"Wretchedness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were not so particular about North and South Dakota, in those days—to take up a claim on Sweetwater, Wyoming. Judith gave scant promise of the beauty that in later life became at once her dower and her misfortune, that which was as likely to bring wretchedness as happiness. In Wyoming she was destined to find an old friend, Mrs. Atkins, who, as the bride of the young lieutenant, had been present at the marriage of Sally Tumlin and Warren Rodney, and who had always ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... for everyone. And to fill the cup of wretchedness to overflowing, the rain, beginning with a drizzle, ended with a downpour. Consultations took place between men who had not spoken to one another for weeks. Fred offered to go on, at all events to Salt Lake City, if Nelson the Canadian and Jacob would go with him. ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the first revelation of that glance would contain something of grief, wretchedness, remorse. The fisherman's countenance wore a shadow of annoyance, but it was expressive, above all, of a childish ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... wretched. But I am glad to say that their wretchedness did not make them forget their manners, as it does sometimes, even with grown-up people, who ought to know ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... features. The greyhound seemed to feel for the troubles of his mistress, for he fawned upon her, as if to kiss her. The solitary woman pressed the little creature, which had come with her from her home, closely to her bosom; for an unwonted sense of wretchedness weighed upon her heart, and she felt as lonely, friendless, and abandoned, as if she were driving alone—alone—over a wide and shoreless sea. She shuddered, as if she were cold—for she thought of her husband, the man who here in the desert should have been all in all to her, but whose presence ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... rich, gathered at back gates by a horde of half-naked children, who all told varieties of one woeful tale. Here, too, you could be drunk for five cents, and be lodged for three, with men, women, and children of all colors lying about you. It was this hideous mixture of black and white and yellow wretchedness which made the place so peculiar. The blacks predominated, and had mostly that swollen, reddish, dark skin, the sign in this race of habitual drunkenness. Of course only the lowest whites were here—rag-pickers, ...
— The Autobiography of a Quack And The Case Of George Dedlow • S. Weir Mitchell
... issue of that punishment, frightful subjects of exclusive interest to themselves; and the art of fiction in which they finally delight is only the more studied arrangement and illustration, by colored fire-lights, of the daily bulletins of their own wretchedness, in the prison calendar, the police ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... my life, but our lives, Amelie. We have crossed the threshold of this house together for the last time. We go no more out to look upon a world fair and beautiful to see, but so full of disappointment and wretchedness to have experience of!" ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... friendly face, And is a terror only at a distance; For as the line of life conducts me on 95 To Death's great court, the prospect seems more fair. 'Tis Nature's kind retreat, that's always open To take us in when we have drained the cup Of life, or worn our days to wretchedness. In that secure, serene retreat, 100 Where all the humble, all the great, Promiscuously recline; Where wildly huddled to the eye, The beggar's pouch and prince's purple lie, May every bliss be thine. 105 And ah! bless'd spirit, wheresoe'er thy flight, Through rolling worlds, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... continued his efforts as president to win the approval of the people by public works. He recognized the necessity of aiding the working classes as far as possible, and protecting them from poverty and wretchedness. During a dearth in 1853 a "baking fund" was organized in Paris, the city contributing funds to enable bread to be sold at a low price. Dams and embankments were built along the rivers to overcome ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... emotion again overcame me, and with my hands extended in entreaty, I turned from one to another, beseeching them to spare me in the name of common humanity, for the sake of all that they held dear. I thought by this time they must be moved to pity, thrilled with sympathy for my wretchedness; accordingly I called to witness the Eye of Justice and the Light of Day, and intrusted my case to the providence of God, when lifting up my eyes I discovered that the whole assembly was convulsed with laughter, not excepting my own kind ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... Marseilles,(17) where they ended their days in close captivity, and had leisure to ponder on the grievousness of their crimes. The wicked wife, in the absence of her husband, continued in her sinful ways even more than before, and at last died in wretchedness. ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... gently, and there was no insincerity in his gentleness. He was profoundly moved by the change in the girl's appearance. At sight of him she had forced a smile; but it lit up her wretchedness like a candle-flame ...
— The Reef • Edith Wharton
... PATRICK. Oh, sirs, if wretchedness Can move most hearts to pity man's distress, I will not think that here A heart can be so cruel and severe As to repel a wretch from out the wave. Pity, for God's sake, at ...
— The Purgatory of St. Patrick • Pedro Calderon de la Barca
... and lovely to be kind; But charity should not be blind; For as to wretchedness ingrate, You cannot raise it from its ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... could ascertain, he took a sudden freak to emigrate. He had inherited a modest fortune, and now maintained himself as cashier in a large tea importing house in the city. He read the newspapers diligently, apparently with a view to convincing himself of the universal wretchedness of mankind in general and the American people in particular, had a profound contempt for ambition of every sort, believed nothing that life could offer worthy of an effort, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... inscription to commemorate this extraordinary instance of true worth; which should make some people in Scotland blush, while, though mean themselves, they strut about under the protection of great alliance, conscious of the wretchedness of numbers who have lost by them, to whom they never think of making reparation, but indulge themselves and their families in most unsuitable ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... beginning nor end, a living which is neither of this world nor of the next. The misery which checks the pulse and thrills the heart with pity in one's common walks about the great cities of Europe is hardly so saddening as the nameless, mocking wretchedness of these women, to whom poverty were a luxury, and houselessness as a draught ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... of wages, one terrible source only of so many evils, and often of so many vices, is general, especially among women; and, again this is not private wretchedness, but the wretchedness which afflicts whole classes, the type of which we endeavor to develop in Mother Bunch. It exhibits the moral and physical condition of thousands of human creatures in Paris, obliged to subsist on a scanty ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... carriages and special trains. Then he had come to scent danger and had grown wary; trying to put her off with generalities, such as the inability of human beings to fly from their own selves, and irrelevancies such as the amount of poverty and wretchedness to be observed in the east of London; refusing to discuss France, which she was always getting to as the first step towards England, except in as far as it was a rebellious country that didn't like kings; pointing out with no little temper that she had already seen ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... doctrine of yesterday; monks and nuns wandered by hedge and highway, as missionaries of discontent, and pointed with bitter effect to the fruits of the new belief, which had been crimsoned in the blood of thousands of English peasants. The English people were not yet so much in love with wretchedness that they would set aside for the sake of it a princess whose injuries pleaded for her, whose title was affirmed by act of parliament. In the tyranny under which the nation was groaning, the moderate men of all creeds looked to the accession of ...
— The Reign of Mary Tudor • James Anthony Froude
... or through their ignorance in not taking notice of their grievance and danger of it, contempt, supine negligence, extenuation, wretchedness and peevishness; they undo themselves. The citizens, I know not of what city now, when rumour was brought their enemies were coming, could not abide to hear it; and when the plague begins in many places ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... been a hurricane in the night. The weed- grown tile-roofs were still dripping, and from lofty brick and low adobe walls a rising steam responded to the summer sunlight. Upstreet, and across the Rue du Canal, one could get glimpses of the gardens in Faubourg Ste.-Marie standing in silent wretchedness, so many tearful Lucretias, tattered victims of the storm. Short remnants of the wind now and then came down the narrow street in erratic puffs heavily laden with odors of broken boughs and torn flowers, skimmed the little pools of rain-water in the ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... ago, her patience completely worn out, she had told him not to come home any more. This was the last straw to Parrot's own wretchedness. He went to a chemist, purchased some oxalic acid, dropped it into a pint of beer and drank it; stumbling into the street, overcome by pain and gasping for breath, he fell to the ground. The police picked him ...
— The Angel Adjutant of "Twice Born Men" • Minnie L. Carpenter
... tragedy of his circumstances. That was nothing to the public. He must give pleasure to the public, and not explanations and excuses. But genius, goodness, many friends, no enemy, the consciousness of imparting enjoyment to multitudes, and to no man wretchedness, a heart alive with all that is tender and gentle, and strong to manful and noble purpose and achievement,—these are grand compensations,—compensations for even more ills than Hood was heir to; and with such ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... once cheerful residence we had been agitated by many melancholy forebodings. Upon entering the now desolate building we had the satisfaction of embracing Captain Franklin, but no words can convey an idea of the filth and wretchedness that met our eyes on looking around. Our own misery had stolen upon us by degrees and we were accustomed to the contemplation of each other's emaciated figures, but the ghastly countenances, dilated eyeballs, and sepulchral voices of Captain Franklin and those with ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin
... borderline of Szech'wan and Yuen-nan. The latter is supposed to be one of the most ill-nurtured and desolate provinces of the Empire, mountainous, void of cultivation when compared with Szech'wan, one mass of high hills conditioned now as Nature made them; and the people, too, ashamed of their own wretchedness, ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... weeks of his imprisonment, the murderer of old man Colton had maintained a lightsome air, but as the time for his trial drew near he appeared to lose the command of that self-hypnotism which had seemed to extract gayety from wretchedness. To one who has been condemned to death there comes a resignation that is deeper than a philosophy. Despair has killed the nerve that fear exposed, and nothing is left for terror to feed on. But Brooks had not this deadened resignation, ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... knee before it, and a swarm of flies zooned angrily away. He put out his hand, but he was afraid to touch, and he only added panic to the bird's wretchedness. ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... too for joy at everything—the children, and the rags, and the draughty hut, and all. And I was so astounded I didn't know where to look. Happy—in all that misery and wretchedness! Were they so utterly without feeling, then, that they could not cry? But now I understand it all. I know what made those poor folk happy in it all: they had found that thing we spoke of—the great secret. And it made the hut a palace for them, ...
— The Song Of The Blood-Red Flower • Johannes Linnankoski
... fire breaks out or weight-strained rafters fall, Towards some egress struggle doubtfully; Though we through silent midnight may address The mind to many a speculative page, Yearning to solve our wrongs and wretchedness, Yet duty and wise passiveness are won,— (So it hath been and is from age to age)— Though we be blind, by ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... willow's bending boughs, at earliest dawn In the noon-tide hour, and when the night-mists rose, I have remembered you: and when the noise Of loud intemperance on my lonely ear Burst with loud tumult, as recluse I sat, Pondering on loftiest themes of man redeemed From servitude, and vice, and wretchedness, I blest you, HOUSEHOLD GODS! because I loved Your peaceful altars and serener rites. Nor did I cease to reverence you, when driven Amid the jarring crowd, an unfit man To mingle with the world; still, still my heart Sighed for your sanctuary, and inly pined; And loathing human converse, ...
— Poems • Robert Southey
... had passed out of that loathsome cabin, never to return; or that Mrs. Murphy, too ill to leave her bed, and Keseberg, too lame to walk, by reason of a deep cleft in his heel, made by an axe, would have to stay alone in that abode of wretchedness? ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... indeed, to lie down. The weather was also unfavorable. The vessel tossed and pitched most fearfully during a succession of violent squalls, accompanied by thunder and lightning. I cannot describe the wretchedness of these unhappy convicts; sick, and surrounded by filth, they were huddled together in the most disgusting manner. The heat was at times unbearable. There were men of sixty—quiet and inoffensive old men—placed with others who were as accomplished villains as the world could produce. ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... him, but simply rested her last hopes on him, and could not get over the thought that even this man had at once, at the first breath of slander, turned away from her with contempt! Who can say what killed her; wounded pride, or the wretchedness of her helpless position, or the very memory of that first, noble, true-hearted nature to whom she had so joyfully pledged herself in the morning of her early days, who had so deeply trusted her, and so honoured her? Who knows; perhaps at the very instant when I fancied that her dead lips were murmuring, ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... beautiful and full of a celestial gladness; but the condemned, those destined to the pains of hell, he has depicted in various attitudes of sorrow, and bearing the impress and consciousness of their misdeeds and wretchedness on their faces: the blessed are seen to enter the gate of paradise in triumphal dance, the condemned are dragged away to eternal punishment in hell ...
— Fra Angelico • J. B. Supino
... secret reasons which made him desire to keep his heart yet free and his hand yet unpledged. But alas! the heart was enslaved already. It was under the most fatal of all spells,—first love conceived at first sight. He was wretched; and in his wretchedness his resolves became involuntarily weakened. He found himself making excuses for the beloved. What cause had he, after all, for that jealousy of the young poet which had so offended him; and if in her youth and inexperience Isaura had made her dearest friend of a ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... a contest between wrath and wretchedness was going on. "Moderate your language, Mr. Ehrenthal," ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... wife, and his eldest great-grandson, and, two years later (1714), his third grandson, the Duke of Berry. He left France overwhelmed with debt, its resources exhausted, its credit gone, its maritime power prostrate; a land covered with poverty and wretchedness. This was the reward of lawless pride and ambition in a monarch who owed his strength, however, to the sympathy and subservience ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... the sadness, the peculiar melancholy, that pervades Jewish relations, then he attains to moral heights and lyric vigor unsurpassed. In his three volumes of poetry, by the side of numerous worthless pieces, we meet many gems of style and thought. The distressed cry of humanity against the wretchedness under which it staggers, the sorrowful protest man makes against the lack of compassion he encounters in his fellow, his obstinate refusal to understand the implacable cruelty of nature when she snatches ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... should be sorry to give you trouble," stammered Halfdan, whose native pride, even in his present wretchedness, protested against accepting a favor from one whom he had been wont to regard as ...
— Tales From Two Hemispheres • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that moment by misery of body and mind that amounted to the extreme of anguish. The garret of the stranger contained no food, no fuel, no light; its occupant was suffering from cold, hunger, and wretchedness. Throwing himself on a broken chair, he clenched his fingers over the manuscript, held within a pale and ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... out and assisted Cecily to alight. In a moment she was in Mina's arms. The next, she recognized Neeld's presence with a little cry of surprise. At a loss to account for himself, the old man stood there in embarrassed wretchedness. ...
— Tristram of Blent - An Episode in the Story of an Ancient House • Anthony Hope
... all I know about it.—Some six weeks ago, I woke suddenly one morning, very early—I think about three o'clock—with an overpowering sense of blackness and misery. Everything I thought of seemed to have a core of wretchedness in it. I fought with the feeling as well as I could, and got to sleep again. But the effect of it did not leave me next day. I said to myself: 'They say "morning thoughts are true." What if this should be the true way of looking at things?' And everything became grey and dismal ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... the people of Ashburton, and never without commiserating my change of condition. This tale often repeated, awakened at length the pity of their auditors, and, as the next step, their resentment against the man who had reduced me to such a state of wretchedness. In a large town, this would have little effect, but a place like Ashburton, where every report speedily becomes the common property of all the inhabitants, it raised a murmur which my godfather found himself either unable or unwilling to withstand: he therefore determined, ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor, Vol. I, No. 5, May 1810 • Various
... dismal and uninviting did the rude steps, which led nobody knew where, appear. For one moment Annie hesitated; but the thought of Nan hidden somewhere in this awful wretchedness ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... manner the advancement of science and the diffusion of information as the best aliment to true liberty; to carry on the benevolent plans which have been so meritoriously applied to the conversion of our aboriginal neighbors from the degradation and wretchedness of savage life to a participation of the improvements of which the human mind and manners are susceptible in a civilized state—as far as sentiments and intentions such as these can aid the fulfillment of my duty, they will be a resource which can ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson
... snatch at every fleeting, alluring promise of relief, through amusement, through anything that offers change and excitement. Little wonder that, robbed of opportunity for vision, they foment blind discontent, so that we all feel there is a mighty substratum of wretchedness and of menace lying under our ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... in this particular contend only for truth. Our author wrote a chronicle in verse of all our English Kings from Brute to King Edward IV. for which Dr. Fuller and Winstanly bestow great encomiums upon him; but he seems to me to be totally destitute of poetry, both from the wretchedness of his lines, and the unhappiness of his subject, a chronicle being of all others the driest, and the least susceptible of poetical ornament; but let the reader judge by the specimen subjoined. He died about the year 1461, being then very aged. From Gower to Barclay it must be ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume I. • Theophilus Cibber
... which had a rich frame; and in the predella are several scenes, with little figures, from the Life of S. Giovanni Gualberto. In all this he acquitted himself very well, because he was assisted in his wretchedness by that Abbot, who took pity on him for the sake of his talents; and in the predella of the panel Raffaellino made a portrait of him from life, together with one of the General who was then ruling his Order. In S. Piero Maggiore, on the right as one ...
— Lives of the Most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects - Vol. 04 (of 10), Filippino Lippi to Domenico Puligo • Giorgio Vasari
... fancy, and Lincoln, being much at the Edwards house, found himself, almost before he knew it, entangled in a new love-affair. In the course of a twelvemonth he was engaged to marry her, but something, nobody knows what or how, happened to break the engagement, and to plunge him again in a very sea of wretchedness. Nor is it necessary that we should know about it further than that a great trouble came upon him, which he bore nobly, after his kind. Few men have had his stern sense of duty, his tenderness of heart, his conscience, so easy toward others, so merciless ...
— The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln • Helen Nicolay
... expect to live, then? Are you always to be a burden on me and your sister? I wonder that you've no shame. Your cousin Roger is right. I will quit London altogether, and leave you to your own wretchedness.' ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... yea, and faith too, by which the soul layeth hold upon Christ, if it be right, must be wrought by the exceeding greatness of his mighty power; the working of which faith, I perceive, poor Ignorance, thou art ignorant of. [1 Cor. 12:3, Eph. 1:18,19] Be awakened, then, see thine own wretchedness, and fly to the Lord Jesus; and by his righteousness, which is the righteousness of God, for he himself is God, thou ...
— The Pilgrim's Progress - From this world to that which is to come. • John Bunyan
... suffering inflicted, here or hereafter, upon any thing but sin,—unrepented, incorrigible sin,—and if you will show me a sinless creature, I will show you one who will never feel the least twinge or pang through all eternity. Death is the wages of sin. The substance of the wretchedness of the lost will issue right out of their own character. They will see their own wickedness steadily and clearly, and this will make them miserable. It will be the carrying out of the same principle that operates here in time, and in our own daily experience. Suppose that ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... and away he went in search of diamonds. He began his search, very properly to my mind, at the Mountains of the Moon. Afterward he came around into Palestine, then wandered on into Europe, and at last when his money was all spent and he was in rags, wretchedness, and poverty, he stood on the shore of that bay at Barcelona, in Spain, when a great tidal wave came rolling in between the pillars of Hercules, and the poor, afflicted, suffering, dying man could not resist the awful ...
— Acres of Diamonds • Russell H. Conwell
... greatest cause of misery and wretchedness in social life is idleness. The want of something to do is what makes people wicked and miserable. It breeds selfishness, mischief-making, envy, jealousy and vice, in all its most dreadful forms. It is the duty of mothers to see that their daughters are ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... traits are the key with the leather strap that verified the judgment of Sancho's kinsmen. To what purpose should a Frenchman, writing in the time of Louis XIV., censure the rapacity of innkeepers, and the wretchedness of their extorted accommodation, when France, from the time of Chaucer to the present hour, has been famous for the civility of the one and the convenience of the other? To what purpose, if the French government were to be criticised, enumerate the danger of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... the 'squire, turning to me) our landlord is a Christian of bowels — Who shall presume to censure the morals of the age, when the very publicans exhibit such examples of humanity? — Heark ye, Clinker, you are a most notorious offender — You stand convicted of sickness, hunger, wretchedness, and want — But, as it does not belong to me to punish criminals, I will only take upon me the task of giving you a word of advice. Get a shirt with all convenient dispatch, that your nakedness may not henceforward give offence ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... and when he pointed to the Chinese as the most prosperous nation upon earth, ascribed their prosperity uniformly to their virtue. We now know that he was wrong in fact: for we have discovered that Chinese civilization is one not of peace and plenty, but of anarchy and wretchedness. But that fact only goes to corroborate the belief, which (strange juxtaposition!) was common to Voltaire and the old Hebrew Prophets at whom he scoffed, namely, that virtue is wealth, and vice is ruin. For we have found that these Chinese, the ruling classes of them at least, are an especially unrighteous ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... me. For I had been accustomed to the wider, airier spaces, and to the bickering rivulets which ran down most of the steeper streets of Plassenburg, and which made it one of the cleanest towns in the world. So that the ancient and unreformed filth and wretchedness of Thorn appealed to my senses as they had ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... and both armies marched and fought,—is touched by the graphic pen of a woman, Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, who saw and felt a part of it: "The histories which we have of the great tragedy give no idea of the general wretchedness, the squalid misery, which entered into every individual life in the region given up to the war. Where the armies camped the destruction was absolute. Even on the border, your farm was a waste, all your horses or cows were seized by one army or the other, or your shop or manufactory was ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... true," said the porter in the dirty dressing-gown, who stood by. I could see at a glance that the manner of that porter towards me was greatly altered, and I began to feel comforted in my wretchedness. Perhaps a Christian from Friday Street, with plenty of money in his pockets, would stand in higher esteem at Suez than at Cairo. If so, that alone would go far to atone for the apparent wretchedness of the place. At Cairo I had not received that attention which had certainly ...
— George Walker At Suez • Anthony Trollope
... to think of the change! What do you care for a beggar's story? Is it amusing? You find it strange? I had a mother so proud of me! 'Twas well she died before.—Do you know If the happy spirits in heaven can see The ruin and wretchedness here below? ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... greatness. It was in vain that a long succession of favourites who had entered that abode with delight and hope, and who, after a short term of delusive happiness, had been doomed to expiate their folly by years of wretchedness and degradation, raised their voices to warn the aspirant who approached the charmed threshold. Some had wisdom enough to discover the truth early, and spirit enough to fly without looking back; others lingered on to a cheerless and unhonoured ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... beginning to torture her like an acute pain, she had suddenly recollected what relief from sleeplessness her husband had been wont to find in the opium pillules, and a box of the medicine, only just opened, was at hand. And was not she, too, suffering unutterable wretchedness? Why should she neglect the remedy which had so greatly mitigated her husband's distress? It was said to have a bad effect after long and frequent use, and she had often checked the Mukaukas in taking it too freely; but could her sufferings be greater? Would ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... of extreme disquiet. It was evident from what had occurred at the mess-table, in relation to the beautiful American, that to her was to be ascribed the wretchedness to which Gerald had become a victim, and he resolved, on the following morning, to waive all false delicacy, and, throwing himself upon his affection, to solicit his confidence, and offer whatever counsel he conceived would best tend to ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... my good uncle, the world is here waxed such, and so great perils appear here to fall at hand, that methinketh the greatest comfort a man can have is when he can see that he shall soon be gone. And we who are likely long to live here in wretchedness have need of some comforting counsel against tribulation to be given us by such as you, good uncle. For you have so long lived virtuously, and are so learned in the law of God that very few are better in this country. And you have had yourself good experience ...
— Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation - With Modifications To Obsolete Language By Monica Stevens • Thomas More
... head with some impatience. "Let us be friends—as I supposed we were going to be—without protestations and fine words. To have you paying compliments to my wisdom—that would be real wretchedness. I can dispense with your admiration better than the Flemish painters can—better than Van Eyck and Rubens, in spite of all their worshippers. Go join your friend—see everything, enjoy everything, learn everything, ...
— Madame de Mauves • Henry James
... Heidelberg, he, gained most by prodigious reading in literature, history; and philosophy. His savage melancholy found relief in grimly humorous narratives and gloomy poems. At the time of his greatest wretchedness he conceived the plots of comedies, "ridiculing something by the representation of nothing." But we note that his reading now begins to suggest to him innumerable subjects for tragedies, such as Napoleon, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... visits had been made two years previously by those who were laboring in the province of Bataan, in order to increase the gospel seed. The meekness and resignation of the fathers in the midst of so much wretchedness and hardship arrested the attention of those barbarians; and the fathers succeeded in catechizing and converting many through their gentleness and kind treatment, and ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... few moments. Sidney, mastering his own wretchedness, which he could not altogether conceal, made attempts to ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... table in front, covered by a rich cloth, sat the heroine, dressed in a gorgeousness of apparel that mocked her misery. Beneath the gems that studded her bosom, there was supposed to be unappeasable wretchedness; and the white brow, covered with a spangled wreath, was presumed to ache with mental agony. She was pale and beautiful. Murmurs of ...
— Round the Block • John Bell Bouton
... analogy dropped as soon as she was on the platform it had lasted long enough to make him feel all the advantage, as it were, of his relief. The woman at home, the woman to whom he was attached, was before him just long enough to give him again the measure of the wretchedness, in fact really of the shame, of their having to recognise the formation, between them, of a "split." He had taken this measure in solitude and meditation: but the catastrophe, as Sarah steamed up, looked for its seconds unprecedentedly dreadful—or proved, more ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... "want is the parent of industry, and wretchedness the mother of ingenuity." I know that you have often approved and rewarded the ingenious productions of my emigrated countrymen in England; but here their labours and their endeavours are disregarded; and if they cannot or ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... bleed; and yet his tears would be all that he could give her. He might relieve the beggar at his door, but he could do nothing for a dying continent. He might provide for his children, but he could do nothing for the nations that were yet to be born to an inheritance of utter wretchedness. Then the privilege of engaging in schemes of magnificent benevolence belonged only to princes and to men of princely possessions; but now the progress of improvement has brought down this privilege to the reach of every individual. ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... reckless indifference; a longing wish to end my miseries at once. I strove against the evil spirit; and for a while succeeded. On our arrival at Kingston, I endeavoured in vain to obtain employment; my stock of money was fast decreasing; and when that was gone, where was I to turn for more? Poverty and wretchedness threatened me from without; remorse was busy within. 'Why should I bear this weary load of life?' said I, as I madly paced the shore, 'when one bold plunge would bury ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... had been captured; to engage the interest of this haughty fine lady for the mother of her lover's children; to appeal to her and make her the instrument of her future happiness, since she was the cause of her present wretchedness. ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac
... quiet humour, and could tell a good story better than most men. He was a good judge of character, and, as a magistrate, could distinguish between what was radically bad in a prisoner, and the crime which was the outcome of want and wretchedness. During his long Birmingham life of nearly seventy years, he was universally respected, and when he descended into the grave it may be said that there was no one who could say of him ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... back one from the fate toward which he shambled so blindly; what could I do when Drink was driving him? If I could not shake off the memories of squalor, hunger, poverty—well-deserved poverty—despair, crime, abject wretchedness, then life could not be borne. I can always call to mind the wrung hands and drawn faces of well-nurtured and sweet ladies who saw the dull mask of loathsome degradation sliding downward over their loved one's face. Of all the mental trials that are cruel, that must be the worst—to ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... sat and watched, ah me, forlorn! Hoping some blessed day to see Deliverance from my woes by thee. Now comes this endless grief and wrong, So dire I cannot bear it long, Sinking, with age and sorrow worn, Beneath my rivals' taunts and scorn. How shall I pass in dark distress My long lone days of wretchedness Without my Rama's face, as bright As the full moon to cheer my sight? Alas, my cares thy steps to train, And fasts, and vows, and prayers are vain. Hard, hard, I ween, must be this heart To hear this blow nor burst apart, ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... as a thousand times worse than death. And God is my judge this day, that if I could die a thousand deaths, most gladly would I die them all, rather than live to see my dear country in such a state of degradation and wretchedness." ...
— The Life of General Francis Marion • Mason Locke Weems
... the heat, her passions, hunger, and wretchedness, her head was turned, and she became so mad that she went out of the house stark naked, and ran up and down St. Peter's Place, asking those who stopped her to take her to my house. This sad story went all over the town and caused me a great deal of ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... solitaries, because they choose to live alone, without any witnesses of their actions. They fear the gifts of fortune, from the apprehension of losing them; and, lest they should be miserable, they embrace a life of voluntary wretchedness. How absurd is their choice! how perverse their understanding! to dread the evils, without being able to support the blessings, of the human condition. Either this melancholy madness is the effect of disease, or exercise on their own bodies the tortures ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... this most painful state of widowhood which excited my compassion and led me to reflections on the instability of the most flattering plans of happiness, that were painful in the extreme, till I was ready to ask whether this world was not created to exhibit every possible combination of wretchedness. I asked these questions of a heart writhing with anguish, whilst I listened to a melancholy ditty sung by this poor girl. It was too early for thee to be abandoned, thought I, and I hastened out of the house to take ...
— Letters written during a short residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark • Mary Wollstonecraft
... amidst sobs and tears, and threw himself into his carriage. On the 19th of March 1815 he was back again in this palace from the island of Elba, wandering with almost infantine joy through the splendid apartments which had witnessed his glory and his wretchedness. ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... desolateness of this country, which wearies one more than I am able to express. One tree, one soil, one water, and one description of bird, fish, or animal, prevails alike for ten miles, and for one hundred. A variety of wretchedness is at all times preferable to one unvarying cause ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... descend and raise the top of the buggy. In doing so he caught the flesh of his hand in the joint of the iron elbow that supported the top and pinched it cruelly. It was the last misery, the culmination of a long train of wretchedness. On the instant he hated Hilma Tree so fiercely that his sharply set teeth all but bit his ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... resolution; but how much did that cost him! It was his own fault, of course. It was all brought on by his impracticability, his whimsicality, his eccentricity, and his punctiliousness. Nevertheless, there was in him that which excited my deepest commiseration. The wretchedness and the pain of his face, and the suffering which was visible in his attitude, all touched me. He sat crouched down, shivering, shuddering, his teeth chattering, and presented a deplorable picture of one who struggled vainly against ...
— The Lady of the Ice - A Novel • James De Mille
... in the 'Divine Comedy' had its source in his sense of the wretchedness of man in this mortal life, owing to the false direction of his desires, through his ignorance and his misuse of his free will, the chief gift of God to him. The only means of rescue from this wretchedness was the exercise by ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... position and challenged the whole Irish race. "It was not tyranny," he cried, "but negligence; it was not the intrusion of English authority, but the absence of all authority; it was that very leaving Ireland to herself which she demands so passionately that was the cause of her wretchedness." After that it was hopeless to expect that he would have an impartial hearing. Every Irishman understood that the lecturer was an enemy, and was prepared not to read for instruction, but to look out for mistakes. An article in The New York Tribune, which ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... suffering, died at Versailles on the 4th of June, 1789, and, though only between seven and eight years of age at the time of his decease, he had given proofs of intellectual precocity, which would probably have made continued life, amidst the scenes of wretchedness, which succeeded, anything to him ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XV. and XVI., Volume 5 • Madame du Hausset, and of an Unknown English Girl and the Princess Lamballe
... Cashmere shawls, the rarest furs of Siberia, the gold stuffs of Persia, and silver plates, off which they had nothing to eat but a black dough baked in the ashes, and half broiled and bloody horse-flesh. Singular assemblage of abundance and want, of riches and filth, of luxury and wretchedness! ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... barren plains; and in a third, a range of inhospitable rocks. The very stones lying upon the hills looked like the scorched and withered scoria of a volcanic region; and even the natives, judging from the specimen I had seen to-day, partook of the general misery and wretchedness of the place. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... evils, in connection with the Union, were then converted into real ones, and these have been augmented a thousand-fold in the severance from that Union. When the South shall 'come to herself'—if she ever does—like the prodigal son, she will find her condition quite as pitiable, and in rags and wretchedness, she will seek her father's house, willing, no doubt, to occupy a servant's place in the national household. Nor until true and genuine repentance shall come to her, can she hope for a father's forgiveness and a prodigal's ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... of poverty, indigence, managing to live, fortune and wealth, cleverly treated by von Justi, Staatswirthschaft, I, p. 449, seq. Rau, Lehrbuch I, 76, seq., establishes the following gradation: privation and wretchedness, poverty, indigence, "getting on," comfort, wealth, superfluity. L. Say calls those who can satisfy the wants of luxury rich; well-to-do, those who can command the comforts of life; and wretched, those who cannot obtain a ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... Salisbury Square some squalid garret sheltered him. He tried to shun the common gaze and hide his very whereabouts. He turned to translating, chance criticisms, and any drudgery that came his way, and all to little purpose. He lived in wretchedness and obscurity, bearing the weight of an increasing poverty, until at last the very hope ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... should visit them with its scanty and precarious bounty. Too many of them were habitually on the verge of starvation, and the crumbling away of the slender support on which alone they stood, brought them at once to the low abyss of wretchedness in which they would have been left if public generosity ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... to be there, though not feeling fit to go. Besides, it was a great load on her mind that she had not told her mamma how she got the chair, nor what was the reason she did not want to go to the meeting. And now she could endure her wretchedness no longer. ...
— A Missionary Twig • Emma L. Burnett
... stout cord passing round the bundle a number of times. It would be quite impossible for the tiny thing to move hand or foot or any part of its body except the face. As one might expect it wore an expression of utter wretchedness though it lay with closed eyes making no sound. I could make almost nothing of what they said, and when I called George to interpret for me they seemed ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)
... usage, which like many others had but served to keep up superstition, could degenerate into so serious a disease, we must take into account the unusual excitement of men's minds and the consequences of wretchedness and want. The bowels, which in many were debilitated by hunger and bad food, were precisely the parts which in most cases were attacked with excruciating pain, and the tympanitic state of the intestines points out to the intelligent physician an origin ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... selfish cad to save his own precious self—if none of these things had happened would Madeline still have gone to Hubbard? Perhaps. But in his heart Ted Holiday had a hateful conviction that she would not, that her wretchedness now was indirectly if not directly chargeable to his own folly. It was terrible that such little things should have such tremendous ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... he would address her; he had not thought what he would say. He had only felt that it was wretchedness to him to quarrel with her, and that it would be happiness to be allowed to love her. And yet he could not lower himself by asking her pardon. He had done her no wrong. He had not calumniated her, ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... these things out clearly; she simply followed the blind propulsion of her wretchedness. She did not want, ever again, to see anyone she had known; above all, she did ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... and noble quality of their natures. They become drunken, indolent, feeble, thievish, and pusillanimous. They loiter like vagrants about the settlements, among spacious dwellings replete with elaborate comforts which only render them sensible of the comparative wretchedness of their own condition. Luxury spreads its ample board before their eyes, but they are excluded from the banquet. Plenty revels over the fields; but they are starving in the midst of its abundance; the whole wilderness has blossomed into a garden, but they feel as reptiles ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... her province ten years before. M. sur M. had changed its aspect. While Fantine had been slowly descending from wretchedness to wretchedness, her ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... do love you, and you bring me only wretchedness. I have never been happy since the miserable day I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... seaman, "with God's help, d'ye see, and the assistance of wind and weather"— "What dost thou talk of wind and weather?" cried the knight, in an elevated tone of affected transport; "without the help of Heaven, indeed, we are all vanity, imbecility, weakness, and wretchedness; but if thou art resolved to embrace the life of an errant, let me not hear thee so much as whisper a doubt, a wish, a hope, or sentiment with respect to any other obstacle, which wind or weather, fire or water, sword or famine, danger or disappointment, may throw ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... position, the First Hall-man was reputed to be quite wealthy. In addition to his miscellaneous grafts, he grafted on us. We farmed the general wretchedness, and the First Hall-man was Farmer-General over all of us. We held our particular grafts by his permission, and we had to pay for that permission. As I say, he was reputed to be wealthy; but we never saw his money, ...
— The Road • Jack London
... of him after her stolen glance in the morning, she longed to do that which he dreaded she would try to do—attempt his reformation. Not that she cared for him personally, or that she had grown sentimentally interested in his Byronic style of wretchedness. So far from it, her happy and healthful nature was repelled by his diseased and morbid one. She found him what girls call a "disagreeable man." But she yearned toward a sinning, suffering soul, found in ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Corporations are sometimes unjust. Politics are liable to become corrupt. In the various associations of home and community life indifference, cruelty, unchastity, and crime add to the burdens of poverty, disease, and wretchedness. A yellow press mirrors a scandalous amount of intrigue, immorality, and misdemeanor. Government abuses its power; public opinion is intolerant and unjust; fashion is tyrannical; law is uncompromising. In times like our own economic interests ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... resemblance than before to a walking scarecrow. Winter is a withered old beldam, too poor to keep a cat, hurkling on her hunkers over a feeble fire of sticks, extinguished fast as it is beeted, with a fizz in the melted snow which all around that unhoused wretchedness is indurated with frost; while a blue pool close at hand is chained in iciness, and an old stump, half buried in the drift. Poor old, miserable, cowering crone! One cannot look at her without unconsciously putting one's hand in his pocket, and fumbling for a tester. ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... however great, and that I had thought to have called my own. I resumed my seat, and, giving expression to my anguish with sighs and tears, I did not stir till evening roused me from my trance of wretchedness. Length of time, sir, flew fast away, and heaped cares upon my head; but the recollection of my youthful days was vivid still as ever. No day dawned without ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did nothing but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about I in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel lived in wretchedness. He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went towards it, and when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes, and they grew clear again, and ...
— Grimm's Fairy Stories • Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm
... maiden the very ideal of ill-fortune and wretchedness. She is the troth-plight wife of Amintor, but Amintor, at the king's request, marries Evad'ne (3 syl.). "Women point with scorn at the forsaken Aspatia, but she bears it all with patience. The pathos of her speeches is most touching, and her death forms ...
— 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.
... is only my second visit, and I have not made much way with her. She is in a state of bodily and mental discomfort very painful to witness. If I am not mistaken, she is driving herself half-crazy with introspection and self-will. You must not give way to this morbid desire to increase her own wretchedness. She needs firmness as ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... known to fable, in which other contrasts between persons and in public affairs make their appearance. A king comes on the stage who in the plenitude of enjoyment and power is brought by overhasty confidence in his nearest kin to the extremest wretchedness into which men can fall. We see the heir to a throne who, dispossessed of his rights by his own mother and his father's murderer, is directed by mysterious influences to take revenge. We have before us a great nobleman, ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke
... holy warfare in distant lands. Titurel, unrenewed by the vision of the Grail, is dead.... At the relation of these mournful events, grief assails Parsifal, who holds himself responsible for all this wretchedness, by reason of his long-delayed return, which he must regard as a consequence of sins and folly of his own,—grief beyond what the human frame is fitted to endure, and he is again swooning, as at the evil news in the first act. Kundry hurries with water ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... wilds and not of cities, so that every man should be his own lawgiver, with a perpetual immunity from all taxation, we could not necessarily infer their political happiness. There are nations where taxation is hardly known, for the people exist in such utter wretchedness, that they are too poor to be taxed; of which the Chinese, among others, exhibit remarkable instances. When Nero would have abolished all taxes, in his excessive passion for popularity, the senate thanked him for his good will to the people, but assured him that ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... treatment of disease. How can I, how can any medical teacher justify himself in teaching anything that is not like to be of practical use to a class of young men who are to hold in their hands the balance in which life and death, ease and anguish, happiness and wretchedness ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... defile, all chance of getting safely through to Ladysmith would be at an end. This was by no means a happy reflection to fill men's minds in the dripping, almost palpable, darkness of the night, and the resolute spirit of the gallant fellows who unmurmuringly stowed away all personal wretchedness and stuck manfully to their grim duty is for ever to be marvelled at and admired. Fortunately the Dutchmen, "slim" as they were, had not counted on the possibility of this march being executed at all, still less of its being executed in pitch darkness. They were caught ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 2 (of 6) - From the Commencement of the War to the Battle of Colenso, - 15th Dec. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... solicitation:—"I wish to go into the excise;" thus he wrote to Glencairn; "and I am told your lordship's interest will easily procure me the grant from the commissioners: and your lordship's patronage and goodness, which have already rescued me from obscurity, wretchedness, and exile, emboldens me to ask that interest. You have likewise put it in my power to save the little tie of home that sheltered an aged mother, two brothers, and three sisters from destruction. I am ill qualified to ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... presented to the magistrates of the state, appointed for that purpose, as vagrants, perversely obstinate, deprived of the control and culture of their natural guardians, or guilty of petty offences, and exposed to a life of crime and wretchedness. ...
— Thoughts on Educational Topics and Institutions • George S. Boutwell
... necessity, sleepless grief, and the maddening impulse of vengeance now comes upon him, so that he is wasted almost to death. He will not, however, abandon his quest for the secret of his art. He may die of hunger and wretchedness; he will not yield. At the last moment of his trial and his misery—alone—at night—in the alternate lurid blaze and murky gloom of his firing-house—success is conquered: the secret is found. This climax, to which the preliminaries ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... tenant of all. For this snuff-box was a present from the lady at the great house, who took an interest in poor old Luke's infirmities, and gave him the snuff-box, a really good piece of workmanship, well filled with the finest snuff, to console his wretchedness. ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies
... he had rescued from her wretchedness and provided with a home on a farm at Bouqueval, whence she had been abducted by Chouette and comrades of hers, by orders of Jacques Ferrand, who wanted her put out ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... her own room and shut herself up in darkness and in wretchedness, but in all that miserable night there came to her not one regret that she had reached her hand ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... alternated every now and then with defiance. She meditated continually how the incubus could be shaken off her life—how she could be freed from this hateful bond to a being whom she at once despised as an imbecile, and dreaded as an inquisitor. For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide; but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release. Towards my own destiny I had become entirely passive; for my one ardent desire ...
— The Lifted Veil • George Eliot
... was scarcely more than a whisper. In her wretchedness, she told the truth, being unable ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed
... oblivion.' It was found, with a dreadful headache in it, but it didn't last; for, in the shaming light of next day's noon, I raised my heavy head in bed, looking back to the birthdays behind me, and tracking the circle by which I had got round, after all, to the bitter powder and the wretchedness again. ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... on my return from Birmingham to the time of my marriage, she was all in all to me! During some four or five days in the early time of our residence at Florence I thought I was going to lose her, and I can never forget the blank wretchedness of the prospect that seemed ...
— What I Remember, Volume 2 • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... be a mistake to think that those months which the friends spent in Majorca were for them a time of unintermittent or even largely-predominating wretchedness. Indeed, George Sand herself admits that, in spite of the wildness of the country and the pilfering habits of the people, their existence might have been an agreeable one in this romantic solitude had it not been for the sad spectacle ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... luxuriousness, insulting to the wretchedness of the poor rentiers who expire with hunger in their garrets, no longer possessing the courage to crawl to the Treasury and get the wherewithal to prolong their ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Southern border of the United States. I repeat that it should be done speedily. Humanity and justice demand it at our hands. What can the free blacks do? Where can they go? They will soon be legislated out of the free states, and their condition in the slave states, must necessarily be one of wretchedness and degradation. Reader, what say you to the above proposition? It is offered for your sober and prayerful consideration. Does it commend itself to your judgment? Is it safe? Is it practicable? Is it suitable, ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... painful certainty gave her, her first impulse was to repair to him at the ready-furnished house he had provided for his new mistress. What was the particular nature of their conference I am unable to relate. It is sufficient to say that the wretchedness of the night which succeeded this fatal discovery, impressed her with the feeling, that she would sooner suffer a thousand deaths, than pass ...
— Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman • William Godwin
... emperor, in the world, and then ere you can well gather your thoughts, to know what he is, he is turned off the stage, and appears in some base and despicable appearance. So quickly is man stript of all those glorious ornaments of holiness, and puts on the vile rags of sin and wretchedness, and is cast from the throne of eminency above the creatures, and from fellowship with God, to be a slave and servant to the dust of his feet, and to have communion with the devil and his angels. And now, ye have man holden out in Scripture as the only wretched ...
— The Works of the Rev. Hugh Binning • Hugh Binning
... his leafy covert, wrung his hands in despair, and cursed the whole creation in the utter wretchedness of his sore distress. It seemed to him monstrous, almost iniquitous, that this woman, so pure and rigidly inflexible, should yield herself so unresistingly to the prince, because he was a prince, ...
— The Forty-Five Guardsmen • Alexandre Dumas
... refinement sin was dressed up in the finest style. The Olympic, Pythian and Isthmian games, which were kept up to give strength to the body and courage in the battle, were debasing and corrupting to the lowest degree of wretchedness. The ages of ancient heroism were filled up with crime and debauchery. They were fruitful in incest and parricide, and all the dark and gloomy events which were necessary to make up the most fearful picture of immorality. The monarchs of Assyria spent their time ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880
... plains, however, exhibits, upon a nearer approach, misery; the more mortifying, as it is less expected by a spectator, who requires at least some days experience to convince him that the squallid scenes of wretchedness and dirt in which he is obliged to pass the night, will prove more than equivalent to the pleasures he has enjoyed in the day-time, derived from an appearance of elegance and wealth—elegance, the work of Nature, not of man; and opulence, the immediate gift of God, and not the result ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... guess the wretchedness as fell upon me, for I've not got the gift to tell you. There I was down on the ship's books for a three years' viage, an' no help for it. I feel nigh to six hundred years old when I think how long that viage was. There isn't no hour-glass as runs slow enough to keep ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... other thought, that he might perform all his actions for the love of GOD. That when sometimes he had not thought of GOD for a good while, he did not disquiet himself for it; but after having acknowledged his wretchedness to GOD, he returned to Him with so much the greater trust in Him, as he had found ...
— The Practice of the Presence of God the Best Rule of a Holy Life • Herman Nicholas
... immense space of time before, and knew and did many things. But that, for all this, it was not at all the more immortal, but that its very entrance into the body of a man was the beginning of its destruction, as if it were a disease; so that it passes through this life in wretchedness, and at last perishes in that which is called death. But you say that it is of no consequence whether it comes into a body once or often, with respect to our occasion of fear; for it is right he should be afraid, unless he is foolish, who ...
— Apology, Crito, and Phaedo of Socrates • Plato
... marks of toil.' Oh! monsieur, do you know what those sacred marks of toil mean? They mean all the gossip of the workroom, the whispered scandal, the mind soiled by all the filth that is talked; they mean lost chastity, foolish chatter, all the wretchedness of their everyday life, all the narrowness of ideas which belongs to women of the lower orders, combined to their fullest extent in the girl whose fingers bear ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... his agitation. The feeling of intense repulsion, which had begun to oppress and torture his heart while he was on his way to the old woman, had by now reached such a pitch and had taken such a definite form that he did not know what to do with himself to escape from his wretchedness. He walked along the pavement like a drunken man, regardless of the passers-by, and jostling against them, and only came to his senses when he was in the next street. Looking round, he noticed that he was standing close to a tavern which was entered by steps leading from the pavement to ...
— Crime and Punishment • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... unrestrained, and that part of Fostat which Ahmed had built was almost entirely destroyed. The adherents of the reigning family were grossly maltreated, many of them killed, and others sent to Baghdad. The governors changed in rapid succession; disorder, want, and wretchedness existed throughout the entire country west of the caliph's kingdom. At this period the provinces of the empire had already fallen into the hands of the numerous minor princes, who, presuming on the caliph's weakness, had declared themselves independent sovereigns. Nothing remained to ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... alas! they're all expir'd, And th' House, as well as Members, fir'd; Consum'd in kennels by the rout, With which they other fires put out: Condemn'd t' ungoverning distress, 1635 And paultry, private wretchedness; Worse than the Devil, to privation, Beyond all hopes of restoration; And parted, like the body and soul, From all dominion and controul. 1640 We, who cou'd lately with a look Enact, establish, or revoke; Whose arbitrary nods gave law, And frowns kept multitudes ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... until he had once more stretched himself on his flinty bed, with a block of wood for a pillow, and was trying to forget his wretchedness in sleep, that he knew. Then he sprang up with ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... easy-chair, and rolled his bemused eyes round upon his brother's household gods. Those book-shelves with a bust at either corner, those red curtains drawn across the window, those prints on the walls—all once so pleasant to the doctor's eyes—took a certain air of squalor and wretchedness to-night which sickened him to look at. The lamp flared wildly with an untrimmed wick, or at least Dr Rider thought so; and threw a hideous profile of the intruder upon the wall behind him. The hearth was cold, with that chill, of sentiment ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... liberal offer for some other statue. Accordingly, two years after, "Beatrice Cenci" was sent. The noble girl lies asleep, the night before her execution, after the terrible torture. "It was," says Mrs. Child, "the sleep of a body worn out with the wretchedness of the soul. On that innocent face suffering had left its traces. The arm that had been tossing in the grief tempest, had fallen heavily, too weary to change itself into a more easy position. Those large eyes, now so closely veiled by their swollen lids, had evidently wept till the ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... many burdened souls before their time, coming, as they did, with the belief that they were bowed down with the only misery like theirs in the universe; for each one of us must suffer long to himself before he can learn that he is but one in a great community of wretchedness which has been pitilessly repeating itself from ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... prevented men from being prone to errors, without changing the [421] constitution of the best of systems or without employing miracles at every turn. It is true that sin makes up a large portion of human wretchedness, and even the largest; but that does not prevent one from being able to say that men are wicked and deserving of punishment: else one must needs say that the actual sins of the non-regenerate are excusable, because they spring from the first cause of our wretchedness, which is original ...
— Theodicy - Essays on the Goodness of God, the Freedom of Man and the Origin of Evil • G. W. Leibniz
... time opened his eyes, he was afresh bewildered. Which was the dream—that vision of wretchedness, or this of luxury? If it was not a dream, how had they moved him without once disturbing his sleep? It was as marvellous as anything in the Arabian Nights! Could it be the same chamber? Not a thing seemed the same, yet in him was a doubtful denial of ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... tide comes back to the ocean, as the stars come with the night. She tried to smother it, but it would not be smothered. At last she resigned herself to the wretchedness of it—as one when, despairing of throwing off a mood, gives way to it and lets it eat its ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore
... took his leave, filled with the same agreeable delusion, and I painfully retraced my steps back into my dungeon. I thought that solitude would now be a relief to me; that to weep would somewhat ease my burdened heart? yet, strange to say, I could not shed a tear. The extreme wretchedness of feeling this inability even to shed tears excites, under some of the heaviest calamities, is the severest trial of all, and ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... mixture of that disease, the nature of which eludes the most minute enquiry, though the effects are well known to be a weariness of life, an unconcern about those things which agitate the greater part of mankind, and a general sensation of gloomy wretchedness[115]. From him then his son inherited, with some other qualities, 'a vile melancholy,' which in his too strong expression of any disturbance of the mind, 'made him mad all his life, at least not sober[116].' Michael was, however, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... most momentous topics which can agitate the minds of men. Two great themes compose his argument: the miserable insignificance of all that is human—human reason, human knowledge, human ambition; and the transcendent glory of God. Never was the wretchedness of mankind painted with a more passionate power. The whole infinitude of the physical universe is invoked in his sweeping sentences to crush the presumption of man. Man's intellectual greatness itself he ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... remnants of an old stript hanging, That served to keep her carcase from the cold, So there was nothing of a piece about her. Her lower weeds were all o'er coarsely patched With different coloured rags, black, red, white, yellow, And seemed to speak variety of wretchedness." ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... you bear to behold in your father a culprit, a great sinner?" He looked so crushed, so very, very miserable, that her loving heart overflowed with sympathy and pity. To look at that dear face, and see the wretchedness of gulf and remorse written there, wrung her heart beyond endurance, and brought the scalding tears to her eyes. She threw her arms about his neck, and answered tenderly: "You cannot be guilty in ...
— Sister Carmen • M. Corvus
... majestic glory which encompasses him? Let us make the trial; let us leave a king all alone to reflect on himself quite at leisure, without any gratification of the senses, without any care in his mind, without society; and we will see that a king without diversion is a man full of wretchedness. So this is carefully avoided, and near the persons of kings there never fail to be a great number of people who see to it that amusement follows business, and who watch all the time of their leisure to supply ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... claimed, and given up to the pursuit of justice, when it happened that the subjects of their criminal acts were weighty enough to sustain an energetic inquiry. Hence their reputation became worse than scandalous: the mingled infamy of their calling, and the houseless condition of wretchedness which had made it worth their acceptance, combined to overwhelm them with public scorn; and this public abhorrence, which at any rate awaited them, mere desperation led them too often to countenance and ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... rarely, sparsely, raggedly, blooming, you might say, with but little heart for its bloom. Where other flowers had been frightened away; where the poor crowded; where factories flared; where junk-heaps rusted; where backyards baked; where smoke defiled; where wretchedness stalked; where crime brooded; where the land was unkempt; where the human spirit was sodden—there the celestial thing multiplied its celestial growths, blessing the eyes and making the heart leap. ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... help me to appreciate the sacredness of work while I have it to do. Grant that I may be spared the wretchedness that comes from working with fragments from idleness. May I do my part, even if it be in obscurity and the night overtakes me before it ...
— Leaves of Life - For Daily Inspiration • Margaret Bird Steinmetz
... chagrin at that which had befallen and for concern anent her separation from her husband. She also refused meat and drink and resolved to cast herself into the sea; but the Magian chained her and straitened her and clothed her in a coat of wool and said to her, "I will continue thee in wretchedness and humiliation till thou obey me and accept me." So she took patience and looked for the Almighty to deliver her from the hand of that accursed; and she ceased not travelling with him from country to country till he came with her ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... under haystacks, or near the warmth of brick-kilns, who had not their accustomed place of rest beneath the open sky. As to the public ways within the town, they had their ordinary nightly occupants, and no others; the usual amount of vice and wretchedness, but ...
— Barnaby Rudge • Charles Dickens
... and the spoils of this fruitful country are proposed as the prize of your valor and discipline. Believe me," added Julian, "the Roman republic, which formerly possessed such immense treasures, is now reduced to want and wretchedness once our princes have been persuaded, by weak and interested ministers, to purchase with gold the tranquillity of the Barbarians. The revenue is exhausted; the cities are ruined; the provinces are dispeopled. For myself, the only inheritance ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... anything!" cried Yozhov, harshly. "You think I am drunk? It's my body that is intoxicated, but my soul is sober, it is always sober; it feels everything. Oh, how much meanness there is in the world, how much stupidity and wretchedness! And men—these ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... not to take a step by which he would lose the whole world at once. "I only lose," said he, "a very small portion of it, and if I should lose the whole, pray what loss is it? For what is there in the world so desirable, unless a man should desire deceit, and violence, and misery, and wretchedness, giddiness and distraction. Contentment and tranquillity," said he, "constitute the happiness of man; but in your city there are no such things to be found. Because who is there here content with his station? Higher, higher, is what ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne |
