What is "mournful"

Usage examples of "mournful".

Malcolm chose to express his ire with a mournful, rather accusatory whine.

It was inscribed on his colossal statues, and repeated in the redoubled acclamations of the mournful and applauding senate.

Countess and Mademoiselle Bearn, having looked, for a moment, with surprise, on her dejected countenance, began, as usual, to talk of trifles, while the eyes of Lady Blanche asked much of her friend, who could only reply by a mournful smile.

Eugenia looked after him with a gentle sigh, which now first she thought blameless, and a pleasure, which, though half mournful, she now suffered herself to encourage.

Their mournful hooting, made with inflatable skin sacs on their great horny snouts, echoed from the walls of ice to the south.

Ben, leading the way to the humpy carrels, who were peacefully chewing their cud and longing for the desert, with a dreamy, far-away look in their mournful eyes.

As the little motoscafo approached the landing-stage on the north-west corner of the island, Patrick caught sight of a mournful procession directly ahead of them.

There was no sound in the house, no sound outside except the mournful hoot of an owl, far away in the piny woods.

Softly, almost imperceptibly these waiting ones took up the mournful plaint, sending it floating out thin and high in answer to the approaching bearers of the dead.

The grave conversations with Bolingbroke and Richard Cromwell, the light scenes in London and at Paris, the favour obtained with the Czar of Russia, are all essential to the creation of that mixture of wearied satiety and mournful thought which conducts the Probationer to the lonely spot in which he is destined to learn at once the mystery of his past life and to clear his reason from the doubts that had obscured the future world.

The long night of his absence or death was the mournful season of distress and anxiety, till the messengers, who had been sent to the mountain tops, descried the first rays of returning light, and proclaimed to the plain below the festival of his resurrection.

The sanctuary was insensibly filled with a curious and mournful crowd, who, in his fate, prognosticated their own.

Antony apprehensively with those big, brown, mournful eyes, and pursed his full lips together.

Over all the earth at once, now that the roar of the engine had stopped, there was an immense and brooding quietness, a drowsed autumnal fume and warmth, immensely desolate and mournful, holding somehow a tragic prophecy of winter that must come, and death, and yet touched with the lonely, mournful and exultant mystery of the earth.

The tune of an incantation, a significant cry, the mien of the operator, these too have a natural leading power over the soul upon which they are directed, drawing it with the force of mournful patterns or tragic sounds--for it is the reasonless soul, not the will or wisdom, that is beguiled by music, a form of sorcery which raises no question, whose enchantment, indeed, is welcomed, exacted, from the performers.