"Melancholy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... crying out in the heat of action: "Comrades, let us attack them on the left flank." Hayder Aga, who heard it, exclaimed: "Who are you? hold your tongue." After the victory the young man, was seen thoughtful and melancholy in the midst of the rejoicings of his brethren; Hayder Aga, as proud a man as ever sat upon a throne, to whom it was reported, sent for the young man, and when he entered the tent rose, and kissed his beard, begging [p.644] him to forget whatever lie might have ...
— Travels in Syria and the Holy Land • John Burckhardt
... defeat clarified the young author's vision, and a bitter melancholy crept over him as the third act unrolled. "They will go out," he said to himself, "and they will not come back for the last act. The play is doomed to disaster." And a flame of hatred rose in his heart against the audience. "They are ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... looked out of his hole, there was, 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 ...
— The Adventures of A Brownie - As Told to My Child by Miss Mulock • Miss Mulock
... of some letters I have lately received from my dear friend, Julia Linnet. She is a warm-hearted little thing, easily led away by her enthusiasm. At first, I was afraid she would pine away with melancholy; but all my uneasiness was dispelled a few mornings since, when a lace-bordered envelope reached me, enclosing two cards tied together with silver-cord, on one of which ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... a volume of themselves. This city could once boast of upwards of thirty parish churches; of which very nearly a dozen have been recently (I mean during the Revolution) converted into warehouses. It forms a curious, and yet melancholy melange—this strange misappropriation of what was formerly held most sacred, to the common and lowest purposes of civil life! You enter these warehouses, or offices of business, and see the broken shaft, the battered capital, and half-demolished altar-piece—the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume One • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... curve; his hair, black and lustrous, twisted itself into rebellious little curls, here and there concealing the circlet of his diadem; his ears, small and upright, were of a ruddy hue; his forehead was broad and full, though a little low, like all antique foreheads; his eyes full of gentle melancholy, his oval cheeks, his chin with its gentle and regular curves, his mouth with its slightly parted lips—all bespoke the nature of the poet rather than that of the warrior. In fact, although he was brave, ...
— King Candaules • Theophile Gautier
... now law with her father; he refused her nothing; he even allowed her to see her mother-in-law, provided the meeting was managed when he was from home. It was so managed, and a melancholy meeting it proved; the old woman's tears and sobs were so irrepressible, that Gladys was obliged to shorten it as much as possible; Netta, however, ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... States having communicated to the two Houses of Congress the melancholy intelligence of the death of their illustrious and beloved fellow-citizen, James Madison, of Virginia, late President of the United States, and the two Houses sharing in the general grief which ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 1 (of 2) of Volume 3: Andrew Jackson (Second Term) • James D. Richardson
... how all things swerve From their known course, or vanish like a dream; Another language spreads from coast to coast; Only, perchance, some melancholy stream, And some indignant hills old names preserve, When laws, and creeds, and people all are lost!" Wordsworth's ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 179. Saturday, April 2, 1853. • Various
... was necessary to cross the camp, or rather the several camps, of the army; and we wended our way over cold and miry ground, through fields where all was devastation and ruin. This camp presented a most singular aspect; and I experienced feelings of bitter melancholy as I saw our soldiers compelled to bivouac at the gates of a large and beautiful city of which they were the conquerors, but the fire still more than they. The Emperor, on appointing Marshal Mortier governor of Moscow, had ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... these woods, and damp the ground With fallen leaves so thickly strown, And cold the wind that wanders round With wild and melancholy moan; ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... up the absurd fancy of exhibiting in print as a sort of boozing buffoon; and who is now, instead of revelling in the license of tavern-suppers and party politics, bearing up, as he may, against severe and unmerited misfortunes, in as dreary a solitude as ever nursed the melancholy of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, No. 477, Saturday, February 19, 1831 • Various
... her salvation; work was the only thing that protected one, that kept one steady and one's values true. At home in Hampstead, absorbed and busy, she had managed to get over Frederick, thinking of him latterly only with the gentle melancholy with which one thinks of some one once loved but long since dead; and now this place, idleness in this soft place, had thrown her back to the wretched state she had climbed so carefully out of years ago. Why, if Frederick did come she would only bore ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... were approaching the village of the Auk tribe, venerable Toyatte seemed to be unusually pensive, as if weighed down by some melancholy thought. This was so unusual that I waited attentively to find out ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... and it is peculiar. It is not the worse for a little idiosyncrasy. He does not go deep into the Scotch novels, but he is at home in Smollett and Fielding. He is little read in Junius or Gibbon, but no man can give a better account of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, or Sir Thomas Brown's Urn-Burial, or Fuller's Worthies, or John Bunyan's Holy War. No one is more unimpressible to a specious declamation; no one relishes a recondite beauty more. His admiration ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... Niebuhr writes home from Great Britain to Madam Hensler, the wife of the good professor who had befriended him in college, "Your letter has made me so wild with delight, that I have felt full of affection to every creature that has come in my way." The melancholy heart and dismal lot of Gerald Griffin, the Irish novelist, found almost their solitary human alleviation and brightness in the sustaining kindness and admiration of a lady, designated in his brother's biography ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... preserved its silence, a restless endurance of the growing heat. Mrs. Thorne, in the thinnest of morning gowns, her damp hair brushed back from her powdered temples, sat alone at luncheon. Ito had put a melancholy perfection into his last salad. ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... make it impossible that she should attract a suitor. Who would dare to marry Elsie? No, let her have the pleasure, if it was one, at any rate the wholesome excitement, of companionship; it might save her from lapsing into melancholy or a worse form of madness. Dudley Venner had a kind of superstition, too, that, if Elsie could only outlive three septenaries, twenty-one years, so that, according to the prevalent idea, her whole frame would have been thrice made over, counting from her birth, she would ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... long-expected books which were to fulfil his early promise never appeared. Hegel's stricture was just. Schelling had no taste for the prolonged and intense labour which his brilliant early works marked out. He died in 1854, having reached the age of seventy-nine years, of which at least fifty were as melancholy and fruitless ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... the matter! When people talk about the Celtic race, I feel as if I could burn down London. That sort of rot does more harm than ten Coercion Acts. Do you suppose a man need be a Celt to feel melancholy in Rosscullen? Why, man, Ireland was peopled just as England was; and its breed was crossed by just the ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... at the wreck a melancholy scene presented itself. It would appear that she was thrown upon the rocks before she went to pieces; the upper part of her stern and hull as far forward as her mizen chains were entire