"Tragic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... years have yet to pass, and again, on a summer morning, Queen Anne Boleyn will leave the Tower of London—not radiant then with beauty on a gay errand of coronation, but a poor wandering ghost, on a sad tragic errand, from which she will never more return, passing away out of an earth where she may stay no longer, into a presence where, nevertheless, we know that all is well—for all of us—and ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... who had accepted the office of intendant of Paris. Their heads were stuck upon spikes, and carried about the city; and it is upon this mode of punishment that Mr. Burke builds a great part of his tragic scene. Let us therefore examine how men came by the idea ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... the young people in all sorts of philosophic roles for the benefit of the industrial and military coalition. Nietzsche depicted in lines of fire the resurrection of heroism, his vision of the superman was that of an ardent soul, steeled by sufferings, meditating a tragic conception of life with serenity, and in his solitary individualism surmounting the infirmity of man and his own by the insistent will ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... personal property. Probably the assurance of Napoleon, the he had sought death on the battle-field but had not found it, was literally true; at any rate, the fate of the unhappy man, bowed down as he was both by physical and mental suffering, was so solemn and tragic that there was no room for hypocrisy, and that he had exposed himself to personal danger was admitted on all sides. Accompanied by Count Bismarck, he stopped at a small and mean-looking laborer's inn on the road to Donchery, where, sitting down on a ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... her father's house with a large envelope concealed inside her shopping bag. Opposition had merely strengthened Harriet's original resolution. She was no longer frightened. Ruth and Bab were absurd to have been so tragic ...
— The Automobile Girls At Washington • Laura Dent Crane
... the mythic national hero of the Germans, whose tragic fate is most powerfully described in the "Nibelungen Lied," and in a series of lays of the Icelandic Edda. A matchless warrior, a Dragon-killer and overthrower of Giants, who possesses a magic sword, he conquers the northern Nibelungs and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... eagerly, devouring her son with her eyes as he made play with capon and pasty and good nut-brown ale, talking betwixt mouthfuls and eliciting from his absorbed audience of one, now a little exclamation of horror at the tale of some tragic occurrence or narrow escape, and anon a hearty laugh at the recounting of some boyish frolic and escapade in one or another of the foreign cities visited in the course of the voyage. Supper over, they drew their chairs up before the fire and continued ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... my last sentence closed recalls inevitably the tragic figure of Lord Randolph Churchill. The adroitness, the courage, and the persistency with which between 1880 and 1885 he sapped Gladstone's authority, deposed Northcote, and made himself the most conspicuous man in the Tory Party, have been described ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... lie,' said Annette, with a tragic gesture of the hand, 'hear me. The window of our dressing-room happens—just happens, by God's providence to confute a fool—to command a view of Dr. Laurent's door. I saw you go in; I could even hear you knock. Do you think you can deceive ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... from Tacitus and Aristotle; with elegies, dithyrambics and Ossianic rhapsodies. As a satirist he possessed great merit, though he sins from an excess of severity, and is sometimes malignant and unjust. He is the chief tragic poet of the revolutionary period, and as Camille Desmoulins expressed it, he decorated Melpomene with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... for romance—for epic and tragic poetry—in the lives of those pioneer women! The lonely cabin in the depths of the forest; the father away; the mother rocking her babe to sleep; the howling of the wolves; the storm beating on the roof; the crafty savage lying in ambush; the war-whoop in the night; the attack ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... they found wanting, and yet young workers still come from the schools at fourteen with poor health, little available hand skill, unprepared to write business letters or to express themselves clearly either by tongue or pen, uninterested in the daily news except in personal or tragic events, unaware of municipal conditions affecting them, ignorant of the simple terms of business life, and with their arithmetic unavailable for use, even in the simple fundamental processes when complicated with details ...
— The Making of a Trade School • Mary Schenck Woolman
... but a single worker—in reality, only one among the daily toilers in the field, moulded physically perhaps in a finer shape than they, and limned in the lawyer's mental vision against a century of the brilliant if tragic history of his race. As he moved slowly along between the even rows, dropping from time to time a plant into one of the small holes dug before him, and pausing with the basket on his arm to settle the earth carefully with his foot, he seemed, indeed, as much the product of the soil upon which he ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... Margarita Mitchell, I suppose? As you like, O Queen! I'll shut up if my babble offends the royal ears. There! Don't look so tragic. I don't want to make myself a nuisance. But all the same it's depressing to see you looking like a mixture of Hamlet and Ophelia and Iphigenia and—and—Don Quixote. Was he tragic too? ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... sarcastic, suspicious glance, that might sour the ripest grapes in Chios," rejoined Eudora. "The comic writers are over-jealous of Aspasia's preference to the tragic poets; and I suppose she permitted this visit to bribe his enmity; as ghosts are said to pacify Cerberus with a cake. But hark! I hear Geta unlocking the outer gate. Phidias has returned; and he likes to have no lamp burn later than his own. We must quickly prepare ...
— Philothea - A Grecian Romance • Lydia Maria Child
... the whole world, that I have striven to set forth as fully as possible every incident, every misunderstanding, every collision of interests or feelings, that brought it to pass. No episode in the development of the nations of Europe is so tragic as this. That two peoples should, within the space of nine months, abjure their friendly relations and furiously grapple in a life and death struggle over questions of secondary importance leads the dazed beholder at first ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... natives wound up the bodies of the Frenchmen in native cloth and decently buried them, as they were in the habit of burying their own dead. The only inference which ought to have been drawn from this tragic occurrence was that heathen natives have a keen sense of justice, and that if men will go on the disproportionate principle of a life for a tooth, and shoot a man for a perfect trifle, they must abide by the consequences. It is almost certain ...
— Samoa, A Hundred Years Ago And Long Before • George Turner
... corruptions of the Roman Court, the personal qualities by which he—a foreigner and a mere monk—made himself for a short period the lawgiver, the prophet, and virtually the dictator of Florence—that Florence which was at the time the very gemmary of the Renaissance—his sudden fall and tragic death; all combine to attract toward him our admiration, pity, and love, and to leave upon our minds the impression of his extraordinary moral genius. And yet, though a spiritual side was not wanting in ...
— The Essentials of Spirituality • Felix Adler
... draw a veil over the tragic fate of the kettleful of blue crabs, but when Anne next saw them they were beautifully boiled, and red—red as the scarlet ...
— Judy • Temple Bailey
... fellow was killed—a wonder there were not more—and all hands were sorry for him; but tragedy and comedy so often bunk together, and men who adventure are more apt to dwell on the humorous than the tragic side of things. There was that about the code-books. The instructions to all ships are to get rid of the code-books if there is ever any likelihood of the enemy capturing the ship. The code-books are bound in thick lead covers. They are kept ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... was one of the spectators who had stood behind the shelter of a bush, surveying, with sorrowful countenance, the tragic scene. He was a short, but fine-looking and very athletic man—a champion Cornish wrestler, named William Jeff. He was a first-rate boatman, and a bold swimmer. Fortunately he also possessed a generous, daring heart. When this man saw Captain Phelps near the shore, he sprang forward, dashed into ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... had a new and strange experience—droll in one way, grotesque in another and when everything is said, tragic: at least an adventure. Harriet looks at me accusingly, and I have had to preserve the air of one deeply contrite now for two days (no easy accomplishment for me!), even though in secret I have ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... like a vise on his shoulders. He turned and looked into the eyes of the old man and saw a tragic light there ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... occasional day's work. With this he bought books for Priscilla, vaguely realizing that these would most interest her, but his selection often made her laugh. Piqued by her indifference, Jerry-Jo plotted a thing that led, later, to tragic results. Remembering the favour Priscilla had long ago shown for the book from Far Hill Place, he decided to utilize the taste of the absent owner, and the owner himself, for his own ends, not realizing that Priscilla had never connected ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... Princess who was to be Queen of Spain, I would follow her to Madrid, come what might, just for the joy of breathing the air she breathed, of seeing her drive past me in her carriage sometimes. I had wondered, knowing the traditions of our family, many of them tragic, when love would come to me. Now it had come quickly, in a moment; but not to go as it had come. It and I would be one, for always. The girl was little more than a child, but I knew she was to be the one woman for me; and that was ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... steeped in the same colours as the characters themselves; everything he touches seems to be filled with life and to speak— to look happy or sorrowful,— to reflect the feelings of the persons. His comic and humorous powers are very great; but his tragic power is also enormous— his power of depicting the fiercest passions that tear the human breast,— avarice, hate, fear, revenge, remorse. The great American statesman, Daniel Webster, said that Dickens had done more to better the condition of the English poor than all the statesmen ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... during the Free Silver craze of 1896, and the dark and tragic days that followed it the three or four succeeding years, the paper having stood, as it had stood during the Greenback craze, for sound money, was the property in danger. It cost more of labor and patience to save ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... sacred hymns and oratorios, he laid the foundation for all our modern music. When he died in the year 1750 he was succeeded by Mozart, who created musical fabrics of sheer loveliness which remind us of lace that has been woven out of harmony and rhythm. Then came Ludwig van Beethoven, the most tragic of men, who gave us our modern orchestra, yet heard none of his greatest compositions because he was deaf, as the result of a cold contracted during his ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... so rigid, so lasting, so indelible, that not all their tears could wash out a word of it, unless they took to themselves other mates, in which case their second state might be worse than their first. Free love—love in chains. How absurd it all was, and how tragic too. One might react back to the remaining choice—no love at all—and that was absurder and more tragic still, since man was made (among other ends) to love. Looking under her heavy lashes at her pretty ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... pity be your cue; for where a man is all pride, vanity, and personal aspiration, he goes through fire unshielded. In every part and corner of our life, to lose oneself is to be gainer; to forget oneself is to be happy; and this poor, laughable, and tragic fool has not yet learned the rudiments; himself, giant Prometheus, is still ironed on the peaks of Caucasus. But by and by his truant interests will leave that tortured body, slip abroad and gather flowers. Then shall death appear before him in an altered guise; no longer as a doom peculiar ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to herself, looking back on the years. Many people would have said that she had had no very happy time since that sudden moment of her father's death, but it did not seem to her, in retrospect, unhappy. There had been unhappy times, tragic times, but life was always bringing forward some magnificent moment, some sudden flash of splendour that made up for all the rest. How could you be bitter about people when you were all in the same box, all as ignorant, ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... light of heart in this tragic hour I would call this story the Adventure of the Lifted Fiance, but that would be so out of key with my emotions that I cannot bring myself to do it. I must content myself with a narration of the simple facts of ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs
... Phyl Sanderson's cry of horror that Healy heard. She had put her horse up the steep at a headlong gallop, had seen the whole furious struggle and the tragic end of it that witnessed two men hurled over the precipice into space. She slipped from the saddle, and sank dizzily to the ground, not daring to look over the cliff at what she would see far below. Waves of anguish shot through her and ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... crisis proportions—in female and child poverty, child abandonment, horrible crimes, and deteriorating schools. After hundreds of billions of dollars in poverty programs, the plight of the poor grows more painful. But the waste in dollars and cents pales before the most tragic loss: the sinful waste of human spirit and potential. We can ignore this terrible truth no longer. As Franklin Roosevelt warned 51 years ago, standing before this Chamber, he said, "Welfare is a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit." And ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... passages abounding in vivacity, in the colour and play of life.... The pith of the book lies in its singularly fresh and vivid pictures of the humours of the gold-fields,—tragic humours enough they are, too, here ...
— Robbery Under Arms • Thomas Alexander Browne, AKA Rolf Boldrewood
... of the old man—at one moment boasting ingenuously of his career, and at the next almost hysterical with woe—roused his pity in a very disconcerting manner, and from his sight the Lucas & Enwright factotum vanished utterly, and was supplanted by a tragic human being. But he had no idea how to handle the unexampled situation with dignity; he realized painfully his own lack of experience, and his over-mastering impulse was to get away while it was still possible to get away. Moreover, he ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... tragedy and comedy, made also originally to be sung, but which, in process of time, upon truer principles of nature, came to be acted and declaimed, were but super-inductions to the choruses, of which, in tragedy especially, the tragic-writers, could not well get rid, as being part ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... herself and was silent. In a little while she began to think with an almost tragic sense of pity of the withered and lonely old maid who walked beside her. She could pity thus profoundly because she could image herself in the like case; and though the figure she saw was far from being clear, her own terror of it and revolt from it told her how terrible it was. If she ...
— Aunt Rachel • David Christie Murray
... result is certain. It seems that the lad was stalked by a spy, one Garay, and was murdered by him. His body, they think, was thrown into the Hudson and was carried away. At least it was never found. A most tragic business. I could have loved that lad as if he had been my own son. It caused great grief to both Hardy and Huysman,—and to ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... possession of her and she sat staring at the papers strewn on her table, seeing a tragic picture of herself grown desolate and lone in the long years wherein she lost, one by one, the friends who had once loved her. Mrs. Nat's puzzled face rose vividly before her as it had looked across the studio table, and ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... There are, however, mysteries in the souls of Maggies. The drudge had probably been affianced oftener than any woman in Bursley. Her employers were so accustomed to an interesting announcement that for years they had taken to saying naught in reply but 'Really, Maggie!' Engagements and tragic partings were Maggie's pastime. Fixed otherwise, she might ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... became known that there was an organized committee for the purpose of dealing with criminals. It was about this time the case of John Jenkins came up and he was arrested and tried by the Committee, and condemned to be hanged. He was then hanged until he was dead. The tragic fate of Jenkins, and the determination manifested to deal severely with the villains had the effect of frightening many away. The steamers to Stockton and Sacramento were crowded with the flying rascals. The Sydney Coves and the more desperate characters remained. At this, ...
— California 1849-1913 - or the Rambling Sketches and Experiences of Sixty-four - Years' Residence in that State. • L. H. Woolley
... for the tough old politician of the Fifteenth Ward was laughing, at one of his own jokes probably, and looking up in the face of Mr. Blake, whose back was turned to me, in a way that entirely precluded all thought of any tragic expression in that quarter. Somewhat disgusted, I withdrew ...
— A Strange Disappearance • Anna Katharine Green
... perform a part; rehearse, spout, gag, rant; "strut and fret one's hour upon a stage"; tread the boards, tread the stage; come out; star it. Adj. dramatic; theatric, theatrical; scenic, histrionic, comic, tragic, buskined[obs3], farcical, tragicomic, melodramatic, operatic; stagy. Adv. on the stage, on the boards; on film; before the floats, before an audience; behind the scenes. Phr. fere totus mundus exercet histrionem [Lat][Petronius Arbiter]; "suit the action to the word, the word ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... Sanetomo appreciated the situation thus created there is much difficulty in determining. The sentiment of pity evoked by his tragic fate has been projected too strongly upon the pages of his annals to leave them quite legible. He had seen his elder brother and two of the latter's three sons done to death. He had seen the "removal" of several of his father's most trusted lieutenants. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... should never think of associating with the sources of Hampstead Ponds or any other folly. While in such scenes as those at the Fleet Prison, the author is clearly endeavouring to do much more than raise a laugh. He is sounding the deeper, more tragic ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... there could not be love between husband and wife, and it was counted a mark of low breeding for a husband to challenge his wife's right to her young knight's services, though sometimes we are told the husband risked this reproach, occasionally with tragic results. This mode of love, after being eloquently sung and practised by the troubadours—usually, it appears, younger sons of noble houses—died out in the place of its origin, but it had been introduced into Spain, and the Spaniards reintroduced it into Italy when they acquired ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... pause during which he surveyed his audience as if to determine the effect of his words; "as soon as the two young ladies who were so unfortunate as to make the mistake of connecting a tragic prospect with this affair have ...
— Campfire Girls in the Allegheny Mountains - or, A Christmas Success against Odds • Stella M. Francis
... that illness," said Mr. Cromering, meditating. "Did he do or say anything while you were with him that would throw any light on the subsequent tragic events of the night, for which he ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... in greater perplexity about justice than I was before I began to learn;' 'The rho in katoptron must be the addition of some one who cares nothing about truth, but thinks only of putting the mouth into shape;' 'Tales and falsehoods have generally to do with the Tragic and goatish life, and tragedy is the place of them.' Several philosophers and sophists are mentioned by name: first, Protagoras and Euthydemus are assailed; then the interpreters of Homer, oi palaioi Omerikoi (compare Arist. Met.) and the Orphic poets are alluded to ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... dry arches of Waterloo Bridge, to sufferers of a more poetic class. Whether his sympathies showed thereby that he had risen or fallen, let my readers decide each for himself. It is a credit to any man to feel for any human being; and Italy, as she is at this moment, is certainly one of the most tragic spectacles which the world has ever seen. Elsley need not be blamed for pitying her; only for holding, with most of our poets, a vague notion that her woes were to be cured by a hair of the dog who ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... but how were we supernaturally surprised into almost awful joy at beholding a mortal goddess! The house was crowded with hundreds more than it could hold, with thousands of admiring spectators who went away without a sight. This extraordinary phenomenon of tragic excellence! this star of Melpomene! this comet of the stage! this sun of the firmament of the Muses! this moon of blank verse! this queen and princess of tears! this Donellan of the poisoned dagger! this empress of pistol and dagger! ...
— English as She is Wrote - Showing Curious Ways in which the English Language may be - made to Convey Ideas or obscure them. • Anonymous
... generous impulse to free Raymer from an incubus. If it were the curse of the Midas-touch to turn all things to gold, it seemed to be his own peculiar curse to turn the gold to dross; to leave behind him a train of disaster, defeat, and tragic depravity. The plunge into the labor conflict had merely served to afford another striking example of his inability to break the evil spell, and Raymer could ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... you to tell me all about him. He interests me; but you see my sympathies are so intense, my imagination is so lively, that I don't trust my own impressions. They have misled me more than once!" And she gave a little tragic shudder. ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... contrast between conventional frauds, received as component parts of the great system of civilization, and the less deceptive invasions of the laws which discriminate the meum from the tuum, is tempting to a satire that is not without its justice. The tragic truths which lie hid in what I may call the Philosophy of Circumstance strike through our philanthropy upon our imagination. We see masses of our fellow-creatures the victims of circumstances over which they had no control,—contaminated in infancy ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Rambert finished for her, "I have sometimes protested to you that I was the victim of an abominable persecution, and that there was a tragic mystery in my life: in short, that if I was shut up here, it was because someone wanted me to be shut up. Come now, Berthe, has it never occurred to you that perhaps I ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... heroic in its surroundings: being flanked by the two castle-like wings abutting upon huge half-ruined archways, and having in its rear the scarred and broken mighty wall—that once was so gloriously magnificent and that now, perhaps, is still more exalted by its tragic grandeur of divine decay. And yet another touch of pathos, in which also was a tender beauty, was supplied by the growth of trees and shrubs along the base of the great wall. Over toward the "garden" exit was a miniature forest of figs and pomegranates, ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... murmured sympathetically. "But in my case it is different. You see—I am responsible for this whole tragic business!" ...
— The Day Time Stopped Moving • Bradner Buckner
... went on. The stout lady with the wig (and the excellent heart) personated the sentimental Julia from an inveterately tragic point of view, and used her handkerchief distractedly in the first scene. The spinster relative felt Mrs. Malaprop's mistakes in language so seriously, and took such extraordinary pains with her blunders, that they sounded more ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... history. He was no reader. Orion was fond of books, and Pamela; even little Henry had read more than Sam. But now, as he read, there awoke in him a deep feeling of pity and indignation, and with it a longing to know more of the tragic story. It was an interest that would last his life through, and in the course of time find expression in one of the rarest ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... consolidated. No man who is not himself under God's moral and spiritual instruments could believe how often in the quietest, clearest, and least tempestuous day he has the chance and the call to say, Yea, Lord, Thy will be done. And, then, when the confessedly tragic days and nights come, when all men admit that this is Gethsemane indeed, the practised soul is able, with a calmness and a peace that confound and offend the bystanders, to say, to act so that he does not need to say, Not my ...
— Bunyan Characters - First Series • Alexander Whyte
... harbor of Nagasaki that there was a settlement of Dutch Christians for some hundreds of years. An indiscreet letter captured on the way to Holland by a Portuguese adventurer and maliciously sent to Japan, caused the tragic destruction of the Christian colony. The enmity of Christian nations anxious to add to their properties in the islands in remote seas was so strong that any one preferred that rather than his neighbors might ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead
... which this little scene might have been called the tragic culmination, had taken place in the life and family of William Gerhardt, a glass-blower by trade. Having suffered the reverses so common in the lower walks of life, this man was forced to see his wife, his six children, and himself dependent for the necessaries of life upon whatever windfall of ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... with dignified gestures, she took a tragic-comic farewell of the home which she and her family ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer
... content to make butter, gossip, and lay up money all her days; or do what poor Matty Stone had done, try to crush and curb her needs and aspirations till the struggle grew too hard, and then in a fit of despair end her life, and leave a tragic story ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... again fell all in a heap. It was apparent that some time must elapse before this recollection, once risen in her mind, could settle to rest again. After what seemed to us hours she slowly raised herself again and continued her tragic narrative. ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and to leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior to their tormentors. Sganarelle, M. ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... tragic; preferred the Catskills with a dull old aunt to Vienna with a gay young father. John went alone, sore from the quarrel and rather adrift. In Vienna, he met Paula Carresford, an American opera singer, young, extraordinarily beautiful, ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... a tragic tale, and would take many chapters in the telling. I may not give them here. Let ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... starting a most tragic event occurred. Our fleet was assembled around the palace, and the signal was given to rise slowly to a considerable height before imparting a great velocity to the electrical ships. As we slowly rose we saw the immense crowd of giants beneath us, with upturned faces, watching our departure. ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... had hoped to gather any information concerning Brian's history from the ravings of his delirium he was mistaken. Brian's mind ran upon the incidents of his childhood, upon the tour that he had made with his father when he was a boy, upon his school-days; not upon the sad and tragic events with which he had been connected. He scarcely ever mentioned the names of his mother or brother. Like Falstaff, when he lay a-dying, be "babbled of ...
— Under False Pretences - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... description of himself in Berlin and a head-waiter. He evidently expected his advent to cause a profound sensation. I found out why: he was the official welcomer to Evian. Twice a day, for an infinity of days, he had entered in solemn fashion, faced the same tragic assembly, made the same fiery oration, gained applause at the climax of the same rounded periods and allowed his voice to break in the same rightly timed places. Having kept his audience in sufficient suspense as regards his mission, he unwrapped the muffler from his neck, removed his coat, ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... to touch such chord be thine, Restore the ancient tragic line, And emulate the notes that wrung From the wild harp, which silent hung By silver Avon's holy shore, Till twice a hundred years roll'd o'er; When she, the bold Enchantress, came, With fearless hand and heart on flame! From the pale willow snatch'd the ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel , Volume I. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various
... a tragic actor, and as such an interpreter of Shakespeare on, it is believed, the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... that all these tragic and jealous remarks about A—— were written under the influence of romantic reading, and that I only half believed them while I was writing, exciting myself for the pleasure of it, and I greatly regret ...
— Marie Bashkirtseff (From Childhood to Girlhood) • Marie Bashkirtseff
... Funerals, Rousseau Sham-Funerals, and the Baptism of Petion-National-Pike! Nevertheless this Procession has a character of its own. Tricolor ribands streaming aloft from pike-heads; ironshod batons; and emblems not a few; among which, see specially these two, of the tragic and the untragic sort: a Bull's Heart transfixed with iron, bearing this epigraph, 'Coeur d'Aristocrate, Aristocrat's Heart;' and, more striking still, properly the standard of the host, a pair of old Black Breeches (silk, they say), extended on cross-staff high ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... so tragic in the words of the boys that Mr Rogers and his sons seized their guns, and telling Coffee and Chicory to lead, they went straight for the forest-land towards which Coffee said he had seen ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... acquired a rapacious crook. His open, tar-saturated collar, attached to a shirt that had once been red, exposed his dry collar bones and the thick black hair on his breast. About his whole figure there was something more tragic than before. Red sparks seemed to fly from his inflamed eyes and light the lean, dark face with the fire of unconquerable, melancholy rage. Sofya paled and was silent, her gaze riveted on the peasant. Ignaty shook his head and screwed up his ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... against myself," says Father; "you may quote Beza against Beza, and Erasmus against Erasmus; but that will not shake the eternal Laws of Purity and Truth. But, mind you, Ned, never did anie reach a more lofty or tragic Height than this Child of Fancy; never did any represent Nature more purely to the Life; and e'en where the Polishments of Art are most wanting in him, he pleaseth with a certain wild and ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... it up and glanced over it as I sat there; but, you know, Mag, the heavy-weight plays never appealed to me. I don't go in for the tragic—perhaps I saw too much of the real thing ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... fallen on that occasion, and I remember of detesting the name of Cumberland with more than infant hatred. Mr. Curle, farmer at Yetbyre, husband of one of my aunts, had been present at their execution; and it was probably from him that I first heard these tragic tales which made so great an impression on me. The local information, which I conceive had some share in forming my future taste and pursuits, I derived from the old songs and tales which then formed the amusement of a retired ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume I (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... reforms, simply because he was the son of his father. The feminine society world welcomed him gladly, because he was rich, distinguished, a good match, and almost a newcomer, with a halo of romance on account of his supposed death and the tragic loss of his wife. Besides this the general opinion of all who had known him previously was that he had greatly improved during these last five years, having softened and grown more manly, lost his former affectation, pride, and contemptuous irony, and acquired ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the dark, old-fashioned wall-paper was covered by a large map of ancient Rome, the work of some German scholar. Cleric had ordered it for me when he was sending for books from abroad. Over the bookcase hung a photograph of the Tragic Theatre at Pompeii, which he had given me ...
— My Antonia • Willa Cather
... tragedians to meddle with contemporary events. To three serious dramas, or a trilogy—at first connected together by a sequence of subject more or less loose, but afterwards unconnected and on distinct subjects, through an innovation introduced by Sophocles, if not before—the tragic poet added a fourth or satyrical drama; the characters of which were satyrs, the companions of the god Dionysus, and other historic or mythical persons exhibited in farce. He thus made up a total of four dramas, or a tetralogy, which he got up ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... Plautus, among the Romans. Thus, Sophocles gives to OEdipus the true qualities of a king, in both those plays which bear his name; but in the latter, which is the "OEdipus Coloneus," he lets fall on purpose his tragic style; his hero speaks not in the arbitrary tone; but remembers, in the softness of his complaints, that he is an unfortunate blind old man; that he is banished from his country, and persecuted by his next relations. The present French poets are generally accused, that wheresoever ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... innocent be protected. No one can conceive, unless he has been identified, as a physician, with one of the large metropolitan hospital clinics, of the extent of this class of disease, and of the frightful suffering caused, and innocent lives ruined, by infection conveyed in this way. It is a tragic corollary to the marriage vow "for better ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... sudden, wonderful arousing of the French under their peasant heroine, Jeanne d'Arc, and her tragic capture and execution.[35] At last even the French peasantry were roused; and the French nobles forgot their private quarrels and turned a united front against the invaders. The leaderless English lost battle after battle, until of all France they ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... through the long centuries of its tragic history, has stood on the ash-mound of its national humiliation. Plundered, vilified, and persecuted, a nation of sorrows, and acquainted with grief, from whom men have hid their faces in aversion not concealed, Israel has yet clung with a grip that nothing could ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... with Nolla, and when she saw the happy smiles on both faces, she groaned, and turned to go to the library where, so little time before, the tragic lover had escaped with a determination to never look at another girl as long as he lived—excepting ...
— Polly's Business Venture • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... tragic day came to a close, with the plains light long after the sun had gone down, and the Ammons settlement gone, and a devastating sense of emptiness. Ida Mary and I realized that we had no place to go. With typical frontier ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... as a refugee, as a persecuted woman, with tears in her eyes. She had told him a tragic story of Thugut's tyranny and wanton lust. Because she had refused to submit to the voluptuous desires of the Austrian minister, he had sworn to ruin her, and his love had turned into furious hatred. She further stated the minister ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... said Oliver, rising from his low seat and confronting her, "don't be so tragic—so intense. Plump little women like you shouldn't go in for tragedy. Smile, Rosy; it is your metier to smile. You have won a good many games by smiling. You must smile ...
— Brooke's Daughter - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... Frenchmen's cramped quarters, and in the spring only eight followers were alive to greet the ship which came with new colonists and supplies. It took a soul of iron to continue the project of nation-planting after such a tragic beginning; but Champlain was not the man to recoil from the task. More settlers were landed; women and children were brought along; land was broken for cultivation; and in due course a little village grew up about the ...
— The Seigneurs of Old Canada: - A Chronicle of New-World Feudalism • William Bennett Munro
... hissing whisper grew yet more tragic, "I brought Helen Louise and Peter home with me too, they were with ...
— The Heart of Arethusa • Francis Barton Fox
... wrong things. "Know ye not that whoever will be the friend of the world is the enemy of God?" When Saul was found in a certain company he had ceased to respect himself. This is why he was found there; and these two things were more than enough to sweep his life to its tragic close. How many of us have read this man's life-finish? Let me suggest to you something new to read. A story that has in it more elemental material than half the fiction that ever was written, or half the facts that mortgage ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... in flame shall be burning, The soul to its heaven returning. (with tragic emphasis) Great loss! but the world yet must bear it, When ...
— La Boheme • Giuseppe Giacosa and Luigi Illica
... more closely at the ethics of love at the time of the Renaissance, we are struck by a remarkable Contrast. The novelists and comic poets give us to understand that love consists only in sensual enjoyment, and that to win this, all means, tragic or comic, are not only permitted, but are interesting in proportion to their audacity and unscrupulousness. But if we turn to the best of the lyric poets and writers of dialogues, we find in them a deep and spiritual passion ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... elderly and decrepit people, and among them a stately ruin of a woman on a very large scale, with a profile—for I did not see her front face—that stamped itself into my brain as a seal impresses hot wax. By the tragic gesture with which she took a pinch of snuff, I was sure it must be Mrs. Siddons. Her brother, John Kemble, sat behind,—a broken-down figure, but still with a kingly majesty about him. In lieu of all former achievements, ...
— P.'s Correspondence (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... fortress. 'Trust in Him at all times.' Build your house under the walls of the Eternal Help. Live in the Presence. Find the attitude of faith, and the act of faith will be simple. Trust in Him through every hour, and when a tragic hour comes one step shall take you ...
— The Threshold Grace • Percy C. Ainsworth
... Miss M'Crea, her fall wanted not the tragic display you have laboured to give it, to make it as sincerely abhorred and lamented by me, as it can be by the tenderest of her friends. The fact was no premeditated barbarity. On the contrary, two chiefs who had brought her off for the purpose of security, ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... mutiny. I knew the man well, and know that he knew the ruffianly element he had to deal with in the first lot of colonists, and dealt with it in a proper and summary manner. Had there been half a dozen more such men as himself and Villacroix to back him up, the tragic ending of the ill-fated expedition ...
— Ridan The Devil And Other Stories - 1899 • Louis Becke
... native religion, they are as reticent as their northern brethren, if not more so. "I would rather be hanged than tell anything," said one shaman to me. Still, all things come to him who waits. This very man, who was so tragic, became my friend, and when we parted he asked me to write my name on a piece of paper, that he might salute me every morning. A name is a sacred thing, and they never tell their ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... horseback over the campagna or on foot through the Rome of the middle ages, and sat once more on the steps of Ara Coeli, as had become with him almost a superstition, like the waters of the fountain of Trevi. Rome was still tragic and solemn as ever, with its mediaeval society, artistic, literary, and clerical, taking itself as seriously as in the days of Byron and Shelley. The long ten years of accidental education had changed nothing for him there. He knew no more in 1868 than in 1858. He had learned nothing whatever ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... A tragic fear shines in the cat's eyes. "What are you going to do to me now?" it seems to ask, lying on a rubbish-heap, a prey to mange and hunger—and feverishly it waits the new torture that will shatter its ...
— Barks and Purrs • Colette Willy, aka Colette
... with his brother down the broad Upper Ramp to the business section of Sun Lake City, he could not shake off the feeling of helpless anger, the growing conviction that Roger Hunter's death involved something more than the tragic accident in space that Major Briarton ...
— Gold in the Sky • Alan Edward Nourse
... he cried, and stretched out his arm toward her across the table. He saw no one but her, spoke to none but her. There was a fierce yearning and a hopelessness in his voice and bent head and outstretched arm that lent for the time a tragic dignity to the pageant, evil and ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... arm, he was about to continue, but he saw what stopped him. He saw the last move in Frank Armour's tragic- comedy. He and Marion left the room as quickly as was possible to him, for, as he said himself, he was "slow at a quick march"; and a moment afterwards the wife heard without demur her husband's tale of ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... this movement Were not my own. Within me still remains A reverence for my mother and her freedom! 'Twas he—'Twas he by whom my soul's possessed, Who sprang upon you with this tragic force! Thank God! I'm saved! The Corsican ...
— L'Aiglon • Edmond Rostand
... his face again, that all that kindness and affection is gone out of my life, is a great blow. No friend could leave such a blank to me as that old and faithful one, though the death of younger ones might be more tragic; but so many things seem gone with him into the grave. Many indeed will mourn that kind, wise, steadfast man—Antiqua fides. No one nowadays will be so noble with such unconsciousness and simplicity. I have bought two Coptic turbans to make a black dress out of. ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... Now it is revealed, this secret so full of horror, as the tragic poet says. Now, my daughter, learn from my lips how you may alleviate this misfortune, so far as it ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a tragic mask, the club of Hercules, or a sword. She wears the cothurnus, and her head is wreathed ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... bursting, he started up and fell forward on his face unconscious. Some one, a bit more brutal than the rest, said, "It 's five dollars' fine every time a nigger faints," but no one laughed. There was something too portentous, too tragic in ...
— The Sport of the Gods • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... of the centuries.... Their liberation is certain; a little more effort, a little more enlightenment and it will come. Out of the richness of our own freedom must we give aid to these sisters of ours in Asia. When I review the slow, tragic struggle upward of the women of the West I am overwhelmed with the awfulness of the task these Eastern women have assumed. They must follow the vision in their souls as we have done and as other women before us have done. My heart yearns to give them aid ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... to descend and annihilate this forward girl from a land of barbarians. Finding his deities failed to respond, he threatened to cast his unworthy body upon the point of a sword, if Zura cut another bud. But I knew, if Ishi's love of flowers failed to prevent so tragic an end, his love of ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... Fehmgerichte; originally organised to redress the wrongs of tyranny, it has become a gigantic instrument of oppression. The Archbishop of Cologne is the actual president of the order, not in his capacity as an elector, nor as archbishop, but because he is Duke of Westphalia, where this tragic court ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... his face at this moment resembled the tragic mask much more than the comic. But Miss Garland was not looking at him; she had taken up her ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... Brockenham, severely shocked by the tragic circumstances of William Day's death, recovered quickly from the blow, to say that the death had been the best thing which could happen to the family. To be rid of such a man, to have no more attaching ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... pickle. And it won't make me sick. There's seven of us to have a bite, and one bite wouldn't give anybody's stomach a pain. Oh, Miss Mary, you ain't Miss Lizzie Bettie Pryor. Please don't tell me not to get it. Please don't!" And the little fingers twisted and untwisted in tragic intensity of appeal. ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... to Cleopatra Indignation of the Romans Antony gives up his Parthian expedition Returns to Alexandria Contest with Octavius Battle of Actium Wisdom of Octavius Death of Antony Subsequent conduct of Cleopatra Nature of her love for Antony Immense sacrifices of Antony Tragic fate of Cleopatra Frequency of suicide at Rome Immorality no bar to social position in Greece and Rome Dulness of home in Pagan antiquity Drudgeries of women Influence of women on men Paganism never recognized ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... window, feeling, for an instant, faint and sick. In a few moments I returned, and looked out again. Both the fallen ones had regained their feet, and passed out of sight, and Biddy, who had witnessed the last scene in this half comic, half tragic performance, was giving the pavement a plentiful coating of ashes ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... to turn from summer pic-nics to shipwrecks; but every reader knows how often, even in the midst of the world's pleasures and gaieties, mankind is startled by thrilling stories of the tragic experiences of some of ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... scenes, tragic and humorous, that have been enacted within this old yellow house on the corner would fill a volume. A vivid picture of the social and public life of the old time might be painted by a skillful hand, using the two Earl of Halifax inns for a background. The painter ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... This tragic scene, which occurred in 1570, closes the history of Novgorod as an independent State. Its real independence had long since ceased to exist, and now the last spark of the old spirit was extinguished. The Tsars could not suffer even a shadow of political independence to exist within ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace |
