Melancholy

This melancholy was not deep but it was wide, seeming to fill the empty places of his body and mind the way a receding flood leaves a scrim of loose, rich topsoil.

He knew the very best background for a poem of deep and refined sentiment and pathetic melancholy was one where great and satisfying merriment had prepared the spirit for the powerful contrast.

“Pray do, my dear Miss Lucas,” she added in a melancholy tone, “for nobody is on my side, nobody takes part with me, I am cruelly used, nobody feels for my poor nerves.” Charlotte’s reply was spared by the entrance of Jane and Elizabeth.

And, since each corpse had its finger in or near its mouth, I understood that each person had delivered himself to this melancholy place and then poisoned himself with ice-nine.

II But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud, That fosters the droop-headed flowers all, And hides the green hills in an April shroud; Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose, Or on the rainbow of the salt-sand wave, Or on the wealth of globed peonies; Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows, Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave, And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

Borís sketched two trees in the album and wrote: “Rustic trees, your dark branches shed gloom and melancholy upon me.” On another page he drew a tomb, and wrote: La mort est secourable et la mort est tranquille.

I want you down in King’s Landing, not up here at the end of the world where you are no damned use to anybody.” Robert looked off into the darkness, for a moment as melancholy as a Stark.

The melancholy which had seemed to the sad eyes of the anxious boy to hang, for days past, over every object, beautiful as all were, was dispelled by magic.

The melancholy degeneration of the Great Houses has afflicted me at last, perhaps.

I remember how mockingly bright the day seemed as I went back on my melancholy pilgrimage to the little house at Woking, how busy the streets and vivid the moving life about me.

In about five minutes, however, he began to get more and more quiet, and finally sank into a sort of melancholy, in which state he has remained up to now.

In the late spring the canning-factory started up again, and so once more Marija was heard to sing, and the love-music of Tamoszius took on a less melancholy tone.

“As Usual.” He looked round at them in his melancholy way.

90 Heavy, melancholy men turn lighter, and come temporarily to their surface, precisely by that which makes others heavy—by hatred and love.

It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I levelled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me.

Whom, if there is nobody?” This idea of finding himself alone, alone, all alone, in the midst of this great uninhabited country, made him so melancholy that he was just beginning to cry.

A great deal of the metaphor and of the sentiment is obscure, most probably by translation; but enough is left to show they were strongly pointed in the original.62 From what is transmitted to us of the character of Solomon, he was witty, ostentatious, dissolute, and at last melancholy.

His melancholy ponderings were rudely interrupted when a troupe of painted dwarfs came bursting from the belly of a wheeled wooden pig to chase Lord Butterwell's fool about the tables, walloping him with inflated pig's bladders that made rude noises every time a blow was struck.

Dantès listened to these melancholy tidings with outward calmness; but, leaping lightly ashore, he signified his desire to be quite alone.

She put them in his buttonhole, as a peace-offering, and he stood a minute looking down at them with a curious expression, for in the Italian part of his nature there was a touch of superstition, and he was just then in that state of half-sweet, half-bitter melancholy, when imaginative young men find significance in trifles, and food for romance everywhere.

“From the fields and from the vineyards Came no fruits to deck the feasts, Only flesh of bloodstained victims Smoldered on the altar-fires, And where’er the grieving goddess Turns her melancholy gaze, Sunk in vilest degradation Man his loathsomeness displays.” Mitya broke into sobs and seized Alyosha’s hand.

“I wish I hadn’t mentioned Dinah!” she said to herself in a melancholy tone.

On the other hand, to surrender himself to save that man, struck down with so melancholy an error, to resume his own name, to become once more, out of duty, the convict Jean Valjean, that was, in truth, to achieve his resurrection, and to close forever that hell whence he had just emerged; to fall back there in appearance was to escape from it in reality.

Pale rays of light tiptoed across the waters; and by and by there was to be heard a sound at once the most musical and the most melancholy in the world: the mermaids calling to the moon.

Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity of joint stocks and spades long enough all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time, and for nothing; but though a crowd rushes to the depot, and the conductor shouts “All aboard!” when the smoke is blown away and the vapor condensed, it will be perceived that a few are riding, but the rest are run over—and it will be called, and will be, “A melancholy accident.” No doubt they can ride at last who shall have earned their fare, that is, if they survive so long, but they will probably have lost their elasticity and desire to travel by that time.

He is bowed down with melancholy thought; he carries the whole weight of the universe upon his shoulders.

Here are our thoughts, voyagers’ thoughts, Here not the land, firm land, alone appears, may then by them be said, The sky o’erarches here, we feel the undulating deck beneath our feet, We feel the long pulsation, ebb and flow of endless motion, The tones of unseen mystery, the vague and vast suggestions of the briny world, the liquid-flowing syllables, The perfume, the faint creaking of the cordage, the melancholy rhythm, The boundless vista and the horizon far and dim are all here, And this is ocean’s poem.

III In melancholy moonless Acheron, Farm for the goodly earth and joyous day, Where no spring ever buds, nor ripening sun Weighs down the apple trees, nor flowery May Chequers with chestnut blooms the grassy floor, Where thrushes never sing, and piping linnets mate no more, There by a dim and dark Lethaean well Young Charmides was lying; wearily He plucked the blossoms from the asphodel, And with its little rifled treasury Strewed the dull waters of the dusky stream, And watched the white stars founder, and the land was like a dream, When as he gazed into the watery glass And through his brown hair’s curly tangles scanned His own wan face, a shadow seemed to pass Across the mirror, and a little hand Stole into his, and warm lips timidly Brushed his pale cheeks, and breathed their secret forth into a sigh.

My father saw this change with pleasure, and he turned his thoughts towards the best method of eradicating the remains of my melancholy, which every now and then would return by fits, and with a devouring blackness overcast the approaching sunshine.

He strikes a match and proceeds to light the cigarette with enigmatic melancholy.

Fahad was a melancholy, soft-voiced, little-spoken man of perhaps thirty, with a white face, trim beard and tragic eyes.

A few melancholy birds were piping and wailing, until the round red sun sank slowly into the western shadows; then an empty silence fell.

The night after the funeral, at which he had been sadly affected, Utterson locked the door of his business room, and sitting there by the light of a melancholy candle, drew out and set before him an envelope addressed by the hand and sealed with the seal of his dead friend.

And after twenty years they laid In that tomb by him and her, His son George, the astrologer; And Masons drove from miles away To scatter the Acacia spray Upon a melancholy man Who had ended where his breath began.

He beheld the tower as a temple-spire of the religion of business, a faith passionate, exalted, surpassing common men; and as he clumped down to breakfast he whistled the ballad “Oh, by gee, by gosh, by jingo” as though it were a hymn melancholy and noble.

It was a melancholy and impressive ceremony.

“Hazel Levesque,” he said in a melancholy voice.

All things that we ordained festival Turn from their office to black funeral: Our instruments to melancholy bells, Our wedding cheer to a sad burial feast; Our solemn hymns to sullen dirges change; Our bridal flowers serve for a buried corse, And all things change them to the contrary.

Fremen were people of extraordinary energy at sunrise but a deep and lethargic melancholy often overcame them at nightfall.

Nature in him seems to be snapping her fingers in the face of all earthly dejection and melancholy with a boyish hip-hip-hurrah.

As bearing death in the fallacious bait, From the bent angle sinks the leaden weight; So pass'd the goddess through the closing wave, Where Thetis sorrow'd in her secret cave: There placed amidst her melancholy train (The blue-hair'd sisters of the sacred main) Pensive she sat, revolving fates to come, And wept her godlike son's approaching doom.

He was a slim yet somewhat swaggering figure, clean-shaven, dark-haired, and blue-eyed, and, as seemed natural in an officer of that famous regiment of victorious failures and successful suicides, he had an air at once dashing and melancholy.

Just as Daisy’s house had always seemed to him more mysterious and gay than other houses, so his idea of the city itself, even though she was gone from it, was pervaded with a melancholy beauty.

She sprang towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred carefully the dying embers, sought all around her anything that could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tête-à-tête—she gathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.

This is old age; but then thou must outlive Thy youth, thy strength, thy beauty, which will change To withered, weak, and grey; thy senses then, Obtuse, all taste of pleasure must forgo To what thou hast; and, for the air of youth, Hopeful and cheerful, in thy blood will reign A melancholy damp of cold and dry, To weigh thy spirits down, and last consume The balm of life.” To whom our Ancestor: “Henceforth I fly not death, nor would prolong Life much, bent rather how I may be quit, Fairest and easiest, of this cumbrous charge, Which I must keep till my appointed day Of rendering up, and patiently attend My dissolution.” Michael replied: “Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest Live well; how long or short, permit to Heaven.

Don Quixote asked the same question of the second, who made no reply, so downcast and melancholy was he; but the first answered for him, and said, “He, sir, goes as a canary, I mean as a musician and a singer.” “What!” said Don Quixote, “for being musicians and singers are people sent to the galleys too?” “Yes, sir,” answered the galley slave, “for there is nothing worse than singing under suffering.” “On the contrary, I have heard say,” said Don Quixote, “that he who sings scares away his woes.”232 “Here it is the reverse,” said the galley slave; “for he who sings once weeps all his life.” “I do not understand it,” said Don Quixote; but one of the guards said to him, “Sir, to sing under suffering means with the non sancta fraternity to confess under torture; they put this sinner to the torture and he confessed his crime, which was being a cuatrero, that is a cattle-stealer, and on his confession they sentenced him to six years in the galleys, besides two hundred lashes that he has already had on the back; and he is always dejected and downcast because the other thieves that were left behind and that march here ill-treat, and snub, and jeer, and despise him for confessing and not having spirit enough to say nay; for, say they, ‘nay’ has no more letters in it than ‘yea,’233 and a culprit is well off when life or death with him depends on his own tongue and not on that of witnesses or evidence; and to my thinking they are not very far out.” “And I think so too,” answered Don Quixote; then passing on to the third he asked him what he had asked the others, and the man answered very readily and unconcernedly, “I am going for five years to their ladyships the gurapas for the want of ten ducats.” “I will give twenty with pleasure to get you out of that trouble,” said Don Quixote.

With sick call suspended and the door to the medical tent nailed shut, Doc Daneeka spent the intervals between rain perched on a high stool, wordlessly absorbing the bleak outbreak of fear with a sorrowing neutrality, roosting like a melancholy buzzard below the ominous, hand-lettered sign tacked up on the closed door of the medical tent by Captain Black as a joke and left hanging there by Doc Daneeka because it was no joke.

I left Holmes seated in front of the smouldering fire, and long into the watches of the night I heard the low, melancholy wailings of his violin, and knew that he was still pondering over the strange problem which he had set himself to unravel.

The stationary is dull; the declining melancholy.