Tristness

Beneath the snowy turban, which adorns her head, what pathos seems to dress her brows; what silent, yet what speaking, tristness, highly touched!

Notwithstanding the tristness of the town, there are many visitors during the Summer who come for quiet and economy.

He who has lashed, with such biting keenness, the poets and the critics of his day; and laughed to scorn, alike the metaphysical poetics of an “In Memoriam,” the morbid tristness of “A Life-drama,” the transcendental theosophy of a “Festus,” and all the vagaries of a Carlyle, a Ruskin, or a Gilfillan: must be assumed to offer something which he, at least, believes to approach more nearly the true requisites of poetic perfection.

Kate was delighted with this proposal, and the business of packing and preparing seemed to dispel much of the tristness which had possessed her of late, and Wycherly was happy again.

“Her Majesty,” he says, “still dresses with exquisite simplicity, her toilet being toned and tinted in harmony with the tristness of the hour. Long live the brave and beautiful Empress Eugenie!”

The forlorn condition of the girl; her gesture, which seemed full of sadness; the silent fall of leaves; the tristness of the autumn woods, overcame Miss Lascelles; and as she walked silently beside me, with her head bent, I saw that she was crying.

IN the country and city where Ovidius Naso wrote his Tristia there is a Minister of Public Instruction, the Honourable Signor Nasi by name, who seeks to remove the tristness of the Italian teachers’ lot by requiring them to study and teach their pupils The Duty of Man, by Mazzini. Such was the stone offered to the Italian schoolmasters for bread, and they seem to digest it badly. For, if one may trust the news in L’Européen, “these unhappy pariahs of education, whom successive governments have fed with promises and fine words, are losing their patience at last.”

All this time, Colonel Ireton was making a forced march across the Darling Range, that low cordillera unsurpassable in tristness, barrenness and steepness.