"Tragic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Vanloos, Lantara, Watteau, La Motte, Dehle, Abbe Trublet, Buffon, Dorat, Cardinal de Bernis, Crebillon the Gay, Marie Antoinette, Made. de Pompadour, Vade, Mlle. Camargo, Mlle. Clairon, Mad. de la Popeliniere, Sophie Arnould, Crebillon the Tragic, Mlle. Guimard, Three Pages in the Life of Dancourt, A Promenade in the Palais-Royal, the ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... atom of poetry. In her artificial dignity, her plausible wit, and her endless volubility, she would remind us of some of the most admired heroines of French tragedy, but for that unlucky box on the ear which she gives the Duchess of Gloster,—a violation of tragic decorum, which of course destroys ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... money for his travelling expenses by extortion from the unfortunate Jews. He landed at Crook, near Waterford, on the 20th June, 1210. His army was commanded by the Earl of Salisbury, son to Henry I., by "Fair Rosamond," of tragic memory. De Braose fled to England when he heard of the King's movements. Here he endeavoured to make peace with his master, but failing to do so, he carefully avoided putting himself in his power, and ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... we might almost say—she began to busy herself in arranging some children's playthings, and other little wares, on the shelves and at the shop-window. In the aspect of this dark-arrayed, pale-faced, ladylike old figure there was a deeply tragic character that contrasted irreconcilably with the ludicrous pettiness of her employment. It seemed a queer anomaly, that so gaunt and dismal a personage should take a toy in hand; a miracle, that the toy did not vanish in her grasp; a miserably absurd idea, that she should go on perplexing ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... two exceptions my partings from these normal women have not been tragic and all whom I have met in after life (seven) have been very ready to resume relations with me, four of them having made the ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the order, which is carried out. There is a breathless silence, and people from the village gather round with tragic expectations. NAPOLEON walks on alone towards the Fifth battalion, Throwing open his great-coat and revealing his uniform and the ribbon of the Legion of Honour. Raising his hand to his ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... to this fashion from first to last. When first he ventured on a considerable poetical enterprise, he spoke his thoughts, not in his own name, nor as his contemporaries ten years later did, through the mouth of characters in a tragic or comic drama, but through imaginary rustics, to whom every one else in the world was a rustic, and lived among the sheep-folds, with a background of downs or vales or fields, and the open sky above. His shepherds and goatherds bear ...
— Spenser - (English Men of Letters Series) • R. W. Church
... from the notion that earth was dirt, and stones were stones, the same all over the world, he has since so far outstripped his instructors, that as I write this he is drawing a plan of the strata, with the inhabitants dramatically arranged, Aubrey suggesting tragic scenes and uncomplimentary likenesses. His talent for drawing shows that Averil's was worth culture. If our geology alarm Richard, tell him that I think it safer to get it over young, and to face apparent discrepancies with revelation, rather than leave them to ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rotor motors were ruined. The couplers—pilot-to-main-gyro connections—had been heated red hot and were no longer hardened steel; their dimensions had changed and they would no longer fit. But these were not disastrous items. They were serious, but not tragic. ...
— Space Platform • Murray Leinster
... Paris,—laughing, tragic Paris, who once had need of a singer to proclaim her splendor and all her misery. Fate made the man; in necessity's mortar she pounded his soul into the shape Fate needed. To king's courts she lifted him; to thieves' hovels ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... "Have done with your tragic airs, madam," he cried, laying a heavy hand upon her arm. "I have had enough of them. I ask you again, how have you dared to commit ...
— The Masked Bridal • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... Trismegistus, a mystical writer of the Neo-Platonist school; Thebes, etc.: subjects of Athenian Tragedy; Buskin'd: tragic; Musaeus: a poet ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... be as rich as you like, Father. Mr. Steering is to leave here; you need never be dispossessed during your lifetime. It is all safe and sure. Uncle Bernique will not tell, Mr. Steering will not tell, Piney will not tell, I shall make no sign." The tragic strength of her endeavour to make him see that it was all with him; to leave it all to him; if so be that the better part were to be chosen, to make him choose it for himself; re-establish himself in so much as ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... in my brain And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies, Gay, tragic, rapt, right heart of Spain Fed with the ...
— The Vision of Sir Launfal - And Other Poems • James Russell Lowell
... Mr Summers, "would God that it were not. I have mentioned but one case, yet it is a fact that for every gale that blows dozens of wrecks take place on our coasts, each with its more or less tragic history. You remember the last gale? It is not three weeks since it blew. No fewer than one hundred and ninety-five wrecks took place on the shores of the United Kingdom on that night and the following ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... appeared to bestow the slightest thought. They were wholly engrossed with the terrible catastrophe that had befallen the famous adventurers. What was the loss of the Susquehanna and all it contained, in comparison to the loss experienced by the world at large in the terrible tragic denouement just witnessed? The worst had now come to the worst. At last the long agony was over forever. Those three gallant men, who had not only conceived but had actually executed the grandest and most ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... went through the listeners as Silas said that, for Major seemed a hero in their eyes, and his tragic ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... Clarence had no poetry in his soul, and was not even allowed to touch you by his dream in the Tower. Richard said his conscience-stricken, soul-torturing speech—"Richard loves Richard, that is I am I." in a matter-of-fact way. It is a great tragic note in Shakespeare, but in Berlin it was quite a playful matter. Just as the murderers played at murdering Clarence, so Richard joked with himself over, "is there ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... or Macbeth. Sometimes a fault is committed on the part of the teacher, by permitting a pupil to confine his selections to one favorite class. I have observed in certain schools, that one particular boy would always appear in a comic piece, another in a tragic, and so on. It would be better for the teacher to require each pupil to speak a variety of pieces, so as to secure a more general and comprehensive culture than would result from practice on a ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... if to touch such chord be thine, Restore the ancient tragic line, And emulate the notes that rung From the wild harp, which silent hung By silver Avon's holy shore, Till twice a hundred years rolled o'er; When she, the bold enchantress, came, With fearless hand and heart on flame! From the pale willow snatched the treasure, And ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... possibly help in this matter, I really think you would be helping things you yourself care about; and one person, not myself, who deserves it. I will not say it would be killing two birds with one stone, which might seem a tragic metaphor; but bringing one bird at least to life; and allowing the other bird, who is a goose, to go on a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... is common in those days), "Amour Dure—Dure Amour." The same posy is inscribed in the hollow of the bust, and, thanks to it, I have been able to identify the latter as Medea's portrait. I often examine these tragic portraits, wondering what this face, which led so many men to their death, may have been like when it spoke or smiled, what at the moment when Medea da Carpi fascinated her victims into love unto death—"Amour Dure—Dure Amour," as runs her device—love ...
— Hauntings • Vernon Lee
... fell upon that tragic room, a sound shivered. Long, slow, bell-like. Nearer. It galvanized Jake into terror-stricken action. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... car watched each other surreptitiously, mutually suspicious, like dogs. Scraps of talk were separated by long intervals. Mr. Prohack wondered what the deuce Softly Bishop had done that Angmering should leave him a hundred thousand pounds. He tried to feel grief for the tragic and untimely death of his old friend Angmering, and failed. No doubt the failure was due to the fact that he had not seen Angmering for so ...
— Mr. Prohack • E. Arnold Bennett
... truth, not less natural than agreeable. Its grand divisions correspond, moreover, with those of time; the contemplation of the present is Comedy—mirth for the most part being connected with the present only—and the past and the future are the dominions of the Tragic muse. ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... dreaded the effect on my queasy stomach; but when it came to finding, searching and burying them one by one, all sense of horror—though they were not pleasant to look upon—was forgotten in an overmastering feeling of pity, such as one feels at the tragic ending of a moving story, only so oppressive as to make the whole scene like a sad and impersonal dream, on which and as in a dream my mind kept recurring to a tableau which I must have seen over fifteen years ago in ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... must we do in this tragic predicament? For my own part, I have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic, fairly, squarely, and irrevocably. It has an imperishable use in human life, but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality—just what it is I can perhaps ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... the easterners had arrived, and, almost with the moment of their coming, there had begun the first act in what was to prove a drama of almost tragic happenings. ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... these crosses might mean and repented doing so immediately afterwards, for he informed her that they marked the places where unlucky travellers had come by an untimely death; the inscriptions were the records of the tragic romances through the scene of which ...
— The Poor Plutocrats • Maurus Jokai
... same year she gave the public her third Tragedy, intitled, The Unhappy Penitent, acted at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane. In the dedication to Charles lord Hallifax, she draws the characters of several of the most eminent of her predecessors in tragic poetry, with great judgment and precision. She observes, that Shakespear had all the images of nature present to him, studied her thoroughly, and boldly copied all her various features: and that though he chiefly exerted himself on the more masculine passions, it was ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... the archangel—tearing their cheeks, their hair, their breasts in agony, because they see Hell through the prison-bars, and hear the raging of its fiends, and feel the clasp upon their wrists and ankles of clawed hairy demon hands; in all this terrific amalgamation of sinister and tragic ideas, vividly presented, full of coarse dramatic power, and intensified by faith in their material reality, the Lorenzetti brethren, if theirs be indeed the hands that painted here, summed up the nightmares of the Middle ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... "Stuff and Nonsense," and "The Bull Calf," T. B. Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy," and many another volume of American origin, that is now familiar to every Briton with a sense of humour, are the most widely known. It is needless to praise the literally inimitable humour of the tragic series "Our Cat took Rat Poison." In Lewis Carroll's "Rhyme? and Reason?" (1883), Mr. Frost shared with Henry Holiday the task of illustrating a larger edition of the book first published under the title of "Phantasmagoria" ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... the city's representatives at Shrewsbury, a tragic story is told. Meeting, one day, Laurence Duket, his rival in the affections of a woman known as "Alice atte Bowe," the two came to blows, and Crepyn was wounded. The affray took place in Cheapside, and Duket, fearing he had killed his man, sought sanctuary ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... gave me pain to write; they will give the judicious patron pain to read; therefore we are quits. I think, as I look over their slattern paragraphs, of that most tragic hour—it falls about 4 P. M. in the office of an evening newspaper—when the unhappy compiler tries to round up the broodings of the day and still get home in time for supper. And yet perhaps the will-to-live ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... about the lonely pass, While the faint snow-shine of that plateaued space Lit, where it lay upon the frozen grass, The mournful, tragic beauty of ...
— Last Poems • Laurence Hope
... telegram in her hand, and turned away with a half-tragic air which at the moment struck Graydon as a little "stagy," and then he condemned himself for the thought. As she did not speak for a moment, he said, sympathetically, ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... in this house when discovery would have been death, and that is no longer since than after Lord Holland and the Duke of Buckingham's rising at Kingston; and hang me, if I thought once of twisting my brow into such a tragic fold as yours, but cocked my hat at ...
— Woodstock; or, The Cavalier • Sir Walter Scott
... Genevieve would laugh at the memory of this tragic evening, as she laughed at George's stern ultimatums, and at Junior's decision to be an engineer, and at Jinny's tiny cut thumb. But she had no sense of humor now. As she ran to the corner, and poured the whole distressful story into her husband's ears, she felt ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... egotist, and played cock o' the walk; and now at last his philosophy was giving some foundation for his feet. Yet at this auction-sale he looked a distracted, if smiling, whimsical, rather bustling figure of misfortune, with a tragic air of exile, of isolation from all by which he was surrounded. A profound and wayworn loneliness showed in his figure, in his face, in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... himself—fraud and robbery? And her "perfect lover," whom Amidon habitually thought of as "that fellow Brassfield"—all the perfections which Elizabeth had learned to attribute to him, would no longer be credited to Amidon. It was tragic! ...
— Double Trouble - Or, Every Hero His Own Villain • Herbert Quick
... believe at the instance of a society of scientists, it was resolved to transport the body to the summit of Mount Mitchell; for the tragic death of the explorer had forever settled in the popular mind the name of the mountain. The task was not easy. A road had to be cut, over which a sledge could be hauled, and the hardy mountaineers who undertook ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... that, but he guessed some of it. He had not gone very far in experience himself, but he suspected that this wild creature of the hills was likely to have a turbulent and perhaps tragic time of it. She was very much a child of impulse. Thirstily she had drunk in all he could tell her of the world beyond the hills that hemmed them in. He had known her frank, grateful, dreamy, shy, defiant, and once, for no apparent reason, a flaming little ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... drama of nature's composing called a typhoid fever, with its regular bedchamber scenery, its properties of phials and pill-boxes, its little company of stock actors, its gradual evolution of a very simple plot, its familiar incidents, its emotional alternations, and its denouement, sometimes tragic, oftener happy. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... all her property? Beggar her heirs for—He could not say what. No; even such a resolution could not account for her remarkable expression of concentrated will. There was in her distracted mind something of more tragic import than this; and he dared not question what; dared not even approach this woman who, less than a week before, had linked herself to him for life. The uneasy light in those fixed and gleaming eyes betrayed a reason too lightly poised. He feared any ...
— The Chief Legatee • Anna Katharine Green
... admit not only that this view is much more attractive and more truly tragic than the ordinary conscience theory, but that it has more verisimilitude. But I feel no doubt that it does not answer to Shakespeare's meaning, and I will simply mention, out of many objections to it, three which ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... Athenaeum for allowing me to reprint the poem "Detachment" and the first chapter of this book. The courtesy of the Editor of the Pall Mall Gazette in permitting me to use again any of my contributions to his paper also enables me to include in the fifth chapter the tragic incident ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... a tragic experience and prophecy. It was insanity that robbed the world of its most finished short story writer, the author of this tale; and even before his madness became overpowering, de Maupassant complained that he was haunted ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... of Baron Harnier was exceedingly tragic. Having wounded a buffalo, the animal charged a native attendant and threw him to the ground; Baron Harnier was unloaded, and with great courage he attacked the buffalo with the butt-end of his rifle to rescue the man then beneath the animal's horns. The buffalo left the ...
— The Albert N'Yanza, Great Basin of the Nile • Sir Samuel White Baker
... window, feeling, for an instant, faint and sick. In a few moments I returned, and looked out again. Both the fallen ones had regained their feet, and passed out of sight, and Biddy, who had witnessed the last scene in this half comic, half tragic performance, was giving the pavement a plentiful coating of ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... blame be shouldered upon young Yarnell. But later his conscience had forced him to a confession. It is enough here to say that he was later tried and acquitted, thus closing the chapter of the wastrel's tragic death. ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... Ridicule" should be barred from heroic poetry.[11] The influence of the genres theories even after Pope's death may be shown by the fact that Pope, for the very reason that he had failed to work in the major genres, was often ranked below such epic or tragic poets as ...
— An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad • Walter Harte
... Madness!" And Irene, who had risen from her chair, commenced moving about the room in a wild, irresolute kind of way, something like an actress under tragic excitement. ...
— After the Storm • T. S. Arthur
... is known as "The Legend of Elphi." Elphi the Farndale dwarf was doubtless at one time the central figure of many a fireside story and Elphi's mother was almost equally famous. The most tragic story in which they both play their leading parts is that of Golpha the bad Baron of Lastingham and his wicked wife. The mother helped in hiding some one Golpha wished to torture. In his rage he seized the mother, and sentenced her to be burnt ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... of the women of Versailles, came Marie Antoinette, the woman who, in the most striking and tragic of all destinies, represents not solely the majesty and the griefs of royalty, but all the graces and all the agonies, all the joys and all the ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... Parisian theatre men, their wives, and their families laughing unrestrainedly at a piece, that if exhibited before an American audience would simply disgust some, and make others morbidly attentive. This kind of literature, comic or tragic, disseminated as it everywhere is among impulsive and passionate Russian readers, has been anything but morally healthful. One might as rationally go about and poison wells. And the Russian youth are sophisticated to a degree that seems to us almost startling. ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... am sure ages quickly those that live it. Circumstances over which I exercised but a nominal control—a description of human life it appears to me—had thrown my lot into close connection with France, that "light-hearted heroine of tragic story"; and at this time I watched with even a greater eagerness than other Englishmen the grim tragedy slowly working to ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... the tragic paintings by which Mr. Burke has outraged his own imagination, and seeks to work upon that of his readers, they are very well calculated for theatrical representation, where facts are manufactured for the sake of show, ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... moment at which Cortes, at the head of his followers, rode into the city of Mexico is one of the most dramatic in all history. Nothing in any novel of adventure compares with it in amazing contrast or tragic possibilities. The men of the Age of Cannon met the men of the Age of Stone. The mighty Catholic Church confronted a nation of snake-worshiping cannibals. The sons of a race that lived in hardy simplicity, a race of fighters, had come into a capital where life was more luxurious than ...
— Days of the Discoverers • L. Lamprey
... tragic culmination of Berkeley's ruthless cruelties was the occasion of the bitter censure by the king, already recorded. After the death of Berkeley, Mrs. Drummond brought suit against his wife, Lady Frances Berkeley, for recovery of her property, and a verdict in her favor was given by ...
— School History of North Carolina • John W. Moore
... pleasure of looking on, a spectator of the accidents of existence, an observer of the follies of mankind. Like the Gods of the Epicurean, you seem to regard our life as a play that is played, as a comedy; yet how often the tragic note comes in! What pity, and in the laughter what an accent of tears, as of rain in the wind! No comedian has been so kindly and human as you; none has had a heart, like you, to feel for his butts, and to leave them sometimes, in a sense, superior ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... reminder of his own poverty stricken condition. His thoughts turned from Rochester and his jokes, to his own immediate and tragic position. The whole thing was his own fault. It was quite easy to say that Rochester had led him along and tempted him; he was a full grown man and should have resisted temptation. He had let strong drink get hold of him; well, he had paid by the loss of his money, to say nothing of the ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... and had a strange poetic or tragic relation to his entrance. My father was out of town; I was away in England. Whether it was that the absence of my father had relaxed his power of moral restraint, or whether through neglect of the servant he had been desperately hungry, or most likely both being true, ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... any real objection to the Biblical idea that sin and death in humanity are essentially related? I do not think there is. To say that many people are unconscious of the connection is only another way of saying that many people fail to realise in full and tragic reality what is meant by death and sin. They think very little about either. The third chapter of Genesis could never have been written out of their conscience. Sin is not for them all one with despair: they are not, through fear ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... at the beginning, but they could do little. Their own lives were in constant danger from tumbling wreckage, for the rescuers were playing a game of tragic jackstraws. The ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... to breathe out from the depths of her heart the intense pathos of the original romance, so far exceeding that of the opera,-the human tenderness, the mystic terror of a tragic love-tale more solemn in its ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which in her opinion was full of contradictions throughout ("Semi-christiani"), and was disconcerted neither by the gospel of these Jewish Christians nor by anything else about them.[429] But as the Synagogue also vigorously condemned them, their position up to their extinction was a most tragic one. These Jewish Christians, more than any other Christian party, ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... trick of the firelight she seemed to have no body. The oval of the face and hair hung beside the fire with a dark vacuum for background. As if dazed by the glare, her green-blue eyes stared at the flames. Every muscle of her face was taut. There was something tragic in her thus staring—her age ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... positive and substantive proof of what I assert? I have not; but the concurrence of facts and the weight of probabilities do not leave me in possession of the doubts I should wish to entertain on that tragic event. Besides, there exists a certain popular instinct, which is rarely at fault, and it must be in the recollection of many, not only that the general opinion favoured the notion of Pichegru's assassination, but that the pains taken to give that opinion another direction, ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... too, and trusted and respected the judgment of Mrs. Festus Willard, whose friendship was tantamount to a certificate of character and eligibility. As against that, he set the unforgotten picture of the itinerant quack, vending his poison across the countryside, playing on desperate fears and tragic hopes, coining his dollars from the grimmest of false dies; and now that same quack,—powerful, rich, generous, popular, master of the good things of life,—still draining out his millions from the populace, ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... annihilate this forward girl from a land of barbarians. Finding his deities failed to respond, he threatened to cast his unworthy body upon the point of a sword, if Zura cut another bud. But I knew, if Ishi's love of flowers failed to prevent so tragic an end, his love of ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... should attempt tragedy or comedy. Her features were considered rather too sharp for comedy, and her figure not quite tall enough for tragedy. She herself preferred tragedy, which decided the point; and Mr Revel, who knows all the actors, persuaded Mr Y—- (you know whom I mean, the great tragic actor) to come here, and give his opinion of her recitation. Mr Y—- was excessively polite; declared that she was a young lady of great talent; but that a slight lisp, which she has, unfitted her most decidedly for tragedy. Of course it was abandoned for comedy, which she studied some ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... Kit took both her hands with a mock tragic gesture, "ANYTHING but that! To lose your friendship, Poppycheek, would be to lose all that makes life worth living! Now, if I promise to get even with you, by never trying to ...
— Patty's Suitors • Carolyn Wells
... and they all touched glasses with him. Suddenly, to his own surprise Frederick expanded in a wave of frankness, calling himself a shipwrecked man in two senses of the word. "I have gone through much in my past; and were not the sinking of the Roland so fearfully tragic, I should feel inclined to look upon it as a symbol of my former life. The Old World, the New World. I have taken the step across the great pond, and already feel something like ...
— Atlantis • Gerhart Hauptmann
... first week of war wild rumours flew of victory and disaster, but the heart of Winnipeg as of the nation was chiefly involved in the tragic and glorious struggle of little Belgium. And when two weeks had gone and Belgium, bruised, crushed, but unconquered, lay trampled in the bloody dust beneath the brutal boots of the advancing German hordes, Canada with ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... all be spared to ship on a new Andromeda," she said. No sooner had the words left her lips than the thought came unbidden: "If my uncle and Captain Coke wished the ship to be thrown away, nothing could have better suited their purposes than this tragic error." ...
— The Stowaway Girl • Louis Tracy
... her success deportment as Sylvia in Farquhar's "Recruiting Officer" leaves Drury Lane for the Haymarket supplants Mrs. Bracegirdle salary at the Haymarket —— and at Drury Lane as Andromache in "Distressed Mother" plays Marcia in "Cato" meets Alexander Pope tragic parts rivals produce a riot, her triumph as Jane Shore adheres to Drury Lane takes Sophonisba, praised by Thomson meridian lustre mistress of A. Maynwaring personal attractions accepts protection of Marlborough's nephew received at Court her natural children ancestress of Earls of Cadogan sympathy ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... hence the royal actor borne, The tragic scaffold might adorn, While round the armed bands Did clap ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... a curious kind of way. His own arguments while he was fighting for his life had, in a way, convinced himself. She was a rare creature, and she was alluring— more alluring than she had ever been; for a tragic sense had made her thinner, had refined the boldness of her beauty, had given a wonderful lustre to her eyes; and suffering has its own attraction to the degenerate. But he, George Masson, had had a great shock, and he had come out of the jaws of death by the skin of his teeth. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... discomfort, though two of us nearly fainted on parade the following morning—it was streamingly hot—but our farewell dinner was absolutely spoilt. Bottles of the best Moselle Carlow could produce were left untouched. Songs broke down in curses. It was tragic. ...
— Adventures of a Despatch Rider • W. H. L. Watson
... into sundry more special denominations; the most notable be the heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satyric, iambic, elegiac, pastoral, and certain others; some of these being termed according to the matter they deal with; some by the sort of verse they like best to write in; for, indeed, the greatest part of poets have apparelled their poetical inventions in ...
— A Defence of Poesie and Poems • Philip Sidney
... as well as a 'varsity substitute of a week's standing, he was intensely patriotic, and the thought of a tie game was unbearable; to a youth of his enthusiasm a tie was virtually a defeat for the Blue; and a defeat for the Blue was something tragic, inconceivable! Pemberton was a sandy-haired, blue-eyed, round-faced chap of eighteen; in height, five feet nine; in weight, one hundred and sixty-eight; neither large nor heavy, but speedy as they make them, a bundle of nerves, endowed with a fanatical ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... this state of mind, consumed with a desire to know more of my unhappy acquaintance and yet not daring to press him with questions, there came a tragic happening that revealed to me with startling suddenness the secret I was bent on knowing. One night, very late,—in fact it was about four o'clock in the morning,—I received an urgent summons to the bedside of a man who had been shot. As I bent over him I saw that it was my friend, and for the ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... him so well as Bobby Galleon. Bobby had always understood him, and now he felt for him with a tenderness that had both the past and the future to heighten its poignancy. It seemed to Bobby that nothing more tragic than the death of this child could possibly have occurred. It filled him with anxiety for the future, it intensified to a depth that only so simple and affectionate a character as his could feel, the love that he had always had ...
— Fortitude • Hugh Walpole
... Whether his sympathies showed thereby that he had risen or fallen, let my readers decide each for himself. It is a credit to any man to feel for any human being; and Italy, as she is at this moment, is certainly one of the most tragic spectacles which the world has ever seen. Elsley need not be blamed for pitying her; only for holding, with most of our poets, a vague notion that her woes were to be cured by a hair of the dog who bit her; viz., by homoeopathic doses of ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... the United States. I cordially approve of the proposed apprentice system for our national vessels recommended by the Secretary of the Navy. The occurrence during the last few months of marine disasters of the most tragic nature, involving great loss of human life, has produced intense emotions of sympathy and sorrow throughout the country. It may well be doubted whether all these calamitous events are wholly attributable to the necessary and inevitable ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... that was really quite too absurd, that was really childish, a scene over the memory of which, I must believe, they themselves have sometimes laughed together; though, at the moment, its absurdity held, for him at least, elements of the tragic. ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... tragic tale, and gave a terrible interest to the gaunt, white-haired, shattered-looking man who was the hero of it. It had one point of special awe for me, and I used to watch him in church and think of it, till I am ashamed to say that I forgot even when to stand up and sit down. He had served ...
— We and the World, Part I - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... children. But although the interest of friends secured her a partial success, her gravity and sadness failed to excite the sympathy of her pupils, who missed in her the playful gayety always most winning to children. Martha, however, pushed bravely on, a figure of tragic sobriety to all who watched her course. The farmers thought her a strange girl, and wondered at the ways of the farmer's daughter who was not content to milk cows and churn butter and fry pork, without further hope or thought. The good clergyman of the town, interested in her situation, sought a ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... a reasonably cheerful look, but it was a tragic failure. The man was looking past her to the post-office beyond, and the things Patsy had seemed to feel in his face suddenly rose to the surface and revealed themselves with an instant's intensity. Patsy followed the look over her ...
— Seven Miles to Arden • Ruth Sawyer
... "What a tragic face, Maggie," said her father, chucking her under the chin. "We must only trust that the picture is mislaid, not lost. Now, good-by, my dear, I am ...
— The Children of Wilton Chase • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... whom so many of the greatest talents were to live such passionate lives and die such tragic deaths, one serene man, T. W. Rolleston, seemed always out of place. It was I brought him there, intending to set him to some work in Ireland later on. I have known young Dublin working men slip out of their ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... which M. Renan gives us of his early life are what we should have looked for from the writer of the Vie de Jesus. The story of the disintegration of a faith is supposed commonly to have something tragic about it. We expect it to be a story of heart-breaking disenchantments, of painful struggles, of fierce recoils against ancient beliefs and the teachers who bolstered them up; of indignation at having been so long deceived; of lamentation ...
— Occasional Papers - Selected from The Guardian, The Times, and The Saturday Review, - 1846-1890 • R.W. Church
... and diplomatist, was well pleased to have failed, or rather, paradoxically, he told himself that failure was his true success. The King—he had come to the conclusion that Louis had played one of those grim jests which were not all a jest and at times had tragic consequences—the King, no doubt, had been deceived, possibly by Saxe, and to have Saxe proved a liar beyond question could not but be a relief. So all was well; the King's fears could be set at rest, and he himself was freed from an odious duty. Against ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond
... whose tragic end was so linked with his own existence—of the body buffeted by the waves somewhere in the blue expanse that stretched ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... was well equipped. He had the observant eye, the power of selection, command of the telling phrase and happy epithet, the sense of the comic and the pathetic. Beyond Chaucer he had passion and the power of rendering it, so that he might have reached greater tragic depth, as he surpassed ...
— Robert Burns - How To Know Him • William Allan Neilson
... and no suspicion to emphasise the tragic nature of Scipio's death. He was but fifty-six; he was by far the greatest general that Rome could command, a champion who could spring into the breach when all seemed lost, make an army out of a rabble and win victory from defeat; he was a great moral force, the scourge of ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge
... love him, a young woman married by mere worldly convention to a sickly, brutal, and brutish drunkard, old enough to be her father. And what were these scruples? Merely that a new love might distract Alfieri from his plans of study and work, that a woman might cheat him of glory, and Italy of the tragic drama which would school her to virtue. That there could be any other scruples appears never to have crossed Alfieri's brain: that there could be any reason to pause and ask himself whether he was doing wrong or ill before exposing to temptation the woman whom he loved, ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... disgust and terror, is thus in its own nature ridiculous, we ought not to be surprized if the very same vices which spread horror and desolation thro' the Tragic scene should yet furnish the Comic with its highest laughter and delight, and that tears, and mirth, and even humour and wit itself, should grow from the same root of incongruity: For what is humour in the humourist, but incongruity, whether of sentiment, ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... in this country a girl shifts for herself. If she marries, well and good; if she remains single, well and good too, provided she can earn her living or has means. When she has neither means nor craft and fails to marry, she is one of the most tragic figures in our confused social hierarchy, difficult to help, superfluous. She sets her hand to this and that, but she has no grip on life. To think of her is to invoke the very image of failure and incompetence. She flocks into every opening, blocking and depressing it; as a "help" she becomes a ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... difficulties only whetted her discoverer's appetite, so that when, after an hour, she had studied out the beginning of the document, she was deep in a world of romance-freighted history. Here was a journal written by a woman in the brave and tragic days ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... tunes, as healthy and fresh as anything in the theatre pieces. The "Golden" sonata is, after all, a fair representative. If the last movement seems—as most of the finales of all the composers until Beethoven do seem—a trifle light and insignificant after the almost tragic seriousness of the largo, we must bear in mind that it was very frequently part of Purcell's design to have a cheerful ending. Unfortunately, there is no good edition of the sonatas. They are chamber music, and never were intended to be played in a large room. They should be played in a small ...
— Purcell • John F. Runciman
... "but, you know, I had expected to find a place from which I could gain some inspiration for tragedy—for I should like to try, once for all—if I should have to give up the stage—whether I had the stuff of a tragic actress in me. And, you know, in that case, I ought to dress in black velvet, and carry a taper through dungeons, and get accustomed to storms, and ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... that tragic history, so famous, so bitterly debated, so often and so controversially described, remain full of suggestion for the curious examiner of the ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... learn from them. Carlyle would have Emerson teach by more definite signs, rather than interpret his revelations, or shall we say preach? Admitting all the inspiration and help that Sartor Resartus has given in spite of its vaudeville and tragic stages, to many young men getting under way in the life of tailor or king, we believe it can be said (but very broadly said) that Emerson, either in the first or second series of essays, taken as a whole, gives, it seems to us, greater inspiration, partly because his manner is less ...
— Essays Before a Sonata • Charles Ives
... mad? Had the announcement of his marriage turned her brain? In that pause, before either could speak again, a knock that had been twice given unheard, was repeated a third time. It brought both back instantly from the tragic, to the decorum of every-day life. Lady Helena sat down; Sir Victor opened the door. It was a servant with a note on ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... serfs, and all the glory and the grief of feudal life. The man of imagination has lived the life of all people, of all races. He has been a citizen of Athens in the days of Pericles; listened to the eager eloquence of the great orator, and has sat upon the cliff, and with the tragic poet heard "the multitudinous laughter of the sea." He has seen Socrates thrust the spear of question through the shield and heart of falsehood—was present when the great man drank hemlock and met the night of death tranquil as a star meets morning. He ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... noble-spirited, this side the tomb, are broken down forever. Well might his heart-crushed father sob aloud, "He seemed to tread the earth as a spirit from some better world." The author of "Horae Subsecivae" aptly quotes Shakspeare's memorable words, in connection with the tragic bereavement of that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various
... many ways, as you will perhaps say, and as I agree, a tragic story. If we had possessed last spring the ammunition—both for ourselves and our allies we now possess, the war would have gone differently. Drunkenness, trade-union difficulties, a small—very small—revolutionary element among our work people—all these have made trouble. ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... King Constantine by the Press of the Allied countries, with some few good exceptions, has been one of the most tragic affairs since the Dreyfus case. Its effect on the state of Europe during and since the War is remarkable. If King Constantine's advice had been followed, and the Greek plan for the taking of the Dardanelles ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... find the old clay tablets on which the children of that ancient time had learned to write. Progress? Regress! While history as a whole, from the Cro-Magnon man to the twentieth century, does certainly suggest a great ascent, it has not been an automatic levitation. It has been a fight, tragic and ceaseless, against destructive forces. This world needs something more than a soft gospel of inevitable progress. It needs salvation from its ignorance, its sin, its inefficiency, its apathy, its silly optimisms ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... high purposes in his choice of the subject of Joan of Arc and other pictures, and the process by which those purposes were brought to completion. He tells us, that in his enthusiasm he visited, as a pilgrim, the spot where the heroic and tragic scenes of his subject were enacted. He presumes that the houses there are now pretty much what they were then; and he has thought an exact representation of them necessary to historical truth, and he has ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... foremost canoe with Yah-chi-la-ne and Has-se; and as they sped onward he told them at greater length than before of the tragic events of the past few days, and of ...
— The Flamingo Feather • Kirk Munroe
... Skelmerton," he said, and in a flash there flitted before Polly's mind the weird and tragic history which had broken this loving woman's heart. Lady Arthur Skelmerton! That name recalled one of the most bewildering, most mysterious passages in ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy
... The boss was the boss, and what he said went. But his demeanor was tragic, telling ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... weddings after play began, also pantomimes, beast combats, and theatrical dances, also heathen festivals, vows to Pan, bacchanal rites, public dances by women, the appearance of men dressed as women, or of women dressed as men, and the use of comic, tragic, or satyric masks. All the Dionysiac rites had been forbidden long before. These canons prove that those rites were still observed. These clerical rules and canons do not represent the mores and they never overruled the mores at Constantinople. They only bear witness to what existed in the ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... mysteries in the souls of Maggies. The drudge had probably been affianced oftener than any woman in Bursley. Her employers were so accustomed to an interesting announcement that for years they had taken to saying naught in reply but 'Really, Maggie!' Engagements and tragic partings were Maggie's pastime. Fixed otherwise, she might ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... man of a tragic turn of mind, and fond of giving vent to the passion of a scene, I would have walked up and down the room, striking myself on the brow or breast, and shouting, "Confusion! distraction!" and other powerful words which Mr Kean used to deliver with astonishing ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... dramatic dialogue and movement, but dramatic monologue and episode. For illustration, we might refer to Hagar in the wilderness. Her tragic loneliness and shuddering despair alight upon the page of Scripture with the interest that attends the introduction of the veiled Niobe with her children into ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... of blur and blot Have slid since I beheld that spot, And saw in curious converse there Moving slowly, moving sadly That mysterious tragic pair, Its olden look may linger on - All but the ...
— Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries, with - Miscellaneous Pieces • Thomas Hardy |
