"Lost cause" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there had crept into Clara's manner a polite calmness which I never liked to see. What was I going to do with these two after supper, when my cousin Flagg, with his mind undistracted by relays of cream toast, could give his entire attention to the Lost Cause? ...
— The Queen of Sheba & My Cousin the Colonel • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... was the leading character? Supposing, when the time came, he could not be found.... Into what a dismal fiasco the play would turn. All his interest would have been thrown away. His solicitors would have been investigating a lost cause. Forest would have been sent packing back to Rome ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... husband's, or brother's, or sweetheart's good standing in the home or society to assay to vote a Democratic ticket. Such a step on the part of a Negro man has in some instances broken up his home. The Spartan loyalty of the Southern white woman to the Confederacy and the Lost Cause was not more marked than is the fidelity of the Negro woman to that party which stood for universal freedom and the brotherhood of man, and whose triumphant legions so ignominiously crushed Freedom's sullen and vindictive foe. Although the Government provides ...
— Hanover; Or The Persecution of the Lowly - A Story of the Wilmington Massacre. • David Bryant Fulton
... the supreme moment—the act of sheer devotion that was to brand that simple soul through the ages as a noble martyr in, alas! a lost cause. Shading her eyes with her hand, she perceived a legion of the enemy encamped on the one island of which the lonely Gallic loch boasted. Her woman's wit had devised a plan. Flinging baps and haggis to the ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... he has invited it. I am a man in despair, the fugitive of a lost cause. That man holds the keys of escape. And, besides, between him and me there is a reckoning to ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini
... The defenders of a lost cause, if cause it was, scarcely ever knew what it was to draw a free breath. When they were not fighting, they were marching, often on bare feet, and of the two they did not know which they preferred. They were always hungry; ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... you are not so mad as to declare Jacobite now? It's a lost cause, boy. There's not a thing in it but noble hole-and-corner work and not a ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... birthday of the greatest citizen, and the noblest and the best, after Washington, that this land or any other has yet produced. The old wounds are healed, you and we are brothers again; you testify it by honoring two of us, once soldiers of the Lost Cause, and foes of your great and good leader—with the privilege of assisting here; and we testify it by laying our honest homage at the feet of Abraham Lincoln, and in forgetting that you of the North and we of the South were ever enemies, and remembering only that we are now ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... are a lost cause," he remarked cheerfully. "They were looking pretty good two or three weeks ago. This hot weather has dried them up. Next year we'll have water down here to the house. All these things ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... we follow a lost cause, and even though the gooseberry and the raisin and the apple be doomed, let us see it through with gallantry! The enemy has mobilized dreadful engines of war against us. Let us retort in kind. He has tanks in the field—let us retort with tankards. They tell me there is a warship ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... replied, with a repetition of her charming laugh, which rearoused in Willis's breast all the regrets of a lost cause. "They didn't intend ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... that once washed them. On an October day, the Surrey hills standing round about in shadowy distances, the silence of two centuries is scarcely broken by the rustle of leaves dropping on their own deep carpet, and the very spirit of a lost cause dwells here, slowly dying. The house stands backed by a steep wooded hill, beyond which corn-fields 'clothe the wold and meet the sky;' the mansion is a grey, two-storied parallelogram flanked by square towers of only slighter elevation; their projecting ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang
... reported in a lifetime. But their result can be stated in a phrase. The same brevity must apply to the campaigns, the stratagems, ballistics and tactics of Mrs. Budlong: numberless efforts at secession ended as a lost cause. ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes
... and Oxford is the home of one more lost cause. The gods (of the gallery) may be with the winners, but it is the losing side that still ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 10th, 1920 • Various
... God went on grinding. Thirty years later, when in the battle of Missionary Ridge the chivalry of Georgia went down before the army that represented justice and freedom and the authority of national law, the vanquished and retreating soldiers of a lost cause could not be accused of superstition if they remembered that the scene of their humiliating defeat had received its name from the martyrdom of Christian missionaries at the hands ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... here and there on the British Coast—until when finally defeated at "Culloden Moor," 1746, this wraith of the House of Stuart disappears—dying obscurely in Rome; and "Wha'll be King but Charlie," and "Over the Water to Charlie," linger only as the echo of a lost cause. ...
— The Evolution of an Empire • Mary Parmele
... gloried in details. My rugged war-lords were very real to me, and my adventures sounded many periods of history. I was a solitary caveman with an axe of stone; I was a Roman soldier of fortune; I was a Highland outlaw of the Rebellion. Always I fought for a lost cause, and always my sympathies were with the rebel. I feasted with Robin Hood on the King's venison; I fared forth with Dick Turpin on the gibbet-haunted heath; I followed Morgan, the Buccaneer, into strange and exotic lands of trial and treasure. It was a wonderful gift of ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... wrote poetry, like Pearse, under whom he was at school, but he was better known and his verse of a higher standard. He seems almost to have had an inkling of his future fate, and might also be said to have deliberately chosen the lost cause of his heart, for, in one of his earlier poems, entitled "The War Legacy," we find ...
— Six days of the Irish Republic - A Narrative and Critical Account of the Latest Phase of Irish Politics • Louis Redmond-Howard
... when the ship moved away. Her eyes searched through the throng for the slight figure of the girl who had abandoned a lost cause. ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... the faith he announces in the New Order coming on, for it is not so felt. The touch of pessimism invades the poem in many details, but here at its heart; for Arthur alone of all the heroes of epic in his own defeat drags down his cause. He is the hero of a lost cause, whose lance will never be raised again in mortal conflict to bring the kingdom of Christ on earth, nor its victory be declared except as the echo of a hope of some miraculous and merciful retrieval ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... a woman been made who could inspire such passion without returning it? He reminded himself that she was of a later, a gayer, lighter, less strenuous generation than his own. Thousands of men had waded blood for a principle and a lost cause in his day. In hers the gigantic republic stood up a menace to nations. The struggle for existence was over before she was born. Yet women seemed more in earnest now than ever before. He said to himself, "I have always picked out natures ...
— The Indian On The Trail - From "Mackinac And Lake Stories", 1899 • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... a good deal of thinking, the last few hours. I've been wondering if I'm a Lost Cause. And I've been wondering why women should want to put sugar in their claret. If it's made to be bitter, why not accept the bitterness, and let ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... melt like wax over heat, and the flags hung close together like a trophy of battle in a chapel. But still the gray men came. And now, in a storm of flame and smoke, they reached the foremost cannons of the Union line, and planted their flags. So much were they permitted for the glory of a lost cause. For a little, men killed one another with the butts of guns, with bayonets, and with stones, and then, as the overdrip of a wave broken upon an iron coast trickles back through the stones of the beach to the ocean, so all that was left of Pickett's ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... again to me that evening, and held a phantom levee behind the Marchioness of Heatherdale's shoulder. His 'ghaist' looked bonnie and rosy and confident, yet all the time the band was playing the requiem for his lost cause and ...
— Penelope's Progress - Being Such Extracts from the Commonplace Book of Penelope Hamilton As Relate to Her Experiences in Scotland • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... been wandering from Newfoundland to Boston and Quebec seeking aid, but a lost cause has few friends, and if La Tour turned pirate on Boston boats, he probably thought he was justified in paying off the score of Boston's bargain with Charnisay. Later he turned trader with the Indians from Hudson Bay, and found friends in Quebec. Word of his wrongs reached the French court. ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... But for his energetic and consistent representations the steps that were taken—all too late as they proved—never would have been taken at all, or deferred to such a date as to let the public see by the event that there was no use in throwing away money and precious lives on a lost cause. ...
— The Life of Gordon, Volume II • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... principles, whom moderation, or love of literature, rendered superior to the suggestions of party rancour; or, as he himself has expressed it in the Dedication of "Amphitryon," who, though of a contrary opinion themselves, blamed him not for adhering to a lost cause, and judging for himself what he could not chuse but judge. Philip Sidney, the third earl of Leicester, had taken an active part against the king in the civil wars, had been named one of his judges, though he never look his seat among the regicides, and ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... Jose thoughtfully. "He'll spend the last drop of blood in his body to keep this country for Spain. He's Loyalist and Royalist to the core. It's a pity, too, because he is fighting for a lost cause." ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... through Danish, Norman, Tudor, Stuart, and Cromwellian assault, to the larger imperialism of the nineteenth century, when, as Thierry, the historian of the Norman Conquest, tells us, it still remained the one "lost cause" of history that refused to admit defeat. "This indomitable persistency, this faculty of preserving through centuries of misery the remembrance of lost liberty and of never despairing of a cause ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... and made many widows and orphans; all the land was in terror for the harm thus wrought upon them. The knights who came thither saw the folk as they fled with all their goods and their foodstuff, they deemed theirs was a lost cause. They met many folk, men women and children who would flee the land; they drave their cattle before them and were laden with their goods; some were ahorse, some afoot, 'twas the best they might do ...
— The Romance of Morien • Jessie L. Weston
... away with dark frowns or care-knit foreheads. Out in the Forum bands of young "Optimates" were shouting for Pompeius, and cursing Caesar and his followers. Drusus, following Antonius, felt that he was the adherent of a lost cause, the member of a routed army that was defending its last stronghold, which overwhelming numbers must take, be the defence never so valiant. And when very late he lay down on his bed that night, the howls of the fashionable mob were ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... stern issue in a concrete form, and at last the complete unification of a community—whether for better or for worse is no matter—was hammered by iron and cemented in blood. It is there now; an established fact. Secession is a lost cause; and, whether for good or for ill, the United States exists, and will continue to exist, a unified World Power. Sovereignty now rests at Washington, and neither in Columbia for South Carolina nor in Boston for Massachusetts. The State exists ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... prepare my accounts for the auditor, he proved conclusively from the vouchers (which I was careful to preserve) that the Confederate Government owed me L1,000; but I never applied for the "little balance" and now it is buried with the "lost cause." ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... no matter how widely the Western American may differ from his friend in the East, or how keenly the ex-Confederate may feel over the "lost cause," the warm-blooded son of Kentucky will fight as bravely under the flag of the republic as will his frozen-featured brother from Minnesota, and the dreamy individual who gazes poetically upon the placid waters of Puget Sound will shout as loudly ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various
... the Seine, wrought havoc in his character and his work, and gives us the sole criterion for the rest of his days. Yet, despite his devotion to Paris, home-sickness, yearning for Germany, was henceforth the dominant note of his works. At that time Heine considered Judaism "a long lost cause." Of the God of Judaism, the philosophical demonstrations of Hegel and his disciples had robbed him; his knowledge of doctrinal Judaism was a minimum; and his keen race-feeling, his historical instinct, was forced into the background by other sympathies and antipathies. He was ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... evolutionists are clinging to the radio-activity theory desperately, an S.O.S. of a lost cause, depending, like evolution, on a great many assumptions, and unproven hypotheses. The assumption is that a radio-active substance, like uranium, "decays," or passes into many other substances, of which radium is one, finally producing lead in 1,000,000,000 ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... of artillery thundered its arrival, and reverberated it far across the distant hills and valleys of Virginia, awakening echoes which have been hushed since Lee manfully gave up the struggle of the "lost cause" at Appomattox. Winding along the indicated route toward the grounds of Washington College, the procession slowly moved past the Institute, and when the war-horse and hearse of the dead chieftain ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... removed to the Abbaye, which was the old Benedictine monastery of St. Germain, in hackney coaches; twenty-two of them were priests. Lewis XVI. had fallen because he refused to proscribe the refractory clergy who were accused of spreading discontent. Beyond all men they were identified with the lost cause, and it had been decided that they should be banished. They were imprisoned in large numbers, as a first step towards their expulsion. That group, escorted by Marseilles from the Mairie to the Abbaye, ...
— Lectures on the French Revolution • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... erected; and many others doubtless will be erected in them hereafter. Some of them are in secluded situations, where for many mites the population is sparse, and the few people that live near them cherish tenderer recollections of the "Lost Cause" than of that which finally won. But such of them as are contiguous to cities are places of interest to more or less of the neighboring population; and, in some of them, there are commemorative services ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. II, No. 1, October, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... from a gun if he really wanted me," said Ruth. "No, the only way I can bring Ronicky is to surround myself with new dangers, terrible dangers, make myself a lost cause again. Then Ronicky would come laughing and singing, eager as ever. Oh, I ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... glad life poured out in patriotic pride into that fatal struggle, in all the valor and endurance of that dark conflict, in all the gloom of its disaster, and in all the sacred tenderness that clings about its memories. He was the poet of the Lost Cause, the finest interpreter of the feelings and traditions of the splendid heroism of a brave people. Moreover, by his catholic spirit, his wide range, and world-wide sympathies, he ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... termination, tragic,—which melts into holy hope and radiant promise as a night of storm and fearful darkness melts into the light and glory of the dawn and sunrise when the sky is fair. I can hear and see this blind old Puritan, chanting the drama of a lost cause as a David lamenting for his Absalom dead. Milton is sublime in history, misfortune, range of ideas, warrior strength, and prowess to fight and die undaunted. Not even his darkness makes him sob ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... mobilizing at Chickamauga was the regiment to which Rivers, a friend of his boyhood, belonged. There, three days later, his State was going to dedicate two monuments to her sons who had fallen on the old battlefield, where his father, fighting with one wing of the Legion for the Lost Cause, and his father's young brother, fighting with the other against it, had fought face to face; where his uncle met death on the field and his father got the wound that brought death to him years after the ...
— Crittenden - A Kentucky Story of Love and War • John Fox, Jr.
... and speak to you of things which are at the other end of the world from Landis and the other girl. It is because I have to keep my hands gripped hard to control myself. Because, though I have given up hope, I would follow a forlorn chance, a lost cause, and tell you again and again that I love you, ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... fought for the Lost Cause ever cherished anything more vividly than those hours between midnight and the next noon when they marched at the double quick across hill and valley and forest to the relief of their great commander. There was little need for the officers to ...
— The Sword of Antietam • Joseph A. Altsheler
... attitude; the lost paradise of the early poems; Milton's Puritanism; his melancholy; the political and public preoccupations of the later poems; the drama of Milton's life; his egotism explained; an illustration from Lycidas; the lost cause; the ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... with a eulogy on the immaculate character, the political importance and the profound learning of that venerable septuagenarian who still had strength to battle consistently and nobly for the lost cause of his youth. An exordium of this nature was the regular procedure. That was how "the Chief" did things. And as he spoke, Rafael's eyes turned anxiously upon the clock. He wanted to be long, very long. If ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... question of life for Germany, was refused by Belgium because the Government had made itself a tool of England and France. This same Government then organized an unparalleled guerrilla warfare in order to support a lost cause, and by that act—Herr Rolland, you are a musician!—struck the horrible keynote of conflict. If you are at all in a position to break your way through the giant's wall of anti-German lies, read the message to America, by our Imperial Chancellor, of Sept. 7; read further the telegram which on Sept. ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... been listening to old Klem Zareff ranting about the Lost Cause and the greedy Terran robber barons holding the Galaxy in economic serfdom while they piled up profits. The Federation didn't fight that war for profits; there weren't any profits to fight for. They fought it because if the System States had won, half of them would be at war among themselves now. ...
— Graveyard of Dreams • Henry Beam Piper
... exactly laugh at him, because it was reported that he had really killed some men, and loved some women. They found such a combination irresistible, when coupled with an appearance both vigorous and gallant. The son of an Oxfordshire clergyman, and mounted on a lost cause, he had been riding through the world ever since he was eighteen, without once getting out of the saddle. The secret of this endurance lay perhaps in his unconsciousness that he was in the saddle at all. It was as much his natural seat as office stools to other mortals. He made ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... taken, the beloved Confederacy must be renounced at least in words. Entries in the Diary become briefer and briefer, yet are sustained unto the bitter end, when the deaths of two brothers, and the crash of the Lost Cause, are told with the tragic reserve of ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... her was no such fool as to waste time in a lost cause. This one was lost, he knew, and it booted little for him to become involved where, even at the best issue, there was risk enough for him. He reflected that risk must have existed even had this young lady been a shade more dull of mind, of less brilliant faculty in leaping to conclusions ...
— The Purchase Price • Emerson Hough
... a whole indifferent acquiescing world, miserably beaten. In all men's opinions, only not in his own! Inspired by the indignation, which makes, if not verses, satirical law-papers, the withered Music-master, with a desperate heroism, takes up his lost cause in spite of the world; fights for it, against Reporters, Parlements and Principalities, with light banter, with clear logic; adroitly, with an inexhaustible toughness and resource, like the skilfullest fencer; on whom, so skilful is he, ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... he faced her once more every thought vanished from her mind save the one which had sustained her through the extraordinary measures she had taken to secure herself this opportunity of presenting her lost cause to the judgment of the only man from whom she could ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... faults of temper which often endangered and perhaps at last ruined the cause he served. They can be best appreciated by reading his own book. There is throughout a note of querulousness which weakens one's sympathy for the hero of a lost cause. He is always explaining how things ought to have happened, how the people of Kentucky ought to have been angry with Lincoln instead of siding with him, and so on. One understands at once how he was bested in ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... was learned that he was a South Carolina lawyer, and not a carpet-bagger. Such credentials were unimpeachable, and the passengers found him a very agreeable traveling companion. Apparently sound on the subject of negroes, Yankees, and the righteousness of the lost cause, he yet discussed these themes in a lofty and impersonal manner that gave his words greater weight than if he had seemed warped by a personal grievance. His attitude, in fact, piqued the curiosity of one ...
— The House Behind the Cedars • Charles W. Chesnutt
... and social prestige, who had rendered valuable service throughout the campaign. The next evening the suffrage forces held a grand rally in Metropolitan Temple. Every seat in that fine auditorium was occupied and the aisles were crowded. It was not a meeting of the adherents of a lost cause, but of one which had suffered only temporary defeat. Miss Anthony presided and was given a true California ovation and, as her voice rang out with all its old-time vigor, there was not one in that vast audience but hoped she might return to ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... the tale of his steadfastness, his unselfishness, his goodness to his soldiers, and the base ingratitude and wickedness with which his countrymen treated him, more than ever do we instinctively long that the lost cause had proved the winning one, and again and again we have to remind ourselves of the terrible evil it would have been to the world if Carthage had overcome Rome. For Carthage was possessed of almost every bad quality which could work ill to the human race. Greed for ...
— The Red Book of Heroes • Leonora Blanche Lang
... it—or rather not thinking about it. It is interest—nothing but interest—which informs their new policy. They always find out what pays. Never did they fight a forlorn hope or die for a lost cause. As the shadow follows the sun, so priests follow the sun of prosperity. They are the friends of power, whoever wields it: of wealth, whoever owns it. When they talk about the rights of the people, it means that they feel the king-times are ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... instance—over Timrod as 'the crowning infamy of American letters.' He has taken the trouble to lay out a course of study for me, the object of which is to place me right in my appreciation of the literary men of the South. It includes Pollard's 'Lost Cause' and the works of W. G. Simms. I have not fully promised to follow it to the end. Timrod, ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... constantly called on him for the exercise of the very qualities which he had least at hand. Nature had never meant him for a conspirator, or even for a subtle political intriguer; nor, indeed, had Nature ever intended him to be the adherent of a lost cause. All that could have made a position like his tolerable to a man of his peculiar capacity would have been faith in the cause—that faith which would have {117} prevented him from seeing any but its noble and exalted qualities, and would have made him forget himself in its hopes, its perils, its ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... lawful prey. In the case of an outward-bound ship, the gang-officer's duty was confined to seeing that she carried no more hands than her protection and tonnage permitted her to carry. All others were pressed. Cowed by armed authority, or wounded and bleeding in a lost cause as hereafter to be related, the men were hustled into the boat with "no more violence than was necessary for securing them." [Footnote: Admiralty Records 1. 1437—Capt. Aldred, 12 June 1708.] Their chests and bedding followed, making a full boat; and so, having cleared the ship ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... natural medium for self-expression, I might be sad, but to-morrow I would sanction your going down to the Opera House. It would be unwise to stop you, and, further, it is not our way. The Welses have ever stood by, in many a lost cause and forlorn hope, knee to knee and shoulder to shoulder. Conventions are worthless for such as we. They are for the swine who without them would wallow deeper. The weak must obey or be crushed; not so with the strong. The mass is nothing; the individual everything; ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... commanders, the first of whom, Robert E. Lee, is believed by many to be the greatest in our country's history. No doubt some of the renown which attaches to Lee's name is due to his desperate championship of a lost cause, and to the love which the people of the South bore, and still bear, him because of his singularly sweet and unselfish character. But, sentiment aside, and looking at him only as a soldier, he must be given a place in the front rank of our greatest captains. There are not more than two or three to ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson
... Hood's "siege" of Nashville for two weeks could not be regarded otherwise than as a stupendous farce, were it not for the desperate bravery with which he thus kept up the appearance of still fighting for a lost cause rather than be the first to admit by his own action that it was indeed lost. It is now well known that the feeling among the Southern people and that of some of the highest officers of the Confederate government made it impossible for any officer of their army ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... finished him. As the absurdly formal clock between the book-cases ticked off the leaden-winged seconds, his plan for the rescue of Pacific Southwestern took the form of a crass impertinence, and only the grim determination to see a lost cause decently coffined and buried kept the enthusiast with his ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... illegality, the utter wrongfulness of the American position, is occasionally raised among us by those who see the great obligations to the mother country under which the colonies lay, and who recall the needless hardships suffered by the wretched Tories, the martyrs of a lost cause. Doubtless wrongs were inflicted in the course of the struggle, and the great expenditures of England were in large part unrequited. But it must be remembered that the world had not yet reached the point where the losers in a war were gently treated, and that no amount of ...
— The Siege of Boston • Allen French
... for he knew that men did not follow women from continent to continent without some assurance of a friendly greeting. Clay's mind went back to the days when he was a boy, when his father was absent fighting for a lost cause; when his mother taught in a little schoolhouse under the shadow of Pike's Peak, and when Kit Carson was his hero. He thought of the poverty of those days poverty so mean and hopeless that it was almost something ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... Tibullus has another claim to notice. All Augustan writers express their dread and weariness of war. But Tibullus protests as a survivor of the lost cause. He has been, himself, a soldier-lover maddened by separation. As an heir of the old order, he saw how vulgar and mercenary was this parvenu imperial glory, won at the expense of lost liberties and broken hearts. War, he says, is only the strife of robbers. Its motive is the spoils. It happens ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... who fell in the battle of Ball's Bluff are buried in Union Cemetery, on the northern border of Leesburg. Their resting place is marked by an imposing marble shaft, in honor of the comrades of "the lost cause," "wherever they lie." Many of the Union soldiers who perished at Ball's Bluff lie buried where they fell. Their mournful little cemetery was recently acquired by the Federal government and its approaches and environs greatly improved. The battlefield is still one of the chief ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... the feeling, the negro in South Carolina is at the feet of Moses and Whipper, because he was driven there. The old master has as yet made no sign of sympathy or friendship. I am profoundly convinced that if, instead of mourning over the lost cause, as in the past they were wont to bluster about the Yankees and slavery, these people had dealt wisely with the negro and generously with the Northern immigrant, these States, and South Carolina especially, would be free and powerful. I hail ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... after all it must be treated as a ruin. But surely their own pagan temple of political liberty is now much more of a ruin than the other; and I fancy I am one of the few who still take off their hats in that ruined temple. That is why I went about looking for the fading traces of that lost cause, in the old-world atmosphere of the ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... a public character. Launched upon the law at a very early age, and quite without protectors, he had become a trafficker in shady affairs. He was known to be the man for a lost cause; it was known he could extract testimony from a stone, and interest from a gold mine; and his office was besieged in consequence by all that numerous class of persons who have still some reputation to lose, and find themselves upon the point of losing it; by those who have made ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... dictator of the Confederacy if he had chosen, and no one then or since would have blamed him; but it was not in his mind to do anything but his duty as a soldier. The best beloved and most memorable by far of all the men who served that lost cause, he had done nothing to bring about secession at the beginning, nor now did he do anything but conform to the wishes of his political chief. As for that chief, Lincoln had interpreted Davis' simple position quite ...
— Abraham Lincoln • Lord Charnwood
... a Virginian, moaned that rude mountaineers had routed Democrats of the 'old Southern type' from the Capital on the Kanawha and that the Lost Cause was lost all over again. He was still sad because Senator Matthew M. Neely had been elected Governor on a platform to restore democracy to the Democratic Party, and government to the governed, ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... his account in the year 551, probably in Constantinople, is now put in English form, as part of an edition of the Getica prepared by Mr. Mierow. Those who care for the romance of history will be charmed by this great tale of a lost cause and will not find the simple-hearted exaggerations of the eulogist of the Gothic race misleading. He pictured what he believed or wanted to believe, and his employment of fable and legend, as well as the naive exhibition of his loyal prejudices, merely heightens the interest ...
— The Origin and Deeds of the Goths • Jordanes
... wondered if in his place I could be sternly just. At my feet the little brook babbled in the night, while the camp noises slowly died away. Meantime, intent on my purpose, I tried to arrange in my mind what I would say or how plead a lost cause. I have often thus pre-arranged the mode of saying what some serious occasion made needful. I always get ready, but when the time comes I am apt to say things altogether different, and to find, too, that the wisdom of the minute is apt to be the ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... realized the fact, they fought as though they had been contending man for man. Indeed, they contended desperately against the odds before them, and deserved victory for their steady valor. But with them then it was a "lost cause," and through no fault of their own. Before the Union column had reached the position assigned to them, the lieutenant in command had sent his bugler into the forest to sound the retreat for the portion of the company ...
— A Lieutenant at Eighteen • Oliver Optic
... brief, however. He was deposed for attempting to introduce the Mohammedan religion into the kingdom. Osai Apoko was crowned as his successor in 1797. The Gaman and Kongo armies attached themselves to the declining fortunes of the deposed king, and gave battle for his lost crown. It was a lost cause. The new king could wield his sword as well as wear a crown. He died of a painful sickness, and was succeeded by his son, Osai ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... tarantula piers detract from the song of a mocking-bird in a fragrant orange grove? We know that farther out, past the Confederate Soldiers' Home,—that rose-embowered, rambling place of gray-coated, white-haired old men with broken hearts for a lost cause,—it flows, unimpeded by the faintest conception of man, and we love it all the more that, like the Priestess of Isis, it is calm-browed, even ...
— The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories • Alice Dunbar
... Different, but more impressive is the memorial of Lee. You enter through the chapel where the students gather daily, then passing the chancel, stand in a mausoleum, where nobly conceived in marble the soldier lies as if asleep. He bears his symbols as champion in chief of the "Lost Cause," but the light on his face is not that of battle. It is serene, benignant, at peace. I was deeply moved as I stood before it, but soon after I was to experience a deeper thrill. The afternoon was waning when I walked on to ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... solution which he offered to the woes of earthly life. As Caesar was stricken low, was not the long contest for possession of the people over, and would not the people, the great silent multitude, speak out, and give itself to him, the Pope? He had begun experiments with France, forsaking the lost cause of the monarchy and recognising the Republic which he hoped might prove strong and victorious, for in spite of everything France remained the eldest daughter of the Church, the only Catholic nation which yet possessed sufficient strength to restore the temporal power at some propitious ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... doctor ever being visible again, and kept the door mentally on the jar while she spoke through a moral gap an inch wide. Of course, that is only our nonsense. Sally was really in the house when Craddock heroically, as a forlorn hope in a lost cause, offered to "go and see"; and going, said, "Miss Nightingale; and is Dr. Vereker expected in to tea?" without varnish of style, or redundance of wording. But Sally lent herself to this insincere performance, and remained in the hall until she was called ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... particle of evidence. Admiration was yielded by the North to Stonewall Jackson even in his life-time; there was early recognition of Lee's magnanimous acceptance of defeat; but the bitterest odium was long visited upon Davis. It was heightened by the tenacity with which his intense nature clung to "the lost cause" as a sentiment, after the reality was hopelessly buried. The South itself gave its highest favor to Lee, its most effective defender, and a man of singularly impressive character; while Davis's mistakes of administration, and his reserved and over-sensitive temper chilled a ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... large Spanish force was actually despatched for the purpose, but the news of Tyrone's defeat reached the Spaniards on their arrival, and they promptly reembarked, and gave up what they considered a lost cause. Some of the Irish chiefs were compelled to surrender; others fled to Spain, in the hope of stirring up some movement there against England, or at least of finding a place of shelter. Ireland was suffering ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... Cal," she interrupted placidly. "I know! You're going to tell me, once more, your pet theory that there's many a boy in that backwoods who might paint a great canvas, or model a deathless bronze—or—or lead a lost cause, if he could only be found and provided with the chance. It sounds—it sounds very big and grand and romantic, Cal, but has it ever occurred to you that anyone big enough for things like those ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans
... apparent lack of guile, and her ever-watchful eye. He paid tribute to his copious wife for her determined babble of generalities, well-knowing that she was bursting with suppressed excitement under the knowledge that Alice had come to try and patch up a lost cause. He chuckled at the feline manners of the little lady whom they had all known so long as Mrs. Edgar Lee Reeves, her purring voice, her frequent over-emphasis of exuberant adjectives, her accidental choice of the sort of verb that had the effect of smashed crockery, her receptiveness to the underlying ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... twin-brethren, fought side by side; but Romance, that ancient parasite, clung affectionately with her tendril-hands to the mouldering walls of an ancient wrong, thus enabling the historian, whilst awarding the victor's palm to General Grant, to write kindly of the lost cause, dear to the heart of a nobler and more chivalrous man, General Lee, of the Virginian army. And again, is it not almost possible to envy the historian to whom will belong the task of writing with full information, and all the advantage of the true historic distance, the history of ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... its surrender August 15, 1646, to the Parliamentary army under General Fairfax, after a severe siege of more than two months. It was the last fortress in England to hold out for the lost cause of King Charles, and a brave record did its gallant defenders make against an overwhelmingly superior force. The Marquis of Worcester, though eighty-five years of age, held the castle against the Cromwellians ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... the ex-boss of the employment bureau contributed to the tedium of the trip with merry jests and anecdote. But now and then he would weep upon the bananas and make oration about the lost cause of liberty and ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... life has been one of adventure. Previous to the war he graduated at Oxford, in Butler county, in the same class with the gallant Joe Battle, who, with his brother, fell beside their father at Shiloh, while fighting under the flag of the Lost Cause. After graduating he went to Hamilton and read law with Judge Clark, who acquired some notoriety at Hamilton by his advocacy of the right of secession in 1860-61. When the war begun, Hasseltino determined to risk his fortunes ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... pair doubtfully. Their unarmed condition and Paul's visibly battered state told that these were no dangerous conspirators; and devotion to a lost cause always stirs the generous feelings of brave men. It may, however, be doubted whether the pair would have gained their wish had it not been for the fact that at this moment Edward himself appeared, disarmed, but otherwise treated with due honour ...
— In the Wars of the Roses - A Story for the Young • Evelyn Everett-Green
... we honour as the prince of virtues in a Briton shall we condemn as vice in this little band of Free State Boers and their leader, loyal to a lost cause? No, England, no! It is not you that shriek anathemas to the weeping skies because the foe dies hard. The gutter gamin and the brutal lout who never owned a soul fit to rise above the level of the kettle singing on the hearth may brand the ...
— Campaign Pictures of the War in South Africa (1899-1900) - Letters from the Front • A. G. Hales |
