All 14 Uses of
calamity
in
The House of the Seven Gables
- For the last seventy years the most noted event in the Pyncheon annals had been likewise the heaviest calamity that ever befell the race; no less than the violent death—for so it was adjudged—of one member of the family by the criminal act of another.†
Chpt 1
- This lovely Alice had met with some great and mysterious calamity, and had grown thin and white, and gradually faded out of the world.†
Chpt 5
- There had been something so innately characteristic in this look, that all the dusky years, and the burden of unfit calamity which had fallen upon him, did not suffice utterly to destroy it.†
Chpt 7
- Shall we venture to pronounce, therefore, that his long and black calamity may not have had a redeeming drop of mercy at the bottom?†
Chpt 7
- By some good agency,—possibly, by the unrecognized interposition of the long-buried Alice herself,—the threatening calamity was averted.†
Chpt 9
- —this veil, under which far more of his spirit was hidden than revealed, and through which he so imperfectly discerned the actual world,—or was its gray texture woven of some dark calamity?†
Chpt 9
- If a tear—a maiden's sunshiny tear over imaginary woe—dropped upon some melancholy page, Clifford either took it as a token of actual calamity, or else grew peevish, and angrily motioned her to close the volume.†
Chpt 10
- We are less than ghosts, for the time being, whenever this calamity befalls us.†
Chpt 11
- She seems to think that all the calamities of the Pyncheons began from that quarrel with the wizard,
Chpt 12 *calamities = disastrous events
- …Colonel Pyncheon meant to be the house of his descendants, in prosperity and happiness, down to an epoch far beyond the present,—under that roof, through a portion of three centuries, there has been perpetual remorse of conscience, a constantly defeated hope, strife amongst kindred, various misery, a strange form of death, dark suspicion, unspeakable disgrace,—all, or most of which calamity I have the means of tracing to the old Puritan's inordinate desire to plant and endow a family.†
Chpt 12
- I consider myself as having been very attentive; and, though I don't remember the incidents quite distinctly, yet I have an impression of a vast deal of trouble and calamity,—so, no doubt, the story will prove exceedingly attractive."†
Chpt 14
- There lives not the human being (except yourself,—and you not more than I) who has shed so many tears for Clifford's calamity.†
Chpt 15
- The whole seemed little else but a series of calamity, reproducing itself in successive generations, with one general hue, and varying in little, save the outline.†
Chpt 16
- Of so slight a nature, and so shattered by his previous calamities, it could not well be short of utter ruin to bring him face to face with the hard, relentless man who had been his evil destiny through life.†
Chpt 16
Definition:
-
(calamity) a disastrous event; or the distress resulting from it