"Tragedy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Saladin, or like the French of the revolutionary wars making the Pope Pius of those days answerable for the wrongs of Vercingetorix. The thing sounds like comedy, almost like conscious comedy. But it is a kind of comedy which may become tragedy, if the idea from which it springs get so deeply rooted in men's minds as to lead to any practical consequences. As long as talk of this kind does not get beyond the world of hot-headed students, it may pass for a craze. It would be ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... birth carry a sort of canopy over you as you hoed. And there might be a person at each end of the row with some cool and refreshing drink. Agriculture is still in a very barbarous stage. I hope to live yet to see the day when I can do my gardening, as tragedy is done, to slow and soothing music, and attended by some of the comforts I have named. These things come so forcibly into my mind sometimes as I work, that perhaps, when a wandering breeze lifts my straw hat or a bird lights on a near currant-bush and shakes out a full-throated summer song, ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... true in its proportions, than when she had been a girl. Her hair, trained into smooth obedience, was fastened within the muslin cap she had fashioned for herself, tied Quaker fashion under her chin. Her face was very white, as if, having blanched with terror in the tragedy of Haun's Mill, the life-blood had not as yet returned ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... and with a check apron over her patched gown. The sailor boy, who was her sole earthly stay, was washed overboard in a late tempest. This couple from the palace and the almshouse are but the types of thousands more who represent the dark tragedy of life and seldom quarrel for the upper parts. Grief is such a leveller, with its own dignity and its own humility, that the noble and the peasant, the beggar and the monarch, will waive their pretensions to external rank without the officiousness ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... power. Hence, there are good landscape and portrait painters among women, but as long as women have painted there has not been any great woman-painter of history. They make poems, romances, and sonnets, but not one of them has written a good tragedy.'' This expression shows that the imaginative power of woman is really more reproductive than productive, and it may be so observed in crimes and in the testimony ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... in extracting information. But then it is doubtful if, under such circumstances, his purpose would have been so strong, so absolutely invincible as Scipio's. As it was, with single-minded simplicity, Scipio saw no reason for subterfuge, he saw no reason for disguising the tragedy which had befallen him. And so he shed his story broadcast amongst the settlers of the district until, by means of that wonderful prairie telegraphy, which needs no instruments to operate, it flew before him in every direction, either belittled or ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum
... of those shallow natures to which the tragedy of life is impossible. He was disappointed—angry at the turn which affairs had taken; but he was not reduced to despair. To take things easily had been his complete code of morals and philosophy from ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... same hour, the Faubourg was still shuddering at the tragedy which had just stained the Aire Saint-Mittre with blood. The return of the troops, after the carnage on the Nores plain, had been marked by the most cruel reprisals. Men were beaten to death behind bits of wall, with the butt-ends of muskets, others had their ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... all manner of trivialities. From Piedmont to the confine of Dalmatia he knew every little master that ever made or marred panel or plaster, and he paid the penalty of such knowledge. Surmising the tragedy of his career and its essential nobility I had discounted the ugly rumours connecting him with the sale of the Del Puente Giorgione. When every fool learned that the Giorgione at "The Curlews" was false, many inferred that Anitchkoff, having praised it, must have a hand in Brooks's bad ...
— The Collectors • Frank Jewett Mather
... consummate tragedy of Benedict Arnold's career than the Battle Monument which rises on the banks of the Hudson to commemorate the victory of Saratoga. In the square shaft are four high Gothic arches, and in these are placed heroic statues of the generals who won the victory. Horatio Gates, unworthy ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 (of 5) • John Marshall
... Turkish sacrifices to conquer it, worthy of several Serbian kings who gave their lives defending it. It was a rich and beautiful spot on this earth. It was the centre of the Serbian mediaeval state and power, the very heart of the Serbian glory from the time when the Serbs became Christians till the tragedy of Kossovo, and after this tragedy till the death of King Marko of Prilep in the beginning of the fifteenth century. Even during the time of slavery under the Turks, Macedonia was the source of all the spiritual and moral inspirations and supports of the enslaved nation. It happened only accidentally ...
— Serbia in Light and Darkness - With Preface by the Archbishop of Canterbury, (1916) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... and he saw that she was smiling faintly. Her face bore no trace of the tragic truth she had uttered. But the tragedy was plain enough to him, even without her passionless words of revolt. The situation of this young, educated girl, aglow with youth, bettered, body and mind, to the squalor of Clinch's dump, was perfectly ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... alive, throwing his body limb by limb into the fire, and his ashes into the air, that no trace or memory might remain of such an infamous, inhuman creature. One of his companions gave me an exact account of this tragedy, affirming that himself had escaped the same punishment with the greatest difficulty; he believed also that many of his comrades, who were taken in that encounter by those Indians, were, as their cruel captain, torn in pieces and burnt alive. Thus ends ...
— The Pirates of Panama • A. O. (Alexandre Olivier) Exquemelin
... the accusation in your own words. Hippolytus says in one passage in your tragedy of that name: 'O Zeus, why, in the name of heaven, didst thou place in the light of the sun that specious evil to men—women? For if thou didst will to propagate the race of mortals, there was no necessity for this to be done by women, but ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... conditions of life should be explained in our discourse. Therefore, it was not without reason that Socrates is reported, when Euripides was exhibiting his play called Orestes, to have repeated the first three verses of that tragedy— ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... over, and the plan did seem feasible. Then she looked at this man and realized that relationship with him meant possible motherhood for her again. The tragedy of giving birth to a child—ah, she could not go through that a second time, at least under the same conditions. She could not bring herself to tell him about Vesta, but she must ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... ever, tonight, he had a sense of witnessing Destiny stalking through those soft gardens, of Tragedy skulking about ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... M. H. began a tragedy on St. Winefred Oct. '79, for which he subsequently wrote the chorus, No. 36, above. He was at it again in 1881, and had mentioned the play in his letters, and when, some years later, I determined to ...
— Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins - Now First Published • Gerard Manley Hopkins
... altar here)—Ver. 727. It was usual to have altars on the stage; when Comedy was performed, one on the left hand in honor of Apollo, and on the representation of Tragedy, one on the right in honor of Bacchus. It has been suggested that Terence here alludes to the former of these. As, however, at Athens almost every house had its own altar in honor of Apollo Prostaterius just outside of the street door, it is most probable ...
— The Comedies of Terence - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Notes • Publius Terentius Afer, (AKA) Terence
... three actors in this tragedy of sin and sorrow and remorse; and the more we read these wonderful poems, and perceive the intense passion that throbs through them, the nearer we seem to get to the great heart of Shakespeare, the real inner life of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, April 1875, Vol. XV., No. 88 • Various
... dear, that is a different matter. That is the real tragedy of a woman's life.' In flooding reminiscent thought she forgot her remonstrating; her voice ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... he discoursed all the time about Giant Despair and Christian. He improvised, while playing ball, a sad tragedy, and among other things said, "I wept, and pitied myself." Now he has stopped playing, for the lambs have come to graze before the windows, and he is talking incessantly about having one for his own pet lamb. ...
— Memories of Hawthorne • Rose Hawthorne Lathrop
... the shot had been fired into a magazine of gunpowder. The Indians had come without arms, or there might have followed a bloody tragedy. As it was, they gathered their blankets about them, and, with threatening gestures and faces presaging a terrible revenge, silently stole ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... repertoire after all, for whether the piece be melodrama, farce, genteel comedy, or harrowing tragedy, it has to be played by ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... whole delicate texture of Ibsen's Doll's House was woven from a commonplace story of a woman who forged a cheque in order to redecorate her drawing-room. Stevenson's romance of Prince Otto (to take an example from fiction) grew out of a tragedy ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... of those cases where the art of the reasoner should be used rather for the sifting of details than for the acquiring of fresh evidence. The tragedy has been so uncommon, so complete and of such personal importance to so many people, that we are suffering from a plethora of surmise, conjecture, and hypothesis. The difficulty is to detach the framework of fact—of absolute undeniable ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... good manners* To telle you a tale, or two or three. And if you list to hearken hitherward, I will you say the life of Saint Edward; Or elles first tragedies I will tell, Of which I have an hundred in my cell. Tragedy *is to say* a certain story, *means* As olde bookes maken us memory, Of him that stood in great prosperity, And is y-fallen out of high degree In misery, and endeth wretchedly. And they be versified commonly Of six feet, which men call ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... in Comedy as he failed in Tragedy, but here the failure sprang from the very force and vigour of his mind. He flung himself like the men of his day into the reaction against Puritanism. His life was that of a libertine; and his marriage with a woman of fashion who was yet more dissolute than himself only gave ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... say curiosity, was aroused. There must be a whole story in those two shafts with their simple inscriptions, a life-drama or perhaps a tragedy. And who was more likely to know it than the postmaster of the quaint little old town. Just after the war, as if tired with its exertions to repel the invader, the old place had fallen asleep and ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... And now comes the tragedy. Miss Penn-Cushing's letter of thanks was icy. She feared I had been "a thought nepotic," and (with my permission) she would ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, June 2, 1920 • Various
... however, make but brief reference to this festive occasion, and proceed to tell of an event which created an unexpected sensation in our little community, and might have closed our New Year's Day amusements with a terrible tragedy. ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne
... been watching the cauldron, and filling his tin dipper at the freshwater pools, as he came to descend the black wall leading to the valley of rocks, he witnessed a little tragedy. ...
— A Maid of the Silver Sea • John Oxenham
... something on the horse in front of him; something which needed care, and stopped him from looking backward. In the whirling of my wits, I fancied first that this was Lorna; until the scene I had been through fell across hot brain and heart, like the drop at the close of a tragedy. Rushing there through crag and quag, at utmost speed of a maddened horse, I saw, as of another's fate, calmly (as on canvas laid), the brutal deed, the piteous ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... is Scott's only novel that deals with precisely contemporary life, and "St. Ronan's Well" is a kind of backwater; the story of a remote contemporary watering-place, of local squireens, and of a tragedy, mangled in deference to James Ballantyne. Scott did not often care to trust himself out of the last echoes of "the pipes that played for Charlie," and though his knowledge of contemporary life was infinitely wider than Stevenson's, we see many good reasons for his abstention from use of his ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Dodge, as they turned a corner. "You stay in the car, Bayliss. I can attend to this better." So Dodge was soon pouring a tale of woe and tragedy up through the night speaking tube into the astounded, half-suspicious ...
— The High School Boys' Fishing Trip • H. Irving Hancock
... it seemed to Anna, in looking back on the tragedy of it all, that he had never looked so handsome, never been so absolutely irresistible as on that autumn day when he had taken her hand and said: "I couldn't help making that run with your eyes ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... the house because he couldn't rest long in any one place, and yet he could never write at his best moving about. You know, Carrissima, it was really a tragedy. He took such pains—writing and re-writing, especially after he and I were left alone; but he knew he wasn't reaching his own standard. He never said a word, but of course I saw he was worrying himself to death. ...
— Enter Bridget • Thomas Cobb
... was fortunate. Murtha had had no family. There had been plenty of scandal about him, but as far as I knew there was no one except his old cronies in the organization to be shocked by his loss, no living tragedy left in the wake ...
— The Ear in the Wall • Arthur B. Reeve
... the fatal year 1574, when, "much against the minds of many of the Spaniards themselves, that cruel and bloody Inquisition was established for the first time in the Indies"; and how, from that moment, their lives were one long tragedy. ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... together by their misfortune, and forgetting to torment one another, talked, their heads close together, over the tragedy which had befallen. They were angry, outraged, seeing what their father had done as it affected themselves, and they did not spare him. Sometimes to them—the elder boy and girl—Mrs. Day felt constrained to ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... case of Fergusson is not one to pretend about. A more miserable tragedy the sun never shone upon, or (in consideration of our climate) I should rather say ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... this,—how full of untold story, of tragedy and laughter, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise! This is the Black Belt of Georgia. Dougherty County is the west end of the Black Belt, and men once called it the Egypt of the Confederacy. It is full of historic interest. First there ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois
... of the final acts of the tragedy we may pass quickly. Undismayed by the fall of the sanctuary and still hoping for divine intervention, John and Simon withdrew from the Temple to the upper city. Driven from this, they took refuge in the underground caverns and caves to be ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... corner, very white-faced, and staring with round eyes, for the tragedy had taken a turn that he did not intend or expect, shook himself and rubbed his ...
— The Ghost Kings • H. Rider Haggard
... tragedy befell her which could befall a woman. If her child lived, it lived the life of wretchedness and was an outcast also. The outcome of its existence was determined by the order of woman its mother chanced to be. If ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... rejects. So it seemed to me that a volume of sonnets would be something quite new. Victor Hugo has appropriated the old, Canalis writes lighter verse, Beranger has monopolized songs, Casimir Delavigne has taken tragedy, and ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... close of the great series of tragedies of blood and revenge, in which "The Spanish Tragedy" and "Hamlet" are landmarks, but before decadence can fairly be said to have set in. He, indeed, loads his scene with horrors almost past the point which modern taste can bear; but the intensity of his dramatic situations, and his superb power of flashing in a single line a light ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster
... great irrigation schemes of the far West, which have not only opened up new territory, but have called into evidence new combinations of the qualities most potent in human life,—love, sacrifice, heroism, devotion to duty, and tragedy and comedy as well. In his novels, "The Daughter of a Magnate" and "Whispering Smith," in such vivid and delightful short stories as "The Ghost at Point of Rocks," which appeared in Scribner's Magazine for August of 1907, Mr. Spearman has dramatized the pathos, the wit, the vast and ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... into excellent company! But I care not! I will on! All this seems as if it were but the prologue to the tragedy. But be it that, or be it what it will—I care nothing for myself; and I have little cause to care more for them. She never had any mercy on me; and least this last interview, when I was ...
— Anna St. Ives • Thomas Holcroft
... xv., p. 690, 695, Casaub. Welcker, 'Griechische Tragodien', abth. iii., s. 1078, conjectures that the verses of Theodectes, cited by Strabo, are taken from a list tragedy, which probably bore the title ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... common thought," was very nearly the destruction of his life. When at last he emerged from the anguish and confusion of her folly, her extravagance, her rage, her despair, and her devotion, he was left alone with endless memories of intermingled farce and tragedy, and an only son, who was an imbecile. But there was something else that he owed to Lady Caroline. While she whirled with Byron in a hectic frenzy of love and fashion, he had stayed at home in an indulgence bordering on ...
— Queen Victoria • Lytton Strachey
... the successor of Gallus, for a time displayed much moderation, he eventually relinquished this pacific course; and, instigated by his favourite Macrianus, an Egyptian soothsayer, began about A.D. 257 to repeat the bloody tragedy which, in the days of Decius, had filled the Empire with such terror and distress. At first the pastors were driven into banishment, and the disciples forbidden to meet for worship. But more stringent measures ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... The tragedy enacted that night and morning was so harsh, so virulent and so swift that it left the inmates of the Old Mill as though stunned. Instead of uniting them in a common emotion, it scattered them, giving each of them an ...
— The Frontier • Maurice LeBlanc
... thoroughfare, crowded with so many memories of hideous tragedy; by the side of the gloomy prison; past the debtors' door with its forbidding spiked wicket; past the gallows gate with its festoons of fetters; we walked in silence until we reached the entrance to ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... thoughtful at the least, but not curious. Very suspicious this last circumstance! A flash crossed my mind, but I could gain nothing, even with my most dexterous wiles, from the little Dacre, who is a most unmanageable heroine. However, with the good assistance of a person who in a French tragedy would figure as my confidante, and who is the sister of your Lachen, something was learnt from Monsieur le valet, to say nothing of the page. All agree; a countenance pale as death, orders given in a low voice of suppressed passion and sundry oaths. I ...
— The Young Duke • Benjamin Disraeli
... odd kind of tragedy," said Lord Braithwaite, with a scornful smile. "Come, my old friend, lay aside this ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... countenance perceived from the front, hardly from the middle of the house. Authors, therefore, substitute what is here called broad farce for genuine comedy; their jests are made intelligible by grimace, or by that sort of mechanical wit which can be seen; comedy is made up of trick, and tragedy of processions, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 486 - Vol. 17, No. 486., Saturday, April 23, 1831 • Various
... killed, had known tragedy and loss and heartache, but never before had she seen the crest of the distant Wall to dance upon the pale skyline so. Then she whirled into the house and her young voice pealed out a call—Billy, Conford, Bent—she drew them to her running through the deep house—to point to the ...
— Tharon of Lost Valley • Vingie E. Roe
... is the octopus, the devil-fish, of these waters, and there is, perhaps, no tragedy enacted here that equals that of one of these vampires slowly sucking the life out of a ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... enjoyed this peaceful episode, and looked on at the pretty play in which the young folk unconsciously imitated their elders, without adding the tragedy that is so apt to spoil the dramas acted on ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... moan of the Atlantic surges came sonorously. Jacky was restless and wakeful, but did not suffer, and liked to talk. Frances listened to him with a new-born power of sympathy, which she thought she must have caught from Corona. He told her all the tragedy of his short life, and how bad he felt, about Dad's taking to drink and Mammy's having ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... chateau stared at the burning bungalow, fascinated, petrified. Through the mind of each man ran the sudden, sharp dread that Chase had met death at the hands of his enemies, and yet their stunned sensibilities refused at once to grasp the full horror of the tragedy. ...
— The Man From Brodney's • George Barr McCutcheon
... fell purpose was working in my mind, but a certain high tragedy in my aspect warned him to silence; so he only dogged me around the corners of the house, eyed me askance from the wood-shed, and peeped through the crevices of the demented little barn. But his vigilance bore no fruit. I but walked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... Gay City. Yet that little slip of paper would, in a couple of hours, send them to Amiens, and a little later they would be at the front suffering Hell. Laboreur did a wonderful etching of an officer bidding farewell to his wife at the Gare du Nord. It gave the whole tragedy of the place—the blackness, smoke, smell and crush. There, any night during an air raid, one could not help thinking what would happen if the Boche got a bomb on the Gare, with its thousands of fighting men all jambed together under its glass roof in the semi-darkness. ...
— An Onlooker in France 1917-1919 • William Orpen
... Godwin replied, "but we are promised a wireless outfit before the season closes. Now, if you are ready," he added, turning to Ned, "we'll go back to the hut and make the examination suggested. I'm afraid there was a tragedy there last night." ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... peace is in the air, and we are praying with all our hearts that it may come. Nobody but those who have seen with their own eyes can know the unspeakable horrors of this war. It is not only those who are fighting at the front who have known the full tragedy, it is those also who are fighting at home the relentless foe of poverty, sickness, and desolation. If victory comes to Japan, half the glory must be for those silent heroic little women, who gave their all, then took up the man's burden and cheerfully ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... they knew, as they stood there, of the terrible tragedy—the cruelest ever enacted—those grim, silent walls of Whitestone Hall were soon to witness, in fulfillment of the strange prophecy. Hagar, the maid, had scarcely ceased speaking ere the door was flung violently ...
— Daisy Brooks - A Perilous Love • Laura Jean Libbey
... constantly reacted in these vast western solitudes, and the fate of the unfortunate traders would be unknown, until some day, perchance, a living skeleton, a famished being, covered with blood, dust, and mire, would arrive at one of the military posts on the borders, and relate an awful and bloody tragedy, from which he alone ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... get round the corner without betraying a little of himself, for Elspeth having borne up magnificently when he shook hands, screamed at the tragedy of his back and fell into the arms of Tod's wife, whereupon Tommy first tried to brazen it out and then kissed her in the presence of a score of witnesses, including Grizel, who stamped her foot, though what right had she to be so ...
— Sentimental Tommy - The Story of His Boyhood • J. M. Barrie
... bargains, examined with a critical eye and with the aid of a magnifying glass the fabrics brought in by the weavers, and in fact carried on his trade as though he had for ever been separated from the tragedy which befel him in ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... was alive, Raffles was laughing as though his vocal cords would snap—there was neither tragedy nor illusion in the apparition of Raffles. A life-size Jack-in-the-box, he had thrust his head through a lid within the lid, cut by himself between the two iron bands that ran round the chest like the straps of a portmanteau. He must have been busy at it when I found him ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... marriage was performed that day in spite of the tragedy," Carnacki told us. "It was the wisest thing to do considering the things that I cannot explain. Yes, I had the floor of that big cellar up, for I had a feeling I might find something there to give me some ...
— Carnacki, The Ghost Finder • William Hope Hodgson
... contrary, I am quite sure of them. I know that you have come hither to translate the Bible, the truth of which has been questioned so often, into reality. You intended to make of the chapter of Judith and Holofernes a tragedy of our times. But although you are as beautiful and seductive as Judith, I am no Holofernes, who allows himself to be ruled by his passion, and forgets the dictates of prudence in the arms of a woman. I never was the slave of my passions, madame, and it is ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... possible like the tragic Roman buskin; one end of the great toga is tied into a rough hood which covers the actor's head; a mask may be worn, but it is often difficult to speak through, and, if desired, the actor's face may be made up to represent a mask of Tragedy. ...
— Aria da Capo • Edna St. Vincent Millay
... face of this tragedy," added Colonel Broadcastle in a low voice, "I trust you will not forget the exigencies of the situation. It is for ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... of the farce amused her at first. It was soon to become interesting, exciting, terrible, even to the verge of tragedy. ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... part in the events upon which Shakespeare, five hundred years later, founded his famous tragedy ...
— Famous Men of The Middle Ages • John H. Haaren, LL.D. and A. B. Poland, Ph.D.
... had died, brooding over the emptiness of his great triumph. His son the Black Prince had died, cursing the falsity of Frenchmen. England also had gone through the great tragedy of the Black Death and her people, like those of France, had been driven to the point of rebellion—though with them this meant no more than that they felt ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... influenza, I should think; but no doubt the tragedy had a good deal to do with it. She went down to stay for a couple of months with an uncle in Dorsetshire, and got better. Then the family lost some money, through a solicitor's mismanagement—enough anyway to make a great deal of difference. The mother too broke down in health. Miss ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... twain while thus the fight Waxed sharp, hot, cruel, though renewed but late, The Soldan clomb up to the tower's height, And saw far off their strife and fell debate, As from some stage or theatre the knight Saw played the tragedy of human state, Saw death, blood, murder, woe and horror strange, And the great acts ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... still more terrifying. Somewhere at the back of the Garden, a piercing whistle cut the air—evidently a signal—and suddenly we found ourselves facing a ghastly tragedy, and were made to realise the resistless superiority of a small body of disciplined ...
— The Conquest of America - A Romance of Disaster and Victory • Cleveland Moffett
... page in American history with such comfort as we can wring from the fact that the modern exponents of the oldest anarchy have been at least once rebuked, and with the further satisfaction that the Homestead tragedy brought momentarily to the attention of the entire nation a practice which even at that time was a source of great alarm to many serious men. In the great strikes which occurred in the late eighties and early nineties there was a great deal of violence, and C. H. Salmons, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... and went down to speak to Emily, Jane's nice little maid. Emily is a good little thing, and she was obviously terribly, though not altogether unpleasantly, shocked and stirred (maids are) by the tragedy. ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... the barony of Warmley returned to the house of Merceron, and the portrait of the wicked lord came to hang once more in the dining-room. So the curtain falls on the comedy; and what happened afterwards behind the scenes, whether another comedy, or a tragedy, or a mixed half-and-half sort of entertainment, now grave, now gay, sometimes perhaps delightful, and again of tempered charm—why, as to all this, what reck the spectators who are crowding out of the theatre and home ...
— Comedies of Courtship • Anthony Hope
... For The Tragedy of Ida Noble the Baron tenders his grateful thanks to W. CLARK RUSSELL. It starts well, and the excitement is artistically sustained. At the close of every chapter Oliver, the reader, is perpetually "asking for more." A capital ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, March 25, 1893 • Various
... Corneille's "Polyeucte," with the "Hamlet." In the first an equal calamity befalls the good, but in their calamity they are blessed. The death of the martyr is the triumph of his creed. But when we have put down the English tragedy,—when Hamlet and Ophelia are confounded in death with Polonius and the fratricidal king, we see not what good end for humanity is achieved. The passages that fasten on our memory do not make us happier and holier: they suggest but terrible problems, to which ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... to her (and when Doctor Hentley had privily assured Billy that she was sound as a dollar), she herself took up the matter of the industrial tragedy that had taken place before her door. The militia had been called out immediately, Billy informed her, and was encamped then at the foot of Pine street on the waste ground next to the railroad yards. As for the ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... dare to look at her, even with this grim mingling of farce and tragedy which seemed to invest every scene of that sordid drama. Miss Eversleigh continued gravely: "The groom's name was Robert, but Jack might have been the name of one of his ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... for death's to-morrow, And crave fresh progress toward a higher goal! Appalled by Earth's long tragedy of sorrow, I humbly ask one favor for my soul, When this life's sun is set,— To ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... new place which we sometimes come suddenly upon, with a strange feeling that we have seen it before, though when we cannot tell; so Bessie impressed Grey as a part of the tragedy enacted in the old New England house many, many years ago, and covered up so long. He almost felt that she had been there with him and that now she was standing by the hidden grave and stretching her hand to him across it with an offer of help and sympathy. And so strong ...
— Bessie's Fortune - A Novel • Mary J. Holmes
... our 'squire); we are not yet come to the catastrophe; and pray God it may not turn out a tragedy instead of a farce. — The captain is one of those saturnine subjects, who have no idea of humour. — He never laughs in his own person; nor can he bear that other people should laugh at his expence. Besides, if the subject had been properly chosen, the joke was too severe ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... destruction of all her hopes for her brother distressed Arenta. Her own marriage had been a most unfortunate one, but its misfortunes had the importance of national tragedy. She had even plucked honour to herself from the bloody tumbril and guillotine. But Rem's matrimonial failure had not one redeeming quality; it was altogether a shameful and well-deserved retribution. And she had boasted to her friends ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... in drama. My opponent attempted to give an instance to the contrary, and replied that it was a well-known fact that in music, and consequently in opera, they could do nothing at all. I repelled the attack by reminding him that music was not included in dramatic art, which covered tragedy and comedy alone. This he knew very well. What he had done was to try to generalise my proposition, so that it would apply to all theatrical representations, and, consequently, to opera and then to music, in order to make certain of defeating me. Contrarily, we ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... you to go with me away from this court room and its minions of the law, away from the scene of this tragedy, to a distant, I wish I could say a happier day. The story I have to tell is of a lovely little girl, with sunny hair and laughing eyes, traveling with her parents, evidently people of wealth and refinement, upon a Mississippi steamboat. There is an explosion, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... which the scope of the poem extends itself to a wider survey of human existence and its meanings.[108] Two of the volumes are narrative poems, each tending to a tragic crisis; Red Cotton Night-Cap Country (1873) is a story entangled with questions relating to religion; The Inn Album (1875) is a tragedy of the passion of love. The volume of 1876, Pacchiarotto with other Poems, is the miscellaneous gathering of lyrical and narrative pieces which had come into being during a period of many years. Finally in La Saisiaz Browning, writing in his own person, records the experience ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... replied to this masonic sign, God knows; but the manager fortunately entered, to assure us that the audience had kindly consented not to pull down the house, but to listen to a five act tragedy instead, in which he had to perform the principal character. "So, then, don't wait supper, Amelie; but take care of Monsieur ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)
... dry. She could not weep. She could only crouch there and peer into the blackness of the gulf that lay at her feet.... Then the doorbell rang, and she started. Eyes wide with tragedy, she looked toward the door, for she knew that there stood Bonbright Foote, come ...
— Youth Challenges • Clarence B Kelland
... refinement which one sees in small tailors and watchmakers, in poor men of sedentary trades. Behind him a twisted group of winter trees stood up as gaunt and tattered as himself, but I do not think that the tragedy that he symbolized was a mere fancy from the spectral wood. There was a fixed look in his face which told that he was one of those who in keeping body and soul together have difficulties not only with the body, but ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... professor of Jena dispenses with both the hare and the curry, in serving up his pabulum to the "protamoebA|." The improvident pabulum "evolves" its own eaters, and then, spider-like, is eviscerated by them, as was Actaeon by his own hounds. As Life, therefore, begins in the tragedy of Mount CithA|ron, it is to be hoped it will end in the delights of ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... The remorseless tragedy on which this ballad is founded, took place upwards of a century ago. In the retired village of Romanby, near Northallerton, Yorkshire, there resided a desperate band of coiners, whose respectability and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... impulsions. The stage is set by life and the ages; the actor enters and the show begins. In the instance in question, the stage was set by our whole modern system of civilization. The war lords were the "Deus ex machina"—the show was a real one—a tragedy. ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... struggle against the German political present is the struggle against the past of modern nations, which are still vexed by the recollections of this past. For them it is instructive to see the ancien regime, which enacted its tragedy with them, playing its comedy as the German revenant. Its history was tragic so long as it was the pre-existing power of the world, and freedom, on the other hand, a personal invasion, in a word, so long as it believed and was obliged to believe in its justification. So long ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... The tragedy of "Strafford" is one of Mr. Browning's earliest compositions. It was once placed upon the stage by Mr. Macready, but it is no more of an acting play than all the other pieces of Mr. Browning, and is too political to be good reading. The characters seem to be merely reporting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... too, gathering up her books, and as she passed the teacher's platform she stopped and looked her full in the face. She said not a word, and the tragedy between the woman and the girl was played in silence, for the woman knew from the searching gaze of the girl and the black defiance in her eyes, as she stalked out of the room, that her own flush had betrayed her secret as plainly ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... over the course of organic evolution, we see the unfolding of a great drama, or tragedy, in which, for millions upon millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other millions upon millions ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... Idaho," she said, "you would soon hear the story of "King" Plummer and Sylvia. It is a tragedy of our West; that is, it began in a great tragedy, one of those tragedies of the plains and the mountains so numerous and so like each other that the historians forget to tell about them. Sylvia's mother was Mr. Grayson's eldest sister, much older than he. She and her husband ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... house in the Parc Monceau, so much was she possessed by the idea that this was a repetition of that dreadful day, when with Modeste, just as now, she went to meet an irreparable loss. She seemed to see before her her dead father— he looked like Fred, and now, as before, Marien had his part in the tragedy. Could he not have prevented the duel? Could he not have done something to prevent Fred from exposing himself? The wound might be no worse than it was said to be in the newspaper—but then a second meeting was to take place. No!—it ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... riven by the frequent storms that devastate these hills. In one place a most gruesome sight was met with. Under a small tree beside a tiny stream stood a three-legged cooking-pot, and round it lay three skeletons, with a scattering of shrapnel bullets to silently tell the story of the tragedy. Beside one body lay a Rifleman's haversack, an eloquent if speechless travesty on the fortunes of war, for undoubtedly they were the remains of Boers, over whose head a chance shrapnel must ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... fulfilling the laws of dramatic justice—that the farce should succeed the tragedy—our attention was at this moment called to a ludicrous incident. The Mexican trapper had ridden up, and halted beside the waggon; when all at once his eyes became fixed upon an object that lay near at hand upon the grass. ...
— The Wild Huntress - Love in the Wilderness • Mayne Reid
... and where so many hearts had been throbbing wildly between hope and fear, no living creature remained; nothing but a few feet of the shattered masts appearing now and then above the surging waves, was left to tell of the terrible tragedy that had ...
— The Coxswain's Bride - also, Jack Frost and Sons; and, A Double Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... numbed from his heavy sleep, now realized that some kind of tragedy had occurred, and guessed enough to believe that Allan was a victim. From his prostrate position, with one powerful leg he interrupted Gardiner's flight, and the next moment the two men were rolling on the floor in each other's arms. Harris was much the stronger man of the two, ...
— The Homesteaders - A Novel of the Canadian West • Robert J. C. Stead
... keenest when most recent. As he approached I saw he was more irritated and upset than at the moment of the accident. Above his pinched, cleanshaven chin his lips shot out with an angry twitch. The portfolio shook under his arm. He flung me a look full of tragedy and went ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... play must be original. It must consist of not less than three acts, and all manuscripts must be in the hands of the committee appointed by the president of the senior class on the Tuesday before the Easter vacation. The play may be comedy, drama, or tragedy, but it must be representative. The duties of the committee will be to receive the plays. As soon as they have been submitted they are to be turned over to three members of the Overton faculty, provided they are ...
— Grace Harlowe's Fourth Year at Overton College • Jessie Graham Flower
... them—let them not think that they were safe from the hoofs of this war-monster, just because they were three thousand miles away! Capitalism was a world phenomenon, and all the forces of parasitism and exploitation which had swept Europe into this tragedy were active here in America. The money-masters, the profit-seekers, would leap to take advantage of the collapse over the seas; there would be jealousies, disputes—let the audience understand, once for all, that if world-capitalism did not make this a world-war, it would be only because ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... and some of the tragedy can be found at London railway stations, and only the fact that members of the staff are well occupied prevents them from furnishing shelves of bookstalls with records of their observation. The classes ...
— Love at Paddington • W. Pett Ridge
... came near to giving the note of tragedy to the British community, and losing the number of her mess (to use a nautical, and therefore appropriate expression) by reason of a big willow tree, beneath whose shady boughs she had moored her floating ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... him to call again, she is sure to do the wrong thing. Then there are those wedding days, the proudest and happiest of a girl's life, when she slips her hand into the arm of the wrong man or otherwise gives herself away before she is given away. Tragedy lurks in such trifles. Don Stewart, who has suffered countless mortifications and heartbreaks from just such little things as these, determined that something shall be done to spare others ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... into words: "Ah! Oxford'll never be the same again in my time. Why, who's to teach 'em rowin'? When we do get undergrads again, who's to teach 'em? All the old ones gone, killed, wounded and that. No! Rowin'll never be the same again—not in my time." That was the tragedy of the war for him. Our universities will recover faster than he thinks, and resume the care of our particular "Kultur," and cap the products of our public schools with the Oxford accent and the ...
— Another Sheaf • John Galsworthy
... for her. And Ailsa rose and fled; but a moment later, seated at the side of the dying man, all thought of self vanished in the silent tragedy ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... killed—a wonder there were not more—and all hands were sorry for him; but tragedy and comedy so often bunk together, and men who adventure are more apt to dwell on the humorous than the tragic side of things. There was that about the code-books. The instructions to all ships are to get rid of the ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... destiny, they placed the pitfalls before his feet and closed his eyes that he might not see; they hid from him the way of escape. Allah Achbar! It was destiny. In no other way can be explained the madness which sped the victims of that tragedy to their ruin; for with the enemy at their very gates, the Muslims set up and displaced kings, plotted and counterplotted. Boabdil was twice deposed and twice regained the throne. Even when the Christian kingdoms had united to consume the remnant of Moorish ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... let me give my readers a piece of information. A screaming farce is ever so much more difficult to act than a tragedy of Shakespeare. Any—well, any duffer can act Brutus or Richard the Third or the Ghost of Banquo, but it is reserved only to a few to be able to do justice to the parts of Bartholomew Bumblebee or Miss Anastatia Acidrop. ...
— The Master of the Shell • Talbot Baines Reed
... of the committee had been extremely stormy. On the subject of a tragedy entitled, "The Death of Hercules," the classic party and the romantic party, whom the mayor had carefully balanced in the composition of his committee, had nearly approached the point of tearing each other's hair out. Twice Phellion ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... remedy: to err, to be mistaken, to be ignorant is to be human. How much better it is in marriage to be blind to a wife's shortcomings than to make away with oneself out of jealousy and to fill the world with tragedy! Adulation is virtue. There is no cordial devotion without a little adulation. It is the soul of eloquence, of medicine and poetry; it is the honey and the sweetness ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... city the governor issued a statement to the people of the state, reciting the events leading up to the recent tragedy, and, under date of June 29, ordered the enlistment of as many men as possible in the militia of Adams, Marquette, Pike, Brown, Schuyler, Morgan, Scott, Cass, Fulton, and McDonough counties, and the regiments of General Stapp's brigade, ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... a few hours' time I was considerably more so. In the contents-bill of a local news sheet I read the announcement of my own murder at the hands of some person unknown; on buying a copy of the paper for a detailed account of the tragedy, which at first had aroused in me a certain grim amusement, I found that the deed ascribed to a wandering Salvationist of doubtful antecedents, who had been seen lurking in the roadway near the scene of the crime. I was no longer ...
— Reginald in Russia and Other Sketches • Saki (H.H. Munro)
... The tragedy came on in this way: Sebastian Hurtado, one of Lara's principal officers, had brought with him his wife, Lucia Miranda, a Spanish lady of much beauty and purity of soul. During the frequent visits which Mangora, the cacique of the Timbuez, paid to the fort, he saw ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... of the son of an obscure East-Side plasterer was worth. On his return he tore up all that he had written, and substituted a curt paragraph, without character or color, which he turned in. He had gauged the value of the tragedy accurately, in the light of his study of ...
— Success - A Novel • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... melodrama would have ejaculated "Saved!" but I haven't a tragedy nose, and I gave only a stifled squeak, more like the swan-song of a dying frog than anything ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... from Lorraine to Poland, from Flanders to Nish, watching the failure of his troops before Nancy and Ypres, inditing grandiose proclamations to Europe, prophesying a peace which never comes. He is a figure worthy of Greek tragedy. The [Greek: hubris] which defied the gods has put him outside the homely consolations of mankind. He has devoted his people to the Dance of Death, and himself, like some new Orestes, can find no solace though he seek it wearily in the four corners ...
— Raemaekers' Cartoons - With Accompanying Notes by Well-known English Writers • Louis Raemaekers
... passion, the predominance of which in this tragedy a recent critic has not a little carpingly condemned, is entirely natural in such an untamed savage as Abdelazer, whilst history affords many a parallel ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. II • Aphra Behn
... was kept from Desmond. It was not till weeks after that he heard of the terrible tragedy. Then, with the horror and pity he felt, there was mingled a fear that Bulger had been among those who perished. The seaman, he knew, had taken a stout part in the defense of the fort; Mr. Merriman had not mentioned him as being among the prisoners; ...
— In Clive's Command - A Story of the Fight for India • Herbert Strang
... town was a season of shopping and of warm anticipations—and then came a sudden crash. Afterward it was hard to remember. For tragedy entered into these rooms, and it was not easy to look back and see them clearly as they had been. That first month became confused, the memories uneven; in some spots clear and vivid, ...
— His Second Wife • Ernest Poole
... for him in a car outside and in a few minutes they were at the scene of the tragedy. A curious little knot of spectators had gathered, looking with morbid interest at the place where the body had been found. There was a local policeman on duty and to him was deputed the ungracious task of warning his fellow villagers to keep their distance. The ground had already been ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace |
