the shelter it is supposed to afford the hare. According to the "Grete Herbale," "if the ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
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