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More "Pathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sound, not more emphatic, imperative or clear than the others; it was formless, feeble and ineffably pathetic. It was its utter incongruity which reached Dewforth through the robotic clamor, and which touched him ... a mewing, as of a kitten trapped in ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... immediate effect. Vast crowds of people, wild to see Grandmother Cruncher, besieged the ticket-office and packed the exhibition-room, where, upon the platform, elsewise deserted, stood that noble old lady in all her pathetic beauty. Mr. Scollop, in a condition of rapture scarcely possible of portrayal, stood all the afternoon in his private office opening wine for the gentlemen of the press and giving them the fullest information. He truly said he had nothing to conceal. He had ...
— Tin-Types Taken in the Streets of New York • Lemuel Ely Quigg
... at her with unchanged countenance. Not even the movement of a muscle, denoted that his heart was touched at her pathetic appeal. His expression was as hard and cold as adamantine, nor did a single feeling of pity move him. He cared for nothing but money; she could not give him what he wanted, and too sentiment of commiseration, no spark of charity, no feeling of manly regret ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams
... There was something very pathetic and pleading in his voice, and it went to Bessie's heart, and when he took her face between his two hands and kissed her lips, she kissed him back again, and then withdrew from him just as Jack ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... blessing had been pronounced and the bridal pair were kneeling at the altar Dame Nellie Melba, wearing a blue dress and hat, crept from the side chapel to the choir and to the joy of the audience sang the pathetic 'Ave Maria' that Desdemona sings in the last act of Verdi's Othello when she feels her predestined doom approaching."—"Evening Standard" on a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... day of the second quarter. She confessed this with tears, and her husband, who thought her feminine passion for hats adorable, dried her tears and took her to the opening night of a new play. But he did not furnish the pathetic little gold mesh bag, and as he made her promise not to borrow, she did not treat her friends to tea or ices at any of the fashionable rendezvous for a month. Then her native French thrift came to her aid and she sold a superfluous gold purse, a wedding ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... answer at all; but for a brief moment her lip trembled. Amid all this merriment she had sat with a troubled face, and with a sore and heavy heart. She had seen in it but a pathetic bravado. He would drink Scotch whiskey—he would once more light a cigarette—merely to assure her that he was getting thoroughly well again; his laughter, his jokes, his wild sallies were all meant, and she ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... remnants with which they are apt to be covered, only enhancing for the awakened perception the impressiveness either of a sublimely penetrating life, as in the twin green leaves that will become the sheltering tree, or of a pathetic inheritance in which all the grandeur and the glory have become a ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... surely it is ridiculous to make the defect of a foreign language a reason for / our not availing ourselves of one of the marked excellencies of our own. / "The Sonnet (says Preston,) will ever be cultivated by those who write on / tender, pathetic subjects. It is peculiarly adapted to the state of a man / violently agitated by a real passion, and wanting composure and vigor of / mind to methodize his thought. It is fitted to express a momentary burst / of Passion" etc. Now, if there be one species of composition more ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... moonlit terraces and gardens sloping gently to the water, and its windows lit up for an Easter ball, and its reception-rooms thronged by its own exclusive set, and one of its charming and accomplished daughters melting a select party to tears by her pathetic recitation about ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Queen's lonely rooms the woman and the priest met daily to discuss now this or that point of theology, or now (to cite a single instance) Gammer Tudway's obstinate sciatica. Considerate persons found something of the pathetic in their preoccupation by these matters while, so clamantly, the dissension between the young King and his uncles gathered to a head. The King's uncles meant to continue governing England, with the ...
— Chivalry • James Branch Cabell
... exciting as applause. Andre, at his mother's side, thrilled with such an unknown pleasure, with that proud delight which a man feels when he stirs the multitude, be he only a singer in a suburban back-yard, with a patriotic refrain and two pathetic notes in his voice. Suddenly the whisperings redoubled, were transformed into a tumult. People were chuckling and fidgeting with excitement. What had happened? Some accident on the stage? Andre, leaning terrified towards the actors as astonished as himself, saw every opera-glass ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... To hear you such things speak, And I could tell What made your eyes a growing gloom of love, As a warm South-wind sombres a March grove. And it was like your great and gracious ways To turn your talk on daily things, my Dear, Lifting the luminous, pathetic lash To let the laughter flash, Whilst I drew near, Because you spoke so low that I could scarcely hear. But all at once to leave me at the last, More at the wonder than the loss aghast, With huddled, unintelligible phrase, And ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... Jamieson's version entitled Lady Jane. Jamieson gives another copy, where the heroic lady is known as Burd Helen, but Scott, Motherwell, Kinloch, Buchan, and others agree on the name Fair Annie. The pathetic beauty of the ballad has secured it a wide popularity. There are Danish, Swedish, Dutch, and German versions. "But Fair Annie's fortunes have not only been charmingly sung," says Professor Child. "They have also been exquisitely ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)
... classical sculpture, nor yet as though she were cousin-german to Hedda Gabler. When she errs, she errs on the side of modernity; and that is as it should be. Certainly she puts too much "psychology" into the character of the fond, gentle lady, whose simple humanity at pathetic odds with Fate wins sympathy from the audience without effort or emphasis; while a hankering after the latest subtleties has led her to misunderstand completely the passage (580-95 in the acting edition) in which she supposes the queen to be ...
— Pot-Boilers • Clive Bell
... in private with great politeness, and after giving me a chair he began a long and pathetic discourse, the gist of which was that it was my duty to forgive this little ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... the word. But I do love the poor old thing. Her letters are rich. She tells me about all the new babies and who's courting who and how the horses are. It is pathetic." ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... those orators who arose during the reign of the Bourbons. The intrepid Manuel uttering his protests against royal encroachments, in a chamber of Royalists all heated by passions and prejudices; Laine and De Serres, pathetic and patriotic; Guizot, De Broglie, and De St. Aulaire, learned and profound; Royer-Collard, religious, disdainful, majestic; General Foy, disinterested and incorruptible; Lafitte, the banker; Benjamin Constant, the philosopher; Berryer, the lawyer; Chateaubriand, the poet, most eloquent ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IX • John Lord
... wimmen, gentle and refined as she was, she went into rough bar-rooms, and knelt on their floors, and prayed what her sad heart wus full of,—for pity and mercy for her boy, and other mothers' boys,—prayed with that fellowship of suffering that made her sweet voice as pathetic as tears, and patheticker, ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... obeyed; and this business being completed, Mr. Cox, after trying in vain to obtain a shilling or two cash in hand, bade them a pathetic farewell and went off down the path, for some reason best ...
— Light Freights • W. W. Jacobs
... will at first appear paradoxical, from the tendency of metre to divest language, in a certain degree, of its reality, and thus to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition, there can be little doubt but that more pathetic situations and sentiments, that is, those which have a greater proportion of pain connected with them, may be endured in metrical composition, especially in rhyme, than in prose. The metre of the old ballads is very artless; yet they contain ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... continued seriousness, she was undeniably serious when she called upon Mrs. Willoughby at half-past one on the following day. There were dark shadows under her eyes, and the eyes themselves seemed to look pathetic reproaches at a world which had laid upon her unmerited distress. Mrs. Willoughby was startled at her appearance, and imagined ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... thrown back to stop her tears from falling. Her throat shook. She was so young—only a child herself! A broad shaft of sunshine covered her small figure; her red dress glowed in the living light. Looking at her, a pathetic idea came to Mrs. Wilcox. "You never had a frock that became you more," she murmured between two sighs. Mrs. Nevill Tyson heard neither murmur nor sighs. And yet her senses did their work. For years ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair
... benignant Nature. Not there the look which, in the matured man gazing on the bright ghost of his former self, might have daunted the timid and warned the wise. "And I was like this! True! I remember well when it was taken, and no one called it flattering," said Mr. Losely, with pathetic self-condolence. "But I can't be very much changed," he added, with a half laugh. "At my age one may ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a word about all the other beautiful and pathetic associations which are connected with this emblem of the covering wing, sweet and inexhaustible as it is, but I simply leave with you the two thoughts that I have dwelt upon, of the twofold manner of that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... forth almost if not wholly untarnished, and the heroine herself proves to be the lost daughter of some rich man and so in every respect an eligible match. Along with these love-pieces we find others of a pathetic kind. Among the comedies of Plautus, for instance, the -Rudens- turns on a shipwreck and the right of asylum; while the -Trinummus- and the -Captivi- contain no amatory intrigue, but depict the generous devotedness of the friend to his friend and of the slave to his master. Persons and situations ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... daughter of a Jasper Losely!" But though she could not conceive the musician's covert meaning in these heraldic discourses, Sophy, with a justness of discrimination that must have been intuitive, separated from the more fantastic declamations of the grotesque genealogist that which was genuine and pathetic in the single image of the last descendant in a long and gradually falling race, lifting it up once more into power and note on toiling shoulders, and standing on the verge of age, with the melancholy consciousness that the effort was successful only for his fleeting life; ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... professional pictures, of lakes, and mountains, exquisitely finished, at the frame-makers in High Street for three pounds apiece! And here he was rambling in hundreds and thousands! She saw that that extraordinary notion about being able to paint was a natural consequence of the pathetic delusion to which he had given utterance yesterday. And she wondered what would follow next. Who could have guessed that the seeds of lunacy were in such a man? Yes, harmless lunacy, but lunacy nevertheless! ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... doctrine of the Trinity, and all sacraments, forms, and ceremonies. They represented, on their best side, the most vigorous effort of the Reformation to return to the spirituality and the simplicity of the early Christians. But their intense spirituality, pathetic often in its extreme manifestations, was not wholly concerned with another world. Their humane ideas and philanthropic methods, such as the abolition of slavery, and the reform of prisons and of charitable institutions, came in time to be accepted ...
— The Quaker Colonies - A Chronicle of the Proprietors of the Delaware, Volume 8 - in The Chronicles Of America Series • Sydney G. Fisher
... Rag Fair department of old clothes, the ludicrous and pathetic called for an equal blending of smiles and tears. It seemed as if every household, from Maine to California, from the St. Lawrence to the Rio Grande, had rummaged its attics for the flood sufferers. Merchants delivered themselves of years' accumulations of shop-worn goods—streaked, ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... to do," said Anne, drawing back. As for Ursula, she would not at all have objected to the splendour of the carriage. And her heart was melted by the lonely little woman's pathetic looks. But the other ladies stood out. They stood by while poor Mrs. Copperhead got into the carriage and drove off, her pale reproachful little face looking at them wistfully from the window. It was afternoon by this time, getting ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... slight, slim little figure, with big blue eyes, and long, black curved lashes and eyebrows, which made her eyes the most beautiful feature in her face. Very soft, fine curly hair surrounded a rather pathetic-looking little face; but her movements were like quicksilver, and though all the little Stuarts were noted for their mischievous ways and daring escapades, Betty ...
— Odd • Amy Le Feuvre
... Roosevelt and I and most of the children know your very amusing and very pathetic accounts of East Side school children almost by heart, and I really think you must let me write and thank you for them. When I was Police Commissioner I quite often went to the Houston Street public school, and was immensely impressed by what ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... governor, the judges of the superior court, the king's attorney and solicitor general. The report was accepted; copies printed; and six hundred circulated through the towns and districts of the province, with a pathetic letter addressed to the inhabitants, who were called upon not to doze any longer, or sit supinely in indifference, while the iron hand of oppression was daily tearing the choicest fruits from the fair tree of liberty. The circular ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... a display of the treasures he has brought for the redemption of Hector's body, but with a pathetic address to the feelings of Achilles. Homer well knew that neither gold nor silver would influence the heart of a young and generous warrior, but that persuasion would. The old king therefore, with a judicious abruptness, avails himself of his most powerful ...
— The Iliad of Homer - Translated into English Blank Verse • Homer
... memoirs is related a pathetic story of a youth's death from accidental shooting. "Put me in the boat," implored he of his comrades, "that I may die under my country's flag." Another, a young Scotchman, who had a leg cut off in battle, cried out mournfully, ...
— How the Flag Became Old Glory • Emma Look Scott
... her supreme hope and consolation. In view of what afterward happened, she regarded it as the effect of a mystical intimation from another world that was sacred, and could not he considered like an ordinary fact without sacrilege. There was something very pathetic in her absolute conviction that Ormond's happiness was an emanation from the source of all happiness, such as sometimes, where the consciousness persists, comes to a death-bed. That the dying are not afraid of dying is a fact of such common, ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells
... winding gravel walks, of which Mrs Murchison was wont to say that a man might do nothing but weed them and have his hands full. In the middle of the lawn was a fountain, an empty basin with a plaster Triton, most difficult to keep looking respectable and pathetic in his frayed air of exile from some garden of Italy sloping to the sea. There was also a barn with stabling, a loft, and big carriage doors opening on a lane to the street. The originating Plummer, Mrs Murchison often ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... feeling toward her. She was undoubtedly plucky, he thought; she would stand up to her guns, but she suddenly looked very tired, a pathetic figure ...
— A Man to His Mate • J. Allan Dunn
... pothooks, "See what I am doing! I am sitting here and learning my letters—my letters! I who was once a Writer!" Over this shattered image of what Ibsen had been, over this dying lion, who could not die, Mrs. Ibsen watched with the devotion of wife, mother and nurse in one, through six pathetic years. She was rewarded, in his happier moments, by the affection and tender gratitude of her invalid, whose latest articulate words were addressed to her—"min soede, kjaere, snille frue" (my sweet, dear, good wife); and she taught to adore their grandfather the three children of a new ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... He is 'abandoned by his friends, and proscribed the emoluments of his profession.' He is 'exhibited to the world as a marked man fallen under royal displeasure.' He appeals to posterity in the most pathetic terms. 'Reader!' he exclaims, 'when this meets your eye, the author of it will be rotting in his grave, insensible alike to censure and to praise; but he begs to be forgiven this apparently self-commendation. It has not sprung ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... only remarkable adventure of Mr. Tatler's brief existence; unless we consider as such a silly Chaldee manuscript in imitation of Blackwood, and a letter of reproof from a divinity student on the impiety of the same dull effusion. He laments the near approach of his end in pathetic terms. "How shall we summon up sufficient courage," says he, "to look for the last time on our beloved little devil and his inestimable proof-sheet? How shall we be able to pass No. 14 Infirmary Street and feel that all its attractions are over? How shall we bid farewell for ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... finished him was the sight of an officer in a kilt crawling on his hands and knees across the wet and heaving deck, desperately anxious to get to the side of the ship before his malady reached its crisis. M.'s chair was taken by a pathetic-looking V.A.D. girl, whose condition soon ...
— A Padre in France • George A. Birmingham
... wonderfully; and I do believe it would have passed by a handsome majority, had not a new proposition been presented, by an orator of singularly pathetic powers. ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... soon "known and read of all men"—and women. Now we have a collection of the kind to which we have alluded. When scribbled, they have been thrown into a drawer of the table whereon they were written. They are of all kinds and descriptions; of matters humorous and of matters pathetic: some have come warm from the heart—others come fresh from the fancy. Many things from the lips of others have been preserved, some of which drew tears from eyes unused to weep; while, on the other hand, and in respect of other things, the "water ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... mother of the Gracchi.] The child of Caius did not long survive him. The son of Tiberius died while a boy. Only Cornelia, the worthy mother of the heroic brothers, remained. She could (according to the purport of Plutarch's pathetic narrative) speak of them without a sigh or tear; and those who concluded from this that her mind was clouded by age or misfortune, were too dull themselves to comprehend how a noble nature and noble training can support sorrow, for though fate may often frustrate virtue, yet 'to bear ...
— The Gracchi Marius and Sulla - Epochs Of Ancient History • A.H. Beesley
... Watcher, with the sleepless brow, Pathetic in its yearning—deign reply: Is there, O is there aught that such as Thou Wouldst take ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... gorge from the saddle; the mountain tops between which it lay had been the favorite haunts of thunderstorms. It was now late in December, and not a drop of rain had fallen. When I look back at myself then, from where I now am, I seem a very pathetic figure. ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... admirably performed. It is the handsomest, and perhaps the most genteelly attended of any of the Parisian theatres. The music here, as well as the musicians, are all Italian; and there can certainly be no comparison between it and the French, which is generally feeble and insipid in pathetic expression, and extravagant and bombastic in all attempts at grandeur. The first singer at the Odeon was Madame Sessi, who has since been in London; but Madame Morelli, with a voice somewhat inferior in power, appeared to us a more elegant actress. The performance ...
— Travels in France during the years 1814-1815 • Archibald Alison
... Ailsie. The child had thrown down the coverings, and her deformity, as she lay with her back to them, was plainly visible through her slight nightgown. Her little face, deprived of the lustre of her eyes, looked wan and pinched, and had a pathetic expression in it, even as she slept. The poor father looked and looked with hungry, wistful eyes, into which the big tears came swelling up slowly and dropped heavily down, as he stood trembling and shaking all over. Norah was angry ...
— Victorian Short Stories, - Stories Of Successful Marriages • Elizabeth Gaskell, et al.
... awkwardness over the smoking grate, and his eyes softened. Then he took fresh note of the room—the faded, threadbare carpet, the sparse old furniture that had seemed ugly to even his uninformed boyish taste, the dingy walls and begrimed low ceiling—all pathetic symbols of the bleak life to which she had ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... to his heart as well as his judgment. And the devotion of this one-armed and enfeebled veteran to the cause of his own country, his eagerness to serve her in the field and his confidence in his ability still to do so, were pathetic as well as inspiring. It was all so big, and patriotic, and splendid, even in its childish egotism and simplicity, that the pure absurdity of it found no place in the mind of this ...
— The Flag • Homer Greene
... most undutiful wife," Helen pronounced severely. "I am sure Henry is a delightful person, even if he is a little irresponsible, and it is almost pathetic to remember how much you were in love with him, a year ...
— The Zeppelin's Passenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... did her best, for she was as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through some tragic perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of the simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small bony nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes beneath an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if they ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Madame de la Fontaine standing on the gallery under the Red Oak. It was the dusk of a mild pleasant day. She was clad still in her soft grey gown with furs about her waists and neck, and a grey scarf over her head. But there was something infinitely pathetic to him in the listlessness of her attitude, in the expression of a deep and melancholy that had come ...
— The Inn at the Red Oak • Latta Griswold
... how few were the lines that defined the lid, the socket, the curve of the cheekbone, the bridge of the nose, and how expressionless. It was doubtless the warmth and glow of the fire, the clinging desire of companionship, the earnest determination to be content, pathetic in one who had but little reason for optimism, that caused him to ignore the vacillating glancing moods that successively swayed Keenan, strong while they lasted, but with scanty augury because of their evanescence. He was like some newly discovered property ...
— The Phantoms Of The Foot-Bridge - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... eagerly forward, her sewing falling unheeded to the floor; and her soft breast rose and fell to a rush of sweet emotion, and her lips parted in delicious wonderment, and the blood came back to her cheeks, and her dimples were no longer pathetic, but eloquent of sweetness and innocence, and her eyes turned moist and brilliant, glowing with the glory of womanhood first recognized, tender and pure. Ah, my sister—lovely in person but lovelier far in heart and mind—adorably innocent—troubled and destined to infinitely ...
— Doctor Luke of the Labrador • Norman Duncan
... actual history and appropriate it. I had been much attracted to Mary Tudor, and I had studied everything about her on which I could lay my hands. I did not love her, but I pitied her profoundly, and the Holbein portrait of her seemed to me to indicate a terrible and pathetic secret. I cannot, however, give a complete explanation of her fascination for me. It is impossible to account for the resistless magnetism with which one human being draws another. The elements are too various and are compounded with too much subtlety. Bitter Roman Catholic as Mary was, I wished ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... rejoined Fink; "I consider it overdone to expend more feeling upon a sparrow than his own relatives do. But I know you like to consider all around you in a tender and pathetic light." ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... February 4.—One pathetic incident touched me nearly this morning, as a forerunner of many that may come soon. I found sitting on a doorstep, apparently too weak to move, a young fellow of the Imperial Light Horse—scarcely more than a boy—his stalwart form shrunken ...
— Four Months Besieged - The Story of Ladysmith • H. H. S. Pearse
... desperately to the ground, trying hard to prevent themselves being lifted from it; and when at last, in spite of all their struggles, they were hoisted into the air, the helpless appearance of the huge animals and their despairing little cries and whines were quite pathetic. I found it trying work being on the river all day; my eyes suffered from the glare, and I became so reduced that before I left Calcutta I weighed scarcely over eight stone—rather too fine a condition in which to enter on a campaign in a mountainous country, ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... to fail her, but with a sudden effort she released the detective's grip on her wrist. Very tall she was, very bony in her black cotton dress. Pathetic, too, with her thin, iron-grey hair, and that apron concealing the left half of her face. It was odd, Dundee thought, that it was not the swollen jaw she chose ...
— Murder at Bridge • Anne Austin
... experience, she had learned to think on matters which are wholly strange to girls of her station, to regard the life of the world and the individual in a light of idealism and with a freedom from ignoble association rare enough in any class. Her forecast of the future to be spent with Sidney was pathetic in its simplicity, but had the stamp of nobleness. Thinking of the past years, she made clear to herself all the significance of her training. In her general view of things, wealth was naturally allied with education, but she understood why Michael had had ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... muzzle, head and paws was matted and plastered with some thick liquid, giving him a curious frowsy appearance. He was evidently in a towering rage but it was also apparent that he was suffering great pain, his ferocious growls being interspersed with long, low, pathetic whines. ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... to be realized there or in England, he panted for the charms of home which he had never known. "I am fixed," he tells her, "to live a country life, and to have many (I hope) years of comfort, which God knows, I never yet had—only moments of happiness,"—a pathetic admission of the price he had paid for the glory which could not satisfy him, yet which, by the law of his being, he could not cease to crave. "I wish for happiness to be my reward, and not titles or money;" ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. II. (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... of personal incident and suffering which she gives in the present work, will no doubt attract general attention. It would be difficult to point out delineations of fortitude under privation, more interesting or more pathetic than those contained in ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... are touched by its pathetic beauty, but only they who have heard his verses in the tones of his deep, musical voice can know of the wondrous ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... powerful and pathetic by turns, and he possessed great sweetness of intonation,—combined with sympathetic feeling and special felicity of emphasis. And feeling is the vitalising principle of poetry. Jasmin occasionally ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... the frantic clutch of the still shrieking Esmeralda, Jane crossed the room to look into the little cradle, knowing what she should see there even before the tiny skeleton disclosed itself in all its pitiful and pathetic frailty. ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... striking influence. To-day our land is filled with men who have sown the seed of thought and purpose, but whose harvest is of so high a quality that with long patience must they wait for the fruition. How pathetic the reverses of the last four years. The condition of our land as to the overthrows of its leaders answers to the condition in Poland when Kossuth and his fellow patriots, accustomed to life's comforts and its luxuries, went forth penniless exiles to accustom themselves to menial toil, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... affecting sincerity, its restraint, its exquisite and unflagging simplicity. The hesitant and melancholy personages who invest its scenes—Melisande, timid, naive, child-like, wistful, mercurial, infinitely pathetic; Pelleas, dream-filled, ardent, yet honorable in his passion; old Arkel, wise, gentle, and resigned; the tragic and brooding figure of Golaud; Little Yniold, artless and pitiful, a figure impossible anywhere save in Maeterlinck; ...
— Debussy's Pelleas et Melisande - A Guide to the Opera with Musical Examples from the Score • Lawrence Gilman
... ears was pathetic, but Prescott paid no heed. He was always all but deaf to remarks from the spectators. He knew what he was trying to do, and he was coming as close as a hard-worked pitcher could get to that idea at the fag-end ...
— The High School Pitcher - Dick & Co. on the Gridley Diamond • H. Irving Hancock
... idea of purchasing territory to which Virginia had the prior claim. Angered by Henderson's refusal, The Dragging Canoe, leaping into the circle of the seated savages, made an impassioned speech touched with the romantic imagination peculiar to the American Indian. With pathetic eloquence he dwelt upon the insatiable land-greed of the white men, and predicted the extinction of his race if they committed the insensate folly of selling their beloved hunting-grounds. Roused to a high pitch ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... he says, "which blows from the tombs of the ancients comes with gentle breath as over a mound of roses. The reliefs are touching and pathetic, and always represent life. There stand father and mother, their son between them, gazing at one another with unspeakable truth to nature. Here a pair clasp hands. Here a father seems to rest on his couch and wait to be entertained by his family. To me the presence of these scenes was very touching. ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... those pathetic histories that are founded on the abuse of convents, the misery originates from the parent, and falls upon the child. The reverse has sometime happened; and there are examples of unhappy parents, who have been rendered miserable by the religious perversity of a daughter. In the fourteenth volume ...
— Sketches of the Fair Sex, in All Parts of the World • Anonymous
... children," she said to herself, "it would not make so much difference if I did grow old and ugly. He would have the children to give him pleasure." "I don't see what there is left for me to do," she said again and again. Sometimes she made pathetic attempts to change the simplicity of her dress. "Perhaps if I wore better clothes, I should look younger," she thought. But the result was not satisfactory. Her severe style had always been so essentially her own that any departure from ...
— Hetty's Strange History • Anonymous
... bandage that he had worn around his ankle for weeks without any apparent necessity, and the Judge scrutinized with tender solicitude the faded cicatrix of a scratch upon his arm. A passive hypochondria, born of their isolation, was the last ludicrously pathetic ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte
... wife found Jerome much improved. He had become more serious; a certain gravity had taken the place of his youthful bubbling high spirits. He spoke with emotion, respect, and affection of his young wife whose pathetic situation was made even more disturbing by the state of her health. He proposed to throw himself at his brother's feet, and by prayers and supplications to wring from him the consent he desired. "No one can doubt," he says in his Memoirs, "that his heart was torn by the ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand
... May this pathetic relation bring us all nearer to one another in sympathy and love; and serve to awaken in every woman's breast the desire to emulate and perpetuate the pure faith and noble devotion which these Sisters of ours have handed down ...
— Woman's Endurance • A.D.L.
... to Jehovah for having freed them from the barbarians by whom they had been captured. They knew, from having several times before seen the British flag, that they would be kindly treated. They described through Tatai, in pathetic language, the way that they had been treated after having been captured. They had been ordered not to pray aloud, or to sing, and, when off the farther end of this island, to their grief they heard the voices of several of their countrymen, who had come on board. In vain they shouted to warn them. ...
— Ben Hadden - or, Do Right Whatever Comes Of It • W.H.G. Kingston
... a strange home-coming for Placidia. Bought and sold twice over, twice a fugitive, the companion of the rude Goth, she is the most pathetic figure in all that terrible fifth century, and never does she appear more pitiful than on her return from the camps and the triumphs of the barbarians to the decadent splendour and the corruption of the imperial court of Ravenna, and again as a ...
— Ravenna, A Study • Edward Hutton
... hands clasped behind his back he stood and gazed fixedly out of the window. Beneath him the brown water glided past with curling eddy and gleaming ripple, while its soft murmur was the only sound that broke the pathetic silence surrounding this lonely man. His small and perfectly formed face was quite expressionless; the curve of his thin lips meant nothing; all the suppressed vitality of his being lay in those deep, soft eyes over ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman
... from the House of Detention to the Tombs and indicted for the murder of Torsielli. The first, dated September 22d, was merely to inform his supposed friend Silvio of the change in his residence and to inquire the whereabouts of another prisoner named Philip. The second would be pathetic were it not written by the defendant in the case. It carries with it the flavor ...
— True Stories of Crime From the District Attorney's Office • Arthur Train
... silent woman talk. At first it was difficult, for I tried to discover her feelings, her attitude, her history. As to the first two of these I met only failure and the last was pathetically simple. An orphan she was, a bread-winner, an observer. I say it was pathetic, but not that she was. Things are changing rapidly with women, I can see that plainly, but twenty years ago a man still felt, ridiculously perhaps, that a kindly, competent woman, however successful in her ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... anecdotical scenes of the massacre, most of them brutally ferocious, others painfully pathetic, some generous and calculated to preserve the credit of humanity amidst one of its most direful aberrations. History must show no pity for the vices and crimes of men, whether princes or people; and it is her duty as well as her right to depict them so truthfully that men's souls and imaginations ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume IV. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... over the wedding. In theory I have grown more and more opposed to such exhibitions. A wedding is more pathetic than a funeral, and nothing, perhaps, is more out of place than the jubilations of the guests. When a man and a woman, as husband and wife, have lived together five years, then the community should engage a band and serenade them, but at the outset—however, ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... There is something infinitely pathetic in the epitaph this much-loved and successful woman wrote for herself when she felt ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... not see the propriety of confining one's self to technical sacred music. Any grave, solemn, thoughtful, or pathetic music has a proper relation to our higher spiritual nature, whether it be printed in a church service-book or on secular sheets. On me, for example, Beethoven's Sonatas have a far more deeply religious influence than much that ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... situation with what equanimity she could muster. Mrs. Stanton's invitation arrived by return of post, and was accepted with great relief by Miss Bowes, who had been wondering how to dispose of her pupil during the holidays. The Cuckoo received the news with such pathetic glee that Ulyth's heart smote her for not ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... sent a pathetic complaint the other day that though he wished to do so he was unable to fall in love, has called forth a sympathetic response from a number of readers of both sexes. These ladies and gentlemen write to say that they also, like Latour, cannot understand how it is that ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... perceived him watching my looks, and labouring to penetrate my secret thoughts, I should doubtless have been ruined: but he fixed his eyes upon the floor, and no gesture or look indicated the smallest suspicion of my conduct. After some pause, he continued, in a more pathetic tone, while his whole frame seemed to partake of ...
— Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist - (A Fragment) • Charles Brockden Brown
... says the old girl, in a pathetic squeak. Further answer she makes none, but squats down outside, and begins a petulant whine: sure sign that she has a tale of woe to unfold, and is going ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... gay. Fritz had the satisfied and rather larky air of a man who has been having one good time and intends to have another. She glanced into the drawing-rooms. They were crammed. She saw in the distance Lady Cardington talking to Sir Donald Ulford. Both of them looked rather pathetic. Mrs. Wolfstein was not far off, standing in the midst of a group and holding forth with almost passionate vivacity and self-possession. Her husband was gliding sideways through the crowd with his peculiarly furtive and watchful air, which always suggested the old nursery game, "Here I am ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... kiss it; then checked himself, apparently terrified at his own boldness and the chasm he had been on the point of bridging. There was the merest suggestion of all this, but I understood it and smiled, for nothing is more pathetic than to see the frank impulse of an inferior checking itself abashed. The love of a plebeian for a girl of noble birth implies ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... ridiculous effigy of the Tsar with a knout in his hand now occupied the symbolic position and dominated the scene. The incidents of the war which affected Russia were then played. Spectacular cavalry charges on the road, marching soldiers, batteries of artillery, a pathetic procession of cripples and nurses, and other scenes too numerous to describe, made up that part of the pageant ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... cold, we remain below, and Mohammed Umar returns to read out more "Book of Lights," or some pathetic ode. I will quote in free translation the following production of the celebrated poet Abd el Rahman el Burai, as a perfect ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... in a manner to be felt rather than exactly defined, a passage equally exquisite and equally pathetic in Virgil's picture of Dido, where, with the shadow of her death also falling upon her, she seems to hear the phantom voice of her dead husband, and "mixes her fancies" with the glooms of night and the owl's ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... I'm afraid, Roger. I've only seen one other person so violent, and that was an Irish cook we had before you were born, who drank raw spirit out of the bottle. As for Therese, she stormed first, then she wept, and was pathetic, then she raged again. Altogether she must have tried everything, but you know what your father is like when he takes a stand. At last she shut herself up in her room and sent for the doctor. She declared she was ill, and threatened going ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... day and has to forget me," he answered calmly. "You can bring me back to bed when she is through." And to this plea was added a pathetic wag of the ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... phase, it is sure to appear at the most inopportune times and unsuitable places, creating the inevitable commotion which the blunder and tactless are born to make. As it whisks aimlessly around, it may hit the clergyman's nose in the most pathetic sentence of his sermon, or drop into the soprano's mouth at the supreme climax of her trill. Satan himself could scarcely produce a more complete absence of devotion than is often caused by ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... Benjamin Franklin's immense common sense, and gift of terse proverbial speech, but none of his lusts and sceptical infirmities. The immortal twenty-line address at Gettysburg is the high water mark of sententious eloquence. With that speech should be placed the pathetic and equally perfect letter of condolence to Mrs. Bixby of Boston after her five sons had fallen in battle. With that speech also should be read that wonderful second Inaugural address which even the hostile London Times pronounced to ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... took her by the hand and led her into the house, with a dignity which would have been admirable, had it not been so pathetic. Miss Barnes felt that she was stepping off terra firma, and lighting on Mars, so strange and muddled was this new ...
— The Cricket • Marjorie Cooke
... Shakspearian fidelity to nature could give success to such an experiment. The slightest tincture of affectation, or false sentiment, would ruin the whole. We always distrust the man who would play upon our emotions, and are glad to take refuge in the ludicrous, to save ourselves from the pathetic. If a single weak spot can be detected in the magic chain which he would throw around our feelings, if every link does not ring with the sound of genuine metal, the charm is at once broken, and we laugh to scorn the writer who ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... occasion; but Glover was the corsair, and burnt cork had to suffer, and I know that there was quite a pretty Miss whom he had no especial objection to embracing as Medora. When he said, "My own Medora!" it was quite pathetic—enough to cause a titter among the younger portion of ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... dollars' worth of talk. The chairman allowed them five minutes apiece, and they thought time dear at a dollar a minute. But there were speeches to be made for buncombe, and they made the best of the seconds. They howled, they raged, they stormed. They waxed eloquent or pathetic. Jones of Georgia was swearing softly and feelingly into Shackelford's ear. Shackelford was sympathetic and nervous as he fingered a large bundle of manuscript in his back pocket. He got up several times and ...
— The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... officer who spoke English like a native, had served as an officer in British ships, and seemed a good fellow. He was pleased to be congratulated on his plucky fight; but it was rather pathetic all the same, for he had been cut off practically at his own ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... of the book. On this arose an argument with the Lord Chief Justice; he pointed out that we did not deny that the circulation of the book was going on, and we assented that it was so. It was almost pathetic to see the judge, angry at our resolution, unwilling to sentence us, but determined to vindicate the law he administered. "The question is," he urged, "what is to be the future course of your conduct? The jury have acquitted you of any intention to deliberately violate the ...
— Autobiographical Sketches • Annie Besant
... drones of capitalism as well. Yet the labor that, as equal members of society they will have to perform, will not oppress them: their bodily health will be materially improved. The worry of property—said to be, judging from the pathetic assurances of our employers and capitalists in general, harder to bear than the uncertain and needy lot of the workingman—will be forever removed from those gentlemen. The excitements of speculation, that breed so many diseases of the heart and bring on so ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... thing," he answered, "and on a wild-goose chase. I never heard anything so pathetic in my life. She ought to be in short frocks, playing with her dolls, and she has come here four thousand miles to a city she knows nothing of, to steal back—well, you know what. One could laugh if it were ...
— The Governors • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... to myself. Then I told Cordelia of my experience with Mr. Blossom, and we wondered where and when and how this pathetic comedy of cross-purposes would end. We talked the matter over many a time after that, and we agreed that it would be hard to find an instance of deception more touching than that which we had met with in the daily life of Mr. and Mrs. Blossom. Meanwhile the two old people became ...
— Second Book of Tales • Eugene Field
... amusing spectacles of to-day is the attitude of the American press toward the revolution. It is also a pathetic spectacle. It compels the onlooker to be aware of a distinct loss of pride in his species. Dogmatic utterance from the mouth of ignorance may make gods laugh, but it should make men weep. And the American editors (in ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... one safe hiding-place—the pool. With rare presence of mind he concealed the pathetic remnant of his belongings and plunged just in time, diving under a clump of low-hanging willows where a friendly root gave support ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume V. (of X.) • Various
... the dull monotony of every-day events, stories fitted to rouse the reader from languid weariness and stir anew in his veins the pulse of interest in human life. There are many such,—dramas on the stage of history, life scenes that are pictures in action, tales pathetic, stirring, enlivening, full of the element of the unusual, of the stuff the novel and the romance are made of, yet with the advantage of being actual fact. Incidents of this kind have proved as attractive to writers as to readers. They ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... the end of the Indian race. The poor Indian, following his long trail, has at last come to the end. The worn horse and its rider tell a long, pathetic story. ...
— Palaces and Courts of the Exposition • Juliet James
... I believe, been a votive shrine for sailors for some centuries; and was rebuilt from designs by Esperandieu. It is prettily decorated inside by delicately stained windows, and has a small but fine organ. It is full of pathetic relics of poor lost mariners, and when the wind is howling on stormy nights, one can realize and understand the sentiments which prompted the building of this votive temple, and the numerous mementoes, literally covering its walls, placed ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... could, would, should, and always have trusted my person freely with my friend—if he will allow me to call him so,"—here the robin grew quite pathetic, and said that often and often he had been indebted to his friend for a sumptuous repast, or for a draught of water when all around was ice; he assured them they might put the ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... their care was by no means a pleasant prospect. Besides, these children were the son and daughter of the outcast of the family, an only sister half-forgotten though only two months deceased. The thing itself was pathetic, yet it seemed an imposition: above all to adopt two children who had traveled all their young lives with a circus was at least to ...
— Pearl and Periwinkle • Anna Graetz
... wrath, good Lord, deliver her! O, Lord God, save her! Have mercy on her, we beseech thee, good Lord!' The poor, helpless people had nothing but their prayers to give Joan of Arc; but these we may believe were not unavailing. There are few more pathetic events recorded in history than this weeping, helpless, praying crowd, holding their lighted candles, and kneeling, on the pavement, beneath the prison walls of ...
— Joan of Arc • Ronald Sutherland Gower
... for the responsibility of the historian; though all Spanish history, Christian or Saracen, so abounds in romantic interest that there is less excuse, as less necessity, for outstepping the limits of truth, or giving undue prominence to the pathetic and marvellous. From this defect of most of his predecessors, the work of the Count de Circourt is in a great measure free. He has made a dexterous and conscientious use of the materials within his reach, and produced a work ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... of the reign two portraits of George the Third are placed in immediate and pathetic contrast. The one portrait represents George as he showed in the first year of his reign—alert, young, smiling, with short-cut powdered hair, a rich flowered coat, and the star and ribbon of the Garter on his breast. So ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... idea of the fitness of things. My story is pathetic: it will look badly to see you drowned ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - February, 1876, Vol. XVII, No. 98. • Various
... at once, like blows, two fierce gaunt eyes struck him in the face. Two eyes staring from some dirty brown pieces of cloth on end, it seemed, by reason of their own pathetic striving for notice, rather than because of any life ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... was a gauge. Bennington Clarence de Laney always glowed at heart when they rubbed his fur the wrong way, for it showed that they felt they knew him well enough to do so. And in this there was something just a little pathetic. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... Carmen's progress was almost pathetic. When in Simiti he hung over the child in rapt absorption as she worked out her problems, or recited her lessons to Jose. Often he shook his head in witness of his utter lack of comprehension. But Carmen understood, and that sufficed. His admiration for the priest's ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... arms about. He was pitifully ridiculous. His face puckered as an ill-treated little boy's might do. This time it wasn't just the pathetic twinge that had broken his voice before; he found himself to his own amazement on the verge of loud, undignified, childish weeping. He was weeping passionately and noisily; he was over the edge of it, and it was too ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... oculo-motor, pathetic, ophthalmic division of the trigeminal, and the abducens nerves are ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles
... but kept a strict lookout all the time. And in the morning she called him to look at something, and this something was a soft, helpless, little, baby giraffe, with delicate limbs and small body, a funny, scraggy, long neck and small head, with the very same sort of gentle, pathetic eyes ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... abridged from An Essay towards the History of Arabia, antecedent to the Birth of Mahommed, arranged from the 'Tarikh Tebry' and other authentic sources, by Major David Price, London, 1824, pp. 4, 11.—We miss in this curious legend the brief but pathetic account of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, as found in the last two verses of the 3rd chapter of Genesis, which suggested to Milton the fine conclusion of his Paradise Lost: how "some natural tears they dropped," as ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... chatter, floating to him through the open window of his library did not carry a single note of sadness; for Nancy had tried to cover her unhappiness under a cloak of forced gaiety; but she could not hide her tragic little face, nor the pathetic droop of her lips and the circles ...
— The Motor Maids in Fair Japan • Katherine Stokes
... laying down the law—and that her laws were expected to remain unbroken. The "occasional trip to London" sounded bleakly in Nan's ears. Still, she argued, Lady Gertrude would only be her mother-in-law—and she was sure she could "manage" Roger. There is a somewhat pathetic element in the way in which so many people light-heartedly enter into marriage, the man confident in his ability to "mould" his wife, the woman never doubting her power to "manage" him. It all seems quite simple ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... better house in which to refuse to make a chair or mend a clock—a much better house to do nothing in—and doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man. All but the hard-hearted must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it. As he stood gazing at the leaky roof and the rickety cradle in a pensive manner, there one day came into his mind a new and curious ...
— Utopia of Usurers and other Essays • G. K. Chesterton
... execution, I would ascribe, without hesitation, to Fletcher. In the scene (v. 1) where the French ambassador pleads for Barnavelt we recognise Massinger's accustomed temperance and dignity. To the graver writer, too, we must set down Leydenberg's solemn and pathetic soliloquy (iii. 6), when by a voluntary death he is seeking to make amends for his inconstancy and escape from the ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various
... called himself truly, a Beauty-Killer. That strange lust he inherited from his mother, who had been robbed of all she cared for, and hoped for, in life by a beautiful woman, and rendered insane three months before his birth. It was a most pathetic tragedy. We shall ...
— The Crooked House • Brandon Fleming
... who knew him. Some months ago he sent me some recollections of his early days, of the clerks he had known, and his reflections on his long ministry, and these have been recorded in this book, and will now have a pathetic interest for his many friends and for all who admired his noble, ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield
... was so white and patient a face in its misery that her blind tenderness seemed almost like an intentional cruelty. It was an intensity of feeling almost palpable, but Sylvie's mouth remained unburnt, though it removed itself with a pathetic little ...
— Snow-Blind • Katharine Newlin Burt
... slept in her dressing-room; the silver taper-stand which the young advocate bought for her with his first fee; a row of small packets inscribed by her hand, and containing the hair of such of her children as had died before her; and more odds and ends of a like sort—pathetic tokens of a love which bound together for a little while here on earth, and binds together for evermore in heaven, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... fall of an iron beam belonging to the pumping engine at the pit-head. Before the shaft could be cleared and a way opened to the workings, all the poor fellows had died, overcome by the deadly "choke-damp." Joseph Skipsey, the pitman poet, in a simple ballad, tells the pathetic story. ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... appealingly at his wife through his big spectacles, his eyes looking very large and pathetic through the ...
— The Calico Cat • Charles Miner Thompson
... types of character—among men I mean—emerge as most characteristic of his interest and as best lending themselves to his method, I should put my finger upon those pathetic middle-aged persons, like Mr. Verver in "The Golden Bowl," or Mr. Longdon in "The Awkward Age," who, full of riches and sad experience, have retired completely from active life, only to exercise from the depths of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... guard against his emerging again, but Tom decided on Koku. The giant, though not as intelligent as the colored man, was more efficient in an emergency because of his great strength. Eradicate was getting old, and there was a pathetic droop to his figure as he shuffled off when ...
— Tom Swift among the Fire Fighters - or, Battling with Flames from the Air • Victor Appleton
... ideas and tendencies of his times and not a sweeper of the chords that stir in human nature the heroic or the pathetic, it is none the less uncritical to rank this Spaniard as a brainless technician. Everything is relative, and the scale on which Fortuny worked was as true a medium for the exhibition of his genius as a museum panorama. Let us not be ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... themes, and with others which the most favourable critics admit to be, if not exactly dull, yet certainly not lively. Something the same may be said of Samson, though here a decided stiffening and mannerising of the verse is to some extent compensated by the pathetic and human interest of the story. It is to be observed, however, that Milton has here abused the redundant syllable (the chief purely poetical mistake of which he has been guilty in any part of his work, and which is partly noticeable in Comus), and that his ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... actually gave me the idea that he was about to commit suicide. Flinging himself into a chair, and plunging his hand deep into his bosom, from which I almost expected to see him draw the fatal weapon, he extracted a paper, and held it forth to me. "Read!" he exclaimed, with the most pathetic tones of Talma in tragedy—"read my ruin!" I read, and found that it was a letter from his domineering little Jewess, commanding him to throw up his commission on the spot, and especially not to go to France, on penalty of her eternal ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... Caesar. 'It is the most brutal and the most pathetic scene that profane history has to record; it was, as Goethe has said, the most senseless deed that ever was done. It was wholly useless, for it did not and could not save Rome from monarchy. The deed was done by a handful of men, who, pursuing ...
— Helps to Latin Translation at Sight • Edmund Luce
... champagne? He was, in fact, an object of the greatest pity—for I know of no greater than a gentleman of his habits without the means of gratifying them. He must live well, and he has not the means. Is there a more pathetic case? As for a mere low beggar—some labourless labourer, or some weaver out of place—don't let us throw away our compassion upon THEM. Psha! they're accustomed to starve. They CAN sleep upon boards, ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... of her success, Mrs. Tarbell was by no means satisfied with herself, and the pathetic note in Mrs. Stiles's voice proved too much for her. "Mrs. Stiles," she said, turning round quickly, "perhaps I have been putting one side of the matter too strongly before you. If you will bring your daughter here some morning, we can discuss ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... surely have found other and more interesting forms telling the same tale. If light falling through loose foliage does indeed make upon the garments of a lad lying beneath spots at a little distance wonderfully like mildew, then rather let the boy sit for us under a tree of denser foliage, where a pathetic subject will not risk an unintentionally comic treatment. If a stone-breaker's face corrupts in purple spots at a certain period after death, we would prefer him painted before corruption, and consequently hideousness, had begun. If women will wear gowns ugly in color and form, and will sit or stand ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... tell you that, did he? He always lets you know all the bothers I get into. You'll think I do nothing but fight and kick up rows; and," added the speaker, with a pathetic look of injured innocence, "I've been ...
— Soldiers of the Queen • Harold Avery
... beautiful:—that she could go no where without finding other Bellfleurs; and she might judge, by the danger she had just now so narrowly escaped, of the probability of being involved again in the same:—he represented to her, in the most pathetic terms, that her innocence could have no sure protection but in the arms of a husband, or the walls of a convent; and on his knees beseeched her, for the sake of that virtue which she so justly prized, since she would not accept of him for the one, to permit him to place her in that ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... this whole matter: it is neither height of thought that is discommended, nor pathetic vehemence, nor any nobleness of expression in its proper place; but it is a false measure of all these, something which is like them, and is not them: it is the Bristol-stone, which appears like a diamond; it is an extravagant thought, instead of a sublime one; it is roaring madness, ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... PAINTERS The Earth-Veil The Mountain Glory Sunrise on the Alps The Grand Style Of Realization Of the Novelty of Landscape Of the Pathetic Fallacy Of Classical Landscape Of Modern Landscape ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... interesting to watch normal children in these concentrations, because from their habits we may learn so much which may improve our own sadly different manner of living. It is also interesting but pathetic to see the child gradually leaving them as he approaches boyhood, and to trace our part in leading him ...
— Power Through Repose • Annie Payson Call
... this who may think me a trifle too fond and may doubt the great glory to which I testify here. They will remember how singularly the things we no longer possess rise upon the imagination and enlarge themselves, and they will quote that pathetic error whereby the dead become much dearer to us when we can no longer smile into their faces or do them the good we desire. They will suggest (most tenderly) that loss and the enchantment of memory have lent a thought too much of radiance and of harmony to what was certainly a noble creation ...
— On Nothing & Kindred Subjects • Hilaire Belloc
... "infidel," a hater of humanity, grossly ignorant and wholly indifferent to the decencies, we now view Girard as a lonely and pathetic figure, living out his long life in untiring industry, always honest, direct, frank, handicapped by physical defects, wistful in his longing for love, helpless to express what he felt, with a heart that went out to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... but rather pathetic belief of the old dying Duke in the courtesy with which he and his States would be treated by the French, see Beugnot, tome 1. p. 80: "I feel sure that there is a courier of the Emperor's on the road to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... horrible stories to tell of the ravages of the Bulgar and the atrocities of the Bolsheviki. At one place the Serbian women and children got the breakfast of my men, the Tommies refusing to eat until the kiddies had been satisfied. And the pathetic homage they paid to our flag when they discovered it was the flag of England! I shall never forget some of the scenes which showed us also the wonderful trust the struggling nationalities of the world have in the power, humanity and honour of our country. It is a priceless possession ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... tight at the clasp of her waist, and letting her chin fall on her throat, shook her body fretfully, much as a pettish little girl might do. Wilfrid grimaced. "Tick-tick" was not a pathetic elegy in his ears. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... on a camp stool, with his back leaning against the dresser, his face lighted up by the blaze of a splendid fire, which burned in a most comfortable-looking kitchen range, and his hands drawing forth most pathetic music from a violin, sat his old friend Joe Dumsby, while opposite to him on a similar camp stool, with his arm resting on a small table, and a familiar black pipe in his mouth, sat that worthy son of ...
— The Lighthouse • Robert Ballantyne
... this time as if nobody loved him. As a song, it was not a very pathetic song, being all about coons spooning in June under the moon, and so on and so forth, but Gussie handled it in such a sad, crushed way that there was genuine anguish in every line. By the time he reached the refrain I was nearly in tears. It seemed such ...
— The Man with Two Left Feet - and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... smiled. "Her tender heart," said Mr. Erwyn, "is affected by the pathetic and moving spectacle of the poor hungry swans, pining for their native land and made a raree-show for visitors in the Pantiles; and she has gone to stay them with biscuits and to comfort ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... to Burke more than life. The old man's grief was agonizing and inconsolable. "The storm has gone over me," he wrote in words which are well known, but which can hardly be repeated too often for any who have an ear for the cadences of noble and pathetic speech,—"The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about me. I am stripped of all my honours; I am torn up by the roots and lie prostrate on the earth.... I am alone. I have none to meet my ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... a pathetic ring in his tone, and tears rise to her eyes. Can anything be so hopeless as ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... a little pathetic. Neatness, rather than the gloss of novelty (though other gloss there was), characterised the garments of the men. The toilettes of the women were modest; that amount of praise (and it is a good deal) ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... another of the name, was commonly called Butterwood Harvey, as he lived on Butterwood Creek. Mr. Henry, it is believed, understanding that the people were on their guard against his faculty of moving the passions and through them influencing the judgment, did not resort to the pathetic as much as was his usual practice in criminal cases. His main object appeared to be, throughout, to cast discredit on the testimony of Tom Harvey. This he attempted by causing the law respecting riots to be read by one of his assistants. It appeared in evidence ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... Roxholm a great attraction—his voice, his bearing, and his gentle gravity all seemed to convey a thing which reached the boy's heart. On his own part the childless man had from the first felt for his little kinsman a pathetic affection. Had fate been kind, instead of cruel, the son of his own Alice might have so bloomed and grown stalwart and fair. He liked to talk with the child even when he was but a few years old, and as time passed, and he shot ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... seized the dead body, and the numerous expences in which he had been involved, by petitions he could not withstand, from the meaner and more clamorous of those whom his late brother-in-law had left unpaid. He concluded with a pathetic prayer for her happiness, and a declaration that his own was lost for ever, since now he was even deprived of her sight. Cecilia wrote an affectionate answer to Mrs Harrel, promising, when fully at liberty, that she would herself ...
— Cecilia vol. 2 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)
... a lovely land, and around the burg of Rubens it is perhaps least lovely of all. Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed each other on the characterless plain in wearying repetition, and, save by some gaunt gray tower, with its peal of pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's fagot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the mountains or amid the forests feels oppressed as by imprisonment with the tedium and the endlessness ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... been implored by the Sisters to moderate the rigor of her austerities, in order to prolong her life for the sake of the community, she answered them by an instruction on the Christian's obligation of leading an austere and penitential life, and so pathetic were her words that the Sisters burned with a desire to ...
— The Life of Venerable Sister Margaret Bourgeois • Anon.
... writer who has so thoroughly understood the wonderful eloquence of Napoleon as Lord Brougham. He has pronounced the address to the Old Guard, at Fontainebleau, "a masterpiece of dignified and pathetic composition"; and the speech at the Champ de Mars, he says, "is to be placed amongst the most perfect pieces of simple and majestic eloquence." Napoleon certainly knew well the people with whom he had to deal, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... to imagination that Robert Elsmere makes its main appeal, undoubtedly a powerful and pathetic one. It bids us ask ourselves what, with the phenomena before us, we can conceive possible and real. It implies, of course, much learning, with claims of victory in the spheres of history and science, with names ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... with someone that she had never even thought of pursuing. Mr. HALIFAX gives me an impression of almost cinematographic and gramophonic exactness in his portraiture. George Shadd, Ruth's father, who worked in the gasworks and was one of the very best, delighted me particularly, with his pathetic little garden, his battle with the slugs and black-fly, and his fine patience with Mrs. Shadd, who put her washing before his fire and her props among his choicest seedlings—a difficult woman indeed. The author writes with humour and sympathy; and that is the way to ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, May 23, 1917 • Various
... those centuries for this night; who has given up to the coming hour all the freedom of eternity, won in the old way, in hope of a new life in a new world such as she longed for...!" She stopped suddenly. As she had gone on speaking there had come with her words a strange pathetic, almost pleading, tone which touched me to the quick. As she stopped, I could see, before she turned away her head, that her eyes were ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... raised her lustrous eyes A beast peeped at the door; When she downward cast her eyes A fish gasped on the floor; When she turned away her eyes A bird perched on the sill, Warbling out its heart of love, Warbling, warbling still, With pathetic pleadings low. ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... him a hearty fright; what had happened to her in the early night might very well happen to him before morning. And he so young! And with such immense possibilities of disorderly amusement before him! He felt quite pathetic over the notion of his own fate, as if it had been some one else's, and made a little imaginative vignette of the scene in the morning when they ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... mankind—generosity, self-denial, chastity, frugality, patience, protection to the feeble, the downtrodden, and the oppressed; the love of daring adventure, devotion to a pure religion and a lofty purpose, most admirably pathetic, even when in the eyes of the vulgar most fantastic—had been the proudest and most poetical of Spanish characteristics, never to be entirely uprooted from ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... marvellous Iambes (in alternate lines of 12 and 8 syllables), which hiss and stab like poisoned bullets, and which were transmitted to his family by a venal gaoler. There he wrote the best known of all his verses, the pathetic Jeune captive, a poem at once of enchantment and of despair. Suffocating in an atmosphere of cruelty and baseness, Chenier's agony found expression almost to the last in these murderous Iambes which he launched against the Convention. Ten days before ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... Halicarnassus, thinking to correct me and avenge himself. Now I knew quite well that America loved him, and did not love his brother, but with the mention of his name came into my mind the tender, grieved surprise of that pathetic little appeal, and I just said thought it aloud,—assuming historic knowledge enough in my listeners to prevent misconception. But to this day Halicarnassus persists in thinking or at least in asserting, that I tripped ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... and Sublime.—What a world of reasonings, not immediately obvious, did the sage of old open to our inquiry, when he said that the pathetic was the truest source of ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 536, Saturday, March 3, 1832. • Various
... her kind in trying to create here in this room a piece of England. Through the window he looked out upon a lawn which was being watered by a garden-sprinkler, and where a gardener was at work attending to a bed of bright flowers. There, too, she had been making the usual pathetic attempt to convert a half-acre of this country of yellow desert into a green garden of England. Coulson had not a shadow of doubt in his mind Stella Ballantyne would exchange this room with its restful colours and its outlook on a green lawn for—at ...
— Witness For The Defense • A.E.W. Mason
... in which the question was asked, the pathetic look that accompanied it, convinced Captain Winstanley that, if he valued his domestic ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... then got Oxo for the men, many of whom had had nothing to eat for two days. They are a nice-looking lot of men and boys, with rather handsome faces and clear eyes. Their absolute exhaustion is the most pathetic thing about them. They fall asleep even when their wounds are being dressed. When all was made straight and comfortable for them, the nurses turned the lights low again, and stepped softly about the ...
— My War Experiences in Two Continents • Sarah Macnaughtan
... chapter in which the boy and the girl are lost in the cave, and Tom, seeing a gleam of light in the distance, discovers that it is a candle carried by Indian Joe, the one enemy he has in the world. In 'Pudd'nhead Wilson' the great passages of 'Huckleberry Finn' are rivaled by that most pathetic account of the weak son willing to sell his own mother as a slave "down the river." Altho no one of the books is sustained thruout on this high level, and altho, in truth, there are in each of them passages here and there that we could wish away (because they are not worthy of the association ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... written to Dickens on the appearance of his fourth number (early in April): "Chuffey is admirable. . . . I never read a finer piece of writing: it is deeply pathetic ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... she shrank back at sight of him. "That man there," pointing to Miller, "is Karl von Mueller, captain in the Secret Service." A low moan broke from Kathleen, and she looked anywhere but at Miller, who had stepped forward to stand between her and the pine table with its pathetic burden. "Von Mueller," continued ...
— I Spy • Natalie Sumner Lincoln
... deposited, and there have passed hours in silent meditation. Influenced by this sublime and holy feeling, the sachem whose mother's tomb had been violated gathered his men together and addressed them in the following beautifully simple and pathetic harangue—a curious specimen of Indian eloquence, and an affecting instance of filial piety ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... few more pathetic words in the New Testament than that short sentence which tells of his rejection, "He came unto his own, and his own received him not." Another pathetic word is that which describes the neglect of those ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... me that Felicia that night was in her most charming mood. She wore a dress of some soft white material, and a large black hat, under which her face—a little paler even than usual—wore almost a pathetic aspect. Her fingers touched my arm as we entered the restaurant together. She seemed, in a way, to have lost some of her self-control,—the exclusiveness with which she had surrounded herself,—and to have become ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... between men and women arrived at an age to discriminate beyond mere physical charm, nevertheless physical charm is the most powerful, though not always acknowledged, motive of their choice. 'Because of this,' says the pathetic Hilda Donne in A Marriage Ceremony, touching her cheek, which is terribly disfigured by a birth-mark, 'I have never had love. Can you think what that means? You can't. Once I thought I was not ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... perceives that the hero is softened, and then only in such a manner as to flatter the pride of the conqueror. The ego d'eleeinoteros per, and the apusato aecha geronta, are not exactly like the tone of the earlier parts of the Iliad. They are almost too fine and pathetic. The whole passage defies translation, for there is that about the Greek which has no name, but which is of so fine and ethereal a subtlety that it can only be felt in the original, and is lost in an attempt to transfuse it into ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... quite pathetic in the tones in which this declaration of renunciation was made. It was evidently a supreme effort of repentance, and Reginald felt almost uncomfortable ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... woman she was. Her tailor-made gown of dark green cloth fitted her to perfection; she was turned out with all that delightful perfection of detail which seems to be the Frenchwoman's heritage. Her smile, half pathetic, half appealing, was certainly sufficient to turn the head of a dozen young ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... relaxed when Winny flung herself from side to side again and over, and lighted on her feet in the little curtseying posture, perfunctory and pathetic. ...
— The Combined Maze • May Sinclair
... besought him on her knees, but his fear of losing an army made all pleadings vain. In fact, as I ascertained by the following cablegram which came into my hands, Napoleon's instructions for the French evacuation were in Mexico at the very time of this pathetic scene between him and Carlotta. The despatch was in cipher when I received it, but was translated by the telegraph operator at my headquarters, who long before had mastered the key of ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... vaudevilles: she could not represent her own character,—an actress's talent and heart being as widely separated, in general, as yours are. She could bring upon the stage in her body the presentment of a naive, innocent, pathetic nature, and use the influence such nature might have on the people outside the orchestra-chairs there. It was not her own nature, we know. She dressed and looked it. A timid little thing, in her fluttering white slip, her light hair cut close to her head, in short curls. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... London slums, I had occasion to observe that among the women of the poor, and more especially in those who had lost the first bloom of youth, modesty consisted chiefly in the fear of being disgusting. There was an almost pathetic anxiety, in the face of pain and discomfort, not to be disgusting in the doctor's eyes. This anxiety expressed itself in the ordinary symptoms of modesty. But, as soon as the woman realized that I found nothing disgusting in whatever was proper and necessary ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... city of Antibes is at once a type of the old regime and of the new. Lying on the sea, with a background of snow-capped mountains, it has not entirely escaped the fate of Nice; neither has it yet lost all its old Provencal characteristics. It is a pathetic compromise between the quaint reality of the old and the blatancy of the new. The little parish church is of the very far past, having lost its Cathedral rank over six hundred years ago to Sainte-Marie in Grasse, a town scarcely younger than its ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... the roast-horse and roast-mule which the garrison seems to have been chiefly living on for the past five or six weeks, and find both pretty good, quite equal, if not superior, to the old trek-ox. Some people tell us pathetic stories of the hardships to women and young children and babies, owing to the difficulty of getting proper food, especially milk. On the other hand, many seem to have actually enjoyed the siege, and two or three young ladies have assured me that they found it infinitely diverting and enjoyed ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... Drinkwater, he lay calm and sensible, like a man just recovering from some long illness, and there was a look of pathetic wonder in his eyes that he was still alive which was pitiful ...
— Will of the Mill • George Manville Fenn
... consideration for the boxes which he was handing down in a manner expressive of energy and expedition, rather than any regard for their contents. A resounding "thump" on the ground, caused by the sudden descent of one of her precious charges, elicited a cry of agony from the Frenchwoman, accompanied by the pathetic appeal: ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... forth question after question, I could not help noticing and wondering about the pathetic wistfulness in her eyes and the nervous eagerness of her manner. Presently she said she hoped to visit the Yosemite herself some time, and then hurriedly asked if I had seen any of the people who live there during the winter, and if ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... Colonel Morden.— Compliments him on his pathetic narratives. Farther account of ...
— Clarissa Harlowe, Volume 9 (of 9) - The History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... There is something almost pathetic in the history of these efforts which were made during the progress of secession, to avert, if possible, the coming shock. The great peace conference, assembled by the action of Virginia, belongs to these painful and wasted endeavours. On February 4, ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... seen New York disintegrate, and Arthur's explanation sounded like some wild dream of an imaginative novelist. Not one person in all the gathering could actually realize that his home might yet be waiting for him, though at the same time he felt a pathetic anxiety for the welfare ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... taste for "demonstrations" of any sort had gone out of the people. Sympathetic crowds met the trains from Switzerland that contained the first of the "grands blesses" the militarily useless wounded whom Germany at last concluded to give back to their homes. And I recall one pathetic sight which I witnessed by accident—the arrival of one of the long trains from the front bringing back the first "permissionnaires" those soldiers who had been given a three or four days' leave after nine months in the trenches. In front of the Gare de l'Est a great ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... the general list of attractions calculated to reconcile a young lady to a parental roof with which she had no practical acquaintance. At all events, when I feared the embarrassment and dismay of a pathetic parting with darling grandmamma and the aunties, and the sweet cat and the dear vicar and all the other objects of affection, I ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... said Mr. Puttock, spreading out his plump hands in pathetic fashion, "as you might conjecture, Mr.—" he glanced at the visitor's card—"Benham, my influence at the present juncture is less than nil. I am powerless. I can only look on at what I conceive to be a course of conduct fraught with peril to the true interests ...
— Half a Hero - A Novel • Anthony Hope
... kindle charity than the most elaborate arguments. The fullest exposition of Mr. Tryan's doctrine might not have sufficed to convince Janet that he had not an odious self-complacency in believing himself a peculiar child of God; but one direct, pathetic look of his had dissociated him ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... conflicting impulses, that we teach people this indirect and tactical procedure in life, and to judge by remote consequences instead of the immediate face of things. The very desire to act as our own souls would have us, coupled with a pathetic disbelief in ourselves, moves us to follow the example of others; perhaps, who knows? they may be on the right track; and the more our patterns are in number, the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in concert ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... published in Sydney in 1862. It was not long before he recognised the extreme weakness of most of its contents, and did what he could to suppress the book. He sent specimens of his best work to the London 'Athenaeum', and wrote a pathetic letter to the Editor, which was printed in the issue of 27th September, 1862, together with some of the poems and a most kindly comment. Kendall soon wrote again, sending more poems, and received encouraging notices in 'The Athenaeum' on 19th September, 1863, 27th February, 1864, and 17th February, ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... Mr. Webster knew the chord to strike, and he touched it with a master hand. This was the "something left out," of which we know the general drift, and we can easily imagine the effect. In the midst of all the legal and constitutional arguments, relevant and irrelevant, even in the pathetic appeal which he used so well in behalf of his Alma Mater, Mr. Webster boldly and yet skilfully introduced the political view of the case. So delicately did he do it that an attentive listener did not realize that he was straying from the field of "mere ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... for it," replied his tormentor; "but the best thing you can do is to write an apology at once: pitch it pretty strong in the pathetic line, - say it's your first offence, and that you'll never be a naughty boy again, and all that sort of thing. You just do that, Giglamps, and I'll see that the note goes ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... but instantly throwing a tone of pathetic appeal into his voice: "Why, Capt'n, look a' here! It's hard seein' any diff'rence between young babbies in broad sunlight and a smooth sea; but down in the ragin' waves, an' in the night time, ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... how pathetic, when you come to think of it! I should really like to make her acquaintance. Don't you think it's too silly? There is my father, spending half his lifetime with a person who is probably very attractive—and I don't ...
— The Lonely Way—Intermezzo—Countess Mizzie - Three Plays • Arthur Schnitzler
... the officer who caught him when falling, he implored him to support him, saying, "Do not let my brave soldiers see me drop, the day is ours, keep it!" A death attended with circumstances more pathetic or incidents more picturesque the annals of war do ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... if challenging that lady to take a 'set to' with him; while Bloody Mike stumbled over the prostrate form of the lady's maid, who occupied a temporary bed upon the floor. Forgetting his assumed part, he yelled out for something to drink, and forthwith began to sing in tones of thunder, the pathetic ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... and obtained control over him in the deciding days that were to follow. Guided by the duke, and attended by his brothers, but without the ceremonious glories of regality, Lewis XVI. went down to the Assembly and made his submission. In the pathetic solemnity of the scene, the deputies forgot for a moment their righteous anger and their more righteous scorn, and the king returned to the palace on foot, in a sudden procession of triumph, amnestied and escorted by the ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... between the brother-officers was boisterous, but there was something almost pathetic in the warmth with which they grasped hands, for they had first met in the same ship as middies, and many a time during Captain Lawrence's visits Nic had sat and listened to their recollections of the dangers they had gone ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... her two companions had to laugh at this, but the laughter was close to tears, after all. It was really pathetic that this waif of the streets should suspect the sanity of anybody who desired to do her ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... touchingly subdued and apologetic, nestling close to his sister's side and whispering to her how he had tried to get ma to wait and come down to the Settlement, and hungrily begging with his pathetic childish eyes for her to say that this thing which had come upon them was not, after all, the calamity he feared. Snub-nosed, nine-year-old Pony, whose two front teeth had come in quite too large for his mouth, Pony, with the quick-expanding pupils, and the temperament ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... hand nervously clutching a branch of rhododendron, one foot twisting in the moss, Lescott was seeing an altogether new Sally. There was a renunciation in her eyes that in contrast with the child- like curve of her lips, and slim girlishness of her figure, seemed entirely pathetic. ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... work "with an expression of satisfaction on his face that indicated a sense of happiness and content that his boy, born in that distant, humble home in Ohio, had risen to fame and brought such honor upon the name. It was, indeed, a pathetic sight to see a father venerate his son as the elder Edison did." Not less at home was Mr. Mackenzie, the Mt. Clemens station agent, the life of whose child Edison had saved when a train newsboy. The old Scotchman was one of the innocent, chartered libertines ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... a strolling fiddler and his dog. The fiddler has been ruined by drink, and his monologue is one of the most pathetic and effective pieces in ...
— Down The River - Buck Bradford and His Tyrants • Oliver Optic
... never before in his hitherto easy going life had he so earnestly needed it. A sense of humour in a queer abstract way provides a quality of companionship—it gives a man the power to be a pal to himself—to talk to himself aloud—to laugh at adversity—to spot the comic side in the most pathetic predicament. Each day provided something new in the matter of discomfort or alarm. The calls he was obliged to make upon his resources of humour were therefore severe and exacting. Over and over ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... than out of it? There was not one of their number who did not inwardly rejoice at Mrs. Pelham's going, but they clouded their gentle faces in decorous mourning; they grouped about her on the piazza when the hour for parting came, looking infinitely pathetic and picturesque, and the soft voices were touching in their subdued sorrow; there were even eyes that glistened with unshed tears, and both Mrs. Raymond and Mrs. Turner begged that she would write to them, and heaven only knows what all. ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... the eternal Lheureux, who swore he would arrange matters if the doctor would sign him two bills, one of which was for seven hundred francs, payable in three months. In order to arrange for this he wrote his mother a pathetic letter. Instead of sending a reply she came herself; and when Emma wanted to know whether he had got anything out of her, "Yes," he replied; "but she wants to see the account." The next morning at daybreak Emma ran to Lheureux to beg him to make out another account for not more ...
— Madame Bovary • Gustave Flaubert
... it with a small, pathetic sigh, and took a step towards the fireplace, as if to entreat his pardon. But before he could be aware of this his attention was claimed by a sound without. The latch of the back door was lifted with a click, and, almost before ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... china, delf, glass, and plate in the establishment. He made us go into the cellar, and told us how much wine he had got there, and how much beer. "It's all paid for, Mrs Greenow, every bottle of it," he said, turning round to my aunt, with a pathetic earnestness, for which I had hardly given him credit. "Everything in this house is my own; it's all paid for. I don't call anything a man's own till it's paid for. Now that jacket that Bellfield swells about with on the sands ...
— Can You Forgive Her? • Anthony Trollope
... before long, manage to arrive. The good Suhm, who had been Saxon Minister at Petersburg to his sorrow this long while back, got in motion soon enough; but, alas, his lungs were ruined by the Russian climate, and he did not arrive. Something pathetic still in those final LETTERS of Suhm. Passionately speeding on, like a spent steed struggling homeward; he has to pause at Warsaw, and in a few days dies there,—in a way mournful to Friedrich and us! To Duhan, and Duhan's children afterwards, he was punctually, not too lavishly, attentive; in like ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... from the roof, while looking-glasses, chandeliers, and girandoles decked the walls, the whole enlivened by garlands of flowers and festoons of silk and ribbons. Here we were waited upon by twenty-four negroes in blue and white turbans and party-coloured clothes and sashes, whilst the most pathetic music was performed by a concealed band. Toasts to the king and queen, the royal family, the army and navy, with their respective commanders, the knights and their ladies, and the ladies in general, were drunk in succession, each followed by a flourish ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford
... removed from earth. He was even driven out from the Unitarian body. But he was none the less steadfast and bold, and the great mass of men and women who thronged his audience room at Boston and his lecture rooms in other cities spread his ideas. His fate was pathetic. Full of faith and hope, but broken prematurely by his labours, he retired to Italy, and died there at the darkest period in the history of the United States—when slavery in the state and the older orthodoxy in the Church seemed absolutely ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the first time that she had a pivot on which to hang her quadrennial plea, and that pivot was Wyoming, the men of that equal-minded State in both conventions holding up her hands. Miss Anthony's pathetic eyes reveal that she has attained to loneliness—the guerdon of great spirits who struggle from any direction toward the mountain tops of human liberty. But on the heights such souls meet God, and one day all women shall ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... ingratitude in 65 A.D., when the emperor seized upon a plot against himself as the pretext for sentencing Seneca to enforced suicide. In the vivid pages of the historian Tacitus, there are few more pathetic descriptions than that recounting the slow ebbing of the old philosopher's life after his veins had been opened. Seneca had known many vicissitudes of fortune. He was banished from Rome in 41 A.D., but, after his recall, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various
... to them that do succeed; But, in a more pathetic sense, are bound To such as fail. They all our loss expound; They comfort us for work that will not speed, And life—itself a failure. Ay, his deed, Sweetest in story, who the dusk profound Of Hades flooded with entrancing sound, Music's own tears, was failure. Doth it read ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... erect as a confidante on the stage of the Francais; nothing will persuade me that she has not been impaled and the shaft broken off in her body. Miss Stevens is, however, fair enough to be not too unpleasing if I must positively marry her. But—and this to me is truly pathetic—she has the hands of a woman as immaculate as the sacred ark; they are so red that I have not yet hit on any way to whiten them that will not be too costly, and I have no idea how to fine down her fingers, which are like sausages. Yes; she evidently belongs to the ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... the supreme value of this last essay is made by the fact that in its pathetic statement of uncertainties and probabilities one can discern something very much resembling a declaration of faith. Though assured that we have yet no foundation for any belief in the persistence of consciousness after the death of the brain, we are bidden to remember that the ultimate ...
— The Romance of the Milky Way - And Other Studies & Stories • Lafcadio Hearn
... Lady Beauchamp's "comprehending" Everett in this matter. There was something almost pathetic in her mingled anger, perplexity, and disappointment. She could only look on him as a headstrong young man, suicidally bent on his own ruin,—turning obstinately from every offered aid, and putting the last climax of wretchedness to his isolated and fallen position ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 5, No. 28, February, 1860 • Various
... Cragsnook, with its joys of new-found interest, however, soon erased the picture of the pathetic little child and her caretaker from the minds of the three scouts, and when next morning Mrs. Harris bade them good-by and started back to New York, she had no idea what part that first incident of their ...
— The Girl Scouts at Bellaire - Or Maid Mary's Awakening • Lilian C. McNamara Garis
... resistless as a blade. Had she said to me: "Sir, you are an upstart, and I, sitting quietly at the same table with you, and inviting you to eat of the same dish of marmalade, am a descendant of the Blands and the Fairfaxes,"—her words would have stabbed me less deeply than did the pathetic "Can this be ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... outside the pale of organized religion of today. George Santayana is a materialist and sceptic who, in his "Reason in Religion," reveals his scepticism and frowns upon personal immortality. "It is pathetic," he comments, "to observe how lowly are the motives that religion, even the highest, attributes to the deity, and from what a hard-pressed and bitter existence they have been drawn. To be given the best morsel, to be remembered, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... the honor of the men. When a woman is inconsistent the husband must be, according to me, minotaurized. If the minotaurized man is a fine fellow, if he enjoys a certain esteem,—and many husbands really deserve to be pitied,—then in speaking of him, you say in a pathetic voice, 'M. A—- is a very estimable man, his wife is exceedingly pretty, but they say he is not happy in his domestic relations.' Thus, madame, the estimable man who is unhappy in his domestic relations, the man who has an inconsistent wife, or the husband who ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... interesting inasmuch as it assists us to appreciate the pathetic condition of Irish affairs at the time. The very fact that the petition of the Irish parliament could be so handled, proves how strong had been the hold over Ireland by England, and with what daring insistence the English ministers ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... off the sloppy marsh to stand under the trees, and old Ladrone edged close to the big fire to share its warmth. This caused us to bring in the other horses and put them close to the fire under the big branches of the fir tree. It was deeply pathetic to watch the poor worn animals, all life and spirit gone out of them, standing about the fire with drooping heads and half-closed eyes. Perhaps they dreamed, like us, of the beautiful, warm, grassy hills of ...
— The Trail of the Goldseekers - A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse • Hamlin Garland
... still that little foreign accent that made it so pathetic, although, in spite of some odd blunders, she had become almost fluent in the English tongue. There was still no indication of tears in either her voice or her eyes, as she leaned back in the padded chair, her head supported by its ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... seem self-contained and equal to his troubles, Anna telling Lillian not to mind, and the latter staring dumbly into the future, not knowing what to think. Surely a brilliant sun had set on their local scene, and in a very pathetic way. ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... music, and not necessarily sad music either, has the same effect. Why this particular emotion should be aroused is certainly an enigma. "Crying because you are so happy" is similar {514} but itself rather inexplicable. In many other cases, the emotional appeal of art is easily analyzed. The pathetic appeals straightforwardly to the grief impulse, the humorous to the laughter impulse, the tragic to fear and escape. The sex motive is frequently utilized in painting and sculpture as well as ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... frequently told me that she liked Angus from the start because he seemed so robed in health and draped in a kind of pathetic modesty, with eyes whose colour she was certain would not fade. How women do love the metaphors of millinery! How better than the sage of Chelsea they understand the philosophy of clothes! But she also ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... Brandy Station, Gettysburg and other engagements. At the cavalry engagement of New Baltimore he was taken prisoner, and soon thereafter made the acquaintance of the inside of Libby Prison. We get many glimpses of life in that well-known Prison-Pen, and are treated to numerous pathetic and humorous incidents that fell under Glazier's notice. All have read of what was endured by such of the Union soldiers who passed that ordeal, and the reader can, therefore, imagine what fell to the lot ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... The appeal was pathetic and sincere. It fell on adders' ears. His scheme found favour neither with Brethren nor with Utraquists. To the Brethren Augusta was a Jesuitical juggler. To the Utraquists he was a supple athlete trying to dodge his ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... effect. They are kept in perfect order, and the inscriptions, though not always eloquent, are almost always full of feeling, and sometimes extremely touching. There is one near the entrance, which is pathetic in its native language, and though it loses much in the translation, I ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... the mirth there was a pathetic passage between a couple of impecunious players, Johnny Brinkley (played by Mr. GEORGE ELTON, who had many good things to say and said them well) and Effie, his wife, on the theme of the precariousness ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. CL, April 26, 1916 • Various
... A pathetic incident happened one day. We were transporting eight prisoners to Boma and when we stopped these carried wood on to the steamer. One of them was the son of the Chief of a large village at which we stopped, who thus had the mortification of seeing his ...
— A Journal of a Tour in the Congo Free State • Marcus Dorman
... too. It is a dear room, with something pathetic about its simple sweetness, and the kind thought to give me pleasure which shows in every little innocent detail. The floor is covered with a white straw matting, and there are no two pieces of furniture that match. There's a wide, wooden bed of no particular period that I can recognise, ...
— Lady Betty Across the Water • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... destroy almost everything before he went, except at Douchy, where there was some good dug-out timber. Needless to say, the famous Mary of that village was not to be found. The French were immensely pleased at regaining part of their lost territory, though it was a pathetic sight to see some of the old people coming to look at the piles of bricks which had once been their homes. Two ladies came to Gommecourt with a key, little thinking that so far from finding a lock they would find not even a door or door-way—there was not even a brick wall more than two ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills
... of the most humorous passages; of the most pathetic. In the humorous passages is the author laughing at her characters, or laughing with them? Compare in this respect her treatment of Mrs. Jamieson, Miss Barker, and Miss Pole with Scott's treatment of Prior ...
— Teachers' Outlines for Studies in English - Based on the Requirements for Admission to College • Gilbert Sykes Blakely
... them, says: "Almost all their songs were thoroughly religious in their tone, however quaint their expression, and were in a minor key both as to words and music. The attitude is always the same, and, as a commentary on the life of the race, is infinitely pathetic. Nothing but patience for this life—nothing but triumph in the next. Sometimes the present predominates, sometimes the future; but the ...
— The Colored Regulars in the United States Army • T. G. Steward
... down from the Bunker Hill Monument, and the Stars and Stripes raised in its place; every now and then, also, the shrieks and groans of the wounded, were heard from the corn-patch, which added, of course, the pathetic element to the scene. At last, when all the ammunition was exhausted, peace was declared, and the American forces assembling around the monument, listened to General Stark, as he vehemently burst forth into "To be, or not to be," pointing ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... her guitar, commences a song, the first that occurs to her, which chances to be "Lucy Neal," a negro melody, at the time much in vogue on the plantations of the South. She has chosen the pathetic strain without thought of the effect it may produce upon her sister. Observing it to be painful she abruptly breaks off, and with a sweep of her fingers across the guitar strings, changes to the merrier refrain of "Old Dan Tucker." Helen, touched by the delicate consideration, rewards it with ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... of something which is awful, even dreadful to remember—something which bears with searching force on all men's ways and hopes and plans—something before which he knew himself to be as it were continually arraigned—something which it was strange and pathetic to find so little recognized among other men." But, alas! this is how we refuse to live. We thrust the thought of judgment from us; we treat it as an unwelcome intruder, a disturber of our peace; we block up every approach ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... romantic interest. Legends are afloat concerning the King's later days which would not be altogether unworthy the closing hours of a great Roman emperor. George had his melting moments, it would seem, and not long before his death, being in a pathetic mood, he gave the Duchess of Kendal a pledge that if he should die before her, and it were possible for departed souls to return to earth and impress the living with a knowledge of their presence, he, the faithful and aged lover, would come back from the grave to his mistress. When ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... among all those who knew him best, it had long come to be recognised that his skill as an impersonator was only second to his genius as a creator of humorous and pathetic character. His success in each capacity sprang from his intense sympathy and his equally intense earnestness. Whatever with him was worth doing at all, was worth doing thoroughly. Anything he undertook, no matter what, he went in at, according to the good old ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... at me with so touching an expression in his dark eyes—he might have been making some most pathetic request—that I really could not resist him. Besides which, to confess the truth, the proposal found great favour in my own eyes. I looked consideringly at the ready-cut slices of ...
— The Boys and I • Mrs. Molesworth
... previous letter had meant? Was Anthony Leverett nearing the end, counting his days, finishing up his earthly work, and delegating it to other hands? There was something pathetic in it, and the trust in the uprightness and honor that Anthony Leverett reposed in him touched him keenly. But this part surprised and, at first, annoyed him. He drew his fine brows in ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... Dialogues issued by this writer, Dr Johnson remarked, with his usual pointed severity, 'Here is a man telling the world what the world had all his life been telling him.' His 'Monody' expresses real grief in an artificial style, but has some stanzas as natural in the expression as they are pathetic in ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... things)—knowing as I did that Miss Rose Delaine and Miss Wright had both refused him. I did not realise in my intolerant youth that the anxiety of some middle-aged bachelors still to appear eligible, the way their minds hover round imaginary conquests, has its pathetic side. Looking back, I believe now that Miss Collett was not by any means poor Uncle Tom's first choice, but his last chance. And perhaps he was her last ...
— The Lowest Rung - Together with The Hand on the Latch, St. Luke's Summer and The Understudy • Mary Cholmondeley
... the hall light. She stood there, blinking, a bent, pathetic little figure. Her eyes were averted. "Are you all right, Ma? We began to worry ...
— Half Portions • Edna Ferber
... discover that the corpse, God forgive him, is that of a brother and friend and that the Powers of Darkness threatening humanity are advancing upon him ... out of Moscow. I muse ... yes, it was a good war. War is never pathetic, never wholly a waste. Maturity no less than childhood must have its circuses. But the Jabberwock ... Ah! the Jabberwock ... the soul of man celebrating the immortal triumph of righteousness ... the good Don Quixote has valiantly slain another windmill and your Sancho Panza shakes ...
— Erik Dorn • Ben Hecht
... began to tell his story over again to her, and she stayed so long listening to it, that her companions had turned the corner of the street, and were out of sight. She looked about in great distress; and I never shall forget the pathetic voice with which she said, 'Oh! what will become of me? every body will be angry with me.' I assured her that nobody should be angry with her, and she gave me her little hand with the utmost innocent ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... moment the light in her eyes changed. The look there was an appeal, and it expressed confidence, too. Prescott felt a strange tremour. Her glance rested full upon him and it was strangely soft and pathetic. ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... attempt to gleam, is admired and recorded by its well-disciplined constituency. Not only that, but at the first timid blink of the sun the true Scotsman remarks smilingly, 'I think now we shall be having settled weather!' It is a pathetic optimism, beautiful but quite groundless, and leads one to believe in the story that when Father Noah refused to take Sandy into the ark, he sat down philosophically outside, saying, with a glance at the clouds, 'Aweel! the day's just aboot the ord'nar', ...
— Penelope's Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... action, of course, excited a good deal of criticism amongst the older dignitaries of the order, and among the members of the government and court, it was heartily approved of by the world at large, as being not only well deserved, but also a singularly pathetic demonstration on the part of the dying monarch of his profound sense of obligation to ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy
... he swept his fingers over the strings, and a burst of harmony arose and filled the marble room; and, as it died away in softest echoes, his sweet, clear, pathetic voice sang ...
— Saronia - A Romance of Ancient Ephesus • Richard Short
... strand me, Hester!" replied her brother. "How you could see anything pathetic, or pitiful as you call it, in that disreputable old humbug, I can't even imagine. A more ludicrous specimen of tumble-down humanity it would be impossible to find! A drunken old thief—I'll lay you any thing! Catch me leaving a sov where he ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... although she would have had fine eyes but for her red lashless lids. She wore her thick hair cropped short, like a boy, and was pasty and sallow in complexion, hollow-cheeked, thick-featured, and overgrown, with long thin hands and feet, and arms and legs of quite pathetic length and tenuity; a silent and melancholy little girl, who sucked her thumb perpetually, and kept her own counsel. She would have to lie in bed for days together, and when she got well enough to ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... hers. There was something almost pathetic in the worshiping light which shone there. He was, as he had always been, ...
— The Malefactor • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... his wife," that "Nikitin was one of the most remarkable men in the world," that "only his intimate friends could know how remarkable he was"; partly too upon the dog-like capacity of Andrey Vassilievitch to fetch and carry for his friend, to put himself indeed to the greatest inconvenience. It was pathetic to see the flaming pleasure in the man's eyes when Nikitin permitted him to wait upon him, and how ironically, upon such an occasion, ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... message in Scotland as elsewhere. It seems to us now as if the burden which it laid on the individual—on frail and feeble women, for example, in that time of persecution—was overwhelming. It is most pathetic to find Knox, when sitting down to write tender and consoling messages to those in such circumstances, pre-occupied with urging the obligation of each one of them individually to hold fast, against possible torture ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... self-repression, would probably give her a death-blow. He felt literally like a murderer before her, but he had to answer. Talbot's own letter, General Washington's command, and the promptings of his own affection had made him an actor in this pathetic drama. He had no choice but to proceed. The truth must be told. Nerving himself to the inevitable, he replied ...
— For Love of Country - A Story of Land and Sea in the Days of the Revolution • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... so!" cried Suzette. "You think that because you would have done it for any one! But you have done it for us; and as long as I live I shall remember that! Oh"—She broke off; and dropped her face with a pathetic, childlike helplessness on her lifted arm; and now he was less than ever able to leave her. They all sat down again, after they had risen to part; Matt felt the imperative necessity of encouraging them; of rescuing her from the conjecture ...
— The Quality of Mercy • W. D. Howells
... firm had been that mighty hero's grasp upon the national imagination, that the Franks accepted as matter of course that his family should bear rule, and rallied round the various worthless members of it with rather pathetic loyalty, fighting for them one against the other, reuniting and redividing the various fragments of the empire, until the feeble Carlovingian race died ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... and refined as she was, she went into rough bar-rooms, and knelt on their floors, and prayed what her sad heart wus full of,—for pity and mercy for her boy, and other mothers' boys,—prayed with that fellowship of suffering that made her sweet voice as pathetic as tears, and patheticker, so ...
— Sweet Cicely - Or Josiah Allen as a Politician • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... be nothing at all remarkable or remorseful about Ralph Rackstraw. But Ralph immediately begins to sing about a nightingale and a moon's bright ray and several other things most inappropriate to the occasion, and winds up with "He sang, Ah, well-a-day," in the most pathetic manner. The other sailors repeat after him, "Ah, well-a-day," also in a very pathetic manner, and Ralph thanks them in the politest, most heartbroken manner, ...
— Operas Every Child Should Know - Descriptions of the Text and Music of Some of the Most Famous Masterpieces • Mary Schell Hoke Bacon
... said Patty, squeezing his hand, "you are always so wise and good. That's just the point; we must not spoil the happiness by the sorrow, though that is what Marian is always trying to do. Poor Marian, she's such a pathetic creature; I wish ...
— Patty in Paris • Carolyn Wells
... started. Impossible for her to speak in that first moment. But when she had dried her eyes, she said, with a pathetic childish air— ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... sad ones—sentimental an' romantic, with a bad case o' chronic lonesomeness; an' one twilight he told her a pathetic little love story about a girl back in England what had had sense enough to cut him out of her assets when he had trooped over to this country to punch a fortune out o' beef cattle. This had been about five years previous; but his heart still ached about it—though it hadn't ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... hour passed. Then the door opened slowly. Peggy came in. She was pale, and her eyes were red. She smiled—a pathetic little smile. ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... as the Captain was on all ordinary occasions, he proved, on the present, eloquent and almost pathetic; for the tears came into his eyes when he recounted the various quarrels which had become addled, notwithstanding his best endeavours to hatch them into an honourable meeting; and here was one, at length, just chipping the shell, like to be smothered, for want of the most ordinary ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... grace, from the cross. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." The death of Christ is an expression of God's free grace. If we regard Christ, in his life and character, as a manifestation of God's will, then his pathetic and tender death reveals to us that God loves us even when we are sinners, before reparation or repentance; "for, while we were sinners, Christ ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
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