"Pathos" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... shoulders together with a slight determined jerk, threw himself back upon the grass, and turning to me, with that tremulous, haggard smile upon his lips which I knew so well, but which had never before struck me with such infinite pathos, "Luckily," he said, "there are other things to do in life besides being happy. Only perhaps you understand now what I meant last night when I spoke of things which flesh and blood cannot bear, and yet which ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... thoughtfully gazing upon the lovely features, and comparing them with those of the young girl, whose image filled his mind. "It is very strange," murmured he; "the same waving mass of hair, the same beautifully-arched brows and long lashes, and the liquid eyes, melting one with their subduing pathos; the very expression so like, too! It is very wonderful! very wonderful!" and he wiped away a tear that betrayed the depth and ...
— The Elm Tree Tales • F. Irene Burge Smith
... riotous, extravagant; it acquired taste, gentleness, adroitness, finesse, lightness of touch, a delicate colouring of playful fancy. It preserved indeed its old sympathy with pity, with passion; but it learned how to pass with more ease into pathos, into love, into the reverence that touches us as we smile. And hand in hand with this new developement of humour went a moderation won from humour, whether in matters of religion, of politics, or society, a literary courtesy and reserve, a well-bred temperance and modesty of tone and phrase. ...
— History of the English People, Volume VII (of 8) - The Revolution, 1683-1760; Modern England, 1760-1767 • John Richard Green
... died out in a sob, and her eyes closed upon the tears gathered in them. It was the final weakening of her courage. For all its brevity, for all it was told in such desperate haste, the story lost nothing of its appeal, nothing of its pathos. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... foiled but wise to walled Bagdad. So I, so all. The treasure sought not found, But some divine tears found to superadd Themselves to a long story. The great round Of yesterdays, their pathos sweet as sad, Found to be only as to-day, close bound With us, we hope some good thing yet to know, But God is not in ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Jean Ingelow
... and which are now nowhere to be found, although once having excited quite a sensation. The French cannot certainly be considered as a musical nation, yet many of their airs are full of life, and quite exhilarating, whilst others have a degree of pathos which touches the heart; still none of their music has the nerve, the depth, the sterling solidity of the German, nor the elegance nor grace of the Italian. Yet some composers they have whose works will have more than an ephemeral fame, amongst whom may be cited Aubert, whose ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... held by the truly patriotic mind, as we find it expressed in history and in literature, there grows up a religious sentiment, which protects from criticism the qualities of the ideal personage. A certain pathos of country attaches itself to all who as great individuals represent country, and to all its portrayals and symbols. All these symbols acquire a high degree of suggestive force because of the depth ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... the scene of the arrival of the Prussians vivid? How is this done? Note the dramatic contrast between the arrival of the Prussians and the actions of the peasants. How has the author drawn the character of Bernadou? By what details does the author give special poignancy to the pathos of her account? What is the significance of the title "A Leaf in ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... anatomy, but chiefly because of those as yet indefinable and secret processes of feeling and intuition in man, which made him feel rather than understand the pity and the terror, the majesty and the pathos of the human spirit and reveal them in significant and expressive line. Knowledge supported rather than rivaled insight. In the same way, both saint and sinner need religious instruction. Nevertheless they are what they are because they are first perceptive rather than reasoning beings. They ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... hundreds of charming stories and essays, she has published several volumes of poems. Her writings on sacred subjects display a strong, intelligent faith, and a tender piety. She is a writer whose pathos, originality, grace of diction, sweetness of rhythm, purity of sentiment, and sublimity of thought entitle her to rank among the first of our American poets. Miss Donnelly has lived all her life in her native city of Philadelphia, where she is the center of a cultured ...
— De La Salle Fifth Reader • Brothers of the Christian Schools
... few connecting scenes were introduced, after which the Corpus Christi play could fairly claim to be a complete story of 'The Fall and Redemption of Man'. Admittedly of crude literary form, yet full of reverence and moral teaching, and with powers of pathos and satire above the ordinary, it became one single play, the sublimest of all dramas. To regard it as a collection of separate small plays is a fatal mistake—fatal both to our understanding of the single scenes and to our comprehension ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... a word or a sentence, by a bodily organ (eye or ear) that has been touched with virtue for evoking the spiritual echo lurking in its recesses, belongs, perhaps, to every impassioned mind for the kindred result of forcing out the peculiar beauty, pathos, or grandeur that may happen to lodge (unobserved by ruder forms of sensibility) in special passages scattered up and down literature. Meantime, I wish the reader to understand that, in putting forward the peculiar power with which my childish ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... movement of hot desires—the agitation of excited impulses or inclinations which hurry men into sin in spite of their consciences. It is also to be noticed that the prayer of my text, with singular pathos and lowly self-consciousness, is the prayer of 'Thy servant,' who knows himself to be a servant, and who therefore knows that these glaring transgressions, done in the teeth of conscience and consciousness, are all inconsistent with his standing ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as she leaned upon the window frame. There was a certain pathos in the simple strain, and she could fancy that the lad, who was clearly English, as an exile felt it, too. Once more as the jaded horses and clashing machine grew smaller down the edge of the great sweep of yellow grain, his voice ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... angry jealousy of a previous wife. In short, doubts, obstacles and delays make great havoc of both hero and heroine. They give way to melancholy, indulge in amorous rhapsodies, and become very emaciated. So far the story is decidedly dull, and its pathos, notwithstanding the occasional grandeur and beauty of imagery, often verges on the ridiculous. But, by way of relief, an element of life is generally introduced in the character of the Vidushaka, or Jester, who is the constant companion of the hero; and in the young maidens, who are confidential ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... struck upon my ear—a cry strangely modulated between pathos and derision; and looking across the valley, I saw a little urchin sitting in a meadow, with his hands about his knees, and dwarfed to almost comical smallness by the distance. But the rogue had picked me out as I went down the road, from oak wood on to oak wood, driving Modestine; and he ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said Miss Blair, and she laughed as if she were laughing at herself. Then she added, with a little pathos, "You yourself, if you had been in my place, would have wanted one little corner in which you could ...
— By the Light of the Soul - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... fair-faced man, a scholar, a dreamer, too, maybe. By birth or accident, he had suffered from a deformity. He limped when he walked, and his left hand had less than normal efficiency. On his face the pathos of the large will and the limited power was written over by the ready smile, the mark of ...
— Winning the Wilderness • Margaret Hill McCarter
... rough-witted above fear or gain; But nothing further had the gift to espy. Sudden you re-appear. With wonder I Hear my old friend (turn'd Shakspeare) read a scene Only to his inferior in the clean Passes of pathos: with such fence-like art— Ere we can see the steel, 'tis in our heart. Almost without the aid language affords, Your piece seems wrought. That huffing medium, words, (Which in the modern Tamburlaines quite sway Our shamed souls from their bias) in your play ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... other. All are written in mixed blank and rhymed verse, much interlaced and "enjambed." The best of the historical poems is, by common consent, Rosamond, which is instinct with a most remarkable pathos, nor are fine passages by any means to seek in the greater length and less poetical subject of The Civil Wars of York and Lancaster. The fault of this is that the too conscientious historian is constantly versifying what must be called mere ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... charming love story is laid in Central Indiana. The story is one of devoted friendship, and tender self-sacrificing love. The novel is brimful of the most beautiful word painting of nature, and its pathos and tender sentiment will endear ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... desired, and many are the complimentary speeches uttered from time to time by the audience. Arthur Dynecourt too had not overpraised his own powers. It is palpable to every one that he has often trod the boards, and the pathos he throws into his performance astonishes the audience. Is it only acting in the final scene when he makes love to Miss Hardcastle, or is there some real sentiment ...
— The Haunted Chamber - A Novel • "The Duchess"
... found it is just as easy unconsciously to inflict an injury with my pen and Indian ink as it is to do good. Let us suppose, for instance, that a great painter has just finished a very sentimental work—a picture so brimful of beauty and pathos that it appeals to everybody, myself included. As I stand before it, and admire, it is impossible perhaps for me to restrain a sympathetic tear from making its appearance in, at all events, one of my eyes. But how about the other? Ah! with regard to that other eye, I ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... the hem of your dress. My poor girl, my own dear Joan, how you must have suffered! Yet I envy you—I do, on my soul! Life becomes ennobled by actions such as yours. And Alec must never know what you have done for him. That is both the grandeur and the pathos of it. Joan, my precious, your namesake was burnt on the pyre for a King's cause, yet her deed would rank no higher than yours if the world might be allowed to judge between you. But do not dream that your romance ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... of the doll was not sufficient to satisfy the sudden queer craving. The knowledge of the hopeless helplessness of that little girl throbbed through him. The memory of the spectacle of what he had left on the canal bank made the pathos of this little scene in the garret doubly poignant as he looked into the child's eyes. Never, in his memory, had he invited a child ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... on the heights of Cairo. It is a little difficult to define exactly what is a man's duty to the Sphinx; and therefore the Mamelukes used it entirely as a target. There was little in them of that double feeling, full of pathos and irony, which divided the hearts of the primitive Christians in presence of the great pagan literature and art. This is not concerned with brutal outbreaks of revenge which may be found on both sides, or with chivalrous ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... vigorous counsel. I lost a stanch friend by his death. I can sum up his qualities in no better way than by the word "manliness." He never uttered an ignoble word, thought an ignoble thought, or did an ignoble act. His method of speech was clear, simple, spirited, without much pathos or emotion, but still calculated to stir ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... the fight against the Arctic frost. Each vessel carried an auxiliary screw and an engine of twenty horse-power. When we remember that a modern steam vessel with a horse-power of many thousands is still {113} powerless against the northern ice, the Erebus and the Terror arouse in us a forlorn pathos. But in the springtime of 1845 as they lay in the Thames, an object of eager interest to the flocks of sightseers in the neighbourhood, they seemed like very leviathans of the deep. Vast quantities of stores were being loaded into the ships, ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock
... not held to account for so doing if she appear at all public functions clad in such weeds as she may find available. It is not even needful, indeed, that her supreme effort should attain any definite standard. Anybody can collect a few black things, and there is often an added pathos in the very incongruity of some of the mourning toilettes that pass up the aisles of the ...
