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Pathos   /pˈeɪθɑs/   Listen
Pathos

noun
1.
A quality that arouses emotions (especially pity or sorrow).  Synonym: poignancy.
2.
A feeling of sympathy and sorrow for the misfortunes of others.  Synonyms: commiseration, pity, ruth.
3.
A style that has the power to evoke feelings.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Pathos" Quotes from Famous Books



... with short yet deep enthusiasm, with more than one tearful pause, on the virtues of his mother; he acknowledged the unbounded gratitude which was due to that God who had so wonderfully conducted him to find a parent and a home in England, and with renewed pathos of look and manner ratified the proffer which Sir Robert had made of his heart and hand to her who alone on this earth had reminded him of that angelic parent. "I nave seen her beloved face, luminous in ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter

... Beautiful in its pathos is the poem of "A Court Lady," and there are few satires more biting than "An August Voice," which, as an interpretation of the Napoleonic words, is perfect. Nor did she fail to vindicate the Peace ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... deep pathos in his voice, "no one can be better aware than I am that I have made many mistakes in the course of my life; but that quality on which I think I have reason to be satisfied with myself is my rigidity when I know a thing is wrong. There occurs to me now an instance in my career which will prove to ...
— The Stories of the Three Burglars • Frank Richard Stockton

... not bathos, The one by an early Chinese, The other, that infinite pathos, Our Nursery Rhymes, if you please. He was lost, he avowed, in this era; His spirit was seared by the West, But he deemed to be Monk in Madeira Would probably suit ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, VOL. 100. Feb. 28, 1891 • Various

... good English account of Vienna during the Congress will be found in "Travels in Hungary," by Dr. R. Bright, the eminent physician. His visit to Napoleon's son, then a child five years old, is described in a passage of singular beauty and pathos. ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe

... been truly remarked, that tragedy, in no small degree, owed its downfall to Euripides. Poetry was gradually superseded by rhetoric, sublimity by earnestness, pathos by reasoning. Thus, Iphigenia and Macaria give so many good reasons for dying, that the sacrifice appears very small, and a modern wag in the upper regions of the theatre would, at the end of the speech of the latter heroine, almost have exclaimed, ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides

... with the sweetest kindness of feeling towards the persons who hold that doctrine. Earnest theological debate may be carried on without the slightest touch of ungenerous personality. Who but must feel the pathos and admire the charity of these eloquent ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... power of impersonation implying of itself the union of all the natural requirements with a mastery in their display attainable only by consummate art—it is hard to believe that he can ever have been excelled; though doubtless the mingled fire and pathos of Kean transcended in their effect any like exhibition ever witnessed on the stage. Except for the few—if any still survive—who can remember the Othello of Kean, living recollection affords no opportunity for a judgment founded ...
— Lippincott's Magazine. Vol. XII, No. 33. December, 1873. • Various

... nothing pleases aged Kentuckians better than to tell stories which they heard their fathers tell of Clay's happy repartees to opposing counsel, his ingenious cross-questioning of witnesses, his sweeping torrents of invective, his captivating courtesy, his melting pathos. Single gestures, attitudes, tones, have come down to us through two or three memories, and still please the curious guest at Kentucky firesides. But when we turn to the cold records of this part of his life, we find little to justify his traditional ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... now, Guy, my boy." Unconsciously his voice took on the incomparable pathos of age displaced. "I'm out of the race," he ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... of verse have won popular favor so quickly as this volume, which is now in its ninth edition and selling as steadily as when first published. It is a rare combination of wit, humor, sense, and homely pathos. ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer

... vestiges of past eras, dead ambitions, vanished glory, and long-outworn belief, and I ignored eras, ambitions, glory, and belief, and thought only of form, and height, of the miracle of blackness against silver, and of the pathos of statues whose ever-open eyes at night, when one is near them, suggest the working of some evil spell, perpetual watchfulness, combined with eternal inactivity, the unslumbering mind caged in the body that ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens

... neither. He simply said: "My friends, I do not agree with all that you have said. I think, as you do, that the way white people treat us in the street cars and hotels"—and he might have added, in churches, but he did not—"is wrong, unchristian, and cruel." And when he said that, there was a pathos in his voice which made me ashamed to be a white man. "But," he added, "while I think as you do that it is cruel, I do not think that the white people will ever stop treating us as inferiors so long as we are inferiors, and I think that they will despise us as long as they can. But when ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 12, December, 1889 • Various

... composer lies buried, and a form of communication is made to us on this suitable spot, that Bellini is dead; then comes, in episode, a catalogue of all the operas he ever wrote, with allusions to each, and not a little vapouring and pathos, while a host of heroes and heroines we never before heard of, is let loose upon us; presently, a marked pause, and some by-play, makes it evident that he sees something, and cannot see what the thing is; he shortly, however, imparts to us in confidence, though ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various

... boy," cried the visitor petulantly; and then, with a sad smile full of pathos on her quivering lip, she added softly, "I can't tell ye to call me mother: my son died, Dominic, just when he began to know me; but look here," she cried, brightening, though the lad could see tears in her fine dark eyes, out ...
— First in the Field - A Story of New South Wales • George Manville Fenn

... carefully and highly wrought scene, occurring just before Eldredge's actual attempt on Middleton's life, in which all the brilliancy of his character—which shall before have gleamed upon the reader—shall come out, with pathos, with wit, with insight, with knowledge of life. Middleton shall be inspired by this, and shall vie with him in exhilaration of spirits; but the ecclesiastic shall look on with singular attention, and some appearance of alarm; and the suspicion ...
— The Ancestral Footstep (fragment) - Outlines of an English Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... no knowledge of the world; with few books; with a want of that tact possessed by some intellects, of knowing and turning to account the tendencies of the age in literature, it was hardly to be expected that Andrew would soon succeed as a poet, though his imagination was powerful, and there was pathos and even occasional sublimity in his poetry. For five long years he had been toiling and striving without any success whatever in his vocation, in the way of realizing either ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... that the spells she deemed all- powerful have been counteracted by some sorceress of skill superior to her own, gives great reality to the scene; and the curses of the dying boy, launched with tragic vigour, and closing with a touch of beautiful pathos, bring ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... must have been added to the coat as a substitute for vanished splendors, with tasteless but painstaking devotion, for it followed faithfully the curves of the long-missing frogs. And, to complete the comedy and pathos of the garment, all its buttons were gone save one. The second button from the top alone remained. The coat was fastened by other twine strings tied through the buttonholes and other holes rudely pierced in ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry

... passed that way since he had last spoken; that the same sun had swung silently above him and the unchanged landscape, and there had been no interruption nor diversion to his monotonous thought. The wilderness annihilates time and space with the grim pathos of patience. ...
— In a Hollow of the Hills • Bret Harte

... Gorham she had from the first of her entering the school taken a deep interest in. The small, deformed, pale girl had a pathos in her whole appearance that touched deeply Marion's sympathies. They were in different classes, and, so far, had come little in contact; but now she felt irresistibly drawn to the art studio during the hours when Helen was there, and, standing near, ...
— Miss Ashton's New Pupil - A School Girl's Story • Mrs. S. S. Robbins

... story of intense power and pathos. The hero is a hunchback (Punchinello), who wins the love of a beautiful young girl. Her sudden death, due indirectly to his jealousy, and the discovery that she had never faltered in her love for him, ...
— Philip Winwood • Robert Neilson Stephens

... should be extinct. But the courage of Du Bourg did not fail him. When the counsellors had fulfilled their commission and were about to retire, the fettered prisoner detained them, and uttered a speech of exquisite pathos. It was the bewitching spirit of delusion, he said, the messenger of hell, the capital enemy of truth, that had accused him before them, because he had abandoned her. To that evil spirit had they too readily listened and condemned him and others like him, the children of the God ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird

... 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 was involved ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs

... part in the debate are now living—Lord Houghton and the Dean of Lincoln. How many still remember kind and civil Baxter, the harness-maker opposite Trinity; and how many of them ever heard him sing his famous song of 'Poor Old Horse'? Yet for pathos, and, unhappily in some cases, for truth, it may well rank even with 'The Ancient Mariner.' And Baxter used to sing ...
— Two Suffolk Friends • Francis Hindes Groome

... minute, because the boys were as quick to feel the pathos of the little story as tender-hearted Daisy, though they did not show ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott

... beautiful, glittering world as flighty as fancy itself, so melancholy and sonorous, so bitter and yet so gay, full of inward pathos and glaring sarcasms, where misery was warm and grace was sad, the last vestige of a lost age, a distant race, which, we are told, came from the other end of the earth and brought us in the tinkling of its bells the echo and vague memory ...
— Over Strand and Field • Gustave Flaubert

... of this 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 ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston

... George the poorer in this, that as a member of Parliament his expenses were greater. The fellow-lodger, who afterwards became private secretary to one of Mr. Lloyd George's rivals, has told me that no public speech of Mr. Lloyd George ever equalled in pathos and power the speeches which the young member of Parliament would often make in those hungry days, seated on the edge of the bed, or pacing to and fro in the room, speeches lit by one passion and directed ...
— The Mirrors of Downing Street - Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster • Harold Begbie

... ruinous, and had been long since abandoned. It had been a rather grand house once, and must have belonged to people of importance in the country. There was a finely-carved scutcheon with arms over the Gothic door, and the mullioned windows, which had lost all their glass, had something of the pathos of gentility that, becoming poor and old, has been abandoned to all winds and weathers. The little courtyard was full of high weeds and shrubs, and the wild flags that grow on the rocks had laid their green leaves together to hide the wounds of the old walls. Swallows, sparrows, ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker

... period when she is most distinctly before us was a subject people. It was largely the presence of a foreign oppressor which gave to the national voice that tone of intense entreaty toward a divine friend and deliverer which runs its pathos through psalm and history and prophecy. There had been a better day for Israel, before Assyrian and Egyptian trampled her. There had been a day when Philistia and Edom quailed and fell before her, and the Lord ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam

... appearance in the Kirtland Temple. Smith was as bold and aggressive as ever, but Rigdon, weak from illness, had to be supported to his seat. An eye-witness of the day's proceedings says* that "the pathos of Rigdon's plea, and the power of his denunciation, swayed the feelings and shook the judgments of his hearers as never in the old days of peace, and, when he had finished and was led out, a perfect silence reigned in the Temple ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... mind employed on some subject which should not be painful, began chatting about the war and its prospects. Elsley soon caught the cue, and talked with wild energy and pathos, opium-fed, of the coming struggle between despotism and liberty, the arising of Poland and Hungary, and all the grand dreams which then haunted minds ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... 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 on his way from the Schools, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede

... Methodist Church, in which he had held a prominent position both as a Preacher and Secretary of the Conference. He was a man of genial spirit, affable manners, and commanding eloquence. His sermons were well prepared, and especially in given passages, were delivered with an unction and pathos that could not fail to produce an abiding impression. The great concourse of people who waited upon his ministry attested how highly he was appreciated by those who were permitted to listen to his weekly ministrations. A revival occurred during the winter, and at the ...
— Thirty Years in the Itinerancy • Wesson Gage Miller

... of his well-known poem, "Natterin' Nan," which first appeared in a Bradford journal in 1856. This is a vigorous piece of dramatic realism, setting forth the character of a Yorkshire scold and grumbler with infinite zest and humour. But it is in pathos that the genius of Preston chiefly consists. In poems like "Owd Moxy," "T' Lancashire Famine," and "I niver can call her my wife," he gives us pictures of the struggle that went on in the cottage-homes of the West Riding ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman

... of them all got farther into our hearts than the little speckle-breasted song sparrow, one of the first to arrive and begin nest-building and singing. The richness, sweetness, and pathos of this small darling's song as he sat on a low bush often brought tears ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir

... Philotas on the 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 expletive matter. This must always make ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... roofed, and might easily have been made habitable; but there was no glass in the windows; all the rooms were silent with that silence so deep and sad of the long-deserted house which is not sufficiently wrecked by time and decay to have lost the pathos of human associations. The breath of the dying twilight stirred the ivy leaves upon the wall of the detached chapel where never a person had prayed for many a year, and the goblin bats came out from the shadowy places to flutter against ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... did not rise to the epic, and scarcely expanded into the dramatic; his path was comparatively narrow; his kingdom remained small, yet where he stands is hallowed ground; his art is musical, altogether lyrical, yet toned with pathos, as if the lamentations of The Holy Women at the Sepulchre mingled with the angel-voices of The Nativity. The man and his work are among the most striking and unaccustomed phenomena of the century, and so far as his art is true to God, humanity, and nature, ...
— Overbeck • J. Beavington Atkinson

... he repeated at intervals from sheer force of habit. With his pipe alight he was an ideal listener; without it his attention wandered and grew drowsy. But Malcolm, wrapt up in his own visionary conceits, did not see the pathos ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... a work of genius and, as always with works of genius, it is difficult to analyze the elements that have gone to make it. There is poetry here and fantasy and humor, a little pathos but, above all, a number of creations in whose existence everybody must believe whether they be children of four or old men of ninety or prosperous bankers of forty-five. I don't know how Mr. Lofting has done it; I don't suppose that he knows himself. There it is—the ...
— The Story of Doctor Dolittle • Hugh Lofting

... 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

... however, is not to say the last word. The question is whether Wordsworth, however unequal to Shelley in lyric quality, to Coleridge or to Keats in imaginative quality, to Burns in tenderness, warmth, and that humour which is so nearly akin to pathos, to Byron in vividness and energy, yet possesses excellences of his own which place him in other respects above these master-spirits of his time. If the question is to be answered affirmatively, it is clear that only in one direction must we look. The trait that really places Wordsworth ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... a grassy valley. Orpheus stands beside it plunged in the deepest grief, while a troop of shepherds and maidens bring flowers to adorn it. His despairing cry of 'Eurydice' breaks passionately upon their mournful chorus, and the whole scene, though drawn in simple lines, is instinct with genuine pathos. When the rustic mourners have laid their gifts upon the tomb and departed, Orpheus calls upon the shade of his lost wife in an air of exquisite beauty, broken by expressive recitative. He declares his resolution of following her to the underworld, when Eros enters and tells him of the condition ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... Paris was rushing at that time to the Porte-Saint-Martin, to see one of those pieces to which the power of the actors lends a terrible expression of reality, Richard Darlington. Like all ingenuous natures, Esther loved to feel the thrills of fear as much as to yield to tears of pathos. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... emotion, this story of love and murder, this work of the great poet now passed away—all this is poured into the ears of one man, who sits motionless, entranced, until the tale is told, the play done, and he walks out into the quiet night, quivering with the terrible pathos of Becket's end. ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... protection and refuge were sought (Amos ix.). What did they mean ? It would be to misunderstand the prophets to suppose that they took offence at the holy places— which Amos still calls Bamoth (vii.9), and that too not in scorn, but with the deepest pathos—in and by themselves, on account of their being more than one, or not being the right ones. Their zeal is directed, not against the places, but against the cultus there carried on, and, in fact not merely against its ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen

... those brilliant ones in which pure Beauty, in a fit of caprice, seems to have lent herself to the service of Elegance, but, only half disguised in changing forms and dazzling lights, betrays in every movement her own nobility and pours out lavishly her glorious pathos. ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... bared their heads (and there were three women among them) and sang, with a pathos that surely the old hymn had never expressed before, their national ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss

... stories are told of the men and women he helped away, some of them full of pathos, and some decidedly amusing. He told the latter which related to his ingenious contrivances for assisting fugitives to escape the police with much pleasure, in his later years. We would repeat many of them, but this is not the time or place. The necessity of avoiding the police was the only ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... a later period, that the real character of the persecuted class is to be gathered. Walker writes with a simplicity which sometimes slides into the burlesque, and sometimes attains a tone of simple pathos, but always expressing the most daring confidence in his own correctness of creed and sentiments, sometimes with narrow-minded and disgusting bigotry. His turn for the marvellous was that of his time and sect; but there is little room to doubt ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... his heart desired. He adored "La Belle Lucerce," the fascinating Snake Charmer, and somewhere in the background the artiste had a husband. Little the audience suspected the passion that devoured their grotesque comedian while he cut his capers and turned love to ridicule; little they divined the pathos of a situation which condemned him behind the scenes to whisper the most sentimental assurances of devotion when disfigured by a flaming wig and a nose that was daubed vermilion! How nearly it has been said, One half of ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick

... his brow rested an expression of constant grief and anxiety. He was a man that seldom spoke of his own troubles to any one, but it was plain to be seen that his erring boy was never absent from his thoughts, and there was a feeling and pathos in his voice when he addressed his congregation, especially the younger portion of it, which had never been noticed before. It was his custom upon the first sabbath evening in each month to deliver an address to the youth of his flock and it was noticed that his appeals ...
— Stories and Sketches • Harriet S. Caswell

... There was a pathos in his appeal that would have melted many a stony heart, but Westray's principles were unassailable, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... their interrupted joyous song in the final scene, all serve to heighten our feeling of affectionate pity and regret. The imaginary former friendship between Pym and Strafford adds still more to the pathos of the delineation, and gives rise to some of the finest speeches, notably the last great colloquy between these two, which so effectively rounds and ends the play. The fatal figure of Pym is impressive and admirable throughout, and the portrait of the Countess of Carlisle, ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons

... Lilia had achieved pathos despite herself, for there are some situations in which vulgarity counts no longer. Not Cordelia nor Imogen more deserves ...
— Where Angels Fear to Tread • E. M. Forster

... lucid references to the original sources. The most attractive feature of the work to the general reader will doubtless be the sketch of the popular poetry of the Slavic nations, illustrated with abundant specimens of songs and ballads, many of which are marked with a strong natural pathos and tenderness, and all of them possessing a certain rustic simplicity, which is usually of a very ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various

... 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 of ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans

... the child was allowed to visit the National Gallery unattended; but although he never lost his affectionate awe for the two dim interiors, he did not really begin to appreciate Rembrandt until he had reached manhood. Rembrandt is too learned in the pathos of life, too deeply versed in realities, to win the suffrages of youth. But he was attracted by another portrait in the National Gallery—that called A Jewish Rabbi. This was the first likeness ...
— Rembrandt • Mortimer Menpes

... at which the thoughtless may smile, but it is full of pathos, and eloquent for those who knew him best. His attitude is stiff and his coat hunches up in the back, but his kind old heart asserts itself through the gentle eyes, and when he has gone away at last we do not criticise the picture any more, but beyond the old coat that hunches up in ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye

... in them that reminded me of the icicle eyes of the crocodile, and, curiously, I associated that reptile's notions of fair warfare with Leith as I looked at him. That sullen face, with the eyes that would never brighten at a tale of daring, or dim from a story of pathos, belonged to a man who would imitate crocodile tactics by lying quiet till his prey ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer

... are they to lazy folks, Who pour down on us gifts of fluent speech, Sense most sententious, wonderful fine effect, And how to talk about it and about it, Thoughts brisk as bees, and pathos soft and thawy. ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge

... melancholy youth; puritanical, severe and formal in their manners, their relaxations a Bible Society, or a meeting for the conversion of the Jews. But Lady Katherine was beautiful, and all were kind to one to whom kindness was strange, and the soft pathos of whose ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... printed sermons were the main source of my instruction and delight. His range and variety of observation ... his width of sympathy; his natural and spontaneous pathos; the wealth of illustration and metaphor with which his sermons were adorned, and which were drawn chiefly from natural objects, from his orchard, his farm, his garden, as well as from machinery and from all kinds of natural processes; his naturalism and absence of theological ...
— The Booklover and His Books • Harry Lyman Koopman

... Strype—(in a strain of pathos and eloquence not usually to be found in his writings) "we have brought this excellent prelate unto his end, after two years and a half hard imprisonment. His body was not carried to the grave in state, nor buried, as many of his predecessors were, in his own cathedral church, nor ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... friends go into wolves and snakes; others, that they wander about the forests; and they are much afraid of ghosts. A few think that they go to "a good or bad place," according to their deeds; but Shinondi said, and there was an infinite pathos in his words, "How can we know? No one ever came back to tell us!" On asking him what were bad deeds, he said, "Being bad to parents, stealing, and telling lies." The future, however, does not occupy any place in their thoughts, and they can hardly be said to ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird

... effect. The autumn wood robed 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

... in the army; and to the wonder of all near by, the Emperor heard her with marked respect and immediately granted her request. She sought only this for her surviving son. She had seen two children die—there was moving pathos in the daughter's death—and now she was standing by the last. Never was child guarded more faithfully or sent more proudly on his path in life. One should read the memoirs to understand, and pause frequently to consider: how she promised her husband bravely in the ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... which we now stand. When one knows every little nook and corner of one's ship as we did, and has helped her time and again in the fight that she made so well, the actual parting was not without its pathos, quite apart from one's own desolation, and I doubt if there was one amongst us who did not feel some personal emotion when Sir Ernest, standing on the top of the look-out, said somewhat sadly and quietly, 'She's ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton

... a composer that her brilliant talents stand preeminent. MOZART, BEETHOVEN, and a host of others excelled in this respect, but they all lack that exquisite pathos and graceful rhetoric which so distinguished this queen of literature. The beautiful creations of that fruitful brain are as a passing panorama of constant delight. Her style is singularly free from affectation, and, while we are at one moment rapt in wonder at her chaste and vigorous description ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 33, November 12, 1870 • Various

... application of blows to some acrobatic infant who had "funked" his little job. Impossible such horrors in the world of pure poetry opened out to us at Niblo's, a temple of illusion, of tragedy and comedy and pathos that, though its abords of stony brown Metropolitan Hotel, on the "wrong side," must have been bleak and vulgar, flung its glamour forth into Broadway. What more pathetic for instance, so that we publicly wept, than the fate of wondrous Martinetti Jocko, who, after ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... half-smiling eyes enticed him, inspired an unquenchable thirst. And his was one of those natures which, encountering spiritual difficulty, at once jib off, seek anodynes, try to bandage wounded egoism with excess—a spoiled child, with the desperations and the inherent pathos, the something repulsive and the something lovable that belong to all such. Having wished for this moon, and got her, he now did not know what to do with her, kept taking great bites at her, with a feeling all the time of getting further and further ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... in Loder's knowledge of her, her voice broke, her control deserted her. She stood before him in all the pathos of her ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston

... sight of the eager young faces, alight with generous enthusiasm. Perhaps it was the pathos of the story of one missionary barrel as told by girlish lips trembling with feeling. Perhaps it was just the novelty of receiving so direct, and so confident an appeal for "something you'd like to have given to you, you know." Perhaps it was a little ...
— The Sunbridge Girls at Six Star Ranch • Eleanor H. (Eleanor Hodgman) Porter

... before of the view she had years ago of de Barral clinging to the child at the side of his wife's grave and later on of these two walking hand in hand the observed of all eyes by the sea. Pictures from Dickens—pregnant with pathos. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad

... and loathing, Rose-Marie was suddenly sorry for Jim. There was something pitiful—something of which he did not realize the pathos—in his speech. God had never been in the tenement—God had never been in the tenement! All at once she realized that Jim's wickedness, that Jim's point of view, was not wholly his fault. Jim had not been brought ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster

... in their own atmosphere, and as if revealed. It is as if their vulnerable being was exposed and they have not the wit to cover it. There is a pathos of physical sensibility and mental inadequacy. Their mind is not sufficiently alert to run with ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence

... and in which conversions to Rome are only permitted after a certain age or in clearly defined circumstances. There would be something beyond mere practical wisdom in such law-giving, an exquisite sense of the pathos of human life and its requirements; scapulars, indulgences and sacraments are needed by the weak and the ageing, sacraments especially. "They make you believe but they stupefy you;" these words are Pascal's, the great light ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... dwelling was found a diary which told its own tale of lonesomeness and starvation. Is there real pathos in the last writings of this once vigorous ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... practised, and planted some flowers, and made some things for Miranda's baby, and then"—she hesitated, with an adorably shy look full of that pathos, which made so many of her simplest statements seem claims for protection, "and then I went over into 'My ...
— Katrine • Elinor Macartney Lane

... gesture, the arm thrust out, the hand open, the fingers spread, Louis shrank back, his other arm across his face. It was a movement eloquent of pathos, despair, and suffering; then, with another sigh, he straightened himself, his corpse-like ...
— The Justice of the King • Hamilton Drummond

... reciting a tragedy, and that, of course, made it all the funnier. They said he never once suggested by his tone or manner that he was singing anything funny - that would spoil it. It was his air of seriousness, almost of pathos, that made it ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome

... 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, ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta

... self-elected addition to the party of the day. He tried to look stern, and cracked his whip at the creature, but was in a moment obliged to join in the general cheers. Poor piggy soon found a strap round his neck, and was dragged into the background. Scott, watching the retreat, repeated with mock pathos the first verse of an ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton

... bachelorhood"—which appears in the sequel to have been a persistent mourner-hood—and the forty years' hopeless passion of mild Susan P.—which very permanence redeems and almost dignifies, is in the author's sweetest vein of mingled humour and pathos, wherein the latter, as ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... throat; and she did not subject me to that embarrassment I always feel in the presence of a lady who is much decolletee, when I sit next her or face to face with her: I cannot always look at her without a sense of taking an immodest advantage. Sometimes I find a kind of pathos in this sacrifice of fashion, which affects me as if the poor lady were wearing that sort of gown because she thought she really ought, and then I keep my eyes firmly on hers, or avert them altogether; but there are other ...
— Through the Eye of the Needle - A Romance • W. D. Howells

... feel about it now?" I said. "Don't you feel sorry for the muddle and ignorance and pathos of it all? Can't something be done to show everybody what a ghastly mistake it is, to get so tied down to the earth and the things ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson

... intimately and in elaborate detail. Both men were at heart moralists, seeking the truth by the exaggerated methods of humour and caricature; perverse, even wrong-headed at times, but possessed of a true pathos and largeness of heart, and when all has been said — though the Elizabethan ran to satire, the Victorian to sentimentality — leaving the world better for the art that they practised ...
— Every Man In His Humour • Ben Jonson

... work itself. It is the solemn farewell of the aged lawgiver to the people whose leader he had been for the space of forty years. In perfect harmony with this are the grandeur and dignity of its style, its hortatory character, and the exquisite tenderness and pathos that pervade every part of it. It is every way worthy of Moses; nor can we conceive of any other Hebrew who was in a position to ...
— Companion to the Bible • E. P. Barrows

... roll the morsel on the palate of his imagination, and found that the pathos of it almost moved him to tears. But before long he fell from the clouds to more practical matters. The secret was his, but what was he going to do with it? Where make his market of it? One by one he considered all the persons concerned. To ...
— The Castle Inn • Stanley John Weyman

... first days when Aileen was young, and love and hope had been the substance of her being. The thought ran through all his efforts and cogitations like a distantly orchestrated undertone. In the main, in spite of his activity, he was an introspective man, and art, drama, and the pathos of broken ideals were not beyond him. He harbored in no way any grudge against Aileen—only a kind of sorrow over the inevitable consequences of his own ungovernable disposition, the will to freedom within himself. Change! Change! the inevitable passing of things! ...
— The Titan • Theodore Dreiser

... sweet, low, yet penetrating voice, that now had a pathos which melted every heart, she sang the following words, which, like the perfume of crushed violets, have risen in prayer from many bruised and ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe

... instant submission. Unless the words "Roman Citizens!" had suggested more than meets the ear, how could they have produced this wonderful effect? The works of Voltaire and Sterne abound with examples of the skilful use of the language of suggestion: on this the wit of Voltaire, and the humour and pathos of Sterne, securely depend for their success. Thus, corporal Trim's eloquence on the death of his young master, owed its effect upon the whole kitchen, including "the fat scullion, who was scouring a fish-kettle upon her knees," to the well-timed use of the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... face; the melodious voice, with its rich Spanish accent; the quiet grace of the gestures; the wild pathos of the story; even the measured and inflated style, as of one speaking of another and a loftier world; the chivalrous respect and admiration for woman, and for faithfulness to woman—what a man he was! If he had been pleasant heretofore, he was ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley

... 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 with money to ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss

... part a glance at these Marterl und Taferl, which are so frequent on all the mountain-roads of the Tyrol, will give you a strange sense of the real pathos of human life. If you are a Catholic, you will not refuse their request to say a prayer for the departed; if you are a Protestant, at least it will not hurt you to say one for those who still live and suffer and toil ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke

... his voice was that of many who followed him. Loving the mother country with passion, the sense of exile long remained with them—a double exile, since they had first taken firm hold in Leyden, and parted from its ease and prosperity with words which hold the pathos and quiet endurance still the undertone of much New England life, and which, though already quoted, are the key note ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell

... over many pages of Anastasius, and for two reasons: first, that he had not written it; and secondly, that Hope had; for it was necessary to like a man excessively to pardon his writing such a book; as, he said, excelling all recent productions, as much in wit and talent as in true pathos. Lord Byron added, that he would have given his two most approved poems to have been ...
— Books and Authors - Curious Facts and Characteristic Sketches • Anonymous

... dreamed of windows with iron bars across them, and strait-jackets, into which he was thrusting his brother, while a face, the loveliest he had ever seen, looked reproachfully at him, with tears in the soft blue eyes, and a pleading pathos in the voice which said words he could not understand, for the language was a strange one to him who ...
— Tracy Park • Mary Jane Holmes

... the world, has been done in the South, so that one may be reasonably sure of an artistic pleasure in taking up a Southern story. One finds in the Southern stories careful and conscientious character, rich local color, and effective grouping, and at the same time one finds genuine pathos, true humor, noble feeling, generous sympathy. The range of this work is so great as to include even pictures of the more conventional life, but mainly the writers keep to the life which is not conventional, the life of the fields, the woods, the cabin, the village, the little country ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden

... story has a real grip, and the solution of the mystery concerning the death of the girl victim of an unknown hand is at once original and instinct with a true human pathos. The character of the detective who investigates the case is one of the triumphs of the book, and he is no stereotyped member of the Criminal Investigation Department but a living personality as well as a convincing police officer. Mr. Carlton Dawe has written in THE KNIGHTSBRIDGE ...
— Jack O' Judgment • Edgar Wallace

... gesticulated in clouds of tobacco smoke, and propounded fantastic philosophies amid the rattle of dominoes—and afar off in the street a voice was crying "Haricots verts!" My new friend's talk had the pathos of spiritual exile, for, as French in blood as a man could be, born in Bordeaux of Provencal parentage, he had lived most of his life in America. The decoration of a rich man's house in the neighbourhood had brought him thus into my solitude, and, that work completed, he would ...
— October Vagabonds • Richard Le Gallienne

... Liancourt died while a Polignac escaped. Many 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 if the victims of the guillotine ...
— History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814 • F. A. M. Mignet

... always been our opinion, that the very essence of poetry—apart from the pathos, the wit, or the brilliant description which may be imbodied in it, but may exist equally in prose—consists in the fine perception and vivid expression of the subtle and mysterious analogy which exists between the physical and the moral world—which makes ...
— The Young Lady's Mentor - A Guide to the Formation of Character. In a Series of Letters to Her Unknown Friends • A Lady

... country's treasure. The former he characterises as an incoherent composition, in which useless gesticulation diminishes the dramatic effect, while striving to force it; and adds that all the false romanticism of painting comes from this sort of theatrical pathos. Of the other he writes "It was the picture at the Louvre which shocked me with its violent declamation and its forced blows that never hit anything. But here at Munich a mystery so profound broods over the drama that ...
— Six Centuries of Painting • Randall Davies

... jealous are some of those who well and wisely love the chansons, that I have known objections taken to ranking as pure examples, despite their undoubted age and merit, such pieces as Amis et Amiles (for passion and pathos and that just averted tragedy which is so difficult to manage, one of the finest of all) and the Voyage a Constantinoble, the single early specimen of mainly or purely comic donnee.[15] This seems to me, I confess, mere prudery or else mistaken logic, starting from the quite ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... could not always see the difficulties that beset the President. Many of them failed to realize that at heart he was as true to freedom as they. Even Lowell, in the later Biglow Papers, which pleaded with deeper pathos and power than before for freedom—even he could write of "hoisting your captain's heart up with a derrick." Wendell Phillips on one occasion, impatient of Lincoln's attitude toward the fugitive slave law, called him "the slave-hound from Illinois." Beecher,—who ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam

... led up to the pathos and prettiness of their reconciliation in the end? Shakespeare mixes the comic and the ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells

... have every element of the drama of life as it begins within the lives of children. The two stories are a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous; the foibles and fancies of childhood, interspersed with humor and pathos. ...
— A Woman for Mayor - A Novel of To-day • Helen M. Winslow

... significance in all things lent a special pathos to his conjectures to-day about Mrs. Talcott. He did not know how far her affection for Karen went and whether it were more than the mere kindly solicitude of the aged for the young; but the girl's presence in her life must give at least interest and colour, and after Mrs. Talcott had spoken her ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... to him, and poesy, 160 Herself a poet. Soon the solemn mood Of her pure mind kindled through all her frame A permeating fire; wild numbers then She raised, with voice stifled in tremulous sobs Subdued by its own pathos; her fair hands 165 Were bare alone, sweeping from some strange harp Strange symphony, and in their branching veins The eloquent blood told an ineffable tale. The beating of her heart was heard to fill The pauses of her music, and her breath 170 Tumultuously accorded with ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley

... garters was "subtle" and "masterly" and "inevitable"—that it had an "old-world charm," and was "redolent of the soil." We said, too, that we had "read it with breathless interest from cover to cover," and that it had "poignant pathos and a convincing realism," and the "fine flower of delicate sentiment," besides much other rot that the ...
— New Treasure Seekers - or, The Bastable Children in Search of a Fortune • E. (Edith) Nesbit

... the tariff, and the general was wrangling with him. The Barclays were talking to themselves, and the children were clattering about underfoot, and in the trees overhead. Bob's eyes and Molly's met, and the man shuddered at what he saw of pathos and yearning, and he said: "Well, why not? It's no worse to go than to want to go. What's wrong about it—Molly, do ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... unmoved, for the shadow in the distance was growing more and more distinct, and the suspicion with which he regarded her drove away every particle of commiseration, and made him blind to the emotion welling up in her eyes, hostile to the pathos in ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott

... perhaps somewhat obscured by its being chivalrously pointed towards those fair beings who brighten our existence and lengthen our griefs. Without the Ladies, the speaker found, we may be politicians, but we cannot be gentlemen. He discovered (upon the spot, and with a delicate suggestion of pathos) that by a curious coincidence, the Ladies were the men's mothers, their wives, their sisters, their daughters. This being greatly applauded, he added that over these husbands, these fathers, these brothers—and might be added "these lovers"—the Ladies wielded a mighty influence. ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... proved of far-reaching effect. He was sitting in this very church on an occasion; a high mass was being celebrated. The minister was all right; he was doing splendidly. He was even eloquent; he spoke convincingly, with feeling and pathos. But in the middle of a most stirring peroration in which he, carried away in an outburst of spiritual fervour, had meant to shout: "Jews and Gentiles!" his tongue had tripped and he had said: "Gents and ...
— Shallow Soil • Knut Hamsun

... two preliminary tuning notes were sounded, and then the violinist began to play. Her skill was undoubted, but the feeling and pathos which she threw into the long-drawn sighing notes were more remarkable even than her skill. There was a touch of genius in her performance which held the listeners enthralled. When she had finished, she disappeared ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant

... was minister of an orthodox church in the West, a lovely, faithful lady came to me to raise some question touching this matter of prayer. It had been suggested, I suppose, by something I had said; and I asked her this question: What would you think of me if I should come to you, and with pathos in my voice, and perhaps with tears in my eyes, plead with you to be kind to your own children, beg you to give them something to eat, beseech you to furnish them with clothes, entreat you to educate them, to do the best for them that you knew how? What would you think ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage

... companion hesitated, but I had the advantage here, being the one who could speak Italian; so I promptly replied that we would not go in the omnibus under any circumstances. The whole story was then repeated with more adjectives and superlatives, and gestures of a form and pathos to make the fortune of a tragic actor. I repeated my refusal. He began a third time: I sat down on the steps, rested my head on my hand and looked at the carvings of the portal. This drove him to frenzy: so ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various

... his secretaries that morning, and himself dictated the letters which bore the sad news to Beatrice's family at Mantua and Ferrara. In that dark hour the passion of his love and sorrow breaks through conventional formalities, and gives a touch of pathos to the brief message which he sent to ...
— Beatrice d'Este, Duchess of Milan, 1475-1497 • Julia Mary Cartwright

... of purpose, which would seem to leave little for the last consummating change to accomplish. When he calculates that the reader is on the verge of pitying him, he takes care to throw him back the defiance of laughter, as if to let him know that all the Poet's pathos is but the sentimentalism of the drunkard between his cups, or the relenting softness of the courtesan, who the next moment resumes the bad boldness of her degraded character. With such a man, who would wish either to laugh or to weep?"—Eclectic Review (Lord Byron's Mazeppa), August, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... through the clouds and lay across the city, giving a peculiarly unctuous look to the slimy streets, in which there were a good many pedestrians more or less splashed with mud. There was a certain hopefulness in the atmosphere, and yet a pathos such as there always is in Spring, when it walks through London ways, bearing itself half ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens



Words linked to "Pathos" :   quality, commiseration, pathetic, fellow feeling, style, expressive style, sympathy



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