and lying on the stern frame: about 100 yards off was her stem with part of her forecastle ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... elasticity, and the sprightliness of the sister's spirits, that invariably rose with the coming on of night, failed under the depressing influence of that rain-hastened funeral and that "set-in" rainy evening. As for the sister whose spirits fell with the fall of day, she was fast lapsing into a melancholy condition ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... dived into the public-house, and told a dark seedy man, with his black hair plastered and rolled effeminately, that he had got a bloke who would stand a quid for a mount. The two came out, and the plastered Italian went to the stables: the melancholy punster conducted Henry into the arena, and stood beside him like Patience on a monument. Presently a quiet ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... Light-headed with joy, the queen extended her hands to them, thanking them with broken words, which expressed her intoxication and her gratitude better than the choicest phrases could have done, when suddenly, turning round, she perceived George Douglas, alone and melancholy. Then, going to him and taking him by ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to break jest, and to bob one another, which they call repartie." The original edition of The Sullen Lovers is partly in blank verse; but, in the first collected edition of Shadwell's works, published by his son in 1720, it is printed in prose. Stanford, "a morose, melancholy man, tormented beyond measure with the impertinence of people, and resolved to leave the world to be quit of them" is a combination of Alceste in The Misanthrope, and Eraste in The Bores; Lovel, "an airy young gentleman, friend to Stanford, ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... said Cosmo. "I made acquaintance with it the last thing as I was growing ill. It looks to me so melancholy! If I were here, I should never rest till I had with my own hands got it into ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... crossed the hall 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 those ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... melancholy fact that among the enemies of our birds two of the most destructive and relentless are our women and our boys. The love of feather ornamentation so heartlessly persisted in by thousands of women, and the mania for collecting eggs and killing birds so deeply rooted in our boys, ...
— Bird Day; How to prepare for it • Charles Almanzo Babcock
... [Pg 346] that he make it a god, work also and fall down." With perfect justice Stier remarks: "Notwithstanding the connection with, and allusion to, the circumstances of that time, the word of the Prophet is to be understood in a general, spiritual way, as a melancholy, bitter lamentation over the general misery, and man's deep-rooted perverseness in running with effort and exertion, after that which is pernicious to the soul, and in serving some Baal better than Jehovah." "Fatness" ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions. Vol. 2 • Ernst Hengstenberg
... a moment to look at the trees by the roadside, at the neighboring meadows sleeping in the bright sunlight. Over yonder the reapers were gathering the last sheaves. Farther on they were ploughing. But all the melancholy of the silent toil had vanished, so far as the girl was concerned, so delighted was she at the thought of seeing her ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... lamb 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
... was sensible of the force of this argument, and after bestowing sundry anathemas on the cheating friar and the inn, in which he was zealously joined by Peregil, he said in a melancholy tone, "Well, as there is no remedy, we must put up with this misfortune as ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... notes were as clear; and through them ran a sadness as of a mist of moonlight. And just as moonbeams, when they mingle with the mist, make the melancholy of night, so the memory of a dead love ran through everything Alice ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... customary track so that he might reach the shealing the quicker by a short cut that led through boggy grass. He stumbled in hags and tripped on ancient heather-tufts; the birds wheeled and mocked over him, something in their note most melancholy ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... It is melancholy to think how much valuable property was engulphed in this untrodden waste, how many shuttlecocks, hit a little too hard, had toppled over and settled on some flowery clump, in full view of, but out of reach for ever of their unfortunate ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... all that survived of his neck. I rose softly, signing to the others not to interrupt their conversation, and stole up to him. He did not move; his hands were clasped on his stomach. I peered round into his face; its lines were set in a grotesque heavy melancholy. At first I felt very sorry for him; but as I went on looking at him something of Coralie's feeling came over me, and I grew angry. That he was doubtless very miserable ceased to plead for him, nay, it aggravated his offence. ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... of Cambridgeshire or the emptiness of Romney Marsh that this corner of England will appeal, but to such an one it is full of interest and certainly not without beauty. Pagham, however, of which I had read, with its creek and harbour, its curious Hushing Well, its golden sands, and extraordinary melancholy, as it were a ruin of the sea, sadly disappointed me. Only its melancholy remains. Its harbour, where of old we read the sea-fowl were to be seen in innumerable flocks, and the whole place was musical with ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... no means a refreshing torrent; it winds its slow way in muddy melancholy to the cleanly water of the Vaal. But at least it contained water in which both men and horses could forget the heat of the veldt. All day the weary cavalrymen waited for the supplies, which did not come until they were attempting ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm
... masturbation: Miss H.H., 28 years of age, a robust brunette, with fully developed figure, without any trace of anaemia or chlorosis, but with an apathetic expression, bluish rings around the eyes, with hypochondriacal and melancholy feelings. She complains of pressure on the head ("as if head would burst"), giddiness, ringing in the ears, photopsia, hemicrania, pains in the back and at sacrum, and symptoms of spinal adynamia, with a sense of fatigue on the least exertion in walking or standing; she sways ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Jonathan Goddard, reader of the physic lectures at Gresham College, suddenly fell down dead in the street, as he was entering into a coach. He was a pretty corpulent and tall man, a bachelor between 45 and 50 years of age; he was melancholy, inclined to be cynical, and used now and then to complain of giddiness in his head. He was an excellent mathematician, and some time physician to Oliver the Protector" (John Coniers, apothecary, in Shoe Lane. MSS. Sloan. 958). The "drops" were a preparation of spirit of hartshorn, with other things; ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken
... heart but very imperfectly before you, on a subject to which I attach the utmost importance, if I did not undertake to give you the correct point of view with regard to it. I need not here repeat how many of the perverted endeavors and melancholy fortunes of humanity you charge upon religious associations; this is clear as light, in a thousand utterances of your predominant individuals; nor will I stop to refute these accusations, one by one, in order to fix the ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... midst of 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 of the brown hills of ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... pinewood. Which he had threaded for a good half-mile, when, the fifth hour of the day being well-nigh past, yet he recking neither of food nor of aught else, 'twas as if he heard a woman wailing exceedingly and uttering most piercing shrieks: whereat, the train of his sweet melancholy being broken, he raised his head to see what was toward, and wondered to find himself in the pinewood; and saw, moreover, before him running through a grove, close set with underwood and brambles, towards the place where he was, a damsel most comely, stark naked, her hair ...
— The Decameron, Vol. II. • Giovanni Boccaccio
... composed, and gentle, he seemed bent on appearing not only resigned, but cheerful. I might even have supposed him verging on being happy, had not the havoc of grief on his face, and the tone of deep melancholy in his voice, assured me his Solitude was all sacred to his ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... and nothing less than a public funeral could, as it was thought, do justice to its memory. The remains of the bird were laid on a bier, which was borne by two slaves; musicians went before it, playing mournful airs; and a great crowd of people of all ages and conditions, brought up the rear of the melancholy procession. ...
— Anecdotes of Animals • Unknown
... Soto conducts us 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
... breaking into little curls just above her ear; at the smooth forehead rendered so distinguished by the fine penciling of her arching brows; at the delicate nose with nostrils all alive to the beating of an over-anxious heart; at the mouth, touching in its melancholy so far beyond her years; and lastly at the strong young figure huddled on the little stool; and bending forward again, he uttered two or three quick sentences which ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... constitution and good natural abilities; but who, from an ill-directed education, possess nothing more solid than mere accomplishments, and have no materials for thought," and no "occupation to excite interest or demand attention." "The liability of such persons to melancholy, hysteria, hypochondriasis, and other varieties of mental distress, really depends on a state of irritability of the brain, induced ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... a half-breed trapper he heard of a white man who had crossed the Coast Range three grasses ago. This white man had three or four head of cattle, a Cree servant, and a queer-looking cayuse with long ears and a mournful, melancholy cry. This latter member of the gang carried ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... which he had raised the corn crop; a strange, huge, solitary man, self-reliant, unflinching, cut off from all his fellows by endless leagues of shadowy forest. Thus he dwelt alone in the vast dim wastes, wandering whithersoever he listed through the depths of the melancholy and wintry woods, sleeping by his camp-fire or in the hollow tree-trunk, ever ready to do battle against brute or human foe—a stark and sombre harbinger of the ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the music: a Lied by Schubert—the favorite composer of the day; a master "whose best work was still unknown," as she said in the cant she had learned from the critics, alluding to the fact that only the least subtle of the melancholy composer's works had thus far ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... When he grew melancholy and sleepless, and walked about all night, it was a real addition to our many evils. He declared that he must soon die, and I heard him one night earnestly beseeching God, in language of great force and eloquence, to forgive him. In the morning he was dead, having strangled ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... replied the apprentice, in a melancholy tone, "for life has lost all charms for me. But do not remain here, or you may be infected ...
— Old Saint Paul's - A Tale of the Plague and the Fire • William Harrison Ainsworth
... Phoenix. It was a sorrowful prospect for these wanderers, that on the morrow they must again set forth, and that, after many nightfalls, they would perhaps be no nearer the close of their toilsome pilgrimage than now. These thoughts made them all melancholy at times, but appeared to torment Cilix more than the rest of the party. At length, one morning, when they were taking their staffs in hand to set out, he ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... female friends, mine following and perceiving Anneke colouring highly, and looking a little distressed. As for Mary Wallace she appeared to me then, as I fancied was usually the case whenever Guert Ten Eyck approached her, to be struggling with a species of melancholy pleasure. ...
— Satanstoe • James Fenimore Cooper
... evening I sent off another runner with a telegram and quite a mail of letters from officers and men for their mothers', wives, and lovers over seas. He was a bony young Kaffir, with a melancholy face, black as sorrow. At six o'clock I saw him start, his apish feet padding through the crusted slush. One pocket bulged with biscuits, one with a tin of beef. Between his black chest and his rag of shirt he had tucked that neat packet which was to console so many a woman, white-skinned and ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... manuscript had found its way back to him, he had received every one with an increasing bitterness and despair, which gradually wrought his brain almost to a state of mental malady. By constitution he was nervous and melancholy: the utmost of the world's success would hardly have made him happy; he had no internal strength to cope with disappointment—no sanguine hopes pointing to a brighter future: he was overwhelmed with present failures. ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... up a hideous moaning. The men present do not think it undignified to utter loud lamentation and to shed frequent tears. Least commendable of all (from a modern standpoint) are the hired dirge singers, who maintain a most melancholy chant, all the time beating their breasts, and giving a perfect imitation of frantic grief. This has probably continued day and night, the mourners perhaps taking turns ...
— A Day In Old Athens • William Stearns Davis
... days after the sailing of the Lydia the weather broke. The morning mist lay heavy on the islands, and the lofty Ward Hill of Hoy hid his crown in the lowering clouds; the Bay of Stromness was glassy calm. High above the rain goose shrieked its melancholy cry, and the sea mews and sheldrakes, even the shear waters and bonxies, flew landward to the shelter of the cliffs. On the upland meadows the cows sniffed the moist air and refused to eat, and the young lambs sought the protection ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... carry it into effect. The first thing that occurred was a message from the Charity Hospital that Mrs. Watson was dying, and had asked for me. I did not care much about going. There is a sort of melancholy pleasure to be had out of a funeral, with its pomp and ceremony, but I shrank from a death-bed. However, Liddy got out the black things and the crape veil I keep for such occasions, and I went. I left Mr. Jamieson and ...
— The Circular Staircase • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... babies like balancing-poles, as they tottered along the gangway-plank. Men tried to secure themselves from being brushed into eternity by the powerful sweep of skirts. My own personal reminiscence of this transit from the wharf to the gallant bark of our choice is melancholy and vague, being marked chiefly to memory by the complicated curse bestowed upon me by a hideous old Irish-woman, whose oranges I accidentally upset in the crowd, and by whom I was subsequently derided with ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... pie in his hand. "Ah, yes!" He essayed a reckless laugh, but that evident simulation failed before Patterson's melancholy. With an assumption of falling in with his friend's manner, rather than from any personal ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... that he should have the cruelty himself to announce such a melancholy piece of news: they found his Royal Highness at the appointed hour in Miss Hyde's chamber: a few tears trickled down her cheeks, which she endeavoured to restrain. The chancellor, leaning against the wall, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... indeed very melancholy to reflect that our country has witnessed the time, when the bread of life had been taken from the children, and such husks as these substituted in its stead. Accredited ministers of the Roman Catholic Church have lately assured us ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... honour. The Hudson's Bay Company retained him in their service at various factories, and three years after his famous expedition they made him governor of Fort Prince of Wales. During his service there he had the melancholy celebrity of surrendering the great fort (unfortunately left without men enough to defend it) to a French fleet under Admiral La Perouse. Among the spoils of the captors was Hearne's manuscript journal, which the generous victors returned on the sole condition that it should be published as soon ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... say that the Dead die not, but remain Near to the rich heirs of their grief and mirth. I think they ride the calm mid-heaven, as these, In wise majestic melancholy train, And watch the moon, and the still-raging seas, And men, coming ...
— The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke • Rupert Brooke
... which we passed were deserted except by women and very old men; their aspect was most melancholy. The country is sandy and the land not fertile, but ...
— Three Months in the Southern States, April-June 1863 • Arthur J. L. (Lieut.-Col.) Fremantle
... sideways with his back to the curtains. He listened gloomily, with a melancholy and exhausted air, ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... supposed that I have received many tributes to the qualities that I possess. I have already exposed many of these to the public gaze, still have some left, and it seems to me a pity that my readers should miss any of the evidence. The first testimonial is from my sister Casey, and a melancholy interest is attached to it. It was the last one she wrote for me before I took the momentous step which will be ...
— Marge Askinforit • Barry Pain
... a very melancholy Reflection, that Men are usually so weak, that it is absolutely necessary for them to know Sorrow and Pain to be in their right Senses. Prosperous People (for Happy there are none) are hurried away ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele
... brief (the days of the penny Life) Tommy, looking back to this year, was sure that he had never really tried to work. But he had. He did his very best, doggedly, wearily sitting at the round table till Elspeth feared that he was killing himself and gave him a melancholy comfort by saying so. An hour afterwards he might discover that he had been far away from his books, looking on at his affecting death and counting the mourners ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... because of his forlorn way of muttering, "It's a weary warld, and nobody bides in't," as he went his melancholy rounds, sighed like one about to cry, ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... friendliness, and for forgiveness. And, O puissant one, truth, charity, penance, purity, compassion, soft speeches and absence of animosity towards friends,—all these were always in them. Slumber, procrastination, fretfulness, envy, and want of foresight, discontent, melancholy, cupidity never assailed them. In consequence of the Danavas having been distinguished for these good qualities, I dwelt with them from the beginning of the creation for many yugas together. Times were altered, and that alteration brought about an alteration ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... with him heartily, if somewhat hastily, and then prevailed upon him to drive on, which he did with melancholy resignation, disapproval expressed in every line of his body, which, from his box, was outlined strongly against the sky through the thin white camisa, embroidered as daintily as a girl's ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... Kate went away for no longer than a couple of days to her cousins at Penrith, he used to watch her departure till she was hidden at the first bend of the road about half a mile distant, and then when he went back to his room and looked at her empty chair, a half-mad, unconquerable melancholy overcame him. It was not to be explained by anxiety. It was inexplicable, a revelation of something in him dark and terrible. In 1844 Kate Radcliffe was twenty-four years old. She had never been handsome, and when she was sixteen her pony had missed its footing on a treacherous mountain track ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... of Malay extraction has in parts of the East Indian archipelago thus driven before him the dark-coloured native. The varieties of man seem to act on each other in the same way as different species of animals—the stronger always extirpating the weaker. It was melancholy at New Zealand to hear the fine energetic natives saying that they knew the land was doomed to pass from their children. Every one has heard of the inexplicable reduction of the population in the beautiful and healthy ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of previous explorers. From New York we travelled to Vancouver, thence across the now famous Chilkoot Pass to the Great Lakes and down the Yukon River to the sea, crossing Bering Straits in an American revenue cutter to the Siberian settlement of melancholy memory. From here I hoped to reach the nearest Russian outpost, Anadyrsk, by dog-sled, proceeding thence along the western shores of the Okhotsk Sea to Okhotsk and Yakutsk. The latter is within a couple of thousand miles of civilisation, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... have struck up a melancholy Magyar folksong; the crowd breaks up in isolated groups, mothers and fathers with their sons whisper in the dark corners of the barn. The father who did his service thirty years ago gives sundry good advice—no rebellion, quiet obedience, no use complaining ...
— A Bride of the Plains • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... 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 but ...
