"Pitiable" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with one hand by the cape of his coat, with the other by the waistband of his breeches, and bearing him to the door, as he would any other noxious animal, fairly pitched him head foremost into the street, to the manifest surprise and dismay of the passengers, to whom he told a "pitiable tale," when one of the crowd pronounced him to be a notorious dog-stealer, and the fellow, immediately on this recognition, made a precipitate retreat. 328 "I am glad," said Dashall to his friends, who had witnessed the result of this affair from one of the windows of the coffee-room, ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... the timid fellow-traveller of Frank Osbaldistone, who carried the portmanteau. Osbaldistone says, concerning him, "Of all the propensities which teach mankind to torment themselves, that of causeless fear is the most irritating, busy, painful, pitiable."—Sir W. Scott, Rob Roy (time, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... the child's mind had sunk into hopeless imbecility. The kind-hearted miller and his wife endeavored to coax her out of her chair by the chimney-corner, but she crouched there, a wan, mute figure of woe, pitiable to contemplate; asking no questions, causing no trouble, receiving no consolation. One bright March morning she sat, as usual, with her face bowed on her thin hand, and her vacant gaze fixed on the blazing fire, when, through the open window, came ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... violence such a pitiable panic fell upon the older man that Woolfolk halted. Lichfield Stope raised his hands as if to ward off the mere impact of the words themselves; his face was stained with the ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... A rush was made thither from the front: and this thinned the crowd considerably; so then Mrs. Dodd was got out by the help of some humane persons, and carried into the nearest house, more dead than alive. There she found Mrs. Archbold in a pitiable state. That lady had been looking on the fire, with the key in her pocket, by taking which she was like to be a murderess: her terror and remorse were distracting, and the revulsion had thrown her into violent hysterics. Mrs. Dodd plucked up a little ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... west, did he not, monsieur? Well, he failed, but, perhaps, that was accident. He might have succeeded. It is not often in the history of the world that such an opportunity comes to any person, man or woman. La Salle, at least, tried to live up to his full stature. Monsieur, how pitiable it would be, yes, more, how terrible it would be, to have such an opportunity thrown in your way and know that you were too ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... water. The same old dissatisfactions and discomforts would spring from the human heart, when it looked with envy on the luxuries of the ten-thousand-dollar men, or when by recklessness and foolishness or illness the habitual home life became suddenly reduced to a pitiable three-thousand-dollar standard, which would be the goal for the workingmen of to-day. We are too little aware that the average existence of the masses in earlier centuries was on a much narrower scale than the life of practically the poorest to-day, and that ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg
... as she gazed at the painting. She paled and trembled. "This misfortune is indeed pitiable," said she. "You know not how much I would give had it not occurred." She drew on her glasses and viewed the damaged picture scrutinizingly. "The colors," said she, "were but water-colors, and that is why they were ...
— After Long Years and Other Stories • Translated from the German by Sophie A. Miller and Agnes M. Dunne
... for poultry, this does not mean that any cheap soil will do. A heavy wet clay soil worth $150 an acre for dairying is worth nothing for poultry. Pure sand is likewise worthless and nothing can be more pitiable than to see poultry confined in yards of wind swept sand, without a spear of anything green within ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... deplorable, grievous, pitiable, calamitous; mean, despicable, contemptible, base, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... bright, and John Baptiste went on snowshoes with messages to the lake camp. He found its inmates in a more pitiable condition than we were. Only one death had occurred there since our last communication, but he saw several of the starving who could ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... sick boy, holding a glass of water to his lips; and as she looked round, Mr. Smith thought he had never seen a face so strangely and sadly altered as hers. It had lost nearly all its childishness—it looked so old, and womanly, with a weight of care in it that was pitiable to see; and yet, with all this, it was so calm and still, so composed, that any one would have imagined that her one thought was how to nurse her patient. And so it was. Madge felt that a great deal depended upon her fortitude and self-control. Had she ...
— The Boy Artist. - A Tale for the Young • F.M. S.
... idleness." This experience, somewhat idealized, is the basis of the first part of "Tiger Lilies". Here Lanier had the opportunity of seeing at its best the life of the old South just before it vanished in the cataclysm of the Civil War. Of that life he afterwards wrote: "Nothing can be more pitiable than that at the time when this amiable outcome of the old Southern civilization became known to the world at large, it became so through being laid bare by the sharp spasm of civil war. There was a time when all our eyes and faces were distorted with passion; none of ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... he is well educated, and graduated with honor at one of our Eastern colleges. With a knowledge of this fact, it is pitiable to see him standing at the corner of the street in his busy town in a suit of seedy black and a shockingly bad hat, chafing his hands together and pretending to wait for ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the men sauntered out upon the verandah for a smoke. Lois went, too, but sat somewhat apart with a piece of needlework in her hands. She preferred to be alone that she might think. She thought first of old David, and his pitiable condition. What could she do to help him? she asked herself. It was not right that he should be kept as a pauper while there were several people in the parish who could provide for him without the least trouble. Her father was one of them, and she was determined ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... In a pitiable state of mind, Soames walked away from the Post Office. Gianapolis had hurried off in the direction of Victoria Station. Something was wrong! Some part of the machine, of the dimly divined machine whereof he formed a ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... inhabitants of the rural districts appeared to be moderately well fed, a majority of the people of Innsbruck were manifestly in urgent need of food. Some of them, indeed, were in a truly pitiable condition, with emaciated bodies, sunken cheeks, unhealthy complexions, and shabby, badly worn clothes. The meager displays in the shop-windows were a pathetic contrast to variety and abundance which characterized them in ante-bellum ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... his wife's sister, he could not recall her name, although it had been perfectly familiar, and this and other lapses of memory appeared to frighten him. For a long time he sat very still with his face buried in his hands, doubtless striving to rally his forces. And the most pitiable part of it was his fear that George and I should notice his weakness ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... In a last pitiable struggle against the inevitable, the fool broke from his guards, and flung himself towards the door. One of the burly Swiss caught him by the neck in a grip that made him cry out with pain. Gian Maria eyed him with a sinister smile, and Martin proceeded to fasten ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... manner, human chattels assuming their natural right to go where they please, are advertised with a woodcut representing them as bending forward in the act of running, and carrying with them a small bundle containing their scanty wardrobe,—a pitiable figure! And yet this is done, not to awaken sympathy, but to excite vigilance, as in the following instances, which I have picked out ...
— American Scenes, and Christian Slavery - A Recent Tour of Four Thousand Miles in the United States • Ebenezer Davies
... had uttered these statements, exasperating and pitiable in the recital, before persons alarmed for themselves, exciting greater indignation in the hearers than was felt by themselves, they affirmed "that there never would be any other limit to their occupying the lands, ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... probable that any earthly power could have secured Republican endorsement at this time, although heretofore the party always had posed as the champion of this cause. There never was a more pitiable exhibition of abject subserviency to party domination. Men who had stood boldly for woman suffrage in the legislature, men who had spoken for it on the platform in every county in the State, sat dumb as slaves in this convention, sacrificing without scruple a lifelong principle for the sake of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... liberal tone of thinking here in Liverpool. The Colonel and Major seemed to be of similar principles; and the eyes of the latter glowed, when he sang his father's noble verse, "The rank is but the guinea's stamp," etc. It would have been too pitiable if Burns had left a son who could not feel the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... bow and was turning away when Lancelot Vane suddenly appeared. His face was very pallid and he clutched the door to steady himself. What with his evident weakness and his bandaged head he presented rather a pitiable picture. ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... Most pitiable was the scene which awaited him there. People were really dying in the streets, as he had been told. Some were already dead. A mother had died in front of her cottage, and her little children sat crying beside her body. Another, with a look of despair in her eyes, sat rocking ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... deplorable plight, and he makes all matters worse by his foolish little answers to his assailants. It is a pity that he has no kind friend to suggest to him that he had better not bandy words with the Examiner. His plea about the "printer" was too ludicrous, and his second note is pitiable. I only regret that the names of Ellis and Acton Bell should perforce be mixed up with his proceedings. My sister Anne wishes me to say that should she ever write another work, Mr. Smith will certainly have the first ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... that he might squeeze dry this orange of the present, and lose no opportunity, no moment. Thus it came to pass with him, as it does with us all who overwork ourselves, that actually he did less than he might have done, and warped himself in a most pitiable way indeed. A conscientious fellow, as he was, Clarian had hitherto been very faithful to his duties in the regular curriculum,—but now all this was changed. Here was a grand something to be done, a something so grand, indeed, that his whole life must bow before its exactions, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... make the children sensible of the pitiable condition of these men, Grandfather singled out Peter Oliver, chief justice of Massachusetts under the crown, and imagined him walking through the streets of Boston on the morning before he left ...
— Grandfather's Chair • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... let himself in with his key about eleven. He did not retire. He went into the library, got out some law books, and sitting down at the table, appeared as if about to do some work. But he did not pick up the pen. He sat there, his head sunk on his chest, with a look of misery on his face that was pitiable to see. ...
— Two Boys and a Fortune • Matthew White, Jr.
... wound is of course still fresh and sore, but is already showing signs of healing. The poor man has evidently been not only barbarously mutilated, but nearly frightened to death. With his pale face and half-grown beard, and his head bound up, he is a pitiable object. Obviously he was nearly as much afraid of me as of his midnight assailants, and was far too much bewildered by the harsh tone of "the Saxon" to tell a smooth and coherent story. Bit by bit, amid many interruptions, ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker
... to see no gentleman," cried Hutchins noisily. "Unless"—his manner suddenly changed to one of pitiable anxiety—"unless you're from the Company ...
— Four Max Carrados Detective Stories • Ernest Bramah
... Romanes gave me a pitiable account of himself in a letter the other day. He has had an attack of hemiplegic paralysis, and tells me he is a mere wreck. That means that the worst anticipations of his case are being verified. It ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... and I lighted mine from theirs; but scarcely was this done ere the rain fell in torrents. I had no blankets or protection of any kind against this, and Kaiber was in the same predicament; so that when the fire was extinguished our position became pitiable in the extreme, for I know not if I ever before suffered so much from cold; and to add to my annoyance I every now and then heard Kaiber chattering to himself, under its effects, ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... calamity on his own head. He was in no state to be left alone; and even the bereaved father found pity in his desolate heart for one who loved his lost child so well; and the two old men took him home between them, in a helpless and pitiable condition. ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... themselves on the produce of the fields, which, however, on account of their long bills, they could not readily pick up. For eider-ducks and frogs they had no appetite, for they feared with such dainty morsels to ruin their stomachs. In this pitiable situation their only consolation was that they could fly, and accordingly they often winged their way to the roofs of Bagdad, to see what was ...
— The Oriental Story Book - A Collection of Tales • Wilhelm Hauff
... been affianced to the Dauphin of France, and her father would bring the marriage about within a few weeks. To this girl I had thought to be gracious, and had feared that I might be too condescending. I then realized what a pitiable ass a man may make of himself by giving his whole time ...
— Yolanda: Maid of Burgundy • Charles Major
... triumph assured. Then we should have little or no disorganization of our economic, industrial, and commercial systems at home, no staggering war debts, no swollen fortunes to flout the sacrifices of our soldiers, no excuse for sedition, no pitiable slackerism, no outrage of treason. Envy and jealousy would have no soil for their menacing development, and revolution would be without ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... and poignantly expressed a mood which is common to all men who have any feeling for the past. It is a pathetic, almost a tragic mood, a longing more pitiable than that of any fanatic for any paradise, any lover for any woman, because it is quite impossible that it should ever be satisfied. To see, to feel, to move among the foundations of our generation—it is so natural a desire, ...
— Hilaire Belloc - The Man and His Work • C. Creighton Mandell
... the more pitiable in its effects because it served to unnerve and discourage those few of stouter hearts and more hopeful temperaments who had already begun the labor of restoration and reconstruction amid the embers of their desolated homes. In New York this feeling of hope and confidence, this ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... afternoon or evening. Nearly every Saturday a number of these young men were invited to our house to tea, or supper, for it was a good, substantial meal. The misery of some of these lads, owing to embarrassment, possibly from awe of the Superintendent, was pitiable and evident even to me, a boy of ten or eleven years old. But as soon as my father got command, as it were, of the situation, one could see how quickly most of them were put at their ease. He would address himself to the task of making ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... lake, and dream that she was just something better than the poorest of human creatures. She could not avoid putting her mind in competition with this brilliant woman's, and feeling eclipsed; and her weakness became pitiable. But Countess d'Isorella mentioned once that Pericles was at the Villa Ricciardi, projecting magnificent operatic entertainments. The reviving of a passion to sing possessed Vittoria like a thirst for freedom, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... we were to arrive at the Convent of St. Mary of the Angels very wet, covered with mud, perishing with cold, dying of hunger, and that the porter, instead of letting us in, were to leave us at the gate in this pitiable state, saying angrily, 'You are a couple of idle vagabonds, who stroll about the world, and receive the alms which the real poor ought to get.' If we bear this treatment with patience, without being discomposed, and without murmuring; if even we think humbly and charitably that ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe
... and might be heard pacing up and down there in a tempest of perplexity. He came forth only to order his horse, and desire M. de Sauve and a few grooms to be ready instantly to ride with him. His face was full of pitiable perplexity—the smallest obstacle was met with a savage oath; and he was evidently in all the misery of a weak yet passionate nature, struggling with impotent violence against a yoke that evidently ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... application of the spur. Too much accustomed to the roughness of the sea to heed this, we were nevertheless very sorry for these exposed deck-passengers, few of whom escaped seasickness. Crowded together as they were during the copious rainfall, their sufferings that afternoon and night were pitiable. There were some families with women and children, and such shelter as a canvas awning could afford was kindly arranged for them. When we anchored in shoal water off the coast next morning, and the big flat-boats came to take them ashore, they had hardly strength ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... to look upon just now." The precaution was much needed. Frost set in once more, and now with unending grip. Vilna offered a poor haven of refuge. The stores were soon plundered, and, as the Cossacks drew near, Murat and the remnant of the Grand Army decamped in pitiable panic. Amidst ever deepening misery they struggled on, until, of the 600,000 men who had proudly crossed the Niemen for the conquest of Russia, only 20,000 famished, frost-bitten, unarmed spectres staggered across the bridge of Kovno in the middle of December. The auxiliary ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... and children of Manfred met with a pitiable fate. On learning of the sad death of her husband Helena sought safety in flight, with her daughter Beatrice and her three infant sons, Henry, Frederick, and Anselino; but she was betrayed to Charles, ...
— Historical Tales, Vol 5 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality, German • Charles Morris
... Humpo ends, 'A final question, Mr. Bright, and I can release you from the painful, the pitiable ordeal it has been my sad duty to inflict upon you. A final question: 'Have you in your own mind suspicions of the identity of this unhappy woman's betrayer?' Old man cannot speak for emotion. Only nods, hands at his breast like a prophet about to ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... in that stream of pitiable men who staggered across the bridge from the Konigsberg road. Some instinct had turned it southwards. Now it began again, and the rumour spread throughout the city that Rapp was coming. At length, in the middle of December, an officer brought word ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... the ruling classes marries, he spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his concubine, "in order to prove that he does not care much for the bride." (Ploss, II., 434.) "The condition of Chinese women is most pitiable," writes ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... the snow choked and blinded him; fear and anxiety, so far as he was capable of feeling them, bewildered and oppressed him. A helmless ship in storm and darkness was in no more pitiable condition than this ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... How pitiable it is to see a great good man be-fuddled by a half truth. For to allege "Industrialism" to be the grand agency in the elevation of a race of already degraded labourers, is as much a mere platitude as to say, "they must eat and drink and sleep;" for man cannot live without these habits. But they ...
— Civilization the Primal Need of the Race - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Paper No. 3 • Alexander Crummell
... vain, for by his over-indulgence in morphia, his worrying and wandering, and irregular mode of life, Vrain had completely shattered his health. He lapsed into a state of second childhood, and, being deprived of the drugs which formerly had excited him to a state of frenzy, sank into a pitiable condition. For days he would remain without speaking to any one, and even ceased to take a pleasure in his books. Finally his limbs became paralysed, and so he spent the last few months of his wretched life in a bath-chair, ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... pitiable one. By the paleness of her cheeks, it was evident that she suffered cruelly; while she spoke, her tears flowed ceaselessly, and it was easy to see that every word came from her heart, and that what she had said ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... where he had found the pitiable remnants of Soapy he came upon Carter. The range boss was lying prone on his back, his body apparently unmarred. His horse was standing near him, grazing. Carter had not been in the ...
— Square Deal Sanderson • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Book-keepers in the great Bureau of Intellect. Monsieur, I don't apply these remarks to you, but I meet on all sides men who make it a business to teach new ideas and disclose chains of reasoning to people who turn pale at the first word. On my word of honor, it is pitiable! But that's the way of the world, and I don't pretend to reform it. Your objection, Monsieur, is really ...
— The Illustrious Gaudissart • Honore de Balzac
... agony. So rapid was the ravage, that it seems to have been more like an explosion than the ordinary progress of fire. The alarm and despair were almost simultaneous. The number of persons destroyed in this most pitiable and frightful catastrophe was 115, and among them was the accomplished author, Mr. ELIOT WARBURTON. His career in literature had been unusually brief. It is only a few years since The Crescent and the Cross attracted general applause; Hochelaga, or, The Conquest of Canada, followed soon ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... a certain hire being all sent back without payment, some of their horses lamed, and others killed, without any satisfaction made for them. The poor fellows came round the house weeping and tearing their hair and beards in a most pitiable manner, without getting anything but drubs from the insolent soldiers. I would have paid them the money out of my own pocket with all my heart, but it would only have been giving so much to the aga, who would have taken it from them without any remorse.... The villagers are ...
— Round About the Carpathians • Andrew F. Crosse
... by taking from them the limited freedom they have, a freedom they are so little able to misuse, and from the loss of which we and they have so little to gain? As nothing is more ridiculous than a haughty child, so nothing is more pitiable than ...
— Emile - or, Concerning Education; Extracts • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... themselves not wanted in the churches, his converts set up a separate and more militant organization. In 1879 the Army invaded America, landing at Philadelphia, where, as in the Old Country and in other American cities, pitiable sin and wretchedness grovelled in obscurity. In 1894 there were in the United States 539 corps and 1,953 officers, and in the whole world 3,200 corps and 10,788 officers. Without proposing any programme of social or political reform, and without announcing any ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... overreached itself, and she sat there a pitiable object, with the ruin she had herself caused around her. I gave her one look, and ...
— Orrain - A Romance • S. Levett-Yeats
... spent a happy evening. Next morning I noticed the first symptoms of the disease the hateful widow had communicated to me, but in three or four days I found it was of a very harmless character, and a week later I was quite rid of it. My poor Spaniard, on the other hand, was in a pitiable case. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... "It's pitiable," said Ben to Major Morris, as they trudged along side by side. "I reckon some of these ignorant creatures have an idea that we have ...
— The Campaign of the Jungle - or, Under Lawton through Luzon • Edward Stratemeyer
... object of the poor-law committee. He asked, "Who were the parties composing that committee? On the one hand, there was all the property of the country, in every variety and form, aggregated to support a measure peculiarly framed for its interest and protection. Who was the other party? All that was pitiable and miserable in the land, sunken alike by ignorance and destitution. How, again, were the respective causes of these parties conducted? On the one side was one of the most active and vigilant bodies ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... it was not as bad as Colonel Rush had feared. Rebellion against lawful authority, rank disobedience and deception were to be laid at Percy's door, not to speak of the pitiable weakness which had suffered him to be led into this wrong, and the enormity of his at least passive acquiescence when Flagg had stolen Seabrooke's letter; still worse his own destruction of it, almost involuntary though it was. What he had apprehended the colonel would hardly have confessed ...
— Bessie Bradford's Prize • Joanna H. Mathews
... way, and another another; but the Khoja contrived to keep up with the cock, which he drove before him with his stick, the poor bird waddling hither and thither, and fluttering from side to side with distress and indecision pitiable to behold. ...
— Miscellanea • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... voluble, when once she passed into the humor of talking. Therese let her talk unchecked. It seemed to do her good to chatter about Belle and Lou, and Jack Dawson, and about her home life, of which she unknowingly made such a pitiable picture to her listener. ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... of the German people when the war in its first intense moment had, as it were, cast into a permanent form the molten popular soul, what was that of the nation which the Germans knew in their hearts, in spite of the most pitiable academic illusion, to be the permanent and implacable enemy—I ...
— A General Sketch of the European War - The First Phase • Hilaire Belloc
... Proserpine, 'I make it a rule to support the weaker side, and nothing will ever persuade me that Ixion is not a victim, and a pitiable one.' ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... that told her story. Upon the drawn cheeks and the drooped, woful lips there was no dabbing of cosmetics now; the professional smile, painted, pitiable and betraying, was lacking from the characterless mouth, yet the major—sweet-minded, clean-living old man though he was—knew at a glance what manner of woman he had found here in this lodging house. It was the face of a woman who never intentionally does any evil and yet rarely gets a ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... happen to meet a man of known name, you will watch him, will listen to him, will try to sneak into his confidence, and you will blab, for money, about him, and your blab will inevitably be mendacious. In short, like the most pitiable outcasts of womankind, and, without their excuse, you will live by selling your honour. You will not suffer much, nor suffer long. Your conscience will very speedily be seared with a red-hot iron. ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... wandered about for days in a pitiable plight. The wound in his shoulder, although it still contained the bullet, was not enough to kill him, and, although his blinded eyes and swollen nose caused him intense suffering, there was no likelihood of his dying for some days. So it was that he wandered on ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... Europe will keep back the progress and happiness of the rest. The prospect is not very bright; a too generous confidence might betray some nation into irretrievable disaster. But the bracing influence of national danger may perhaps be beneficial. For we have to remember the pitiable decay of the ancient classical civilisation, which was partly due, as we have found, to a desire for comfortable and easy living. There have been signs that many of our countrymen no longer think the strenuous ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... apparently lifeless, his head tucked under his body, clothes over his head, exposing the larger part of his anatomy—a pitiable lump, lying in the sandy path twenty feet from the well. The handle of the windlass had caught him across the shoulders, sending him flying through the air. For days thereafter "Al-f-u-r-d" was swathed in bandages and bathed with liniments; for a time, at least, the family was free from the cares ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... passed but some unhappy family fell a victim to French bribery and savage cruelty. As for me, though now in comfortable circumstances, with an affectionate and amiable wife, it was not long before I suddenly became the most pitiable of mankind. I can never bear to think of the last time I saw my dear wife, on the fatal 2d of October, 1754. That day she had left home to visit some of her relations, and, no one being in the house but myself, I stayed up later than usual, expecting her ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... did indubitably look very ill. His appearance of woe, despair, and dreadful apprehension was pitiable in the highest degree. With a gesture of intense weariness he declined food, nor could she persuade ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... a parlour with a regulated temperature—as if that were not to die a hundred times over, and for ten years at a stretch! As if it were not to die in one's own lifetime, and without even the sad immunities of death! As if it were not to die, and yet be the patient spectators of our own pitiable change! The Permanent Possibility is preserved, but the sensations carefully held at arm's length, as if one kept a photographic plate in a dark chamber. It is better to lose health like a spendthrift than to waste it like a miser. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... they had sought him at Saint-Germain-en-Laye, where he was said to be hidden, at Saint-Denis-de-Monts, at Saint-Romain, at Rouen. The prefects of Eure and Seine-Inferieure were ordered to set all their police on his track. The result of this campaign was pitiable, and they only succeeded in arresting d'Ache's younger brother, an inoffensive fellow of feeble mind, appropriately named "Placide," who was nicknamed "Tourlour," on account of his lack of wit and his rotundity. His greatest fear was of being ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... She has not the faculty of creating anything original by her own intellect, so that, having lost love, all her mental power shrinks up. Her cat, her little dog, and the daily care of her person and small household occupy her whole mind. It is not surprising that such persons generally create a pitiable ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... Watson," said he. He was in a pitiable state of reaction, with every nerve in a twitter. "I say, Watson, what ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... anger swept over Justine at this last derisive stroke of fate. It was grotesque and pitiable that a man like Amherst should create out of his regrets a being who had never existed, and then ascribe to her feelings and actions of which the real woman had again and ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... softening. Fanny stood by as at a spectacle provided for her amusement, without rancour, but equally without pity. Beatrice was contemptuous. What right, said her countenance, had a servant-girl to covet jewellery? And how pitiable the spirit that prompted to a filching of half-crowns! For the criminals of finance, who devastate a thousand homes, Miss French had no small admiration; crimes such as the present were ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... Flo. Alas! the most pitiable object in nature—an unhappy maniac; she resides at the same cottage where I found ...
— The Mirror of Taste, and Dramatic Censor - Volume I, Number 1 • Stephen Cullen Carpenter
... she said at last, "the most pitiable spectacle in the world is you, Mr. Rimrock Jones. You try to buy friends, as if they were commodities, and you try to buy them wholesale. You set up the drinks and try to buy the whole town, but what is the result of it all? Why, you simply attract a lot of leeches and bloodsuckers whose sole purpose ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge
... was really in a pitiable state. "I'm sorry to trouble you, Mrs Clayton Vernon. But I want to speak to Gilbert for ...
— The Matador of the Five Towns and Other Stories • Arnold Bennett
... realized it and saw this and looked down on that lonely, patient, wistful little creature making the best shift she could with those pitiable playthings, something came up from that man's breast into his throat. He had not supposed he had any of it left in his soul—it was tender, ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... this have won success, while those poor wretches who are dragged one way by nature and the other way by these ava tars, they set one foot in the boat of the real and the other in the boat of the unreal, and thus are in a pitiable plight, able neither to advance nor to keep ...
— The Home and the World • Rabindranath Tagore
... help were made. The Duke himself was base enough to answer that on the fourth day after Christmas help would come, and this though he must have known that there was no real chance of succour. But with a pitiable confidence in their leaders the envoys dragged themselves back to Rouen and bade the garrison hold out only for another fifteen days, and then they should be rescued. To men already starving we can scarce imagine what the delay of another fortnight meant. It was drawing near to Christmas. ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... he did not hear what. He was white and trembling, in pitiable case even to eyes that could only see skin-deep; but the doctor's step came beating like a drum to him, and he was solidly seated when the doctor ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... his 'Manuscript in a Bottle' among others. It would have broken your hearts, gentlemen, to have seen him. His black coat was buttoned up close to his chin—seedy, badly worn—he himself shabby and down at the heels, but erect and extremely courteous—a most pitiable object. My servant wasn't going to let him in at first, he ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... over it one morning, my back against a huge elm-tree that flung its yellow flowers to the wind. At the sight of the rich and glorious view before me, I thought bitterly of the scorn with which even in our literature we affect to hold this land of ours, and poured maledictions on the pitiable plutocrats who fall out of love with fair France, and spend their gold to acquire the right of sneering at their own country, by going through Italy at a gallop and inspecting that desecrated land through an opera-glass. I cast loving eyes on ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... has not lived all his life in England to share the satisfaction with which the English papers commonly welcome the intelligence that some great American manufacturing concern is establishing branch works in Canada. It is well for Canada that such works should be established; but it is pitiable for the Empire that it should be left to the United States to establish them. British capital was the chief instrumentality with which the United States was enabled to build its own railways and conduct ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... for him with a thinly veiled persistency which was remarkable. Yves, for whom I then sent, made himself particularly charming to her, so much so that this time I felt a shade of more serious annoyance; I even asked myself whether the laughably pitiable ending, which I had hitherto vaguely foreseen, might not, after all, soon ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... see, though but in shadow and the fables of theatres, the pomp of tragic representations of human fortune; 'tis not without compassion at what we hear, but we please ourselves in rousing our displeasure, by the rarity of these pitiable events. Nothing tickles that does not pinch. And good historians skip over, as stagnant water and dead sea, calm narrations, to return to seditions, to wars, to which they know ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... however, to the thousands of women and children living day and night in the mine tunnels some eight or twelve thousand feet below the surface. Theirs was a pitiable condition, and how much longer they could have held out had not help come it is difficult ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... by the humanity of the farmer, was now employed in raising his master. His lordship made the most pitiable figure that can be imagined. His features, as well as his dress, wore an appearance perfectly uniform. "Whither would you convey him?" said Mr. Godfrey, who was now returned. "What shall we do with him?" "Oh, and ...
— Damon and Delia - A Tale • William Godwin
... all these, and similar opposite qualities, simultaneously acted as motives upon Peepi, certes, he would have been a most pitiable mortal, in a ceaseless eddy of resolves, incapable of ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... blotches which told of carouses with Dundas at Wimbledon. Months and years of triumph (apart from the Russian defeat) had stiffened his confidence and pride; but the fateful shadow of the French Revolution must have struck a chill to his being, especially then, on the arrival of news of the pitiable surrender of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and the shooting down of the Swiss Guards at the Tuileries. No royalist could look on the future without inward shuddering; and both these men were ardent royalists. We know from Canning's confession that it was the starting of the club, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... he might find fellow-sinners of unquestioned sanity. But the conduct of his public life goes to prove that his wits were diseased. His behavior in the House, when it was not intolerably tedious, was characterized by a grotesque buffoonery which men looked upon as laughable {194} or pitiable according to their tempers, but which they had not yet learned to look upon as dangerous. When he denounced the King as a Papist, when he declared that the time would come when George Gordon would be able to dictate to the Crown and Parliament, when he occasionally interrupted his wild utterances ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Once or twice, at their first coming, Mrs. Johnstone had descended for a walk in the streets; but by this time the unhappy lady had it fixed in her mind that she was being watched and followed, and shook with apprehension at every corner. So pitiable indeed were the glances she flung behind her, and so frantic the precautions she used to shake off her supposed pursuers and return by circuitous ways, that Kirstie pressed her to ...
— Two Sides of the Face - Midwinter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... stubborn lip,—that heavy, yet not stolid expression,—all seem to warrant a resemblance to that singular and fortunate man, to whom folly appears to have been as great an instrument of success as wisdom, and who rose to the supreme power perhaps no less from a pitiable fanaticism than an admirable genius. So true is it that great men often soar to their height by qualities the least obvious to the spectator, and (to stoop to a low comparison) resemble that animal* in which a common ligament supplies the place and possesses ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... States, Maryland, did not adopt them until March, 1781. Congress under he confederacy dealt with the States and did not have the confidence or the love of the people. It required nine States to pass any measure of importance. During the war the confederacy was a pitiable failure. It issued bills which no one would take, its certificates of indebtedness and promises to pay were so worthless that it gave rise to the proverb, "Not worth a continental." Robert Morris, the financier, ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... to pity him. If ever mortal was pitiable, he was the man. He had broken down at last, under the conflict of violent emotions which had been roused in him since the morning. The effort to follow Mrs. Lecount along the mazes of intricate combination through which she ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... of the bee, but with the most intimate details of its private life, I have looked at them with a new interest and a new sympathy. For there is no animal which does not get more out of life than the pitiable insect which Dr. Watts holds up as ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... pathos, pity patron, customer peculiar, unusual perspicuity, perspicacity permeate, pervade permit, allow perseverance, persistence pertain, appertain pictorial, picturesque pitiable, pitiful pity, sympathy pleasant, pleasing politician, statesman practicable, practical precipitous, precipitate precision, preciseness prejudice, bias prelude, overture pride, vanity principal, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... presence of Christ's Body and Blood under the forms of the consecrated bread and wine. The other maintains that there is no real presence whatsoever, except in the hearts of the believing communicant."[5] Was such a state of pitiable helplessness ever seen or heard or dreamed of anywhere! And yet this church, please to observe, is supposed to be a body sent by God to teach. Heaven preserve us from such a teacher. As a further illustration of the utter incompetency of the Establishment ...
— The Purpose of the Papacy • John S. Vaughan
... man raised to life went immediately and reported the matter to the rulers, whom they knew to be intensely hostile toward Jesus. In the parable we have recently studied, the spirit of the rich man pleaded from his place of anguish that Lazarus, the once pitiable beggar, be sent from paradise to earth, to warn others of the fate awaiting the wicked, to which appeal Abraham replied: "If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."[1033] Now a Lazarus had been in reality raised ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... cumbering the earth Dave Cowan thought farmers the most pitiable. To this tireless-winged bird of passage farming was not a loose trade, and the news that his son was pledged to agrarian pursuits shocked him. To be mewed up for life on a few acres ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... that Jemmy had almost forgotten his own language. I should think there was scarcely another human being with so small a stock of language, for his English was very imperfect. It was laughable, but almost pitiable, to hear him speak to his wild brother in English, and then ask him in Spanish ("no sabe?") whether ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... alone—as, for instance, to Kant's "AEsthetik"—I was anything but elated or vain in consequence. I had read in Sartor Resartus, "If a man reads, shall he not be learned?" and I knew too well that reading was with me an unprofitable, perhaps pitiable, incurable mania-amusement, which might ruin me for life, and which, as it was, was a daily source of apprehension between me and my good true friends, who ...
— Memoirs • Charles Godfrey Leland
... dark and drear, and thick and misty. How unlike those brilliant hours that once summoned him to revelry and love! Unhappy Popanilla! Thy delicious Fantaisie has vanished! Ah, pitiable youth! What could possibly have induced you to be so very rash? And all from that unlucky lock ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... FESTUNG or Hill Castle,— where Martin Luther sat solitary during the Diet of Augsburg (Diet known to us, our old friend Margraf George of Anspach hypothetically "laying his head on the block? there, and the great Kaiser, Karl V., practically burning daylight, with pitiable spilling of wax, in the CORPUS-CHRISTI procession there), [Antea, vol. v. p. 197.]—where Martin Luther sat solitary, and wrote that celebrated Letter about 16 Crows holding THEIR Parliament all ...
— History of Friedrich II of Prussia V 7 • Thomas Carlyle
... these men, in their walks, as often as we have, we know not; this we know—that the miserably poor man (no matter whether he owes his distresses to his own conduct, or that of others) who feels his poverty and vainly strives to conceal it, is one of the most pitiable objects in human nature. Such objects, with few exceptions, ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... undamaged boats were lowered and the survivors from the liner once again cast adrift to face the horrors of the previous night. Rafts floated free with all that were left of the crew of the sloop—two officers and thirty men. Their condition was pitiable. There had been no time to get either food or extra clothing, and so heavily laden were the light structures of capuc and wood that the occupants were ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... pisxto. Pit (well, etc.) puto, fosajxo, kavo. Pit (theatre) partero. Pitch (to smear with) kalfatri. Pitch pecxo. Pitch (of ships) subakvigxi. Pitcher krucxo. Pitchfork forkego. Piteous kompatinda. Pitfall enfalujo. Pith suko. Pitiable kompatinda. Pitiful kompatinda. Pitiless senkompata. Pity kompati, bedauxri. Pity, it is a estas domagxo. Pivot akso. Placable kvietebla, kvietema. Placard afisxo, kartego. Place (to put) meti. Place loko. Place, a public placo. Place of abode restadejo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... habits of life, his very vices, for the first time seriously oppressed him. He bestirred himself in dusting his black clothes, washing his hands and face, and other acts characteristic of his studiously neat habits, and for a moment forgot his annoyance. The thought of deserting his weaker and more pitiable companions never perhaps occurred to him. Yet he could not help feeling the want of that excitement which, singularly enough, was most conducive to that calm equanimity for which he was notorious. He looked at the gloomy walls that rose a thousand feet ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect—in terror. In this unnerved—in this pitiable condition—I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... was the most pitiable of all; the windows had only the leaden frames left, and those bent and battered; the delicate panelling was scarred and split by the shower of stones that had poured in through the window and that now lay in all parts of the room. A painting of her mother that had ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... on each other and leaning forward. The roofs of these time-worn habitations are full of holes, and have been patched here and there with laths; from underneath them project mildewed beams, which are shaded by the dusty-leaved elder-trees and crooked white willow— pitiable flora of those ...
— Creatures That Once Were Men • Maxim Gorky
... cut a poor figure notwithstanding his singular beauty. The sleeves of his jacket were too short; with his ill-cut country gloves and a waistcoat too scanty for him, he looked prodigiously ridiculous, compared with the young men in the balcony—"positively pitiable," thought Mme. de Bargeton. Chatelet, interested in her without presumption, taking care of her in a manner that revealed a profound passion; Chatelet, elegant, and as much at home as an actor treading the familiar boards of his theatre, in two days had recovered all the ground lost in ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... he jumped on him and rode him until the faithful animal laid down and died of exhaustion. He was left on foot some 75 miles east of where I was. Service was so weak and exhausted from worry, lack of sleep and nourishment that his condition was pitiable. We had to watch him for twenty-four hours to keep ...
— The Second William Penn - A true account of incidents that happened along the - old Santa Fe Trail • William H. Ryus
... thoroughfare of life. And so the insensibility which had overtaken her, was not the ordinary swoon with which Nature relieves the overstrained nerves, but the return of the epileptic fits of her early childhood; and if the condition of the poor girl had been pitiable before, it was tenfold more so now. Yet she did not complain, but bore all in silence, though it was evident that her health was giving way. But now, help came to her from a strange quarter; though many ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... stay a pitiable object, with a hide- bandaged lower leg, often limped past the tents; and, thinking the limb broken, I asked the history of the accident. Our hero, it appears, was a doughty personage, famed for valour, who had lately slipped into the Juhayni country with the laudable intention of "lifting" ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... beneath his lashes, and again lowered his eyes. I heard a long gasping sound, as if he found difficulty in breathing. He sat upright, and threw back his shoulders with a pitiable effort to ...
— Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories • Henry Seton Merriman
... and grounds us in love, and that is to root us in the souls of other men; then to tear them from us irrevocably—parents, children, husband, wife, lover, beloved, friend,—is to leave us of all men most pitiable. ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin
... It was pitiable to see the vacant eye which Sir Robert fixed upon her pale, fine face, and most painful to observe the look of anxious inquiry with which ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... the one shield for the spirit against the besieging vanities of life. Gerty's faith had fallen from her long ago, and, as she remembered this, Laura felt a jealous impulse to snatch her friend away from the restless worldliness and the inordinate desires. The pitiable soul of Gerty showed to her suddenly as a stunted and famished city child struggling for life in an atmosphere which carried the taint of death, and in her imagination the picture was so vivid that she ...
— The Wheel of Life • Ellen Anderson Gholson Glasgow
... amiable self-satisfaction is the mark of earthly bliss, Solomon in all his glory was a pitiable mortal compared with Mr. Cohen—clearly one of those persons, who, being in excellent spirits about themselves, are willing to cheer strangers by letting them know it. While he was delivering himself with lively rapidity, he took the baby from his wife and holding it on his arm presented his features ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... they show a graded advance from one to another equal to successive additions of the same electrical unit charge, thus indicating a real gamut of the elements that we can run up by adding or run down by subtracting the same unit of electrical charge. It is pitiable to have to record that next year this scientific genius was killed in the ill-fated Gallipoli ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... fowls, and, after eating their eggs, he secured one of the hens, and began plucking it. The noise of the poor bird called some of the servants to the rescue, when they found the half-plucked creature in such a pitiable condition that they killed it at once. After this, Mr. Monkey was chained up, ...
— Minnie's Pet Monkey • Madeline Leslie
... life of Rousseau. As to his character, Lord Brougham says that "never was so much genius before united with so much weakness." The leading spring of his life was egotism. He never felt himself wrong, and the sophistries he used to justify his immoralities are both ludicrous and pitiable. His treatment of Madame de Warens, his first benefactor, was heartless, while the abandonment of his children was infamous. He twice changed his religion without convictions, for the advancement of his fortunes. He pretended to be poor when he ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... England, where the attitude of the majority towards the Government approached hostility. As a manifestation of contemporary national character, of unwillingness to subordinate personal gain to public welfare, to loyalty to country, it was pitiable and shameful, particularly as it affected large communities; but its instructive significance at this time is the evidence it gives that forty years of confederation, nearly twenty-five being of the ...
— Sea Power in its Relations to the War of 1812 - Volume 2 • Alfred Thayer Mahan
... am well off, sir," he replied; "but I have not always been so. Until I was forty-five years old, my life was a series of absurd and useless privations. I had a father who wasted my youth, ruined my life, and made me the most pitiable ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... Jisr-ed-Damieh, thus cutting off the last possible means of escape. Prisoners were surrendering in thousands. They looked weak and exhausted; in many cases they had fled over a parched country and beneath a burning sun for three or four days, without touching a drop of water. Their plight was pitiable. By that evening, the Turkish armies west of the Jordan ...
— With the British Army in The Holy Land • Henry Osmond Lock
... outward and sensible result of prayer, is, a penitent resolution, joined with a consciousness of weakness in effecting it, yea even a dread, too well grounded, lest by breaking and falsifying it, the soul should add guilt to guilt; by the very means it has taken to escape from guilt; so pitiable is the state of ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... tell him, and the youth thought it would be easy enough to do it. So he set himself to work to catch three hares alive, put them in a bag, clad himself in some old rags so that he looked so poor and wretched that it was quite pitiable to see him, and in this guise on Sunday forenoon he sneaked into the passage with his bag, like any beggar boy. The Governor himself and every one in the house was in the kitchen, keeping watch over the joint. While they were doing this ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... moved by threats, and I decline to discuss the matter further," retorted Killen with a pitiable ...
— The Vision Spendid • William MacLeod Raine
... had embarked him in negotiations the results of which had proved so fatal: he thought only that they had died for him, and his anguish grew insupportable. "He was," says Mademoiselle, "in a most pitiable state; he was not wounded himself, yet he was covered from head to foot with dust and blood, his hair all disordered, his face flushed with exertion, his cuirass battered with blows, and having lost the scabbard of his sword ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... conceal her disgust.] Oh, if you knew how painful it is to hear you whining like this! It's pitiable, really! In the girl's own interest—how can ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro
... fellow, because he hadn't another friend in the place. He knew he should be kicked out for his pains, but that would be more agreeable than otherways." From all I gathered from Thompson, it appeared that the pitiable man—the audacious minister of God—was the slave of one of the most corroding passions that ever made shipwreck of the heart of man. The love of money absorbed or made subservient every other sentiment. To heap up riches, there was no labour too painful, no means too vicious, no conduct ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... the French Revolution and the unforgettable incident of the pitiable peasant child were not without influence in causing him to become a great poetic interpreter of childhood. No poem has surpassed his Alice Fell, or Poverty in presenting the psychology of childish grief, or his We Are Seven in voicing the ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... of nothing. "If anything happens to your money, Albion," said Sidney, "I'll make it good, even if I have to sell my wine-cellar." Albion was afraid even to keep a revolver. His state of terror was pitiable, and the more so because he had a fear of betraying it, which was to some extent the most cruel fear of all. Sidney Meeks was probably the only person in East Westland who understood how it was with him, and he kept his knowledge to himself. Sidney was ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Wilson, commonly called David, has set up a Temple of the Davidites, with Virgins of the Sun, dressed in white, and all the tomfooleries of a long beard and exclusive sanctity. But America is a fine country for such knavery. Another curiosity is less pitiable and more natural. It is Bond Lake, a large narrow sheet of water, on the summit between Lake Simcoe and Lake Ontario, which has no visible outlet or inlet, and is therefore, like David Wilson, mysterious, although common sense soon lays the mystery in both cases bare; ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... seed was so attractive, and he who had baited the trap knew it full well, and that the bird could not resist its appetite. The fowler is our Lord. The bait is Divine Love. The bird is the soul. O skillful catcher of souls! O irresistible bait of Divine Love! O pitiable victim! but most blessed soul; for in the hands of our Lord the soul only dies to self to ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... of business cares and domestic sorrow had begun to tell even upon John's perfect health and nervous system. Facing absolute ruin in the war years and surrounded by pitiable famine and death, he had kept his cheerful temper, his smiling face, his resolute, confident spirit. Now, he was singularly prosperous. The mill was busy nearly night and day, all his plans and hopes had been perfected; ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... martyr. He must do "a perisher." That is precisely what the master of a lonely boat in an odd angle of the Coral Sea was doing when a joyful sail appeared—a dove-like messenger from civilisation and shops. It was a pitiable famine. No one had had a smoke for a week. The black boys had broken up their nicotine-saturated clay pipes and masticated them to pulp, and still treasured the quids, while the "Boss" pondered cigars during the day and dreamt them at night. But relief was at hand. ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... condoling chant concludes abruptly with the doleful exclamation, "Now we are dejected in spirit." Enkitenlane, "I am becoming poor," or "wretched," is apparently a derivative of kitenre, to pity, and might be rendered, "I am in a pitiable state." "We are miserable in mind," would probably be a literal version of this closing ejaculation. Whether it is a lament for the past glories of the confederacy, or for the chief who is mourned, is a question which ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale |
