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More "Poignant" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... immediately depend. The harvest of misery arising from this cause it is impossible to estimate. It is not to be seen in the open. It dwells unseen in humble homes, in city, village, or field, borne often uncomplainingly, but not less poignant from this cause. The tears and terrors thus produced are beyond calculation. But while the glories of war are celebrated with blast of trumpet and roll of drum, the terrible accompaniment of groans of misery is too apt to pass ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... oblivion of the danger that encompassed her. What a beautiful picture! By skilful manoeuvring the vessel was extricated from an ugly position, and the unhappy first mate who had neglected to put himself into communication with the Deity before the accident happened, became the object of poignant dislike for having broken one of the most important articles of nautical faith by doing ...
— Windjammers and Sea Tramps • Walter Runciman
... Jim's knee, however, he leaned in confidence against him, and sighed with a sweet little sound of contentment, as poignant to reinspire a certain ecstasy of sadness in the miner's breast as it was to excite an envy in the hearts of ...
— Bruvver Jim's Baby • Philip Verrill Mighels
... herself broken at last by the ordeal of the witness-box in a "defended action." Inevitably such a book, a record of disillusion and increasing misery, can hardly be cheerful; tales with a purpose seldom are. But the poignant humanity of it will hold your sympathy throughout. You may think that Mr. MAXWELL too obviously loads his dice, and be aware also that (like others of its kind) the story suffers from over-concentration on a single theme. It ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, April 14, 1920 • Various
... far different and yet unborn poets. But it is only fair to Shelley to remember that the moral being of mankind is as yet in its childhood; all poets play with images not understood; they touch on emotions sharply, at random, as in a dream; they suffer each successive vision, each poignant sentiment, to evaporate into nothing, or to leave behind only a heart vaguely softened and fatigued, a gentle languor, or a tearful hope. Every modern school of poets, once out of fashion, proves itself to have been sadly romantic and sentimental. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... paused, with a groan that betokened not only a poignant sorrow, but also something of relief—for the tortures of not being able to unburden himself had plainly become intolerable. He glanced up and met the compassionate eyes of the rector, who stood leaning ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... incident in the smoking-room. With him it was just one pretty girl after another. He had heart enough for them all, and only one who was so young and who had been so long on battlefields could well understand what a keen, even poignant, pleasure it ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... chance could never produce any thing so beautiful, and yet there is nothing in it that shocks your sight. True, then, the hand of wit appears in repartee, as it must in all kinds of verse. When, with the quiet and poignant brevity of it, there mingles the cadency and sweetness of verse—"the soul of the hearer has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... on the iron plate in the middle of the tent, our adventurers found the cold at this point of their journey most poignant. It was about Christmas; but the exact time of year had little to do with the matter. The wind was northerly, and keen: and they often at night had to rise and promote circulation by a good run on the snow. But early on the ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... perturbation which belonged both to the man in advanced years and to the particular moment in the century. Even in his treatment of classic myth, of the nude in goddess and woman, there was, as we shall see presently, a greater unrest and a more poignant sensuality—there was evidence of a mind and temperament troubled anew instead of being tranquillised by the ...
— The Later works of Titian • Claude Phillips
... contacts and separations, these leave-takings at the convents were the saddest. And it was not only that this place had the same poignant and unbearable beauty as the place we had just left, but its beauty was unique. You felt that if the friends you had just left were turned out of their house and garden to-morrow, they might still return some day. But here you saw a carefully guarded and fragile loveliness on the very eve ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... man's food arrived. And he looked at it and sniffed at it daintily—like a reluctant patient going under the ether—and he tasted of it; and then he put his face down in his hands and burst into low, poignant moans. For it wasn't the real thing at all. The stuffing of the turkey defied chemical analysis; and, moreover, the turkey before serving should have been dusted with talcum powder and fitted with dress-shields, it being plainly a crowning work of the art preservative—meaning by that the cold-storage ...
— Cobb's Bill-of-Fare • Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb
... the net effects of the War, and of Allied policy since the War, especially upon the lives of the common people in all lands. Enough detail is included to give the sense of poignant human realities; but the situation is grasped as a whole and drawn in broad and distinct outline—the "Balkanization" of Europe; the new Balance of Power; the economic chaos; the responsibility of the Allied statesmen; the inner meaning of Bolshevism, and of the war against Bolshevism; finally, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner
... firm hold in his breast. He began to turn towards the mother and father who had been wrapped up in his future,—who loved him so devotedly. He was forgetting his early and passionate love, and the bitter sorrow of her death was losing fast its poignant power to steel him against his kindred. He knew they could not but be proud of the record he had made in the ranks of the gallant ——th, and then he shrank and shivered when he recalled the dreadful words of his curse. He had made up his ...
— From the Ranks • Charles King
... relief was not the first who had represented Agamemnon thus, for a painter, Timanthes, had made a picture of this subject about B.C. 400, and in describing it Quintilian said that "when he had painted Calchas sad, Ulysses sadder, and had represented in the face of Menelaus the most poignant grief that art can express, having exhausted the deepest feelings and finding no means of worthily portraying the countenance of the father, he covered his head and left it to every man's own heart to estimate ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... fish is not all of the fishing. Yet there are circumstances which make this philosophy hard to accept. I have in mind an incident of angling tribulation which rivals the most poignant instant of my boyhood, when a great trout flopped for one sharp moment on a mossy stone and then was gone like a golden flash into ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... to his landlord, and over the idea of ejectment from his little dwelling the tailor would brood day and night. Folks said he was going crazed about it. None the less was Sim's distress as poignant as if the grounds for it had been more real. "Haud thy bletherin' gab," Wilson said one day; "because ye have to be cannie wi' the cream ye think ye must surely be clemm'd." Salutary as some of the Scotsman's comments may have been, it was ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... Think we're all cheerful enough? We know that two of us are! All right!" He called down the request and it seemed to Honor that a little quiver went through the singers in the shadow. The guitars broke into a poignant, sobbing melody. ...
— Play the Game! • Ruth Comfort Mitchell
... smouldering braziers, love and hate: And chaunt the grieved verses of a dirge For dying gods, remembering flutes and shawms: With perverse moods I trouble you, and urge The sense to beauty. Give me some sweet alms, Some reverie, some pang of a damasked sword, Some poignant moment yet unparalleled In my dream-broidered chronicles, some chord Of mystery Love's music never knelled Before;—but nought of the rough alchemy ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... passed, to the conclusion that Templeton, wearied out by his long confinement, had become desperate, and had gone abroad. As good a theory as could be got, seeing that he had not trusted himself in going near his friends; and Annie, whose grief was sharp and poignant, came also to settle down with a belief which still promised her her lover, though perhaps at a long date. But, somehow or another, Annie could not explain why, even with all the fondness he had to the work of her ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... mysterious broke the quiet routine of his life. The presence of Ume in the chamber seemed to fade a little, but, for some reason inexplicable to himself, this brought now no poignant grief. He did not tell the wonderful thing to Mata or old Kano, but hid the still unfinished picture where no one but himself ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... in Moliere's farce, when the true nobleman broke in on their high life below stairs, we were destined to be confronted with a real pedlar. To make the lesson still more poignant for fallen gentlemen like us, he was a pedlar of infinitely more consideration than the sort of scurvy fellows we were taken for: like a lion among mice, or a ship of war bearing down upon two cock-boats. Indeed, he did not deserve the name of pedlar at all: he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thou?—the poignant question of to-day. The pride of Christian culture, the greatest human achievement in history, with, as we thought before 1914, the seal of immortality set upon her, is now perhaps moving towards dissolution and death. Europe has begun a rapid decline, though no one dares to think that she will ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... both in mind and person: She had an elevated understanding, with all the delicacy, and softness of her own sex. Her voice, however sweet in itself, was still rendered more harmonious by what she said. Her wit was poignant without severity: Her manners were humane, polite, easy and unreserved.— Wherever she came, she attracted attention and esteem. As virtue was her guide in morality, sincerity was her guide in religion. She was constant, but ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... none by his humming; but he stopped short in an improvised variation on the theme of Vulcan's song in "Philemon and Baucis" when he heard a subdued but none the less poignant cry of distress from Joan. In order to turn his head he was compelled to twist his ungainly body, and Joan, who was standing well away from her canvas, was aware of the movement. She ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... consolation to poor Stella, when the moment for her parting with her husband arrived. That moment came the very next day. It need not be dwelt on. Stella's lot was that which numberless wives of naval officers have to endure; but, though widely shared, her grief was not the less poignant as she watched with tearful eyes through the admiral's spy-glass the corvette under all sail ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... Many poignant recollections are mine, more of them bitter than sweet; but no one of them all can compare with the memory of ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... life to a satisfactory completion—false mating. It is not a difficulty peculiar to woman. Man knows it as often. It is the heaviest curse society brings on human beings—the most fertile cause of apathy, agony, and failure. If the woman's cry is more poignant under it than the man's, it is because the machine which holds them both allows him a wider sweep, more interests outside of their immediate alliance. "A man, when he is vexed at home," complains Medea, "can go out and find relief among his ...
— The Business of Being a Woman • Ida M. Tarbell
... Holy Father's grief and poignant sorrow, under his calamities, was the loss of souls. "Ah!" said he, in a conversation with Mgr. Langenieux, Archbishop of Rheims, "I could bear my misfortunes courageously, and God would give me strength to withstand the evils which afflict the Church. But there is one thing ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... friendly to awaken delusive hopes, and, after all, his regard for her was characterized more by boyish adoration than by the deep passion of manhood. To his sanguine spirit the excitement of camp and the responsibilities of his new position formed attractions which took all poignant regret from his leave-taking, and she was glad to recognize this truth. She had failed signally to carry out her self-sacrificing impulse, when he was so ill, to reward his heroism and supplement his life with her own; and she was much relieved to find that ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... look back now on that day I find the memory of my suffering has dimmed slightly. The passage of weeks and months has served to soften the harsh outlines of poignant recollection. What now in retrospect most impresses me is the heroism I displayed, the stark fortitude, the grandeur of will power, the triumph for character. Sheer gallantry, I ...
— One Third Off • Irvin S. Cobb
... "A poignant flame," he relates, "pierced my brain like an arrow of fire, and for several weeks I was prostrated with fever. At length physical and moral strength awoke within me. Again I took my gun, my game-bag, my portfolio, and ...
— An Iron Will • Orison Swett Marden
... necessary elementary knowledge. The fingers must be set upon the keys with a certain decision, firmness, quickness, and vigor, and must obtain a command over the key-board; otherwise, the result is only a tame, colorless, uncertain, immature style of playing, in which no fine portamento, no poignant staccato, or sprightly accentuation can be produced. Every thoughtful teacher, striving for the best result, must, however, take care that this shall only be acquired gradually, and must teach it with a constant regard to individual peculiarities, and not at the expense of beauty of performance, ...
— Piano and Song - How to Teach, How to Learn, and How to Form a Judgment of - Musical Performances • Friedrich Wieck
... what some of them might be! Though Florentia saw nothing I saw many things in this poor little shabby "Due d'Enghien," coming over to our roaring London, where the dots have to be so big on the i's, with its barely audible note of originality. It appealed to me, touched me, offered me a poignant suggestion of the way things happen ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... now against her self-respect, her compassion, her innate sense of right. Already she was his tool. True, she had submitted to be so for a great purpose. But suppose she had to submit again hereafter—always henceforth? And what made the thought more poignant was, her knowledge that he was right; that he knew what to do, and how to do it. She could not help admiring him for his address, his quickness, his clear practical insight: and yet she despised, mistrusted, all ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... popular songs of America he liked Marching Through Georgia and Dixie best. For Home, Sweet Home he had no liking, perhaps from having heard it during some moment of poignant homesickness. He said that such a song made too brutal an assault upon a man's tenderest feelings, and believed it to be a much greater triumph for a writer to bring a smile to his readers than a tear—partly, perhaps, because it is a more ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... are impersonal. We cannot identify ourselves with what moves us in painting or sculpture or architecture: on the contrary, it lifts us out of ourselves, away from our griefs and cares, instead of giving them a more intense and poignant expression, which at some moments is all the divinest music seems to do. Their influence is always benign and serene, and we may always have recourse to it, while the secrets of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann lie hidden between leaves, in ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... to discover that instead of Charles O'Malley, I had written the name of Lucy Dashwood. I could bear no more. The laughing and raillery of my friends came upon my wounded and irritated feelings like the most poignant sarcasm. I seized my cap and rushed from the room. Desirous of escaping from all that knew me, anxious to bury my agitated and distracted thoughts in solitude and quiet, I opened the first door before me, and seeing ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... figure of Mrs. Baker was very out of place in this setting. Her voice was poignant, reedy. A look at her made it evident that she was a conventional, good woman. She had soft, cloudy golden eyes and a pathetic mouth, and she seemed on the point ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... the fire and the Carringford's poignant trouble, Janice Day had a mental problem to solve which occupied her thoughts a good part of ...
— Janice Day, The Young Homemaker • Helen Beecher Long
... head, no urging would'st thou need To make thee lap Narcissus' mirror up." I was all fix'd to listen, when my guide Admonish'd: "Now beware: a little more. And I do quarrel with thee." I perceiv'd How angrily he spake, and towards him turn'd With shame so poignant, as remember'd yet Confounds me. As a man that dreams of harm Befall'n him, dreaming wishes it a dream, And that which is, desires as if it were not, Such then was I, who wanting power to speak Wish'd to excuse myself, and all the while Excus'd me, though unweeting that I did. "More ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... uttered a poignant short bark and leaped heavily to one side. His bared teeth traced a line of whiteness through the gloom. The next instant he dashed past his master's legs, almost upsetting his balance, and shot out into the room, where he went blundering ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... the next afternoon, addressed to Harvey. In a state of great excitement he broke the seal and read the poignant missive with eyes that were glazed with wonder and—something ...
— What's-His-Name • George Barr McCutcheon
... ages Fell the first keen notes of strife, And they held out their hands in the darkness Toward that blatant boon called life; And they heard the building of empires, And the restless trampling of men, And the dust that was made for heartbreak Grew poignant even then. ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... personal inclination was concerned, Sara would gladly have adopted Elisabeth's suggestion. She shrank inexpressibly from returning to Monkshaven, shrouded, as it was, in brief but poignant memories, but she had given Selwyn her word that she would go back, and, even in a comparatively unimportant matter such as this appeared, she had a predilection in favour ...
— The Hermit of Far End • Margaret Pedler
... faint, gasping cry, for his mind had led him to the hour of the lost innocence. There are thousands on thousands of men who have lived purer lives than he who would yet deride the shaft which struck him, and laugh to think of its poignant power to wound. For the pure soul in the frail body, for the high hope and the will of burned cord, for the passion which hurries the senses and has no power to blind the conscience, there is a lasting purgatory open. How many a time since that hour of loss he had groaned in the silence ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... and strain of her two years of life in Penfield left her for a long time bruised and sore. Her relation with Stephen, as she looked back upon it, hurt her in every fibre of her nature. Sometimes she was filled with remorse for the grief she had caused him, and sometimes with poignant distress, of doubt whether she had not after all been unjust to him. Underlying all this remorse, all this doubt was a steadily growing consciousness that her love for him was in the very outset a mistake, an abnormal emotion, born of temporary and ...
— Mercy Philbrick's Choice • Helen Hunt Jackson
... her as an artist in story-telling. She was equally at home in interpreting the subtle blending of wit and wisdom in Daudet, the folk lore philosophy of Grimm, or the deeper world philosophy and poignant human appeal of ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... for the reception of our lost one, and tho' we had nothing but wretchedness now to impart, I was willing to procure her a welcome to what we had. This task would have been more difficult but for our recent calamity, which had humbled my wife's pride, and blunted it by more poignant afflictions. Being unable to go for my poor child myself, as my arm grew very painful, I sent my son and daughter, who soon returned, supporting the wretched delinquent, who had not the courage to look up at her mother, ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... wondered whether that ideal happiness was not too complete to last. In the years I had lived I had become a pessimist. I feared a too-complete ideal. The realization of our hopes is always followed by a poignant despair. In this world there is no cup of sweetness without dregs of bitterness. The man who troubles after the to-morrow creates trouble for himself, while he who is regardless of the future is like an ostrich burying its head in the sand at ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... replied and the way she said it raised a more poignant question in his mind. Was she miffed, perhaps, because he had failed to call on her, that time when he came back to town? He had borrowed her money—she might have been worried, that time when ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... remained standing, with my face half turned aside, for I could not muster courage to meet her look. I several times commenced a reply without power to conclude it. At length I made an effort, and in a tone of poignant grief exclaimed: 'Perfidious Manon! perfidious, perfidious creature!' She had no wish, she repeated with a flood of tears, to attempt to justify her infidelity. 'What is your wish, then?' cried I. 'I wish to die,' ...
— Manon Lescaut • Abbe Prevost
... across the small white pages, pausing as if of its own accord. She looked at the last words she had written and shut the book. Yes, she was near to all humanity; but nearer than any to one who was all the world to her. Suddenly she felt, with poignant intensity, the nearness not only of his body to hers, but the nearness of their souls. Her spirit and his touched in the silence of the forest. She did not look at him yet, but she knew that he was looking at her, and that his heart was in the ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... returning from a visit to the sick at Bonneville, met him on the Upper Road. Eighteen years had passed since Angele had died, but the thread of Vanamee's life had been snapped. Nothing remained now but the tangled ends. He had never forgotten. The long, dull ache, the poignant grief had now become a part of him. Presley knew this to ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... in his evidence, the accused discovered every token of the most poignant sensibility. At one time his features were convulsed with anguish; tears unbidden trickled down his manly cheeks; and at another he started with apparent astonishment at the unfavourable turn that was given to the narrative, though without betraying any ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... pedestrianism. The idea of lugging that heavy saddle five miles over a mountain road caused him to knit his brows and look very serious indeed. As he gave the saddle an impatient kick, his eyes rested on the Bologna sausage, one end of which protruded from the holster; then there came over him a poignant recollection of his Lenten supper of the night before and his no breakfast at all of that morning. He seated himself on the saddle, unwrapped the sausage, and proceeded to cut from it two ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... deserving, as the most worthy, of the highest recompenses. They have been minded to have more certain proof of thy worth than could be shown by thee within the limits of thy father's house, whom I know to be abundantly endowed with riches; wherefore, first, with the poignant instigations of love they brought thee from a senseless animal to be a man, and after with foul fortune and at this present with prison dour, they would fain try if thy spirit change not from that which it was, whenas thou wast scantwhile glad of the gotten prize. If that[266] be the same ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... scene a delicious and poignant sweetness? He must surely have uttered these words, in which suddenly the Italian does not suffice and Francis is obliged to resort to the mystical language of the breviary ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... Then the poignant thing interpolated. A volley crashed ahead of them some half of a mile away and another volley answered from a still nearer point. Swishing noises which the correspondent had heard in the air he now know to have ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... young and tender sons, who are sold to the far South, where they have to toil without requite to supply the world's market with cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, &c. Our venerable mothers are borne down with poignant grief at the fate of their children. Our sisters, if not by the law, are by common consent made the prey of vile men, ...
— The Fugitive Blacksmith - or, Events in the History of James W. C. Pennington • James W. C. Pennington
... treatment would not half so well have served his purpose. His audience were not prepared for any philosophy of exposure, still less for any attack upon the essential principles of the Church; he himself did not see how the successive laxities which he fixes with his poignant satire, or sets in the light of his withering scorn, spring from a vicious conception of Christianity and of the office of the Church. He does what he does, however, with exquisite effect; and the Jesuit Order, many and powerful as have been its opponents, never ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... Italian mind, like the Greek, had an ethical twist—twist in more senses than one, some would say, but that does not matter. Manners, morals, motives—these three could not but displace, to some extent, mere incident: though there was generally incident of a poignant or piquant kind as well. In other words the novella was actually (though still in miniature) a novel in nature as well as in name. And these novelle became, as is generally known, common in English translations after the middle of the sixteenth century. Painter's huge Palace of Pleasure ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... protection. And then, after lesser things, the interesting, if not intensely poetical, Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon leads us to one of the most remarkable of all Mr Arnold's poems, Bacchanalia, or the New Age. The word remarkable has been used advisedly. Bacchanalia, though it has poignant and exquisite poetic moments, is not one of the most specially poetical of its author's pieces. But it is certainly his only considerable piece of that really poetic humour which is so rare and delightful ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... realized, with a strange enlightenment as to her own mental processes, what angry jealousy the look on his face would have roused in her only so short a time ago—jealousy for the sake of her own children, that any loss, any grief, should be poignant and pierce his heart save for them. Now she was sorry for ...
— The Moonshiners At Hoho-Hebee Falls - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... myth, a belief in which had the effect of cutting me off from the actual world, by linking me with a world of phantoms. Those moments of exaltation which the contemplation of the Biblical past afforded us, allowing us to call ourselves the children of princes, served but to tinge with a more poignant sense of disinheritance the long humdrum stretches of our life. In very truth we were a people without a country. Surrounded by mocking foes and detractors, it was difficult for me to realize the persons of my people's heroes or ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... titles of these productions are highly characteristic of the style of the controversy, and, indeed, are sometimes considerably more poignant than the text, it may be well to give some of them in ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... sensuous; sensorial, sensory; emotive, emotional; of feeling, with feeling &c n.. warm, quick, lively, smart, strong, sharp, acute, cutting, piercing, incisive; keen, keen as a razor; trenchant, pungent, racy, piquant, poignant, caustic. impressive, deep, profound, indelible; deep felt, home felt, heartfelt; swelling, soul-stirring, deep-mouthed, heart-expanding, electric, thrilling, rapturous, ecstatic. earnest, wistful, eager, breathless; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... manufacturing house to which I had advanced quite half the capital, in order to enter into a sympathetic communion with the cotton-spinners. The writer complained heavily of the import duty on the raw material, made some poignant allusions to the increasing competition on the continent and in America, and pretty clearly intimated that the lord of the manor of Householder ought to make himself felt by the administration in a question of so much magnitude to the nation. On this hint I spake. I sat down on the spot ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... Would Hero Giles remain friendly? With poignant anxiety, Nelson watched that dishevelled martial head sink ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... herself; and the baby, in a fresh white dress, was there tied into its arm-chair with a napkin, and beating on the table with a spoon. Bartley's nonchalance amidst all this impressed Kinney with a yet more poignant sense of his superiority, and almost deprived him of the powers of speech. When after breakfast Bartley took him out to Cambridge on the horse-cars, and showed him the College buildings, and Memorial Hall, and the Washington Elm, and Mount ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells
... the excessive sweetness of his amorous muse, he offers no support to the wearied spirit,—no sense of strength or renewal to the fagged brain. He does not grapple with the hard problems of life; and his mellifluous murmurings of delicious fantasies have no place in the poignant griefs and keen regrets of those who have passed the meridian of earthly hopes, and who see the shadows of the long night closing in. And David Helmsley realised this all suddenly, with something ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... never forget the poignant impression that Paris made on me that first morning in early June when I descended from the train at the Gare de Lyon. After a time I came to accept the new aspect of things as normal, to forget what Paris had been before the war, ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... solemnly. For the time the thought of war inspired Prescott with the most poignant repulsion, since he was taking this girl to the army which he ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... be silent now, she believed, and the success of her efforts to win him from Jennie Burton would be complete. If left to himself in this wild, distracted mood he would indeed break every tie that bound him to her rival; but after time had blunted his poignant self-condemnation he would inevitably come back to her. The conscience whispered: "Who forgave you here? What did you promise here? What does that tree mean with its branches reaching out towards heaven? What would you think ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... fullest understanding with those similarly situated, could help as one who knew from practice and not from theory. He realized what a marvellous blessing poverty can be; but as a condition to experience, to derive from it poignant lessons, and then to get out of; not as a condition to ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... even die without advantage to their fellow-creatures; for death consecrates their example, and the wisdom, which might have been slighted at the council-table, becomes oracular from the shrine. Those rare excellences, which make our grief poignant, make it likewise profitable; and the tears which wise men shed for the departure of the wise, are among those that are preserved in heaven. It is the fervent aspiration of my spirit, that I may ...
— Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit etc. • by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... beast of prey. He gasped with agony, with bitter joy. Ah, that was the true love! What did he care that the woman lacked this and that? He loved her because he loved her; he loved her for her faults. And in spite of the poignant anguish, he thanked her from the bottom of his heart, for she had taught him love. She had caused him endless pain, but she had given him the strength to bear it. She had ruined his life, perhaps, but ...
— The Hero • William Somerset Maugham
... unless forced to talk; and the effect was that Fan grew more and more reluctant to address her, although her heart was overcharged with its unexpressed love and sympathy. Only once, a few days after their return to town, did Constance give way to her poignant feelings, and that was on the occasion of a visit from Mr. Northcott to their rooms. She saw him reluctantly, and was strangely cold and irresponsive in her manner, and as it quickly discouraged him when his kindly efforts met with no appreciation, the conversation they had was soon over. ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... and sorrow my rashness has brought to your innocent heart; but you fly from my approach, and banish me from your presence. No mercy for one, who, though he may have erred, is surely atoning for his errors by anguish as deep, as poignant as your own. Night after night I walk the piazza beneath your windows. I know you hear my step and feel that I am near. But you will not open the casement and let me for a moment behold your features and crave your forgiveness. O, Louise, am I to die ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... and Jimmie remained to comfort his friend. But there was no consolation for Jack, whose bitter mood had turned to dull despair and grief that would be more poignant in the morning, when he would be better able to comprehend the fell blow that had shattered his happiness and crushed his ambitions and dreams. He refused pipe and cigars. Until three o'clock he sat staring vacantly at the floor, seemingly oblivious ...
— In Friendship's Guise • Wm. Murray Graydon
... when he had once invaded it, he kept possession for many years; not, indeed, without the competition of rivals who sometimes prevailed, or the censure of criticks, which was often poignant, and often just; but with such a degree of reputation as made him, at least, secure of being heard, whatever might be the final determination ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... necessarily be followed by resignation. Regretted this for dual reason. First, House would be deprived of presence of esteemed Viscount on Ministerial bench. Secondly, and to the generous mind this consideration even more poignant, the secession of a Minister so highly prized would in present circumstances strike heavy blow at Government. Might even lead to break up of Ministry, dissolution of Parliament, destruction of Home ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 8, 1914 • Various
... their continuance begets a habit of endurance, which generally alleviates their greatest rigour; but when one passes suddenly and unexpectedly from a miserable and calamitous lot to one of prosperity and enjoyment, and soon after relapses into his former state of woe and suffering: this is such a poignant affliction, that if it does not extinguish life, it is only to make it a prolonged torment. Well, I returned to my ordinary rations, and to the bones which were flung to me by a negress belonging to the house; but even these were partly filched ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... strange, Through rich yet poignant harmonies: Subtle and strong browns, reds Magnificent with death and the pride of death, Thin, clamant greens And delicate yellows that exhaust The exquisite chromatics of decay: From ruining gardens, from reluctant woods— ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... to be sure, reasons and to spare why the name should make her sit up straight. Her curiosity had turned the key, and lo, with a click, here was an entirely changed, immensely complicated, intensely poignant situation. But our excitable old friend was an Englishwoman: dissimulation would be her second nature; you could trust her to pull the wool over your eyes with a fleet and practised hand. Instinctively, furthermore, she would ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... briary and—good? Just this last night you will be able to carry away with you a whiff of real sweetbriar. To-morrow the whole town will be in bloom. It is now I think if we could only see it." Rose Mary had gained her composure and the poignant wistfulness in her voice was but a part of the motif of the briar ...
— Rose of Old Harpeth • Maria Thompson Daviess
... they led the decorous lives of the French middle class, but when they were together it was a sight to see! A curious one, and to us, with our strong associations of ideas, that tremendous hand which memory has upon our heart-strings, a poignant one. For they had lost their powers, but not their impulses. It was a case of si vieillesse pouvait. I suppose they may have appeared to some chance wayfarer, getting a glimpse of them at their gambols between the ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... vivid, and for a few poignant weeks his wife's horrible end haunted him. But after a while he forced himself to take a long holiday in Greece, and from there he came back with his nerves in better order than ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... child knew what poignant anguish he inflicted upon his father by asking this innocent and perfectly natural question! Gaunt would have given worlds, had he possessed them, for the priceless privilege of saying farewell to his idolised wife; but he knew it could not ...
— The Missing Merchantman • Harry Collingwood
... fell. I stumped off for my prize, actually achieving a sort of run, the first for years,—pretty sure, however, that the creature was making game of me rather than I of it, and would rise and flirt its tail in my face when I should be near enough to make the mockery poignant. No, the poor thing's game was up. It was a large bird, of an orange-brown hue, mottled with faint white and shadings of black. A powerful relenting came over me, and I could have sat down and cried like a baby, had that been suitable for a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... piercing note of the military bugle, the crack of the cabmen's long whips, the clatter of wooden shoes, and the Angelus bells then chiming, made up a volume of sound which fell on Robert's ears with all the poignant strangeness of an old song heard again after many years. A hundred memories flocked into his mind at the first distant view of that familiar scene: memories of his boyhood, its errors, its visions, its ambitions; his revolt against nature ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Sunderland, who had hitherto promoted his councils behind the curtain. That politician was now sworn of the privy council, and gratified with the office of lord-chamberlain, which had been resigned by the earl of Dorset, a nobleman of elegant talents and invincible indolence, severe and poignant in his writings and remarks upon mankind in general, but humane, good-natured, and generous to excess, in his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... playing strange disturbing chords with the left hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar, and becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought gently and persistently against ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... & Buckley had wilfully deceived him, for Mr. Hatch's partner almost cried with vexation and disappointment when he found that the woman and child he pointed out were not the "parties" they were looking for. Indeed, Mr. Buckley's grief was so poignant that Von Barwig almost felt sorry for the man, who declared that his professional honour as a detective was ruined from that moment. It was, in this case, for Von Barwig made up his mind at once never ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... wrong. My broken health, my altered character, my weary secret sorrows, unpartaken and unconsoled, have punished me for many years past more heavily than you think. Do you desire to see me visited by more poignant sufferings than these? If it be so, you may enjoy the vindictive triumph of having already inflicted them. Your threats will force me, in a few hours, from the friends I have lived with, at the very time when the affection shown to me, and the honor conferred on me by those friends, have made ...
— Hide and Seek • Wilkie Collins
... narrative, which is concerned almost exclusively with the poignant strangeness of a woman's experiences, it is sufficient to say that Captain Christopher Herrick was what is generally known as a fine fellow—handsome, modest, well-to-do, altogether desirable as a lover and a husband. At thirty-five ...
— Possessed • Cleveland Moffett
... their hearts was gratified by the unexpected appearance of the Nelson on their shore. The fifteen years of exile they had so patiently endured was at once forgotten. Every bosom was filled with boundless joy; so true it is, that man only requires a ray of sunshine to change his most poignant griefs into smiles ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... we came down late and enjoyed everything with that keen poignant sense of pleasure that novelty alone can give. To us coming from a stay of months in town the small sitting-room, the open casement window, the simple breakfast-table, the loud noise of birds' voices without, the green glow of the garden ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... with all its brilliancy, the air was soft, and the two women, visibly affected, found encouragement, of a sort, in the things of nature. The mother stopped now and then, to rest her daughter, whose sufferings were poignant, so that it was well-nigh midnight before they reached the path that goes down from the woods to the sloping meadow where the silvery roof of the chalet shone. The moonlight gave to the surface of the quiet water, the tint of pearls. The little noises ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... had been any one rather than Walford. The fact was that he wanted to forget, if possible, the keen and bitter pain of his disappointment: and now the presence of his unhappy guest had brought it all back to him and would keep it in poignant remembrance as long as they two should remain together. Then, he bethought himself how selfish a feeling he had been allowing himself to indulge; how utterly he had forgotten that the matter was one with which Lucy's happiness must be inseparably connected; ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... uncertain by a guiding theory which too often eludes his own comprehension, he yet manages to produce works of art of unquestionable beauty and authority, and to interpret life in a manner that is poignant and illuminating. There is vastly more intuition in him than intellectualism; his talent is essentially feminine, as Conrad's is masculine; his ideas always seem to be deduced from his feelings. The view of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... odour hung heavy in the room. Three or four women (much better gowned than Eleanor) and a dozen men applauded from the drawing-room; a strange-looking youth with a shock of auburn hair drew from a violin sounds which it required no knowledge of technique to feel extraordinarily poignant and moving. All but the dancer were smoking, and Molly sat on the floor (in copper-coloured chiffon, too!) her hands clasped about her knees, a cigarette in an amber holder between her lips ...
— The Strange Cases of Dr. Stanchon • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... ready to risk his life for an idea, to brave the most direful perils, to endure the most poignant suffering that the world's store of knowledge may be increased, that science may be advanced, that just one more fact may be added to the things actually known. If the record of man in the tropics has been stained by theft, rapine, and murder, the story ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... was in a deep sleep. Her hands hung limp. Her face was very pale and very fatigued. She liberated the same sadness as the sound of the mandolin and the gleam of silver in the June sky, but it was far more poignant. At the spectacle of those weary and unconscious features and of the soft, bodily form, George's resentment was annihilated. He wondered at his resentment. He was aware of nothing in himself but warm, protective love. Tenderness ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... conversation was taking place Letty, in the back spare room, was conducting a ceremonial too poignant for tears. There were tears in her heart, ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... feuds were indeed forgotten; thanks to a noble-minded Premier that was natural enough. But had there been a national poet then big enough to translate into great verse the true spiritual state of Canada, he would have written with poignant sadness about Quebec; perhaps a few verses on the overwhelming British-born majority in the First Contingent. He would have explained that being a native son of Canada, whether you were English or French by extraction, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... frightful and unnatural weariness, water up to the belly, mud and dung and infamous filth. It is befouled faces and tattered flesh, it is the corpses that are no longer like corpses even, floating on the ravenous earth. It is that, that endless monotony of misery, broken, by poignant tragedies; it is that, and not the bayonet glittering like silver, nor the bugle's chanticleer call to ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... my dear child, whether I continue to be really fond of life; I confess to you that I find poignant sorrows in it, but I am even more disgusted with death; I feel so wretched at having to end all thereby, that, if I could turn back again, I would ask for nothing better, I find myself under an obligation which perplexes me; I embark ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... already indebted to you, sir," said the Professor, "for about twenty-four hours of the most poignant and humiliating mental and bodily anguish a human being can endure, inflicted for no valid reason that I can discover, except the wanton indulgence of your unholy powers, I can only say that any gratitude of which I am conscious is of ...
— The Brass Bottle • F. Anstey
... the palace, and the crowd of nobles, by whom its spacious halls and galleries had been filled, having retired, Marie was at length left at liberty to indulge her grief, rendered only the more poignant from the constraint to which she had been so long subjected. Her first impulse was to command that the bed of the young sovereign should be removed to her own chamber, and this done, she abandoned herself to all ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... poignant pain Will wear away 'neath hail and rain, And rush of winds through branches bare With something ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... and idiosyncrasies, often so painfully strange—it does not even see them. It is greatly to be regretted that no Dostoyevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting decadent—I mean some one who would have felt the poignant charm of such a compound of the sublime, the morbid and the childish. In the last analysis, the type, as a type of the decadence, may actually have been peculiarly complex and contradictory: such a possibility is not to be lost sight of. ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... of conjecture, and what proportion of them contain disenchantments will never be known. Honora lay awake for a long time that night, and the poignant and ever recurring remembrance of her husband's remark sent the blood to her face like a flame. Would Peter, or George Hanbury, or any of the intimate friends of her childhood ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... his life and his daily surroundings, all remained the same as formerly, it seemed absurd to imagine that it could be otherwise, or that he, Semenoff, would no longer exist as at the present. The thought of death, which at first had made so deep a wound, grew less poignant; the soul oppressed found freedom. Moments of complete forgetfulness became more and more frequent, and life once again lay before him, rich in colour, in movement, ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... thoughtfully over it. He had had with him two of the Lexington militia who, in the battle, had been near poor Todd, their colonel, while fighting like a lion to the last and bleeding from many wounds. The recollection of it all was very clear now, very poignant: the bright winding river, there broadening at its ford; the wild and lonely aspect of the country round about. On the farther bank the long lofty ridge of rock, trodden and licked bare of vegetation for ages by the countless passing buffalo; blackened by rain and sun; ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... story," continued the Nawab, "the sprite waving her arms beckoned the king to follow her, and led the way towards the river's mouth. It entered the lake only a short distance from where they were. The king experienced a poignant grief when for a moment he feared that, unable to follow her, he must forever lose sight of his beauteous visitant. But in another instant he was stepping into a tiny skiff which suddenly appeared where a moment before had floated ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... The death of this poor little girl has cast her mother into such a state, her grief is as poignant at the present day as it was fourteen years since; and, after having feared for her life, to-day we fear ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue
... himself waiting for that moment every evening, and his satisfaction when he caught it was rather that of a person who is pleased at verifying something he has had the acumen to discover than any more poignant emotion. He went far oftener to see this than he did to watch Blanche in her small part as one of the innocuous and well-bred company performing at the little old Strand Theatre, which was then still a phalanx of the ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... car itself, and for the hand at the wheel, this part of the trip was a most wearing one; but for the merry passengers, who had no responsibility concerning hidden holes and muddy curves, it was nothing but a delight growing more poignant with every new vista through the green arches, and with every echoing laugh ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... retribution? Is it in this country, situated at sixteen thousand miles from the seat of his injustice and oppression? To tell a poor man that he may obtain redress in the court of King's Bench, what is it but a cruel mockery, calculated to render the pang more poignant, which it would ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... with what I have quoted out of my diary here it is not inappropriate to add that I lost my babies in three out of my five confinements. These poignant and secret griefs have no place on the high-road of life; but, just as Henry and I will stand sometimes side by side near those little graves unseen by strangers, so he and I in unobserved moments will touch with one heart ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... lightened by the companionship of his wife, Elizabeth Throgmorton, most beautiful of all the late Queen's maids of honor. Another solace was the History of the World, the writing of which set his mind free to wander forth at will although his body stayed behind the bars. But the contrast was too poignant not to wring this cry of anguish from his preface: 'Yet when we once come in sight of the Port of death, to which all winds drive us, and when by letting fall that fatal Anchor, which can never be weighed again, the navigation of this ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood
... well-nigh unbearable sadness which comes into the face of dogs is because they cannot say Thank you to their masters. Whereas David takes my kindness as his right. But for this, while I should chide him I cannot do so, for of all the ways David has of making me to love him the most poignant is that he expects it of me as a matter of course. David is all for fun, but none may plumb the depths of Porthos. Nevertheless I am most nearly doing so when I lie down beside him on the floor and he puts an arm about my neck. On my soul, ma'am, a protecting arm. At such times ...
— The Little White Bird - or Adventures In Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... greater issues to fix it on the smaller ones. In its way Drusilla's interference was a welcome diversion, since the point she raised was important enough to distract Olivia's attention from decisions too poignant to dwell on long. ...
— The Street Called Straight • Basil King
... and never give a damn For anything but comradeship And books to read and ale to sip, And shandygaff at every inn When The Gorilla rode to Lynn! O world of wheel and pipe and oar In those old days before the War. O poignant echoes of that time! I hear the Oxford towers chime, The throbbing of those mellow bells And all the sweet old English smells— The Deben water, quick with salt, The Woodbridge brew-house and the malt; The Suffolk villages, serene With lads at cricket on the green, And ...
— Songs for a Little House • Christopher Morley
... in his tracks. Had that midnight rifler of safes and vaults been any other on earth than the man he was, the old retainer would have rushed upon him and struck to save the Weymouth property. But now the watcher's soul was tortured by the poignant dread of something worse than mere robbery. He was seized by an accusing terror that said the Weymouth name and the Weymouth honour were about to be lost. Marse Robert robbing the bank! What else could it mean? The hour of the night, the stealthy visit to ...
— Roads of Destiny • O. Henry
... character to keep her from dropping it all, and flying back to the peace and quiet of her old Edinburgh home. And yet she had struggled on under the burden for four years—four long years this spring; but even at this late day, she was overcome with a feeling of homesickness, as poignant as it had been in her ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... answered simply. But I have never heard such poignant regret as his wonderful voice crowded ...
— Legends of Vancouver • E. Pauline Johnson
... Kennen and Koennen, a separation which the Greeks could not conceive because for them knowledge ended in skill or was exemplified in precepts and proverbs that were so clear cut that the pain of violating them was poignant. Ideas must be long worked over till life speaks as with the rifle and not with the shotgun, and still less with the water hose. The purest thought, if true, is only action repressed to be ripened to more ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... my story now. There are phases more vivid in the commonplace lives of these men and women, I do not doubt: love, as poignant as pain in its joy; crime, weak and foul and foolish, like all crime; silent self-sacrifices: but I leave them for you to paint; you will find colours enough in your own house ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... and husbanded her patience with what stoicism she could command. There were times, twilight falling on the world of sea and rock beyond the kitchen window, with the last fire of the sun failing in the west like a bright hope—there were hours when her fear of the issue was so poignant that her decision trembled. The weather mellowed; the temptation gathered strength and renewed itself persistently—the temptation discreetly to accept the aid of artifice. After all, what matter? 'Twas surely a thing o' small consequence. An' who would ever hear the least whisper about ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... in his short life she felt no response in her child. Indeed, she recognized his withdrawal from her, more poignant in its effect upon her because it was unconscious on his part. In that one moment the instinct of motherhood leapt full within her, a sudden bewildering emotion, totally new to her in its aliveness, its vividness. ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... of the earth where white men journeyed, and at home he was beloved and honored. He died October Sixth, Eighteen Hundred Ninety-two, aged eighty-three, and for him the Nation mourned, and with deep sincerity the Queen spoke of his demise as a poignant, personal sorrow. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... the house, and the marble balustrade, with the jessamine twining round its columns. The picture was very beautiful—but something was wanting to perfect its beauty; and the name of the something that was wanting sang itself in poignant iteration to the beating of his pulses. And he longed and longed to tell her; and he dared not; and ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... cupped, and mustard plasters were applied, which seemed to afford some relief. Reviving a little and recovering consciousness, Mr. Adams inquired for his wife. She was present, but in extreme illness, and suffering the most poignant sorrow. After a few moments' interval he relapsed again into unconsciousness. A correspondent of the New York Express describes as follows the progress of these ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... war take place, I must declare that I should more deplore success on the part of this country than defeat; and though as an English citizen I could not but lament the disasters of my countrymen, still it would be to me a less poignant matter of regret than a success which would offer to the world the disastrous and disgraceful spectacle of a free and mighty nation succeeding by force of arms in putting down and tyrannising over ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... their fingers and drank out of the bottles, sans apology. Strange were their speculations, their wonderings, their plans—now discussed specifically, now half-voiced by a mere word that thrilled them both with sudden, poignant emotion. ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... he could not talk to her here, after all. The idle girls at the end of the counter were already whispering, and their smiles were poignant javelins of ridicule. The captain of the Seamew knew that he was far beyond ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... Ingleside, turned aside to the hidden spring in Rainbow Valley. She had not been there all summer; the beautiful little spot had no longer any allurement for her. The spirit of her young lover never came to the tryst now; and the memories connected with John Meredith were too painful and poignant. But she had happened to glance backward up the valley and had seen Norman Douglas vaulting as airily as a stripling over the old stone dyke of the Bailey garden and thought he was on his way up the hill. If he overtook her she would have to walk home with ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... stood the half-emptied decanter of brandy and a glass and a syphon of soda-water. . . . Goodness knows, I'm not a superstitious or even an imaginative man; I had been in that room before and had hated it, on account of its poignant associations; nothing transcendental had affected me; but now I shuddered, physically shuddered, as though the cubic space were informed with a spirit in the torture of an everlasting despair. Doria not knowing, he could have borne his punishment. ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... the desire to end his Indian captivity and return home. Uncertain as he was of the time that had passed since starting on his hunt, he knew that it was long enough to awaken the most poignant anguish on the part of his loved mother, who must suffer far more, before, under the most ...
— Camp-fire and Wigwam • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... to run on love's errands—till dawn brought the sight of faded flowers, the suddenly bleak apartment, the unpressed couch! Then the brave, swift flight of the spirit's wings to other altitudes, above pain and shame! And like love and sorrow, refined to a poignant essence, still the music brooded ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... combined. To-night, either because he was very tired or for some other reason, the mystery of the sadness of this music, which floats through all its triumph, appealed to him more than usual, and in a strangely poignant way. The monotonous pulsation was like the pulse of life, that life in which he and the man beside him were for a time involved, from which presently they would be released, whether with or against their wills. The pulse of life! Suddenly from the general his mind passed to the ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... to listen, when my guide Admonish'd: "Now beware: a little more. And I do quarrel with thee." I perceiv'd How angrily he spake, and towards him turn'd With shame so poignant, as remember'd yet Confounds me. As a man that dreams of harm Befall'n him, dreaming wishes it a dream, And that which is, desires as if it were not, Such then was I, who wanting power to speak Wish'd to excuse myself, and all the while Excus'd me, ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... thoughts leaped the desolate, frozen miles to where a lonely girl watched hour by hour beside the wretched bed of her father, only relieved now and then by a perfunctory and uninterested doctor. He had not allowed himself to think of her often; it was a dangerous and poignant subject for him. He had kept his mind upon the plans that he had set in operation. If those failed, he might entertain the sickening thought of never seeing her again. He had no right to marry her and ...
— The Wilderness Trail • Frank Williams
... angels which visited his couch; for Gaspar Ruiz was instructed in the mysteries of his religion, and had even been taught to read and write a little by the priest of his village. He waited for her with impatience, and saw her pass out of the dark hut and disappear in the brilliant sunshine with poignant regret. He discovered that, while he lay there feeling so very weak, he could, by closing his eyes, evoke her face with considerable distinctness. And this discovered faculty charmed the long, solitary ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... so at one with me.... A hush descended on the music, and I found myself playing strange disturbing chords with the left hand, irregularly repeated, opposing the normal accent of the bar, and becoming stranger and more disturbing. And Diaz was playing an air fragmentary and poignant. The lovers were waiting; the very atmosphere of the garden was drenched with an agonizing and exquisite anticipation. The whole world stood still, expectant, while the strange chords fought gently and ...
— Sacred And Profane Love • E. Arnold Bennett
... fever of enthusiasm lent glamour to the scenes which were daily enacted on the Place de la Revolution, turning the final acts of the tragedies into glaring, lurid melodrama, almost unreal in its poignant appeal ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... heard the poignant undertone, The interminable sobbing of the sea; And now that morn breaks dim and dolorously I mark the riotous surges landward blown, Tempestuous and towering, and hurled prone Upon the stark sand reaches; and the glee Of the ...
— From The Lips of the Sea • Clinton Scollard
... powerful sympathy that unites us, that I fear, that virtue, that strong sense of honor and fame, so powerful in minds most turned to tenderness, would only have served to make more poignant the pangs of hopeless, ...
— The History of Emily Montague • Frances Brooke
... dwellers in London, of vivid impressions, of poignant memories, reasserting themselves afterwards with a curious sense of unreality, as though belonging to another set of days and another world. Dominey long remembered his dinner that evening in the sombre, handsomely furnished ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... another chorus—from three miles down the river: the convicts singing hymns in their cells at midnight. And I ground gently and sit in the silvered shadows with little bewildered shrimps flicking against me, and unlanguaged thoughts come and go—impossible similes, too poignant phrases to be stopped and fettered with words, and I am neither scientist nor man nor naked organism, but just mind. With the coming of silence I look around and again consciously take in the scene. I am very ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... superiors. I am, in fact, the lineal descendant of Sir Mungo Malagrowther, who makes a figure in the Fortunes of Nigel, and have retained a reasonable proportion of his ill-luck, and, in consequence, of his ill-temper. If, therefore, I should chance to appear too warm and poignant in my observations, you must impute it to the hasty and peevish humour which I derive from my ancestor. But, at the same time, it often happens that this disposition leads me to speak useful, though ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... doubtless not a common look, for the sight of a mass of money at that moment, when money was everything to me, roused every lurking demon in my breast) seemed to appall, if it did not frighten her, for she rose, and meeting my eye with a gaze in which shock and some strange and poignant agony totally incomprehensible to me were ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... man was dismayed by her unexpected grief, and endeavoured to soothe her; but she seemed touched by a poignant remorse which would ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... simple naivete of the beginning of it. Staring at a fallen horse in the street. It's just where they would be, both of them. They'd stand there for hours and just stare and stare. And then she steps back on his foot and there's 'his dear face' smiling at her; ah, it's pathetic, it's poignant! I can see it absolutely. Yes, I can. As if I were in the crowd around the horse, watching them. There they are, the horse between us, and all the doltish, staring faces round about; and their two dull ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... assuming gaiety when her heart was a prey to the most poignant feelings, she had completely acquired by long practice. With the promptitude of an actress, she could instantly appear upon the stage, and support a character totally foreign to her own. The loud knocks at the door, ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. III - Belinda • Maria Edgeworth
... of a president of the republic, even as his mediaeval prototype bore a bishop's mitre or a cardinal's hat. The boisterous exuberance of youthful spirits still vents itself in rowdy student life to the scandal of bourgeois placidity, and the poignant self-revelation and gnawing self-reproach of a Francois Villon find their analogue in the pathetic verse of a Paul Verlaine. Beneath the fair and ordered surface of the normal life of Paris still sleep the fiery passions which, ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... of liberal Hearts! Is this the land, where Genius ne'er in vain Pour'd forth her soul-enchanting strain? 15 Ah me! yet Butler 'gainst the bigot foe Well-skill'd to aim keen Humour's dart, Yet Butler felt Want's poignant sting; And Otway, Master of the Tragic art, Whom Pity's self had taught to sing, 20 Sank beneath a load of Woe; This ever can the generous Briton hear, And starts not in his ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... attack at the mouth of the cave. Knife in hand, he waited for a horned, glittering-eyed face to stoop or an arrow or hatchet to glance under that low rim, the horizon of his darkness. His chagrin at having taken to a trap and drawn danger on a woman was poignant; the candle had caught him like a moth, and a Sioux would keenly follow. Still, no lightest step betrayed the Sioux's knowledge of his whereabouts. A long time passed before he relaxed to an easy posture and turned to the interior of ...
— Marianson - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... such a career. The blending in most unnatural union of the elements of degradation and moral misery with such exquisite perceptions of beauty, grace, and refinement, produces the impression of a sort of monstrosity, a deformity of the whole higher nature, which fills one with poignant compassion and regret. Poor, fair, admired, despised, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... before his eyes, but he did not open them. He reached blindly for his pipes, and played "The Song of Angus to the Stars," tears of joy running from between his closed eyelids, to recognize in his own music the quality he had been starving for; the sense of the futile, poignant beauty, of the lovely and harmless tragedy, of the sweet, moving, gay sad ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... blow fell. His father was suddenly struck down; and while he was indulging a grief, poignant and profound indeed, but natural, wholesome, manly, his uncle usurped the crown. This second blow would be acutely felt, but it would rather rouse than prostrate his energies. There is no passion in Hamlet when there has been no love. And he had always held his uncle in slight esteem—foreboded ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... skeletons really were down there, she wished they would go in and throttle her father. He was the author of all her misery; and was any woman on earth so miserable as she? Why should he live, exist down there like a beast in his cave, when his death would give her liberty?—a poignant happiness in itself. She wondered did she kill him should she be hanged? They rarely hanged anybody in California, never when there was gold to rattle contemptuously in the face of the law; why should she not deliver her mother and herself? They would both be in an asylum for the ...
— The Californians • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... dream of school, of trying to keep order in immense classrooms, or hurrying about in search of my form. When I had my long and dreary illness, lasting for two years, I invariably had happy dreams. Now that I am well again, I often have dreams of causeless and poignant melancholy. It is the rarest thing in the world for me to be able to connect my dreams with anything which has recently happened; I cannot say that marvellous landscapes, ceremonies, conversations with exalted personages, sensational incidents, play any considerable ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... may seem at first sight rather dull. It suggests little of that poignant and unearthly beauty, that heroism, that immense attraction, which really belong to the spiritual life. Here indeed we are dealing with poetry in action: and we need not words but music to describe it as it really is. Yet all the forms, all the various beauties and achievements ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill
... this thou touchest my most poignant pain, My ill-starred father's piteous disgrace, The taint of blood, the hereditary stain, That clings to all of Labdacus' famed race. Woe worth the monstrous marriage-bed where lay A mother with the son her womb had ...
— The Oedipus Trilogy • Sophocles
... spoke a sudden pang of utter weariness and longing seized him. A rush of the boyish malady of homesickness, concentrated from all the dreary months of his long absence, and none the less poignant because it was involuntary. The wide, cool, shadowy halls of his mother's house, always aglow with blossoms and haunted with their odors, all the superficial lotus-charm of Southern life—and he had lived it superficially enough to ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... beyond her own understanding, as she sat weeping slowly, silently. The aspect of those forlorn graves, that recorded the final ebbing of hope and life at the pest camp, had struck her recollection with a most poignant appeal. Strangers, wretches, dying alone, desolate outcasts, the terror of their kind, the epitome of repulsion—they were naught to her! Yet they represented humanity in its helplessness, its suffering, its isolated woe, and its great and final mystery; she felt vaguely grieved for their ...
— The Raid Of The Guerilla - 1911 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... see, with such emphatic regularity, one's coevals changing in figure, and diminishing in number, summer after summer!.... Perhaps it is nobler, this deliberate viewing of oneself as part of the stream. To the spectator, certainly, the flow and transiency become apparent and poignant. In five minutes fifty years of America, of so much of America, go past one. The shape of the bodies, apart from the effects of age, the lines of the faces, the ways of wearing hair and beard and moustaches, all these change ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... all evil predictions while I awaited the return of the Honourable George. I was only too certain he would come suffering from an acute acid dyspepsia, for I had seen lobster in his shifty eyes as he left me; but beyond this I apprehended nothing poignant, and I gave myself up to meditating profoundly upon ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... Hunefer. So in the Pyramid Texts the dead are spoken of as Those Who Ascend, the Imperishable Ones who shine as stars, and the gods are invoked to witness the death of the King "Dawning as a Soul." There is deep prophecy, albeit touched with poignant pathos, in these broken exclamations ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... just mentioned as surpassing the rest, has been careful in his Oration for Ctesiphon, (which is the best he ever composed) to set out very cooly and modestly: when he proceeds to argue the point of law, he grows more poignant and pressing; and as he advances in his defence, he takes still greater liberties; till, at last, having warmed the passions of his Judges, he exults at his pleasure through the reamining part of his discourse. But even in him, thus ...
— Cicero's Brutus or History of Famous Orators; also His Orator, or Accomplished Speaker. • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... and vigorous a thing, that so many metrical experiments come from there. Only a vigorous tree has the vitality to put forth new branches. The poet with originality and power is always seeking to give his readers the same poignant feeling which he has himself. To do this he must constantly find new and striking images, delightful and unexpected forms. Take the word "daybreak", for instance. What a remarkable picture it must once have conjured up! The great, round sun, like the yolk of some mighty egg, BREAKING ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... progressive movement also, and notes behind his Paris hat to his companion that the girl looks something like the marble. She does. Though the grief of the face of the daughter of Minos as she lies deserted by her lover on the rocky shore of Naxos be a poignant and a present woe, there is the shadow of its mate on the brow and lips of the girl who gazes at its pure and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... serve to awaken responsibility among the wealthy and powerful toward the poor and the weak? When all goes well, when there are no thunderous warnings such as this of the helplessness of man against the forces arrayed against him, the fortunate do not realize that for millions mere existence is a poignant struggle; that hunger and cold and disease prevail even when there are no ghastly floods to make them vivid and picturesque. We do not doubt that there are many who will be stirred by the shock of this dreadful story to a deeper ...
— The True Story of Our National Calamity of Flood, Fire and Tornado • Logan Marshall
... without any visible repugnance upon the diet, which would have excited abhorrence in the minds of all my countrymen. With them it was a work of the greatest importance to settle the formalities of a meal; to contrive a new and poignant sauce, to combine contrary flavours in a pickle, to stimulate the jaded appetite to new exertions, till reason and everything human sank under the undigested mass of food, were reckoned the highest efforts of genius; even the magistrate did not blush to display ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... fashion the sensations that are naturally excited by external stimuli localizing themselves in the end organs of sense. As these sensations, while not the all of emotion, are largely involved in emotion as its more poignant element, and as emotion is a first requisite in the appeal of a story, it is evident that the writer of stories will do well to acquire the art of reviving sensations. Further, as in the quickening of sensations our ideas become more ...
— The Writing of the Short Story • Lewis Worthington Smith
... mind to ask her father to allow her, knowing well that he would consent to that or to any other wholesome wish of hers. But then came the thought that he would be all alone at home; and following that came another thought, and one of more poignant feeling. He was alone now! Already, for many days, she had left him, for the first time in her life! Stephen was quick to act; well she knew that at home there would be no fault found with her for a speedy return. Within a few hours she had brought her visit to an end, and was ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... I've heard the minister say.' And so we went on for some time, till she became drowsy over her knitting, on the sultry summer afternoon; and I stole away for a walk, for I wanted some solitude in which to think over things, and, alas! to blame myself with poignant stabs ...
— Cousin Phillis • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... Did you think I'd dare go out in the dark alone, without you?" and her joyous ingenuous casting of herself upon his protection was positively poignant. "Hurry, please, because I—don't want anybody to find me before you come!" After which request it took him very little time to run across the lot and vault the fence into the road ...
— Andrew the Glad • Maria Thompson Daviess
... considered, added to our perplexity and it was a dawning consciousness that we would be perhaps less cruel if we killed the lions outright. Jones and Emett arrayed themselves on the side that life even in captivity was preferable; while Jim and I, no doubt still under the poignant influence of the last lion's heroic race and end, inclined to freedom or death. We compromised on the reasonable fact that as yet we had shown only a ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... all marked her as an artist in story-telling. She was equally at home in interpreting the subtle blending of wit and wisdom in Daudet, the folk lore philosophy of Grimm, or the deeper world philosophy and poignant human ...
— The Art of the Story-Teller • Marie L. Shedlock
... impressed me as the saddest I ever was in. Everything in it was in perfect keeping with the sentiment of complete melancholy, though it was rather too luxurious to express deep grief. Sorrow which is poignant, is not expressed in so sensuous a manner. But the chapel is unique; there is nothing else like it in the world, and ...
— Paris: With Pen and Pencil - Its People and Literature, Its Life and Business • David W. Bartlett
... a shadow. The creator of Ottima and Colombe, of Balaustion and Pompilia had much to tell of womanhood. Michal occupies, as is right, but a small space in the history of Paracelsus, yet her presence in the poem and her silent withdrawal have a poignant influence. We see her as maiden and hear of her as mother, her face still wearing that quiet ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the whole race without danger of revelation. She remembered that amid all the clamorous grief of others, while Lugena had mourned and wept over the burning of the church and the scenes of blood and horror, she had exhibited little of that poignant and overwhelming grief or unappeasable anger which she would have expected, under the circumstances, from one of her temperament. She concluded, therefore, that the woman might have some knowledge ...
— Bricks Without Straw • Albion W. Tourgee
... But you can give me the details of it later on. You must have a long, long story of your own to tell which ought to be of poignant interest. But ... will you marry me? I suppose you know dear Linda died—was killed by a bomb in a German air-raid last year—October, 1917. I really felt heart-broken about it, but I know now I am only doing what she would have wished. She came at last to talk about ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... have, all my life, at times meditated on my good fortune in being a Roman and a Roman of equestrian rank. While waiting in the great Audience Hall of the Palace, especially, the emotions aroused by these meditations often became so poignant as almost to overcome me, on this day in particular. As I viewed the splendor of the Hall and the gorgeousness of the crowd that thronged it, my heart swelled at the thought of being part of all that magnificence. It thrilled ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... base-born Hessian slave walks threatening by, Some servile Scot with murder in his eye, Still haunts my sight, as vainly they bemoan Rebellions managed so unlike their own. O may I never feel the poignant pain To live subjected to such fiends again! Stewards and mates that hostile Britain bore, Cut from the gallows on their native shore; Their ghastly looks and vengeance beaming eyes Still to my view in dismal visions rise,— ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... of the couple were practically the same. During the daytime, when they were not face to face, they enjoyed delightful hours of repose; at night, as soon as they came together, both experienced poignant discomfort. ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... knew that he could never forget, and that the old memories of the wilderness and of the woman he had loved would force themselves upon him, year after year, with their old pain. But these new thoughts and plans for the child made his grief less poignant. ...
— Isobel • James Oliver Curwood
... the Marquise volunteered to watch while her husband slept, and, in administering some medicine to her child, mistook the vial and poisoned her. Martha died and it was impossible to conceal the cause of her death from the grief-stricken mother. Her despair was even more poignant than that of her husband for with hers was mingled a frightful remorse which all the tenderness of the Marquis could not assuage. This despair caused an attack of fever from which she recovered, but which left her in a still more pitiable condition. ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... the district attorney. "A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil" is an hysterical book, just because the real philosophical basis of Miss Addams' thinking was not deliberate enough to withstand the shock of a poignant horror. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... liked to think that my descendants would sit in the old house, and that men of my race and name would long own the estates. But doubtless it is all for the best; for at least I can view the permanent loss of my estates, in case the Yorkists triumph, without any poignant regret." ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... followed "The Three Sisters," and the poignant truth of the picture, together with the tender beauty of the last scene, touched his audience profoundly, both on the stage and when the play ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov
... open heart, and to carry about with me whithersoever I go, like some melody from hidden singers sounding in my ears, the Name and the Love of my Father God—that and that only, brother, is true rest and abiding blessedness. There are many other joys far more turbulent, more poignant, but they all pass. Many of them leave a nauseous taste in the mouth when they are swallowed; all of them leave us the poorer for having had them and having them no more. For one who is not a Christian I do not know that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... cutting me off from the actual world, by linking me with a world of phantoms. Those moments of exaltation which the contemplation of the Biblical past afforded us, allowing us to call ourselves the children of princes, served but to tinge with a more poignant sense of disinheritance the long humdrum stretches of our life. In very truth we were a people without a country. Surrounded by mocking foes and detractors, it was difficult for me to realize the persons of ...
— The Promised Land • Mary Antin
... experience of how evil comes out of good. What would happen to that love, Rose did not know. For a time it burned more brightly, fanned by Christabel's heroism and Francis's remorse, but heroism can become monotonous to the spectator and poignant remorse cannot be endured for ever. Christabel's plight was pitiful, but Rose was sorrier for Francis. He had, as it were, engaged her compassion years ago, he had a prior claim, and as time went on, her pity for Christabel changed ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... every word he said, his dramatic temperament gave force and a kind of rhythm to his confession that made it very poignant, and his face very white, his big eyes glowed tragically as he stood looking ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... no more, for Heaven's sake!" cried the sculptor. "There are a thousand better and more poignant methods of being miserable than that, if to be miserable is what you wish. Nay; I question whether a monk keeps himself up to the intellectual and spiritual height which misery implies. A monk I judge from their sensual ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... beloved; and, stifling the swelling emotions of sensible grief, this incomparable son followed her remains to the church, and offered up for her soul the sacrifice of propitiation. Who shall adequately conceive his feelings during the celebration of that mass? Was his grief less filial, less poignant, because it was reasonable and Christian? and because, instead of breaking into wild laments and barren demonstrations, it remained pent up in the recesses of his strong heart, and left free play and exercise to calm judgment and the salutary measures ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... we must wait for our character until our geographical advantages and the absence of social distinctions manufacture it for us, we are likely to remain a long while in suspense. When our foreign visitors begin to evince a more poignant interest in Concord and Fifth Avenue than in the Mississippi and the Yellowstone, it may be an indication to us that we are assuming our proper position relative to our physical environment. "The land," says Emerson, "is a sanative and Americanizing influence ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... terrible night and suffered a painful awakening on the morning after the Holkers' garden-party. Colonel Kelmscott, too, had his bad half-hour or so before he finally fell asleep; and he woke up next day to a sense of shame and remorse far more definite, and, therefore, more poignant and ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... himself. It is enough to say that, while fools have frequently ridiculed them, all who have ever realized that there is such a thing as the warfare of the spirit with its own weakness, will find a poignant interest in the tragedy of Johnson's inner life, always returning again and again to the battle in which he seemed to himself to ...
— Dr. Johnson and His Circle • John Bailey
... whirlwind of his own poignant emotion; he was telling himself, with voiceless and yet most binding oaths, that never, never should the woman whose heart had just beaten against his heart, whose lips had just trembled beneath his lips, go back to act the part of even the nominal wife to Tom Pargeter. He would consent to any ...
— The Uttermost Farthing • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... have! We should give our leisure to service and the arts. Just as peasants all work together to repair the roads, so the whole community would work together to seek truth and the meaning of life, and, I am sure of it—truth would be found very soon, man would get rid of his continual, poignant, depressing fear of death and even ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... his being able to take Azinte back to her old mistress, now that she had found her husband and child, even if it had been admissible for a lieutenant in the British navy to return freed negroes again into slavery, and wound up with bitter lamentations as to his unhappy fate, and expressions of poignant regret that fighting and other desperate means, congenial and easy to his disposition, were not available in the circumstances. After which explosion he subsided, felt ashamed of having thus committed himself, and ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... crowning joy of his contemplative mind. He had reserved them for his final discharge. Dear demonstrative creatures! Dyspepsia would not weaken their poignant outcries, or self-interest check their fainting fits. On the generic woman one could calculate. Well might The Pilgrim's Scrip say of her that, "She is always at Nature's breast"; not intending it as a compliment. Each woman is Eve throughout the ages; whereas ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... prepare them for the reception of our lost one, and tho' we had nothing but wretchedness now to impart, I was willing to procure her a welcome to what we had. This task would have been more difficult but for our recent calamity, which had humbled my wife's pride, and blunted it by more poignant afflictions. Being unable to go for my poor child myself, as my arm grew very painful, I sent my son and daughter, who soon returned, supporting the wretched delinquent, who had not the courage to look up at her mother, whom no instructions ...
— The Vicar of Wakefield • Oliver Goldsmith
... Montraville, "what poignant reflections does a man endure who sees a lovely woman plunged in infamy, and is conscious he was her first seducer; but are you certain of ...
— Charlotte Temple • Susanna Rowson
... lieges in 1719. The ballad-poet had thus in 1719 no temptation to be 'archaistic,' like Mr. Rossetti, and to sing of old times. He had, on the contrary, every inducement to indite a 'rare new ballad' on the last tragic scandal, with its poignant details, as of Peter kissing the dead ...
— The Valet's Tragedy and Other Stories • Andrew Lang
... bruised body less. It was as if the Lady and the storm together were making easier for the slowly dying man his last trail across the desert. He still struggled to keep alive, by sheer will-power, flickering sparks of consciousness, and to do so concentrated every thought on Nan. It was a poignant happiness to summon her picture to his fainting senses; he knew he should hold to life as long as he could think of her. Love, stronger than death, welled in his heart. The bitter cold and the merciless wind were ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... sympathize with the fullest understanding with those similarly situated, could help as one who knew from practice and not from theory. He realized what a marvellous blessing poverty can be; but as a condition to experience, to derive from it poignant lessons, and then to get out of; not as ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok
... without poignant shame, Luella Miner's recent account[46] of the experiences of Fay Chi Ho and Kung Hsiang Hsi, two Chinese students who, after showing magnificent devotion to American missionaries during the horrors of the Boxer massacres, ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... from another room issued a lady with a face of rare and delicate loveliness. Her soft, clinging black gown, with a touch of white at her throat, served to emphasise the sweet purity of her face, but cast over it a shade of sadness at once poignant and tender. ...
— The Sky Pilot in No Man's Land • Ralph Connor
... luxury of self-pity. But the sudden death of his gallant roadster, his proud pacer through the streets of Barbie, touched him with a sense of quite personal loss and bereavement. Coming on the heels of his other calamities it seemed to make them more poignant, more sinister, prompting the question if misfortune would ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... no fault in her. She was altogether lovely to him, and his delight was the more poignant as he recognised in her one of the girls he had seen on the stage a couple of weeks ago. That being true, nothing could keep her from being glorious in his eyes,—not even the grease-paint which adhered in unneat patches to her face, nor her taste ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... the boy's cap? Yes; that's the same woman. I wonder whether you could guess who she was. A singular being, is she not? The most marvellous creature, quite, that I have ever met: a wonderful elegance, exotic, far-fetched, poignant; an artificial perverse sort of grace and research in every outline and movement and arrangement of head and neck, and hands and fingers. Here are a lot of pencil sketches I made while I was preparing to paint ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... that clears up our misconceptions; it shows us the error of our hates; it dispels our worries and our fears; it allays the grief that seemed too poignant to ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... Leila Burton's music—her husband, and Dick Allport, and I—with the throb of London beating under us like the surge of an ocean in anger, when there rose above the smooth harmonies of the piano and the pulsing roar of the night a sound more poignant than them both, the quavering melody of a street ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... courage, without means, without knowledge, without skill, without anything real except his bodily appetites. Even in my childhood I found in this poor devil's unsuccessful encounters with the facts of life, a poignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The book, in spite of its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the other day ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... soul on the lips of infancy. That confused chirruping of a thought, that is as yet no more than an instinct, has in it one knows not what sort of artless appeal to the eternal justice; or is it a protest uttered on the threshold before entering in, a protest meek and poignant? This ignorance smiling at the Infinite compromises all creation in the lot that shall fall to the weak defenceless being. Ill, if it shall come, will ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... annoyed none by his humming; but he stopped short in an improvised variation on the theme of Vulcan's song in "Philemon and Baucis" when he heard a subdued but none the less poignant cry of distress from Joan. In order to turn his head he was compelled to twist his ungainly body, and Joan, who was standing well away from her canvas, was aware of the ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... her eyes, though there were no tears in them, and stood upright, holding herself tensely as if she were battling for calm; then she replaced the poignant note in its envelope, and went back to the stables. Again she met no one, for those who were down ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice
... from the very source of life, its glossy surfaces already beginning to wither and dull in the sure approach of corruption and decay. But what beauties were there to pluck, lovely fading beauties, poignant and exquisite sensations, which she was capable of savoring, which she sadly knew she would live and die without having known, a heritage into which she would never enter; because she had known the unforgettable taste of the other heritage, ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... old things are all coming back," she says in a tone of poignant regret, whether at this fact or at the realization of the loss of them he ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... happen. Some arrows of scorn that had buried themselves in his heart had generated strange and unspeakable hatred. It was clear to him that his final and absolute revenge was to be achieved by his dead body lying, torn and gluttering, upon the field. This was to be a poignant retaliation upon the officer who had said "mule drivers," and later "mud diggers," for in all the wild graspings of his mind for a unit responsible for his sufferings and commotions he always seized upon the man who had dubbed him wrongly. And it was his idea, vaguely formulated, ...
— The Red Badge of Courage - An Episode of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane
... table beside the bed. Upon it were some flowers in a glass, a prayer book, a rosary, a goblet of water, a fan. Mechanically he counted the things—over and over. He was dry-eyed. He felt not the least desire to weep. The grief he was enduring was too poignant for tears. It was as if he had been slashed from forehead to ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... she cried, "Where is my father?" No father appeared. At last it was said that Sava had been sent to a long distance with a large sum of money, and had been killed by robbers. In the ninth year of one's life the most poignant grief is quickly effaced, and after six months Anielka ceased to grieve. The old people were very kind to her, and loved her as if sue were their own child. That Anielka might be chosen to serve in the palace never entered their head, for who would be so barbarous as to take the child away from ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. I, No. 6 - Of Literature, Art, And Science, New York, August 5, 1850 • Various
... statement about his father on the first page was not a slip. He told what he wanted to tell but he discouraged too much effort to go into detail on those matters. One senses a tragedy in his life and in the life of his mother that is poignant and appealing. Although he states no connection, one will not miss the impression that his stepfather was hostile. Suddenly we find his mother sending him to his father. But after he reached his ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States from Interviews with Former Slaves, Arkansas Narratives, Part 4 • Works Projects Administration
... rations as were served out to the Rebel soldiers and sailors. It was some little time before the fearful mistake came to the knowledge of Winder. I fancy that the news almost threw him into an apoplectic fit. Nothing, save his being ordered to the front, could have caused him such poignant sorrow as the information that so much good food had been worse than wasted in undoing his work by building up the bodies of ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... have poignant and dramatic interest. In the simple, massive, bed-room with its huge bay window opening on Table Mountain and a stretch of lovely countryside, hangs the small map of Africa that Rhodes marked with crimson ink and about which he made the famous utterance, "It must be all red." Hanging on the wall ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... an intimacy to the end of his life, visiting Balliol once or twice every year; and, heaviest blow, of John Tyndall, the friend and comrade whose genial warmth of spirit made him almost claim a brother's place in early struggles and later success, and whose sudden death was all the more poignant for the cruel touch of tragedy in the manner ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... now about fifteen years old, and is kept by himself in a quiet room. Even my conversation with the father and mother did not quite clear up the character of this mysterious being. Lady Hypatia, who has a pale and poignant face, and is clad in those impalpable and pathetic greys and greens with which she has brightened so many homes in Hoxton, did not appear to talk of her offspring with any of the vulgar vanity of an ordinary human mother. I took a bold step and asked if the Superman ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... overpowering in the sight of her, in the fire of her eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise of her head. She wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos, that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it she stepped with the buoyancy—the long ...
— The Inheritors • Joseph Conrad
... carbuncle. My footboy shall eat pheasants, calvered salmons, Knots, goodwits, lampreys. I myself will have The beards of barbels served; instead of salads, Oiled mushrooms, and the swelling unctuous paps Of a fat pregnant sow, newly cut off, Dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, For which I'll say unto my cook, 'There's gold: Go forth, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fore-crosstrees sweeping the town with his glass. A gust of wind carried down to him the sound of children crying, and with it an indistinguishable humming, at once menacing and dejected, like the sigh of an impending gale. It echoed in his ears long afterwards, the most poignant note in war, the voice ...
— Wild Justice: Stories of the South Seas • Lloyd Osbourne
... those nights would be a hollow mockery, the glance of any possible rival in her direction a desecration. Why, he even had to restrain himself to keep from doing actual damage to Philippi, who, though on the shady side of forty-five, still sang a most dashing Escamillo; nor was his jealousy less poignant because Philippi and ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... seemed asleep. The conies crying from their runways suddenly took on poignant pathos. They appeared to be grieving with her; but the ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice. It was very loud, it rang startling in his own ears, it was the only sound audible in the world, for the terribly distinct questions that extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain within his breast,—came to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of one's conscience. Outside the court the sun blazed—within was the wind of great punkahs that made you shiver, the shame that made you burn, the attentive eyes whose glance stabbed. The face of the presiding magistrate, clean shaved and impassible, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... facts—made more poignant by the airy declaration of the Democratic Presidential candidate, that the great National question of the Tariff is a mere "local issue,"—was largely instrumental, in connection with the insolent aggressiveness of the Southern leaders, in Congress, in occasioning ...
— The Great Conspiracy, Complete • John Alexander Logan
... was one of the most poignant memories of my life. The look she gave him and the look he gave ...
— Room Number 3 - and Other Detective Stories • Anna Katharine Green
... of the woman who had died there, or whether it took its character from the prevailing desolation, the cabin in the valley was an unlovely thing. Nor did the cleanliness, the conscientious making the best of things, soften the woful aspect of the place. Rather was the appeal the more poignant to the seeing eye, as the brave makeshift of the self-respecting poor strikes deeper than the beggar's whine. The house was bare but for the few things that Alida could take in the wagon in which they made their ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... been wise as Gleason he would have cultivated Mrs. Whaling's society instead of dropping her, as he did in this critical state of affairs. When the good lady called to see the ladies of the cavalry the next morning, she referred with poignant sorrow to the fact that those two misguided young men were drowning their sorrows in the flowing bowl. Mrs. Stannard ventured a disclaimer, but Mrs. Whaling had her information straight from the quartermaster, and was ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... the lost dryad was but a shadowy figure in the background, necessary to the picture, perhaps, yet not of poignant, personal interest. It was only of Petro ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... with a groan that betokened not only a poignant sorrow, but also something of relief—for the tortures of not being able to unburden himself had plainly become intolerable. He glanced up and met the compassionate eyes of the rector, who ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... hero through a woman's love ... we take to be a mere commonplace of romanticism, which Ibsen, though he satirised it, had by no means fully outgrown when he wrote Peer Gynt. Peer's return to Solveig is (in the original) a passage of the most poignant lyric beauty, but it is surely a shirking, not a solution, of the ethical problem. It would be impossible to the Ibsen of to-day, who knows (none better) that No man can save his brother's soul, or ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
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