Sadness and Melancholy

Take love when love is given, / But never think to find it / A sure escape from sorrow / Or a complete repose.

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.

 

Life is sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating. O.

 

We are never more discontented with others than when we are discontented with ourselves.

Like summer tempest came her tears.

 

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,

 

She only said, ‘My life is dreary,

 

Good-night, good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow.

 

Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment,

 

Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

 

O Sorrow, wilt Thou live with me No casual mistress, but a wife.

 

Be near me when my light is low.

 

I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within.

 

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

 

This is the truth the poet sings, That a sorrow’s crown of sorrow is remembering happier things.

 

The long mechanic pacings to and fro, The set gray life, and apathetic end.

 

The lion on your old stone gates Is not more cold to you than I.

 

Weeded and worn the ancient thatch Upon the lonely moated grange. 1

 

And if I should live to be The last leaf upon the tree In the spring, Let them smile, as I do now, At the old forsaken bough Where I cling.

 

Slowly consumed, like fire down a candle; Forever flowing, like a passing river. Now, morning, I face my lone shadow: Suddenly my eyes are bleared with tears. 1

 

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface.

Les sanglots longs

Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven.

Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucketof whitewash and a long-handled brush. Hesurveyed the fence, and all gladness left himand a deep melancholy settled down upon hisspirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feethigh. Life to him seemed hollow, and existencebut a burden.