A quality that arouses emotions (especially pity or sorrow)

Usage examples of pathos.

The Marches escaped from it all with sighs and groans of relief, and before they drove off to see the great fountain of the Orangeries, they dedicated a moment of pathos to the Temple of Friendship which Frederick built in memory of unhappy Wilhelmina of Beyreuth, the sister he loved in the common sorrow of their wretched home, and neglected when he came to his kingdom.

And Hall, usually so merry, could outfoot them all when he once got started on the cosmic pathos of religion and the gibbering anthropomorphisms of those who loved not to die.

Don Juans are haunted by the pathos of imitation and the consciousness of living a parodistic derivative of a once charismatic identity.

Bret Harte in verse and story touched the parallels of tragedy and of comedy, of pathos, of bathos, and of humor, which love of life and lust of gold opened up amid the unapprehended grandeurs and the coveted treasures of primeval nature.

But the Azerbaijani man sighed and made a comment that in its simplicity and precision of vocal gesture seemed both to reprise my thoughts and to invest them with the pathos common to all those disoriented by the test of life.

Cormac, while possessing the true Gaelic antipathy for his Cymric kin in general, sensed the pathos and valor of this brave, vain struggle, and even Wulfhere, looking into the far-seeing eyes of the British king, felt a trifle awed.

Laurette would sometimes seat herself upon a stile or a fragment of rock, and taking her lute, which she knew how to touch with exquisite pathos, would play some charming air which she accompanied with her voice, till the soul of Enrico was lost in an extasy of delight, from which he was reluctantly awakened.

Leviathan, which God of all his works Created hugest that swim the ocean-stream, the picture that follows of the Norse-pilot mooring his boat under the lee of the monster is completed in a line that attunes the mind once more to all the pathos and gloom of those infernal deeps: while night Invests the sea, and wished morn delays.

This introduction to the third act recalls the introduction to the first, which also begins with the hymnlike phrase, and sets the key-note of pathos which is sounded at every dramatic climax, though pages of hurdy-gurdy tune and unmeaning music intervene.

The other two Iliadic armings are those of Patroclus, full of pathos, and of Achilles, full of wrath, but also of foreboding, for it is on this occasion that the horse Xanthos prophesies his coming death.

Words that are not and can never be words are sought by Lucien here through what he guesses to be the maxillofacial movements of speech, and there is a childlike pathos to the movements that perhaps the rigid-grinned A.

It is true that the humour of Micawber is good literature and that the pathos of little Nell is bad.

The third act corresponds to the pathos and peripety of the traditional tragic form.

In looking over those very dissimilar collections it is not difficult to discover that the songs which he wrote for the more stately work, while they are more polished and elegant than those which he contributed to the less pretending one, are at the same time less happy in their humour and less simple in their pathos.

For my part, I know no cry that paints pain with surer pathos than a passage now to be quoted.