— Moriah's Mourning and Other Half-Hour Sketches • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... understood or half understood my 'Poet's Vow'—that is, if you read it at all. Uncle Hedley made a long pause at the first part. But I have been reading, too, Sheridan Knowles's play of the 'Wreckers.' It is full of passion and pathos, and made me shed a great many tears. How do you get on with the reading society? Do you see much or anything of Lady Margaret Cocks, from whom I never hear now? I promised to let her have 'Ion,' if I could, before she left Brighton, but the person to whom it was lent did not ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... tone of pathos, a tone as if she was not quite sure of herself, in those last words, which made Clare refrain from answering her. He turned silently, and they entered a green alley which led to the foot of the terrace surrounding the house. As they walked along, Marston Brent's figure appeared at the end of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... you for the sake of your family, young man!" said Mr. Bouncer with pathos; "you've come to the right shop, for this is Brazenface; and you've come just at the right time, for here is the gentleman who will assist Mr. Pluckem in examining you;" and Mr. Bouncer pointed to Mr. Four-in-hand Fosbrooke, who was coming up the street ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... fight with the wood, and came in beaten to tell his wife how he must go to the city. I know she smiled at him, her heart going down the while, and cheered him, though she was like to despair at the thought of the lonely winter. Ah, the pathos of it! Did God help them that day? Ay, and for many a day after. And may He forgive all people whose lives overflow with plenty of everything, and who fret their souls ...
— Beyond the Marshes • Ralph Connor
... poems are unsaleable belongs then to a certain grade of poetry which ought never to have strayed out of the album in which it was first written, except for the benefit of the stationer, printer, and the newspapers. Nearly all the poetry of this description is too bizarre, and wants the pathos and deep feeling which uniformly characterize true poetry, and have a lasting impression on the reader: whereas, all the "initial" celebrity, the honied sweetness, lasts but for a few months, and then ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13 Issue 364 - 4 Apr 1829 • Various
... individual life, if need be, for the sinner's soul. The two feelings are not only compatible in the same person, but necessarily belong to a perfect being. Our Lord breathed out a prayer for His murderers so fervent, and so full of pathos, that it will continue to soften and melt the flinty human heart, to the end of time; and He also poured out a denunciation of woes upon the Pharisees (Matt, xxiii.), every syllable of which is dense enough with the wrath of God, to sink the ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... three last movements himself. That was a great deal and showed off his powers. It was the first time I had heard him, and I don't know which was the most extraordinary—the Scherzo, with its wonderful lightness and swiftness, the Adagio with its depth and pathos, or the last movement, where the whole keyboard seemed to "donnern und blitzen." There is such a vividness about everything he plays that it does not seem as if it were mere music you are listening ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... mean is, that I would like to know any one of these performers thoroughly, and out of his uniform: that preacher, and why in his travels this and that point struck him; wherein lies his power of pathos, humour, eloquence; — that Minister of State, and what moves him, and how his private heart is working; — I would only say that, at a certain time of life certain things cease to interest: but about ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... those whom we have loved and lost are more painful, where all is so exquisitely painful, than the reading of letters by them or to them. The most trivial commonplaces—the lightest expressions of regard—are all invested with the tenderest pathos, and from our hearts there seems rung out at every line the despairing refrain of "nevermore—nevermore." It was thus, and with blending tears, that Zillah read the first part of Guy's letter, which was full of tender love and thoughtful consideration. Soon, however, this sadness ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... deep pathos as she mentioned Nelly's name, while Larry O'Neil sat with his hands clasped, gazing at her with an expression ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... perhaps better so. If there were not loss of memory our minds would now range over the adventures of thousands of years in the past. It would encompass a vast drama with countless loves and hates, of many lives filled with pathos and tragedy. Thus to distract the mind from the present life would retard our progress. There will come a time in human evolution when the average person will be able to recall his past incarnations, and then there will be no need or argument that ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... full of pathos and action. We watch this heroic man as he builds the lighthouse on ...
— Lives of Girls Who Became Famous • Sarah Knowles Bolton
... of the sacrifices of Michael Gillane for her, his country, even though that sacrifice be on his wedding eve. Seen and listened to, "Cathleen ni Houlihan" brings tears to the eyes and chokes the throat with sobs, so intimately physical is the appeal of its pathos. He is, indeed, dull of understanding or hard of heart who can witness a performance of this play and not feel that something noble has come his way. It seizes hold of the Irishmen of the patriotic societies as does "The Wearing of the Green," and even ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence'—the very 'juice of the mind oozing from the brain, and enriching and fertilising wherever it falls'—and seldom far removed from its kindred spirit, pathos, with which, however, it is not too closely akin to marry; for pathos is bound up in mysterious ties with humour—bone of its bone, and flesh ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sun-light; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!" All this brightness has its attendant shadow, and deep from the childish heart comes that true note of pathos, the ever memorable toast of Tiny Tim, "God bless Us, Every One!" "The Cricket on the Hearth" strikes a different note. Charmingly, poetically, the sweet chirping of the little cricket is associated with human feelings ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... was ready, Uncle Joshua knelt down, and winding his arm around Fanny, prayed in simple, touching language that God would protect his Sunshine, and at last bring them all to the same home. "All of us; and don't let one be missing thar." There was a peculiar pathos in the tone of his voice as he said the last words, and all knew to ...
— Tempest and Sunshine • Mary J. Holmes
... harrowing emotions in one's voice, and not sing more than "do, re, mi, fa." I tried to profit by his teachings, and brought them to bear upon the pathetic words of "Oh, darkies, how my heart grows weary," and I could see that both their Majesties were deeply moved. I sang the word "weary" with such pathos that every one was more or less affected, and the phrase, "All the world is dark and dreary," I rendered in the ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... Addison. He unites many of the finest characteristics of these several writers. He has wisdom and wit of the highest order, exquisite humor, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry, and the most heart-touching pathos. In the largest acceptation of the word he is a humanist. No one of the great family of authors past or present has shown in matters the most important or the most trivial so delicate and extreme a sense of all that is human. It is the prevalence ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... as lightly as she could upon the dark hours of her baby's coming, when she was doomed to pass through that Valley of the Shadow far away from the protecting and comforting love of him whose right it was by every law of Nature to have been, then of all times, by her side; but the Boy felt the pathos of it, and his eyes filled with tears. His mother—the mother of his dreams—his glorious queen-mother—to suffer all this for ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... formed for good or for evil, might turn out a sorry boon to her."[146] We may doubt, in spite of one or two charming and graceful passages, whether Rousseau was of a nature to have any feeling for the pathos of infancy, the bright blank eye, the eager unpurposed straining of the hand, the many turns and changes in murmurings that yet can tell us nothing. He was both too self-centred and too passionate for warm ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... Cripple—a recitation I had prepared with particular enthusiasm and satisfaction. It fulfilled, as few poems do, all the requirements of length, climax and those many necessary features for a recitation. The subject was a theme of real pathos, beautified by the cheer and optimism of the little sufferer. Consequently when this couple left the hall I was very anxious to know the reason and asked a friend to find out. He learned that they had a little hunch-back child of their own. After this experience ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... him; and Mr. Hastings, accordingly, is thrown into very great distress. You see sentiment always prevailing in Mr. Hastings. The sentimental dialogue which must have passed between him and a Gentoo broker would have charmed every one that has a taste for pathos and sentiment. Mr. Hastings was pressed to receive the money as a gift. He really does not know what to do: whether to insist upon giving a bond or not,—whether he shall take the money for his own use, or whether he shall ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... that they are sensible of the unity of sin and death. We may call sin a spiritual thing, but the man who has never felt the shadow of death fall upon it does not know what that spiritual thing is: and we may call death a natural thing, but the man who has not felt its natural pathos deepen into tragedy as he faced it with the sense of sin upon him does not know what that natural thing is. We are here, in short, at the vanishing point of this distinction—God is present, and nature and spirit interpenetrate in His presence. We hear much in other connections ...
— The Atonement and the Modern Mind • James Denney
... not first of all review his troops, he called a meeting for prayer. The nation fasted and prayed, and the king led the devotions of his people. What a prayer! Have you noticed the four questions he puts to his God? And with what pathos he says "Our eyes are upon Thee!" Shall not the people of God imitate Judah? "They gathered themselves together to ask help of the Lord." Why should we not make this the motto of our weekly ...
— Broken Bread - from an Evangelist's Wallet • Thomas Champness
... the gulf that yawned between his nature and hers, and, almost cursing her for being so above him, there came to him a strange longing to feel some touch upon him which would give his face the calmness that under its pathos he read upon hers. It was no determination to struggle to a higher plane, no desire for it, but only the old cry for some one to be sent to cool the tip of his tongue because the flame tormented him. It was not, however, an appreciable lapse of time before he again felt his feet upon the floor ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1 • Various
... between 580 and 561 B.C., when Jehoiachin was liberated. Chapters 1 and 3 follow the regular order of the Hebrew alphabet and apparently represent the work of a later author or authors. Chapter 1 is full of pathos and religious feeling and is closely parallel in thought to such psalms as 42 and 137. Chapter 3 is a poetic monologue describing the fate and voicing the contrition of the righteous within the Judean community. Chapter 5, ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... the thousands of these poor refugees that crossed the frontier at Maastricht and besieged the doors of the Belgian consul there was no railing or declaiming against the horror of their situation. The pathos of lonely, staring, apathetic endurance was ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... solicit the reader's attention to the simplicity, the pathos and the beauty of this personification ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 8 • Richard F. Burton
... him later to attempt to defend his people against calumny and ignorance, the conditions under which he labored made against the production of a true and spirited history. Yet if he does not appear worthy of admiration, we must beware of judging him harshly; and there is deep pathos in the fact that he was compelled in writing to be his own worst detractor. The combination, which the autobiographical account reveals, of egoism and self-seeking, of cowardice and vanity, of pious profession and cringing obsequiousness, of vaunted magnanimity and spiteful malice to ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... gave a look at the two who followed her, but she herself had no idea of its pathos and urgency. "I just tripped on a brick and was stunned for a few ...
— The Privet Hedge • J. E. Buckrose
... nothing. After all, he was English, and to some extent reticent, but he felt that his comrade's dramatic utterance was more or less warranted, for the irony and pathos of the situation was clear to him. Grenfell had found the mine at last, but the gold he had sought so persistently was not for him. Men great in the mining world had smiled compassionately at his story, others ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... cloudless autumn evening or sparkling with puns like a frosty January midnight with stars—was ever pregnant with materials for the thought. Like every author distinguished for true comic humor, there was a deep vein of melancholy pathos running through his mirth, and even when his sun shone brightly its light seemed often reflected as if only over the ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... vital work, fresh and authentic. Most of its stories are composed in a minor key, a tone of subdued pathos—pathos marking both the nature and limit of Anderson's talent. (He spoke of himself as a "minor writer.") In a few stories, however, he was able to reach beyond pathos and to strike a tragic note. The single best story in Winesburg, Ohio is, I think, "The Untold Lie," in which the urgency ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... think that Wordsworth is one whose memory evokes a deep personal attachment. I doubt if any figures of bygone days do that, unless there is a certain wistful pathos about them; unless something of compassion, some wish to proffer sympathy or consolation, mingles with one's reverence. I have often, for instance, stayed at a house where Shelley spent a few half-rapturous, ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he would fall to with a great air of heartiness, cut himself a mouthful, and, before he had swallowed it, would have forgotten his dinner, his company, the place where he then was, and the escape he was engaged on, and become absorbed in the vision of a sick-room and a dying girl in France. The pathos of this continual pre-occupation, in a man so old, sick, and over-weary, and whom I looked upon as a mere bundle of dying bones and death-pains, put me wholly from my victuals: it seemed there was an element of sin, a kind of rude bravado of youth, in the mere relishing of food at the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 20 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... BOOK-WORMS owns to being easily affected by a pathetic episode. He well remembers how years ago in the course of a discussion among literary men about books and their writers, the Baron acknowledged that in spite of his having been told how the pathos of DICKENS was all a trick, and how the sentiment of that great novelist was for the most part false, he still felt a choking sensation in his throat and a natural inclination to blow his nose strenuously whenever he re-read the death of Little Paul, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 17, 1891 • Various
... there besides Richard Talbot and his son who felt the pathos of this appeal? One defenceless woman against an array of the legal force of the whole kingdom. It may be feared that the feelings of most were as if they had at last secured some wild, noxious, and incomprehensible animal in their net, on whose ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he heard a little crooning song from the waters—no words, no tune that could be called a tune. It reminded him more of a baby's toneless cooing of joy, and yet it had a rhythm to it, too, and both joy and pathos in its cadence. Across the bright path of the moon's reflection he saw her come. Her head and neck were crowned and garlanded with shining weed, as if for a festival, and she stretched out her white arms to him and beckoned to him and laughed. ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... There is a little volume, called Voices from the Ranks, in which numerous letters written by privates, corporals, etc., in the Crimea, are collected and arranged. They are full of incident and pathos. Suffering, daring, and humor, the love of home, and the religious dependence of men capable of telling their own Iliad, make this a very powerful book. In modern times the best literature of a campaign will be found in private letters. We have some from Magenta and Solferino, written by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... month to month, and had no opportunity of correcting the composition as a whole,—she was apt to give undue prominence to minor details, and throw her high lights on to obscure corners, instead of concentrating them on the central point. These artistic rules kept her humour and pathos,—like light and shade,—duly balanced, and made the lights she "left out" some of the most ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... two days after his drunken flight. When Mrs. Penton came on the scene the manager was standing helplessly before the staff, crying like a bruised youngster. Evan sat up all night with him, studying the pathos and humor of delirium tremens. The drink demon is a tragic devil, but he has ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... is it that for tens of thousands of square miles it is choked with trees, a mere tangle of life, defying all entry. The idea of our humanity sadly walking the streets of Glasgow or sitting mournfully fishing on the piers of the Hudson, out of work, would be laughable if it were not for the pathos of it. ...
— My Discovery of England • Stephen Leacock
... of pathos and humor. It is all stories and sketches depicting life in the far West. It tells of the doings of Grizzly Pete, Joe Kip and other inhabitants of Frozen Dog, Idaho, where Colonel Hunter has his beautiful ranch. It breathes the spirit of the mountains and the forest. ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... and desolation must be terrible beyond description. Remembering that the sisters found even these usually dismal moors a welcome relief from their tomb of a dwelling, we may appreciate the utter dreariness of their situation and the pathos of Charlotte's declaration, "I always dislike to leave Haworth, it takes so long to be content ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors - Vol. II Great Britain And Ireland, Part Two • Francis W. Halsey
... ungodly imps down there have a great appreciation of virtue and pathos. They dash their dirty fists into their peepers at the childish treble of a little Eva—and they cheer, O, so lustily, when Chastity sets her heavy foot upon the villain's heart and points her sharp sword at his rascal ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... of that day in the Chamber of Deputies was not one to be forgotten. The aspect and the accents of the Republican leader were at times absolutely pathetic with the pathos of unaffected terror. It was difficult to believe, whilst listening to him, that he could really have 'five millions of professed atheists' at his back, encouraging him to extirpate Christianity, root and branch, out of the land ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... lifting to the faces of waiting girls now and again their strange, young, brooding eyes, bold, laughing, and afraid, hungry, pathetic, arrogant, as the eyes of young men are, tameless and untamable, but full of the pathos of the untamed. Joan's heart shook a little under their looks, but when Pierre lifted his eyes to her, her heart stood still. She had not seen them following her progress around the room. He had come in late, and finding no place at the long, central table ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... The pathos of death is this, that when the days of one's life are ended, those days that were so crowded with business and felt so heavy in their passing, what remains of one in memory should usually be so slight a thing. The phantom of ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... others whom we love, which is its sting. And none of us can live very long without knowing in our own heart's experience the reality, as well as the terror, of death. This too has its meaning for us, to look at life more tenderly, and touch it more gently. The pathos of life is only a forced sentiment to us, if we have not felt the pity of life. To a sensitive soul, smarting with his own loss, the world sometimes seems full of graves, and for a time at least makes him walk softly ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... absence he had mentally aged a dozen years. What arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than its pathos. Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality. He thought they wanted readjusting. Who was the moral man? Still more pertinently, who was the moral woman? The beauty or ugliness ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... of the Venus and Adonis is unpleasing; but the poem itself is for that very reason the more illustrative of Shakespeare. There are men who can write passages of deepest pathos and even sublimity on circumstances personal to themselves and stimulative of their own passions; but they are not, therefore, on this account poets. Read that magnificent burst of woman's patriotism and exultation, Deborah's Song of Victory; it is glorious, but nature is the poet there. It is ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... epic were produced by a kind of artistic commingling of pathetic with symbolic elements, and as though he wished to call attention to the danger of reversing the correct proportions, for instance, by the symbolic obtaining the preponderance in tragedy, or pathos in the epopee, or to the danger of exaggerating these proportions, until there was too much tragic pathos, or too much epic symbolism. But a scientific definition of the expressions used was altogether lacking, and I had to devote ...
— Recollections Of My Childhood And Youth • George Brandes
... that I must possess that particular one, and she has undertaken to make sure of it. The result has been, between us, a rather assiduous and almost cordial intercourse; for, if I have been unable to fully respond to all her hopes, I listen, at least with religious attention, to the little melancholy pathos which is habitual with her. I appear to understand her, and she seems grateful for it. The truth is that I never tire hearing her voice, which is musical, gazing at her features, which are exquisitely regular, ...
— Led Astray and The Sphinx - Two Novellas In One Volume • Octave Feuillet
... repeating the airs they drummed on their pianos,—in a different manner from theirs, it is true,—which bewildered them. They noticed, too, that, however the child's fingers fell on the keys, cadences followed, broken, wandering, yet of startling beauty and pathos. The house-servants, looking in through the open doors at the little black figure perched up before the instrument, while unknown, wild harmony drifted through the evening air, had a better conception of him. He was possessed; some ghost spoke through ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various
... nature's orators spoke poetry to music with an eloquence as fervid and delicate as ever rung in the Forum. She gave each verse with the same just variety as if she had been reciting, and, when she came to the last, where the thought rises abruptly, and is truly noble, she sang it with the sudden pathos, the weight, and the swelling majesty, of a truthful soul hymning ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... animal has a trace of wit, or humor, or pathos. Not an animal has ever laughed, or spoken, or sung. The silence of the ages ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... who wished well to France, many who had laboured for her salvation, perished; virtue received the just punishment of vice. But the Revolution has another side; it was no mere nightmare of horrors piled on horrors. It is part of the pathos of History that no good has been unattended by evil, that by suffering alone is mankind redeemed, that through the valley of shadow lies the path by which the race toils slowly towards the fulfilment of its high destiny. And ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet
... coughed, spat, produced a handkerchief of crimson silk with which he wiped his eyes and mouth, twirled his moustaches and plunged again into a torrent of words, turning on Telemachus from time to time little red-rimmed eyes full of moist pathos like ...
— Rosinante to the Road Again • John Dos Passos
... preserved some faint echo of the words he used, but I can give no conception of the dignity and earnestness of his manner, or the intense pathos ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... hand, they were not aware of his unsuitableness, they showed either carelessness or incapacity which will rank them beneath mediocrity, and by their act they stamped the English name with ignominy. And yet there is a pathos at the end of it all when he was brought to see the cold, inanimate form of the dead monarch. He was seized with fear, smitten with the dread of retribution, and exclaimed to Montholon, "His ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... married so many years that without looking she knew just what his expression would be, and preferred to avoid the actual sight of it as long as possible. Meanwhile, he stared hard at her, his lips beginning to move with little distortions not lacking in the pathos ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... gradually losing its tremor, rolled soothingly through the room; and when she knelt and repeated the prayer selected for the occasion—a prayer of thanks for the safe return of a traveller to the haven of home—her tone was full of pathos and an earnestness that strangely stirred the proud heart of the wanderer as he stood there, looking through his fingers at her uplifted face, and listening to the first prayer that had reached his ears for nearly nineteen weary years ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... Quincey ends an eloquent criticism by declaring that the "lyrical tumult of the changes, the hope, the tears, the rapture, the penitence, the despair, place the reader in tumultuous sympathy with the poor distracted nun." The pathos of the Unfortunate Lady has been almost equally praised, and I may quote from it a famous passage which Mackintosh repeated with emotion to repel a charge of coldness brought ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... lobster-sauce; and he gave expression to his high regard for that soothing and delicate compound when he decided that persons engaged in lobster-fishery were exempt from legal liability to impressment. "Then is not," inquired his lordship, with solemn pathos, "the lobster-fishery a fishery, and a most important fishery, of this kingdom, though carried on in shallow water? The framers of the law well knew that the produce of the deep sea, without the produce of the shallow water, would be ...
— A Book About Lawyers • John Cordy Jeaffreson
... written for him who has reached that grand estate where he may feel disdain for the feverish follies of youth. A lad may be an ass; doubtless he is. A maid may be as fitful as the west wind, and in the story of the fitfulness and folly of the man and the maid, there is vast pathos and pain, from which pathos and pain we may learn wisdom. Now the strange part of this story is not what befell the youth and the maid; for any tragedy that befalls a youth and a maid, is natural enough and in the order of things, as Heaven knows well. The strange part of this ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... left him as unlike them as all things else could conspire to make him. The long hair that hung untrimmed over his face seemed a black emphasis for the cameo delicacy of his features, lending them a wan note of pathos. On his thin temples, bluish veins traced the hall-mark of an over-sensitive nature, and eyes that were deep pools of somberness gazed ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... first time he was struck with a certain pathos in her immobile face. She looked up at him, and there was a gleam almost ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... All love, pathos, loyalty, and noble boy character are exemplified in this homeless little lad, who has made the world better for his being in it. The boy or girl who knows Remi has an ideal never to be forgotten. But it is a story ...
— Under the Ocean to the South Pole - The Strange Cruise of the Submarine Wonder • Roy Rockwood
... and emotions, it is easy for them to appear common and vulgar. And this is specially observable in the works of the French tragic writers, who set no other aim before themselves but the delineation of the passions; and by indulging at one moment in a vaporous kind of pathos which makes them ridiculous, at another in epigrammatic witticisms, endeavor to conceal the vulgarity of their subject. I remember seeing the celebrated Mademoiselle Rachel as Maria Stuart: and when she burst out in fury against Elizabeth—though she did ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... Margaret's eyes were not opened until the lease of Wickham Place expired. She had always known that it must expire, but the knowledge only became vivid about nine months before the event. Then the house was suddenly ringed with pathos. It had seen so much happiness. Why had it to be swept away? In the streets of the city she noted for the first time the architecture of hurry, and heard the language of hurry on the mouths of its inhabitants—clipped words, formless sentences, potted expressions of approval or disgust. ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... bitter complaints against Aziru and his father Abd-Ashera come from Rib-Addi of Gebal. His utterances rival the Lamentations of Jeremiah both in volume and in monotonous pathos. One of these many letters, the contents of which are often stereotyped enough, is also noticeable for its revelation of the connection of Rib-Addi, who must already have been an elderly man, ...
— The Tell El Amarna Period • Carl Niebuhr
... calm and collected, took his seat at the table, and when all were assembled, opened the Bible, which Harry had, by his master's direction, put before him, at the hundred and third Psalm. Deeply touching were those fervent words read out with solemn earnestness and pathos by the young man, in the presence of those he loved so dearly, specially when he lingered on the third and fourth verses, "Who forgiveth all thine iniquities; who healeth all thy diseases; who redeemeth thy life from destruction; who crowneth ...
— Amos Huntingdon • T.P. Wilson
... taken and the jury returned to the court room to render the verdict. "The prisoner at the bar will stand up," said the judge. Eunice stood up and her little boy stood up as well. There was the element of pathos in the standing up of that little boy, for the audience knew that his destiny ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... horrible chaw-bacon smack about it. Visions of a grinning lout, open from ear to ear, unkempt, coarse, splay-footed, rose before him and afflicted him with the strangest sensations of disgust and comicality, mixed up with pity and remorse—a sort of twisted pathos. There lay Tom; hobnail Tom! a bacon-munching, reckless, beer-swilling animal! and yet a man; a dear brave human heart notwithstanding; capable of devotion and unselfishness. The boy's better spirit was touched, and it kindled his imagination to realize the abject figure of poor ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... monument for their masters. It is impossible to describe the exquisite beauty of the slow movement of those dark figures aslant the broad flight of steps; individual expressions were of course indistinguishable, and yet the movement and attitude of the groups conveyed pathos and patient endurance as well as any individual speech or gesture in the ordinary theatre. Some groups carried hammer and anvil, and others staggered under enormous blocks of stone. Love for the ballet has perhaps made the Russians ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... in its scarlet clothes, The matchless tinting on the royal rose Whose velvet leaf by no least flaw is flecked, Love's supreme moment, when the soul unchecked Soars high as heaven, and its best rapture knows— These hold a deeper pathos than our woes, Since they leave nothing ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Niemann's characteristic criticism: Adolf Robinson, the barytone of the first few German seasons, was an excellent singer and also actor; but he belonged to the old operatic school, and was prone to extravagant action and exaggerated pathos. He was, moreover, fond of the footlights. At one of the last rehearsals for "Tristan und Isolde," Robinson, the Kurwenal of the occasion, was perpetually running from the dying hero's couch to the front of the stage to sing his pathetic phrases with tremendous feeling ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... for a minute, because the boys were as quick to feel the pathos of the little story as tender-hearted Daisy, though they did not ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... a sound from the room across the hallway arrested his attention. It was music, sweet and full of pathos. Reynolds at once knew that it must be Glen. It could be no other, and he was determined to see her once more ere her father should ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... of the uncouth verbiage of the old narrative, there is a touch of human pathos about it which makes it worthy ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... community was more and more masculine when it was producing more and more women. Nor can you say that a city is growing richer and richer when more and more of its inhabitants are very poor men. There might be a false agitation founded on the pathos of individual cases in a community pretty normal in bulk. But the fact is that no one can take a cab across Liverpool without having a quite complete and unified impression that the pathos is not ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... a world of pathos and pleading in the voice which asked this question, just as there was a world of tenderness in the manner in which Morris smoothed and caressed and fondled the bowed head resting on the chair arm. And Katy felt it all, understanding what it ...
— Family Pride - Or, Purified by Suffering • Mary J. Holmes
... that she will be on the lookout. She goes there, and the skilful owner of the agency shows her how miserable the pay would be for any decent evening work, and how easily she can earn all the money she needs for her mother if she is willing to be paid by men. At first she refuses with pathos, but under the suggestive pressure of luring arguments she slowly weakens, and finally consents to exchange her street gown for a fantastic costume of half-nakedness. The feelings of the audience are ...
— Psychology and Social Sanity • Hugo Muensterberg |
