"Tragic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... past. The quiet, clever, old-fashioned Frenchwoman by whom she had been educated had seen to that. She could wander through the narrow streets on the other side of the Seine, and reconstitute the amazing, moving, tragic things which happened there during ...
— The Chink in the Armour • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... existences. Of all forms of the aleatory, that which most commonly attends our working men—the danger of misery from want of work—is the least inspiriting: it does not whip the blood, it does not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is passive; and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly touching them, it does truly season the men's lives. Of those who fail, I do not speak—despair should be sacred; but to those who even modestly succeed, the changes of their life bring interest: a job found, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... gradually warmed with her theme, as she described her confidence and blind credulity, and then, with a tragic gesture, as if she desired to drive away these cruel memories, she suddenly seized her glass and ...
— The Count's Millions - Volume 1 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau
... de' Lambertazzi is even more tragic in its results, as here the woman has to suffer as well as the man, and in its general outlines this incident recalls many of the features of Romeo and Juliet, though there is no evidence that Shakespeare used ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... took shape forthwith, with tragic precision. Lupin, the mocking, indomitable Lupin, no longer even thought of concealing his anxiety and, with features pale as death, strove to hear, to guess. And Shears continued, in reply ...
— The Blonde Lady - Being a Record of the Duel of Wits between Arsne Lupin and the English Detective • Maurice Leblanc
... whistled, the cars gave a jolt, and Anna Moore was launched on her tragic fate. She never knew how the time passed after leaving Mrs. Tremont, till Sanderson joined her at the next station. She felt as if her will power had deserted her, and she was dumbly obeying the behests of some unseen ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... was I tragic? I didn't mean to be, my dear. There's a lot about me that you don't know, but something that you've guessed. I can't abide shams and conventions really. Let's have life, I say, whatever it is. Heavens! I've seen street girls ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... These are tragic times, sorrowful times, yet great and noble times, for these are days of fiery ordeal whereby mean and petty things are forgotten and the dross of unworthy things burned away. To-day the two great Anglo-Saxon peoples stand ...
— Great Britain at War • Jeffery Farnol
... like the gases of the chemist, new things, sometimes like and sometimes unlike themselves and each other; producing now some unknown substance of excellence and utility, at other times some baneful element, known but too well elsewhere, but unexpected here. But not the watching of the often tragic meeting of these great fatalities of inherited spirit and habit only: for equally fascinating almost has been the watching of the elaboration by this double-natured period of things of little weight, mere trifles of artistic material bequeathed to it by one or by ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... was concealed "on the underground," among friends; and that night drive, with its haste and its apprehension, was so of a piece with the times, that I can hardly separate it from them in my memory. We were all being carried along in an uncontrollable sweep of tragic events. In a sort of blindness, like the night, unable to see the nearest fork of the road ahead of us, we were being driven to a future that held ...
— Under the Prophet in Utah - The National Menace of a Political Priestcraft • Frank J. Cannon and Harvey J. O'Higgins
... in Scotland where lived the friends bound to him by such tragic memories of help asked and rendered in a man's worst extremity, that he could never speak of them when he was living his ordinary life in Manchester, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... say so!" cry I, trying to impart a tragic tone to my voice, and only hoping that my face looks more distressed and aghast than ...
— Nancy - A Novel • Rhoda Broughton
... unfavourable to the character of Carter, and these were strengthened by his being paroled on the ground, and his whole company without insult or injury being made prisoners of war. Whether he was called to account for his conduct, I have never learnt. These excepted, the only survivors of this tragic scene were Capts. Stokes, Lawson and Hoard, Lieuts. Pearson and Jamison, ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... becomes the panegyrist and the censor of the French Revolution. He vindicates with a powerful hand the ideas which it evolved; while he castigates, and depicts with poetic melancholy its mournful errors and its tragic character. He makes Vergniaud, the chief of the Girondists, say before his execution—"In grafting the tree, my friend, we have killed it. It was too old. Robespierrie cuts it. Will he be more successful than ourselves? No. This soil is too ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... standard of literary criticism that was practically unrivalled. The authority of its scientific and political writers was equally high; as for serial fiction, Mr. Morley published Mr. Meredith's Beauchamp's Career and The Tragic Comedians, besides less important novels by Trollope and others. More recently the publication of fiction has been exceptional. The (1890) Review of Reviews Index said ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... it themselves; or conquerors who have impoverished, pillaged, sacked, burnt, and destroyed the countries and cities of their fellow-creatures, from no other provocation than that of glory, i. e., as the tragic poet calls it, ...
— The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great • Henry Fielding
... Crepyn, one of the city's representatives at Shrewsbury, a tragic story is told. Meeting, one day, Laurence Duket, his rival in the affections of a woman known as "Alice atte Bowe," the two came to blows, and Crepyn was wounded. The affray took place in Cheapside, and Duket, fearing he had killed his man, sought ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... care, resolved to attain some literary glories; and first, he published his now-renowned tragedy of 'Boadicea,' with his name at length, giving a mint of proceeds to that very proper charity the Theatrical Fund. Secondly, he followed up his tragic triumph by a splendid 'Caractacus,' by way of a companion picture. Thirdly, he turned to his maligned law-treatise on Defence, and boldly published a capital vindication thereof, flinging down his gauntlet to the ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... inferior sense. Shakespeare is dragged to the bar by Thomas Rymer, who demonstrates, with what degree of critical ability is still disputed, but certainly in clear and vigorous English, that Shakespeare has no capacity for tragic writing. Dante is banished, by the critics of the Renaissance, into the Gothic darkness. So the pendulum of fashion swings to and fro, compelled, even in the shortest of its variable oscillations, to revisit the greatest writers, ...
— Romance - Two Lectures • Walter Raleigh
... pardon," I said, turning my mind from the past to the future, from regret to apprehension. The necessity of considering my situation prevented me from contemplating, at that time, the perfidy of Mlle. d'Arency, the blindness with which I had let myself be deceived, or the tragic and humiliating termination ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... relations with the young iron-founder sprang from a generous impulse to free Raymer from an incubus. If it were the curse of the Midas-touch to turn all things to gold, it seemed to be his own peculiar curse to turn the gold to dross; to leave behind him a train of disaster, defeat, and tragic depravity. The plunge into the labor conflict had merely served to afford another striking example of his inability to break the evil spell, and ...
— The Price • Francis Lynde
... with women and men of Louisa's calibre. I had hardly arranged myself and my materials when the door slowly opened, and she entered. She was alarmed, yet wary. To see a naturally hearty, merry little body subjected for years to this nervous strain, with a tragic idea forced into a brain meant to be busied only with dress, cookery, or babies, appeared ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... know myself what word Betty is searching for, but I do believe these very things that you like best come very close to my own guess. For if love is the greatest thing in the world, the making of a home to shelter it is most important. I have an idea that love would come to a tragic end if, when it returned home to dinner, Polly should meet it in the character of Ophelia, with wild flowers in her hair, offering it rosemary and rue for dinner instead of meat ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... very beginning that first news of the firing on Fort Sumter flew through the North like a tragic cry, and men felt a sense of doom hanging over the nation. Bertrand Ballard heard it and walked sorrowfully home to his wife, and sat long with bowed head, brooding and silent. Neighbor Wilcox heard it, and, leaving ...
— The Eye of Dread • Payne Erskine
... and with his lips pressed to the altar, implored divine succour in his terrible extremity. 'If the opinions of Arius be true,' the patriarch prayed, 'let me die; but if they are false let him be judged.' The tragic end of Arius was considered the ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... plot may be either comical or tragic. Mr. Botts ludicrously fights against a black-hand enemy—who proves to be his mischievous small son. Plump and fussy Mrs. Jellifer lays deep but always transparent plans to outwit her daughter's suitor and is finally entrapped into so laughable a situation that she ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds
... more than ten years since I met, for the last time, Michael Robartes, and for the first time and the last time his friends and fellow students; and witnessed his and their tragic end, and endured those strange experiences, which have changed me so that my writings have grown less popular and less intelligible, and driven me almost to the verge of taking the habit of St. Dominic. I had just ...
— Rosa Alchemica • W. B. Yeats
... better known to the world at large, is more respected and honored, than is Mme. de Polignac or even the great salon leaders such as Mme. de Genlis or Mlle. de Lespinasse. She owes this prominence to her undying devotion to her queen, to her marvellous beauty, and to her tragic death on the guillotine. She was not even bright or witty, the essentials of greatness among French women—not one bon mot has survived her; but she may well be placed by the side of her queen for one sublime virtue, too rare in those days,—chastity. ...
— Women of Modern France - Woman In All Ages And In All Countries • Hugo P. Thieme
... because of the lack of travelling expenses, emigrated in comparatively small numbers, followed the commercial proletariat, using the criminal disguise of artisans, in order to transfer their energies to a "field economically more favorable to them." The position of these people was tragic. The fictitious artisans became the tributaries of the local police, depending entirely on its favor or disfavor. The detection of such "criminals" outside the Pale was followed by their expulsion and the confiscation of ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... as you said in your letter, Frank. There IS something tragic in it. It will be with me for ever. All the future will arrange ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle
... is it not strange That in vast Holy Russia, With masses and masses Of people unnumbered, No song has been born 10 Overflowing with joy Like a bright summer morning? Yes, is it not striking, And is it not tragic? O times that are coming, You, too, will be painted In songs of the people, But how? In what colours? And will there be ever A smile in ...
— Who Can Be Happy And Free In Russia? • Nicholas Nekrassov
... instinctive sense of balance, and this is very rare in men who are given to thought. Though a dark man, he has an extraordinarily fair complexion; his jet-black hair contrasts finely with the lustreless tints of the neck and forehead. He has the tragic head of Louis XIII. His moustache and tuft have been allowed to grow, but I made him shave the whiskers and beard, which were getting too common. An honorable poverty has been his safeguard, and handed him over to me, unsoiled by the loose life which ruins ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... enlightenment have extended over distant seas and lands. The lives of our official representatives and many of our people in China have been marvelously preserved. We have been generally exempt from pestilence and other great calamities; and even the tragic visitation which overwhelmed the city of Galveston made evident the sentiments of sympathy and Christian charity by virtue of which we ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... as myself, with this difference, that whereas he, looking upon the adventure as a comic one, only laughed, I who found it too tragic shuddered with indignation. ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... so much taste; Pierrette's was hidden beneath her Breton cap, and she knew nothing of the fashions. Moral, Bathilde was everything, Pierrette nothing. The proud little Breton girl understood this tragic poem. ...
— Pierrette • Honore de Balzac
... perhaps, held the foreground of the talk, but they played like summer lightning on the edge of the conversation. And deep in the hearts of all was a galling sense of the ridiculous. Jessie, they thought, was most to blame. Apparently, too, the worst, which would have made the whole business tragic, was not happening. Here was a young woman—young woman do I say? a mere girl!—had chosen to leave a comfortable home in Surbiton, and all the delights of a refined and intellectual circle, and had rushed off, trailing us after her, posing hard, mutually ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... waters of Lake Ontario, the wandering pedestrian or the lone fisherman may see, resting upon a gravelly flat, the remains of an old Indian canoe, whose once beautiful proportions, now untraceable in its rottenness, bore a prominent part in the tragic event ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... well-filled dancing cafe, and the tragic voice of the accuser brought a crowd of curious people about our table. Captain Grauble waved them back. As they pushed forward again, a street guard elbowed in, brandishing his aluminum club and ...
— City of Endless Night • Milo Hastings
... Very tragic indeed the maiden looked as she tossed off her hat and flung herself face downward on the bed, refusing to cast even a glance at the cell which was to be her hateful prison. "For of course I shall ...
— Queen Hildegarde • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... Hall, and sleep there, and keep it aired, and have it all ready for you when you turned up. They didn't guess what was going to happen, of course; still, they had their suspicions of the Wild Wood animals. Now I come to the most painful and tragic part of my story. One dark night—it was a very dark night, and blowing hard, too, and raining simply cats and dogs—a band of weasels, armed to the teeth, crept silently up the carriage-drive to the front entrance. Simultaneously, a body of desperate ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... here were sour, stern-visaged individuals, and our welcome was as frigid as it had been warm at Verkhoyansk. The Chief of Police had recently met his death under tragic circumstances, which I shall presently describe, and I was received by the acting ispravnik, whose grim manners and appearance were in unpleasant contrast to those of our kind old friend Katcherofsky. Although this natural prison had no bolts and bars or other ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... to control or influence him. This was true at the time and remains true now. Time and again have efforts been made to harness his energies to the State, but they have never succeeded. The responsibilities of office are irksome to his imperious temperament. There is something almost tragic in a figure, equipped with the qualities of an hereditary autocrat, endeavouring to accommodate himself to the needs of a democracy. The spectacle of this purple Emperor of the Press, with his ear constantly glued to the ground, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 19, 1919 • Various
... dismay. There was tragic tenseness in this dramatic situation—a father fighting for his son, a ...
— The Third Degree - A Narrative of Metropolitan Life • Charles Klein and Arthur Hornblow
... aloud. "Ah, you wish a tragic end to your romance, madame," said he. "Not so, however. It will be quiet and prosaic. You will act neither the part of a martyr nor a heroine. I wish neither to reproach nor punish you. I leave that to God and ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... admired tragedy from my earliest days. I believe I must have acted in it in the nursery—at least the scenes I have in my mind appeared to me to be tragic at the time, although it was not of my own will that I participated in them. The occasions, for instance, when I was stood in the corner for misconduct at table, or thrashed by my big brother for my "cheek," or dosed with castor oil by the doctor for "mulligrubs," ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed
... of old junk wanting in many interesting, mournful, and tragic suggestions. Who can say in what gales it may have been; in what remote seas it may have sailed? How many stout masts of seventy-fours and frigates it may have staid in the tempest? How deep it may have lain, as a hawser, ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... ladies. This lady was as far remote from her husband in temperament as Venus is from Neptune. He was darkness, she was daylight; and the patience with which she tolerated him in his dark moods was beautiful though tragic. It was plain that she loved him, for what else in a woman could overlook such darkness ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... wife—with a Petrarch in her hands? Where out of Venetia can we find portraits so simple, so frank, and yet so interpretive as his "Sculptor," or as his various portraits of himself—these, by the way, an autobiography as complete as any in existence, and tragic as few? Almost Venetian again is his "St. James" caressing children, a work of the sweetest feeling. Even in colour effect, and technique, how singularly close to the best Venetian painting in his "Dispute about the Trinity"—what blacks and whites, what greys and purplish browns! And in ...
— The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance - With An Index To Their Works • Bernhard Berenson
... the tragic part of the story, for which Mr. Hutton, the author of the 'History of Derby,' is responsible. As he worked in the silk mill when a boy, from 1730 to 1737, he doubtless heard it from the mill-hands, ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... with the great crimes, the great tragedies of the time, as so many bright-coloured threads in that sombre tapestry of human passion. To recall in the obtuse, grieved, marred faces of uninteresting men or women, the disappointments, the sorrows, the tragic mistakes of the children they were long ago; that is a good trick for taking our own sympathy by surprise, which Gaston practised when he saw the last, or almost the last, of some of them, and felt a great pity, a ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... so impregnated with cold light that we still see clearly. We are amid magnificent tragic scenery on a lake surrounded by a kind of fearful amphitheatre outlined on all sides by the mountains of the desert. It was at the bottom of this granite circus that the Nile used to flow, forming fresh islets, ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... seemed rather distracting than helpful! She stroked Drummond's hair, and asked if he was sure his throat was better, just as he was on the point of completing a difficult addition; she told her husband the tragic history of the cook's impertinence, and handed him a heavy bill, when the poor man was enjoying the first quiet rest of the day; she requested Mollie's advice about spare-room curtains at the moment when long-separated ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the easterners had arrived, and, almost with the moment of their coming, there had begun the first act in what was to prove a drama of almost tragic happenings. ...
— The Boy Ranchers in Camp - or The Water Fight at Diamond X • Willard F. Baker
... their illustrious traditions. The man whom ye saw me conversing with by the stockade was the one whom the tribe intrusted with the task; but the priests, after much consideration among themselves of the object of his visit, refused to have anything to do with such a tragic affair, and thereupon ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... dramatist. Dr. Clifford is a reformer; Mr. Henniker Heaton is a passionate reformer; and both are capable of literature when they are excited. But they are not dramatists. We still await Mr. Henniker Heaton's tragic fourth act about the failure of the negotiations for a penny post with France. Brieux is too violent a reformer ever to be a serious dramatist. Violent reformers are unprincipled, and the reformer in Brieux forces the dramatist in him to prostitution. The dramatist in him is not strong ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... in the church a tablet, which looks as if it had marked his grave. It has upon it the archbishop's coat of arms, the letters J. H., the initials of his name, and the motto he assumed, and which contrasts strangely with his troubled life and tragic end—'Misericordia ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... is true he had managed his plans and speculations with great ability. Substituting Charles, like a villain as he was, in his own affair with Grace Davoren, he contrived to corroborate the falsehood by the tragic incident of the preceding night. Now, if this would not satisfy Alice of the truth of his own falsehood, nothing could. That Charles was the intrigant must be clear and palpable from what had happened, and accordingly, after taking a ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... nurse to France, Miss Alice Fitzgerald, in memory of Edith Cavell, which shows the unity of your feeling and ours on that tragic execution, and her work under our War Office in Queen Alexandra's Imperial Army Nursing Service with the British Expeditionary Force, as well as the work of all the American nurses we have had helping ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... could not, must not, be born. And it was not born. One can imagine the horror of that tragic time: the criminal flame of sleepless nights, the blood-charged atmosphere of guilty despair, the moans of agony that had to be ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... letter, for one of the consequences of our misfortunes is, that we dine every day at half-past four o'clock; which premature hour arises, I suppose, from sorrow being hungry as well as thirsty. One most laughable part of our tragic comedy was, that every friend in the world came formally, just as they do here when a relation dies, thinking that the eclipse of les beaux yeux de ma cassette was perhaps a loss ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... gray and mysterious over the frosty green of spruce brought no hope to Beatrice, sitting beside the unconscious form of Ben in the cave fronting the glade. Rather it only brought the tragic truth home more clearly. Her love for him had manifested itself too late to give happiness to either of them: even now his life seemed to be stealing from her, into the valley ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... Millicent might agree to, if, as seemed likely, her rather elderly companion had to be left behind. Nasmyth had, no doubt, already reached British Columbia; and it looked as if those indirectly brought together by George Gladwyne's tragic death would be reunited at the scene of it. This was, Lisle reflected, merely the result of a natural sequence of events, but there was for all that something strangely ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... the Attainder of the Conspirators ("Statutes of the Realm," 3 James I., c. 2). Coke himself characterized the treason at the trial as "beyond all examples, whether in fact or fiction, even of the tragic poets who did beat their wits to represent the most fearful and horrible murders." And in the prayer to be used in the Anniversary Service for the Fifth of November it is described as having been attempted "in a most ...
— The Identification of the Writer of the Anonymous Letter to Lord Monteagle in 1605 • William Parker
... story of a throne was indeed a tragic one; Goliba had lost his only daughter, the pride of his heart, and ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... was one of the spectators who had stood behind the shelter of a bush, surveying, with sorrowful countenance, the tragic scene. He was a short, but fine-looking and very athletic man—a champion Cornish wrestler, named William Jeff. He was a first-rate boatman, and a bold swimmer. Fortunately he also possessed a generous, daring heart. When ...
— Saved by the Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... tragic poet, who died in the 69th year of his age, B.C. 456, in Prometheus Vinctus, refers to cave dwellers in a way that indicates that even then they belonged ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... to hold that mere strip of land against more men and better artillery because they had determined to die there. Some of those who had not yet paid the price of death told me. They were not tragic about it. There was no display of heroics. They said it seriously, but they smiled a little, too, over their wine glasses, and the next morning they were back in ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... him again if you don't want," she promised rashly. "He shan't come in here except over my dead body," she added, with tragic emphasis, and a sudden memory of a pink-backed novelette ...
— The Beggar Man • Ruby Mildred Ayres
... feared she among the bands to stray Of armed men, for often had she seen The tragic end of many a bloody fray; Her life had full of haps and hazards been, This made her bold in every hard assay, More than her feeble sex became, I ween; She feared not the shake of every reed, So cowards ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... such tragic situations that Hawthorne found the material which was best suited to the ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... effeminate behaviour in a man, a rough manner in a woman; these are ugly because unsuitable to each character, and different from the qualities which we expect in the sexes. It is as if a tragedy abounded in comic beauties, or a comedy in tragic. The disproportions hurt the eye, and convey a disagreeable sentiment to the spectators, the source of blame and disapprobation. This is that INDECORUM, which is explained so much at large by Cicero in ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... More pathetic, tragic even, was the last speech of Calhoun, read for him while he sat in his senatorial chair; the tall form bowed by age and weakness, the gaunt, impressive face furrowed by the long strife for a doomed cause, but the old fire still alight in the dark eyes ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... the ball, the tragic story of two lovely girls was told me. When mere children, they had accompanied their mother to some gala, and on returning at night, just as the mother advanced from the carriage, she was shot from the veranda of her own house. ...
— Journal of a Voyage to Brazil - And Residence There During Part of the Years 1821, 1822, 1823 • Maria Graham
... which, of all human countenances that I have ever known, was the one that passed most quickly and completely from the expression of gaiety to that of repose. Repose in her face always suggested sadness; and while you were watching it with a kind of awe, and wondering of what tragic secret it was the token, it kindled, on the instant, into a radiant Italian smile. The Countess Scarabelli's smiles tonight, however, were almost uninterrupted. She greeted me—divinely, as her mother used to do; and young Stanmer sat in the corner of the sofa—as I used to ...
— The Diary of a Man of Fifty • Henry James
... doubt, the matter would have ended: a young man fascinated by a pretty woman on the stage—'tis a small matter, and one from which there doth not often spring a weary trail of tragic circumstances. Armand, who had a passion for music, would have worshipped at the shrine of Mlle. Lange's perfect voice until the curtain came down on the last act, had not his friend de Batz seen the keen enchantment which the actress had produced ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... calumniating his name, had no option but contempt, or the sole retribution (wretched though it be) which the customs of the higher class permit to those who live within its pale. But contempt for a wrong that a sorrow so tragic had followed—was that option ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... which no imitation could attain, and which attempted improvement could only mar. The very construction of the whole—for it does appear as a whole—is influenced by the circumstances which made the life of that tragic period. ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... after the tragic years of a world war, and what it will become as a treasure house for the years to come, is ...
— Foch the Man - A Life of the Supreme Commander of the Allied Armies • Clara E. Laughlin
... During his walk with Mr. Alford he appeared interested only in machinery, ores, etc., but his trained eyes made a topographical map of surroundings, and everything centred about Bute's shanty. In the evening, he amply returned his host's hospitality by comic and tragic stories of criminal life. The next day he began to lay his plans carefully, and disappeared soon after breakfast with the ostensible purpose of climbing a height at some distance for the sake of the prospect. He ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... Her face was in her hands again. For a moment she sobbed on, chokingly; then, with a tragic gesture, she lifted her head and looked straight into ...
— Pollyanna Grows Up • Eleanor H. Porter
... as sombre as a tragic mask. She leaned forward, clasping her knee in her thin hands, and looking away from him into remote ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... I know not what thoughts came to her mind as we sat looking out on the pictures o; the mirage which the sun was painting on the desert landscape. But, finally, as we gazed, there seemed, among these weird images, one colossal tragic shape which moved, advanced, changed definitely. Now It stood in giant stature, and now dwindled, but always it came nearer. At last it darkened and denned and so disappeared beyond a blue ridge not half a mile away from us. We realized at last that it was a solitary ...
— The Way of a Man • Emerson Hough
... the maid, and at length won her consent to be his wife. The simple marriage ceremony of the tribe was performed, and Wolsey led Minamee to his home; but the wedding was interrupted in an almost tragic manner, for a surly fellow who had loved the girl, yet who never had found courage to declare himself, was wrought to such a jealous fury at the discovery of Wolsey's good fortune that he sprang at him with a knife, and would have despatched him on the spot had not ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... cotton fields, with the black people hoeing in them and looking no bigger than flocks of birds feeding. And here came another steamboat—and yonder another! The very drift logs, so countlessly frequent, vast trees from vast forests, some of them not yet dead, told to her sobering mind in tragic dumb show as they came gliding and plunging by, the age-long drama of their rise, decline, and fall. Unbrokenly green, yes, forever the one same green, were the low willow and cottonwood jungles of the creeping shores; but while the "labboard" shore was still Louisiana the "stabboard" ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... The contrast between Charlotte's tragic tone and the picture she gave of her small brother was too much for Ruth's gravity, and she laughed ...
— Glenloch Girls • Grace M. Remick
... "And a tragic enough one. We ought to change the old proverb, 'It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of the needle than for a poor man to marry a ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... "and that infernal gorilla waltzing round up there with a live baby?" The Professor's tragic manner would have been the making of a ...
— The Missing Link • Edward Dyson
... were wounded, but from the total darkness, neither their number, nor their situation could be ascertained; and, if this had been possible, it was not in the power of their compatriots to afford them the least relief. During the whole of that tragic night, their groans and lamentations were dreadful in the extreme. Being in the Gun-room I was at some distance from the immediate scene of this bloody outrage, but the distance was by no means far enough to prevent my hearing their continual cries from the extremity of pain, ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... often flowed into blank verse; and so indeed did his sister's [Mrs. Siddons']. Scott (who was a capital mimic) often repeated her tragic exclamation to a foot-boy during ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... character, and almost vies with tragedy: in fact, it is tragedy to the eye, and is amenable to the same laws. The St. Sebastians of Guido and Razzi; the St. Jerome of Domenichino; the sternly beautiful Judith of Allori; the Pieta of Raffaelle; the San Pietro Martire of Titian; are all so many tragic scenes wherein whatever is revolting in circumstances or character is judiciously kept from view, where human suffering is dignified by the moral lesson it is made to convey, and its effect on the beholder at once softened and heightened by the redeeming grace which genius and poetry have ...
— The Diary of an Ennuyee • Anna Brownell Jameson
... pantomime. His brethren who seek the theatre for amusement are of similar opinion, and so are they who stand behind the foot-lights. Therefore it is, that, for every passable comedian, America can produce a whole batch of very fair tragic actors. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... there was neither food nor water on board, the pangs of hunger and thirst became immediately aggravated, and so on the first day of their tragic adventure real suffering commenced in grim earnest, and the full horrors of shipwreck were ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... think and act quickly, or it might be possible that all their hopes and plans for service in France would vanish in one tragic instant. ...
— The Campfire Girls on the Field of Honor • Margaret Vandercook
... life, with no regret at parting; Full of whatever thou could'st give, I rise From thy neglected feast, and go to sleep: Yet, on this brink of death, my eyes are opened, And heaven has bid me prophecy to you, The unjust contrivers of this tragic scene:— An age is coming, when an English monarch With blood shall pay that blood which you have shed: To save your cities from victorious arms, You shall invite the waves to hide your earth[1], And, trembling, to the, tops of houses fly, While deluges invade your lower ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... I left you at Versailles it was the firmness of force of will fighting to accept the inevitable. For I had seen your face. It was like mine, and yet I had to give you up! I had to give you up knowing that I might not see you again; knowing that this tragic, incomprehensible fatality had set you against me; knowing that any further efforts to see you meant only pain for Alice and for me. Whatever happiness she knew came from you, and that she should have. And remember, Jack, that out of all this tragedy I, too, had my point ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... ships-of-the-line and one Neapolitan seventy-four. Of the former, four were three-decked ships, carrying ninety-eight to one hundred guns, a class of vessel of which the French had but one, the "Sans Culottes," of one hundred and twenty, which, under the more dignified name of "L'Orient," afterwards, met so tragic a fate at the Battle of the Nile; but they had, in compensation, three powerful ships of eighty guns, much superior to the British seventy-fours. As, however, only partial engagements followed, the aggregate of force on either side is a matter of ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... was strong again lie led his pack to a new neighborhood, and, as he was never seen or heard of again, he probably shared the fate of most wild animals and died a tragic death. ...
— Rataplan • Ellen Velvin
... [Drawing herself up.] Oh, dear no! They are as happy as possible! And as for trusting us, it is tragic how ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... to stare at the organist. It was a gaze at once mournful and appealing—not different in that respect from the gaze of any of the queer people around him, but it affected Miss Eustis strangely. To her quick imagination, it suggested loneliness, despair, that was the more tragic because of its isolation. It seemed to embody the mute, pent-up distress of whole generations. Somehow Helen felt herself to be playing for the benefit of this poor creature. The echoes of the wedding-march sounded grandly in the little church, then came ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... of Voltaire's tragedies,' he went on wearily, 'there is some worthy who rejoices that he has reached the furthest limit of unhappiness. Though there is nothing tragic in my fate, I will admit I have experienced something of that sort. I have known the bitter transports of cold despair; I have felt how sweet it is, lying in bed, to curse deliberately for a whole morning together the hour and day of my birth. ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... The tragic farce of sending the Emperor to the poisonous plateau of Longwood, and giving Lowe Plantation House with its much more healthy climate to reside at, is a phenomenon which few people who have made themselves conversant with all the facts and circumstances ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... boy of about twelve, recite not only 'Hector's Farewell' from the Iliad, but even Hamlet's celebrated monologue. On one occasion, when I was in the fourth form of the school, one of my schoolfellows, a boy named Starke, suddenly fell dead, and the tragic event aroused so much sympathy, that not only did the whole school attend the funeral, but the headmaster also ordered that a poem should be written in commemoration of the ceremony, and that this poem should be published. Of the various poems submitted, among which there was one by ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner
... on you a year of happiness—only not my philosophic proposition, as you sarcastically call it. That is greater than I and greater than you—pray heaven it do not clash with the promise of our peace. Virgil, I think, meant to exhibit such a tragic conflict in his tale of AEneas and Dido, only poetwise the inner impulse which worked within AEneas he expressed dramatically as a messenger from the gods. It shows but little understanding of the poem or of human ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... the youngest must have been fifty at least. They received the time-honoured wage of tenpence a day, and worked, or talked, about eight hours. They loved to work near the main road, discussing the natural history of the occupants of passing carts or carriages. They knew something comic, tragic, or compromising about everybody, and expressed themselves with epigrammatic force. A farmer occupant of a neighbouring farm in long-past days, was a favourite subject of such recollections. After relating how "he ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... this book may not only entertain by the love story, the tragic yet happily ended romance within its pages—for there is romance here aside from the great Captain and his exploits—but that in a small way it may serve to set forth not so much the brilliance and splendor and glory of war as the ...
— The Eagle of the Empire - A Story of Waterloo • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... liberal Hearts! Is this the land, where Genius ne'er in vain Pour'd forth her soul-enchanting strain? 15 Ah me! yet Butler 'gainst the bigot foe Well-skill'd to aim keen Humour's dart, Yet Butler felt Want's poignant sting; And Otway, Master of the Tragic art, Whom Pity's self had taught to sing, 20 Sank beneath a load of Woe; This ever can the generous Briton hear, And starts not in his eye ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... it is that is always ready to depart from the body, and is unconcerned as to whether she will be extinguished, scattered, or removed! But she must be prepared upon reasonable grounds, and not out of mere obstinacy like the Christians; her fortitude must have nothing of noise or of tragic ostentation, but must ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... happy home have withdrawn her from public life—but the genius of Miss Adelaide Kemble will not be soon forgotten. Another bright ornament of our stage, however, still remains. Possessing less physical energy and tragic power than her contemporary, Mrs Alfred Shaw is, nevertheless, the most pure, polished, and cultivated English singer we ever heard on the boards of our national theatre. The finish and refinement of her style, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various
... government, and which failed to accomplish all that was hoped, the Emperor Maximilian I. of Mexico projected a scientific exploration of the ruins of Yucatan during his brief reign, while he was sustained by the assistance of the French. The tragic death of this monarch prevented the execution of his plans; but his character, and his efforts for the improvement of Mexico, earned for this accomplished but unfortunate prince the gratitude and respect of students of antiquity, and even of Mexicans who were ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... of Margaret of York, wife of Charles the Bold, who after the tragic death of her consort retired to Malines, was in the Rue de l'Empereur. It was used latterly as the hospital, and was utterly destroyed in the bombardment ...
— Vanished towers and chimes of Flanders • George Wharton Edwards
... itself, and too much dependent upon exciting narrative, tearful appeal and poetic romance. The cultivation of the missionary principle and the inculcation of the doctrine of the privilege and beauty of supporting missions, apart from any impassioned appeals or tragic events, is one of the desiderata of the Church today. It is a morbid condition of the mind of the Church which demands exciting narrative and hysterical appeal in order to arouse it to its duty in this matter; and it also tends ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... of the young, care-free things, had come a glimmer of fore-vision of the long tragic days, treasure trails and desert deaths, primitive devotions and ungodly vengeance, in which the threads of their own lives would be entangled before those two ever heard the music of the ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... and weariness, yet O we loved it so! As on we tramped exultantly, and no man was our master, And no man guessed what dreams were ours, as, swinging heel and toe, We tramped the road to Anywhere, the magic road to Anywhere, The tragic road to Anywhere, such ...
— The Spell of the Yukon • Robert Service
... him as a refugee, as a persecuted woman, with tears in her eyes. She had told him a tragic story of Thugut's tyranny and wanton lust. Because she had refused to submit to the voluptuous desires of the Austrian minister, he had sworn to ruin her, and his love had turned into furious hatred. She further stated the minister had threatened ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... raised the portiere, placed her right hand on the key of the door; and, standing against the rich background of the sapphire and ruby-colored folds of the Oriental draperies, she turned her head toward the friend she was leaving, and said, a little mockingly, yet with a touch of tragic emotion: ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... upon me—in spite of his ridiculous philosophy—to belittle my ambitions, to make of small worth my achievements, to bring home to me the fact that in spite of these I was neither contented nor happy though he kept his humour and his poise, he implied an experience that was far deeper, more tragic and more significant than mine. I was goaded into making an ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and tragic strain that lies so deep in the Celtic race now rose to the surface and transformed him. He took a step forward and ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... serve as a general explanation of their purport. The second, twelfth and fourteenth rhapsodies are admirable examples of the series. In general these "Hungarian Rhapsodies" open with a few brief bars suggestive of tragic recitative, which leads into a broad yet strongly marked and searching rhythm, upon which is built a slow, stately yet mournful melody, broken in upon here and there by strange weird runs and rapid passages. These latter serve a double purpose. They imitate the curious aeolian harp effects of the ...
— The Pianolist - A Guide for Pianola Players • Gustav Kobb
... cried imploringly, and she held up the hair-brush: "Please! Please don't be so dreadfully stuffy and—tragic. You're always saying or looking or hinting that I've changed. Just because I've got to know really congenial people, and go about more, and am frightfully keen on—on everything, you behave as though ...
— The Garden Party • Katherine Mansfield
... gallantry has been many times re-told, but never grows wearisome. The memory of that stormy voyage of the Forfarshire, which ended in disaster on the Harcar rocks in the Farne group, remains in men's minds as the dark and tragic setting which throws into bright relief the gallant action of the father and daughter who dared almost certain death to rescue their fellow-creatures in peril. It was in September, 1838, that the ill-fated vessel ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry
... been uncertain of the outcome of the convention, and will eventually bring to us many who are sick of the hypocrisies, the shams and the illusions that have held them in chains for nearly three tragic years." ...
— The Red Conspiracy • Joseph J. Mereto
... to tell is something in its nature akin to that of poor Mrs. Jones, who was happy enough down in Devonshire till that wicked Lieutenant Smith came and persecuted her; not quite so tragic, perhaps, as it is stained neither by murder nor madness. But before I can hope to interest readers in the perplexed details of the life of a not unworthy lady, I must do more than remind them that they do know, or might have known, or should ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... off in languid nothingness, and he slept. Dodson arose preparatory to stretching himself on his couch. But first he bent over his friend with a sense of tragic appreciation. ...
— The Shape of Fear • Elia W. Peattie
... quintessence of life. We sit moping over a smoky charcoal fire in a dug-out. Suddenly someone, more wide-awake than others remembers the 'Fragments.' Out it comes, and we laugh uproariously over each picture. For are these not the very things we are witnessing every day, incidents full of tragic humour? The fed-up spirit you see on the faces of Bairnsfather's pictures is a sham—a mask beneath which there lies something that is ...
— Fragments From France • Captain Bruce Bairnsfather
... been the same since Lemuel Shackford's death; he had never crossed its threshold; Margaret had scarcely known him by sight, and Mr. Slocum had not spoken to him for years; but Richard's connection with the unfortunate old man had brought the tragic event very close to Margaret and her father. Mr. Slocum was a person easily depressed, but his depression this morning was so greatly in excess of the presumable cause that Margaret ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... two talked, while the other woman watched them furtively. Her face was that of one who has lived much in a short space of time and her dark, burning eyes betrayed tragic depths of feeling. Her black hair, slightly tinged with grey, was brushed straight back from her wrinkled forehead. Her shoulders were stooped and her ...
— Flower of the Dusk • Myrtle Reed
... kick with his utmost power against his fair, fat, substantial partner. What is the result? He did not calculate the "vis inertiae," that a little body kicking against the greater is wont to come off second best—so he kicks himself out of bed, and here ends the comedy of the affair; the rest is tragic enough. Some how or other, in his fall, he broke his neck upon the spot. This was a very awkward affair. The bell is rung, up come the friends; the story is told, nor is it other than they had suspected. It does not end here, for, of course, there must be an inquest. It is an Irish jury. All ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... bowl, Worthy to shine in hall or bower, When spring-time brings the reveller's hour. Grave it with themes of chaste design, Fit for a simple board like mine. Display not there the barbarous rites In which religious zeal delights; Nor any tale of tragic fate Which History shudders to relate. No—cull thy fancies from above, Themes of heaven and themes of love. Let Bacchus, Jove's ambrosial boy, Distil the grape in drops of joy, And while he smiles at every tear, ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... better known by the sobriquet of Juan Chiquito or "Little John," which his diminutive stature had earned for him. This worthy is represented as a constant disturber of the peace, and he met the tragic fate which his reckless life had invited. From being a trusted friend he had incurred the enmitv of a noted character named Charley Antobees, than whom, perhaps, no one has had a more varied frontier experience. Coming to the Rocky Mountains in 1836 in the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... refinement, highly educated—whose volume, "A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains," is one of the earliest and most picturesque accounts of that time—upon whom "Rocky Mountain Jim" exerted his blandishments. Some sort of romance existed between them, how serious no one knows, for the tragic shooting of Jim, by an irate pioneer father, ...
— A Mountain Boyhood • Joe Mills
... I describe the struggle of an ancient people towards liberty. I tell of a Mongol nation, roughly awakened from its long sleep, under conditions of tragic terror, that has seized hold of and is clinging fast to, things vital to civilization as we see it, freedom and free faith, the honour of their women, the development ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... out of four of Dionysos we hear nothing. We see, it may be, Agamemnon returning from Troy, Clytemnestra waiting to slay him, the vengeance of Orestes, the love of Phaedra for Hippolytos, the hate of Medea and the slaying of her children: stories beautiful, tragic, morally instructive it may be, but scarcely, we feel, religious. The orthodox Greeks themselves sometimes complained that in the plays enacted before them there was "nothing to ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison
... nothing I admire more than a woman who has a mind and uses it. I'll tell you something else," he said, standing and permitting Kessler to rise this time. "I was truly sorry about Eileen Bennett's death on this plane, but Eileen was getting along like me. Sarah Pollitt's was the really tragic case, to have accomplished so much so young and with that fearful handicap! ...
— The Last Straw • William J. Smith
... to dwell upon it now. The tale of actual experience which the rescuers have brought back, with Caspar's surmises added, has given her a full and clear comprehension of everything; not only explaining the tragic event already past, but foreshadowing other and further dangers yet to come, and which may, at any moment, descend upon herself and the dear ones still left ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... not without its heady charm for a girl with the facile, the almost tragic, adaptability of seventeen years. True, it was not married life as she had dreamed it; but it was her husband's life. She made ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... not one which Barbara would have chosen for Georgina to see, being one that was advertised as a thriller. It was full of hair-breadth escapes and tragic scenes. There was a shipwreck in it, and passengers were brought ashore in the breeches buoy, just as she had seen sailors brought in on practice days over at the Race Point Lifesaving station. And there was a still form stretched out stark and dripping under ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the hall door, but she declined to shake hands with me. Her appearance was little short of tragic. I think that at another time I might have been amused, for never in my life had I spoken more than a few courteous words to the girl. But my nerves were all on edge, and I took her seriously. I walked down the street, leaving her standing in ...
— The Betrayal • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... something so tragic in the words of the boys that Mr Rogers and his sons seized their guns, and telling Coffee and Chicory to lead, they went straight for the forest-land towards which Coffee said he ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... on the score of the delusive farces which, with pretences almost as transparent as the above, are from time to time played off for the purpose of easing the public of their superfluous cash. Let us glance briefly at a speculation of a different kind, no less a bubble as it proved, but one whose tragic issues have already wrought the wreck of many innocent families, and which, at the present moment, under the operation of the Winding-up Act, is darkening with ruin and the fear of ruin a hundred humble abodes. We have good reason ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... significant word,—'faithless and perverse generation.' The addition carries a grave lesson, as teaching us that the two characteristics are inseparably united; that the want of faith is morally a crime and sin; that unbelief is at once the most tragic manifestation of man's perverse will, and also in its turn the source of still more obstinate and wide-spreading evil. Blindness to His light and rejection of His love, He treats as the very head ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... land was formerly the land of Polybos, and Adrastos was daughter's son to Polybos, and Polybos dying without sons gave his kingdom to Adrastos: the Sikyonians then not only gave other honours to Adrastos, but also with reference to his sufferings they specially honoured him with tragic choruses, not paying the honour to Dionysos but to Adrastos. Cleisthenes however gave back the choruses to Dionysos, and the other rites besides this he ...
— The History Of Herodotus - Volume 2 (of 2) • Herodotus
... very words of the most modest amongst all poets. Of the same manner are our songs which are turned into burlesque, and the serious words of the author perverted into a ridiculous meaning. Thus in Timon's "silli" the words are generally those of Homer and the tragic poets, but he applies them satirically to some customs and kinds of philosophy which he arraigns. But the Romans not using any of these parodies in their satires—sometimes indeed repeating verses of other ...
— Discourses on Satire and Epic Poetry • John Dryden
... of my introduction to Castleman County. It was a long time before I went there, but I learned to know its inhabitants from Sylvia's stories of them. Funny stories, tragic stories, wild and incredible stories out of a half-barbaric age! She would tell them and we would laugh together; but then a wistful look would come into her eyes, and a silence would fall. So very soon I made the discovery that my Sylvia ...
— Sylvia's Marriage • Upton Sinclair
... may be amusing, it may be tragic," was the man's reply. "We're picking up May Cranston ...
— The Golden Face - A Great 'Crook' Romance • William Le Queux |