— Under the Rose • Frederic Stewart Isham
... than all the banners from the most ensanguined battle-fields that the valor of England has ever won, and with what a wealth of intellect is that nation endowed which after the centuries of immortal names already enshrined there has had the proud although most melancholy honor of adding in one decade—scarcely more than ten years—the names of Macaulay, Grote, Dickens, Thackeray, and Lytton? [Cheers.] They are our contemporaries, not our countrymen; but we cannot afford to resign our claim to some portion of their glory as illustrators of our common language. And ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... ship and sailed away over the hot, dry wastes, on and on over the cities of antiquity. The ruins of New York, London, Paris and other marts of the ancients were visited in their melancholy quest for life. But even the sites of these cities were hard to find. Only the tops of the tallest structures, such as the tip of the Washington monument and the towers of office buildings stood above the ashes and sands of centuries. But not even the shadow of a cloud was ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... and are greatly admired in Professor Ruskin's letters has played many of his best specimens within an hour, some in half that time. This same player states that he recurs with great interest, though melancholy in its character, to some games, he has played with those afflicted in various ways, on account of the solace and consolation as well as pleasure it has been found to afford him! The excellent contests some ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... ended his unhappy life at the age of 55, having reigned 42 years. Lewis the Dauphin was the eldest son of Charles VI. He was born 22nd January, 1396, and died before his father, December 18th, 1415, in his twentieth year. History says, "Shortly after the battle of Agincourt, either for melancholy that he had for the loss, or by some sudden disease, Lewis, Dovphin of Viennois, heir apparent to the French king, departed this ...
— King Henry the Fifth - Arranged for Representation at the Princess's Theatre • William Shakespeare
... are melancholy as an owl. I will tell you a funny story. Did you ever hear of one General Sherman? He that ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... with them; they are so fond of being occupied too; they are quite an example for any young person." When, after a stay of three weeks, the time came for the young men and their father to return to Germany, the moment of parting was a melancholy one. "It was our last HAPPY HAPPY breakfast, with this dear Uncle and those DEAREST beloved cousins, whom I DO love so VERY VERY dearly; MUCH MORE DEARLY than any other cousins in the WORLD. Dearly as I love Ferdinand, and ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... strange that, instead of the looked-for lightening of gloom, there was, if possible, in his bearing, his wife being safely dead and buried, an increase of melancholy. ...
— A Sheaf of Corn • Mary E. Mann
... easy-going, cultured and kindly gentlemen, rather limited in their views, without a trace of their sister's force of intellect or her strenuous temper. E. resembled her in person, he was tall, fair, with auburn curls; he cultivated a certain tendency to the Byronic type, fatal and melancholy. A. was short, brown and jocose, with a pretension to common sense; bluff and chatty. As a little child, I adored my Uncle E., who sat silent by the fireside holding me against his knee, saying nothing, but looking unutterably sad, and occasionally shaking his warm-coloured tresses. ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... is agreeably greeted with a perpetual confluence of sweet sounds. A Scotch traveller, in passing through one of the most delightful villas of Rome, overheard a stonemason chanting something in a strain of peculiar melancholy; and on inquiry, ascertained it to be the "Lament of Tasso." He soon learned that this celebrated piece was familiar to all the common people. Torquato Tasso was an Italian poet of great merit, who was for many years deprived of liberty, and subjected to severe ...
— The Liberty Minstrel • George W. Clark
... last that he was designedly given up, and so far from trying to meet his faithless lady, dejectedly refused all society where he could fall in with her, and only wandered about the parks to feed his melancholy with distant glimpses of her on horseback, while Armine and Barbara, who held Elvira very cheap, were wicked enough to laugh at him between themselves and term him ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... much as a flower-pot or a basket-table"—weighed heavily on her happy soul. Needless to say she had never dreamed that Nevill would let the house remain in its present state; her intellect could never have grasped so melancholy a possibility, and the fact was somewhat unsettling to her faith in Nevill Tyson. "Isn't it—for a young bride, you know—just a little—a little triste?" And being more than a little afraid of her son-in-law, she waved her hands to give an inoffensive vagueness ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... Notwithstanding the melancholy and apparently threatening circumstances which attended the death of Theodoric, his descendants succeeded to his power without a contest. In Spain, his grandson, Amalaric, who had probably by this time attained his majority, was hailed as king of the Visigoths. In Italy, Athalaric, now barely ...
— Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation • Thomas Hodgkin
... to all his friends, stretched himself upon another bier, upon which were laid seven little loaves of bread and a pitcher of water, and he also was let down-down-down to the depths of the horrible cavern, and then a stone was laid over the opening, and the melancholy company wended its way ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments • Andrew Lang.
... feature in a Report which otherwise is melancholy reading is to be found in the consistency of the statesmen of Natal, which is admirable in comparison with the fast degenerating land policy of Cape Statesmen. Ten years ago the Native Affairs Commission reported on the question of Land Tenure ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje
... tender and penetrating quality did ample justice to all that is most exquisite in romance. When you had once heard that voice, guided by the force of his father's grand method, you never forgot its sincerity and melancholy; it haunted you and left you impatient ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... God only knows when they are to have a resurrection. When I passed from Dundalk where this cursed usurper's handy work is yet visible, I cast mine eyes around from the top of a mountain, from whence I had a wide and a waste prospect of several venerable ruins. It struck me with a melancholy, not unlike that expressed by Cicero in one of his letters which being much upon the like prospect, and concluding with a very necessary reflection on the uncertainty of things in this world, I shall here insert a translation of ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift
... the favourite of the literary classes and preserved its Chinese traditions. Speaking broadly, the art of Kyoto showed a decorative tendency, whereas that of Kamakura took landscape and seascape chiefly for motives, and, delighting in the melancholy aspects of nature, appealed most to the student and the cenobite. This distinction could be traced in calligraphy, painting, architecture, and horticulture. Hitherto penmanship in Kyoto had taken for models the style of Kobo Daishi and Ono no Tofu. This was called o-ie-fu ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... handsome, clean-shaven face. Indeed, so handsome was he, that Venner could think of no more fitting simile for his beauty than the trite old comparison of the Greek god. The man's features were perfectly chiselled, slightly melancholy and romantic, and strongly suggestive of the early portraits of Lord Byron. Yet, all the same, the almost perfect face was from time to time twisted and distorted with pain, and from time to time there ...
— The Mystery of the Four Fingers • Fred M. White
... A melancholy prelude I would sing To song more drear, while thought soars into gloom. Find me the harbor of the roaming storm, Or end of souls whose doom is life itself! So vague, yet surely sad, the song I dream And utter not. So sends the tide its ...
— Along the Shore • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... same author, "are described by the Spaniards as pretty, though with a serious and rather melancholy cast of countenance. Their long, black hair might generally be seen wreathed with flowers, or, among the richer people, with strings of precious stones and pearls from the Gulf of California. They appear to have been treated with ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... not, my dear friend, again be so very melancholy a decliner as to prefer a shroud, when the matter you wish for is in your power; and when, as you have justly said heretofore, persons cannot die when ...
— Clarissa, Volume 3 (of 9) • Samuel Richardson
... which time, seeing his loue thus cross'd, Which I tooke to be idle, and but sport, He straitway grew into a melancholy,] ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... Bell, with a sort of melancholy disappointment. "D—n the cowardly rascal! Tell me, Jack Pringle, what did the long horse-marine-looking slab say to it? He told me he would fight. Why he ought to be made to stand sentry ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... regarded as signal favours bestowed upon them, were not very wholesome in themselves, and diverted their thoughts from the needs of their fellow-men. They also led to most painful reactions, in which the poor contemplative believed himself abandoned by God and became a pray to terrible depression and melancholy. These fits of wretchedness came indeed to be recognised as God's punishment for selfishness in devotion and for too great desire for the sweetness of communing with God, and so arose the doctrine of "disinterested love," which was more and ...
— Light, Life, and Love • W. R. Inge
... are more subtle, weighted with thought, tinged with autumnal melancholy. He was a most fertile composer, and, like all the men of his time and group, produced too much. Yet his patriotic verse was so admirable in feeling and is still so inspiring to his readers that one cannot wish it less in quantity; and in the field of political satire, such as the two series ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... only one— the immortal Plutarch. He was a native of Chaeronea in Boeotia and lived during the first century of our era. Greece at that time was only a province of the Roman Empire; the days of her greatness had long since passed away. Plutarch thus had rather a melancholy task in writing his Parallel Lives. In this work he relates, first the life of an eminent Greek, then of a famous Roman who in some way resembled him; and ends the account with a short comparison ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... scenes, and such placid beauty, the "melancholy Cowley," passed the later days of big anxious existence; here we may fancy him receiving Evelyn and Denham, the poets and men of letters of his troubled day, who found the disappointments of courtly life more than their philosophy ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... might be well to state, signified the prairie; its melancholy personality having penetrated the very marrow of their train existence, they had come to refer to it by the monosyllable, as in certain nether circles the head of the house receives his superlative distinction ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... ships with sighing sheets swept o'er the sea, Some beating up to windward, some that sped Before a following wind, and round them heaved The melancholy surge. Seared shipmen rushed This way and that, adread for tempest-gusts, Hauling the white sails in, to 'scape the death— It all seemed real—some tugging at the oars, While the dark sea on either side the ship Grew hoary 'neath the ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... with his melancholy air, with grief in voice and gesture, placing one hand on Guilleroy's shoulder, repeated in a gentle and amicable manner all that he had just said so ...
— Strong as Death • Guy de Maupassant
... half in the other. The side that turns toward Francois Rabelais would be, on the whole, the side that takes the sun. But there is no statue of Balzac at Tours; there is only in one of the chambers of the melancholy museum a rather clever, coarse bust. The description in "La Grenadiere" of which I just spoke is too long to quote; neither have I space for anyone of the brilliant attempts at landscape-painting which are woven into the shimmering texture of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... degree. But if Nelly, being Nelly, had seen the piteous thing, she would turn against Farrell, and think it loyalty to George to send her rich suitor about his business. Bridget felt that she could exactly foretell the course of things. A squalid and melancholy veil dropped over the future. Poverty, struggle, ill-health for Nelly—poverty, and the starving of all natural desires and ambitions for herself—that was all there was to look forward to, if the Farrells were ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that 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 ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... and 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 the ...
— My New Home • Mary Louisa Molesworth
... Let his melancholy wander, And he'll tell you pretty stories Of the women that have wooed him Long ago; Or he'll sing of bonnie lasses Keeping sheep among the heather, With a crackling, hackling click In ...
— Poems by William Ernest Henley • William Ernest Henley
... we ordained festival Turn from their office to black funeral; Our instruments to melancholy bells; Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast; And all things change them ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent. I will not describe the first emotion of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that, whatever might be the future fate of my history, the life of the historian must be short and precarious." Gibbon died ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... night, and wore a desponding and dejected countenance. But these were only faint indications of the feelings of his heart. He threw himself upon the ground, and refused to be comforted. He seemed dumb with melancholy, and the people were concerned of his life. He spoke nothing; he made no answers to questions put to him, and laid still as if dead. After several days the council appointed a certain merry-hearted Chief to make him a ...
— Legends, Traditions, and Laws of the Iroquois, or Six Nations, and History of the Tuscarora Indians • Elias Johnson
... it, certain it is that it proved totally ineffectual to accomplish its object, and the consequence was that Donald Macgillivray found it equally his duty and his interest to return home to his family with the melancholy tale of poor Rory's fate. All the prescribed ceremonies calculated to rescue him from the fairy dominion were resorted to by his mourning relatives without effect, and Rory was supposed lost for ever, when a "wise man" of the day having learned the circumstance, discovered ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... Christobal in the saloon, and had insisted on telling him various remarkable anecdotes concerning the one-legged skipper of the Flower of the Ocean brig. It was still more odd that when Christobal yielded to a fit of unwonted and melancholy silence after learning from Suarez that the senor captain had been talking to the senorita for a very long time on the promenade deck, Boyle should ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... Macaulay, the plays of Shakespeare, Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound," "The Faerie Queene," Palgrave's Golden Treasury, Bacon's Essays, Swinburne's "Poems and Ballads," FitzGerald's "Omar Khayyam," Wordsworth, Browning, "Sartor Resartus," Burton's "Anatomy of Melancholy," Burke's "Letters on a Regicide Peace," "Ossian," "Piers Plowman," Burke's "Thoughts on the Present Discontents," Quarles, Newman's "Apologia", Donne's Sermons, Ruskin, Blake, "The Deserted Village," Manfred, Blair's "Grave," "The Complaint of Deor," Bailey's ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... came in encouraging quantities when a store-ship was captured. But there never was plenty on hand, and too often not enough, for the powder would deteriorate in bad weather, as was shown at a skirmish at Lechmere's Point. As the troops formed for duty, cartridge boxes were examined, "when the melancholy truth appeared."[124] Further, the men, from whom the lack of powder was concealed, were fond of amusing themselves by indiscriminate shooting. We find General Greene, in an order to his troops, threatening severe punishment to those who shot at geese passing over the camp. And so, with little ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... of these slaves was not always a melancholy one. Argensola says that they ate at the same table with their masters, and married into their families. The histories fail to record the assassination for motives of vengeance of any master or chief by the natives, as they do of encomenderos. After ...
— History of the Philippine Islands Vols 1 and 2 • Antonio de Morga
... happy and sad. The events themselves have faded from the mind, but they registered an emotion, cumulative in its effect, which endures and revives from time to time and is that indefinable feeling, that tender melancholy and "divine despair," and those idle tears of which the poet says, "I know not what they mean," which gather to the eyes at the sight of happy autumn fields and of all lovely natural ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... scarlet and black—of shakos and sabretaches, of English and French and Hanoverian and Scotch, of epaulettes and bare knees; we hear the sound of carbine and artillery fire, the clank of swords and bayonets, the call of bugle and trumpet and the wail of the melancholy pibroch: tunics and gold tassels and kilts—a medley ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... ghost-white house, its mistress wandered from room to room, restless and melancholy. The boys were at play on the lawn; she could hear their mirthful shouts. She felt a vague longing, like homesickness, and yet she was at home. Wearily she sat down in her husband's study chair in the quiet library. She glanced round ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... into night. Along the sere and melancholy wood, the autumnal winds crept, with a lowly, but gathering moan. Where the water held its course, a damp and ghostly mist clogged the air, but the skies were calm, and chequered only by a few clouds, that swept in long, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... baby be!—like her father, I hope—or just a little like her mother, who is not so very ugly, either; at least, Angus says not." And Mrs. Rothesay drew up her tiny figure, patted one dainty hand—the wedded one—with its fairy fellow; then—touched perhaps with a passing melancholy that he who most prized her beauty, and for whose sake she most prized it herself, was far ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... attentively, and heard him give a detailed account of the nature of his mechanism, that he saw (for he was not wanting in scientific knowledge) that Dumiger's confidence was far from misplaced. Frederick, when he had heard sufficient, left the place with a heavy heart, and with melancholy step retired ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 2, July 8, 1850 • Various
... left of the boat, the motionless, melancholy, black hulls of ships emerged from the equally black water. A light moved to and fro on one; someone was walking with a lantern. The sea, caressing their sides, seemed to dully implore them while they ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... manager of the Performance sits before the curtain on the boards and looks into the Fair, a feeling of profound melancholy comes over him in his survey of the bustling place. There is a great quantity of eating and drinking, making love and jilting, laughing and the contrary, smoking, cheating, fighting, dancing and fiddling; there are bullies pushing about, bucks ogling the women, knaves picking pockets, ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the prodigious number of MSS. he had collected. But he sunk beneath the immensity of the task! The want of amanuenses, and of other attentions and comforts, seems to have deeply affected him; in this melancholy state, he wrote to Archbishop Cranmer a Latin epistle, in verse, of which the following is the commencement—very forcibly describing his situation and anguish ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... storming of Dumbarton Castle, Widow Ruet, the mother of my grandmother, hearing nothing for a long time of her poor donsie daughter Marion, had, from the hanging of Archbishop Hamilton, the anti-Christian paramour of that misguided creature, fallen into a melancholy state of moaning and inward grief, in so much that Bailie Kilspinnie wrote a letter invoking my grandfather to come with his wife to Crail, that they might join together in comforting the aged woman; which work of duty and of charity they lost no time in undertaking, carrying with them Agnes ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... 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 conquests made by the Austrian ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume
... look with profound melancholy on that great city of the dead,—the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past,—which occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up by the geologist. ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... stranger even than death. They gazed upon the moon with instinctive, undefined pity. So, as the years passed, and ages melted and remade the snows, the long day was golden with the Beauty that is ever desired, the Ideal never attained; the night was softly silver with the melancholy and eternal hope of the deathless love that eternally desires, eternally ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... shake negative, to which the Cavaliere responded by a long, melancholy sigh. "But her mother is determined ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... modinhas, as they call them,—songs which seem especially adapted for the guitar and moonlight. These modinhas have quite a peculiar character. They are little, graceful, lyrical snatches of song, with a rather melancholy cadence; even those of which the words are gay not being quite free from this undertone of sadness. One hears them constantly sung to the guitar, a favorite instrument with the Brazilians as well as the Indians. This put us all into a somewhat dreamy mood, and we approached ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... roots and boughs and leaves; this is a kind of locomotion; and, as Dr. Erasmus Darwin long since pointed out, they do sometimes approach nearly to what may be called travelling; a man of consistent character will never look at a bough, a root, or a tendril without regarding it as a melancholy and unprincipled compromise" (New edition, ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... 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 ...
— No and Other Stories Compiled by Uncle Humphrey • Various
... an onion and a piece of cheese, and then he dozed till three. As the clock of the University struck that hour he put on his capa—summer and winter he wore it, with melancholy and good reason; by ten minutes past he was entering the shop of Sebastian the goldsmith, in the Plaza San Benito, in the which he sat till dusk, motionless and absorbed in thought, talking little, seeming ...
— The Spanish Jade • Maurice Hewlett
... 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, invidious, vexatious; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... to do them both good, for they shook off their melancholy tendencies, and before the end of the first week their tour was beginning to be thoroughly enjoyable. They did not find cocoanuts and bananas, but they did find plenty of strawberries, and long, prickly vines that would be covered with raspberries, and wild grapes and choke-cherries and currants, ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... my love, And thou art a strorm That breaks black in the sky, And, sweeping headlong, Drenches and cowers each tree, And at the panting end There is no sound Save the melancholy cry of a single owl— Woe ...
— War is Kind • Stephen Crane
... incomparably melancholy, the sun scorches, and the sandy soil gives no nourishment to plants, flowers, vines, or grain. Cultivated land does not exist, it is a desert: ugly, melancholy, and abandoned. But Aigues-Mortes cannot, nay, ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... without tobacco. History was for the most part written before its appearance. "It is 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, ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... had of seeing him thus overpowered, I shall mention one relative to his feelings of friendship. A few days before leaving Pisa, we were one evening seated in the garden of the Palazzo Lanfranchi. A soft melancholy was spread over his countenance;—he recalled to mind the events of his life; compared them with his present situation and with that which it might have been if his affection for me had not caused him to remain in Italy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 474 - Vol. XVII. No. 474., Supplementary Number • Various
... haunted him for the past week, and with it the dogged determination to bear up against it until it should be lost in forgetfulness. But George had resolved to go to chapel that morning, because he felt he wanted a change of some sort, and there was a melancholy pleasure in spending a part of his last Sunday in England ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... conspicuously in his right hand, he advanced and began a slow monotonous chant. All the warriors took up the chant, which had little change save the rising and falling of the note, and which, like most songs of savages, was plaintive and melancholy. ...
— The Riflemen of the Ohio - A Story of the Early Days along "The Beautiful River" • Joseph A. Altsheler
... were encamped at the head of a canyon. The day had been exceedingly hot, and long after sundown the radiation of heat from the rocks persisted. A desert bird whistled a wild, melancholy note from a dark cliff, and a distant coyote wailed mournfully. The stars shone white until the huge moon rose to burn out all their whiteness. And on this night Cameron watched his comrade, and yielded to interest ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... to conceive the effect which this melancholy spectacle produced throughout the army. By the courteousness and condescension of his manners, General Ross had secured the absolute love of all who served under him, from the highest to the lowest; and his success on a former ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... experienced, world-worn, disillusioned, trivial. He is all love, foreseen, foreshadowed in a dream of life to be; all love, diffused through brain and heart and nerves like electricity; all love, merging the moods of ecstasy, melancholy, triumph, regret, jealousy, joy, expectation, in a hazy sheen, as of some Venetian sunrise. What will Cherubino be after three years? A Romeo, a Lovelace, a Lothario, a Juan? a disillusioned rake, a sentimentalist, an effete ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... midst of the fairest pastoral valley of New England, he lived in the contemplation of the ideas that had passed across his mind in the quiet of European galleries, and now became more definite impressions. The secret of those years, with their deep, slow current of refined and melancholy thought, is now sealed with him in eternal sleep; but from the works that remain to us as the matured fruits of his life, we may gain some hint of his experiences. It is not to be questioned that he drew from ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... as day in the moonlight and Frank watched Willy walking, his shoulders thrown back. He sighed; an undefinable, but haunting melancholy hung about Willy; he often impressed Frank as an old book—a book whose text is trite—which no one will read, and which yet continues to make its mute appeal; a something that has always missed its way, that can hardly be ...
— Spring Days • George Moore
... side of the river lay a compact mass of barges; ugly, somber, black in the moonlight, silent witnesses to the ruin of Frankfort. The young man gazed at this melancholy accumulation of useless floating stock, and breathed the deeper when he reflected that whoever could set these boats in motion again would prove himself, temporarily at least, ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... with the promise of reward hereafter, a brief on eternity with the privilege for your ghost of making complaint to the magistracy in case the ruler of the universe does not honor them. Nothing in my old age affords me such melancholy amusement as the foolishness of these persons, who deem themselves so wise, especially those practical, rational, matter-of-fact and epicurean persons, who go to such a vast amount of trouble and suffer themselves to be put off with ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... drawing the portrait of a very melancholy man. It is not indeed my character; and I had, in a comparison with my comrades, many reasons for content. In the first place, I had no family: I was an orphan and a bachelor; neither wife nor child awaited me in France. In the second, ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... pillows she began to sob. Lane looked down at her, at her glistening auburn hair, and slender, white, ringed hand clutching the cushions, at her lissom shaking form, at the shapely legs in the rolled-down silk stockings—and he felt a melancholy happiness in the proof that he had reached her shallow heart, and in the fact that this ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... attracted by the odour, after having been driven off, and we soon saw that a few of the bolder of them had summoned up courage to settle among our oysters, despite the scarecrow which we had set up; but they took to flight immediately upon our approach, and hovered over us all day, uttering their melancholy cries with such persistency, and creating such a volume of sound, that we could scarcely hear ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... the melancholy old gardens of Lexley Hall were withheld from me, no one else seemed to find pleasure or profit therein. Sir Laurence Altham, the lord of the manor and manor-house, was seldom resident in the country. Though a man of mature years, (I speak of the close of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXVI. October, 1843. Vol. LIV. • Various
... time, old Grevin had endeavored not to encourage his daughter's ambition too far; but now, in the midst of the contradictory reflections which the melancholy death of Charles Keller caused him, his ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac |
