"Maudeline" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Billy Bowles? Sure the priest is maudlin! (To the public) How can you, d—n your souls! Listen to his twaddling? ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... the baronet in a maudlin tone, moved by the unfeigned passion of his housekeeper. I gave him a look, and the ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... she says?" her Grace asked the hag nearest to her, and least maudlin with liquor. "I would be sure I ...
— A Lady of Quality • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... men might say him nay. The voices at the table droned on, as from a great distance, and Nicanor lay and listened. They spoke of some woman. No name was mentioned, but the description of her, as it fell from the old man's maudlin lips, sent his heart pounding. So might be described another woman, who for him held life and death and all that lay between. The voice of Valerius at his ear made ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... matter of fact, Creed aged materially during his journey to the door, but to the onlookers his exit seemed a miracle of frantic haste as he clawed and scrambled the length of the room on hands and knees in a maudlin panic of terror. ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... Kova. "By the dead hands at my throat but he shall die, Bar Comas. No maudlin weakness on your part shall save him. O, would that Warhoon were ruled by a real jeddak rather than by a water-hearted weakling from whom even old Dak Kova could tear the metal with ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... old Brooke triumphed, and the boys cheered him and then the Doctor. And then more songs came, and the healths of the other boys about to leave, who each made a speech, one flowery, another maudlin, a third prosy, and so on, which are not necessary to ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... and fierce desires! Why languish thus the wonted fires That arm'd thine heart and nerved thine hand To do whate'er thy firmness planned? Has maudlin love subdued thy soul, Once so impatient of control? Has amorous play enslaved the mind Where erst no common chains confined? Has tender dalliance power to kill The wild, indomitable will? No more must love thus paralyze And ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... war prisoner, or a person who was wounded or half-tortured to death, under their protection, and a short time afterwards the whole war party would be greeting this rescued wretch (usually a man—they were far more pitiless towards women) as brother, son, or friend, and even become quite maudlin over a scratch or a bruise; whereas an hour or so before they were on the point of disembowelling, or of driving splinters up the nails and setting them on fire. In warfare they often gave way ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston
... noisily, continuing on their way with only occasional bursts of abuse, and the firing off of fag ends of French songs, accompanied with a fitful fusilade of low, horselaughter; and thus, mollified and maudlin, unsteadily continued their straggling march, until they halted at a gate on the roadside, and some distance behind which, loomed a large, dingy and deserted-looking dwelling, half concealed by tall trees. No light was to be seen, but, after a brief ...
— The Advocate • Charles Heavysege
... himself with a long pull from a flask he took from his pocket. 'Twas plain that the drink had been his undoing, and indeed, before I parted company with him in Port Royal some days later, he told me with maudlin tears the story of his declension from surgeon on a king's ship to buccaneer, and preached me many an impressive sermon on the ...
— Humphrey Bold - A Story of the Times of Benbow • Herbert Strang
... of course, that I see a gnosis in him of which as a young man I knew nothing. But I do not greatly care about gnosis, I want agape; and Beethoven's agape is not the healthy robust tenderness of Handel, it is a sickly maudlin thing in comparison. Anyhow I do not like him. I like Mozart and Haydn better, but not so much better as I should ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... to a natural impulse—true! That moment of temptation threatened painful consequences—still true! What then? Nothing! Was the dead fruit to hang about his neck forever? Tut!—all natural law was against it. Had he not said that he was above prejudice? So was he above the maudlin sentiment of the "great lovers of noble histories." The sophistry grew apace with Greta's beautiful countenance before him. Catching at her ...
— A Son of Hagar - A Romance of Our Time • Sir Hall Caine
... with his glorious sheaf of golden hair which had grown during his illness tortured into ringlets, and an adoring group of ladies gathered about him, as he stood with troubled, almost haughty mien, and gravely regarded their maudlin sentimentalities. ...
— Lo, Michael! • Grace Livingston Hill
... it checked in the bud, as if it hadn't quite made up its mind yet to be good company. Now it was that after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst into a stream of song so cosy and hilarious as never maudlin nightingale yet formed the ...
— The Cricket on the Hearth • Charles Dickens
... falling down and getting up again. You see, their nerves were gone. The fumes, the gases, the shock, the fire, what they had endured and what they had escaped—all these had distracted them. They danced, sang, wept, laughed, shouted in a sort of maudlin frenzy, spun about deliriously until they dropped. They were deafened, and some of them could not see but had to grope their way. I remember one man who sat down and pulled off his boots and socks and threw them away and then hobbled on in his bare feet until he cut the ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... on the letter in No. 59, printed above, says: "I have looked over our pedigree upon the receipt of this epistle, and find the Greenhats are a-kin to the Staffs. They descend from Maudlin, the left-handed wife of Nehemiah Bickerstaff, in the ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... with difficulty: the Colonel, poor old gentleman, to a sort of permanent dream, in which you could say of him only that he was very deaf and anxiously polite; the Major still maudlin drunk. We had a dish of tea by the fireside, and then issued like criminals into the scathing cold of the night. For the weather had in the meantime changed. Upon the cessation of the rain, a strict frost had succeeded. The moon, being young, was already near the zenith when we started, glittered ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... had dubbed it, lay under the broad face of the sun, and the cascade sparkled at my feet on its run to the sea. Down below the ruffians were engaged in drinking themselves into a condition of maudlin merriment. Well, so much the better, I reflected, for I had made up my mind that now, if ever, was the time to inquire into the fate of Mademoiselle. When Legrand returned, the debauch had developed, and the boat was clumsily put to sea by two of the hands. Evidently ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... cart to make struts, which they secured against the side walls or frame of the gateway. These formed buttresses of considerable strength; and the landlord, instead of grumbling at the damage which might be done to his bordj, and the danger which threatened himself, was maudlin with delight at the prospect of killing a few ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... blowing at Eldridge's Crossing. From the stately pine-trees on the hill-tops, which were dignifiedly protesting through their rigid spines upward, to the hysterical willows in the hollow, that had whipped themselves into a maudlin fury, there was a general tumult. When the wind lulled, the rain kept up the distraction, firing long volleys across the road, letting loose miniature cataracts from the hill-sides to brawl in the ditches, and beating down the heavy heads of wild oats ...
