"Melancholic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... discouraged, disheartened; desponding; chapfallen[obs3], chopfallen[obs3], jaw fallen, crest fallen. sad, pensive, penseroso[It], tristful[obs3]; dolesome[obs3], doleful; woebegone; lacrymose, lachrymose, in tears, melancholic, hypped[obs3], hypochondriacal, bilious, jaundiced, atrabilious[obs3], saturnine, splenetic; lackadaisical. serious, sedate, staid, stayed; grave as a judge, grave as an undertaker, grave as a mustard pot; sober, sober as a judge, solemn, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... see either Monsieur or Madame Perny, I beg you will give them this melancholic proof of my caducity, and tell them that the last time I went to see the boys, I carried the Michaelmas quarterage in my pocket; and when I was there I totally forgot it; but assure them, that I have not the least intention to bilk them, and will pay them faithfully ...
— The PG Edition of Chesterfield's Letters to His Son • The Earl of Chesterfield
... came the gladful morn, that sendeth sick Dreams flying, and all shapes melancholic That vex the slumbers of the love-distraught. Unto his heart the merry morning brought Cheer, and forewhisperings of some far-off rest, When he should end in sweet that bitter quest. But going forth that morn, and with his feet Threading the murmurous maze of street and street, ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... different. Sir George Goring was caustic and severe; Sir John Finett pleasant and social, delighting in nothing so much as in the happiness and gratification of his friends. But the natural disposition of his thoughts was wild and melancholic, taking its hue from some early impression, that was now ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby
... let the blood of sanguine persons; in its second it is warm and dry, at which time it is good to bleed the choleric; in its third quadrant it is cold and moist, and phlegmatic people may be bled; and in its fourth it is cold and dry, at which time it is well to bleed the melancholic." Whatever the moon's phase may be, let blood be shed! We are reminded here of that sanguifluous theology, which even Christians of a certain temperament seem to enjoy, while they sing of fountains filled with blood: as though a God of love could take delight in the effusion of precious ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... centuries been at once the delight and the puzzle of artistic minds: the "Melancholia," "The Knight and the Devil," and "St. Jerome in his Cell." The most reasonable explanation of these weird fancies is that they were intended to represent in allegorical style the three temperaments—the melancholic, the sanguine, and the phlegmatic. The Diet of Augsburg, which was convened in 1518, gave Duerer a passing opportunity to depict the lineaments of the Emperor Maximilian, who gave him several sittings, and who manifested great interest in the painter. ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 8 (of 8) • Various
... reasonably suppose, that those whose speech naturally runs into the notes peculiar to any of these moods, are likewise in nature hereunto congenerous? C Fa ut may show me to be of an ordinary capacity, though good disposition. G Sol re ut, to be peevish and effeminate. Flats, a manly or melancholic sadness. He who hath a voice which will in some measure agree with all cliffs, to be of good parts, and fit for variety of employments, yet somewhat of an inconstant nature. Likewise from the TIMES: so semi-briefs may speak a temper dull and phlegmatic; minims, grave and serious; crotchets, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... The rogue's sharp set, coming from sea; if he should not stay for saving grace, old Foresight, but fall to without the help of a parson, ha? Odd, if he should I could not be angry with him; 'twould be but like me, a chip of the old block. Ha! thou'rt melancholic, old Prognostication; as melancholic as if thou hadst spilt the salt, or pared thy nails on a Sunday. Come, cheer up, look about thee: look up, old stargazer. Now is he poring upon the ground for a crooked pin, or an old horse-nail, with ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... Goedike, and both spoke sorrowfully of the fact that the Professor was evidently again suffering severely. "There is a melancholy," said Goedike, "and it is the most usual, in which the inward depression easily changes to displeasure against every one, and the household of the melancholic suffers thereby intolerably; for the displeasure turns against them,—no one does anything properly, nothing is in its place. How very different is Gellert's melancholy! Not a soul suffers from it but himself, against himself alone his gloomy thoughts turn, ...
— Christian Gellert's Last Christmas - From "German Tales" Published by the American Publishers' Corporation • Berthold Auerbach
... communicative, impetuous, versatile; they pass rapidly from courage to despair. The Bretons are entirely different: they are taciturn, hold strongly to their ideas and usages, are persevering and melancholic; in a word, both in morale and physique they present the type of a ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... found that the same turkey had been twice subjected to the spit; a sole that had been broiled the day before, underwent the operation of frying on the following. Cold meat appeared as hot pie, with many other curious and ingenious devices. Then the wine was so adulterated, compelled, like a melancholic patient, to look old before its time, and fitted, like a pauper, with a ready-made coat perceptibly impregnated with bad brandy, and tasted of every thing but the grape, that, in about six months, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... Groom of the Chamber procured us an audience. Then he remembered how he had laughed at my gambols with Molly O'Flaherty in the hayfield, and how they amused him, and how he thought my Romping ways might divert My Lady Duchess his Consort, who was a pining, puling, melancholic Temperament, and much afflicted with the Vapours, for want of something to do. So he was pleased to smile upon me again, and to give my mother five pounds, and to promise that I should be well bestowed in his household as a waiting-woman, or Bower-maiden, ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... that melancholic, dumb, and deaf stupefaction, which benumbs all our faculties, when oppressed with accidents greater than we are able to bear. And, indeed, the violence and impression of an excessive grief must of necessity astonish ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... like John, nor phlegmatic, as James is sometimes, though incorrectly, represented to have been; but he combined the vivacity without the levity of the sanguine, the vigor without the violence of the choleric, the seriousness without the austerity of the melancholic, the calmness without the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... and bodily tortures of His creatures are pleasant to Him; that, after bestowing upon us reason for our guidance, He makes it of no avail by interposing contradictory revelations and arbitrary commands,—there is nothing to prevent one of a melancholic and excitable temperament from excesses so horrible as almost to justify the old belief ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... and all other high-flown notions, boasted that the world was his country, and was no doubt excellent after-dinner company for the great king. Hegesias, his fellow Cyrenaic, was a man of a darker and more melancholic temperament; and while Theodorus contented himself with preaching a comfortable selfishness, and obtaining pleasure, made it rather his study to avoid pain. Doubtless both their theories were popular enough at Alexandria, as they were in France during ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... thou imagine thou canst slide on blood, And not be tainted with a shameful fall? Or, like the black and melancholic yew-tree, Dost think to root thyself in dead men's ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... being a kindly-hearted soul at bottom, she was really, I believe, the most morbid and melancholic person that ever breathed,—at least, in my experience. Should you, unfortunately, be forced to remain for any length of time in her presence, she had a most singularly depressing influence on your spirits. Wet blanket? Bless your heart! that would be no name for her. She was ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... a herpetic eruption near the mouth is regarded as an evidence that no internal organ is in danger. There is a good deal in not "giving in" to this disease. He who is low-spirited, and apt to despond at every attack, will die sooner than the man who is not of such a melancholic nature. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... 1829.—I shall always be glad to have you come to me when saddened. The melancholic does not misbecome you. The lights of your character are wintry. They are generally inspiriting, life-giving, but, if perpetual, would glare too much on the tired sense; one likes sometimes a cloudy day, with its damp and warmer breath,—its gentle, down-looking shades. Sadness ...
— Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Vol. I • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... wholesome topics. A great help in this type of condition is work therapy. His moral sentiments and principles were always strong enough to prevent him going any further, and he eventually obtained relief. But this condition gave rise to increasing nervous irritation and melancholic depression. ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... king. When the cardinal died, and many gentlemen that served the Red Robe found themselves no longer in esteem, Gonzague passed at once into the circle of the king's most intimate friends. Gonzague, as the comrade of a ruling potentate, proved himself a master of all arts that might amuse a melancholic sovereign newly redeemed from an age-long tutelage, and eager to sate those many long-restrained pleasures that he was at last free to command. Gonzague's ambition appeared to be to play the Petronius part, to be the Arbiter of Elegancies to ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... there of many officers, as well as soldiers, did sufficiently manifest that they were drawn thither to a service they were not delighted in. The old soldiers had little regard for their new officers; and it quickly appeared, by the select and affected mixtures of sullen and melancholic parties of officers and soldiers."—And then the chancellor of human nature adds, "And in this melancholic and perplexed condition the king and all his hopes stood, when he appeared most gay and exalted, and wore a pleasantness ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... apprehension for which no ostensible reason can be assigned. Strange as it might appear, the influence of our dreams upon our waking state is very remarkable; we may awaken refreshed from a dream which has made us, in our sleep, superlatively happy; or we may rise with melancholic feelings after suffering intense affliction in some dream, and the details of both dreams may alike be forgotten. We can not, after being so much disturbed, at once regain our composure; the billows continue heaving after the tempest has subsided; ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... President's voice had a strain of melancholy in it, partly the result of chronic asthma, and partly, no doubt, of a melancholic temperament. This strain, being constant, sometimes had a curiously incongruous effect as contrasted with the subject or circumstances in hand. Whether hailing the dawn of the millennium; holding playful converse with a child, making a speech before the Board,—under whatever rhetorical conditions, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... secretest heart, her deepest womanhood, perhaps, did not consent. There was something in Septimius, in his wild, mixed nature, the monstrousness that had grown out of his hybrid race, the black infusions, too, which melancholic men had left there, the devilishness that had been symbolized in the popular regard about his family, that made her shiver, even while she came the closer to him for that very dread. And when he gave her the kiss of betrothment her ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... pen. Parri was portrayed by Marco da Montepulciano, a disciple of Spinello, in the cloister of S. Bernardo in Arezzo. He lived fifty-six years, and he shortened his life by reason of being by nature melancholic, solitary, and too assiduous in the studies of his art and in his labours. He was buried in S. Agostino, in the same tomb wherein his father Spinello had been laid, and his death caused displeasure to all the men of culture who ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol 2, Berna to Michelozzo Michelozzi • Giorgio Vasari
... of the four humors colored all the conceptions of disease; upon their harmony alone it was thought that health depended. The four temperaments, sanguine, phlegmatic, bilious and melancholic, corresponded with the prevalence of these humors. The body was composed of certain so-called "naturals," seven in number—the elements, the temperaments, the humors, the members or parts, the virtues ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... thousand year ago, but he felt kind of uncertain, and didn't exactly know what he was driving at. The old heathen made out just four humors, as he called 'em,—the sanguineous, phlegmatic, choleric, and melancholic. If he'd only made one step more on to the other side of the fence, he'd have cracked the nut, and picked the kernel, certain. Those four different humors are only four different ways of modifying ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various
... in quite a new way." We may also recall the consultation between M. de Pourceaugnac's two doctors: "The arguments you have used are so erudite and elegant that it is impossible for the patient not to be hypochondriacally melancholic; or, even if he were not, he must surely become so because of the elegance of the things you have said and the accuracy of your reasoning." We might multiply examples, for all we need do would be to call up Moliere's doctors, one after the other. However far, moreover, comic fancy ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... unhappily situated. The dismal Bond Street holds one, another stands cheek by jowl with Marlborough Police Court, and the other two are stuck deep in the melancholic greyness of Wigmore Street. All are absurdly inaccessible. However, when it is a case of Paderewski or Hambourg or Backhaus or Ysayt, people will make pilgrimages to the end of the earth ... or to Wigmore Street. It was at the Bechstein, on a stifling June ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... apparent phlegm, from which it would seem impossible to arouse them. This phlegmatic temperament lessens the credit of the men with the females, who uniformly prefer the European, or the still more vivacious negro. "The indigenous Mexican is grave, melancholic, silent, so long as he is not under the influence of intoxicating liquors. This gravity is peculiarly remarkable in Indian children, who at the age of four or five years display more intelligence and precocity than the children of whites. The Mexican loves to ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 372, Saturday, May 30, 1829 • Various
... in the gathering shadows with melancholic despair. Its walls looked out over the unproductive acres around it as grimly as a fortress overlooks a hostile territory, and its occupants lived with as defensive a frugality as if they were in fact a beleaguered garrison cut off from fresh supplies. This was the ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... Hingham, having been long in a sad melancholic distemper near to phrensy, and having formerly attempted to drown her child, but prevented by God's gracious providence, did now again take an opportunity.... And threw it into the water and mud ... She carried the child ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... is excited or sustained by one or the other of these two motives which divide the empire of love. Perhaps this division is one result of the great question of temperaments; which, after all, dominates social life. The melancholic temperament may stand in need of the tonic of coquetry, while those of nervous or sanguine complexion withdraw if they meet with a too stubborn resistance. In other words, the lymphatic temperament is essentially despondent, and ...
— Father Goriot • Honore de Balzac
... state of erection, but without speaking or making other advances. He was a hard-working, honest, sober man of quiet habits, a good father to his family and happy at home. He showed not the slightest sign of insanity. But he was taciturn, melancholic and nervous; a sister was an idiot. He was arrested, but on the report of the experts that he committed these acts from a morbid impulse he could not control he was released. (Trochon, Archives de l'Anthropologie Criminelle, 1888, ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... am really getting too serious, philosophic, and melancholic. I had no idea, when I asked you down to the Natural History Society rooms to see the great Megatherium, that I was either to bury or resuscitate you in imagination. But I must have my moral, if I draw it from such a lean text as crumbling bones. Let us hope that what we leave behind us, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... at him still again, at the seemingly melancholic and contemplative face, that strangely reminded her of Duerer's portrait of himself. As she did so there was carried to her memory, and imprinted on it, the picture of a wistful and lonely man, his countenance touched, for all its open Irish ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... at the Isle of Ree, upon which he conceived that the company of right ought to have been conferred upon him; and it being refused him by the duke of Buckingham, general of the army, had given up his commission and withdrawn himself from the army. He was of a melancholic nature, and had little conversation with any body, yet of a gentleman's family in Suffolk, of a good fortune, and reputation. From the time that he had quitted the army he resided at London; when the House of Commons, transported ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... was inclined to nervous instability, to rapid and perhaps extreme changes of feeling and mood, and that he was disposed to be, for the time, absorbed in the feeling or mood that possessed him, whether it were joyous or depressed. This temperament the Elizabethans would have called melancholic; and Hamlet seems to be an example of it, as Lear is of a temperament mixedly choleric and sanguine. And the doctrine of temperaments was so familiar in Shakespeare's time—as Burton, and earlier prose-writers, and many of the dramatists show—that ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... silent, the handsome, the bewitchingly melancholic, lived his subterranean life until he was forty-two. Then he was dogged out of Paris by the police, and soon after appeared in his native Geneva after an absence of twenty-five years. He was accompanied by his wife Therese, her mother, and his ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... speech, neither his voice, though men it heard. And in his gear* for all the world he far'd *behaviour Not only like the lovers' malady Of Eros, but rather y-like manie* *madness Engender'd of humours melancholic, Before his head in his cell fantastic. And shortly turned was all upside down, Both habit and eke dispositioun, Of him, this woful lover Dan* Arcite. *Lord Why should I all day of his woe indite? When he endured had a year or two This cruel torment, and this pain and woe, At Thebes, ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... dispositions. Some one has said: "Disposition is a lens through which men and things are seen. A fiery temper, like a red glass, gives to all objects a lurid glare; a melancholic temper, like a blue lens, imparts its own hue; through the green spectacles of jealousy every one else becomes an object of distrust and dislike; and he who looks through the black glass of malice, finds others wearing the aspect of his own malevolence. Only the cheerful and charitable soul sees ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... Our melancholic young squire of Craford was not a man much given to quick-born enthusiasms; but now, as he put down his pen, and her face shone before him for the twentieth time this sunny afternoon, now all at once, "By Jove, she's unique," he cried out. ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... her new berth, and he waves a batch of letters when he sees me looking towards him. So! I have been burrowing in our boilers, testing the scale, inspecting stays and furnace crowns, and the joy of working has come back to me. I was solemn last evening, melancholic and somewhat metaphysical it seems; but let it stand. 'Tis morning, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee
... to allow him to go at large; nor were they subjected to any apparent restraint whatever. Some were engaged in reading, some in exercises and games of skill; of the females some were occupied in sewing, others at work in the kitchen or the laundry; melancholic patients were walking about in silence or sitting gloomily by themselves; idiots were rocking their bodies backward and forward as they sat, but all were peaceable in their demeanor, and the greatest quiet prevailed. No chastisement ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... this capacity he was understood, as was indeed implied in the duties of that officer at the period, to be very strict in executing severity upon such Royalists as fell under his military charge. It appears that the Major, with a maiden sister who had kept his house, was subject to fits of melancholic lunacy, an infirmity easily reconcilable with the formal pretences which he made to a high show of religious zeal. He was peculiar in his gift of prayer, and, as was the custom of the period, was often called to exercise his talent by the bedside of sick persons, until ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... in front, the open book in his hand; his high forehead and his whole countenance bear the impress of earnest and deep thought. This is the melancholic temperament, which does not shrink from the most profound inquiry. Behind him S. Peter bends over the book, and gazes earnestly at its contents—a hoary head, full of meditative repose. This figure represents ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies
... That some such melancholic refinements were restless in the brains of many I have no doubt. Probably only Mrs. Widesworth and the undergraduates were wholly undisturbed by them. Yet, in spite of this secret uneasiness, there was common to the company a stiff recognition of its own virtue, which seemed to impart a certain ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various
... when not under the influence of intoxicating liquors, is grave, melancholic, and silent. The most violent passions are never depicted in his features; and it is sometimes frightful to see him pass, at once, from a state of apparent repose, to the most violent and unrestrained agitation. It is stated that these Indians have preserved, from their ancestors, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... Peter used to retire and stroll about the gardens with his humble favorite, a Polish girl, forgetting the cares of state. This lowly companion, besides great personal beauty, possessed much force of character, and exercised great influence over her melancholic and morose master. Long before her final elevation to the throne, many instances are related of her interference in behalf of mercy, which showed a kind and loving nature. Peterhoff is the favorite summer resort of the ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... signs of Leprosy are, a reddish colour of the face, verging to duskiness; the expiration begins to be changed, the voice grows hoarse, the hairs become thinned and weaker, and the perspiration and breath incline to foetidity; the mind is melancholic with frightful dreams and nightmare; in some cases scabs, pustules, and eruptions break out over the whole body; disposition of the body begins to become loathsome, but still, while the form and figure are not corrupted, the patient is not to be adjudged for separation; but is ...
— The Leper in England: with some account of English lazar-houses • Robert Charles Hope
... now obscurely melancholic, grazed in the meadow. Within the cabin, depending from the smoke-polished rafters, a sack of flour, a bag of sugar, a ham, and several sides of bacon were strung, while a pyramid of tins leaned against the blackened fireplace. The bunk against the right wall ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... sat me down to watch, upon a Bank, With Ivy canopied, and interwove With flaunting Honeysuckle, and beganne, Wrapt in a pleasing Fit of Melancholic, To meditate. ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... held in store for him—many and various—influence, power, mystery, unhappiness, a broken heart. At Claremont his position was a very humble one; but the Princess took a fancy to him, called him "Stocky," and romped with him along the corridors. Dyspeptic by constitution, melancholic by temperament, he could yet be lively on occasion, and was known as a wit in Coburg. He was virtuous, too, and served the royal menage with approbation. "My master," he wrote in his diary, "is the best of all husbands in all the five quarters of the ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... at Dulwich, like a fine Holbein, figures, in blent strength and delicacy, as a genial, or perhaps jovial, soul, finding time for sentiment,—Prynne (included, we suppose, in this company, like the skull at the feast) as a likable if somewhat melancholic young man; while Garrick and his wife playing cards, after Zoffany, present a pair of just very nice young people. On the other hand, the tail-pieces, chiefly devoted to Garrick, prove what a wonderful natural variety there was in Garrick's soul, and are well worth comparative ...
— Essays from 'The Guardian' • Walter Horatio Pater
... Army, with Saxony for field of conquest, and the Reichsfolk to assist, is to be Daun's. But, what is reckoned an important improvement, Loudon is to have a separate command, and Army of his own. Loudon, hot of temper, melancholic, shy, is not a man to recommend himself to Kriegshofrath people; but no doubt Imperial Majesty has had her own wise eye on him. His merits are so undeniable; the need of some Commander NOT of the Cunctator type is become so very pressing. "Army of Silesia, 50,000;" that is to be Loudon's, ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... to such as that. It was beneath their high dignity. And it was beneath hers also. As for himself, he was a thing of patches. Here a patch of exalted chivalry—a noble patch—there a patch of bourgeois, childlike love of fun; here a patch of melancholic asceticism, there one of something quite the reverse. A hopeless patchwork he was. Must she not shrink from him when she knew? He could not quite imagine her understanding the wholly trivial and meaningless impulse that had ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... and foil. Six feet and three inches tall, he was long-legged, lantern-jawed and goggle-eyed. Bilious in his constitution, he was melancholic in his temperament, had been crossed in love and soured at twenty, betrayed and bankrupted at thirty, and at forty had turned his back upon the world, forswearing all its amusements but those of the table, which his poor digestion made more painful than pleasurable, all of its ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... is possible to judge the character of the famous Carafa Pope, he was ardent under a melancholic exterior, rigid but ambitious, utterly blind to everything except the matter he had in hand, proud to folly, and severe to cruelty. A chronicler says of him, that his head 'might be compared to the Vesuvius ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 2 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... sort furnishes little matter for conversation, so the Dutchmen of the Cape do not talk very much. They are a rather melancholic people, and they prefer to feel rather than to argue. So little happens, perhaps, that they have nothing to talk about; but what does it matter if the mind is empty when the heart is full, and when the tender emotions ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... savages they were, you would not wonder that I could not take them home at once, nor that I should wish to see them acquire the good manners that I remembered in the children of this house; I never dreamt of Mr. Belamour heeding the little nursery. He has always been an obstinate melancholic lunatic, confined to his chamber by day, and wandering like a ghost by night, refusing all admission. Moreover my good Aylward had appeared hitherto a paragon of a duenna for discretion, only over starched in her precision. Little ...
— Love and Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... burn brightly, then the man is cheerful and healthy in mind and body; if, on the other hand, he from whom the blood is taken be melancholic or a spendthrift, then it will burn dimly, and flicker ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... and sad eye, his tremulous lip, his contracted forehead, or who heard his querulous, though not unmusical voice, could fail to see that his life was an uneasy one, that he was engaged in some inward conflict. His dark, melancholic aspect contrasted with his seemingly cheerful creed, and was all the more striking, as the worthy Dr. Honeywood, professing a belief which made him a passenger on board a shipwrecked planet, was yet a most good-humored and companionable gentleman, whose laugh ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... mechanically, as it were, and as her fingers wandered over the strings, a bar or two of the strain, sad as the sigh of a broken heart, suggested an old ditty she had loved formerly, when her heart was full of sunshine and happiness, when her fancy used to indulge in the luxury of melancholic musings, as every happy, sensitive, and imaginative girl will do as a ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... of the Roman type, of medium height, thick set and naturally melancholic, with thin, straight lips that were clean shaven, straight black hair, a small but aggressively aquiline nose and heavy hands, hairy on the backs of the fingers, between the knuckles. His wife, Sora Nanna, said that he had a fist like a paving-stone. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... furnished the original incident which Hawthorne has so exquisitely worked up in his story of "The Minister's Black Veil." Being of a singularly nervous and melancholic temperament, he actually for many years shrouded his face with a black handkerchief. When reading a sermon he would lift this, but stood with his back to the audience so that his face was concealed,—all which appears to have been accepted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... to like them, were apt to conceive the sort of kindness for the book, which a person naturally feels for a discovery of his own. This kindly feeling (in some cases, at least) extended to the author, who, on the internal evidence of his sketches, came to be regarded as a mild, shy, gentle, melancholic, exceedingly sensitive, and not very forcible man, hiding his blushes under an assumed name, the quaintness of which was supposed, somehow or other, to symbolize his personal and literary traits. He is by no means ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... assertion of the writing-master, Johann Neudoerffer, who in his youth had known Duerer, that the four figures are typical of the four temperaments, the sanguine, the choleric, the phlegmatic, and the melancholic,—into which categories an amateurish psychology arbitrarily divided human characters,—is as likely to be correct as it is certain that it adds nothing to the power and beauty of the presentation. Though Duerer in his work on human proportions describes ...
— Albert Durer • T. Sturge Moore
... books, and music, Cigars, love-making, orange-trees; People or gay or melancholic, Ices, dancing, and coachmen, if you please; Beer, and good dinners; besides these, Shops where they sell not on tic; And towering ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... the sunshine of gladness has the best right to preside in our sky, is all wrong. It is absolutely wicked, because it casts a baneful influence upon all with whom we associate, and prepares us to go through life like a frowning cloud or a drooping willow, shading the circle of our influence with melancholic gloom. No, better sing with the birds and laugh with the babbling brooklets than be gloomy in Girlhood. Trials and troubles of course will come. We must sometimes weep, and when we do, it should be done with chastened spirits for real sorrow, that we may be ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... old herbalist, "doth exhilarate, and make the mind glad," almost in the same way as a bracing sojourn by the seaside during an autumn holiday. The flowers possess cordial virtues which are very revivifying, and have been much commended against melancholic depression of the nervous system. Burton, in his [61] Anatomy of Melancholy (1676), wrote with reference to the frontispiece ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... two, the maniacal and melancholic. Mania was, however, really a further development of melancholia, and represented a high grade of insanity. Under melancholy he groups not only what we denominate by that term, but also all depressed conditions, and the paranoias, as also many cases of imbecility. The ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh
... to make her vicious, he stoode vpon religion and conscience, what a hainous thing it was to subuert Gods ordinance. This was all the iniurie he woulde offer her, sometimes he woulde imagine her in a melancholic humour to be his Geraldine, and court her in tearmes correspondent, nay he would sweare shee was his Geraldine, & take her white hand and wipe his eyes with it, as though the very touch of her might stanch his anguish. Now would he kneele and kisse the ground ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash
... astonished and mortified at hearing from the usher, who returned looking foolish and chop-fallen, of this outbreak on the part of Jack, for whom he had really begun to conceive a sort of sneaking kindness; but knowing of old his fantastical and melancholic turn, he attributed this sally rather to the state of his bowels, which at all times he exceedingly neglected, and which, being puffed up with flatulency and indigestion to an extraordinary degree, not unfrequently acted upon his brain—generating ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... decide whether we shall give way to them. Temperaments have been classified as sanguine, melancholic, choleric, and phlegmatic. The sanguine type is inclined to look on the bright side of things, to be optimistic; the melancholic tends to moodiness and gloom; the choleric is easily irritated, quick to anger; the phlegmatic is not easily aroused to emotion, is cold and sluggish. An individual seldom belongs exclusively ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... nursed him by turns, as sailors and wives only can nurse; and listened with awe to his piteous self-reproaches and entreaties to Heaven to remove that woe, which, as he shrieked again and again, was a just judgment on him for his wilfulness and ferocity. The surgeon talked, of course, learnedly about melancholic humors, and his liver's being "adust by the over-pungency of the animal spirits," and then fell back on the universal panacea of blood-letting, which he effected with fear and trembling during a short interval of prostration; encouraged by which he attempted to administer a large bolus of ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... that no one would count the cerebral symptoms of Bright's disease as mental is no longer held. Ballet enumerates a number of works upon so-called folie brightique which tend to prove that acute or chronic Bright's disease gives rise either to melancholic disorder or alternately to maniacal and melancholic disorder. How the mental disease is produced is doubtful. Ballet holds that all the various psychopathic disorders resulting from Bright's disease are autotoxic. Renal disease like heart disease is only capable of awakening ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... makes it more or greater, but does not make the subject of another kind. Thus the elephantiasis, being an intense scabbiness, is not a new kind; nor is the water-dread distinguished from other melancholic and stomachical affections but only by the degree. And I wonder we did not observe that Homer was acquainted with this disease, for it is evident that he calls a dog rabid from the very same rage with which when men are possessed they are ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... visible at a distance. In the course of the first few days several ships failed to sight them; and the gale was drifting them out of the usual track. The voyage had been, from the first, neither very successful nor very harmonious. There had been quarrels on board. The captain was a clever, melancholic man, who had no unusual grip on his crew. The ship had been amply provisioned for the passage, but, somehow or other, several barrels of meat were found spoiled on opening, and had been thrown overboard soon after leaving home, as a sanitary measure. Afterwards the ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... extremely irritable (slight noises make him start violently), childishly unreasonable, wants to be left alone, rejects efforts to rouse him, but is disappointed if such efforts be not made, broods, and fears insanity. The true melancholic is convinced he himself is to blame for his misery; it is a just punishment for some unpardonable sin, and there is no hope for him in this world or the next. The neurasthenic, on the contrary, ascribes his distress to ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... the ages; a blow at the very throat of civilization. The three nations which began it, Austria, Russia and Germany, are governed, the first by a doddering imbecile, the second by a weak-minded melancholic, and the third by an epileptic degenerate, drunk upon the vision of himself as the war lord of Europe. Behind each of These men is a little clique of blood-thirsty aristocrats. They fall into a quarrel among themselves. The pretext is that Serbia instigated the murder of the heir ...
— History of the American Negro in the Great World War • W. Allison Sweeney
... was "rich in temperament." The phrase is well chosen. An English expert on the subject of temperament, who visited Whitman some years ago, said he had all four temperaments, the sanguine, the nervous, the melancholic, and the lymphatic, while most persons have but two temperaments, and ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... servant in the apartment of the Duchess of Urbino. The intention has been to stay disorder and to cure him, rather than to inflict punishment. He suffers under peculiar delusions, believing himself guilty of heresy and dreading poison; which state of mind arises, I incline to think, from melancholic blood forced in upon the heart and vaporing to the brain. A wretched case, in truth, considering his great parts and ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... consumptive populace-dogs, and all the ill-constituted, sullen brood:—praised be this spirit of all free spirits, the laughing storm, which bloweth dust into the eyes of all the melanopic and melancholic! ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... out of the village but throughout an occasional vicious whack testified to the presence of some devout doctor. Thus it was that the white King-God came to his throne and sat in state upon his bed to smile at the reflections of a melancholic philosopher. ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... of the king's venison for the feast at which Robin Hood is to entertain the shepherds of the vale of Belvoir. When they have left the stage Aeglamour comes forward and resumes his lament in a strain of melancholic madness. He is again interrupted by the approach of Robin Hood, who enters at the head of the assembled shepherds and country maidens. Robin welcomes his guests, and his praise of rustic sports calls forth from ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... of parting done, * The world will grant me sight of them in union fain and free— Roll up the scroll of severance which others would unroll— * Efface my trouble by the grace of meeting's jubilee! And shall I see them homed with me in cup-company, * And change my melancholic ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... success. You only mentioned it by the way. Are you so detached from everything?... It is not true. Tell me that it pleased you.... It must please you, if only because it pleases me. I don't like you to have a disillusioned air. The tone of your letter is melancholic. That must not be.... It is good that you are more just to others. But that is no reason why you should abase yourself, as you do, by saying that you are worse than the worst of them. A good Christian would applaud you. I tell you ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... times. Giovanni was the only son of five-and-twenty years of wedlock. His mother had been older than his father, and had now been dead some time. She had been a stern dark woman, and had lent no feminine touch of grace to the palace while she lived in it, her melancholic temper rather rejoicing in the sepulchral gloom that hung over the house. The Saracinesca had always been a manly race, preferring strength to beauty, and the reality of power ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... of this disaster, was astonished; and being naturally of a melancholic disposition, as well as endowed with a high spirit, he lost all command of his temper on this dismal occasion. Rage against his nobility, who, he believed, had betrayed him; shame for a defeat by such unequal numbers; regret ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... conduct was entirely the contrary. Do you not remember when you first made her acquaintance, that she was lively even to giddiness, heedless, bold, even coquettish, and appeared to be incapable of a reasonable attachment? However, to-day, you tell me, she has become a serious melancholic; pre-occupied, timid, affected; sentiment has taken the place of mincing airs; at least she appears to so fit in with the character she assumes to-day, that you imagine it to be her true one, and her former one, borrowed. All my philosophy would be at fault in such a case, if I did ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.
... sun of this 23rd August, shining from its rise royally upon pacified, enrolled and liveried armies of cloud, more agreeable to earth's populations than his pinched appearance of the poor mopped red nose and melancholic rheumy eyelets on a January day! Undoubtedly Victor Radnor risked his repute of prophet. Yet his popularity would have survived the continuance of the storm and deluge. He did this:—and the mystery puzzling the suspicious was ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the melancholic earth: O let my Lord rest on Lucilia's lappe. Ile helpe to shield you from the searching ayre And keepe the colde dampes ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... myself up as the horrid example of what comes of that sort of thing for men who have to work as you are doing and I have done. To be sure you are a "lungy" man and I am a "livery" man, so that your chances of escaping candle-snuff accumulations with melancholic prostration are much better. Nevertheless take care. The pitcher is a very valuable piece of crockery, and I don't want to live to see it cracked by going to ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... Everywhere, some fragment of ruin suggesting the magnificence of a former epoch; everywhere, moreover, a Cross,—and nastiness at the foot of it. As the sum of all, there are recollections that kindle the soul, and a gloom and languor that depress it beyond any depth of melancholic sentiment that can ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume I. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and collapsed for the time, and Bill, in his proper person, acquiesced with the humility customarily manifested by Avondale people when Captain Royce was conducting the other side of the argument. But the evil spirit was scotched, not killed; and Bill became a harmless melancholic, dwelling on old time memories of the diggings, and gradually lying himself into the conviction that, if he had gone to Mount Brown, he could have told by the lay of the country, unerringly, and at the first glance, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... that the duke did love me? So may you blame some fair and crystal river For that some melancholic, distracted man Hath drown'd himself ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... sir, I have of late suffered much uneasinesse of speritt concerning my husband. Those fits of ye mopes of w'h I informed you some time back have again come upon him. For awhile I did hope that these melancholic affections were ye fruit put forth by a regenerate soul; but within this month last past it has been my sorrow to discover that these gloomy disorders arise rather from ye promptings of the Evil One. It has pleased Mr. Haygarthe of late to declare that his life is nigh at an end; ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon
... discoursed too well on all the signs, symptoms, and causes of this gentleman's disease. The arguments you have used are so learned and so delicate that it is impossible for him not to be mad and hypochondriacally melancholic; or, were he not, that he ought to become so, because of the beauty of the things you have spoken, and of the justness of your reasoning. Yes, Sir, you have graphically depicted, graphice depinxisti, everything that appertains to this disease. Nothing can be more learnedly, ...
— Monsieur de Pourceaugnac • Moliere
... was in a melancholic, dismal and dire mood; and on the 13th December Lamburn, the engineer, stabbed Cartwright, the ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... was young and looking for a job, I was referred to an esteemed Review, to a well-known philanthropist, devoted to education, to the people, and to the welfare of humanity. I found a very small man of a melancholic, mild and tame aspect. We were in front of the fire, on which he fixed his eyes without looking at me. He talked a long time, in a didactic, monotonous tone of voice. I felt ill at ease and sick at heart, and got away as soon as I could. It was this little man, I afterwards ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Gilbert tells us that the materies morbi of gout is, for the most part, crude and bloody phlegm. Rarely is it bilious, and still more rarely, melancholic. If, however, it is compounded, it consists chiefly of bile mixed with a subtile phlegm, and more rarely, of phlegm mixed with black bile (melancholia), occasionally of black bile mixed with blood. The mixture of black ...
— Gilbertus Anglicus - Medicine of the Thirteenth Century • Henry Ebenezer Handerson
... old tradition that Duerer intended these figures also as embodiments of the four mental temperaments—John, representing the melancholic; Peter, the meditative, or phlegmatic; Mark, the sanguine; and ...
— Rambles of an Archaeologist Among Old Books and in Old Places • Frederick William Fairholt
... that 'magnetic vellum, velin magnetique,' of the Sieurs d'Hozier and Petit-Jean, Parlementeers of Rouen. Sweet young d'Hozier, 'bred in the faith of his Missal, and of parchment genealogies,' and of parchment generally: adust, melancholic, middle-aged Petit-Jean: why came these two to Saint-Cloud, where his Majesty was hunting, on the festival of St. Peter and St. Paul; and waited there, in antechambers, a wonder to whispering Swiss, the ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... is at least equal to the Grecian, as I have said elsewhere, supplying the poverty of his language by his musical ear, and by his diligence. But to return: our two great poets, being so different in their tempers, one choleric and sanguine, the other phlegmatic and melancholic; that which makes them excel in their several ways is, that each of them has followed his own natural inclination, as well in forming the design, as in the execution of it. The very heroes show their ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... be emptied or are moved without the patient's knowledge, and these annoyances combine with the pain and nervous apprehension to drive the victim into a melancholic or neurasthenic state. He suffers, too, from want of occupation, from the absence of exercise, from the anticipation of worse changes in the near future, and usually by the time he reaches the specialist has been more or less poisoned with iodide ...
— Fat and Blood - An Essay on the Treatment of Certain Forms of Neurasthenia and Hysteria • S. Weir Mitchell
... temperaments" to the four great "humors" or fluids of the body. Thus the "sanguine" individual was one with a surplus of blood, the "choleric" had a surplus of bile, the "phlegmatic" a surplus of phlegm, and the "melancholic" a surplus of black bile or spleen; and any individual's temperament resulted from the balance of these four. Sometimes a fifth temperament, the nervous, was admitted, dependent on ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... bridge; which was doing like a man of wits, for had he waited until one could say a Pater noster, he had been snapped up. Who was right down grieved, that was the good knight; never man turned back so melancholic as he was to have missed so fair a take; and the pope, from the good fright he had gotten, shook like a palsy the live-long day." [Histoire du ben Chevalier Ballard, t. ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume III. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... with music (—I dislike all music which aspires to nothing higher than to convince the nerves). But apart from the Wagner who paints frescoes and practises magnetism, there is yet another Wagner who hoards small treasures: our greatest melancholic in music, full of side glances, loving speeches, and words of comfort, in which no one ever forestalled him,—the tone-master of melancholy and drowsy happiness.{HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS} A lexicon of Wagner's most intimate phrases—a host of ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... have forgot. Nay, I remember. When I wrote that sentence I was thinking of Berreo. I loved him, though I took his city. He was a valiant and liberal gentleman, and of a great heart. I mind how I combated his melancholy, for he was most melancholic. But now I have grown like him. Perhaps Sir Edward Coke was right and I have a Spanish heat. I think a man cannot strive whole-heartedly with an enemy unless he have much in common with him, and as the strife ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan
... with our own eyes, it seems to me, a very different hypothesis suggests itself. What little we know of his earlier obscure years, distorted as it has come down to us, does it not all betoken an earnest, affectionate, sincere kind of man? His nervous melancholic temperament indicates rather a seriousness too deep for him. Of those stories of 'Spectres;' of the white Spectre in broad daylight, predicting that he should be King of England, we are not bound to believe much;—probably no more than of the other black Spectre, or Devil in person, to whom ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... and partly because he wrote hymns occasionally, when he grew too old to write love-poems, married the famous beauty before mentioned, Miss Judith Pride, and the race came up again in vigor. Their son, Jeremy, took for his first wife a delicate, melancholic girl, who matured into a sad-eyed woman, and bore him two children, Malachi ...
— The Guardian Angel • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... mirth, especially mirth used at dinner and supper, and mirth toward bed.... Therefore, considering this matter, that mirth is so necessary a thing for man, I published this booke ... to make men merrie.... Wherefore I doe advertise every man in avoiding pensivenesse, or too much study or melancholic, to be merrie with honesty in God and for God, whom I humbly beseech to send us the mirth of heaven. Amen."[245] Such was the advice attributed to a man whose opinion should carry weight, for he had been a "doctor of physicke" and had published with great success ...
— The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare • J. J. Jusserand
... doubtless reached middle age at the time of his accession, but his portraits represent him, nevertheless, with the face and figure of a young man.** The expression in these is gentle, refined, haughty, and somewhat melancholic. MU It is the type of Seti I. and Ramses II., but enfeebled and, as it were, saddened. An inscription of his second year attributes to him victories in Asia,*** but others of the same period indicate the existence of disturbances similar ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 5 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... more like a soldier than ever, at the head of the table. Mutton was in front of her, and there seemed to be nothing on the table cloth but cruets and three dusty and melancholic palms. Peter found that he was sitting between Mrs. Lazarus and Miss Dall, and that he was not expected to talk. It was apparent indeed that the regularity with which every one met every one at this hour of the day, ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... person suffering from acute mania also resists inanition badly, but one the subject of melancholia often endures the total deprivation of aliment for a long time. Esquirol[20] cites the case of a melancholic who did not succumb till after eighteen days of complete abstinence, and Desbarreaux-Bernard another in which life was prolonged for sixty-one days, but in this case a little broth was taken once. Desportes[21] ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond
... made two life-size figures in marble of S. Peter and S. Paul, wrought with consummate grace and executed with fine mastery. He disposed the works that he made in such a manner that he deserves as much praise for them after death as he did when alive. He was a melancholic and solitary person, ever lost in contemplation; which was perchance the reason that he did not live longer, for he passed to the other life at the age of fifty-eight. His works date about ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 3 (of 10), Filarete and Simone to Mantegna • Giorgio Vasari
... the happy Wren, Linnet and Blackcap, Woodlark, Thrush, Perched all upon a sweetbrier bush, Have come at cold of midnight-tide To ask thee, Why and when Grief smote thy heart so thou dost sing In solemn hush of evening, So sorrowfully, lovelorn Thing— Nay, nay, not sing, but rave, but wail, Most melancholic Nightingale? Do not the dews of darkness steep All pinings of the day in sleep? Why, then, when rocked in starry nest We mutely couch, secure, at rest, Doth thy lone heart delight to make Music for sorrow's sake?" A Moon was there. So still her beam, ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... classification of the insane, so that the mild and peaceful melancholic may not be harassed by the ravings of the maniac. The importance of this is obvious; but of still greater importance," he continues, "it will probably be to watch the first dawnings of reason, and instantly to remove from the patient all associates by ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... syne she says, 'It is most heartless of Grizel; she does not even ask how you are to-day; one would think she did not know of the accident'; and she says, 'I have a good mind to write her a very stiff letter.' And says he in a noble, melancholic voice, 'We must not hurt Grizel's feelings,' he says. And she says, 'Grizel thinks it was nothing because you bore it so cheerfully; oh, how little she knows you!' she says; and 'You are too forgiving,' she says. And says he, 'If I have anything to forgive Grizel ...
— Tommy and Grizel • J.M. Barrie
... direction of beauty; and it seemed miraculous that he could turn the yeasty workings of his mind into cool, clear statements of hitherto unstated truth that would in no way betray to those that read them that their maker was lustful and hot-tempered and, about some things, melancholic. He had felt Science to be so gloriously above life; to make the smallest discovery was like hearing the authentic voice of God who is no man but ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... defeated and retreated to Durham. The king, with his army weakened and the treasury depleted, was in great straits. He was again constrained to call a parliament, which met on November 3, 1640. It had a sad and melancholic aspect. The king himself did not ride with his accustomed equipage to Westminster, but went privately in his barge to the parliament stairs. The king being informed that Sir Thomas Gardiner, not having been returned a member, could not be chosen to be Speaker, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XII. - Modern History • Arthur Mee
... long black curling locks. He was certainly handsome, as far as the form of his features and brow; and would have been very handsome, but for the bad complexion which at his age so often accompanies a sedentary life, and a melancholic temper. One glance at his face was sufficient to tell that he was moody, shy, restless, perhaps discontented, perhaps ambitious and vain. He held in his hand a volume of Percy's Reliques, which ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... A melancholic patient is filled through and through with intensely painful emotion about himself. He is threatened, he is guilty, he is doomed, he is annihilated, he is lost. His mind is fixed as if in a cramp on these feelings ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... unusual for her to fancy herself a Glass bottle, a Tea-pot, a Hay-rick, or a Field of Turnips." Instead of being angry, Lady Mary screamed with laughter at the satire of her own whimsies, of how "Red was too glaring for her eyes; Green put her in Mind of Willows, and made her melancholic; Blue remembered her of her dear Sister, who had died ten Years before in a blue Bed." In fact, all this fun seems, for the moment at least, to have cured the original Mrs. Qualmsick of her whimsies, and her remarks on Pompey the Little are so good-natured that we may well forgive ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... comical look of anxious coyness on her jolly face, and holds her elbows squarer than ever; and a few paces off stands Montezuma, magnificent and melancholic; ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... undermined. It was death that he had planned for me; death with the degradation of the scaffold. To strike me down with certainty he had not hesitated to end his life—a life which was, no doubt, already threatened by a melancholic impulse to self-destruction; and the last agony of the suicide had been turned, perhaps, to a devilish joy by the thought that he dragged down my life with his. For, so far as I could see at the moment, my situation was utterly ...
— The Woman in Black • Edmund Clerihew Bentley
... a few good wishes! Or, on some venial treason bent, Frame thyself a government, For thy crest a brirnless hat, Poverty's aristocrat! Nonne habeam te tristem, Planet of the human system? Comet lank and melancholic —Orbit shocking parabolic— Seen for a little in the sky Of the world of sympathy— Seldom failing when predicted, Coming most when most restricted, Dragging a nebulous tail with thee Of hypothetic vagrancy— Of vagrants large, and vagrants small, Vagrants ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... when he woke the next morning. There is no exception to the rule that if a man drink heavily at night the next morning will show the other side to his nature. Thus with Mr. Tebrick, for as he had been beastly, merry and a very dare-devil the night before, so on his awakening was he ashamed, melancholic and a true penitent before his Creator. The first thing he did when he came to himself was to call out to God to forgive him for his sin, then he fell into earnest prayer and continued so for half-an-hour upon his knees. Then he got up and dressed but continued very melancholy for the whole ...
— Lady Into Fox • David Garnett
... seen in Figure 100, representing an individual who was exhibited several years ago in Philadelphia. We have in English the expression, "pulling a long lip." Its origin is said to date back to a semimythical hero of King Arthur's time, who, "when sad at heart and melancholic," would let one of his lips drop below his waist, while he turned the other up like ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... at her and laughed. 'I'll make one for you. Watch! You are to imagine that she—Gloriana, Belphoebe, Elizabeth—has gone on a progress to Rye to comfort her sad heart (maids are often melancholic), and while she halts at Brickwall House, the village—what was its name?' She pushed ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... very apparent on his favoring me so far as to read a few specimens of Don Juan in the moralized version. Whatever is licentious, whatever disrespectful to the sacred mysteries of our faith, whatever morbidly melancholic or splenetically sportive, whatever assails settled constitutions of government or systems of society, whatever could wound the sensibility of any mortal, except a pagan, a republican, or a dissenter, has been unrelentingly blotted out, and its place supplied ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... whatever that it was true. Thomas Reid, the sexton, who remembered that the old squire died forty years ago come Michaelmas, and had been buried in a "wonderful heavy" coffin, Thomas Reid the stern censor of the vicar's sermons, a melancholic and sober man, so far lost his head over the news as to ask Mr. Ambrose's leave to ring the bells, Mr. Abraham Boosey having promised beer for the ringers. Even to the vicar's enlightened mind it seemed fitting ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... Leland, like the melancholic, withdrawn entirely into the world of his own ideas; his imagination delighting in reveries, while his industry was exhausting itself in labour. His manners were not free from haughtiness,—his meagre and expressive physiognomy indicates the melancholy ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... strictly psychological point of view, we must expect thus a broad borderland region between the entirely normal well-balanced mental life and that unbalanced disorder of functions which really interferes with the chance for self-protection and effectiveness. That the melancholic who declines to take any nourishment, or the paranoiac who misjudges his surroundings, is unable to secure by his own energies the safety of his life cannot be doubted. The balance is completely destroyed and the will and the intellect of the physician and of the nurse must ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... daily life, with outward monotony and internal variety, was a pleasant miscellany on which to comment. He was of a middle temperament, "between the jovial and the melancholic"; a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose; choosing bright companions rather than sad; able to be silent, as the mood took him, or to gossip; loyal and frank; a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood; a despiser of empty ceremony; disposed to interpret all things to the best; cheerful ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... to melancholy is recognized by Thoreau. The characteristic suggestion of this nature-lover is that the melancholic go to the woods and study the symplocarpus foetidus (skunk cabbage), whose English name savors of contempt, but whose courage is such that it is already in the autumn jauntily thrusting forth its buds for ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... for that the Duke did love me? So may you blame some fair and chrystal river, For that some melancholic distracted man Hath drown'd ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... took no further notice of him that evening. Which he pretended neither to notice nor to care about, but sat reading. Miriam read also, obliterating herself. Mrs. Morel hated her for making her son like this. She watched Paul growing irritable, priggish, and melancholic. For this she put the blame on Miriam. Annie and all her friends joined against the girl. Miriam had no friend of her own, only Paul. But she did not suffer so much, because she despised the triviality of ...
— Sons and Lovers • David Herbert Lawrence
... were deeply set in a high-cheeked-boned, bronzed face, with a long upper-lipped, grimly-humorous mouth. Its expression in repose gave subtle warning that its owner possessed in a marked degree the strongly melancholic, emotional, and choleric temperament of his race. There was no moroseness—no hardness in it, but rather the taciturnity that invariably settles upon the face of those dwellers of the range who, perforce, ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... the Eunuch, and when he came to him cried, "Fetch me my Wazir, Ja'afar the Barmaki, without stay or delay." Accordingly, he went out and returned with the Minister who, finding him alone, which was indeed rare, and seeing as he drew near that he was in a melancholic humour, never even raising his eyes, stopped till his lord would vouchsafe to look upon him. At last the Prince of True Believers cast his glance upon Ja'afar, but forthright turned away his head and sat motionless as before. The Wazir descrying naught in the Caliph's aspect that concerned ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... too intellectual," he said, speaking very melancholic. "What can't be explained by arithmetic or geography is put down as impossible. Even the preachers encourage such idees and talk about Adam and Eve being allegories. As a result, the graveyard has become the slowest place in town. You simply can't ha'nt ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... nor would any return a reply or aught of address would supply; and said they, 'O King of the Age, verily appearances in dreams hit the mark at times and at times fly wide; for when a man is of a melancholic humour he seeth in his sleep things which be terrible and horrible and he waxeth startled thereat: haply this vision thou hast beheld may be of the imbroglios of dreams so do thou commit the reins to Him who all overreigns ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... not ask every critic about to bring forth an opinion for a sort of chart on which will be shown his various qualities of mind, character; yes, and even his physical temperament; whether sanguine or melancholic, bilious or eupeptic, young or old, peaceful or truculent; also his tastes in literature, art, music, politics, and religion. This reminds one of an old-fashioned game. And all this long-winded preamble is to tell you that the case of Arnold Schoenberg, musical ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... involved in the disintegration of the brain. The difference between the effects of these two causes will hardly be great, but testimony dependent on this altered character of mental activity will have little reliability. Hallucinations, false memories, melancholic accusations of self, particularly, may also be explained in terms of such excitement. We criminalists have frequently to deal with people in above- named conditions, and when we receive intelligent answers from them we must never set them aside, but must carefully make note of ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... unwilling walkers. We are not innocent and simple-hearted enough to enjoy a walk. We have fallen from that state of grace which capacity to enjoy a walk implies. It cannot be said that as a people we are so positively sad, or morose, or melancholic as that we are vacant of that sportiveness and surplusage of animal spirits that characterized our ancestors, and that springs from full and harmonious life,—a sound heart in accord with a sound body. A man must invest himself near at hand and in common ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... had a great reputation in melancholic affections. Manardus says it removes sadness and makes him merry that ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... that have their brains baited and their fancies distempered with the imaginations and apprehensions of witches, conjurers, and fairies, and all that lymphatic chimera, I find to be marshalled in one of these five ranks: children, fools, women, cowards, sick or black melancholic discomposed wits." ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... plans my divorced husband made for a new marriage have gone wrong; he's grown melancholic, abandoned his practice ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... whom we had met at Port-au-Prince. He was a light mulatto, intelligent, quiet, dignified, and able to state his views without undue emphasis. His wife was very agreeable, and his daughter, though clearly of a melancholic temperament, one of the most beautiful young women I have ever seen. The reason for her melancholy was evident to any one who knew her father's history. He had gone through many political storms before he had fled from Haiti, and in one ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the air, she'll run from gallant to gallant, as they sit at primero in the presence, most strangely, and seldom stays with any. She spreads as she goes. To-day you shall have her look as clear and fresh as the morning, and to-morrow as melancholic as midnight. She takes special pleasure in a close obscure lodging, and for that cause visits the city so often, where she has many secret true concealing favourites. When she comes abroad she's more loose and scattering than dust, and will fly from place to place, as she were wrapped ...
— Cynthia's Revels • Ben Jonson
... of this work, Mr. Leland has aimed at the defence of that view of life which combines a cheerful earnestness of purpose with manly energy of action, as opposed to the melancholic, whining, lachrymose spirit, which has been affected by certain popular modern poets, and, through their vicious example, has been cherished as one of the essential qualities of genius. Of this style of character Mr. Leland has not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a settled melancholic turn of mind, having lost in early youth a very peculiar wife. One day, whilst out hunting, he happened to pass a funeral pyre, upon which a Brahman's widow had just become Sati (a holy woman) with the greatest fortitude. On ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... to rule society with dignity; Mr. Watt, to lead the contemplative life of a deeply introverted and patiently observant philosopher. He was one of the most complete specimens of the melancholic temperament. His head was generally bent forward, or leaning on his hand in meditation; his shoulders stooping, and his chest falling in; his limbs lank and unmuscular, and his complexion sallow. His intellectual development was magnificent; comparison and causality immense, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 6 of 8 • Various
... with much labor, carried her vertiginous papa to bed, and Registrator Heerbrand, in the deepest exhaustion, sank on the sofa, which Veronica had left, taking refuge in her bedroom. Registrator Heerbrand had his blue handkerchief tied about his head; he looked quite pale and melancholic, and moaned out: "Ah, worthy Conrector, not the punch which Mam'sell Veronica most admirably brewed, no! but simply that cursed student is to blame for all the mischief. Do you not observe that he has long been mente caphis? And are you not aware that madness is infectious? One fool makes twenty; ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... careful for pelf, Melancholic and thoughtful, his mind Look'd inward and dwelt on itself, Still pensive, pathetic, and kind; Yet oft in despondency drown'd, He from friends, and from converse would fly. In weeping a luxury found, And reliev'd others' woes with ...
— An Essay on War, in Blank Verse; Honington Green, a Ballad; The - Culprit, an Elegy; and Other Poems, on Various Subjects • Nathaniel Bloomfield
... The Town, with the impression that it would be interesting only to Londoners, and I was surprised, ere I had read many pages, to find myself enchained by his pleasant, graceful, easy style, varied knowledge, just views, and kindly spirit. There is something peculiarly anti-melancholic in Leigh Hunt's writings, and yet they are never boisterous—they resemble sunshine, being ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... grand austereness of the rocks of Belle-Isle en mer, to express it in pictures in which one really feels the wind, the spray, and the roaring of the heavy waters breaking against the impassibility of the granite rocks. His recent series of Water-lilies expressed all the melancholic and fresh charm of quiet basins, of sweet bits of water blocked by rushes and calyxes. He has painted underwoods in the autumn, where the most subtle shades of bronze and gold are at play, chrysanthemums, ...
— The French Impressionists (1860-1900) • Camille Mauclair
... a sign of the Saudawi or melancholic temperament in which black bile pre-dominates. It is supposed to cause a distaste for society and a longing for solitude, an unsettled habit of mind and neglect of worldly affairs. I remarked that in Arabia students are subject to it, and that amongst philosophers and literary ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... asylum doors there will be an ever increasing crowd of intelligent men and women psychologists, who will be awake to the first hint of psychic disassociation in an individual. With keen insight and scientific direction, they will teach the beginning paranoic, melancholic, neurasthenic, clairvoyant and psychasthenic the truth about themselves and the first hint of disassociation will be replaced by association, and rest homes, asylums and sanitarium ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.
... response to your request, and the governor's instructions to me for a full inquiry into all the circumstances is that since her confinement Miss Vinsolving has been under constant observation. She has been orderly and obedient and except for slightly melancholic tendencies, which might easily be provoked by the nature of her environment, is quite natural in her behavior. I draw the inference, however, that this docility may be merely the forerunner of an ...
— Sundry Accounts • Irvin S. Cobb
... owing to the impulse of passion that a man at once follows his passion before his reason counsels him. Now the impulse of passion may arise either from its quickness, as in bilious persons [*Cf. I-II, Q. 46, A. 5], or from its vehemence, as in the melancholic, who on account of their earthy temperament are most vehemently aroused. Even so, on the other hand, a man fails to stand to that which is counselled, because he holds to it in weakly fashion by reason of the softness ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... past: critical scruples against tradition did not weigh so heavily on his conscience. His critical faculties, no doubt, were sharpened by the humanistic culture he had acquired. Compared with Luther's peculiar meditative mood, and his half-choleric, half-melancholic temperament, Zwingli evinced, in all his conduct and demeanour, a more clear and sober intelligence, and a far calmer and more easy disposition. His practical policy and conduct was allied with a tendency to judicial severity, in contrast to the free ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin |
