"Pathetic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 1719, after which she sang in various Italian theatres. She had a voice of extraordinary range, beauty, and agility; she was equally accomplished both in florid music and in airs of a sustained and pathetic character, and she was never known to sing out of tune. In appearance she was anything but attractive: she was short, squat, and excessively plain-featured. She was uneducated and ill-mannered, impulsive and quarrelsome. Her arrival ...
— Handel • Edward J. Dent
... of Liza Lehmann (UNWIN), written by herself, and finished, as her husband tells in a pathetic foot-note, "scarcely two weeks before her death," is a book holding many special bonds of association with Punch, not least the fact that her father-in-law, Deputy J.T. BEDFORD, was the author of that Robert, the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 21st, 1920 • Various
... on, with the gap still left wide in the Vandecar household. As month after month passed and nothing was heard of her children, Mrs. Vandecar gradually gave up hope. Her despair left a shadow of pathetic pleading in her blue eyes. This constant silent appeal whitened Floyd Vandecar's hair and caused him to apply himself to business more assiduously than ever. Never once in all those bitter years did he connect Lon Cronk with the ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White
... pretension of the dog. The large dog, so much lazier, so much more weighed upon with matter, so majestic in repose, so beautiful in effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... be more pathetic than the isolation and revolt of the early letters. The boy Ensign is desperately homesick, pining for Fox How, for his mother and sisters, for the Oxford he had so easily renounced, for the brothers parted from him by such ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... over the wedding. In theory I have grown more and more opposed to such exhibitions. A wedding is more pathetic than a funeral, and nothing, perhaps, is more out of place than the jubilations of the guests. When a man and a woman, as husband and wife, have lived together five years, then the community should engage a band and serenade them, but at ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson
... in the laces of her dress and on her fingers. She sat very straight, as even a make-believe duchess should, and led the conversation. To do so was very easy, for everyone agreed with everything she said, remarked Isobel with pathetic enthusiasm. Behind her smile Mrs. Westley was thinking that Maria Drinkwater was a very ...
— Highacres • Jane Abbott
... something in the sight of the familiar room which made Brian's wrath flame up once more. Erica's guileless life seemed to rise before him the years of patient study, the beautiful filial love, the pathetic endeavor to restrain her child-like impatience of conventionalities lest scandalmongers should have even a shadow of excuse for slandering Luke Raeburn's daughter. The brutality of the insult struck him more than ever. Erica, ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... eyes only that are astonished, for from each of those five hundred throats there swells a chant never to be forgotten. From company to company it passes, that wild, characteristic song, so touching in its simple grandeur, so expressive in its deep, pathetic volume. The white men who listened had heard the song of choirs ringing down resounding aisles, they had been thrilled by the roll of oratorios pealing in melody, beautiful and complex, through the grandest of man's theatres, but never till now had they heard music of voices so weird, so soft ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard
... died before the end of the year; and the final report of his committee (filed January 1, 1953) was a pathetic whitewash of ...
— The Invisible Government • Dan Smoot
... servants were re-kindling the fire, and setting a table with refreshments for the unexpected guests. Sophy was resting on a sofa drawn towards the hearth. Archie had thrown his travelling cloak of black fox over her, and her white, flower-like face, surrounded by the black fur, had a singularly pathetic beauty. She opened her large blue eyes as Madame approached and looked at her with wistful entreaty; and Madame, in spite of all her pre-arrangements of conduct, was unable at that hour not to answer the ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... There was something pathetic in the appeal, and something young too, in spite of his grey beard and furrowed face. Still Mrs. Bowring said nothing. It meant almost too much to her, even after twenty-seven years. This old man had taken her, an innocent young girl, had married her, ...
— Adam Johnstone's Son • F. Marion Crawford
... of truants. The result has been a prompt, marked and growing improvement in the attendance and the general interest. Better still, the educated Maori youths are awakening to the sad plight of their people. Pathetic as their regrets are, the healthy discontent they show may ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... left my horse, going cautiously forward with my rifle. The chief however kept by me, anxiously calling out with a pathetic voice "Myen, myen," which words, as I afterwards learnt, meant Men! men! But it was not until a thought had passed in my mind of firing among the group, that I had the good fortune to discover my mistake. The ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... CHANTECLER Pathetic effort of a country birdkin, twisting his thick bill to talk with a city accent! Ah, you wish to bite off bits of slang? My friend, they are green! Every grape you pick breaks in your jaws, for city grapes are glass ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... were old-fashioned, repressed, timid children, with the pathetic outlook of young persons brought up by a melancholy, ancient hireling. But the baby, glowing-eyed, laughing-mouthed rogue, staggering valiantly on sturdy, emulous legs, taking tribute everywhere with all babyhood's ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... gentility. But so strong was the contagion of this association that cottagers themselves began to throw away their beautiful cottage-garden flowers and to grow these plants, so detestable in combination. And to this day one can see often in cottage gardens pathetic imitations of a taste that never was real and which now is discredited among the rich, so that a border of lobelias, calceolarias, and geraniums has become a mark of social inferiority as it was once one of social superiority. But what it never ...
— Progress and History • Various
... of Michael Angelo was a sad one; indeed, it is scarcely possible to recount a more pathetic story than was his. The misfortunes which came to the Medici were sharp griefs to him, and his temperament was such that he could not forget his woes. His family, too, looked to him for large sums of ...
— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement
... habitual, as well as with the general character of the features. That fine and accurate observer of the symptoms of humanity, George Eliot, gives her silly, commonplace, little second-heroine in "Adam Bede," Hester, a pathetic and sentimental expression, to which nothing in her mind or character corresponds, and which must have been an inheritance from some ancestress in whom such an expression had originated with ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... power of tears; when we remember Mr. Reverdy Johnson and Mr. Andrew Johnson confronting each other like two augurs, the one trying not to laugh while he saw the other trying to cry; when we recall the touching scene at Canandaigua, where the President was overpowered by hearing the pathetic announcement that Stephen A. Douglas had for two years attended the academy in what will doubtless henceforward be dubbed that "classic locality," ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... imperfect culture of philology, they could not easily have been; men they were whom religious feeling guided correctly in choosing their expressions, and with whom the state of the language in some respects cooperated, by furnishing a diction more homely, fervent, and pathetic, than would now be available. For their apostolic functions English was the language most in demand. But in polemic or controversial cases Greek is indispensable. And of this Lady Carbery was sufficiently ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... Constitution; turns to scorn the idea of anything being due to the Members of the Assembly; laughs and jokes at the Club being fired into, though the English people in it were within an ace of being murdered by the soldiers; says that Normanby is pathetic over a broken looking-glass,[34] forgetting that the same bullet grazed the hand of an Englishman, "a Roman citizen!" who was between the window and the glass—in short, as I said before, he is quite ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria
... parents, and corporal punishment is allowed in the schools. The grim saying, "Saure Wochen, frohe Feste," seems to express the pedagogic philosophy. The only trouble is that nature does not give this attitude her sanction, for Germany reveals to us that figure, the most pathetic in life, ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... bent her sad head with pathetic patience—pathetic indeed to those who knew the proud spirit that it reported broken and humbled for ever. Following the red-armed, touzled, ragged maid to the dingy cabin that was to be her room, she left her friend to explain ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XVII, No. 102. June, 1876. • Various
... received your American Bill of so many pounds sterling for the Revolution Book, with a "pathetic feeling" which brought "tears" to her eyes. From beyond the waters there is a hand held out; beyond the waters too live brothers. I would only the Book were an Epic, a Dante, or undying thing, that New England might boast in after times of this ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, - 1834-1872, Vol. I • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... dramatic, rushed towards her, embraced her, clasped her to her bosom, and covered her with kisses. She sobbed and kneeled before her; as one may see times without number in the closing scene of the fifth act of any pathetic drama. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... them, only by hard knocks and blows, being pushed and pulled hither and thither. They were kept quite naked on the voyage up; but, when nearing Sydney, each received two yards of calico to be twisted as a kilt around his loins. A most pathetic spectacle it was to watch these poor Natives,—when they had leisure to sit on deck,—gazing, gazing, intently and imploringly, upon the face of the Sun! This they did every day, and at all hours, ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... raced home with the news, and offered to take Mrs. Huntingdon to the boat in his machine, he thought it was Mrs. Huntingdon herself who answered him. The trembling voice seemed only natural under the circumstances. He would have smiled could he have seen the pathetic little face uplifted towards the receiver, the quivering lip still adorned with the fierce mustachios of Gory George, in strange contrast to the soft curls hanging over her shoulders now that they were no longer hidden by ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... for flight, his cap held stiffly across his knees. He watched every movement of the girl, a look of pathetic meekness in ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... captivating woman," muttered Lord Henry, still pulling at the tuft of hair over his brow. "Her blank refusal to accept the fact of her advancing years is the most wonderful and at the same time the most pathetic thing about her." ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... to the very marrow of their bones, for they hung round the stove in the kitchen as if they would never thaw out. When grandmother Ruth set a warm supper before them, they ate like starved animals and cast pathetic glances at the table to see whether there was more food. Tears stood in grandmother's eyes as ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... co-operated with him in his first discoveries, was born at Aswarby, near Sleaford, and Sir John Franklin, who sailed with him in the Investigator, and was subsequently to become an Australian Governor and to achieve a pathetic immortality in another field of exploration, entered the world at Spilsby. Sir Joseph Banks, the botanist of Cook's first voyage, Flinders' steadfast friend, and the earliest potent advocate of Australian colonisation, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... that the proposition was negatived without a dissenting voice, Monsieur Souley not voting. It was now pretty evident to all present that the Congress would have its time and attention pretty well absorbed in receiving deputations of citizens deluded by Saunders' letters, and listening to the very pathetic speeches of Monsieur. The day was now far gone; the Congress began to feel its appetite; the forlorns withdrew in discontent; the presence of many other deputations surrounding the doors was announced; and the Congress drank all round, and adjourned to meet on the following ...
— The Adventures of My Cousin Smooth • Timothy Templeton
... describe the dresses worn on the occasion; but Glover was the corsair, and burnt cork had to suffer, and I know that there was quite a pretty Miss whom he had no especial objection to embracing as Medora. When he said, "My own Medora!" it was quite pathetic—enough to cause a titter among the ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... something of the sternness of battle in the merriment of this meal, and the few jokes that passed were seasoned with a bitterness that is not usual among the light-hearted followers of the sea. Here and there, a messmate was missed, and the vacancy produced some quaint and even pathetic allusion to his habits, or to the manner in which he met his death; seamen usually treating the ravages of this great enemy of the race, after the blow has been struck, with as much solemnity and even tenderness, as they regard his ...
— The Two Admirals • J. Fenimore Cooper
... leave of my Leonora. I abstained from seeing Olivia to avoid altercation, and with all the delicacy in my power I wrote to her, assuring her that my resolution was fixed. Note after note came from her, with pathetic and passionate appeals to my heart; but I was still resolute. At length, the day before that on which I was to set out for L—— Castle, she wrote to warn me, that if I wished to take a last farewell, ...
— Tales And Novels, Vol. 8 • Maria Edgeworth
... away by realism and negation,—this is what made up the essence of the movement of the epoch in the sixties. Turgenev with the instinct of genius saw through this fundamental movement in life and imaged it in living bright pictures with all its positive and negative, pathetic ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... The most pathetic wild-animal situation ever seen in the United States on a large scale is that which for six winters in succession forced several thousand starving elk into the settlement of Jackson Hole, Wyoming, in quest of food at the hands of their natural enemies. The elk lost all fear, partly because they were ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... be able, for the moment, to concentrate his mind and after a little while closed the book and gazed straight ahead of him. Again I thought of the letter, and the vision that, no doubt, he saw of Elaine making her pathetic appeal for ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve
... Now the pathetic emotion to which I have referred, as accompanying my contemplations of the violent struggles of so many excellent persons, is caused by the circumstance that, so far as I can judge, their labour ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... falls from honour, is it merely that she is a victim of momentary intoxication, of stress of passion, of the fever of instinct? No. It is mainly that she is a slave of the sweetest, tenderest, most spiritual and pathetic of all human fallacies—the fallacy that by giving herself to the man she loves she attaches him to herself for ever. This is the real betrayer of nearly all good women that are betrayed. It lies at the root ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... he cried to two other young men who were already there, smoking clay pipes—'here's a lark! The chief wants fifteen inches on this charming and pathetic art-work as quick as you can. And no antics, he says. Here, Jack, here's fifty pages for you'—Mr. Heeley ripped the beautiful inoffensive volume ruthlessly in pieces—and here's fifty for you, Clementina. Tell ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... version. The later heroic poems of the Edda make a less successful attempt to create sympathy for Gudrun; some, such as the so-called First Gudrun Lay, which is entirely romantic in character, try to make her pathetic by the abundance of tears she sheds; others, to make her heroic, though the result is ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday
... bitter night, in a town with every door bolted and all the windows dark. And suddenly I felt that the easiest thing would be to lie down and go to sleep in the snow. Perhaps I'd a vague notion that if they found me there at daylight, frozen stiff, the pathetic spectacle might produce a reaction, a feeling of remorse. ... So I took care to be found! Well, a good many thousand people die every day on the face of the globe; and I soon discovered that I was simply one of the thousands; and when I made ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... veil, until at last the great Spirit seems in brooding gentleness to be in the boundless fields alone. I am not inspired by that brotherhood which does not overflow with love into the being of the elements, not hail in them the same spirit as that which calls us with so many pathetic and loving voices from the lives of men. So I build my dream cabin in hope of ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... presence, all was transformed and redeemed; the old emblems recovered their first significance, the time-worn phrases glowed with life again, and we ourselves were altered—our very heaviness was pathetic: it was the lethargy of death itself, and our poor sleepy prayers the strain of manacled captives ...
— Cecilia de Noel • Lanoe Falconer
... also much!" whispered the Polish lad, and there was rather a pathetic note in his voice. "It is a goodness gracious to ...
— The Khaki Boys Over the Top - Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam • Gordon Bates
... her feeble strength in a mad, pathetic effort to reach her husband, even now at this last hour, when all hope was dead and Death was so nigh, Armand had already wrenched the carriage door from the grasp of the soldier who was guarding it. He was of the South, and knew the trick of charging an unsuspecting ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... was a really pathetic figure, crouched in her low chair, and shaken with terror. She must have rather a bad time; there were so many things she dared not take to his father. She brought them to him instead, her small grievances, her elaborate extravagances, her disappointments. It did not occur to ...
— Dangerous Days • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... was wholly out of tune was gone. The only sound he heard was that of a voice, a fresh young voice, singing a French song in a tone low and soft. He had always liked these little love songs of the kind that were sung in a subdued way. They were pathetic and pure ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler
... dignity, but when he got worked into his theme, he became eloquent in his description of the position of the Indian people and their strong desire to receive the gospel. While he was illustrating his argument with pathetic incidents in his experience, there were many ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 10. October 1888 • Various
... all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James
... others, readily occurs in the pathetic old ballad of the Conde Alarcos, whose woful catastrophe, with the unresisting suffering of the countess, suggests many points of coincidence with the English minstrelsy. The English reader will find a version ...
— The History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella The Catholic, V2 • William H. Prescott
... a pathetic pleading in her voice, low as she spoke, impossible to resist. It made me feel thoroughly ashamed of my impulsive, ...
— My Lady of the North • Randall Parrish
... akin to it by its added testimony to the painter's constant sympathy with weak and beseeching things, and worthy to stand at an equal height with the picture of the slave by virtue of its beauty of conception, loveliness of character, and pathetic appeal to the interest. It was in all respects as typical and comprehensive as The Quadroon itself, holding within its face and figure all the sweetness and innocence of New-England girlhood, yet with the shadow of an uncongenial experience brooding over it, and perhaps of inherited ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume I. No. VI. June, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... his turn began to weep. Clara seemed to him so pathetic, so innocent, so oblivious of all the hard facts of the world. She was like a wild bird, flying in ecstasy, flying higher and higher in the pain of her song. Indeed she was a most touching sight ...
— Mummery - A Tale of Three Idealists • Gilbert Cannan
... attitude, as if challenging that lady to take a 'set to' with him; while Bloody Mike stumbled over the prostrate form of the lady's maid, who occupied a temporary bed upon the floor. Forgetting his assumed part, he yelled out for something to drink, and forthwith began to sing in tones of thunder, the pathetic ...
— City Crimes - or Life in New York and Boston • Greenhorn
... pathetic was this dumb show of farewell, for no word passed between them while he was present, that not only his barbed gibes, but the questions that he meant to ask, died upon the lips of Montalvo. Try as he might he ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... shall be grateful to Captain Hall if his pathetic description of the funeral of 'Dolly' checks your desire to become a sailor, George; for I cannot bear to think of it. We are now to sail along the coast of South America, and the first gulfs in the north of this coast are the ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne
... the heat the blacks dwelt, communing with the beauty of water and sky and open air. It was just between twilight and evening and their minstrels were chanting impromptu hymns to their gods of nature. And as she listened closely, Annabelle thought she caught traces of the sorrow songs in the weird pathetic strains of the African music mongers. From the East the warriors of the tribe came, bringing prisoners, whom they sold to white strangers ...
— The Upward Path - A Reader For Colored Children • Various
... accounted unmanly to strike beneath the knee. But since that desperate traitor Rowland Yorke first introduced thrusting with rapiers, sword and buckler are disused.' In The Two Angry Women of Abingdon, a comedy, printed in 1599, we have a pathetic complaint: 'Sword and buckler fight begins to grow out of use. I am sorry for it; I shall never see good manhood again. If it be once gone, this poking fight of rapier and dagger will come up; then a tall man and a good sword and buckler man will be spitted like a cat or rabbit.' ...
— The Lady of the Lake • Sir Walter Scott
... animals in the house!" said Aunt Lucy, trying to be severe; but Bobbie's face was so pathetic, she did not order them to be taken out at once, as she ...
— Soap-Bubble Stories - For Children • Fanny Barry
... by the prodigies of labour to which he was impelled by the restless promptings of his active brain, and by his ever-pressing need for money. Some of his letters to Madame Hanska have been published during the last few years; and where can we read a more pathetic love story than the record of his seventeen years' waiting for her, and of the tragic ending to his long-deferred happiness? Or where in modern times can more exciting and often comical tales of adventure be found ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... made himself a cosy habitation in the Note-Books, with the fire in the right place and fairly impervious to the direct draughts of criticism. In a two-volume memoir[11] he shivers perceptibly, and at moments he looks faintly ridiculous more than faintly pathetic. ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry
... significant, important. It was a vast melting pot. Through its gates came alike the hopeful and the hopeless, the dreamers and those who would destroy those dreams. From all over the world there came men who sought a chance to labor. They came in groups, anxious and dumb, carrying with them their pathetic bundles, and shepherded by ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... this street," says Crabbe, "finding lately that his rope of onions, which he hoped would have brought a shilling, was to go for only sevenpence henceforth, burst forth into lamentation, execration and the most pathetic tears. Throwing up the window, I perceived the other costermongers preparing impatiently to pack this one out of their company as a disgrace to it, if he would not hold his peace and take the market-rate for his onions. I looked better at this ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... a misfortune that Mr. Dodge is not here to question the gentleman," said the steward to his assistant, "and then we might hear more of his adwentures, which, I make no doubt, have been werry pathetic and romantical. Mr. Dodge is a genuine inquisitor, Mistress Ann; not such an inquisitor as burns people and flays them in Spain, where I have been, but such an inquisitor as torments people, and of whom we ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... where he was told, and received the confidential communication of his partner with pathetic resignation. He only wished the signal to shout might soon arrive. As for Reginald, when he felt himself once more in the clutches of the captivating Jemima, and heard her whisper in his ear the mysterious monosyllable "love," his heart became as ice within him, and he sat like a statue ...
— Reginald Cruden - A Tale of City Life • Talbot Baines Reed
... me, for I love him very much. But O I forgot, Isabella forbid me to speak about love." This antiphlogistic regimen and lesson is ill to learn by our Maidie, for here she sins again:—"Love is a very papithatick thing" (it is almost a pity to correct this into pathetic), "as well as troublesome and tiresome—but O Isabella forbid ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... It was pathetic enough, because, for once, evidently sincere. Annabel smiled and made no reply. Then, with abrupt ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... to hesitate in the expression of any fancy his sickly state might prompt him to make. R—— told him, also, to join the yacht at Cowes when he returned to England. King lived to see the English shores again, and gratefully, in the blunt, pathetic language of a sailor, to thank his amiable benefactor. He fills, at this ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the summer of 1649 they were thus employed, and roused to uncommon fervour by a most pathetic discourse, to which the following hymn, sung by the congregation, ...
— The Loyalists, Vol. 1-3 - An Historical Novel • Jane West
... was aged four when John Baines had suddenly been seized with giddiness on the steps of his shop, and had fallen, and, without losing consciousness, had been transformed from John Baines into a curious and pathetic survival of John Baines. She had no notion of the thrill which ran through the town on that night when it was known that John Baines had had a stroke, and that his left arm and left leg and his right eyelid were paralyzed, and that the active member of the Local Board, the ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... triumphant, while the old mother mopped a large rock in the background. An intervening close-up of this rock revealed her tearful face as she cleansed the granite surface. Above her loomed a painted exhortation to "Use Wizard Spine Pills." And of this pathetic old creature he was made to say, even as he clasped the beloved in his arms—"Remember, she is my mother. I will not desert her now just because I am ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... the best clubs of his time. Percy Linwood and he constantly met in the billiard-room or at the dinner-table. The Major approved of the easy, handsome, pleasant-tempered young man. "I have lost the first freshness of youth," he used to say, with pathetic resignation, "and I see myself revived, as it were, in ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... watch kept by Uncle Jack and me after we had had a good sleep, and there was something very pathetic in the way the poor dog looked at us, as much as to say, "I wish I could speak and put you on ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn
... to children is but a step, and there too, in the shadow of the Fontaine de Medicis, I spend much of my time watching the little ones. Childhood, so innocent, so helpless, so trusting, is somehow pathetic to me. ...
— Ballads of a Bohemian • Robert W. Service
... remembered by posterity?" asked the dying Garfield. In this eager, tremulous question the renowned and the obscure alike have a pathetic interest. For the deeply reflective mind oblivion is a thought all unendurable. The tool man fashions, the structure he rears, the success he achieves, not less than his marble monument, looks down upon the beholder with a mute appeal for recollection. To each eager aspirant for everlasting remembrance ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... exquisite letters his friends might have received, and which would have enriched all the coming time; think of the inimitable drolleries which would have sent a smile over the face of the world; think of the little pathetic touches he would have given in sketches of characteristic humor, all with the freshness of his dawn upon them,—and mourn, O world of letters, for your loss! But the old man,—he for whom the light had gone out in darkness; over ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... preliminary analysis of his mind or heart, was that he wanted to be near her, very near her; and that he was miserable when this was not the case. If she was out of his sight for a moment the virtue seemed to have gone from him and he fell into the pathetic melancholy which he enjoyed in the days when he wrote a great deal of indifferent verse, and was burdened with the conviction that his mission in life was to make ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... quality as the output has increased in quantity. The sacrifices made by many Bengalees in humble circumstances to procure for their sons the advantages of what is called higher education are often pathetic, but the results of this mania for higher education, however laudable in itself, have been disastrous. Every year large batches of youths with a mere smattering of knowledge are turned out into a world that has ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... steamers as they sail from shore to shore are like giant theaters. Every trip is an impromptu drama where comedy, farce, and often startling tragedy offer large speaking parts. The revelation of human nature in the original package is funny and pathetic. Amusement is always on tap and life stories are just hanging out of the port-hole waiting to attack your sympathy or tickle your funny bone. But you 'd have to travel far to find the beginning of a story so heaped up with romantic interest as that of Sada San as ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... heard the story of the swindling of the countryman were several reporters for the great metropolitan afternoon papers, and as the burly policeman dragged the pathetic figure of the grocer's boy to the cell, one of these, a particularly clean-cut, wide-awake ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster
... of a young girl who, in those rigorous Calvinistic days, had her sweet young life overshadowed by the terror of God's wrath for what she considered her unbelief. A few extracts will give a good idea of Mr. Prince's impassioned, pathetic, and even dramatic style, and his apparently "trifling details" add vividness to the picture. His son besought him to dispense with the custom of a funeral oration in his case; but the feelings of the father were sacrificed to what he considered his duty to the youth of his congregation on the ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... of paper on which were jotted several items. There was a sketch written by Mary Reynolds, "The Freshman on the Top Floor," a pathetic little story of a lonely freshman. Gertrude Earle, a demure, dreamy-eyed girl, the daughter of a musician, was down for a piano solo. There was to be a sextette, a chorus and a troupe of dancing girls. Kathleen West had written a clever ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... welfare. These applied to a certain monk of exemplary purity of life and devotion, and urged him to do every thing he could to rescue the doctor from impending destruction. The monk began with him with tender and pathetic remonstrances. He then drew a fearful picture of the wrath of God, and the eternal damnation which would certainly ensue. He reminded the doctor of his extraordinary gifts and graces, and told him how different an issue might reasonably have been expected from him. Faustus listened attentively ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... the whir and chirp of night insects, and from the second story of a house they passed they heard the crude banging of a piano, and a woman's strident voice wailing, "She may have seen better da-a-ys," with a mighty effort to be pathetic. ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... foam. He had made a gallant fight, but the odds were against him. His ears were no longer flattened viciously against his head, but drooped forward piteously, and into his eyes came the look that spelled surrender. He had learned the hard and pathetic lesson of the brute creation, that man was the master. This strange being, who so easily defied his strength and thwarted his cunning, was stronger than he, and ...
— Bert Wilson in the Rockies • J. W. Duffield
... curtains pushed aside by the sahib, who very tenderly and skilfully raises in his arms the sick person inside, and supports him into the station. It is a gaunt scarecrow of a man, a skeleton of a creature, whose big pathetic eyes look dark in his hollow face. He is evidently very ill. He is half-carried across to a carriage next to ours that has been prepared for him, and is laid down on a couch on the seat, and it is not ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... descent from Timour, consolidated the states of India under a central government. His memoirs make one of the most fascinating books ever written. He lived a stirring and a strenuous life, and the world bowed down before him. His death was strangely pathetic, and illustrates the faith and the superstition of men mighty in material affairs but impotent before gods of their own creation. His son and the heir to his throne, Humayon, being mortally ill of fever, was given up to die by the doctors, ...
— Modern India • William Eleroy Curtis
... the merriest of the party. Before taking the fork or the sickle in hand, he would hitch up his soutane, and reveal a pair of still active sacerdotal legs in white linen drawers. The sight of the old man bending his back while reaping, his white beard brushing the golden corn, was pathetic or comic as the humour might seize the beholder. As gay as any of the cicadas that keep the summer's jubilee in the sunny tree-tops, he sings songs that have nothing in common with psalms, and he needs little provocation to dance. French has become an awkward language to ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... carried away the prize from AEschylus. He was a most prolific poet, and his writings, comprising all the subjects that human life, with its joys and sorrows, its hopes and disappointments, could furnish, are noted for their sweetness and pure and exquisite polish. He particularly excelled in the pathetic; and the most celebrated of the existing fragments of his muse, the "Lamentation of Dan'a-e," is a piece of this character. The poem is based upon a tradition concerning Danae, the daughter of Acris'ius, King of Argos, and her infant son, the offspring ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... a quiet, unassuming race, and, indeed, I am fain to confess, were not held in more esteem by mortals than are our sweet cousins whom children call 'Bird's-eyes.' But some one made known to the world that pathetic 'Legend of the Rhine,' in which we are described, then people began to perceive that we were pretty, lovely indeed,—and to make a great fuss about us; but such is the way of ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... we hear, Resonant, soft, pathetic, sweet; In ringing accents, calm and clear, He sways the thousands at his feet, With more than mortal eloquence, Or ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... pathetic. They asked her if she would not like to come down with them to the Indian School; and she looked wistfully and did not answer. Oh, God of Little Children, where are You? Are the Lambs outside ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... who were striving to overcome them and she hung on from day to day in her search with a dogged determination which set its teeth against admitting that the search was hopeless. Her little store of money was fast dwindling away; she looked into the face of every man in uniform with a pathetic earnestness that more than once ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... pause—then the bugle sang "TAPS"—translatable, this time, into "Good-bye, and God keep us all!" for taps is the soldier's nightly release from duty, and farewell: plaintive, sweet, pathetic, for the morning is never sure, for him; always it is possible that he is hearing it for the last ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... against the big stone stove, and his eyes dancing sideways through his glasses. Never did that "ding-dang-dong" sound more hateful than when le grand Bonzig was telling the tale of Bas-de-cuir's doings, from his innocent youth to his noble and Pathetic death by sunset, with his ever-faithful and still-serviceable but no longer deadly rifle (the friend of sixty years) lying across his knees. I quote from memory; what a gun ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... have acknowledged the supremacy of a will outside ourselves. We say, "we are not our own, we are bought with a price," the price of the Precious Blood. But if our acceptance is a reality and not a theory it will turn out to involve much more than we imagined at the first. The frequent and pathetic failures of those who have made profession of Christianity is largely accounted for by this,—that the demands of the Christian Religion on life turn out to be more searching and far-reaching than was supposed ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... thus: "To the rare Few who early in life have rid themselves of the Friendship of the Many, these pathetic papers ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... sculptured feet. They were turned together, half covering each other in pathetic shyness and fear. He looked at them a long time, fascinated. Then, in some pain, he put the picture away from him. ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... mind there was something heart-rending in the expression of that intent, innocent back, so surrendered to their gaze, so unconscious of its own pathetic curve. She wondered if it appealed to Anne in that way. She judged from the expression of her sister-in-law's face that it did not appeal to her in any way ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... of business, also, the time element exerts striking influence. To-day our land is filled with men who have sown the seed of thought and purpose, but whose harvest is of so high a quality that with long patience must they wait for the fruition. How pathetic the reverses of the last four years. The condition of our land as to the overthrows of its leaders answers to the condition in Poland when Kossuth and his fellow patriots, accustomed to life's comforts and its luxuries, went forth penniless exiles to accustom themselves to menial toil, ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... listening to. Amongst other things, coming up from Kroonstad, they had found the burnt remains of the mails destroyed by some of De Wet's minions a little while ago (some of mine were there, I know), and had amused themselves by reading the various scraps. Some of these, they told me, were very pathetic. In one, for instance, a poor old woman had apparently sent her son a packet of chocolate, bought with her last shilling, (she was just going into the Workhouse), and she hoped that it would taste as sweet as if she had paid a sovereign for it. Had they had any mails? No, not since they ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... unclose thy bounty-laden hand In generous dealing, where Is gathered in reunion each long-severed household band, And let no vacant chair Show where the strongest, brightest link In love's dear chain is broken— A symbol more pathetic than By ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard
... The reader will remember the romantic story of the English A'Becket; but it would seem our Scottish advocate was even more highly favoured. Nor is the romance in such cases limited to the ladies. I may refer to the pathetic story of Geoffrey Rudel, a gentleman of Provence, and a troubadour, who, having heard from the knights returned from the Holy Land of the hospitality of a certain countess of Tripoli, whose grace and beauty equalled her virtue, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume XXIV. • Revised by Alexander Leighton
... the saddest, most pathetic figures in all the Bible story, not because he was a villain or a murderer come to judgment, but because he was so good and fine, and so nearly perfect, "on ...
— "Say Fellows—" - Fifty Practical Talks with Boys on Life's Big Issues • Wade C. Smith
... he lay down by the wayside, and, using his burden for a pillow, fell into that dreamless sleep that kisses down his eyelids still. While yet in love with life and raptured with the world, he passed to silence and pathetic dust. Yet, after all, it may be best, just in the happiest, sunniest hour of all the voyage, while eager winds are kissing every sail, to dash against the unseen rock, and in an instant hear the billows roar over a sunken ship. For, whether in mid-sea or ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... rigor of absence, we agreed to correspond with each other, and the pathetic expressions these letters contained were sufficient to have split a rock. In a word, I had the honor of her not being able to endure the pain of separation. She came to see me ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... and great men who were to belong to the future shared in the exciting controversies, which were prolonged over a period of more than half a year. Clay was constantly on his feet, doing battle with a voice which gained rather than lost force from its pathetic feebleness. "I am here," he solemnly said, "expecting soon to go hence, and owing no responsibility but to my own conscience and to God." Jefferson Davis spoke for the extension westward of the Missouri Compromise ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... remarkable, that it is difficult to conceive that he was ever young; but Erskine cannot grow old; his spirit is still glowing and flushed with the enthusiasm of youth. When impassioned, his voice acquires a singularly elevated and pathetic accent; and I can easily conceive the irresistible effect he must have had on the minds of a jury, when he was in the vigour of his physical powers, and the case required appeals of tenderness or generosity. As a parliamentary ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... especially were they glad. Flanders is not a lovely land, and around the burg of Rubens it is perhaps least lovely of all. Corn and colza, pasture and plough, succeed each other on the characterless plain in wearying repetition, and, save by some gaunt gray tower, with its peal of pathetic bells, or some figure coming athwart the fields, made picturesque by a gleaner's bundle or a woodman's fagot, there is no change, no variety, no beauty anywhere; and he who has dwelt upon the mountains or amid ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... extasy of a father rejoicing at the escape of his son from destruction. In Crack, Dozey, Nipperkin, and other drunken characters, his drollery was irresistible. His intoxication displayed as much discrimination as his pathetic performances. Who can forget his stare in being detected in his fuddling as Dozey, and his plea for drinking to "wa-ash down your honour's health:" or his anti-polarity as Nipperkin, when his very legs seemed drunk beneath ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 534 - 18 Feb 1832 • Various
... consented to appear at the Glasgow theatre for his son's benefit. The play chosen was Payne's Brutus, in which the father took the part of "Brutus" and Charles Kean that of "Titus." The audience sat suffused in tears during the pathetic interview, till "Brutus" falls on the neck of "Titus," exclaiming in a burst of agony, "Embrace thy wretched father!" when the whole house broke forth into peals of approbation. Edmund Kean then whispered in his son's ear, "Charlie, we are doing the ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... confront the speaker, on whom his cold blue eyes, lightened now with a gleam of anger, rested. She was sitting at the foot of a big elm-tree, with her back resting against its trunk and her hands loosely clasped round her knees. She was very young, and the forlorn droop of her figure and the pathetic expression that was at that moment depicted upon her face made her look even younger than her years, ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... was conveyed to hers; and she practically gave up hope for anything better than the discovery and return of his remains. Her father, mother, and intimate friends tried in vain to rally her; but the conviction remained that she had read her lover's farewell words. In spite of the most pathetic and strenuous effort, she could not keep up any longer, and sobbed till she slept in ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... looking like a pathetic shadow of her former self as she comes down-stairs to fulfil an engagement with a cadet admirer. She neglects no duty of the kind towards Willy's friends and hers, but she is drooping and listless. Uncle Jack is worried about her; so, too, is mamma, though ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... wampum, they took my advice, and prepared to leave their country and people immediately. Their relatives accompanied them a short distance on their journey, and when about to part, their old uncle, the Tall Chief, addressed them in the following pathetic ...
— A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison • James E. Seaver
... convinced that good fortune had knocked at his door at last. And when he returned to Brackton's he was in an exultant mood. The old storekeeper gave him a nudge and pointed underhand to a young man of ragged aspect sitting gloomily on a box. Slone recognized Joel Creech. The fellow surely made a pathetic sight, and Slone pitied him. ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey
... enough to get married?" she asked in a pathetic little voice. Suddenly her face brightened. "But I don't mind; I'll keep house for you without any money; and storks always come to newly married people, I've ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... intermissions. But in course of time SEEBACH gives us the Garden scene, winning our frantic admiration by her inimitable tenderness and grace, and finally we reach that grandest scene ever written by dramatist, that most pathetic poem ever conceived by poet—the meeting of "FAUST" and "MARGARET" in prison. At last we are more than repaid for the dreary hours that have gone before. We have seen SEEBACH'S "MARGARET"—the most powerful, the most pathetic, the ...
— Punchinello Vol. II., No. 30, October 22, 1870 • Various
... ear. Her life was passed in gossiping and groaning. She pitied others and she pitied herself; she lamented her ill fortune and her stomach. When she had eaten too much she would say dramatically: "I am dying!" and nothing ever was so pathetic as her indigestion. She was constantly moved to tears: she wept indiscriminately for a maltreated horse, for someone who had died, for milk that had curdled. She wept over the various items in the newspapers, she wept for the ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... the Similes that are in all your celebrated Operas: The Swallow, the Moth, the Bee, the Ship, the Flower, &c. Besides, I have a Prison-Scene, which the Ladies always reckon charmingly pathetic. As to the Parts, I have observed such a nice Impartiality to our two Ladies, that it is impossible for either of them to take Offence. I hope I may be forgiven, that I have not made my Opera throughout unnatural, like those in vogue; for I have no Recitative; ...
— The Beggar's Opera - to which is prefixed the Musick to each Song • John Gay
... when her heart began to soften, she one day burst into tears and implored Mr. Ogram to prove his love, not by wildly impossible sacrifice, but simply by sending her to school, so that she might make herself less unworthy to think of him with pathetic devotion, and from a great distance, to the end of her days. To school, in very deed, she had been sent; that is to say, she had all manner of teachers, first in England and then abroad, during the couple of years before the birth of her child; and by this instruction Arabella ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... them over, with strong feelings, partly of sorrow and partly of indignation, at the folly and injustice of a world that could overlook such merit. One of them in particular, which I had always admired for the simple yet pathetic spirit of poetry in which it was written, I was then perusing. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... this pathetic missive, its success with her was complete, and she was for going immediately to the cupboard, and producing the money necessary for her darling son's release. But the carpenter Hayes was much more suspicious. "I don't know you, sir," said he ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... not so bad, after all," he answers, touching the soft garments with his fingers, and studying her. There is a lovely dead silk, with only a very slight garniture of crape; there is the tenderest gray, that looks like a pathetic sigh, and two or three in black, that have the air of youth, an indescribable style that only an artist could give. But the white ones are marvels. One has deep heliotrope ribbons, and another crapy material seems almost alive. There are plain mulls, ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... darns only matter for jest. But myself, I cannot laugh at them. I know the long hopes and fears that centre round the hired waiter; the long cost of the cream and the ice jelly ordered the week before from the confectioner's. But to me it is pathetic, not ridiculous. Heroism is not all of one pattern. Dr. Washburn, had the Prince of Wales come to see him, would have put his bread and cheese and jug of beer upon the table, and helped His Royal Highness to half. But my father and mother's tea was very weak that Mr. Jones or Mr. Smith ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... ships, with the sad music of funeral marches, the measured dip of oars, and the flutter of half-masted flags, the last sad rites were paid to the fallen officers. Perhaps the Indians under Tecumseh who had seen with stupid dismay the great battle of the rival squadrons, witnessed this pathetic spectacle too, before they sullenly withdrew into Canada after Proctor's army. There Harrison pursued them, and in his victory on the banks of the Thames, their mighty chieftain fell, and ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells
... to cast that infatuation—if he had ever been subjected to it—behind him, by reason of her influence over him since she had repeated to him the pathetic words of Mrs. Haddon, and he had gone straight aboard the ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Roy looked pathetic. "But I'm simply up to the eyes. The truth is, I can't be bothered. I'll turn up for the dancing at ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... From whose pathetic, soul-fed springs Seemed surging the Virgilian cry, The sense of tears ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... gentle and so pathetic as these are seldom met with; but curses—in the same strain probably as those to which the Council of Paris took exception—are extremely common. In fact, in some Houses, a manuscript invariably ended with an imprecation—more or less severe, according to the writer's ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... I saw a sight at once ludicrous and pathetic. Two little dragoons of the class of 1917, stripling boys of eighteen or nineteen at the most, walked across the public square; their uniforms were too large for them, the skirts of their great blue mantles barely hung above the dust of the street, ...
— A Volunteer Poilu • Henry Sheahan
... erect in the ring of the dead, no longer attempting to defend himself, either because he was weak with wounds, or because his ammunition was exhausted. There he stood silent and solitary, presenting one of the most pathetic yet splendid sights told of in the generation that he adorned. There was no more firing now, but the natives stole out of their cover and came up to the man quietly, peering at him half afraid. Then one of them lifted his assegai and drove it through ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... there is nothing to worry about when they break down.") Of Unicorns ("Excellent chaps, but so frightfully melancholy") which shone white in the sun and tossed their ivory horns like rapiers. Of a Dragon who, having no treasure to guard, got together a pathetic heap of colored pebbles in its cave. ("And really, he came to believe in time that they were absolutely priceless, and went about with a worried frown of responsibility on his brow!") David, in turn, told the Phoenix about the games he used to play when he lived ...
— David and the Phoenix • Edward Ormondroyd
... should differ in some way (usually in but a trivial detail) from the teaching of any other of his kind. The solemnity of their discussions and the heat of their dissensions about the minutiae of their creeds would be laughable were it not so pathetic.. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 146., January 21, 1914 • Various
... his shaking head, his boots caked brown with mud, the heels close together, the toes pointing upwards and outwards and swaying a little. Every quiver of the body betokened abject helplessness. The limp, swaying figure, clinging weakly to life, was a pathetic sight. ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... "shut to the door"; and we children got to understand by a sort of spiritual instinct (for the thing was too sacred to be talked about) that prayers were being poured out there for us, as of old by the High Priest within the veil in the Most Holy Place. We occasionally heard the pathetic echoes of a trembling voice pleading as if for life, and we learned to slip out and in past that door on tiptoe, not to disturb the holy colloquy. The outside world might not know, but we knew, whence came that happy light as of a new-born smile that always was dawning on my father's ...
— The Story of John G. Paton - Or Thirty Years Among South Sea Cannibals • James Paton
... been already noticed that they were Roman Catholics—all except Tui, who from his superior mental elevation looked down upon their beliefs with calm contempt, although really a greater heathen than any of them had ever been. It was quite pathetic to see how earnestly they endeavoured to maintain the form of worship to which they had been accustomed, though how they managed without their priest, I could not find out. Every evening they had prayers together, accompanied by many crossings and genuflexions, and wound up ...
— The Cruise of the Cachalot - Round the World After Sperm Whales • Frank T. Bullen
... him, and spoil him too, the false blackguard, to turn agin the family—them as has made him! I wondher what he's to get for swearing agin us?"—And then, after a pause, she added in a most pathetic voice "oh, Martin, to think of being dragged away to Galway, before the whole counthry, to be made a conspirather of! I, that always paid my way, before and behind, though only a poor widdy! Who's to mind the shop, I wondher?—I'm ...
— The Kellys and the O'Kellys • Anthony Trollope
... themselves drew up their own cases. Those who had settled this manner of proceeding well knew that the eloquence of advocates very often darkened the truth, and misled the judge. They were unwilling to expose the ministers of justice to the deceitful charms of pathetic, affecting orations. The Egyptians avoided this by making each party draw up the statement of his own case in writing, and they allowed a competent time for that purpose.[8] But to prevent the protracting of suits too long, each party was only allowed one reply. When all the evidence ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 398, November 14, 1829 • Various
... Granville Leveson is going to marry Lady Harriet Cavendish. Lady Bessborough resigns, I presume, in favour of her niece. I have not heard what are supposed to be the secret articles of the treaty, but it must be a curious document." It was in 1812, as I have said, that she wrote out the pathetic confession of what we must suppose to have been ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... Mr. Denis should have rushed on, but Mr. Denis did not rush on. The play stopped. Mr. Denis was not in the library, the improvised greenroom; Mr. Denis did not appear when his name was called in stentorian tones by Ralph, or in pathetic falsetto by Charles. In short, Mr. Denis was not forthcoming. A rush up-stairs on the part of most of the young men brought to light the awful fact that Mr. Denis had retired to his chamber, a prey to ...
— The Danvers Jewels, and Sir Charles Danvers • Mary Cholmondeley
... unspeakable sadness of wounded pride was on her beautiful features, and there was a fondness in the gesture with which she laid her fingers on these exotics and stooped over them, which gave to her solitude a sentiment of the pathetic. ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... prehistoric sea, wingless, voiceless. When Dick would fret now and then, the old sailor would always devise some means of amusing him. He made him fishing tackle out of a bent pin and some small twine that happened to be in the boat, and told him to fish for "pinkeens"; and Dick, with the pathetic faith of ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... walk along the streets is like a kind of nightmare, even when the Boches are not indulging in a spell of hate against the place. Talk of Pompeii—why, this puts it quite among the "also-rans." What a pathetic spectacle to see a whole city in ruins! Stupefaction and sadness at the wholesale destruction is my impression of this melancholy ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... elaborate arguments. The fullest exposition of Mr. Tryan's doctrine might not have sufficed to convince Janet that he had not an odious self-complacency in believing himself a peculiar child of God; but one direct, pathetic look of his had dissociated him ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... to speak with a little gesture of the hands that was quite involuntary and oddly pathetic, but she did not turn away from her audience. Throughout the deep silence that followed that amazing confession she stood quite straight and still, waiting, her face to the throng. A man was standing immediately behind her and she was aware of him, knew without turning that it was Saltash; ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... for the instant were busy looking over the papers, identifying each jewel, wondering if any were missing. They did not notice Billy till a gruff young voice rang out with a pathetic tremble in it: "That you Chief? This is Billy. Say, c'n I bother you to phone to Miss Severn an' ast her to tell m'yant I'm aw'wright? Yes, tell her I'll be home soon now, an' I'll explain. And Chief, I'm mighty sorry those two guys ...
— The City of Fire • Grace Livingston Hill
... remnants of tower and battlement, which afford footing to the wild vine on the Alpine promontory, form but a small part of the great serration of its rocks; and yet it is just that fragment of their broken outline which gives them their pathetic power, and historical majesty. And this element among the wilds of our own country I found wholly wanting. The Highland cottage is literally a heap of gray stones, choked up, rather than roofed over, with ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... be getting restless again, so they moved on once. more, and presently entered a hall where they found a stout lady with a powdered face and extremely short skirts, about to sing a pathetic song, which had been expressly written to suit ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... respects the most sublime and most pathetic of Campanella's sonnets. He is the Prometheus (see last line of No. I.) who will not slay himself, because he cannot help men by his death, and because his belief in the permanency of sense and thought makes him fear lest he should carry his sufferings ...
— Sonnets • Michael Angelo Buonarroti & Tommaso Campanella
... masterly manner. In The Claverings, too, there is a wife whose husband is a brute to her, who loses an only child—his heir—and who is rebuked by her lord because the boy dies. Her sorrow is, I think, pathetic. From beginning to end the story is well told. But I doubt now whether any one reads The Claverings. When I remember how many novels I have written, I have no right to expect that above a few of them shall endure even to the second ...
— Autobiography of Anthony Trollope • Anthony Trollope
... disease, to imitate which no healthy or sane person would, could, or durst attempt. James Montgomery will live by his smaller poems—his larger are long lyrics—and when was a long lyric any other than tedious? Hunt has sung many a joyous carol, and many a pathetic ditty, but produced no high or lasting poem. Pollok has aimed at a higher object than almost any poet of his day; he has sought, like Milton, to enshrine religion in poetic form, and to attract to it poetic admirers: he did so in good faith, and he expended great talents and a young life, in the ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Well, well, would I take more wine? Then go To her; she makes tea on the lawn These fine warm afternoons. And so We went whither my soul was drawn; And her light-hearted ignorance Of interest in our discourse Fill'd me with love, and seem'd to enhance Her beauty with pathetic force, As, through the flowery mazes sweet, Fronting the wind that flutter'd blythe, And loved her shape, and kiss'd her feet, Shown to their insteps proud and lithe, She approach'd, all mildness and young trust, And ever her chaste ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... anything so delightful, so mirth provoking, so pathetic, in a way, as "Seventeen." In my youth I was deprived of the knowledge of this book, for when I swam into the tide of literature, Booth Tarkington was in that world from which Wordsworth's boy came, bringing rainbows, ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... ladyship, with the most pathetic gentleness. "You are right, I dare say, from the worldly point of view. I can't take the worldly point of view. The worldly point of view hurts me." She turned, with impressive gravity, to the page. "You know where you will go, Jonathan, if ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... that the words assigned to the creatures of their genius are the very words they must have said, the only words they could have said, the actual words they assuredly did say. Mere literary power, mere poetic beauty, mere charm of passionate or pathetic fancy, we find in varying degrees dispersed among them all alike; but the crowning gift of imagination, the power to make us realize that thus and not otherwise it was, that thus and not otherwise it must have been, was given—except by exceptional fits and starts—to none ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... that blessed air of tranquillity which pervaded Minor Canon Corner, and that serenely romantic state of the mind—productive for the most part of pity and forbearance— which is engendered by a sorrowful story that is all told, or a pathetic ...
— The Mystery of Edwin Drood • Charles Dickens
... him curious. And, say, with that set, hard look in them narrow eyes, and the saggy droop to his mouth corners, he's almost pathetic. For the first time since he'd drifted across my path I didn't feel like pitchin' ...
— Shorty McCabe on the Job • Sewell Ford
... three games. It was pathetic to see how Mr Cupples's right hand, while he looked at the cards in his left, would go blindly flitting about the spot where his glass had always used to stand; and how, when he looked up unable to find it, his face shadowed over with ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald |
