"Sentimental" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shoots; and she became enamoured of the attentive and admired Englishman. Horace was susceptible of ridicule: there his somewhat icy heart was easily touched. Partly in vanity, partly in playfulness, he encouraged the sentimental-exaggeration of his correspondent; but, becoming afraid of the world's laughter, ended by reproving her warmth, and by chilling, under the refrigerating influence of his cautions, all the ...
— The Wits and Beaux of Society - Volume 2 • Grace & Philip Wharton
... life was eventful, chiefly through his many sentimental attachments, its deepest experience being his profound love and friendship for the Countess of Albany,—Louise Stolberg, mistress and afterward wife of the "Young Pretender," who passed under the title of Count of Albany, and from whom she was finally divorced. The ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... distinct contradiction to the stipulations of the treaties between Rome and Latium; the unprecedented march of the Roman army through the Marsian and Samnite territory to Capua, while all Latium was in arms against Rome; to say nothing of the equally confused and sentimental account of the military insurrection of 412, and the story of its forced leader, the lame Titus Quinctius, the Roman Gotz von Berlichingen. Still more suspicious perhaps, are the repetitions. Such is the story of the military tribune Publius ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... while then there had been little pink blossoming candles, and that there would be many more springs and many blossoms, but the one which had passed no one and nothing had the power to bring back. Sadly gazing into the depths of the retreating dense alley, he suddenly noticed that sentimental tears ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... marriage—except in the ideal Roman Catholic community, where it is based on the sanction of an authority which in real Roman Catholic countries a large proportion of the men decline to obey—is sustained at present entirely by the inertia of custom, and by a number of sentimental and practical considerations, considerations that may very possibly undergo modification in the face of the altered relationship of husband and wife that the present development of childless menages is bringing about. The practical and sustaining reason ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... the commencement of the Spectator and Tatler, periodicals have principally assisted in developing, if we may so term it, the powers of observation. Intelligent readers of this kind of literature would naturally turn away from the insipid stuff of the rhymer, and the equally sentimental trash of the getter-up of fiction, of which our old magazines were mostly composed, to the more rational parts of the publication, such as original essays, critiques, stories which had really some truth for their foundation, or any ...
— Sinks of London Laid Open • Unknown
... it—she missed her strutting at her side to church on Sunday—she missed her noisy, remonstrant setting out to school every morning and her noisy affectionate return—her heart ached when she looked at the little empty bed in her room, and being sentimental she often dropped a tear where she used to drop a kiss on ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... sentimental," she returned, with an air of engaging candor, "don't you? Just my first impression, you know; but it's a face I ...
— Jewel - A Chapter In Her Life • Clara Louise Burnham
... source of continual irritation, and the Westbrook family did its best, by interference and suggestion, to refrigerate the poet's feelings for his wife. On the other hand he found among the Boinville set exactly that high-flown, enthusiastic, sentimental atmosphere which suited his idealizing temper. Two extracts from a letter written to Hogg upon the 16th of March, 1814, speak more eloquently than any analysis, and will place before the reader the antagonism which had sprung ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds
... be too sentimental. Let us be less luxurious but more magnificent. Said Laotse: "Heaven and earth are pitiless." Said Kobodaishi: "Flow, flow, flow, flow, the current of life is ever onward. Die, die, die, die, death ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... the fine clothes which the latter had just put on set off his good looks (for he was handsome and comely in appearance), the king's daughter found him very much to her liking. Indeed, the marquis of Carabas had not bestowed more than two or three respectful but sentimental glances upon her when she fell madly in love with him. The king invited him to enter the coach and ...
— Old-Time Stories • Charles Perrault
... trouble is with the interpretation of the laws by the juries, who merely voice the public sentiment, which is superior to the law itself. The average jury is a whimsical creature, subject to all kinds of influences, though mostly of a sentimental character. In criminal matters where whites are concerned, it seems ever to lean to the defense; and the strongest arguments of the prosecution are easily offset and upset by appeals on behalf of youth, ...
— A Review of Hoffman's Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 1 • Kelly Miller
... it. I can picture the horrid reality. He will marry some thin-lipped creature who will back him in all his madness, and his friends will have to bid him a reluctant farewell. Or, worse still, there are scores of gushing, sentimental girls who might capture him. I wish old Wratislaw were here to ask him what he thinks, for he knows Lewie better than any of us. Is he a ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... is rather a motive than a source; we may call it, for want of a better word, the sentimental or the altruistic motive—the moral motive; the forces behind it being mainly of a religious or moral origin, philanthropists, students of ethics, and recently, to a great extent, the women and the women's clubs. The activity of these great forces ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... moral conflict gets only confused understanding. Sometimes they are aroused by sentimental pity or indignation, but soon tire again. If their own interests are affected they fight well. But there are men and women whose minds have been made so sensitive by personal experiences or so cleansed by right education and by the spirit of God that they take hold of the ...
— The Social Principles of Jesus • Walter Rauschenbusch
... and from her pockets, 'The Gordian Knot' and 'Peregrine Pickle.' Here are 'The Tears of Sensibility' and 'Humphry Clinker.' This, 'The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality,' written by herself; and here the second volume of 'The Sentimental Journey.'" ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... of her," said Grandmother brusquely. "She was a sentimental, fanciful creature. She might have married well but she preferred to waste her life pining over the memory of a man who was not worthy to untie the shoelace of ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... releasing the snow-white thread, which they had drawn out so daintily; and keeping her eyes still fixed steadily on the point where he had disappeared, she gave vent to her feelings in a long-drawn 'heigho!' in every language, and in all times, expression of sentimental sadness. ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... sympathies of every one: in the next place, notwithstanding his high powers, he writes a vicious style; and his false ornaments are exactly of that kind which would be most likely to strike the undiscerning. He likewise abounds with sentimental commonplaces, that, from the manner in which they were brought forward, bore an imposing air of novelty. In any well-used copy of the Seasons the book generally opens of itself with the rhapsody on love, or with one of the stories (perhaps ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... has done the business herself. She's a girl to look out for the main chance. Weir, I hope you haven't been hovering too near the flame. The Ludlow is capital to flirt with,—quick, spicy, sentimental by spells, not the kind of a girl to waste herself on a young, impecunious fellow like our friend Jim, here, so he goes scot-free. Weir, I hope you're not hard hit. We've all had a good time; but I think now we must address ourselves to the examinations in hand, and let the girls ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas
... traders. The acquisition of money, except by despoilment, gift, royal favor, or inheritance, had been unknown at Oldenhurst. The present degenerate custodian of its fortunes, staggering under the weight of its sentimental mortmain already alluded to, had speculated in order to keep up its material strength, that was gradually shrinking through impoverished land and the ruined trade it had despised. He had invested largely in California mines, and was the chief shareholder ...
— A Phyllis of the Sierras • Bret Harte
... presence of the enemy. What was the life of one man compared with the thousands of women and children who were suffering through the horrors of that war? We in England have been for so long mercifully spared the misery of war in our own country, that possibly public opinion has become a little too sentimental. During the Trafalgar Square riots in 1887, it was suggested by some that the Fire Brigade should pump cold water on to the rioters in order to disperse them; and one writer seriously deprecated such a step, on the ground that possibly the poor fellows who got the ducking ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... definition of Pietas, as reverence to sentimental law, you will find I am supported by all classical authority and use of this word. For the particular meaning of which I am next about to use the word Religion, there is no such general authority, nor can there be, for any limited or accurate meaning ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... movements, are worthy of the greatest admiration and above all praise. The conscience of women is in all things more discriminating and sensitive than that of men; their sense of justice, not compromising or time-serving, but pure and exacting; their love of order, not spasmodic or sentimental merely, but springing from the heart; all these,—the better conscience, the exalted sense of justice, and the abiding love of order, have been made by the enfranchisement of women to contribute to the good government and well-being of our territory. To the plain teachings of these two years' ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... been led to feel that they with their riper experience and knowledge of life knew what was best for her, and therefore she had yielded to their wishes and accepted the offer." She was beginning to add, in a sentimental tone, that "had she only followed the impulses of her heart"—when Gregory, at first too stunned and bewildered to speak, recovered his senses and interrupted with, "Please don't speak of your heart, Miss Bently. Why ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... descent upon the Carnatic should be from the same pen as the grave, simple, unadorned Address to the King (1777), where each sentence falls on the ear with the accent of some golden-tongued oracle of the wise gods. His stride is the stride of a giant, from the sentimental beauty of the picture of Marie Antoinette at Versailles, or the red horror of the tale of Debi Sing in Rungpore, to the learning, positiveness and cool judicial mastery of the Report on the Lords' Journals (1794), which Philip Francis, no mean judge, declared on the whole to be ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... sentimental excitement is the presence of noble Judge Sewall, white-haired and benignant, standing up calmly in Boston meeting, with dignified face and demeanor, but an aching and contrite heart, to ask through the voice of his minister humble forgiveness of God and man for his sad share as a judge in the ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... His picture really should be in Memorial Hall, but I thought Uncle Silas would like to be up here among the books, and facing the old place. (with a laugh) I confess to being a little sentimental. ...
— Plays • Susan Glaspell
... arising at narrow intervals from the hedge, and spreading out their deadening shades upon his wheatfields on either side, are not useful nor ornamental to him. They may look prettily, and make a nice picture in the eyes of the sentimental tourist or traveller, but he grudges the ground they cover. He could well afford to pay the landlord an additional rentage per annum more than equal to the money value of the yearly growth of these trees. Besides, ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt
... of Carthage inspired so powerful a people, and natural and honourable as it was that the proud conqueror of Zama should take exception in the senate to so humiliating a step, still that confession was nothing but the simple truth, and Hannibal was of a genius so extraordinary, that none but sentimental politicians in Rome could tolerate him longer at the head of the Carthaginian state. The marked recognition thus accorded to him by the Roman government scarcely took himself by surprise. As it was Hannibal and not Carthage ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... and grace in the temple of Philae; there is an elegance you will not find in the other temples of Egypt. But it is an elegance quite undefiled by weakness, by any sentimentality. (Even a building, like a love-lorn maid, can be sentimental.) Edward FitzGerald once defined taste as the feminine of genius. Taste prevails in Philae, a certain delicious femininity that seduces the eyes and the heart of man. Shall we call it the ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... this question rationally and reverently, free from all sentimental and immoral indulgence for ...
— David • Charles Kingsley
... the important party leaders in order to conciliate unimportant ones, perhaps sentimental ones, like your friend French; that he will make foolish appointments without taking advice. By the way, ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams
... be of opinion that my hero's levity in love is altogether unpardonable, I must remind them that all his griefs and difficulties did not arise from that sentimental source. Even the lyric poet who complains so feelingly of the pains of love could not forget, that at the same time he was 'in debt and in drink,' which, doubtless, were great aggravations of his distress. ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... hearer's commiseration increased. No sentimental pity. As the story went on, he drew from his wallet a bank note, but after a while, at some still more unhappy revelation, changed it for another, probably of a somewhat larger amount; which, when the story was concluded, ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... neck craned, her eyes staring. Her sentimental thoughts had vanished. She was one with the struggling men and beasts, lending her vigor to theirs. Her eyes were on David, waiting to see him dominate them like a general carrying his troops to victory. She ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner
... stony now, and overgrown, and tangled, with ugly-looking elder-bushes sprawling through the ivy. To a painter it might have proved very attractive; but to me it seemed so dreary, and so sombre, and oppressive, that, although I am not sentimental, as you know, I actually turned away, to put my little visit off, until I should be in better spirits for it. And that, my dear Maria, would in all probability ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... it may, it is to our German governesses that we owe the power of understanding Germany, more than to German literature. For the literature itself requires some introduction of mood for its romantic, homely, sentimental, essentially German qualities; the mere Anglo-Saxon or Latin being, methinks, incapable of caring at once for Wilhelm Meister, or Siebennkaes, or Goetz, or the manifold lyric of Forest and Millstream. To understand these, means to have somewhere in us a little sample, ...
— Hortus Vitae - Essays on the Gardening of Life • Violet Paget, AKA Vernon Lee
... finger-prints. Yet he had given Reuben something like a positive assurance that there would be an adequate defence, and had expressed his own positive conviction of the accused man's innocence. But Thorndyke was not a man to reach such a conviction through merely sentimental considerations. The inevitable conclusion was that he had something up his sleeve—that he had gained possession of some facts that had escaped my observation; and when I had reached this point I knocked out my pipe and ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... study of children's literature. Library work with children owes to Miss Hewins a debt of gratitude for her unusual contribution to the establishment of high standards, the development of a broad vision, and the maintenance of a wholesome, sympathetic, but not sentimental point of view. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... has spent many years in the jungle, in writing to me of this bird and of the effects of its melodious song, says, that "its soft and melancholy notes, as they came from some solitary place in the forest, were the most gentle sounds I ever listened to. Some sentimental smokers assert that the influence of the propensity is to make them feel as if they could freely forgive all who had ever offended them, and I can say with truth such has been the effect on my own nerves of the plaintive murmurs of the neela-cobeya, that sometimes, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... besting destiny? I do not see it so. To me its significance, like that of "The Shadow Line," is all subjective; it is an aging man's elegy upon the hope and high resolution that the years have blown away, a sentimental reminiscence of what the enigmatical gods have had their jest with, leaving only its gallant memory behind. The whole Conradean system sums itself up in the title of "Victory," an incomparable piece of irony. Imagine a better label for that tragic record of ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... to deal with such subjects. But there are certain points in the life of the young girl, about which the handbooks have but little to say, which your teachers do not include in their course of tuition. Some of these points are particularly intimate and sentimental. It is here that I would wish to act as your adviser, and, if I may, as your confidential friend. I shall always be glad, while these papers are being published, to receive and answer any letters from young ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 102, April 23, 1892 • Various
... the parlour, and seated himself before the dull neglected fire in the lumbering old arm-chair in which his father had sat through the long lonely evenings for so many years. Mr. Nowell the younger was not disturbed by any sentimental reflections upon this subject, however; he was thinking of his father's will, and the wrong which was inflicted upon ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... you, for his sake, not to make him acquainted with your views, Miss Cinnamond," he said coldly. "The natural warmth of a young man's constitution is sufficiently powerful to lead him astray, without being raised to fever-heat by the uninstructed interference of sentimental females." ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... his heart full of the awe and delight with which the miracle of buds and new verdure inspired him. Nothing could be more accurate or sensitive than the brief descriptions of nature in his works. But there is nothing sentimental about them; partly owing to the Anglo-Saxon instinct which caused him to seek precise and detailed statement first of all, and partly because of a certain classic, awe-inspired reserve, like that of ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... and the old boy will pay me handsome damages, too!... the sentimental old ladies that have nothing else to do but befriend the poor abused sailor, will see to it that I find ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... white race, by their intellectual and traditional superiority, will retain sufficient ascendency to prevent any serious mischief from the new order of things. We admit that the whole subject bristles with difficulties, and we would by no means discuss or decide it on sentimental grounds. But our choice would seem to be between unqualified citizenship, to depend on the ability to read and write, if you will, and setting the blacks apart in some territory by themselves. There are, we think, insuperable objections to this ...
— The Writings of James Russell Lowell in Prose and Poetry, Volume V - Political Essays • James Russell Lowell
... the boatmen, was interesting, as showing what kind of banquet will delight a human soul, starved from its birth. It likes a comic song very much, if the song refers to fashionable articles of ladies costume, or holds up to ridicule members of Congress, policemen, or dandies. It is not averse to a sentimental song, in which "Mother, dear," is frequently apostrophized. It delights in a farce from which most of the dialogue has been cut away, while all the action is retained,—in which people are continually knocked down, or run against one another with great violence. It takes much pleasure ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... that he would be, to Pope. "Hogarth, Smollett, and Fielding" is another miracle of appreciation: and I should like to ask the objectors to "sentimentality" by what other means than an intense sympathy (from which it is impossible to exclude something that may be called sentimental) such a study as that of Goldsmith could have been produced? Now Goldsmith is one of the most difficult persons in the whole range of literature to treat, from the motley of his merits and his weaknesses. Yet Thackeray has achieved the adventure here. In short, throughout the book, he is ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... figure and his daring humour. Yet the music he wrote indicated his sensitive and deeply feeling nature, and though his conversation could hardly be called other than cynical, nor his jokes puritanical, there was always in him a vein of genuine—not sentimental, but perhaps romantic—love and admiration for everything good; good in music, good in art, good in character. He laid down no rules of what was good. 'Tout savoir c'est tout pardonner' was perhaps his motto. But he ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... true connection, might be profitable to the race. I am not afraid of the truth, if any one could tell it me, but I am afraid of parts of it impertinently uttered. There is a time to dance and a time to mourn; to be harsh as well as to be sentimental; to be ascetic as well as to glorify the appetites; and if a man were to combine all these extremes into his work, each in its place and proportion, that work would be the world's masterpiece of morality as well as of art. Partiality is immorality; for ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the most pressing care of Ramsey's life to prevent his roommate from learning that there was any conversation at all, even botanical. Fortunately, Fred was not taking the biological courses, though he appeared to be taking the sentimental ones with an astonishing thoroughness; and sometimes, to Fred's hilarious delight, Ramsey attempted to turn the tables and rally him upon whatever last affair seemed to be engaging his fancy. The old Victorian and pre-Victorian blague word "petticoat" had been revived in Fred's vocabulary, ...
— Ramsey Milholland • Booth Tarkington
... very pretty," said Min. "Still, do you know, as a rule I do not think German poetry nice. It always sounds so harsh and guttural to me, however tender and sentimental ...
— She and I, Volume 1 • John Conroy Hutcheson
... wheel of eternity, with neither beginning nor end. All the time I have left from the study of routes and hotels I spend on guide-books. Now, I'm sure that if any one of the men I know were here, he could tell me all that is necessary as we walk along the streets. I don't say it in a frivolous or sentimental spirit in the least, but I do affirm that there is hardly any juncture in life where one isn't better off for having a man about. I should never dare divulge this to Aunt Celia, for she doesn't think men very nice. She excludes them from conversation ...
— A Cathedral Courtship • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... that the interests of the public would be better protected if fewer private bills were passed relieving officials, upon slight and sentimental grounds, from their pecuniary responsibilities; and the readiness with which army officers join in applications for the condonation of negligence on the part of their army comrades does not tend, in my opinion, to maintain that regard for discipline and that scrupulous observance of duty ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 3 (of 3) of Volume 8: Grover Cleveland, First Term. • Grover Cleveland
... them distinctly to the care of Mr., not Mrs., Grubb, she died, and was buried at sea, not far from Cape Horn. Mrs. Cora enjoyed at first the dramatic possibilities of her position on the ship, where the baby orphans found more than one kindly, sentimental woman ready to care for them; but there was no permanent place in her philosophy for a pair of twins who entered existence with a concerted shriek, and continued it for ever afterwards, as if their only purpose in life ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... no lack of money, the unavoidable restraints of the condition, for at least some months in the year, more than counterbalance any sentimental delight to be found in maternity. For, before all other things in life, maternity demands unselfishness in women; and this is just the one virtue of which women have least at this present time—just the one reason why motherhood is ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... men and women are equally at fault. It seems that a profound, impartial, and absolutely just opinion of our fellow-creatures is utterly unknown. Either we are men, or we are women. Either we are cold, or we are sentimental. Either we are young, or growing old. In any case life is but a procession of shadows, and God knows why it is that we embrace them so eagerly, and see them depart with such anguish, being shadows. And why, if this—and much more than this is true, why are we yet surprised in the window corner by ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... after about a year and a half of respectful aloofness, that the emotion which he felt towards Samuel Marlowe's grandmother-to-be was love, the fashion of the period compelled him to approach the matter in a roundabout way. First, he spent an evening or two singing sentimental ballads, she accompanying him on the piano and the rest of the family sitting on the side-lines to see that no rough stuff was pulled. Having noted that she drooped her eyelashes and turned faintly pink when he came to the "Thee—only thee!" bit, he felt a mild sense of encouragement, strong ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... have remained ever since; and that is why for years I would have no dealings with the cousins in possession, and that is why, the other day, overcome by the tender influence of the weather, the purely sentimental longing to join hands again with my childhood was enough to send all my pride to the winds, and to start me off without warning and ...
— Elizabeth and her German Garden • "Elizabeth", AKA Marie Annette Beauchamp
... remarked the Trained Nurse; "I've seen those that were more sentimental than the Journalist, and none the worse ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... When a sentimental song is sung the audience pay little attention. To patriotic songs they listen respectfully. A song which breathes the glories of literature as represented by Montaigne, Jean Jacques Rousseau, and Moliere is tolerated idly. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... an affectation, in all governments, most especially in those which care little for literature in general, of considering some professions of respect for it necessary to their own characters. Andrea Barrofaldi had been inducted into his present office without even the sentimental profession of never having asked for it. The situation had been given to him by the Fossombrone of his day, without a word having been said in the journals of Tuscany of his doubts about accepting it, and everything passed, as things are apt to pass when there are true simplicity and good ...
— The Wing-and-Wing - Le Feu-Follet • J. Fenimore Cooper
... now, just as you are. I want you here—here where the pain is hardest," and she clasped her arms tightly over her heaving bosom. Then her pride returned again, and with it came thoughts of Arthur Carrollton. He would scoff at her as weak and sentimental; he would never take beyond the sea a bride of "Hagarish" birth; and duty demanded that she too should be firm, and sanction his decision. "But when he's gone," she whispered, "when he has left America behind, I'll find her, if my life is ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... to fish for gudgeon; Betty Castlemaine tormented Cecil Page to his infinitely miserable delight; Ricky von Elster made tender eyes at Dorothy Marche and rowed her up and down the Lisse; and his sister Alixe read sentimental verses under the beech-trees and sighed for the sweet mysteries that young German girls sigh for—heart-friendships, lovers, Ewigkeit—God knows what!—something or other that turns the heart to tears until everything slops over ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... was a prettily painted plate, and this he filled with green and purple grapes, tucked a sentimental note underneath, and leaving it on her threshold, crept away as ...
— Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag VI - An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving, Etc. • Louisa M. Alcott
... passion by having engaged in all sorts of imaginative and semi-poetical dreams. It is a much more serious thing than that, mind you, when it comes to a man. And, for Heaven's sake, don't attribute any of that sort of sentimental make-believe to either Sheila Mackenzie or myself. We are not romantic folks. We have no imaginative gifts whatever, but we are very glad, you know, to be attentive and grateful to those who have. The fact is, I don't think it ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various
... thing may be very rhetorical, and very beautiful, when done up in approved, sentimental French, but it is certainly neither logical nor philosophical. We have a right to insist that M. Renan shall come with no theory which compels him to reject half the facts unexamined, and to garble and misuse half the rest. Those facts stand on the same ground ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... types. In some cases the object possesses a direct, or intrinsic, interest for the mind. The young child, for instance, is spontaneously attracted to bright colours, the boy to stories of adventure, and the sentimental youth or maiden to the romance. In the case of any such direct interests, however, the feeling with which the mind contemplates the object may transfer itself at least partly to other objects associated more or less closely with the direct object ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... he received at school, and he easily picked out his notes, and taught himself little pieces, on the old-fashioned, silk-faced piano, which had belonged to his mother as a girl, and at which, in the early days of her marriage, she had sung in a high, shrill voice, the sentimental songs of her youth. But here, for want of incentive, matters remained; Maurice was kept close at his school-books, and, boylike, he had no ambition to distinguish himself in a field so different from that in which his comrades won their spurs. It was only when, with ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... as Seth lay upon his pallet in the shanty, the sound of Langley's horse's hoofs reached him with an accompaniment of a clear, young masculine voice singing a verse of some sentimental modern carol—a tender song ephemeral and sweet. As the sounds neared the cabin the lad sprang up restlessly, and so was standing at the open door when the singer ...
— "Seth" • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... He has a notorious liaison with a dancer at the Opera; she has married lovelessly. They have met again, and, in sentimental mood, he has recalled that sojourn, has begun to make a kind of tentative love to her, probably unimpaired in beauty, certainly more intellectually interesting, for the whole monologue proves that she can no longer ...
— Browning's Heroines • Ethel Colburn Mayne
... a sentimental desire came over Flora to look into the dragon closet which had so often swallowed Arthur in the days of his boyhood—not improbably because, as a very dark closet, it was a likely place to be heavy in. Arthur, fast subsiding into despair, had opened it, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... and progress, and totally inexperienced in the ways of a selfish world and in the profundity of Jesuitical intrigues; and the unavoidable embarrassments of the time had been increased by the course of his immediate predecessors. Ludwig I., through a sentimental love of the picturesque, had encouraged the multiplication of monasteries and convents and brotherhoods of wandering friars, and Maximilian, though naturally tolerant, and still more liberalized by the influence of his Protestant queen, was ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... to be in a sentimental mood this evening," suggested Farquaharson at last, bringing himself with something of a wrench out of his abstraction and speaking in a matter-of-fact voice. He remembered belatedly that his cigar had gone out and as he relighted it there was a ...
— The Tyranny of Weakness • Charles Neville Buck
... minister of state, and I as sorrowful as an unhappy lover, when, to say the truth, I am thinking of some deep stroke of policy, and you are meditating upon a fair maid's bright eyes. Get you gone, Wilton; get you gone, for a sentimental, lack-a-daisical shepherd! Now could we but get poor old King James to come back, the way to a dukedom would be open ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... he could not imagine his parents in that character; but Peterson was delighted with the prospect, and Phil Doon, whose mother was a large, stout woman, who spent half her day in bed reading sentimental stories, was quite impressed, and enlisted on ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... form the habit of thinking things out logically, or of jumping to conclusions; of thinking critically and independently, or of taking things unquestioningly on the authority of others. We may form the habit of carefully reading good, sensible books, or of skimming sentimental and trashy ones; of choosing elevating, ennobling companions, or the opposite; of being a good conversationalist and doing our part in a social group, or of being a drag on the conversation, and needing to be "entertained." ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... titled client. Long ago her husband was a grocer. She writes sentimental poetry, and her idea of dignity is to snub her type-writer. But I couldn't concentrate my mind on the pleasure of astonishing Lady Hutchinson. I was thinking what a wonderful ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... selected by himself. There had been many more of these degrading travesties on the sacred game, and I had writhed to see them. Playing freak golf-matches is to my mind like ragging a great classical melody. But of the whole collection this one, considering the sentimental interest and the magnitude of the stakes, seemed to me the most terrible. My face, I imagine, betrayed my disgust, ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... swelled as I drew near, until at last I could make out the words, which were singularly appropriate both to the hour and to the condition of the singers. 'The cock may craw, the day may daw,' they sang; and sang it with such laxity both in time and tune, and such sentimental complaisance in the expression, as assured me they had got far into the third ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... are two other hearts, quite as happy as theirs; though after a scene less sentimental, and a dialogue that, to a stranger overhearing it, might appear to be in jest. For all, in real earnest, and so ending—as may be inferred from the young Welshman's final speech, with the ...
— The Flag of Distress - A Story of the South Sea • Mayne Reid
... that labelling? O heavens! what idiots we girls are! That a dozen soft words should have bowled me over like a ninepin, and left me without an inch of ground to call my own. And I was so proud of my own strength; so sure that I should never be missish, and spoony, and sentimental! I was so determined to like him ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... cellar, a stone's throw from his hotel,—a fresh, damp little cellar, which smelt, he could not help thinking, like a grave. Coming out to the sunshine, he shook himself with disgust. "Faugh!" he thought, "what sick fancies and sentimental nonsense possess me? I am growing unwholesome. My dreams of the other night have come back to torment me in the day. These must put ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson
... the first stanza very good solemn poetry, as also the three first lines of the second. Its last line is an excellent burlesque surprise on gloomy sentimental enquirers. And, perhaps, the advice is as good as can be given to a low-spirited dissatisfied being:—'Don't trouble your head with sickly thinking: take a cup, and ...
— Life of Johnson - Abridged and Edited, with an Introduction by Charles Grosvenor Osgood • James Boswell
... sprang up and was silenced by the commander's deep, unpleasant tones. Corks popped spasmodically. Again there were sounds much like a man's sobbing; but these were promptly blared down by a phonograph with a typically American accent. When that palled, a sentimental disciple of frightfulness sang Tannenbaum ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... and if I did they would think me a lunatic or a snivelling, sentimental humbug. I believe that lots of my old friends would scarcely speak to me again. Why, putting aside the pleasures of sport, if the views you preach were to be accepted, what would become of keepers and beaters and huntsmen and dog-breeders, and ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... abruptly directed his thoughts to Peyton and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was precisely that; together with an astonishing lack of sentimental bias, it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... a new uniform. Major Price, immediately introduced me to him; he was Colonel Fairly.(210) He is a man of the most scrupulous good-breeding, diffident, gentle, and sentimental in his conversation, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... comedies were to be pitted against each other.' False Delicacy had a great success. Ten thousand copies of it were sold before the season closed. (Ib p. 96.) 'Garrick's prologue to False Delicacy,' writes Murphy (Life of Garrick, p. 287), 'promised a moral and sentimental comedy, and with an air of pleasantry called it a sermon in five acts. The critics considered it in the same light, but the general voice was in favour of the play during a run of near twenty nights. Foote, at last, by a little piece called Piety ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell
... worst kind of compromise—as a sort of spiritual imitation of the methods of the Triumvirate, where everybody gives up, not exactly his father or his uncle or his brother, but his dearest and most respectable convictions, together with the historical, logical, and sentimental supports of them. The king himself—though certainly no fool, and though hardly to be called an unmitigated knave—was one of those unfortunate persons whose merits do not in the least interest and whose ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... film of moisture came across his eyes. I fear he thought less of the suggestion of Susy's secret meeting with Pedro, or Incarnacion's implied suspicions that Pedro was concerned in Peyton's death, than of this sentimental possibility. He knew that Pedro had been hated by the others on account of his position; he knew the instinctive jealousies of the race and their predisposition to extravagant misconstruction. From what he had gathered, and particularly from the voices he had overheard on the Fair Plains Road, ...
— Susy, A Story of the Plains • Bret Harte
... place without trouble. He is calm, and she is sensible. Then they dine together in the country, for the last time, drink champagne, and separate with blithesome wishes for future prosperity. Or they are both sentimental. Then there is a little weeping and sighing, they promise to write to each other and probably do so for a time, and it is days, perhaps even weeks before the wound in the heart which, happily, is not ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau
... ROGERS [suddenly sentimental]. Talking about clothes, Mr. Manson, I often thinks in my 'ead as I'd like to be a church clergyman, like master. Them strite-up collars are very becoming. Wouldn't you, ...
— The Servant in the House • Charles Rann Kennedy
... considerable growth of buildings, especially the Marineria and other offices connected with the free port. The old pink 'castle' San Cristobal (Christopher), still cumbers the jetty-root; but the least sentimental can hardly expect the lieges to level so historic a building: it is the site of Alonso Fernandez de Lugo's first tower, and where his disembarkation on May 3, 1493, gave its Christian name 'Holy Cross' to ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... other, with a sentimental air, "I wonder what he is thinking of at those times! I'll make love to the captain, and see if I can find out something about him, they seem very intimate. We must try and cheer ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... talking of him—Drake. Did they miss him? At the thought, he was reminded of the absurd song—"Will They Miss Me When I'm Gone?" And, with something like a blush for his sentimental weakness, as he mentally termed it, he sprang up and took his letters. They consisted mostly of bills and invitations. He chucked the first aside and glanced at the others; both were distasteful to him. He felt as if he should like to cut ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice
... in the least, managed, in the revulsion of feeling which made him now the first object in the family, to try his temper perpetually. He had in former times, missed their demonstrations of affection, though healthy, high-spirited, and by no means sentimental, the craving had been only occasional, he had done very well without them, and had gained habits of freedom incompatible with being petted. He had never been used to be interfered with, and could not understand it at all; and that ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... same for any such bundle of skin and bones as you," she belittled. "Don't be sentimental. You'd do it for me. We'd both do it for a starved cat. It's one of the unwritten laws of humanity—women and children first, ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... time, Francis had been brought into direct, personal, intimate contact with Jesus Christ.' 'It was,' Canon Adderley says again, 'no mere intellectual acceptance of a theological proposition, but an actual self-committal to the Person of Jesus; no mere sentimental feeling of pity for the sufferings of Christ, or of comfort in the thought that, through those sufferings, he could secure a place in a future heaven, but a real, brave assumption of the Cross, an entering into the fellowship of the ...
— A Handful of Stars - Texts That Have Moved Great Minds • Frank W. Boreham
... will have to be calculated on a sentimental basis for the ornamental trees, and on a commercial basis for the commercial trees. The actual value of the spraying has not yet been determined. This spraying cannot reach the mycelium in the cambium layer; if the disease has been carried in by ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... whose visit was sentimental, not in any degree inspective, felt herself taken in; but as in some way bringing her in contact with little eager faces, once well-known, and who had received the solemn rite of baptism from her father, she sate down, half losing herself in tracing out the changing features ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... in the mood for a grand theme of Handel, and somebody gives you a sentimental bit of Rossini. Or when Mendelssohn is played as if 'songs without words' were songs without meaning. Or when a singer simply displays to you a VOICE, and leaves music out ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... speak His worth, to tell out, though in feeble way, His glory and exalt His name. And yet we must beware of an unscriptural familiarity with Him, which the Holy Spirit does not sanction in the Scriptures. We must not address Him, as it is so often done, as "my brother," or other sentimental terms, which our pen is reluctant to repeat. In all this we must not forget His dignity and glory. While He thus identified Himself with us and is not ashamed to call us brethren, He is nevertheless the holy Son of God, the Lord of all. As such we ...
— The Lord of Glory - Meditations on the person, the work and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ • Arno Gaebelein
... the particulars,' answered Lee, with an easy transition from a sentimental to a common-sense, business-like tone, and at the same time unscrewing the lid of a tortoise-shell tobacco-box, and taking a folded paper from it. 'I keep these matters generally here; for if I were to drop such an article—just now, especially—I might ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... expedients. Four artificial substitutes for immortality have been devised. Fondly fixing attention upon these, men have tried to find comfort and to absorb their thoughts from the dreaded spectre and the long oblivion. The first is the sentimental phantasm of posthumous fame. The ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... does our sympathetic and sentimental age, recklessly eulogistic of altruism, hurry into self-sacrifice. Altruism in itself is worthless. That an act is unselfish can never justify its performance. He who would be a great giver must first be a great person. Our men, and still more our women, need as ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer
... have Captain Gerardin and his sentimental lieutenant among us again before long," observed Captain Winslow, ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... favourable moment. In fact Frauelein Linda's talk came back to the accursed runes with exasperating persistency. They would confirm his theory. She was happy in being present at this auspicious discovery. It would be a cause wherefore she should not wholly be forgotten. It was this sentimental hint that gave a reasonable hope of taking her mind off the runes, and the harassed philologer set himself resolutely to the task. For her slight advances he found bolder responses, and still scanning the irrigating ditches closely for an especially oozy bottom, he expatiated ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... Alexandria, Arnobius, and the other early Christian disputants, had no prejudice in favour of Hellenic mythology, and no sentimental reason for wishing to suppose that the origin of its impurities was pure, he found his way almost to the theory of the irrational element in mythology which we ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... weather when once their preliminary troubles are over. The hours fly past, and we hail the announcement of breakfast with a sudden joy which tells of gross materialism. I may say, by-the-way, that our lower nature, or what sentimental persons call our lower nature, comes out powerfully at sea, and men of the most refined sort catch themselves in the act of wondering time after time when meals will be ready. For me I think that it is no more gross to delight in flavours ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... meet a girl whom I imagined might be my Mrs Wolff! Is that what you want to ask? Yes—once!—for a passing moment. We met, and I caught a glimpse of her face, and recognised it as the fulfilment of a dream. Then she disappeared. Romantic, isn't it, and disappointing into the bargain? I am not a sentimental fellow, I suppose, for I have never even imagined myself in love, though I have known scores of charming girls; but at that ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... a considerable breather. For the novel is put together in a scrambling fashion, being full of repetitions of almost identical scenes and making very little definite way in a forward direction. There are the usual Irish peasantry and farmers who worship the horse for pecuniary and sentimental reasons, as the Israelites worshipped the golden calf; the usual hunting people, who either ride straight and are grimly sarcastic or talk very big and go for the gates; and the usual English visitors, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, August 19th, 1914 • Various
... whom she thought she liked well enough until she saw papa, and then she knew, and threw away everything for her love; and she did well," says Molly, with more excitement than would be expected from her on a sentimental subject. ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... small in itself. An Irishman named Doyle owned the site Anthony coveted. After years of struggle his small grocery had begun to put him on his feet, and now the new development of the neighborhood added to his prosperity. He was a dried-up, sentimental little man, with two loves, his wife's memory and his wife's garden, which he still tended religiously between customers; and one ambition, his son. With the change from common to park, and the improvement ...
— A Poor Wise Man • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... friend, Lord Clare, is at Rome," he wrote to Moore from Pisa, in March, 1822: "we met on the road, and our meeting was quite sentimental—really pathetic on both sides. I have always loved him better than any male thing ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... that. Said awful hard things about 'em, Jude. He really got me to the point this winter where I felt as if marriage was wrong. But do you know, when the boy was born, yesterday morning, he just went plumb loco. He cried and was sentimental like these young fathers you ...
— Judith of the Godless Valley • Honore Willsie
... do great injustice to this mystical aspiration of the Psalmist, if we degrade it to be the mere expression of a desire for unbroken residence in a material Temple. He was no sickly, sentimental seeker after cloistered seclusion. He knew the necessities and duties of life far better than in a cowardly way to wish to shirk them, in order that he might loiter in the temple, idle under the pretence ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... said very gently, and turned to Theo, for she had a manlike fear of intruding on people's secrets. But Yelverton was one of those unfortunate beings who, when they turn to their sentimental past, must turn not to the memory of one face, but to a kind of romantic mosaic of many faces that in time takes on the horrid semblance of a composite photograph. So it is to be feared that the sad little story of the girl who drowned herself because he ...
— The Halo • Bettina von Hutten
... than Sartor to quicken spiritual life, to shatter 'the Clapham church,' and to substitute a mystic faith and not unlovely hope for the frigid, hard, and mechanical lines of official orthodoxy on the one hand, and the egotism and sentimental despair of Byronism on the other. There is a third school, too, and Harriet Martineau herself was no insignificant member of it, to which both the temper and the political morality of our time have owed a deep debt; the school of those utilitarian ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 6: Harriet Martineau • John Morley
... family. I now and then see very pretty things of their writing in the Lady's Magazine. An elegy on a robin red-breast. The drooping violet, a sonnet. And others equally ecstatic. Quite charming! rapturous! elegant! flowery! sentimental! Some of them very smart, and epigrammatic. It is a family, my dear Trevor, that you must become intimate with. Your merit entitles you to the distinction. You will communicate your mutual productions. You will polish and suggest charming little ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... effort to write a history rather than a drama. What we chiefly see of the crisis is a series of political intrigues at the Court carried out by base persons, of whom the queen is the basest, to ruin Strafford; the futility of Strafford's sentimental love of the king, whom he despises while he loves him; Strafford's blustering weakness and blindness when he forces his way into the Parliament House, and the contemptible meanness of Charles. The low intrigues of the Court leave the strongest impression on the mind, ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Letters of Jacopo Ortis," by Foscolo, belongs to that kind of romance which is called sentimental. Overcome by the calamities of his country, with his soul full of fiery passion and sad disappointment, Foscolo wrote this romance, the protest of his heart against evils which he could ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... nature of the engagement between Caroline and Darrell. She communicated the information to Jasper, who viewed it with very natural alarm. By reconciliation with Guy Darrell, Jasper understood something solid and practical—not a mere sentimental pardon, added to that paltry stipend of L700 a-year which he had just obtained—but the restoration to all her rights and expectancies of the heiress he had supposed himself to marry. He had by no means relinquished the ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... pleasure-loving temperament, not positively sinful or sensual, but still holding pleasure as the greatest good; and regarding what deeper natures call "duty," and find therein their strong-hold and consolation, as a mere bugbear or a sentimental ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock) |
