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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



... were German shells or French fleas. It was astonishing what a lot of humour passed through this central registry from men who were having a tragic time for England's sake; but sometimes the military Censor had to blow his nose with violence because Private Atkins lapsed into pathos, and wrote of tragedy ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs

... green blind. It must have been this silvery quietness of color which in some subtle way affected me with the feeling of a continual Sabbath; and this was strengthened by the bells chiming hour after hour. The pathos, penitence, and hope expressed by the flying notes colored the intervals with faint and delicate memories. They haunted my dreams, and I heard with unutterable longing the dreamy chimes pealing from some dim and vast cathedral of the cosmic memory, until the peace they tolled became almost a ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... It held beauty of curve and fullness and color that could not hide a certain sadness and bitterness. Then the whole flashing brown face changed for Jean. He saw that it was young, full of passion and restraint, possessing a power which grew on him. This, with her shame and pathos and the fact that she craved respect, gave a leap to ...
— To the Last Man • Zane Grey

... plainly was the lady we have followed,— But with a certain grace no modiste's art Could have contrived. Youthful she was, and yet A gravity not pertinent to youth Gave to her face the pathos of that look Which a too early thoughtfulness imparts; And this was Linda,—Linda little changed, Though nearer by four years to womanhood Than when we parted from her in the shadow Of a great woe. Preoccupied she seemed Now with some painful thought, and in a slow, Half-automatic ...
— The Woman Who Dared • Epes Sargent

... laughed, did not the heart of Eaglenose jump? and when she let drops fall from her stars, was not his heart heavy? Afterwards, when she began to think and talk of the Great Manitou, did not the Indian's ears tingle and his heart burn? It is true," continued the youth, with a touch of pathos in his tone which went straight to the girl's heart, "it is true that Eaglenose dwells far below the skipping one. He creeps like the beetle on the ground. She flies like the wild swan among the clouds. ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne

... merriment, as silence follows laughter when the brook sweeps from the purling stones to the deeper pools. Her art was unconscious of itself and scene succeeded scene with a natural charm, revealing unexpected resources, from pathos to sorrow; from vanity to humility; from scorn to love awakened. And, when the transition did come, every pose spoke of the quickening heart; her movements proclaimed the golden fetters; passion shone in her glances, ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... to have a drawer in my desk I called my "fool drawer." I kept my investments in it. I mean, the investments I did not have to lock up. You get the pathos of that—the investments nobody wanted to steal. And whenever I would get unduly inflated I would open that drawer and "view ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette

... listening, the meeting seemed to be very dull. A speaker was introduced. His voice was thin, his manner unimpressive. My friend said, "Let's go," but I replied, "Wait until we see what there is in him." Suddenly, he grew upon us. The address became adorned with a pathos, a sublimity, and an enthusiasm that overwhelmed the audience. When the speaker sat down, ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage

... except those who had seen him thus attired so often. A stranger might have laughed, but he would not have laughed long—the old man's earnestness, sincerity, reverence and devotion were over-shadowing. Its pathos ...
— The Bishop of Cottontown - A Story of the Southern Cotton Mills • John Trotwood Moore

... felt his power slipping from him, and who was too old to seize it back with the vigour of twenty years ago, rose again and in his attitude was the pathos of decayed influence and ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck

... had passed, when the Professor of music started out with a band of colored youth, who had been named the Jubilee Singers. That they could sing with incomparable sweetness he knew. That the songs they were to sing had incomparable pathos no one who heard them doubted. But nothing short of sublimest faith could have sent forth this band of friendless youth on their mission. They often were penniless as they went from town to town. ...
— The American Missionary — Volume 54, No. 01, January, 1900 • Various

... What pathos is in this line of Burns! There is in its slow spondaic movement an eternity of tears. Could satire or sermon have shown more forcibly the revolting inhumanity of a doctrine upheld as divine? Yet were there devout men, in other things gentle and loving and charitable, who preached ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun

... upon the estates of many private individuals by the proposed inundation, by this sudden conversion of teeming meadows, fertile farms, thriving homesteads, prolific orchards, into sandy desolation. Above all they depicted, in glowing colours and with natural pathos, the vast destruction of beef which was imminent, and they urged—with some show of reason—that if Parma were really about to reduce Antwerp by famine, his scheme certainly would not be obstructed by the premature ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... carry. He could afford to be generous, and when he rose to play La Lettre d'Amour it was with the elation of a knight entering the lists, with the ardor of a lover singing beneath his lady's window. La Lettre d'Amour is a composition written to a slow measure, and filled with chords of exquisite pathos. It comes hesitatingly, like the confession of a lover who loves so deeply that he halts to find words with which to express his feelings. It moves in broken phrases, each note rising in intensity and growing in beauty. It is not a burst of passionate appeal, but a plea, tender, beseeching, and ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis

... creed. Each reader must do that for himself, and the less he worries over it, the better I think it will be for him. I have read and reread Cardinal Newman's wonderful Pro Apologia—his statement as to why and how he entered the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, and it has thrilled me with its pathos and evidence of deep spiritual endeavor. Charles Warren Stoddard's Troubled Heart and How It Found Rest is another similar story, though written by an entirely different type of man. Each of these books revealed the inner thought and life of men who were worried about religion, and by worry I ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James

... towards the end of our sojourn here, have not, at certain times during our lives, experienced something akin to what I have tried to put before you in the above! Does not a particular scent, a beautiful country scene, a phrase in music, the beauty or pathos in a picture, symbolic sculpture in a grand cathedral, or even a chance word spoken in our hearing, every now and then waken in our innermost consciousness an enchanting memory of some wonderful happy moment of the past when the sun seemed ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein

... wave on either side the blooming cheeks, whose Nature-grown roses were unusual in this world-weary vicinity of Broadway. A sweet mouth with a sensuous smile at one corner, and a barely perceptible droop of pathos at the other, lent an indescribable piquance to her dimpled smile. The blue orbs which raised to his own with a Sphinxian laugh in their azure depths thrilled him—Holloway, the blase, the hardened theatrical manager, flattered ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... whose ear it was created. Then, losing the former character the whole power of the music was concentrated in softer and still gentler sounds, as if the genius who had given birth to the melody had been pouring out the feelings of his soul in pathos. The temper of the Rover's mind answered to the changing expression of the music; and, when the strains were sweetest and most touching, he even bowed his head ...
— The Red Rover • James Fenimore Cooper

... as his food was all brought in cooked from a neighboring restaurant, this eccentricity of his was well known, and gave an added eclat to his otherwise hermit-like habits. To my mind, it added an element of pathos to his seclusion, and so affected me that one day I dared ...
— The House in the Mist • Anna Katharine Green

... was singing, a little, winsome girl with a sweet childish voice and an innocent face. How terribly out of place she looked in that palace of sin. She sang a simple, old-world song full of homely pathos and gentle feeling. As she sang she looked down on those furrowed faces, and I saw that many eyes were dimmed with tears. The rough men listened in rapt silence as ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... not know whether I shall be able to impart the feeling of an obscure pathos in the case of Mrs. Alderling, which I certainly did not experience in Alderling's. Temperamentally he was less fitted to undergo the rigors of their seclusion than she was; in his liking to talk, he needed an audience and a variety of listening, and ...
— Questionable Shapes • William Dean Howells

... sudden gayety that still had a pathos in it, "it brings back mamma and so many things! Were they packed away, Patty, like one's best clothes? It is as if I could pull them out of a trunk where they had been shut up in the dark. And there were so many pretty garments, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... died down, Doctor Riley made a speech full of true Irish wit and humor, and pathos, too, telling the girls how deeply Deepdale had appreciated the active and patriotic work they had done for their country in the time of its bitterest need and how very sorry they all were to see ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope

... turn from the attractive vista which they reveal but for an alluring phantom which can never be disassociated from those imperial ruins, a face whose beauty and pathos draws us on irresistibly to solve the ...
— Romance of Roman Villas - (The Renaissance) • Elizabeth W. (Elizbeth Williams) Champney

... the joy of existence as dependent upon the smile and favor of Jehovah, and all the happiness, plenty, victory and success of life are attributed, without hesitation, to nothing else but "the loving-kindness of the Lord." Yet this religious fervor becomes the basis of sublimity, pathos, and picturesqueness, such as can seldom be approached even by the finest productions of ...
— Hebrew Literature

... Pathos and humor followed rapidly one upon the other "at the front" in those gruesome days, and Bok was to have his spirits lightened somewhat by an incident of the next day. He found himself in one of the ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok

... graveyard, For a while to muse, and ponder On a half-effaced inscription, Written with little skill of song-craft, Homely phrases, but each letter Full of hope and yet of heart-break, Full of all the tender pathos Of the Here and the Hereafter;— Stay and read this rude inscription, Read ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

... what to say or do. The change from the bacchanalian riot in the great hall to the solemn pathos and woe of the secret chamber sobered him rapidly. Even his obduracy gave way at last. "Caroline," said he, taking both her hands in his, "I will not urge you longer. I am called bad, and you think me so; but I am not brutal. It was a promise ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... is a description of Shelley himself following Byron and Moore—the "Pilgrim of Eternity," and Ierne's "sweetest lyrist of her saddest wrong"—to the couch where Keats lies dead. There is both pathos and unconscious irony in his making these two poets the chief mourners, when we remember what Byron wrote about Keats in "Don Juan", and what Moore afterwards recorded of Shelley; and when we think, moreover, ...
— Percy Bysshe Shelley • John Addington Symonds

... insinuated in regard to those particular portions of the writings of our great novelist by cynical depreciators, who have not the heart to recognise—as did Lord Jeffrey, for instance, one of the keenest and shrewdest critics of his age—the exquisite pathos of a death-scene like that of little Nell or of little Paul Dombey, in the utterance by himself of those familiar passages nothing but the manliest emotion was visible and audible from first to last. Insomuch was this the case, that the least impressionable ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent

... 'em," the Demon replied, half-smiling. "You see," he added, with the blend of irony and pathos which always captivated his friend, "you see, my dear old chap, I'm the first of my family at Harrow, and the sight of all your brothers and uncles and fathers makes me feel like Mark Twain's good man, ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell

... successor, Firuz Shah, have removed to yet another new capital. Well may he have sought to disarm the wrath to come by pious deeds and lavish charities. The record he kept of them is not without a certain naive pathos: ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol

... concluded was greatly admired at the time of its first publication, and it so far excels in art most of the earlier efforts by the author, that it attains one of the highest secrets in true pathos. It produces interest for the criminal while creating terror for the crime. This, indeed, is a triumph in art never achieved but by the highest genius. The inferior writer, when venturing upon the grandest stage ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... patriot. The life of the lonely rancher and of his more lonely wife, the desperate struggle for manhood by the mean of the mine and the railroad and the lumber camp, the magnitude of the issues at stake; the pathos of defeat, the glory of triumph, were all portrayed with a power that compelled the sympathy of his hearers, while the shrewd common-sense vein that ran through all convinced their intellects and won their confidence. Perplexity, wonder, horror, compassion, filled their hearts and were reflected ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor

... beside her, and her mother and Doctor and Mrs. Strong in the back seat. Ten days afterward Marian's head of beautiful dark hair was muslin white. Now it framed a face of youth and beauty with peculiar pathos. "Striking" was perhaps the one adjective which would ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter

... to the popular pastor of the "Garnisonkirche." His wedding-, christening-, and burial-sermons were masterpieces of oratory; though plainly conceived and plainly delivered and free from all and every unctious pathos, they abounded with thought, true feeling, and poetical beauty. Frommel was destined to speak at the graves of most of the great leaders of the war of 1870-71, including Prince August of Wrttemberg, Moltke, Roon, Alvensleben, Kirchbach, and Kameke; the danger to become, on such occasions, ...
— Eingeschneit - Eine Studentengeschichte • Emil Frommel

... talk of this scene with Carlisle, the pathos of Strafford's position is wonderfully brought out—the man who loves his King so overmuch that no perfidy on the King's part can make his resolution to serve ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... great moral reasons, by the voice of national sentiment. Cavour rarely introduced his own personality even into his private letters, much less into his speeches; for the last ten years of his life he seemed a living policy, hardly a man. But in this speech there is a touch of personal pathos in the passage in which he said that, for himself, it would be a grievous day when he had to leave his native Turin with its straight, formal streets, for Rome and its splendid monuments, for which he was not artist enough to care. He called upon the future Italy, established firmly in the Eternal ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... forgiveness and aid. So Prodigal sate down and composed a penitent letter to Uncle Warrington, and exposed his sad case, and besought him to come to the rescue. Was not that a bitter nut to crack for our haughty young Virginian? Hours of mortification and profound thought as to the pathos of the composition did Harry pass over that letter; sheet after sheet of Mr. Amos's sixpence-a-sheet letter-paper did he tear up before the missive was complete, with which poor blubbering Gumbo (much ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray

... That Southern nature, that impassioned artist is cold as a well-rope. Listen to him: the artist is a missionary. Art is a religion, which has its priests and ought to have its martyrs. Once started on that theme, Gennaro reaches the most dishevelled pathos that any German professor of philosophy ever spluttered to his audience. You admire his convictions, but he hasn't any. Bearing his hearers to heaven on a song which seems a mysterious fluid shedding love, he casts an ecstatic glance upon them; he is examining their enthusiasm; he is ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... his constitution that it could almost be marked by daily stages. Sometimes he talked with singular good sense and feeling; but on other occasions he either babbled quite heedlessly, or his intellect would wander back to scenes and incidents of earlier life, many of which he detailed with a pathos that was created and made touching by the unconsciousness of his own state while relating them. They also observed that of late he began to manifest a child-like cunning in many things connected with himself and family, which, though amusing ...
— The Emigrants Of Ahadarra - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... Hotel Mayson next morning there was a sorting out of the mail that had been forwarded from the hotel in New York. The mail of Mrs. Bines was a joy to her son. There were three conventional begging letters, heart-breaking in their pathos, and composed with no mean literary skill. There was a letter from one of the maids at the Hightower for whose mother Mrs. Bines had secured employment in the family of a friend; a position, complained the daughter, "in which she finds constant hard labour caused by the quantity ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson

... enjoy it, for a very pleasant little performance it was. The songs had a thrill of either pathos or piquancy in every word and note, and the audience found they were listening in spite ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... the mere sight of the round close-cropped head, the delicious idle busyness of childhood, the air at once of import and carelessness it holds, disarmed and captured him. It seemed to him to be his own younger self he was watching, and the pathos of unconscious youth, slipping, slipping, imperceptibly but swiftly, struck at his heart. How little while ago it seemed since he had been like Nicky, intent on profound plans, busy in a small but vivid sphere which ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse

... illness on the general's brow; for then I could feel that all had been right and that his death was the natural result of the great distress he felt at opposing my father in the one desire of his heart. That glimpse which Reuben had of him before he fell has always struck me with strange pathos. A little child looking in upon a man, who, for all his apparent health, will in another moment be in eternity—I do not wonder he does not like to ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green

... pathos in this lay, That, even without enchantment's art, Would instantly have found its way Deep in to SELIM'S burning heart; But breathing as it did a tone To earthly lutes and lips unknown; With every chord ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al

... and careers, and I assure you they are very happy in it. It seems to us that women were more than any other class the victims of your civilization. There is something which, even at this distance of time, penetrates one with pathos in the spectacle of their ennuied, undeveloped lives, stunted at marriage, their narrow horizon, bounded so often, physically, by the four walls of home, and morally by a petty circle of personal interests. ...
— Looking Backward - 2000-1887 • Edward Bellamy

... 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 ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... wee bit name! O lives there ane That never, never felt Its pathos an' its wizard power To saften and to melt? No—callous though the bosom be Wi' years o' sin an' shame, 'Twill melt like snaw in summer's sun Before ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various

... story-telling. Young men of the new social school might take exception to that old-fashioned democracy which had its apotheosis in Risler senior. Despite all those objections, it was pronounced a masterpiece of legitimate pathos and sound observation. Even the minor characters were judged striking, and Delobelle's name, for instance, occurs at once to our mind whenever we try to realize the image of the ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... like manner, religion is at its best when it is most anthropomorphic; indeed, the two most spiritual religions, Buddhism and Christianity, have actually raised a man, overflowing with utterly human tenderness and pathos, to the place usually occupied only by cosmic and thundering deities. The human heart is lifted above misfortune and encouraged to pursue unswervingly its inmost ideal when no compromise is any longer attempted with what is not moral or human, and Prometheus is honestly proclaimed to be holier ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana

... of their own lives. In Redon and in Davies the vision is untouched by the foul breath of the world around them. In Rops and Moreau you feel the imagination hurrying to the arms and breasts of vice for their sense of home. The pathos of deliverance is urgent in them. In the work of Davies, and of Redon, there is the splendid silence of a world created by themselves, a world for the reflection of self. There is even a kind of narcissian arrogance, the enchantment of the ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

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

... and something of pathos and romance attending the old mines of Spanish-American countries—Mexico, Peru, and others. They are so interwoven with the history of these countries, so redolent of the past, and of the hope, despair, piety, greed of the old taskmasters who worked ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... of this poetry is tragic, though without pathos or even self-pity. Every human attempt to maintain happiness is foredoomed to be a failure, and this is an attempt to maintain ecstasy in a region where everything which is not ecstasy is pain. In reading every other poet ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... boyhood had given him a deep insight into human nature, into the humor and pathos of other people's lives, and it was that rare insight that enabled him to become in time one of the greatest of all English writers, Charles Dickens, the beloved novelist of ...
— Historic Boyhoods • Rupert Sargent Holland

... 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 ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... is a scene of great pathos. Like Elektra[38] when she recognizes Orestes, so Isolde, when left alone with the only friend who is true to her, throws aside all her haughty manner, forgets her wild thirst for revenge, and for a moment gives way to all the tenderness ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight

... sacrifice of that interest which belongs to special circumstances. It suits every one who grieves or loves or triumphs. It does not indicate the love, the grief, the triumph of this man and no other. It possesses the pathos and the beauty of countless human lives prolonged through inarticulate generations, finding utterance at last in it. It is deficient in that particular intonation which makes a Shelley's voice differ from a Leopardi's, Petrarch's ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various

... I sent Bracebridge Hall to Merrion Street for you: have you got it? Next week another book will be there for you—an American novel Mrs. Griffith sent to me, The Spy; quite new scenes and characters, humour and pathos, a picture of America in Washington's time; a surgeon worthy of Smollett or Moore, and quite different from any of their various surgeons; and an Irishwoman, Betty ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth

... at that boarding-house in Greenwich Street, New York (April, 1844), when he wrote to his dear Muddy (his mother-in-law) to describe how he and Virginia had reached a haven of square meals. That hopeful letter, so perfect now in pathos...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley

... Grimond, with a revulsion from pathos to anger. "Ye speak as if it were the will o' the Almichty, but I am thinkin' the thing was worked from another quarter. Providence had very little hand in it, unless ye call Captain Hugh MacKay Providence, and in that case it'll be true what some folks say, that the devil rules ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... were no sooner heard to roar surprisingly, than Johnny, curving himself the wrong way and striking out at Mrs Boffin with a pair of indifferent shoes, became a prey to despair. The absurdity of the situation put its pathos to the rout. Mrs Betty Higden was herself in a moment, and brought them all to order with that speed, that Sloppy, stopping short in a polysyllabic bellow, transferred his energy to the mangle, and had taken several penitential turns before he ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens

... trailed back home, a broken failure, When Ralph disappeared in New York, Leaving me alone in the city— But life broke him also. In all this place of silence There are no kindred spirits. How I wish Duse could stand amid the pathos Of these quiet ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters

... reads Beecher's delightful "Letters from the White Mountains," or some of his sermons, and imagines his great frame, and far-sounding voice, will get a conception of his power to play on the feelings or men, of his humor, and pathos, and intense conviction, and rapidity in passing from one emotion to another, and ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... through his temperament and it often becomes so imponderable, so bodiless as to suggest a fourth dimension in the art. Space is obliterated. With Chopin one does not get, as from Beethoven, the sense of spiritual vastness, of the overarching sublime. There is the pathos of spiritual distance, but it is pathos, not sublimity. "His soul was a star and dwelt apart," though not in the Miltonic or Wordsworthian sense. A Shelley-like tenuity at times wings his thought, and he is the creator of a new thrill within the thrill. The charm of ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... gift of Alfred's in his hated hand, at the sound of those coarse words, so different from his respectful tenderness, her pride broke down, and tears welled forth. Looking up in his stern face, she said, in tones of the deepest pathos,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... were larger than the actuality that surrounded her. Youth's scorn of the narrow details of life left no room in her mind for an understanding of the compromise which middle-age makes with necessity. The pathos of resignation—of that inevitable submission to the petty powers which the years bring—was lost upon the wistful ignorance of inexperience. While she waited dutifully, with her absent gaze fixed on the old mulberry trees, which whitened as the ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow

... sympathetic passages he is a thorough poet, splendidly imaginative and dramatic. J. R. Greene in his 'History of England' has well spoken of 'the characteristics of his oratory—its passionate ardor, its poetic fancy, its amazing prodigality of resources; the dazzling succession in which irony, pathos, invective, tenderness, the most brilliant word pictures, the coolest argument, followed each other.' Fundamental, lastly, in Burke's power, is his philosophic insight, his faculty of correlating facts and penetrating below this surface, of viewing events in ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... a run or two off the coast of Ireland. It was more pleasant than I can tell you to watch the entire absorption of the gifted engineer, in the maze of machinery which surrounded him, to paint the paternal pathos of his look as he watched every motion and eyed every bearing. The maker of an empire certainly he was; the man of mind who, for the time, had given these ruffians the kingship of the sea; had made mockery of the opposition of the nations; and, I could ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton

... its logical results, they are spiritual superciliousness and the cruelty of caste. For if a man is a beggar by his own pre-natal sins, people will tend to despise the beggar. But Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king. Men of science offer us health, an obvious benefit; it is only afterwards ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... did, of course. Neither spoke. A sense of great shame crept upon him, he hardly knew why. He could not look at Nellie. He wished she would move on and leave him there. The silent pathos of that sleeping face cried to him. Lowest of the low, filthy, diseased probably, her face as though the womanliness had been stamped from her by a brutal heel of iron, she yet was a woman. This outcast and Nellie were of one ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller

... mines, Wheal Owles and Levant, were also in a flourishing condition; a matter, he said, for which they had reason to be profoundly thankful, for the distress in the district had been severe and prolonged. The manager's voice deepened at this point, and he spoke with pathos, for he had a kindly heart, and his thoughts were at the moment with many a poor miner, in whose little cottages the effects of gaunt poverty could be traced in scanty furniture, meagre fare, and careworn brows. He remembered, too, that only the week before he had seen poor ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne

... ago her history as I know it seems to know little. It knows of savage and merciless battles between the partisans of Don Carlos and those of Queen Isabella so few decades since as not to be the stuff of mere pathos yet, and I am not able to blink the fact that my beloved Basques fought on the wrong side, when they need not have fought at all. Why they were Carlists they could perhaps no more say than I could. The monumental historic fact is that the Basques have been where they ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... picturesque course," said Booverman, taking out an approaching cleek for his second shot. "Nothing is more artistic than the tiny little patch of putting-green under the shaggy branches of the willows. The receptive graveyard to the right gives a certain pathos to it, a splendid, quiet note in contrast to the feeling of the swift, hungry river to the left, which will now receive and carry from my outstretched hand this little white floater that will float away from me. No matter; I say again the fourth green ...
— Murder in Any Degree • Owen Johnson

... eighteen, he returned to England a disciple of Rousseau. He had exercised his imagination during the voyage in idealizing the interview with his mother, which was to be conducted on both sides with sublime pathos. His other parent had frequently visited him during his absence. He was prepared to throw himself on his mother's bosom, to bedew her hands with his tears, and to stop her own with his lips; but, when he entered, his strange appearance, his gaunt figure, his excited manners, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... Diodati as it is of Lycidas. We have Daphnis and Bion, Tityrus and Amyntas for characters, Sicilian valleys for scenery, while Pan, Pales, and the Fauns represent the supernatural. The shepherds defend their flocks from wolves and lions. But this factitious bucolicism is pervaded by a pathos, which, like volcanic heat, has fused into a new compound the dilapidated debris of the Theocritean world. And in the Latin elegy there is more tenderness than in the English. Charles Diodati was much nearer to Milton than ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... woman was suckling her youngest-born to keep it from crying, while another of about five stood between her knees. Her white bosom, gleaming amid rags, the baby with its transparent flesh-tints, and the brother, whose attitude promised a street arab in the future, touched the fancy with pathos by its almost graceful contrast with the long row of faces crimson with cold, in the midst of which sat this family group. Further away, an old woman, pale and rigid, had the repulsive look of rebellious pauperism, eager to avenge all its past woes ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac

... influence, 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 of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various

... who are separated by their mist and their mountains from all countries and ages but their own. It is a great picture, painted on clouds instead of canvass, and invested with colours as gorgeous as its shades are dark. Its pathos has a wild sobbing in it, an AEolean tremulousness of tone, like the wail of spirits. And than Ossian himself, the last of his race, answering the plaints of the wilderness, the plover's shriek, the hiss of the homeless stream, ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various

... known to all collegians long before they take their degree. To make the parting words of warning and encouragement tell on ears that are now eager for other and louder sounds, everything that can be done needs to be done to preserve their freshness and their pathos, and certainly nothing could do as much to deprive them of both one and the other as hashing them up annually in a slovenly report as part of the news ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin

... of order was restored, he began his tale. In simple language now, yet with a vehemence and directness that drove home every point, he tore their hearts with the story of yesterday's happenings at Gavrillac. He drew tears from them with the pathos of his picture of the bereaved widow Mabey and her three starving, destitute children—"orphaned to avenge the death of a pheasant"—and the bereaved mother of that M. de Vilmorin, a student of Rennes, known ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... bottom edges, as I could see when he came nearer to me. He wore a faded straw hat, which looked forlorn, as the month was January. His face, despite its angularity of outline and its wanness, had that expression of complacency which often relieves from pathos the countenances of harmlessly demented people. His hair was gray, but his somewhat formidable looking moustache was still dark. He carried an unadorned walking-stick and under his left arm was what a journalistic eye immediately recognized as manuscript. ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens

... in his native tongue, and expressing himself with a certain simple pathos, "I am but a poor man; my name is Giacomo. You have heard of me;—servant to the Signior whom you saw to-day—only a servant; but he honors me with his confidence. We have known danger together; and of all his friends and followers, I alone came with him ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... drink, will you not, dear?" and the speaker, in order to make her pleading irresistible, kissed the one to whom these words were addressed again and again; and, as with a hand upon each shoulder, she looked lovingly into his eyes, there was an added pathos which, to a man of Richard Ashton's sympathetic and sensitive nature, ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter

... hear him again to-day, I should think his talk as wondrous as I thought it then. Then I could thrill at the verse of Musset, and linger lovingly over the prose of Theophile, I could laugh at the wit of Gustave Droz, and weep at the pathos ... it costs me a pang to own it, but yes, I'm afraid ... I could weep at the pathos of Henry Muerger; and these have all suffered such a sad sea-change since. So I could sit, hour after hour, in a sort of ecstasy, listening to the talk ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland

... you ask me to be one of your friends?" she said, slowly. There were pain and pathos in ...
— Wife in Name Only • Charlotte M. Braeme (Bertha M. Clay)

... abstract grace of the bounding lines. Let us take some of these drawings, and pause over them awhile; and, first, one of those at Florence—the heads of a woman and a little child, set side by side, but each in its own separate frame. First of all, there is much pathos in the reappearance in the fuller curves of the face of the child, of the sharper, more chastened lines of the worn and older face, which leaves no doubt that the heads are those of a little child and its mother. A feeling for maternity is indeed always characteristic of Leonardo; and this feeling ...
— The Renaissance - Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Pater

... of the Latin communities of Campania, and a soldier in the first Punic war.(28) In thorough contrast to the language of Livius, that of Naevius is easy and clear, free from all stiffness and affectation, and seems even in tragedy to avoid pathos as it were on purpose; his verses, in spite of the not unfrequent -hiatus- and various other licences afterwards disallowed, have a smooth and graceful flow.(29) While the quasi-poetry of Livius proceeded, somewhat like that of Gottsched in ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... Odes, we have much written in the same style, more often than not by women, or songs possibly written to be sung by them, always in a minor key, fraught with sadness, yet full of quiet resignation and pathos. ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng

... to work at it with great delight and enthusiasm, and finished it in a comparatively short time. The title of the story was "His Wife's Deceased Sister"; and when I read it to Hypatia she was delighted with it, and at times was so affected by its pathos that her uncontrollable emotion caused a sympathetic dimness in my eyes, which prevented my seeing the words I had written. When the reading was ended, and my wife had dried her eyes, she turned to me and said, "This story will make your fortune. ...
— A Chosen Few - Short Stories • Frank R. Stockton

... respected great sorrow; and when Hetty said with a burst of tears, "Oh, Dan, Dan, darling Dan, Betty, your Betty and ours, is so dreadfully ill!" Dan fawned upon the little girl, licked her hands, and looked into her face with all the pathos in the world in his brown doggy eyes. Beersheba, of course, followed his brother's example. So the poor little twins, accompanied by the ...
— Betty Vivian - A Story of Haddo Court School • L. T. Meade

... ancient authority for a clerk or clerks. It is wise to secure work to be attended to in the functions of divine service for as many laymen as possible, consistent with principle and propriety. W.L. was an old man when I saw him, but I can hear him now as with a pathos quite touching and teaching, because done so simply and naturally, he ...
— The Parish Clerk (1907) • Peter Hampson Ditchfield

... rough model he had made in wax, flat still, and only indicated by vigorous touches, the red material smeared on the black surface all around it by his fingers. There was force in the figure, even in its first state, and there was a strange pathos in the bent head, the only part as yet in high relief. But Marzio looked at it angrily. He turned it to the light, closed his eyes a moment, looked at it again, and then, with an incoherent oath, his long, discoloured hand descended on the model, and, with a heavy pressure and one strong ...
— Marzio's Crucifix and Zoroaster • F. Marion Crawford

... half-opened window near me, two large withered oak-leaves silently floated into the little church in the view of all the congregation. I could not but pause for a minute till they should preach their sermon before I began mine. How simply, how unaffectedly, with what natural pathos they seemed to tell their story! It seemed as if they said, Ah you human beings, something besides us is fading; here we are, the things like which ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... sent to him did not reach him, for at the time it arrived he was on his way to the West Indies. Jennie was compelled to watch alone by Vesta's sick-bed, for although sympathetic neighbors, realizing the pathos of the situation were attentive, they could not supply the spiritual consolation which only those who truly love us can give. There was a period when Vesta appeared to be rallying, and both the physician and the nurse were hopeful; but afterward she became weaker. It was said by Dr. ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... mists cleared a little from the old visionary's brain, David gathered that Cromwell was close by, defending himself with difficulty, apparently, like Charles, against 'Lias's assaults. In his youth and middle age—until, in fact, an event of some pathos and mystery had broken his life across, and cut him off from his profession—'Lias had been a zealous teacher and a voracious reader; and through the dreams of fifteen years the didactic faculty had persisted and grown amazingly. He played schoolmaster ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... scope for humour. Cyrano, with all his generous impulses, is too self-conscious for that. But in each of his moods and phases—bravado, sacrifice, acceptance of the inexorable pathos of things—Mr. LORAINE had got at the heart of the man. A very ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various

... us both to tears. Her action had the intolerable pathos of a child's weakness united with a kind of delirium. To watch her feeble hands exhibiting a head-dress which I feared she would never again wear—displaying it with a pitiful smile of pride and joy—was almost more than ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... not without heroic pathos is recorded by Flinders. One native was left sitting alone in the canoe which the gun-shot of the Providence had raked and splintered. The men in the canoes which had made good their flight observed their solitary companion, and some of them returned to him; whereafter "with glasses, ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott

... Coleridge will not, we fear, be as much entertained as we were with his 'Playhouse Musings,' which begin with characteristic pathos and simplicity, and put us much in mind of the affecting story of ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith

... paused to listen to the glorious strains. Those who paused to hear her sing passed on feeling sad at heart. Beginning in somewhat low tones, her voice gradually swelled and the full, round tones full of melody and pathos seemed to lift up and bear one ...
— Imperium in Imperio: A Study Of The Negro Race Problem - A Novel • Sutton E. Griggs

... Mr. Saxe is, in many respects, an improvement on all that he has given us hitherto. There is more versatility in the style, a freer and firmer touch in the handling. Like our best humorists, he shows that the founts of tears and of laughter lie close together; for his power of pathos is almost as marked as that of fun. As good specimens of what he has accomplished in the minor key, we may instance "The Expected Ship," "The Story of Life," and "Pan Immortal." But it is in his faculty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... words was altogether under the speaker's control, but the pathos in it so moved the heart of dear little Dame Loretz that she exclaimed, "Let it be so, father: certainly, it must be. It would please Sister Benigna beyond anything to have all the little children there just as she had arranged. And who has done for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 11, No. 24, March, 1873 • Various

... shook her head again, but as she drew herself gently away she was stabbed by the haggardness of the countenance, the pleading pathos of the eyes. His gust of speech had shaken her too—revealed new points in him. She bent forward quickly and laid her soft lips to his, for one light ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... her case. So, with all a mother's earnestness, she went at once to Gordon and told him the whole story, and begged with tears for his sympathy and help. After hearing the story his heart was touched, he could not refuse a mother's appeal. When a mother pleads, there is power and pathos difficult for any to withstand, much less Gordon. So he went to the lad's late employer, and after considerable argument, the master undertook not to prosecute, but only on condition that Gordon would personally undertake ...
— General Gordon - Saint and Soldier • J. Wardle

... thing of wild and sylvan grace, and there was fulfillment in a dark beauty all her own of the promise she had given as a child. About her was a pathos, too,—the pathos of the flower taken from its proper soil, and drooping in earth which nourished it not. Haward, looking at her, watching the sensitive, mobile lips, reading in the dark eyes, beneath the felicity of the present, a hint and prophecy of woe, felt for her a pity ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston

... dread pathos of our lives! how durst thou, Allah, thus to play With Love, Affection, Friendship, all that shows the god ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... till now, demurring also in her private mind as to the propriety of such a thing. It was pretty to see the tender happiness in the girl's face, and the answering expression of her lover's. It seemed to put poetry and pathos into an otherwise commonplace scene. The gang-plank was lowered, a crowd of people surged ashore, to be met by a corresponding surge from the on-lookers, and in the midst of it Lieutenant Worthington leaped aboard and hastened to where ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge

... because the beauty of the idea can in no way suffer by presenting it in English, French, or German rather than in the original Greek. Again, to quote another instance from Latin, the fine epitaph to St. Ovinus in Ely Cathedral: "Lucem tuam Ovino da, Deus, et requiem," loses nothing of its terse pathos by being rendered into English. Occasionally, indeed, the truth is forced upon us that even in prose "a thing may be well said once but cannot be well said twice" ([Greek: to kalos eipein hapax perigignetai, dis de ouk endechetai]), but this is generally because ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring

... never to have shown such generalship as that of Little Turtle at St. Clair's defeat. He was a great orator, of such a fiery eloquence that the interpreters often declared it impossible for them to give the full sense of his words; but none of his many recorded speeches have the pathos of Logan's. He was, on the savage lines, a statesman and a patriot, but unlike the wiser and gentler Logan he never could rise to the wisdom of living in peace with the whites. He was always an Indian; even at his best he was a savage, just as the ...
— Stories Of Ohio - 1897 • William Dean Howells

... short-story in 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, ...
— Southern Lights and Shadows • Edited by William Dean Howells & Henry Mills Alden

... nun-like dress of black, and the former in a long pilgrim's coat of coarse blue stuff. He bore a pilgrim's staff in his hand, and showed under his close hood a fine, handsome, reverent face, full of a sort of tender awe, touched with the pathos of penitence. In attendance upon the two was a dapper little silk-hatted man, with rogue so plainly written in his devotional countenance that I was not surprised to be told that he was a species of spiritual valet de place, ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... going to do about it?" remarked Solling. "It would be vandalism to break up that arm. What God has joined together let no man put asunder," he concluded with pathos. ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne



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



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