— Jeff Briggs's Love Story • Bret Harte
... must go with Sympathy, else the emotions will become maudlin and pity may be wasted on a poodle instead of a child; on a field-mouse instead of a human soul. Knowledge in use is wisdom, and wisdom implies a sense of values—you know a big thing from a little one, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... utmost difficulty they could be extricated from the clutches of the publicans and the embraces of their pot companions, who followed them to the water's edge with many a hug, a kiss on each cheek, and a maudlin ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... organs and gramaphones and suchlike horrors, but then unless you chance to pass their open windows you need not endure their strains. In England, even if we are fond of music, and therefore sensitive to jarring sounds and maudlin melodies, yet in the street we cannot escape the barrel-organ nor in the house the drawing-room songs. As if these were not enough, we now invite each other to listen to ...
— Home Life in Germany • Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick
... is!—Understand too that except upon a basis of even such rigor, sorrowful, silent, inexorable as that of Destiny and Doom, there is no true pity possible. The pity that proves so possible and plentiful without that basis, is mere ignavia and cowardly effeminacy; maudlin laxity of heart, grounded on blinkard dimness of head—contemptible ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... vain for me to try to escape from my false position. The nearer the Philosophers approached, the more maudlin and effusive these unprincipled young females became, flinging their arms tragically round my neck, and bedaubing my face with their ...
— Tom, Dick and Harry • Talbot Baines Reed
... and wept maudlin tears, disgusting to witness. He said he was an old man who had always lived honestly, and it would break his heart if his grey hairs were to be disgraced. As he sat rocking himself with his hands over his face, I saw his wicked little eyes ...
— Prester John • John Buchan
... his one-time playmate was at the Nest, and it so threw Jack off his balance that he was practically maudlin for a week after ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... a large crowd of the new men who welcomed him heartily, plying him with countless questions, and harking to his maudlin tales of this new country which to him was old. He had followed the muddy river from Crater Lake to the Delta, searching the bars and creek-beds in a tireless quest, till he knew each stream and tributary, for he had been one of ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... strength, not in weakness, in virility and not in tears, in majesty, the majesty truly of meekness, but not of a maudlin, mooning etherealism. The revelation of the perfect man cannot come in a form that a child will pity; it will be admirable from all points of view. It is the heroic rather than the esthetic we ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... a living greatest. There was an outward starch and acerbity produced by toil and danger. But when people felt they could unbend, they were not icebergs but volcanoes, because the fires which burned unseen were those of the soul. The mirth of wine is maudlin and short-lived. It prompts to no labor, and kindles no sacrifices. It is satanic; it blazes and dies, a horrid mockery, exultant and evanescent. But the joy of homes, the beaming face of forgiveness, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... not repeat the grim narrative of the murder. We all know it. One knows not which is the more repugnant—the degradation of the poor child Salome to the level of a dancing-girl, the fell malignity of the mother who would shame her daughter for such an end, the maudlin generosity of Herod, flushed with wine and excited passion, the hideous request from lips so young, the ineffectual sorrow of Herod, his fantastic sense of obligation, which scrupled to break a wicked promise and did not scruple to murder a prophet, or the ghastly picture of ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... sung, good woman, I thank you, I'l give you another dish of fish one of these dayes, and then beg another Song of you. Come Scholer, let Maudlin alone, do not you offer to spoil her voice. Look, yonder comes my Hostis to cal us to supper. How now? is my ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... of the doorway, down the couple of steps to the floor of the saloon, and he staggered a little, simulating drunkenness. He fell over the pool tables, jostled Mexicans at the bar, laughed like a maudlin fool, and, with his hat slouched down, crowded here and there. Presently his eye caught sight of the group of cowboys whom he had before noticed with ...
— Desert Gold • Zane Grey
... choking sensation at my throat. I remember the effrontery of Flint's laughing at me, in a maudlin sort of way, and then—a blank. The next I recall was just now—Eva gazing at me with a worried expression in her dear eyes. I called to her and kissed her, tried to comfort her. Then I ...
— The Master Mystery • Arthur B. Reeve and John W. Grey
... that I could cry like a baby? It cuts me to the heart, it is all so true; it is too much for me, when I think of my wretched, wasted years—paying all that money for my own labour, too! I am sober again after a debauch, I see what the object of my maudlin affection is like, and what it has ...
— Works, V2 • Lucian of Samosata
... "is where Hugo Werner takes to the tall timbers. I don't hypnotise worth a cent. All Koppy's eagle eye does to me is warn me I'm not bullet-proof. Me for the safe spots; they can get as maudlin as they like. I got a hunch this is no place ...
— The Return of Blue Pete • Luke Allan
... maudlin tenderness of an "Essayist and Reviewer" (of all persons in the world!) for "the life of Man,"—meaning thereby his Christian hope, and Faith in the REDEEMER!... As if, (first,) Man's "Life" were in any sense endangered, by our upholding the honour and authority of the ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... woman, with hair unkempt, and hat awry, maudlin tears in her swollen eyes, and swaying as she held the rail, looked shiftily up ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... heart thumping heavily at sound of the voice, thick though it was and maudlin. Dade drunk and full of coarse foolery was a sight he had never before looked upon; but Dade's presence, drunk or sober, made his own plight seem a shade less hopeless. He did not dare a second glance, ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... to a maudlin degree. She would go on in her shallow way of life, smashing windows, voting, leading perfectly decent young men to do things they never meant to do; but he, the tender, the true, the ever-earnest, he would not recover from the wound that frail one had so carelessly ...
— Bunker Bean • Harry Leon Wilson
... bees linger so long beside the vats of the distillery that they became maudlin. And the love of high stimulants in literature is one of the character marks of our generation. Excess threatens our people. Men are anxious to be scholars and hurry along a pathway that leads straight to the grave. Men are anxious to find pleasure, ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... This touch even of maudlin sentiment went direct to Olive's heart. She clung to him, kissed him, begged his forgiveness, nay, even wept over him. He ceased to rage, and sat in a sullen silence for many minutes. Meanwhile Olive took ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... comic military characters in a musical comedy—just as, in mediaeval miracle plays, the comic character was Satan. The play's intention was to show a typical Russian working-class family. There were the old father, constantly drunk on vodka, alternately maudlin and scolding; the old mother; two sons, the one a Communist and the other an Anarchist; the wife of the Communist, who did dressmaking; her sister, a prostitute; and a young girl of bourgeois family, also a Communist, involved ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... way in which you would explain his absurd, maudlin words. A pitiful offer it was, which she, like a sensible girl, declined ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... know their grave: Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust, Destroy our friends, and after weep their dust: Our own love waking cries to see what's done, While shameful hate sleeps out the afternoon. Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her. Send forth your amorous token for fair Maudlin: The main consents are had; and here we'll stay To see our ...
— All's Well That Ends Well • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... pig: I never expected ye to know him! And now the time's past, and ye'll go far afore finding a better. Bill Adams his name was; but Bill to me, always, and in all weathers." Here for a moment he became maudlin. "Paid off but three days agone, same as myself, and now—cut down like a flower! He's the corpse, ahead, in the ...
— The Adventures of Harry Revel • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... to type. Only, whereas among the French he is a thing of the savage past, among the Germans he is a product of the kultured present. And to turn from the field note-book of the German soldier with its swaggering tale of loot, lust, and maudlin cups, its memoranda of stolen toys for Felix and of ravished lingerie for Bertha, all viewed in the rosy light of the writer's egotism as a laudable enterprise, to the plain depositions of the Justice ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... score of them, perhaps, lounging upon spread mats, and smoking their pipes. On floating so near, and hearing the maudlin cries of our crew, and beholding their antics, they must have taken us for a pirate; at any rate, they got out their sweeps, and pulled away as fast as they could; the sight of our two six-pounders, ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... care how much or how little you love me. That depends upon you, as well as myself. I believe the time will come, when you will love me as you ought, and I say this in perfect calm conviction, in all my weakness, and with all my maudlin habits clinging to me. Strangely enough your doubt of me has made me rise up in arms to champion my cause, or else I should lie down forever in the ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... sent Newson and Cooper home to the Shipwreck Dinner at Woodbridge, and supposing they would be maudlin on Saturday, gave them Sunday to repent on, and so have lost the only fine Days we have yet had for sailing. To-day is a dead Calm. 'These are my Trials!' as a fine Gentleman said to Wesley, when his Servant put rather too many Coals on ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome
... more than I do," was Andy's mental comment, when to his question, "What shall we do next?" Richard replied, in a maudlin kind of way, "Yes, that is a very proper course. I leave it entirely ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... spell of intoxication overcame him, weighing down his eyes, he always recalled the same dream. In his maudlin siestas, satiated and happy, there would always reappear another Freya who was not Freya, but Dona Constanza, the Empress of Byzantium. He could see her dressed as a peasant girl, just as she was portrayed ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... He paraphrases David and puts into his mouth such punning conceits as "Fears are my feres," and in his "Saint Peter's Complaint" makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repentance, in which the distinctions between the north and northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns Scotus. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged for his faith, he is able to write good verses. We would almost match the fortitude ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... him a drink of water and filled his pipe, joking him about easy days in the hospital while they sweated in the woods. The drunken cook came out, carrying his rolled blankets, began maudlin sympathy, and was promptly squelched, whereupon he retreated to the float, emitting conversation to the world at large. Then they carried Renfrew down to the float, and Davis began to haul up the anchor to lay ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... brow upturn'd to heaven the holy Sage In silent agony sustains their rage; While each fond Youth, in vain, with piercing cries Bends on the tortured Sire his dying eyes. 355 "Drink deep, sweet youths" seductive VITIS cries, The maudlin tear-drop glittering in her eyes; Green leaves and purple clusters crown her head, And the tall Thyrsus stays her tottering tread. —Five hapless swains with soft assuasive smiles 360 The harlot meshes in her ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... abasement! What are the Italians of today but men tricked out in women's finery, when they should be waiting full-armed to rally at the first signal of revolt? Oh, for the day when a poet shall arise who dares tell them the truth, not disguised in sentimental frippery, not ending in a maudlin reconciliation of love and glory—but the whole truth, naked, cold and fatal as a patriot's blade; a poet who dares show these bedizened courtiers they are no freer than the peasants they oppress, ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... on every occasion. Nothing could be said or done without eliciting a spark from him; and I solemnly declare I have heard much worse wit even from noblemen. His jokes, it must be confessed, were rather wet, but they suited the circle in which he presided. The company were in that maudlin mood when a little wit goes a great way. Every time he opened his lips there was sure to be a roar, and sometimes before ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... struggling, churning, sprawling, desperate efflux from east to west began; once more the Golden Horde was on the march. They did not come, as had their ancestors, on wildly charging horses, threatening with lances and deadly scimitars, but on foot, wretched and begging. Even had I been as maudlin as Stuart Thario desired I could not have fed these people, for there were no longer railroads with rollingstock adequate to carry the freight, no fleets of trucks in good repair, nor was the fuel available ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... squarely against Congress and the people, while the House met his defiance by a concurrent resolution emphatically condemning his reconstruction policy, and thus opening the way for the coming struggle between Executive usurpation and the power of Congress. His maudlin speech on the 22d of February to the political mob which called on him, branding as traitors the leaders of the party which had elected him, completely dishonored him in the opinion of all Republicans, and awakened general alarm. Everybody could now see the mistake ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... about being and not-being when he is only a maudlin compromise between them, and all he wants is to be a maudlin compromise? He is neither one nor the other. He has neither being nor riot-being. He is as equivocal as the monks. He was detestable, mouthing Hamlet's sincere words. He has ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... looked round his company—at some with the maudlin tear of sentiment still on their cheeks, at others eager to escape this soft moment and ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... into the seat, undertaking no reply to his maudlin boastings. She was passing away from the only place in all the world that meant shelter for her now, and already it felt like home, this place that she ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... sell their souls for party, and betray their country to its enemies through lust of power, or something else, God knows what; when I see drunkenness holding high carnival in the nation's capitol, reeling in the seat of the President, and retailing its maudlin declamation before a sickened country from Washington to Chicago, I can only turn to God and the future. Our only hope is in the work of the Christian church through all its agencies, social, ecclesiastical and educational, moulding out of the glorious ...
— Amusement: A Force in Christian Training • Rev. Marvin R. Vincent.
... he is a subject of derision only, instead of admiration; that men pause to regard him as a miracle of conceit and assurance rather than as a prophet; and that his commonplaces about "olive leaves," "calumets," "universal brotherhood," "fatherland," etc., have no more influence than the maudlin rigmarole of the madman whose preternatural force is lost in senility. It is time for Elihu Burritt to go back to his shop: the ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... after profuse and maudlin protestations of his most dutiful zeal all the days of his life for "the service, honour, reputation, and contentment of your princely Grace," observed that he had not thought it necessary to give him notice of such idle and unfounded matters, as being likely to give ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... the mood of finding God. Who seeks Him must seek with thought aflame with love. Caliban's reasoning ambles like a drunkard staggering home from late debauch. His grossness shames us. And yet were he only Caliban, and if he were all alone, we could forget his maudlin speech—but he is more. He is a voice of our own era. His babblings are not more crude and irreverential than much that passes for profound thinking. Nay, Caliban is our contemporaneous shame. He asserts (he does not think—he asserts, settles questions with a word) that Setebos ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... the preacher said "hell." He gave a maudlin cry, and almost whimpered, "No, sir, no, preacher, I am a-goin' to reform." John had known what note to touch in this debased nature. Not love, nor hope, nor shame, would move Tom Davis, but fear stung him into a semblance of sobriety. "I'll come along wi' ...
— John Ward, Preacher • Margaret Deland
... he knows all the magazine editors personally, and they are probably only too glad to oblige him about anything, and—Oh, may be, it is only a dream, after all." My heart was pounding, but not with sorrow or despair or any other maudlin passion; and Stella was now as remote from my thoughts as was Joan of Arc ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... Zaporozhtzi. At length drunkenness and fatigue began to overpower even these strong heads, and here and there a Cossack could be seen to fall to the ground, embracing a comrade in fraternal fashion; whilst maudlin, and even weeping, the latter rolled upon the earth with him. Here a whole group would lie down in a heap; there a man would choose the most comfortable position and stretch himself out on a log of wood. The ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... bardic spirit. His lyre was attuned to reach the ear rather than the heart; his scenes are in enchanted lands; his dramatis personae tread theatrical boards; his thunder is a melo-dramatic roll; his lightning is pyrotechny; his tears are either hypocritical or maudlin; and his laughter is the perfection of ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... with maudlin shoutings, to a small tree that stood by itself, and bound him to it with so many lashings that only his head was free to move. Then they heaped dry wood about him, piling it up until ...
— At War with Pontiac - The Totem of the Bear • Kirk Munroe and J. Finnemore
... attributes of a boy should be so much more fascinating than any mere girl. "There are two kinds of girl," he had heard an older officer once say. "There are girls, and then there is Katie Jones." He had condemned that as distinctly maudlin at the time, but recalled it to-night ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... straightforward notions of right and wrong worth, much maudlin unmerciful indulgence which we hear in these days: and yet not going to the bottom of the matter either, as we shall see in the next war. But, rambling on, he told me how he had come home, war-worn and crippled, to marry a wife and get ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... can deny the presence of a certain savage delight in scenes of grotesque and exaggerated terror. No one who has read "Les Miserables" can deny the existence in him of a vein of lovely tenderness that, with a little tiny push over the edge, would degenerate into maudlin sentiment of the most ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... disposed perhaps as himself, to stand "shrieking out" over the military severities of this campaign, but if we could bring ourselves to believe that Mr Carlyle is really serious in what he writes, we should say that the most impracticable maudlin of peace societies, or "Rousseau-sentimentalism," were wisdom itself compared to his own outrageous and fanatical strain. If the apologist of Cromwell will be content to rest his case on the plain ground open to all generals and captains on whom has devolved the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... he pipes; "see Santa Claus!" And they clap their hands in glee. The woman at the table wakes out of her stupor, gazes around her, and bursts into a fit of maudlin weeping. ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... you about Tom Pinch. He is a despicable kind of character; just the kind of character Dickens liked, because he had himself a thick streak of maudlin sentimentality of the kind that, as somebody phrased it, "made him wallow naked in the pathetic." It always interests me about Dickens to think how much first-class work he did and how almost all of it was mixed up with every kind of cheap, second-rate matter. I am very ...
— Letters to His Children • Theodore Roosevelt
... preponderating role played by American capitalism in the war. In an article which adopts as title that of Norman Angell's book The Great Illusion, Reed declares that the pretence of fighting kings is maudlin, and that Money is the true king. Putting his finger on the sore spot, he adduces figures showing the colossal profits made by the great American companies. Under the bizarre title The Myth of American Fatness,[27] ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... put out all Papists in office And a deal of do of which I am weary But do it with mighty vanity and talking Feared she hath from some [one] or other of a present Fell a-crying for joy, being all maudlin and kissing one another Found to be with child, do never stir out of their beds Had his hand cut off, and was hanged presently! Hates to have any body mention what he had done the day before House of ...
— Widger's Quotations from The Diary of Samuel Pepys • David Widger
... in thy threadbare Farce shall Beauties show, Shall praise thy ribald Mirth, and maudlin Woe; Praise ev'n thy imitating Chaucer's Tales, And call that merry [1] Temple, Fame's Versailles: Thy [2] Shepherd-Song with Rapture they shall see, Which rivals Philips, as Banks rivals Lee; Thy [3] Guernsey ...
— Two Poems Against Pope - One Epistle to Mr. A. Pope and the Blatant Beast • Leonard Welsted
... nobility to him who has the nobility to understand the dream that raised it, he burlesqued its ideals. Cruel, corrupt, lazy, and sloven of soul, he found there what he knew best because it was his own. Aping a sympathy he could not feel, he grew maudlin: ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... nation's failing more evident than in the attitude toward women. It had always been maudlin; and now, long content to use their advantages in small ways, women would become a serious menace to the country generally. He had admitted their economic value—they filled every possible place in the large establishment ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... to give of his meeting with Dick Hardman down at Yellow Mine. The young scion of the would-be dictator of Marco fortunes had been drunk enough to rave about what he would do to Panhandle Smith. Some of his maudlin threats, as related by Brown, caused a good deal of merriment in camp, except to Blinky, who grew ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... sort," I denied testily. "Because a man reaches the age of thirty without making maudlin love ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... toward the lower animals. Many a wholesome feeling can be pushed so far that it becomes a weakness and a sign of disease. Pity for the sufferings of our brute neighbors may be a manly feeling; and then again it may be so fostered and cosseted that it becomes maudlin and unworthy. When hospitals are founded for sick or homeless cats and dogs, when all forms of vivisection are cried down, when the animals are humanized and books are written to show that the wild creatures ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... Mildenham, followed them even to Scotland, where Winton had carried her off. But she had not weakened in her resolution a second time, and suddenly he had given up pursuit, and gone abroad. Since then—nothing had come from him, save a few wild or maudlin letters, written evidently during drinking-bouts. Even they had ceased, and for four months she had heard no word. He had "got over" her, it seemed, wherever he was—Russia, Sweden—who ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... too drunk to notice much." Bob flushed. "You introduced her to the fastest people in New York, then left her entirely to her own resources while you went away and made an ass of yourself. Well, something must have happened to alarm her, and, since you were too maudlin to be of any assistance, she evidently took the bit in her teeth. I can't blame her. For Heaven's sake, why did you set her in with THAT crowd? If you wanted to take her slumming, why didn't you hire a guide and go into the ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... eighteen to eighty, some in tatters, and some clutching babes in their arms, drinking the heavy English ales and whiskies served to them by women. In the whole scene, not one ray of brightness, not one flash of gaiety, only maudlin joviality or grim despair. And I have thought, if some men and women will drink—and it is certain that some will—is it not better that they do so under the open sky, in the fresh air, than huddled together in some close, smoky room? There is a sort of frankness about ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... In maudlin spite let Thracians fight Above their bowls of liquor; But such as we, when on a spree, Should never brawl ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... to be sent to Dr Rider's; and could guess the curious questions and large answers which had followed. He sprang to the ground with a painful suppressed indignation, intensified by many mingled feelings, and waited the arrival of the maudlin wanderer. Ah me! one might have had some consolation in the burden freely undertaken for love's sake, and by love's self shared and lightened: but this load of disgrace and ruin which nobody could take part of—which it was ...
— The Doctor's Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... respect leading to repose or lofty contemplation, or to submission to the evils of life, which it catalogues with amazing detail; a book not even conducive to innocent entertainment. It is the revelation of the inner life of a sensualist, an egotist, and a hypocrite, with a maudlin although genuine admiration for Nature and virtue and friendship and love. And the book reveals one of the most miserable and dissatisfied men that ever walked the earth, seeking peace in solitude and virtue, ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... enjoy myself, and moon about, and bore you to death with old stories about the chimes at midnight—everybody would be a dear old boy or a good old soul, and I should hand out tips, and get perfectly maudlin in the evenings over a glass of claret. That's the normal thing, no doubt—that's what a noble-minded man in a ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... a trace of impatience, for Grenfell's half-maudlin observations occasionally jarred on him; but the latter still looked at him with a ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... yearned towards him. He talked about love and sentiment in a manner which made me recollect that I was in love myself; and you know that when a man is in that condition, his taste is not very refined, any maudlin trash of prose or verse appearing sublime to him, provided it correspond, in some degree, ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... Mr. Larkyns, "we'll go to Charley Symonds' and get our hacks. You can meet us, Harry, just over the Maudlin Bridge; and we'll have a canter ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... f'r that!" Pete exclaimed in maudlin gratitude. He swung widely toward the door, and by a miracle found it. "G'night, Mish'r Duncan. I feel s' good 'bout thish I'm goin' try goin' home 'nd ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... heart was not of human decency bereft, Peter paid the undertaker. He got drunk on what was left; Then he shed some tears, half-maudlin, on the grave where lay the Co., And he drifted to a township where the city failures go. Where, though haunted by the man he was, the wreck he yet might be, Or the man he might have been, or by each spectre ...
— In the Days When the World Was Wide and Other Verses • Henry Lawson
... time wine and friendship had brought poor Dick to a perfectly maudlin state, and he hiccuped out the last line with a tenderness that set one ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mood, angry with himself for entertaining it. It was maudlin. After all Chabrillane and La Motte-Royau were quite exceptional swordsmen, but neither of them really approached his own formidable calibre. Reaction began to flow, as he drove out through country lanes flooded with pleasant September sunshine. His spirits rose. A ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... my duty. I do not mince words. I do not pretend to. I say that Comrade Gregory is unfit to be Thursday for all his amiable qualities. He is unfit to be Thursday because of his amiable qualities. We do not want the Supreme Council of Anarchy infected with a maudlin mercy (hear, hear). This is no time for ceremonial politeness, neither is it a time for ceremonial modesty. I set myself against Comrade Gregory as I would set myself against all the Governments of Europe, because the anarchist who ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... him, as soon as she had driven her husband away, no doubt to complain of her ill-treatment, to air her woes. The fellow had philandered round her some time, and had shown an insolent and interfering temper once or twice towards himself. Yes!—he could imagine it all!—her flight, and Tanner's maudlin sympathy—tears—caresses—the natural sequel. And then her pose of complete innocence at the divorce proceedings—the Judge's remarks. Revolting hypocrisy! If Tanner had been still alive, he would somehow have exposed him—somehow have made him pay. Lucky for him he was drowned in that boat ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I survive the biscuits. But, seriously, Ned, I'm in earnest. No, I don't think I'm going to die—yet awhile. But I ran across young Bixby last night—got him home, in fact. Delivered him to his white-faced little wife. Talk about your maudlin idiots!" ...
— Oh, Money! Money! • Eleanor Hodgman Porter
... maudlin," she said, "you are getting romantic, too. You are reading too many sensational novels and ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... the guise of sociability, false pride, or moral cowardice, tempted Horace B—, and he yielded. Like tinder touched by flame, he blazed into drunkenness, and again and again the proud-spirited, manly, and cultured young lawyer and jurist was seen staggering along the streets, maudlin or mad with alcohol. When he had slept off his madness, his humiliation was intense, and he walked the streets with pallid face and downcast eyes. The coarser-grained men with whom he was thrown in contact had no conception of the mental tortures he suffered, ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... draughts of maddening wine are calculated to inspire; he laughs the world away, and bids it pass. The poor dupe, without his periwig, in the back-ground, forms a good contrast of character: he is maudlin drunk, and sadly sick. To keep up the spirit of unity throughout the society, and not leave the poor African girl entirely neglected, she is making signs to her friend the porter, who perceives, and slightly returns, her love-inspiring ...
— The Works of William Hogarth: In a Series of Engravings - With Descriptions, and a Comment on Their Moral Tendency • John Trusler
... Seeders she despised utterly; she had but taken his kiss as that of a pioneer and prophetic prince who might have set the clocks going and the pages to running in fairyland. But the kiss had been maudlin and unmeant; the court had not stirred at the false alarm; she must forevermore remain the ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... of them, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, under the leadership of the Czar, Alexander I, in the autumn of 1815, had entered into a Holy Alliance to sustain by reciprocal service the autocratic principle in government. Although the effusive, almost maudlin, language of the treaty did not express their purpose explicitly, the Alliance was later regarded as a mere union of monarchs to prevent the rise ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... as Peter Pupkin stood, revolver in hand, in the office of the bank, he had forgotten all about the maudlin purpose of his first coming. He had forgotten for the moment all about heroes and love affairs, and his whole mind was focussed, sharp and alert, with the intensity of the night-time, on the sounds that he heard in the vault and on the ...
— Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town • Stephen Leacock
... day who tell you how Mendelssohn or Wagner flattered them or accepted hints from them. Cummings' life is scarcely even a sketch; at most it is a thumbnail sketch. Only ninety-five pages deal with Purcell, and of these at least ninety-four are defaced by maudlin sentimentality, or unhappy attempts at criticism (see the remarks on the Cecilia Ode) or laughable sequences of disconnected incongruities—as, for instance, when Mr. Cummings remarks that "Queen Mary died of small-pox, and the memory of her goodness was felt so universally," etc. Born in ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... wholly dissimilar but much later article on Shelley's Life. He is rather unduly severe on the single letter of Keats which he quotes; but that was his way, and it is after all only a justifiable rhetorical reculade, with the intent to leap upon the maudlin defenders of the poet as a sort of hero of M. Feydeau, and rend them. The improvement of the mere fashion, as compared with the fantasticalities of the Friendship's Garland period, is simply enormous. And the praise which follows is praise ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... his old ambitions wake from their trance and come to gaze on him reproachfully; he sees that fortune (and mayhap fame) have passed him by, and all through his own fault; he may whine about imaginary wrongs during the day when he is maudlin, but the night fairly throttles him if he attempts to turn away from the stark truth, and he remains pinned face to face with his beautiful, dead self. Then, with a start, he remembers that he has no friends. When he crawls out in the morning to steady his hand he will be greeted with filthy ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... sip, When on smooth petals he would slip, Or over tangled stamens trip, And headlong in the pollen roll'd, Crawl out quite dusted o'er with gold; Or else his heavy feet would stumble Against some bud, and down he'd tumble Amongst the grass; there lie and grumble In low, soft bass—poor maudlin bumble! ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... thought, while the quietest sleeper of the three betrayed his presence by laughing once with the low-toned merriment she recognized as Moor's. These discoveries left her a prey to visions of grimy strollers, maudlin farm-servants, and infectious emigrants in dismal array. A strong desire to cry out possessed her for a moment, but was checked; for with all her sensitiveness Sylvia had much common sense, and that spirit which hates to be conquered ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... at a cost terrible enough, had reached Mrs. Tregenza after all. She had been drinking brown sherry as well as tea, and was in a condition of renewed tears approaching to maudlin, when the announcement reached her. It steadied the woman. Then the thought that this wealth would have been her son's made her weep again, until the fact that it was now her own became grasped in her mind. ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... neighborhood, a mournful sense of distress at the scene exhibited, and sufficiently hinted in the few unpleasant words we have italicized. A muster of Englishmen preferred coughing down their favorite bard, to allowing him to mouth out maudlin twaddle, before the Prince, then first formally introduced to the public, and before a meeting whereat "was collected much of the prominent talent of the kingdom." Mr. Irving, himself most deservedly a man of mark, looked on with much, surprise. Looking on ourselves ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... it. He said you told him to carry them up, and that up they must go, if he had to break down the front door to do it. I think he must have been drinking, Tom, he used such awful language, and at last he got quite maudlin about it and sat down on one of the trunks and cried, actually cried! He said that for years and years he had refused to carry trunks upstairs, and that now, just when he had joined the Salvation Army, and was trying to lead a better ...
— The Cheerful Smugglers • Ellis Parker Butler
... ladies had succeeded at length in collecting and carrying off such among the hiccupping husbands, and maudlin sons, who were able to move, Sir Thomas re-entering the hall, after speeding the last departing chariot, and prudently leaning upon his tall son—for though he had a seasoned head the night's potations had been deep and fiery—was startled well-nigh into soberness, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... to be peculiar to Ratzeburg,) represents the mother as 'weeping aloud for joy'—the old idiot of a father with 'tears running down his face,' &c. &c., and all for what? For a snuff-box, a pencil-case, or some article of jewellery. Now, we English agree with Kant on such maudlin display of stage sentimentality, and are prone to suspect that papa's tears are the product of rum-punch. Tenderness let us have by all means, and the deepest you can imagine, but upon proportionate occasions, and with causes fitted to justify it and sustain its dignity.] In all ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... am your superior in force of mind and force of body. Don't you like to hear that? Doesn't it do you good—when you think of the maudlin humbug generally talked by men to women? We can't afford to disguise that truth. All the same, we are friends, because each has the other's interest at heart, and each would be ashamed ...
— In the Year of Jubilee • George Gissing
... list!" commanded Madden brusquely, with ill-concealed disgust that Smith should be maudlin ...
— The Cruise of the Dry Dock • T. S. Stribling
... much, or how little, your friend means to you, until you have been with her on a cold railway station for hours, when fate has done its best to make you both lose your tempers and your luggage. Only a very real love can survive smiling through that period when, from almost maudlin appreciation, a husband gradually sinks into the commonplace mood of taking his soul's mate "for granted." Only real friendship can live through the disillusionment of irritable temper, lack of imagination, ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... ambassador to the Court of St. James. And once a bottle of Cte Rtie or Scharlachberger is in her, even the least emotional woman shows the same complex of sentimentalities that a man shows, and is as maudlin and idiotic ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... chiefly about a wife he was returning to at Bohn. He became almost maudlin in his sentiment, and at intervals he raised his voice sufficiently to allow our traveling companions to overhear ...
— The Master Detective - Being Some Further Investigations of Christopher Quarles • Percy James Brebner
... me that he'd not have done it, except that she begged him with her last breath to promise it. He said the words with great maudlin tears raining down his face, when ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... be a fortnight, being Saint Maudlin's Day, at ten o' the clock in the forenoon. Will hath passed word to me to get me in, and two other with me. You'll come, my mistresses? There'll not be room for ...
— The White Lady of Hazelwood - A Tale of the Fourteenth Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... have bitten off his tongue. Now she would think him a maudlin flirt. He looked to the ground and saw his dusty, worn shoes. He was afraid to hear her speak, afraid to look up. At last he did, expecting to find her gone. But she was there, looking at him as she had when he told her she was beautiful, ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... at least a minor chord of sentiment, but are usually free from the sentimentality which mars some of Harte's sketches. He is not ashamed to employ pathos, but his tragic situations are rarely overstrained and maudlin. He has all the tenderness of Dickens; his Christmas Eve at Topmast Tickle may well be compared with A Christmas Carol. Norman Duncan never married, but few Canadian or American authors have understood women as did the creator ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... condemn in unmeasured terms "the dangerous tendency of crying out to the Government for aid" in the way of labor legislation. Without a quiver, a member of the capitalist group will run tens of thousands of pitiful child-laborers through his life-destroying cotton factories, and weep maudlin and constitutional tears over one scab hit in the back with a brick. He will drive a "compulsory" free contract with an unorganized laborer on the basis of a starvation wage, saying, "Take it or leave it," knowing that to leave it means to die of hunger, and in the next breath, ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... little—by the time that old Quirk had reached his office in the morning, the heated iron had cooled. If his heart had retained any of the maudlin softness of the preceding evening, the following pathetic letter from Titmouse might have made a very deep impression upon it, and fixed him, in the benevolent and disinterested mind of the old lawyer, as indeed his "poor neighbor." The following is an exact copy of that lucid and eloquent ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren
... but not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... tactics, he turned his back on the snuggery and surveyed the offended woman, with just a touch of maudlin sentiment. ...
— The House of the Whispering Pines • Anna Katharine Green
... Mr. Taper, getting a little maudlin; 'I often think, if the time should ever come, when you and I should be joint ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... The sympathy of the writer is wholly with the child, and the child's absolute indifference to his own sufferings. It might have been safely predicted that this man, should he ever attain to pathos, would be free from the facile, maudlin pathos of ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson • Walter Raleigh
... drawing a letter from his pocket with a maudlin leer, and holding it up before his comrade, who frowned at it, and then shook his head—as well he might, for, besides being very illegibly written, the letter was presented to him ...
— The Lively Poll - A Tale of the North Sea • R.M. Ballantyne
... like to dine on becaficas, To see the Sun set, sure he'll rise to-morrow, Not through a misty morning twinkling weak as A drunken man's dead eye in maudlin sorrow, But with all Heaven t'himself; the day will break as Beauteous as cloudless, nor be forced to borrow That sort of farthing candlelight which glimmers Where reeking London's smoky ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... irregularly, his breath coming in jerky little snorts. "Oh," she wailed in her guilt heart, "he is, he is! Poor dear old Joey, drunk! And it's all, all my fault!" Swiftly she undressed in the dark. If he were to awaken, to begin saying awful maudlin things—- ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... book, &c. Mr. Addison sent for the young Earl of Warwick, as he was dying, to show him in what peace a Christian could die; unluckily he died of brandy: nothing makes a Christian die in peace like being maudlin! but don't say this in Gath where you are." Suppose the editor introduced it with this preface: "One circumstance is mentioned by Horace Walpole, which, if true, was indeed flagitious. Walpole informs ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... 17th day of February, 1908, Beach, still maudlin drunk, went again into his father's store. He didn't look at the guns in the racks this time. He glanced toward the wareroom where the black coffins stood in a row on wooden horses. "I'm looking for the old man," he muttered to a clerk. ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... fearfully postponed a meeting between the two? He remembered suddenly that she had once drawn Molly behind the trees when the old man passed along the road. Poor, defrauded Molly! Forgetting his bitter quarrel with her, he was ready to fall upon her neck in maudlin sympathy. ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... turn from a broken and dingy fragment of a beer-schooner. They were very dirty; their hair had fallen over their eyes, which were bloodshot; the expression of their faces was imbecile. As the phaeton passed, they hailed its occupants in thick voices, shouting against the wind maudlin invitations to drink. ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White
... the car who listened to him that years ago he had quarrelled with his parents in Johnstown and had not seen them since. He was on the way now to see if anything was left of them. One moment he was in maudlin tears and the next he was cracking some miserable joke about the disaster. He went about the car shaking dice with other inebriated passengers, and in the course of half an hour had won $6. Over this he exhibited almost the glee of a maniac, and the fate of his people was lost sight ...
— The Johnstown Horror • James Herbert Walker |
