"Poignancy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The poignancy of forcemeat should be proportioned to the savouriness of the viands, to which it is intended to give an additional zest. Some dishes require a very delicately flavoured forcemeat, for others, it must be full and high seasoned. ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner
... magnificent waistcoat with a heavy sigh over this philosophical dictum, the poignancy of which was enhanced by his knowledge that the upper housemaid had taken to conversing with a mounted policeman in the Park ...
— The Albert Gate Mystery - Being Further Adventures of Reginald Brett, Barrister Detective • Louis Tracy
... he has no longer his luxuriance of expression, nor variety of images. His thoughts are cold, and his words inelegant. Yet such was his love of lyricks, that, having written, with great vigour and poignancy, his Epistle to Curio, he transformed it afterwards into an ode disgraceful ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... instances of wit that remain to this generation; that dear polite double entendre, which keeps alive the attention, and quickens the apprehension, of the best companies in the world, and is the salt, the sauce, which gives a poignancy to ...
— Pamela (Vol. II.) • Samuel Richardson
... exact bearings of things, and he felt a desperate courage to stand his ground. All his sense of suffering, of the shipwreck he had made, and of what he might have to face in the next few days, had become fused into one large poignant emotion. It was an extra poignancy to be aware that Helen would continue to suffer because of his determination to face the consequences. But he was married to Cleo, and, unless she expressly left him, he ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... misfortune as of a misfortune that seems brought about by a peculiarly malignant train of circumstances. The injury in this case not only was irremediable but turned on an accident. Notice also how Maupassant has sharpened the poignancy and bitterness of Madame Loisel's misfortune by making it depend not only on an accident that might so easily not have happened but on a misunderstanding that might so easily have been explained. When Madame Loisel, just on the threshold ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith
... and the effects of which, we believe, have not yet completely died out. In the end, however, Mr. Moncrieff beat his opponent by sixty-seven votes, a majority so small in proportion to the constituency that the bitterness and humiliation of defeat must have been felt with more than ordinary poignancy. It seemed at that time as if the Conservatives would never have another chance of lifting their heads above water. There were few constituencies in Scotland on which they could place perfect reliance, and the Universities ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... lessons written in imitation of the several styles of his enemies, in which their peculiarities were so closely copied, and their extraneous passages (particularly those of Bach of Hamburgh) so inimitably burlesqued, that they all felt the poignancy of his musical wit, confessed its truth, and ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock
... with an anguish such as he had never known before, but he knew that not a minute was to be lost. Dollie must be found at once or it would be too late. It added a poignancy to his woe to know that in coming down the mountain path, he must have passed close to her, who was in sore need of the help he ...
— The Jungle Fugitives • Edward S. Ellis
... the phases through which Tennyson had been passing. Desultory though the method of its production be, and loose 'the texture of its fabric', there is a certain sequence of thought running through the cantos. We see how from the first poignancy of grief, when he can only brood passively over his friend's death, he was led to questioning the basis of his faith, shaken as it was by the claims of physical science—how from those doubts of his own, he was led to think ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... to be supposed that Andrew Melville could retain the least personal resentment against Mr. Herbert; whose verses have in them so little of the poignancy of satire, that it is scarce possible to consider them as capable of exciting the anger of him ...
— Lives of John Donne, Henry Wotton, Rich'd Hooker, George Herbert, - &C, Volume Two • Izaak Walton
... they call their country. The vision of the High Adventure is not often vouchsafed to one, but it is a good thing to have had it—it carries one through many a night at the shambles. Radzivilow is the only place it came to me. In Belgium one's heart was wrung by the poignancy of it all, its littleness and defencelessness; in Lodz one could see nothing for the squalor and "frightfulness"; in other places the ruined villages, the flight of the dazed, terrified peasants show one of the darkest ...
— Field Hospital and Flying Column - Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia • Violetta Thurstan
... coach—a structure about the size and shape of a small canal-boat, with the most beautiful patriotic pictures all over it, of which I only remember Lord Cornwallis surrendering his sword in the politest and most theatrical manner imaginable, although the poignancy of his feelings had apparently turned his scarlet uniform to a pale orange. This magnificent equipage was a trifle rheumaticky about its underpinning, but, drawn by four, six, or eight horses, it still took the road on holidays; and in winter, when ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner
... dawn. The suddenness and secrecy of these goings add to the poignancy of them. I saw him but he did not see me. I found out the hour and made an effort. He is not my boy, but I wanted to look at him. It was perhaps for the last time. ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... accompaniment to the lyre; and without the mechanical harmony the spoken song is an artifice. Quite as plausibly might it be avowed that music was but added to verse to concentrate and emphasize its rapture, to add poignancy and volume to its expression. But the truth is that these two arts, though sometimes happily allied, are, and always have been, independent. When verse has been innocent enough to lean on music, we may be ...
— Victorian Songs - Lyrics of the Affections and Nature • Various
... himself, as if he had been guilty of a crime. And this embittered his every hour; if through momentary forgetfulness he permitted himself to indulge in a little gaiety his distress soon returned with greater poignancy than ever, bringing with it a sudden and inexplicable sadness. He did not dare to question himself, and his dissatisfaction with himself and ...
— Doctor Pascal • Emile Zola
... stroke little less painful than the worst of the accidents that had befallen me: yet, so harassed was my mind, and so wearied with grieving, that I did not feel it with half the poignancy. ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... girl should be earlier led, as her intellect ripens faster, into deep and serious subjects: and that her range of literature should be, not more, but less frivolous; calculated to add the qualities of patience and seriousness to her natural poignancy of thought and quickness of wit; and also to keep her in a lofty and pure element of thought. I enter not now into any question of choice of books; only let us be sure that her books are not heaped up in her lap as they fall out of the package of the circulating library, ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin
... life of middle-class men and women like ourselves, it is true that the lives of the wealthy afford more incident, and that there is a sort of glamour about them which it is difficult to resist. But with a sufficient subtlety the whole poignancy of the lives led by those who suffer neither the tragedies of the poor nor the exaltation of the rich can be exactly etched. The life of the professional middle-class, of the business man, the dentist, the money-lender, the publisher, the spiritual ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... before eating, I was performing my ablutions, guess my mortification, when a huge rat running from his hole leaped into the dish which was placed upon the floor. I was near fainting with agony at the sight, and could not refrain from tears; but at length recovering from the poignancy of disappointment, the rays of comfort darted upon my mind, and I reflected that as disgrace and imprisonment had instantaneously followed the fortunate recovery of my cup and ring, so this mortification, a greater than which could not have ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Complete • Anonymous
... thought I had, better reasons. I remembered that you had once condescended to address me 'candidly, not critically,' that you had even kindly interested yourself on my behalf. I thought that, amid all the keenness and poignancy of your habitual feelings, as powerfully pourtrayed in your writings, I could discern the workings of a heart truly noble. I imagin'd that what to a superficial observer appear'd only the overflowings of misanthropy, were, in reality, the effusions of deep ...
— The Works of Lord Byron: Letters and Journals, Volume 2. • Lord Byron
... nothing to be desired in that regard; though really I do not see why we who have neither youth nor beauty should always expect it of other people. I think it would have been quite enough for her to do the trapeze acts so perfectly; but her being so pretty certainly added a poignancy to the contemplation of her perils. One could follow every motion of her anxiety in that close proximity: the tremor of her chin as she bit her lips before taking her flight through the air, the straining eagerness of her eye as she measured the distance, the frown with which she forbade herself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... the very point about which we are so solicitous. Sorrow shared with affectionate friends is relieved of half its poignancy. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... by; and as the leaves of Autumn rustled at his feet, Delme started, as he felt that the sting and poignancy of his grief was gone. It was with something like reproach, that he did so. There is a dignity in grief—a pride in perpetuating it—and his had been ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... Queen don't want to bother about age. Neither of you has any age. And I'm not imploring you to have her. I'm only telling you that she's there for you if you want her. But doesn't she attract you? Isn't she positively irresistible?" She added with poignancy: "I know if I were a man I should ...
— The Pretty Lady • Arnold E. Bennett
... something about the face and figure of the Prospero that suggested to me those of my father; and this, perhaps, added to the poignancy with which the representation of his distress affected my childish imagination. But the impression made by the picture, the story, and the place where I heard the one and saw the other, is among the most vivid that my ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... well understood my clanger, and I saw him wringing his hands in his anxiety; yet he saw that he could do nothing to help me. I felt that I had been very foolish; and the poignancy of my regret was heightened when I remembered that I had placed myself in my present predicament without any necessity or an adequate object. I had little time, I own, to indulge in such reflections, for all my thoughts and ...
— A Voyage round the World - A book for boys • W.H.G. Kingston
... nature of the scheme which Esperantists are labouring to induce the world to adopt is thus sufficiently clearly defined. Dr. Zamenhof himself, speaking at the Geneva Congress with all the vivid poignancy attaching to the words of a man fresh from the butcheries at that moment rife in the Russian Empire,[1] declared that neither he nor other Esperantists were naifs enough to believe that the adoption ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... place next morning, and at the first shot Major Warde fell dead. Sweeny had to flee the country. He escaped to St Albans, Vermont, where he died, it was said, of remorse a few months later. What must have added poignancy to his sufferings was the statement, afterwards made, that the whole affair was a malicious plot, and that {67} the fatal missive which caused all the trouble was a forgery. Afterwards Mrs Sweeny returned to Montreal, where she went into lodgings. About the same time a raw Scottish lad, who had ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... the water. Till it was only a speck she watched. It vanished. Evening came on. Still she stood there. She did not feel very sad. The strange, dreamlike sensation of the preceding day had returned to her, but with a larger vagueness that robbed it of some of its former poignancy. It seemed to her that she felt as a spirit might feel—detached. She remembered once seeing a man, who called himself an "illusionist," displaying a woman's figure suspended apparently in mid-air. He took a wand and passed it over, under, around the woman to show that ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... "woven paces and waving hands" of Court bedayas, in their spangled pink robes, now echoes to the tread of alien feet; the dim arcades teem with ghostly memories, and the mournful desolation of the Taman Sarie borrows fresh poignancy in the former scene of mirth and music. A moss-grown and slippery stairway leads to the green twilight of a subterranean grotto, containing the richly-carved stone bedstead of the Sultan, who sought this cool retreat from ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... languages, 1707; the collector and translator was Dr. J. Mapletoft. It must be acknowledged, that although no nation exceeds our own in sterling sense, we rarely rival the delicacy, the wit, and the felicity of expression of the Spanish and the Italian, and the poignancy of ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... contracted a sort of affection for his tormentor, mingled, however, with the intensest loathing and horror. Nor were such discordant emotions incompatible. Each, on the contrary, imparted strength and poignancy to its opposite. Horrible love—horrible antipathy—embracing one another in his bosom, and both concentrating themselves upon a being that had crept into his vitals or been engendered there, and which was nourished with his food, and lived upon his life, ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... had been lavish enough; and more than once did Rachel snatch from drawer or wardrobe that which remained some moments in her hand, while the incidents of purchase and the first joys of possession, to one who had possessed so little in her life, came back to her with a certain poignancy. ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung
... history is deceptive if it is used to furnish a picture for coming events. Like drama which compresses the tragedy of a lifetime into a unity of time, place, and action, history foreshortens an epoch into an episode. It gains in poignancy, but loses reality. Men grew from infancy to old age, their children's children had married and loved and worked while the social change we speak of as the industrial revolution was being consummated. That is why it is so difficult for living people ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... the hopes that had been entertained gave poignancy to the sudden disappointment and grief, and the home children could not acquiesce in the dispensation with the same quiet reasonableness as those who had been so long separated from them as not to miss the gentle countenance, or the 'sweet toils, sweet cares, for ever gone.' ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sound of anguish, forlornness, the terrible crying of a woman with a loving heart, whose heart has never been able to relax. Alvina was hushed. In a second, she became the elder of the two. The terrible poignancy of the woman of fifty-two, who now at last had broken down, silenced the girl of twenty-three, and roused all her passionate tenderness. The terrible sound of "Never now, never now—it is too late," which seemed to ring in the curious, indrawn cries of the elder ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... conscience for his grosser desires; nay, should he come to his wished-for yet desolate conclusion, from which the abhorrent nature shrinks and recoils, I do nevertheless firmly think, should the study have been long and deep, that he would wonder to find his desires had lost their poignancy and his objects their charm. He would descend from the Alp he had climbed to the low level on which he formerly deemed it a bliss to dwell, with the feeling of one who, having long drawn in high places an empyreal air, has become unable to inhale ...
— Devereux, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Differences of Good and Evil confounded, Prophaneness, Irreligion, and Unlawful Love, made the masterly Stroaks of the fine Gentleman; Swearing, Cursing, and Blaspheming, the Graces of his Conversation; and Unchristian Revenge, to consummate the Character of the Hero; Sharpness and Poignancy of Wit exerted with the greatest Vigor against the Holy Order; in short, Religion and all that is Sacred, Burlesqu'd and Ridicul'd; To see this, I say, and withall, to reflect upon the fatal Effects which these things have ...
— Representation of the Impiety and Immorality of the English Stage (1704); Some Thoughts Concerning the Stage in a Letter to a Lady (1704) • Anonymous
... attempt to deal in wit—and to bear down every Republican principle by satire—but he miserably fails in both, for his wit is as stale as his satire, and his satire as insipid as his wit. He attempts to ridicule Dr. Franklin, but can any man of sense conceive any poignancy in styling this great philosopher, "poor Richard," or "the old lightning rod." Franklin, whose researches in philosophy have placed him preeminent among the first characters in this country, or in Europe: is it possible ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... sat very still, in the quiet shadowy room, her eyes closed, her hands crossed over the miniature, the Markborough paper lying on the floor beside her. As the first activity of memory, stirred and goaded by an untoward event, lost its poignancy; as she tried in obedience to Meynell to put away her terrors, with regard to the past, her thoughts converged ever more intensely on ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... I wondered at this, and almost blamed him, even in his stricken state, for not feeling the peculiar poignancy of our regret for the loss of Schwartz. And then, his face being turned away, I peeped over to see if he slept, and saw where his tears had dropped silently on the piled-up cushions of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick
... of loving their own child is a sort of barrier to love. They perhaps do not love their own traits, which they recognize in their children; they shrink from their own features in the reflection presented by these little mirrors. A certain strangeness and unlikeness (such as gives poignancy to the love between the sexes) would excite a livelier affection. Be this as it may, it is not probable that Doctor Grimshawe would have loved a child of his own blood, with the coarse characteristics that he knew both in his race and himself, with nearly such fervor ...
— Doctor Grimshawe's Secret - A Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... which led to their present situation—their companion's recent and unaccountable disappearance, and the prevalent superstitions connected with this solitary spot—all contributed to their present alarms with a force and poignancy unusual, and even appalling. They almost expected the "Spectre Horseman" to rush by, or to rise up suddenly before them, and forbid their further progress into ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby
... treachery of Amalia enraged her and inspired her with horror and exasperation. But that of the count, it must be confessed, added poignancy to her grief and depth ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... hearing nothing, longing intensely the while for some breakfast; and just as he was conjuring up visions of a country-house meal, with hot bread, delicious butter, and yellow cream, he detected in the distance the cooking of home-made bacon, and as if to add poignancy to the keen edge of his hunger, a hen began loudly to announce that somewhere or other there was a ...
— In the King's Name - The Cruise of the "Kestrel" • George Manville Fenn
... more into particulars and made use of different expressions; but towards the end he grew agitated, flushed and felt that his heart was throbbing. Anna listened to him in silence, her hands folded on her lap; a mournful smile never left her face ... bitter grief, still fresh in its poignancy, was ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... papers involving the success of his life! A word too much or too little might precipitate the catastrophe, and the bare notion of his son's marriage with a pupil of Lady Conway renewed and gave fresh poignancy to the past. ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of a pert coxcomb who was discontented with our taverns, or the execrations of some bluff sea-captain who was shocked with our manners. The uneasy sense we have of something in our national existence which has not yet been fitly expressed, gives poignancy to the least ridicule launched at faults and follies which lie on the superficies of our life. Every person feels, that a book which condemns the country for its peculiarities of manners and customs, does not pierce into ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, February 1844 - Volume 23, Number 2 • Various
... of all sufferings, all sorrows, can do much, but memory clings with a pertinacity which defies all Time's best efforts. Time may soften the poignancy of deep-rooted sorrow, but it cannot shut out altogether the pain of a mother's grief at the loss of an only son. In spite of all Hervey's crimes he was "the only son of his mother, and she was ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... sacred, he, struggling and uncontrolled, beast-like, was making life more repulsive. The pain of her motherhood never approached the agony of her wifehood, when she knew, while the pride of fatherhood was utterly submerged in the poignancy of his self-abasement, ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... that are never detached from the thought, but that seize it in its very centre, in its interior, that join and bind it. In that respect, fully obeying his own genius, he has gone beyond and some times exceeded the genius of language. His concise, vigorous and always forcible style, by its poignancy, emphasises and repeats the meaning. It may be said of his style that it is a continual epigram, or an ever-renewed metaphor, a style that has only been successfully employed by the French once, by Montaigne himself. If we wanted to imitate him, supposing we had the power ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... hamlet pictured by Goldsmith was neither one thing nor the other, but first Irish and then English. Criticism purely aesthetic cannot destroy the poignancy and profoundness of the theme and throughout the touch of ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • E. S. Lang Buckland
... Kriemhilds and Isondes You storm'd about at Trinity! Nothing at heart but handsome Blondes! 'Folk say that you and Fanny Fry—' 'They err! Good-night! Here lies my course, Through Wilton.' Silence blest my ears, And, weak at heart with vague remorse, A passing poignancy of tears Attack'd mine eyes. By pale and park I rode, and ever seem'd to see, In the transparent starry dark, That splendid brow of chastity, That soft and yet subduing light, At which, as at the sudden moon, I held my breath, and thought ...
— The Angel in the House • Coventry Patmore
... the living, far more than any great poignancy of grief respecting the dead, which affected Harry Esmond whilst in prison after his trial: but it may be imagined that he could take no comrade of misfortune into the confidence of his feelings, and they thought it was remorse and sorrow for his patron's loss which ...
— Henry Esmond; The English Humourists; The Four Georges • William Makepeace Thackeray
... had listened while a woman who had been near San Francisco at the time of the earthquake and fire endeavoured to describe what was in truth indescribable, how the very air itself was at that time charged with a poignancy of agony—an impalpable spiritual agony, apart from such physical cause as heat and fire, an agony which arose from the grief of thousands ...
— A College Girl • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... generations. Being, when we were both young, in sore straits, and hard pressed for money, he parted with this talisman to me, on condition that after his death I should return it to his eldest surviving son. You may guess the poignancy of the grief with which I tell you then that this heirloom is no longer mine. Many years ago I gave it into the hands of Runjeet Singh for a time, in the belief that its potency would aid our national ...
— Atma - A Romance • Caroline Augusta Frazer
... youth. Who does not remember some awakening moment when he first saw virtue and knew her for what she is? Sweet was it then to learn of some Jason of the golden fleece, some Lancelot of the tourney, some dying Sydney of the stricken field. There was a poignancy in this early knowledge that shall never be felt again; but who knows not that such enthusiasm which earliest exercised the young heart in noble feelings is the source of most of good that abides in us as years go on? In such boyish dreaming the soul learns to do and dare, hardens ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... petition set forth the needs of the church, the state and the individual. Esther did not hear a word until a sudden dropping of his voice forced a certain phrase upon her attention. He was praying, with an especial poignancy for "that blessing which maketh ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... the thought help us to the conviction of the relative insignificance of all that can change. That will not spoil nor shade any real joy; rather it will add to it poignancy that prevents it from cloying or from becoming the enemy of our souls. But the thought will wondrously lighten the burden that we have to carry, and the tasks which we have to perform. 'But for a moment,' makes all light. There was an old rabbi, long ago, whose real name was all but lost, because ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... how it combines the excitement of a gaming-table, a duel, and a Roman amphitheatre. The Pagans did well enough; I cordially admire the refinement of their minds; but it has been reserved for a Christian country to attain this extreme, this quintessence, this absolute of poignancy. You will understand how vapid are all amusements to a man who has acquired a taste for this one. The game we play," he continued, "is one of extreme simplicity. A full pack—but I perceive you are about to see the thing in progress. Will you lend me ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 4 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sound which sent a chill thrill running up and down our spines, the sound of singing, a faint far-off chorus of the loveliest voices that ever fell on mortal ears. The tone had that marvelous silver clang of the woodland thrush with yet a deeper, human poignancy, a note of passionate longing and endearment, shy but assertive, wild, but oh! so alluring. We chinned ourselves expectantly on the edge of our ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... expressions in the constitution; but it is not known to what extent, or in what manner he exercises it; nor upon what occasions he is contradicted or opposed. The censure of a bad appointment, on account of the uncertainty of its author, and for want of a determinate object, has neither poignancy nor duration. And while an unbounded field for cabal and intrigue lies open, all idea of responsibility is lost. The most that the public can know, is that the governor claims the right of nomination; that TWO out of the inconsiderable number of FOUR men can too often be managed without ...
— The Federalist Papers
... refer is that which the musician Berlioz called "isolement"—the sense of spiritual isolation, which seizes on those who experience it with a poignancy amounting to awe. Wordsworth's Ode to Immortality affords the locus classicus in the ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... a whole melting-pot full of "rare emotional experiences," "art that was almost intuitive in its passion, so subtly did it"—oh, do all sorts of things!—and "handling the plastic outlines of the theme with rare emotional skill and mastery of technique," "purest lyricism lifted to heights of poignancy,"—all that sort of stuff, you know. Next time a writer, or, better still, a fiddler or a pianist comes to your town, look in your home paper the morning ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... A.'s unsuccessful speculations, and of the fact that E. had allowed the use of his name as a surety, both my uncles were obliged to fly from their creditors, and take refuge in Paris. This happened just when our need was the sorest, and this, together with the poignancy of knowing that their sister's devoted labours for them had been all in vain, added to their unhappiness. It was doubtless also the reason why, having left England, they wrote to us no more, carefully concealing from us even their address, so that when my Mother ...
— Father and Son • Edmund Gosse
... horrible way of interrupting itself for small domestic commonplaces, which in their assumption of the permanency of their old life, their blind disregard of the impending disaster, had an almost unendurable poignancy. A breakfast on the morning of an ...
— The Real Adventure • Henry Kitchell Webster
... Poet—'i.e.' Maker. You see an original genius both in the beauties and the faults of the work. Its language, so simply strong and daring in its homeliness, its free and energetic motion, its fresh fearless touch, its fidelity to nature and to life, the quick succession and sharp brief poignancy of its pictures, its absence of elaboration, and carelessness about minute lights and shades—all combine to prove that the author has an eye, an imagination, and a purpose quite peculiar to himself. He treats "the Grave" with as much originality as if he had been ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... to question a word of the narrative that had reduced a dismal enigma to luminous, connected facts. With the swift processes of reason and the promptness of decision of which he was capable on occasion, he had made up his mind as to his future even as he ascended the stairs to his room. The poignancy of his father's appeal had struck to the bed-rock of his affection and his conscience, revealing duty not as a thing that you set for yourself, but ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... not feel in much trouble nor get in any great alarm, for I suppose the severe exertion dulled everything, and robbed my sufferings of their poignancy as I still swam on more and more slowly, with my starting eyes fixed upon the boat still many yards away from me, and growing more and more dim as the water began to bubble about ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... and the motive to pass it on will thus not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree. It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... The poignancy of expression in her voice and words made the man tremble. And yet she did not speak bitterly nor angrily. Her feeling was beyond all passion. It was the expression of a soul that had suffered everything and could no longer ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... increasing within me. And then the possibility of losing my limb altogether was a thought which now and again forced itself upon me and made the warm blood curdle in my veins. All this time I knew, and the knowledge gave additional poignancy to my sufferings, that with care and proper surgical treatment I could easily have been cured; but I dared not open my mouth in the way of suggestion or complaint, I had already been taught, by bitter experience, the folly ...
— Six Years in the Prisons of England • A Merchant - Anonymous
... my decision was unalterable, and that, as we all felt the poignancy of the parting, it would be better to take leave of each other now, rather than in public when they boarded ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... the providences and events of our changeful lives. Our sorrows by their poignancy, our joys by their incompleteness and their transiency, alike call us to Him in whom alone the sorrows can be soothed and the joys made full and remain. Our duties, by their heaviness, call us to turn ourselves to Him, in whom ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... suddenly, had found debt and dissipation, had broken all off decidedly, and no more had been heard of the young man. It was many years previously; but those cheeks and the tone of the reply made her suspect that there was still poignancy in ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... nerves and a level head, and an abundant confidence in both. Because that dingy little wooden building with its outside stair to his attic, was the nucleus of memories that had by no means lost their poignancy. It was not, after all, so many years ago that she had mounted that stair for the first time, and it couldn't be considered strange that her heart quickened a little as she ...
— Mary Wollaston • Henry Kitchell Webster
... than of anger. The tone of melancholy reproach in which she had uttered the words: "I did not expect this from you, Monsieur de Buxieres!" seemed to convey the hope that he might, one day, be forgiven. At the same time, the poignancy of his regret showed him how much hold the young girl had taken upon his affections, and how cheerless and insipid his life would be if he were obliged to continue on unfriendly ...
— A Woodland Queen, Complete • Andre Theuriet
... just as he was about to give himself up for lost, an amateur cornetist who occupied a studio on the floor above began to play the Lost Chord. A counter-pain set in immediately. At the second bar of the Lost Chord the awful pain that was gradually gnawing away at his vitals seemed to lose its poignancy in the face of the greater suffering, and physical relief was instant. As the musician proceeded the internal disorder yielded gradually to the external and finally passed away entirely, leaving him so far from prostrated that by one ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VI. (of X.) • Various
... regrets in her mind, incipient even before he had quite gone, and now defining themselves momently with added poignancy. A woman who, in her retirement at home, charges herself with the control of a man's conduct abroad, is never likely to be devoid of speculation upon probable disasters to ensue upon any abatement of the activities of her discretion. ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... of it. A long and endearing familiarity has indeed been ours, melancholy and unsating; and it has given rise to a host of trying associations, conjured up by each new visit after a brief absence from Rome, and now adds poignancy of regret to what we feel must ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... throughout. And be it said that it is an epitome not only of the spirit of England but of the United Kingdom, with the emphasis on the united. There is a fine strain of kindness and broad sympathy running through the book, and much of poignancy in the personal ...
— The Backwash of War - The Human Wreckage of the Battlefield as Witnessed by an - American Hospital Nurse • Ellen N. La Motte
... by a rapture of young love—all-surrendering, all-sacrificing love. The music changed. It held the torture of unshed tears, the anguish of a heart deceived and desolate. Mr. Leonard almost put his hands over his ears to shut out its intolerable poignancy. But on the dying woman's face was only a strange relief, as if some dumb, long-hidden pain had at last won to ...
— Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Nethersole, then quite unknown, made a striking impression of evil, though playing only a small part. It was Forbes-Robertson, however, for me, and I think for all the playgoing London of the time, that gave the play its chief value by making us startlingly aware, through the poignancy of his personality, of what one might call the voice of the modern conscience. To associate that thrillingly beautiful and profound voice of his with anything that sounds so prosaic as a "modern conscience" may seem unkind, but actually ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne
... a May morning on Tooting Common. Beverley would have handled that situation well, no doubt. But could he—could anyone—have achieved the poignancy of that unaffected phrase, "It does not seem very likely"? I said that the depths of Art were unplumbable. True, but Ruby Binns has at least ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 3, 1916 • Various
... he, "let England, as an abstraction, fend for itself. But you've a bonny English soul within you, and for that you are fighting. And so had poor Taffy Jones. And I have a bonny Scottish thirst, the poignancy of which both of you have been happily spared. I will leave you, laddie, to seek in slumber ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... relief the quiet form, detached in look and feeling, as of one upborne by the spirit far above the brutal throng. Nowhere does that spiritual emotion find deeper expression than in the "Visitation." The passion of thanksgiving, the poignancy of mother-love, throb through the two women, who have been travelling towards one another, with a great secret between them, and who at length reach the haven of each other's love and knowledge. Here, too, the dying light, ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps
... this he had allowed the murder of young Mar and driven Alexander of Albany into exile; but who can wonder if in his stricken soul he now perceived or imagined that no man can cheat the Fates? His own son, his boy! Some nobler poignancy of anguish than the mere sick despair and panic of the coward must surely have been in his mind as he realised this last and crowning horror. The profound moral discouragement of a man caught in the toils, and for whom no escape was possible; the sickening ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... be twenty to realize the tragedy of it. Dans un grenier qu'on est bien a vingt ans! To be twenty, in a garret, with the freedom and the joy of it! Yes; the dear poet was right. In those "brave days" the poignancy of life comes not in the ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... jaundice-cheeked, scorched at the nose with snuff; and, shuddering with distaste of her cage and her companion, she sat long at the window, all her finery on, chasing dream with dream, and every dream, as she knew, alas! with the inevitable poignancy of waking to the truth. For her the flaming east was hell's own vestibule, for her the greying dawn was a pallor of the heart, the death of hope. She sat turning and turning the marriage-ring upon her finger, sometimes all unconsciously essaying to slip it off, and tugging ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... the following February, an entry in the registers of St Martin's in the Fields records the burial of a child "Charlott Fielding." So it is probable that the very month of the appearance of his first novel brought a private grief to Fielding the poignancy of which may be measured by his frequent betrayals of an anxious ...
— Henry Fielding: A Memoir • G. M. Godden
... to-day with reference to this. An impression of Justin as of something noble and firm seemed to emanate from the room where he lay and fill the house; in his complete abdication, he dominated as never before. More than that, there seemed to be a peculiar poignancy, a peculiar sweetness, in every little thing done for him; it made one ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various
... the front sitting-room of furnished apartments in a Pimlico square that they first began to live again with a vividness and poignancy quite foreign to our former real intercourse. I had been treating myself to a long stay on shore, and in the necessity of occupying my mornings Almayer (that old acquaintance) came nobly to ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... Theatre, New York, January 19, 1909. It was found to be one of the most direct pieces of work the American stage had thus far produced—disagreeably realistic, but purging—and that is the test of an effective play—by the very poignancy of the tragic forces closing in around the heroine. Though it is not as literary a piece of dramatic expression as Pinero's "Iris," it is better in its effect; because its relentlessness is due, not so predominantly to the moral downgrade of the woman, as to the moral ...
— The Easiest Way - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Eugene Walter
... bestow on his sister's visitor. He had arrived late that evening, and had been dismissed to dress with the hasty information that two guests were expected to dinner, but he had had no idea of the last arrival's identity; and to him, too, the meeting brought back with horrible poignancy that last bitter interview ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... Margaret will need to take Dugald over his mathematics, I fear, before he goes up to the entrance." At which remark the painful feeling which the reciting and singing had caused Barney to forget for the time, returned with even greater poignancy. ...
— The Doctor - A Tale Of The Rockies • Ralph Connor
... time except by the relations of the dead. Similarly the Jesuit missionary Lafitau tells us that the name of the departed and the similar names of the survivors were, so to say, buried with the corpse until, the poignancy of their grief being abated, it pleased the relations "to lift up the tree and raise the dead." By raising the dead they meant bestowing the name of the departed upon some one else, who thus became to all intents and purposes a reincarnation ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... join in an everlasting chorus of praise and glory to our Lord and Saviour! I grieve for our lost darling as a father only can grieve for a daughter, and my sorrow is heightened by the thought of the anguish her death will cause our dear son and the poignancy it will give to the bars of his prison. May God in His mercy enable him to bear the blow He has so suddenly dealt, and sanctify it to ...
— Recollections and Letters of General Robert E. Lee • Captain Robert E. Lee, His Son
... rarely troubles them; they have a host of minor pleasures and interests which suffice; no storms of feeling, no pangs of stifled mother-longing ruffle the placid surface of their lives. The real tragedy of the undesired does not touch either of these classes; it is reserved in all its poignancy for those who belong to the type of the grande amoureuse, whom lack of opportunity generally, lack of attractiveness sometimes, has prevented from fulfilling the deepest need ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby
... the centuries creep by. Frequently the hope flowered into the songs of a Judah Halevi or Ibn Gabirol, songs as sweet as have blossomed in the medieval garden; and the prayer found expression in a poignancy attributable only to the racial genius which created the Psalms; but until the nineteenth century the dream preserved all the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... Setoun, of the honourable house of Winton, but of E. D., daughter of a Cameronian cowfeeder!—Jeanie, I can laugh yet sometimes—but God protect you from such mirth.—My father—I mean your father, would say it was like the idle crackling of thorns; but the thorns keep their poignancy, they remain unconsumed. Farewell, my dearest Jeanie—Do not show this even to Mr. Butler, much less to any one else. I have every respect for him, but his principles are over strict, and my case will not endure severe handling.—I ...
— The Heart of Mid-Lothian, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... is but too just," replied the weeping girl; "and it is that circumstance which adds to the poignancy of my grief: were he a less estimable character, were he divested of those amiable qualities that render man dear to the eyes of woman, my reasons for refusing his addresses would be unanswerable. In that case, if I were made a victim to parental authority, some consolation might be found in ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... Ocean House on Cape Elizabeth. She returned much refreshed, and gave herself up cheerfully to her accustomed duties. But a cloud rested still upon her home, and at times the old grief came back again with renewed poignancy. Here are a few lines expressive of her feelings. They were written in pencil on a little ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... my chair, head averted. A tragedy had befallen me which completely overshadowed all other affairs, great and small. Indeed, its poignancy was not yet come to its most acute stage; the news was too recent for that. It had numbed my mind; dulled the ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... train flew along the Connecticut shore Archie realized with a new poignancy the tremendous change that had occurred in his life since he left New York, his birthplace and the home of his family for two hundred years. Instead of lounging in clubs and his luxurious apartment he would now ...
— Blacksheep! Blacksheep! • Meredith Nicholson
... stricken ones from utter despair. Both father and daughter leaned upon him, and he faithfully discharged the duties which devolved upon him. After the funeral of Mrs. Medway, Edward conducted Mr. Medway and Sara to their new home at Limonar. In a few weeks the poignancy of their grief was abated; but Edward's presence seemed to be even more necessary than ever. Tom Barkesdale forwarded his letters and cashed his drafts in New Orleans; and the Honorable Mr. Montague in Maine had no suspicion that his ...
— Little Bobtail - or The Wreck of the Penobscot. • Oliver Optic
... called—outside our human walk; in their hearty love of honest earthly life, in their devotion to their friends, their kindness to dependents, and in their obedience to duty. What caused each of them the most pain was the recollection of a past unkindness. The poignancy of Dr. Johnson's grief on one such recollection is historical; and amongst Lamb's letters are to be found several in which, with vast depths of feeling, he bitterly upbraids himself for neglect of ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... come to view my actions in some sort of perspective, it seems to me that it was the underlying poignancy of this trumpery incident—a poignancy which, nevertheless, bit deep into my soul, that finally determined the current of ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... Buck, the poignancy of his ancient regret having been modified by his long course of consolation from the lips of Avery, was the first to recover. This faded woman, trying to stay time's ravages by her rouge, displaced the beauteous image he had cherished so long in ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Power That signall'st punctual through the sleepy mould The Snowdrop's time to flower, Fair as the rash oath of virginity Which is first-love's first cry; O, Baby Spring, That flutter'st sudden 'neath the breast of Earth A month before the birth; Whence is the peaceful poignancy, The joy contrite, Sadder than sorrow, sweeter than delight, That burthens now the breath of everything, Though each one sighs as if to each alone The cherish'd pang were known? At dusk of dawn, on his dark spray apart, With it the Blackbird ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... that sympathy the oppression of a thing that was greater than disappointment settled upon him heavily, driving from him his own personal dread of this night's ghastly adventure, and adding to his suspense of the last forty-eight hours a hopelessness the poignancy of which was almost like that of a physical pain. Tavish was dead, and in dying he had taken with him the secret for which David would have paid with all he was worth in this hour. In his despair, as he stood there alone in the cabin, he muttered something to himself. The desire possessed him ...
— The Courage of Marge O'Doone • James Oliver Curwood
... Eustache, "I will no longer intrude upon your grief. When time has somewhat assuaged the poignancy of your affliction, I will again call on you to tender ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... contrived by both author and producer (Mr. HOLMAN CLARK). You were not let down at the supreme moment by a hurried shuffle of dimly seen forms or the click of an electrician's gear suggesting too solid flesh. The house was in a queer way stunned by the poignancy of the last scene between the young ghost-mother and the long-sought unrecognised son, and had to shake itself before it could reward with due applause the fine playing of as perfect a cast as I have seen for a long ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 158, April 28, 1920 • Various
... by the fainting, beseeching poignancy of her voice, 'I will wait forty fortnights. And I guess ...
— Leonora • Arnold Bennett
... the unequalled facilities of a European railway carriage for rendering unpleasant things almost intolerable. These people could find no way to alleviate the poignancy of their position. Coleman did not know where to look. Every personal mannerism becomes accentuated in a European railway carriage. If you glance at a man, your glance defines itself as a stare. If you carefully look at ...
— Active Service • Stephen Crane
... one to the other, conquered easily. I do not know if either of the other two were conscious of the new note of life which she seemed to bring with her into our shabby, smoke-smelling room, but to me it came home, even in those first few moments, with wonderful poignancy. An alien note it was, but a wonderfully sweet one. We three men had drifted away from the whole world of our womenkind. She seemed to bring us back instantly into touch with some of the few better and rarer memories round which the selfishness of life is always ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... dug his fingers and toes into the grass and bit a mouthful of it to stifle the cry wrung from him by the torturing poignancy of it. Was ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... He shuffled his feet uneasily. It was against his grain as a man to see this peerless beauty in trouble and refuse her petition. Her arms apparent in all their white perfection of roundness, her exquisitely poised head and lovely face expressed the poignancy of dismay. ...
— The King's Men - A Tale of To-morrow • Robert Grant, John Boyle O'Reilly, J. S. Dale, and John T.
... multitude in prayer. The Israelites, oppressed by their conquerors and sore stricken at the reflection that their God has deserted them, lament, accuse, protest, and pray. Before they have been heard, the poignancy of their woe has been published by the orchestra, which at once takes its place beside the chorus as a peculiarly eloquent expositor of the emotions and passions which propel the actors in the drama. That mission and that eloquence it maintains from the beginning ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... carry out the scheme of life which she appeared to despise, but also to work hard to provide her with the means to fulfil her own aims. She craved money for social advancement. She should have it from him, for there was no other source from which she could obtain it. The poignancy of his own sorrow should not cause him to ignore that she had given up her own career and pursuits in order to become his wife, and was now disappointed and without independent resources. His pride ...
— Unleavened Bread • Robert Grant
... access of feeling, as in the case of mathematics and mechanics. But the geniuses even in strictly intellectual fields have frequently been men of sensitiveness, delicacy, and responsiveness to the feelings of others. That intellectual analysis, however, does frequently blunt the poignancy of feeling is illustrated in the case of John Stuart Mill, who writes ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... passion. Without that warning fear they were exposed at every turn. It might be there, waiting for them in the background, but, with Maisie going about as if nothing had happened, even remorse had lost its protective poignancy. They suffered the strain of perpetual frustration. They were never alone together now. They had passed from each other, beyond all contact of spirit with spirit and flesh with flesh, beyond all words and looks ...
— Anne Severn and the Fieldings • May Sinclair
... such mistakes it was inevitable that she should gradually come to lay the blame on Ralph. She found a poignant pleasure, at this stage of her career, in the question: "What does a young girl know of life?" And the poignancy was deepened by the fact that each of the friends to whom she put the question seemed convinced that—had the privilege been his—he would have known how to spare ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... to which Cervantes contributed his pastoral "Filena," which was much admired at the time. He also wrote several ballads; but ballads generally belong to their own age, and those that remain to us of his have lost much of their poignancy. Two poems, written on the death of Isabella of Valois, wife of Philip II., specially pleased Hoyos, who at the time gave full credit to his promising pupil. That eighth wonder of the world, the Escurial, was in progress during Cervantes' time ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... that beset us for not having taken the left-hand road in life instead of the right are our chief mental resources after forty, and they tell me that we men only know half the poignancy of these miserable recollections. Women have a special adaptiveness for this kind of torture—would seem actually to revel ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... excels them both, in the artfulness and delicacy with which it touches female foibles. I may add, that the imitations of Horace by Pope, and of Juvenal by Johnson, are preferable to their originals in the appositeness of their examples, and in the poignancy of their ridicule. Above all, the Lutrin, the Rape of the Lock, the Dispensary and the Dunciad, cannot be parallelled by any works that the wittiest of the ancients can boast of: for, by assuming the form of the epopea, they have acquired a dignity and gracefulness, ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... alone in her strange surroundings, that desire was losing its poignancy. It didn't seem quite to fill ...
— Suzanna Stirs the Fire • Emily Calvin Blake
... come, and I must catch my train. As I speed through a vast industrial district I find in the evening papers hideous details of the Zeppelin raid, which give a peculiar passion and poignancy to my recollections of a crowded day—and peculiar interest, also, to the talk of an able representative of the Ministry of Munitions, who is travelling with me, and endeavouring to give me a connected view ...
— The War on All Fronts: England's Effort - Letters to an American Friend • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... heights of great tragedy. This is Ben Preston's masterpiece, and, though scarcely known outside of the county, it deserves to take a place side by side with Hood's " Song of the Shirt" by reason of the poignancy with which it interprets the ...
— Yorkshire Dialect Poems • F.W. Moorman
... afflicted at the news of his death, although it was an event I had expected many weeks before it happened. To express this sorrow with the force I feel it, would answer no other purpose than to revive in your breast that poignancy of anguish, which by this time I hope is abated. The object of this letter is to convey to your mind the warmest assurance of my love, friendship, and disposition to serve you. These I also profess to bear in an eminent degree ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... poignancy of pity, whether the coolie-woman were singing too, and found something like relief in the questionable reflection that if she wasn't, in view of the rupee, she ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... degree. His eyes have an odd glassy stare quite peculiar to them. His hair, thickly powdered and pomatumed, hangs down his shoulders on each side as straight as a pound of tallow candles. His conversation, however, soon makes you forget his ugliness and infirmities. There is a poignancy without effort in all that he says, which reminded me a little of the character which the wits of Johnson's circle give of Beauclerk. For example, we talked about Metternich and Cardinal Mazarin. "J'y trouve beaucoup a redire. Le Cardinal trompait; mais il ne mentait pas. Or, M. de Metternich ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... becoming visible in the warmth of her love as certain secret elements become visible in rare intensities of temperature. And in the case of the objects before her, poor shabby witnesses of his days of failure, what they gave out acquired a special poignancy from its contrast to his present cherished state. His shirts were all in round dozens now, and washed as carefully as old lace. As for his socks, she knew the pattern of every pair, and would have liked to see the washerwoman ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... second reason for the image. In becoming the object of great emotional stress for her son, the mother also becomes an object of poignancy, of anguish, of arrest, to her son. She arrests him from finding his proper fulfillment on the sensual plane. Now it is almost always the object of arrest which becomes impressed, as it were, upon the psyche. A man very rarely has an image of a person with whom he is livingly, vitally connected. ...
— Fantasia of the Unconscious • D. H. Lawrence
... indeed, with sentiments and aspirations all of them suddenly extinguished. The first had bequeathed him a single huge sorrow, the second a single trying duty. In due time the anguish had lost something of its poignancy, the light of earlier and happier memories had begun to struggle with and to soften its thick darkness, and even that duty which he had confronted with such an effort had become ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... rebels are here. O'Connor alone is an exception; and this he owes to Talleyrand, to General Valence, and to Madame de Genlis; but even he is looked on with a sneer, and, if he ever was respected in England, must endure with poignancy the contempt to which he is frequently exposed in France. When I was in your country I often heard it said that the Irish were generally considered as a debased and perfidious people, extremely addicted to profligacy and drunkenness, ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... shadows were lengthening. The waves splashed softly against the fallen rocks forty to fifty feet below. They seemed to be calling to him. It was almost like a summons from far away—almost like a bugle-call heard in the mists of sleep. Somehow they soothed him, lessening the poignancy of his anguish, checking his wild rebellion, making him aware of a ...
— The Obstacle Race • Ethel M. Dell
... the wider functioning of brain and muscle which struck me most forcibly was the increased joyfulness of women. They were happy in their work, happy in the thought of rendering service, so happy that the poignancy of individual loss ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... author. Hence in this series he has received citizenship among those to the manner born. The story selected by his son, as representative of his work in brief fiction, is a fine study of character, with a pathetic ending, whose poignancy is due to ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various
... he hinted pretty clearly that he thought so. Of his contemporaries, scarcely any had so much of his admiration as Mr. Gifford, who, considered as a poet, was merely Pope, without Pope's wit and fancy, and whose satires are decidedly inferior in vigour and poignancy to the very imperfect juvenile performance of Lord Byron himself. He now and then praised Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. Coleridge, but ungraciously and without cordiality. When he attacked them, he brought his whole soul to the work. Of the most elaborate ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... exquisite result in the chorus of "Full fathom five." Purcell is in many ways like Mozart, and in none more than in these incessantly distinctive touches, though in character the touches are as the poles apart. In Mozart, especially when he veils the poignancy of his emotion under a scholastic mode of expression, a sudden tremor in the voice, as it were, often betrays him, and none can resist the pathos of it. Purcell's touches are pathetic, too, in another fashion—pathetic ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... are enjoying ourselves; but my young guest has developed a new mood of late which gives poignancy to my growing tenderness for the girl. She has kept up wonderfully, with the aid of her bit of a temper, for which I like her none the less. How she will stand this idleness, monotony, and intimacy, with ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... In the poignancy of the moment Lane lost his reserve and told her the truth of his condition, even going so far as to place her hand so she felt the great bayonet hole in his back. Her silence then was more expressive than any speech. She had the look ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... would be time enough for the boy to see a corpse when he broke his mother's heart—which, following the precedence of all spoilt boys, he was certain to do sooner or later; and this opinion found ready endorsement. The boy suppressed, my case began to look hopeless, and the poignancy of my suspense became such that I thought I should have gone mad. Francois was already persuaded into setting to work with his pick, and, I should most certainly have been speedily interred, had it not been for the timely arrival of a village wag, who, planking himself unobserved ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... that began to happen he was the same sweet Peter Measel with the same assurance of every other body's wickedness and his own divinity, only with something new in his young life to add poignancy. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... her from head to foot. For a while she was caught and tossed on great waves of anguish that left her hardly conscious of anything but the blind struggle against their assaults. Then, little by little, she began to relive, with a dreadful poignancy, each separate stage of her poor romance. Foolish things she had said came back to her, gay answers Harney had made, his first kiss in the darkness between the fireworks, their choosing the blue brooch together, the way he had teased ...
— Summer • Edith Wharton
... with the beauty that I have already grown to associate with the imprint of its publishers, and containing five occasional pieces. Of these the first, which gives its title to the whole, is the most considerable: an essay of very moving poignancy, telling the emotion of the writer during the earliest months of the War, in "the most beautiful English summer conceivable," months that he "was to spend so much of in looking over from the old ...
— Punch, Volume 156, 26 March 1919 • Various
... if it were offered him, nor live in the country if he had permission to do so. All of which made Margaret cry sorely, so unnatural did it seem to her at the first opening; but on consideration, she saw rather in such expression the poignancy of the disappointment which had thus crushed his hopes; and she felt that there was nothing for it but patience. In the next letter, Frederick spoke so joyfully of the future that he had no thought for the past; and Margaret found a use in herself ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... literature. For these—and I could add to them dozens of later stories and poems, ephemeral perhaps but showing what may be done when we burst the bourgeois chain—for these are discoveries in the vigor, the poignancy, the color of our democratic ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... knew anything of the robbery, which added so much poignancy to the sorrow at Garthowen. Ebben Owens seemed to take his son's disappearance much to heart, and to feel his absence more in sorrow ...
— Garthowen - A Story of a Welsh Homestead • Allen Raine
... was glad to be at home again, though this was a home-coming like none other she had ever known. Four months' use had not robbed memory of its poignancy, and the moment of arrival at the House she found unexpectedly painful. However, there came at once the remeeting with papa, and the first and worst hour of reconnection with the old life again was lubricated ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison |
