"Lugubrious" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spacious and handsomely furnished—being, in fact, the chamber of Mrs. Wilcox, the mother of the little fellow who occupied the wide bed. He lay there in lugubrious state, the rosy face stained with much crying, just showing above the edge of the counterpane; his tangle of yellow curls crushed upon the bolster. Below these was a white mound, stretched along the middle of the bed, just the length of ...
— Choice Readings for the Home Circle • Anonymous
... assume a very different aspect under a northern sky, where young Absolute, found by his Lydia Languish "in the garden, in the coldest night in January, stuck like a dripping statue," presents a rather lugubrious spectacle. Horace (Odes, III. 7) warns the fair Asterie, during the absence of her husband abroad, to shut her ears against the musical nocturnes ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... All lamplit, allegorically decorated: a Tree of Liberty sixty feet high; and Phrygian Cap on it, of size enormous, under which King Arthur and his round-table might have dined! In the depths of the background, is a single lugubrious lamp, rendering dim-visible one of your iron cages, half-buried, and some Prison stones,—Tyranny vanishing downwards, all gone but the skirt: the rest wholly lamp-festoons, trees real or of pasteboard; ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... farmers were rapidly proceeding to ruin in consequence of free-trade, and their vaticinations of frightful calamities to the nation were singular displays of extraordinary hypocrisy, or delusions. Amongst the most doleful prophets and lugubrious friends of agriculture was Benjamin Disraeli. He was also the most acrimonious of advocates, while defending claims ignored by the nation as unjust, denounced by political economists as injurious; and, obviously in the exclusive ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... life—and the cat's—and now leading you all over town to keep those nice white slippers clean! By rights, you oughtn't to dance with anybody else. But I ain't looking for real gratitude. Four or five waltzes is all I'll insist on, but—" His tone was lugubrious in the extreme. ...
— Lonesome Land • B. M. Bower
... examination had not fully undeceived me, instead of now being in a state to console you and to reassure you against yourself, you would see me at the present moment partaking your inquietudes, and augmenting in your mind the lugubrious ideas with which I perceive you to be tormented. Thanks to Reason and Philosophy, an unruffled serenity long ago irradiated my understanding, and banished the terrors with which I was formerly agitated. ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... the barrieres—hoping, nay, almost expecting, that the murderer would not drink it without some sign of repugnance. And yet the contrary proved the case. However, the young detective had no time to ponder over the circumstance, for a rumble of wheels now announced the approach of that lugubrious vehicle, ...
— Monsieur Lecoq • Emile Gaboriau
... now at his wits' end, but wishing to finish this lugubrious performance with a flourish, proposed (unhappy thought) that I should address a few words to the now miserable, broken-hearted crowd. I will give you a thousand guesses, dear aunty, and still you will never guess the idiotic words that ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... that death-chamber lugubrious: the windows wide open, the night and the wind entering freely from the garden, making a strong draught; a human form on a table; the body, which had just been embalmed; the hollow skull filled with a sponge, ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... caresses were insupportable. He held her, however, in his arms, and gazed at himself in the pier glass most uncomfortably over her shoulder. "Oh, Jack," she said, "oh, Jack,—what is to come next?" His face became somewhat more lugubrious than before, but he said not a word. "I cannot lose you altogether. There is no one else in the wide world that I care for. Papa thinks of nothing but his whist. Aunt Ju, with her 'Rights of Women,' ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope
... anywhere. I now gave up our man as lost, but still held on, in a pouring mixture of sleet and snow, which added considerably to the gloom of the scene. Every now and then the old mate, who was in very low spirits, would raise a lugubrious wail at the top of his voice of "Ai Khansaman Jee! Ai Khansaman Jee?" "Oh, cook of my soul! oh, cook of my soul, where art thou?" at the same time apparently apostrophizing the deepest whirlpools of the torrent, while the roar of the waters effectually prevented ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... this small quantity of honey could have been which was so fatal in its effects. The preacher said nothing to explain this, but heightened the effect of his mysterious allusion with the words—pronounced in a very hollow and lugubrious tone—tetigisse periisse. At other times the text would be the passage from Jeremiah, "Mors ascendit per fenestras" This puzzled me still more, for what could be this death which came up through the windows, these butterfly wings which the lightest ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... ahead with your canal, I'm afraid that my chance of retaining the water is poor, very poor," Menocal said, with a lugubrious sigh. He drew his fat chin deeper into his coat collar, tugged at the ice on his big white moustache, and ran his eyes up and down the long line of moving teams. "And it will cost me a lot of money." Again the sigh. "I didn't ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... in cunning,[1186] if we may believe his successor in office—had proved himself unequal to the duties of his present position, by giving way to extreme despondency. In the gay capital of France he led a wretched life, in constant dread of future disaster, and ceaselessly uttering lugubrious prognostications. To the Pope he announced that religious matters in France were desperate; everything was rushing to ruin with ever-increasing velocity. The queen mother was unsound in the faith, although, from motives of policy, she dissembled her true sentiments. She favored a preacher, ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... another side to Villiers' temperament. It was piercing and acute in an altogether different sense—a side of forbidding pleasantry and fierce raillery. No longer was it the paradoxical mystifications of Poe, but a scoffing that had in it the lugubrious and savage comedy which Swift possessed. A series of sketches, les Demoiselles de Bienfilatre, l'Affichage celeste, la Machine a gloire, and le Plus beau diner du monde, betrayed a singularly inventive and keenly bantering mind. The whole order of contemporary and ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... very identical puppet performers of Harry Rowe, the famous Yorkshire trumpeter. These, I suppose, were the first plays I ever saw. Those were pleasant walks to Claverton, and pleasant days at Claverton Hall! I wish Hans Breitmann and his "Avay in die Ewigkeit" did not come in, like a ludicrous, lugubrious burden, to all one's reminiscences of places and people one knew upward ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... night was now closing in, and we were going through our performances by the slight illumination of the stars, without any positive certainty as to where the Captain kept his tinder box and candle, that we might furnish some sort of light upon the lugubrious state of affairs. ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... precious article, and quench the sparks with my hands, I see through the flames some of his own garments floating into the fire. The wind blows the sticks down and prostrates an impromptu clothes-line with all its load, while the maid's lugubrious countenance, as she dries petticoat after petticoat and skirt after skirt, set me speculating how much there would be left of her if she took them all off. Our Indian visitors sit hugging their knees and holding their bare feet to the fire, gazing at all the trouble we take over our absurd ...
— A Trip to Manitoba • Mary FitzGibbon
... looked as if it only awaited the will of the owner to be the most active piece of human machinery that ever responded to the impulses of youth and health. But then, his face! What pencil could faithfully delineate features at once so comical and lugubrious—features that one moment expressed the most solemn seriousness, and the next, the most grotesque and absurd abandonment to mirth? In him, all extremes appeared to meet; the man was a contradiction to himself. Tom was a person of few ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... and just then Ching began to tune the instrument, screwing the pegs up and down, and producing the most lugubrious sounds, which somehow made me begin to think of home, and how strange it was to be sitting there in a place which seemed like part of a picture, listening to ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... he says, "in the sense in which Mr. Tegner uses the expression, certainly betray a disease of the soul, but this disease is not peculiar to a temperament which is fostered by a personal emotional affinity for lugubrious topics and ideas given by birth and developed by circumstances; but it is inherent in the weakness (which at times doubtless surprises even the strongest ...) of desiring to set up its sorrowful view of the world as a theory, and treat it as ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... recruiting to be lively among them too, because for thousands of them it was soldier's pay or no bread. Among the troops from the country death had begun to reap great harvests ere a gun was fired, and in all the camps lovers nightly sang their lugubrious "Lorena," feeling that "a hundred months had passed" before they had really dragged through one. March was so tedious, and lovers are such poor arithmeticians. Wherever Hilary Kincaid went, showing these how to cast cannon (that would not burst), those where to build ...
— Kincaid's Battery • George W. Cable
... fat, with a round, red, sentimental nose, and he plays with his eyes turned up to the sky and a look of infinite yearning. He is playing a bass part upon his cello, and so the excitement is nothing to him; no matter what happens in the treble, it is his task to saw out one long-drawn and lugubrious note after another, from four o'clock in the afternoon until nearly the same hour next morning, for his third of the total income of ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... of February 23, we marched up to relieve the Berks. Near Foucaucourt the cookers gave us tea. There also we changed into gumboots. Guides met us at Estrees cross-roads, a trysting place possible only when dusk had fallen, and the lugubrious procession started along a tramway track among whose iron sleepers the men floundered considerably, partly from their precaution of choosing gumboots several sizes too large. On this occasion the ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... presence of the girls made the punishment a disgrace to rankle and burn. Jacker, for pride and the credit of his boyhood made no sound under the first dozen cuts; but his younger brother Ted, from his place in the Lower Fifth, set up a lugubrious wail of sympathy almost immediately, and, as his feelings were more and more wrought upon by the painful sight, his wailing developed into shrill and tearful abuse ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... of lugubrious visions and suspicions, one day disgraced General Swetchine by removing him from office. But this official dismission did not entail banishment, and was followed by no loss of social caste. The general and his exemplary wife continued to live amidst their numerous friends as happily as ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger
... that young Willard's home was gloomy and joyless, because it was presided over by a religious woman. The Presbyterians of that day and that race were by no means a lugubrious people. They did not necessarily view their lives as a mere vale of tears, nor did they think the "night side of nature" the most sacred one. The Rev. Mr. Morrison, one of their divines, tells us that "the thoughtless, the grave, the old ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... that still," Jim said. "But it will be useful, all the same, Murty." He laughed at the stockman's lugubrious face. "Oh, I know it's giving you the sort of pain you had when dad had the telephone ...
— Back To Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... yore, as not long since. But the necessity of speaking in low tones distinguishes our remarks and imposes on them a lugubrious tranquillity. ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... be as quiet as possible. To take his mind off the disappointment, Coristine asked Ben if he could sing and paddle too. He guessed he could, as paddling wasn't taking his breath away any. So Ben was pressed to sing, and at once assumed a lugubrious air, that reminded the lawyer of The Crew. The song was about a dying youth, who is asked what he will give in legacy to his mother, his sister, and various other relatives. He is liberal to all, till his lady-love's ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... at her," he exclaimed, turning to Miss Bart with lugubrious merriment—"I beg your pardon, but do just look at my wife making a fool of that poor devil over there! One would really suppose she was gone on him—and it's all the other way ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... from tracing the course of the valley. We have hitherto had to struggle against mental anxieties, against fatigues, heat, drought, and thirst: we have now to contend with rain and with floods. Everything is becoming awfully damp, and everybody looks awfully dismal. I can see, from the lugubrious countenances of the Kailouees and the blacks, that the rainy season is their real winter. They go shivering about, and seem as if they were half drowned. Our Bornou gauze-cotton tent still bears up well, however, and keeps out ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 1 • James Richardson
... attended a more lugubrious function. When I arrived I found Caerlaverock, the Prime Minister, and the three other members of the Cabinet standing round a small fire in attitudes of nervous dejection. I remember it was a raw wet evening, but the gloom out of doors was sunshine compared to the gloom within. ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... every argument in their power. Often have they been heard in the dusk of evening singing behind a remote hedge that melancholy ditty, "Let us BOTH be unhappy together," which rose upon the twilight breeze with a cautious quaver of sorrow truly heartrending and lugubrious. ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various
... dismantled, and in place of the former drawing-room suite were gathered together incongruous waifs and strays from dining- and smoking-room and boudoir. A number of heavy chairs predominated covered in a maroon leather which had cracked in places; and there were three lugubrious sofas to match. ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... cell along with him, slept with him during the night, accompanied him to the gallows in the morning, and sat under him when they were adjusting the noose, looking up with feelings of unutterable dismay, as clearly indicated by the lugubrious and woebegone cast of his ragged countenance. ...
— Gascoyne, The Sandal Wood Trader - A Tale of the Pacific • R. M. Ballantyne
... bewildered, Mop put up his head, and gave vent to his perplexities in a long and lugubrious howl, to which certainly none who heard it could ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the island, even though it be only to cross to the mainland. The gift of such sight is sometimes hereditary in a family for generations, but this is not an invariable rule, for it often appears sporadically in one member of a family otherwise free from its lugubrious influence. ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... Why, you're only a baby...." Mrs. Minto shook her head several times, with lugubrious effect. But her last words had been full of a smothered affection, more truly precious than a hundred of Gaga's kisses or a dozen ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... have here undertaken becomes known to the public, it will be seen how many and how important are the retrenchments to be made from that lugubrious page of our history. Another important circumstance may be appreciated, which appears to me to arise from all these facts. After having weighed my proofs, every one I hope will join me in seeing that the wretches around the scaffold of Bailly were ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... the grandeur of the whole design, the greatness of Chicago. Then they drove to a vast new hotel in which Mr. Parker had taken a conservative interest, and they still talked of the marvellous growth of the city, its Ultimate Destiny,—terms which had a lugubrious sound in the New Englander's piping voice. As they turned northwards around the great oval of Washington Park, the sun was sinking into a golden haze of dust and smoke. The horses dropped to a peaceful ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... resplendent, the palpitating day. One of Gordon's nephews—a shock of tow hair rising rebellious against an application of soap, stubby, scarred hands, shoes obviously come by in their descent from more mature extremities—who had been audibly snuffling for the past ten minutes, burst into a lugubrious, frightened wail. Through the solemn, appointed periods of the minister cut the sibilant, maternal promise ...
— Mountain Blood - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Watson sent that dispatch to Marion which, from its lugubrious tenor, has acquired a degree of notoriety much greater than the name of the officer from whom it emanated. He complained to Marion of his modes of fighting, objected to the ambuscades of the partisan, and particularly complained that his picquets and sentinels ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... rain comes on with the night, the trees drip, drip in a feeble melancholy sort of way, the wind has a lugubrious sob in its voice, and it is intensely dark. It is about nine o'clock, when Miss Catheron rises from her place by the sick-bed and goes out of the room. In the corridor she stands a moment, with the air of one who looks, and listens. She sees no one. The dark ...
— A Terrible Secret • May Agnes Fleming
... such as "Darwin Chews Dirt; Critic Boulnois says He Jumps the Shocks"—or "Keep Catastrophic, says Thinker Boulnois." And Mr Calhoun Kidd, of the Western Sun, was bidden to take his butterfly tie and lugubrious visage down to the little house outside Oxford where Thinker Boulnois lived in happy ignorance of ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... thought perhaps that a Cockney dandy could not be caricatured, and he consequently went desperate lengths, but threw in here and there a touch of nature. Mr. Lyon was as energetic as ever in Gammon; Mrs. Yates as lugubrious as is her wont in Miss Aubrey; Mrs. Grattan acted and looked as if she were quite deserving of a man with ten thousand a year. As to her singing, if her husband were in possession of twenty thousand per annum, (would to the gods he were!) it could not have been more charmingly tasteful. The ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... a footstep drawing near; Her voice is mute, her song is done, She waits, PONOMO to appear, In shadowed silence all alone. Beneath lugubrious hemlock shade Her heart beats with expectancy, And Kitchewonk's own dusky maid Trusts Rippowam's fidelity. He comes! She sees him near the lake; She knows his form, his step, his voice; No other charm for her could make Her heart and soul ...
— Our Profession and Other Poems • Jared Barhite
... time without excusing himself. He got back while Janet was still engaged upon the article. When she looked up he was standing beside the fire looking down at her. There was something new in his face, a look half lugubrious, semi-humorous, apologetic. ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... lugubrious account of his troubles with space sick voyagers. But I was in no mood to listen to him. My gaze was down on the spider incline, up which, over the bend of the ship's sleek, silvery body, the passengers and their friends were coming ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings
... was a most lugubrious judge, and was always complaining of something or other, but chiefly about the state of his health, so that Curran remarked that it was strange the old judge was plaintive in every case tried ...
— Law and Laughter • George Alexander Morton
... keep up my courage; this lugubrious story would haunt me in spite of myself. Happily the weather soon cleared, and the rays of a bright sun dissipated the clouds which still veiled Mont Blanc, and, at the same time, ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... Jane had heard that lugubrious tone from time to time, and she knew what it meant—an air of sorrow concealing secret joy. So, here was another benefit the company—she preferred to think of it as the company rather than as her father—expected to gain from the strike. It could put off replacing the miserable old cars in which ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... imprisoned in their kennel, was the only sound which came to break the strange silence, and the distant thunder, with its dull rumbling, repeated by the echoes, responded plaintively, and gave a lugubrious character ...
— Gerfaut, Complete • Charles de Bernard
... you the last lugubrious sheet, I have not had time to write you further. When I say that I had not time, that as usual means, that the three demons, indolence, business, and ennui, have so completely shared my hours among them, as not to leave me a five minutes' ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... declares, "It will go luckily with some four-faced Christians, if, with the fullest belief in their own right of entry of paradise, they are not 'stopped at the very doors'"; and the parson, in the case, gets but his deserts, when at his lugubrious sham-piety are hurled stanzas ...
— The Atlantic Monthly , Volume 2, No. 14, December 1858 • Various
... festival, echoing as do no other bells in the world from wall to wall, roof to roof, canal to canal. Everybody moved as though they were inspired with a gay sense of adventure, men and women laughing; the Isvostchicks surveying possible fares with an eye less patronising and lugubrious than usual, the flower women and the beggars and the little Chinese boys and the wicked old men who stare at you as though they were dreaming of Eastern debauches, shared in the sun and tang of the air and high colour of ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... I!" said half a dozen voices. There was silence while the old clock on the mantel wheezed out a lugubrious eight strokes. "LORD, how it rains!" muttered ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... of Hamilton Fish, as Secretary of State, suggested extreme conservatism and probable deference to Sumner. The name of George S. Boutwell, as Secretary of the Treasury, suggested only a somewhat lugubrious joke; Mr. Boutwell could be described only as the opposite of Mr. McCulloch, and meant inertia; or, in plain words, total extinction for any one resembling Henry Adams. On the other hand, the name of Jacob D. Cox, as Secretary of the Interior, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... The attic roof, which sloped sharply on both sides of the room, was full of chinks through which the wind penetrated. Nothing could be less stately, yet nothing was ever more solemn than this lugubrious ceremony. Silence so deep that some far-distant cry could have pierced it, lent a sombre majesty to the nocturnal scene. The grandeur of the occasion contrasted vividly with the poverty of its circumstances, and roused a feeling of religious terror. On either side of the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various
... rideth England with seven thousand spies; these three years I have lived in terror of my life. I have had no bliss that fear hath not entered into—in very truth inter delicias semper aliquid saevi nos strangulavit.' His lugubrious tones grew higher with hatred; he raised one hand above his head and one gripped tight her fat shoulder. 'Terror hath bestridden our realm of England; no man dares to whisper his hate even to the rushes. Me! Me! Me!' he reached a pitch of high-voiced fury. 'Me! ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... offers Sikou a cardboard mask representing the bloated countenance of Dai-Cok, god of wealth; and Sikou replies by a long crystal trumpet, by means of which are produced the most extraordinary sounds, like a turkey gobbling. Everything is uncouth, fantastical to excess, grotesquely lugubrious; everywhere we are surprised by incomprehensible conceptions, which seem the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti
... roof in the central part. This roof could be raised or lowered at will. The building was covered with black roofing paper, and was also painted black inside. There was no scenery to render gay this lugubrious environment, but the black interior served as the common background for the performers, throwing all their actions into high relief. The whole structure was set on a pivot so that it could be swung around with the sun; and the movable ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... and history. The stage has humor. It abhors stupidity. It despises hypocrisy. It holds up to laughter the peculiarities, the idiosyncrasies, and the little insanities of mankind. It thrusts the spear of ridicule through the shield of pretence. It laughs at the lugubrious and it has ever taught and will, in all probability, forever teach, that Man is more than a title, and that human love laughs at all barriers, at all the prejudices of society and caste that tend to keep apart ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... shroud of coarse canvas and a red linen winding-sheet, sewn together at the back, and kept in place by transverse bands disposed at intervals from head to foot. The son of the deceased and a "man of the roll" were present at this lugubrious toilet, and recited at the application of each piece a prayer, in which its object was defined and its duration secured. Every Egyptian was supposed to be acquainted with the formulas, from having learned them during his lifetime, by which he was to have restored to him the use of his limbs, ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... lamplight, shining on their moving dark bodies and glittering, baleful eyes, made the place look like a bank of earth set with fireflies. The dogs dashed on, but at the threshold suddenly stopped and snarled, and then, simultaneously lifting their noses, began to howl in most lugubrious fashion. The rats were multiplying in thousands, and ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... sacred character. With the hope of winning the O'Kelly from one at least of his sinful tendencies, the piano had been got rid of, and its place in the drawing-room filled by an American organ of exceptionally lugubrious tone. With this we had had to make shift, and though the O'Kelly—a veritable musical genius—had succeeded in evolving from it an accompaniment to "Sally in Our Alley" less misleading and confusing than might otherwise have been the case, the result had not been to lighten our labours. ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... youngest—became suddenly attentive. Turning over the leaves of the hymnbook, he then gave out the first two lines of a hymn. The choir accordion in the front side bench awoke like an infant into wailing life, and Cissy Appleby, soprano, took up a little more musically the lugubrious chant. At the close of the verse the preacher joined in, after a sailor fashion, with a breezy bass that seemed to fill the little building with the trouble of the sea. Then followed prayer from Deacon Shadwell, broken by "Amens" from the preacher, with a nautical ...
— A Protegee of Jack Hamlin's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... associated with a hand-cart as decrepit as himself, but not nearly so cheerful; for though he spoke up briskly with a spirit uttered from far within the wrinkles and the stubble, the cart had preceded him with a very lugubrious creak. It groaned, in fact, under a load of tin cans, and I was to learn from the old man that there was, and had been, in his person, for thirteen years, such a thing in the world as a peddler of buttermilk, and that these cans were ...
— Suburban Sketches • W.D. Howells
... sorcerers, alchemists, compounders of magical powders and philtres, frightful rumours circulated, "pacts with the devil were talked of, sacrifices of new-born babies, incantations, sacrilegious Masses and other practices as disquieting as they were lugubrious."[259] Even the King's mistress, Madame de Montespan, is said to have had recourse to black Masses in order to retain the royal favour through the agency of the celebrated sorceress La Voisin, with whom she was later implicated in an accusation of having ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster
... sing a comic song, or he would beg to be allowed to enliven the occasion by the instant introduction of a brief double-shuffle. Barry Cornwall told me that when he and Charles Lamb were once making up a dinner-party together, Charles asked him not to invite a certain lugubrious friend of theirs. "Because," said Lamb, "he would cast a damper even over a funeral." I have often contrasted the habitual qualities of that gloomy friend of theirs with the astounding spirits of both Thackeray and Dickens. They always seemed to me to ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... him with very serious eyes, as he passed through the bar, he had borne that, and his carriage up the stairs; but when he was transferred to his father, whose air, as he took the boy, was melancholy and lugubrious in the extreme, the poor little fellow could endure no longer a mode of treatment so unusual, and, with a grimace which for a moment or two threatened the coming storm, burst out with an infantine howl. "That's how he has ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope
... by an owl, hooting in the ivy outside—no unaccustomed sound, but harsh and melancholy; once, by a long and mournful howling set up by the mastiff, chained in the yard beyond the wing I occupied. A long-drawn, lugubrious howling was this latter, and much such a note as the vulgar declare to herald a death in the family. This was a fancy I had never shared; but yet I could not help feeling that the dog's mournful moans ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... seized it with both hands, and, oblivious to the hopeful derision Gathering on the faces of those about me, I breathed into it all the despair and anguish of my expiring breath. It gave forth a hollow, soulless, and lugubrious squeak, utterly out of proportion to the vital force expended, yet I felt that I had triumphed, and detected a new expression of awe and admiration on the faces of ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... Dream', and it had been written by a certain James Hyslop, a schoolmaster on a man-of-war. I do not know how it came into my possession, but I remember it was adorned by an extremely dim and ill-executed wood-cut of a lake surrounded by mountains, with tombstones in the foreground. This lugubrious frontispiece positively fascinated me, and lent a further gloomy charm to the ballad itself. It was in this copy of mediocre verses that the sense of romance first appealed to me, the kind of nature-romance which is connected with hills, and lakes, and the picturesque ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... messages, then substituted different words to be used in place of the originals. This bit of thoughtfulness on his part was eminently cheering, and when soon afterward he took hasty leave of Grace and Mrs. Gray the latter appeared to be in a less lugubrious frame of mind. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... waits for the return-tide to enact his shrewd and pantomimic morality-play by a hurried shuffle up and down the pavement. The news-dealers—even the enterprising female who summons mercy to the aid of commerce by her absurdly lugubrious visage—have the paper and the change all ready to thrust into their customer's hand. The scene at the crossing of the street baffles description. Talk of the day of miracles being past! One who ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, November 1885 • Various
... yellow river was running like a mill-race, bending the willows, lapping hungrily at the crumbling shore. The bank was black with groups of people, tearful wives and whimpering children, lugubrious neighbors, pessimistic citizens. Bruce called the men together and assigned each boat its place in line. Beyond explicit orders that no boatman should attempt to pass another and the barges must be kept a safe distance ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... emphatically as almost to convince us of his belief that in refusing to mourn in the most lugubrious degree for cousins the Versaillese ...
— A Versailles Christmas-Tide • Mary Stuart Boyd
... they are also reckless about to-morrow's bread and whether the tent is safe against a hurricane in the night. He is struck too by the fact that they are much more vocal than the French troops, and that they seem to have a passion for bad lugubrious songs. There he smiles and shrugs his shoulders, and indeed what else can any of us do in the presence of that mystery? At any rate the legend of the "phlegmatic" Englishman has been scattered to ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... in such lugubrious tones that even Nellie laughed, although sharing his feelings about the prospect of a wet day, with the more than probable contingency of their being confined to the house. "What shall ...
— Bob Strong's Holidays - Adrift in the Channel • John Conroy Hutcheson
... everything was devised that could strike the imagination, awaken curiosity, or excite terror. The awful oath that has been administered in some Continental lodges would send a thrill of horror through every right-minded person, whilst the lugubrious ceremonies the aspirant has to pass elicit a smile—such, for instance, of leading the young Mason with bandaged eyes around the inner temple, and in the higher grades presenting him with a dagger, which he is to plunge into a manikin stuffed with bladders ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... above the house. Through the open window they could see the comforting stars like friendly eyes watching in the sky. One by one the clocks of the town struck midnight, and when the sounds died away the deep silence of a windless night fell again over everything. Only the boom of the sea, far away and lugubrious, filled ...
— The Empty House And Other Ghost Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... towering before us! When shall we have done with them?" said the major, in a lugubrious tone. "How high is this Haystack ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... but dull and lugubrious to the remainder of the party. The girls seemed to feel that there was something solemn about the coming competition between two such dear friends, which prevented and should prevent them all from being merry. Harry perfectly sympathized in the feeling; and even Alaric, though depressed ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... Then he condoled with Mrs. Bernard on a mishap to her child that other people avoided speaking of, for the consequences were likely to be very serious, and she had not yet been made fully aware of them. There was a peculiar, low, lugubrious note in his voice which caused it to be audible through the room, and Bessie, who sat opposite to him, between Mr. Cecil Burleigh and Mr. Logger, devoted all her conversation to them to avoid that of the rector. But he had ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... very fine by the critics: they are two such ghastly epigrams as continually disfigure French Tragedy. For this reason I have never been able to read Racine with pleasure,—the dialogue is so crammed with these lugubrious good things—melancholy antitheses—sparkling undertakers' wit; but this is heresy, and ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... the head of one of the Beagle's sailors who slept under a tree outside the hut, and awakened him with its lugubrious "whoo-woo-woah!" and so frightened the superstitious tar, that he believed himself hailed by one of the malevolent ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... his plump cheeks sagging into lugubrious and reproachful lines, speaking witnesses to a sentiment not wholly unjustifiable in his case. To see circulation steadily going up and advertising as steadily going down, is an irritant experience to the official responsible for the main income of ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... pause of breathless silence between them. Then as, without speaking, he would have turned away, a loud, peremptory knock resounded upon the door of the keep and echoed and re-echoed with lugubrious reverberation through the old ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... of bushy hair, but their owner spoke never a word, though the other stared back with compound interest. There they sat, beaming upon each other—one fiercely, the other curiously, until the re-appearance of the landlord with a very lugubrious and woebegone countenance. It struck Sir Norman that it was about time to start for the ruin; and, with an eye to business, he turned to cross-examine mine host ...
— The Midnight Queen • May Agnes Fleming
... been going on below stairs, was peacefully reading a letter he had received that morning from Strachan at Wrykyn, in which the successor to the cricket captaincy which should have been Mike's had a good deal to say in a lugubrious strain. In Mike's absence things had been going badly with Wrykyn. A broken arm, contracted in the course of some rash experiments with a day-boy's motor-bicycle, had deprived the team of the services of Dunstable, the only man who had shown any signs of being ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... and trousers of a sulphur or mustard yellow, and a shirt of blue-and-white striped cotton. It was conspicuous, it was cheap, it pointed us out to laughter—we, who were old soldiers, used to arms, and some of us showing noble scars,—like a set of lugubrious zanies at a fair. The old name of that rock on which our prison stood was (I have heard since then) the "Painted Hill." Well, now it was all painted a bright yellow with our costumes; and the dress of the soldiers who guarded us being of course the essential British red rag, we made up together ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... extended along the coast so as to mask the fortifications at the top, drawing forth from the shadows the gray masses of the cruisers anchored in the harbor and the black bulk of the cannon that formed the shore batteries, filtering into the lugubrious embrasures pierced through the cliff, cavernous mouths revealing the mysterious defences that had been wrought with mole-like industry in ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... thought and care for the beautiful in person or apparel, as the first step towards saintship. The costume of the religieuse seemed to be purposely intended to imitate the shroudings and swathings of a corpse and the lugubrious color of a pall, so as forever to remind the wearer that she was dead to the world of ornament and physical beauty. All great Christian preachers and reformers have levelled their artillery against the toilet, from the time of St. Jerome ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... the inventory afforded me a little relief; moreover, public opinion was so unanimously unfavorable to the colonel that little by little the place lost the lugubrious aspect that had at first struck me. At last I entered into possession of the legacy, which I converted into ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... the lodges, where the ceremonies were to take place. But as the noisy and impertinent guests showed disposition to undue merriment, the chief shut them all in his wigwam, lest their gentile eyes should profane the mysteries. Here, immured in darkness, they listened to the howls, yelpings, and lugubrious songs that resounded from without. One of them, however, by some artifice, contrived to escape, hid behind a bush, and saw the whole solemnity: the procession of the medicine-men and the bedaubed and befeathered warriors; the drumming, the dancing, the stamping; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... radiant colour was quite natural, she endeavoured to assume an air of the deepest commiseration, which was interrupted, every moment, by involuntary bursts of laughter. For himself, no wretch in the pillory ever wore a more lugubrious aspect, and his sallow visage turned first to one, and then to another, with a look so ridiculously imploring that ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... did not prophesy as divinely as she. They denounced "Woe, woe" upon their persecutors. They reviled Babylon as the oppressor of the House of Israel. They preached the most violent declamations against Rome, drawn from the most lugubrious of the prophets, and stirred the minds of their hearers into the ...
— The Huguenots in France • Samuel Smiles
... be noted by any who make their religion lugubrious, and their Sunday the eclipse of the week. And observe further, that if Milton does not ryme, it is because his faculty of Song was concerning Loss, chiefly; and he has little more than faculty of Croak, concerning Gain; while ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... difficulties or sympathize in the universal danger, ill at ease with herself and irritable with all around her. In her anxiety to hear about Adam—what message he had sent and whether she could not go to see him—she had barely patience to listen to Mrs. Tucker's roundabout details and lugubrious lamentations, and, choosing a very inopportune moment, she broke out with, "What message has Adam sent, Mrs. Tucker? He's sent a message to me, I'm sure: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the opening of Siegfried the following evening. I do not mean the orchestral colouring, but the intrinsic thing, the music itself. The tapping of the hammer on steel goes on, and in mock seriousness the orchestra gives out a series of prolonged sighs or groans of the most lugubrious character, reaching a climax as poor miserable Mime at last gives up his job in despair. Mime, we must remember, is a half-comic personage; and were his music allotted to some heroic man facing an impossible task it would ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman
... pass that Toozle attended the trial of Bumpus, entered his cell along with him, slept with him during the night, accompanied him to the gallows in the morning, and sat under him, when they were adjusting the noose, looking up with feelings of unutterable dismay, as was clearly indicated by the lugubrious and woe-begone cast of his ragged countenance,—but ...
— Gascoyne, the Sandal-Wood Trader • R.M. Ballantyne
... canticle; which done, a thin old voice of a priest at the altar far off (and which had now become quite gloomy in the sunset) chanted feebly another part of the service; then the nuns warbled once more overhead; and it was curious to hear, in the intervals of the most lugubrious chants, how the organ went off with some extremely cheerful military or profane air. At one time was a march, at another a quick tune; which ceasing, the old nuns began again, and so sung until the service ...
— Little Travels and Roadside Sketches • William Makepeace Thackeray
... seems favourable. No sound comes from the direction of the lonely dwelling, not even the bark of a watch dog. The only noises that interrupt the stillness of the night are the lugubrious cry of the coyote and the wailing note of the whip-poor-will; these, at intervals blending with the sweeter strain of the tzenzontle—the Mexican nightingale—intermittently silenced as the marching troop passes near the ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... a deep, lugubrious bass, accompanied with heavy chanting of priests, out of which sometimes rose the clear, young voices of choristers, like light flashing out of the gloom. The church, between the arches, along the nave, ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... thought it proper to write a line to the rectory, informing the family there that Lord Ongar was no more. This she did in a note to Mrs. Clavering; and when it was received, there came over the faces of them all that lugubrious look, which is, as a matter of course, assumed by decorous people when tidings come of the death of any one who has been known to them, even in the most distant way. With the exception of Harry, all the rectory Claverings had been introduced to Lord ...
— The Claverings • Anthony Trollope
... experience. For many years I have picked mine up from the box-seat of a hearse, which I think my most virulent opponents will admit, from the ticklish character of its cattle, accustomed as they are to a stiff, formal and lugubrious method of progression, affords a test that must be regarded as supreme by all candid and unprejudiced inquirers into the matter ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, January 18, 1890 • Various
... yourself comfortable, dear Augusta, and tell me everything. So very kind of you to drive over like this on such a sunny morning. Yes, that's right. Take off that lugubrious Harem veil,—the mark of a Southampton woman,—and let me see your beautiful face. Before I try to give you a chance to speak I must tell you, and I'm sure you won't mind with your keen sense of humor, how that nice boy, Harry Oldershaw, describes those things. No, after ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... so that their rather expensive smartness was detrimental to his chances, in spite of their scrupulous look of having come almost new out of the bandbox that morning. His rather small felt hats still curved jauntily over his full pink face. But his eyes looked lugubrious, as if he felt he had not deserved so much bad luck, and there ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... cringed for years—who used them, bought them, and made his market out of their vanity, their ignorance, and their love of theatrical claptrap, despise them, as he dreams again through life's dream in the gardens of his German prison. They call him now a "sinister scoundrel" and a "lugubrious stage player." But he was their master for many a long year, and they owe their emancipation from his yoke to Prussian arms ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... the eyes of the other boys. One night I was wandering in the playground and heard him playing the violin in his study. My taste in music was barbarian; I liked comic songs, which I used to sing to myself in a lugubrious voice, and in London the plaintive clamour of the street-organs had helped to make my sorrows rhythmical. But now, perhaps for the first time, I became aware of the illimitable melancholy that lies at the heart of all great ...
— The Ghost Ship • Richard Middleton
... true. Abruptly the weather had moderated, and the fine, dry snow that had been falling since early evening had changed to a lugubrious drizzle. A wave of consternation invaded the vestibule for those who had not come in carriages, or whose carriages had not arrived. Tempers were lost; women, cloaked to the ears, their heads protected only by fichus or mantillas, quarrelled with husbands or cousins ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... the next day. "I have news for you," said he, "though somewhat of a lugubrious nature. Lugete Veneres Cupidinesque. You remember the Duchesse ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton |
