pitiableness

Wasn't it in the rich soil of a murder investigation, in the fascination of the gradual unveiling of truth, in shared exertion and the prospect of danger, and in the pitiableness of desperate and broken lives that his poetry put out its shoots?

The Lighthouse James, P. D. 1988

Shall we not consider the city-bred girls, confined in circles where the vulgar glitter of wealth was mitigated only by the feeblest dilettanteism, -- spirited young women, falling into a morbid condition, whose pitiableness Dr. Ray has well illustrated, -- who have yet been strengthened to possess their souls in health and steadiness by a voice without pleading in their behalf the right to choose their own work and command their own lives?

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 Various

It was only a boy's fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a moment.

Youth and the Bright Medusa 1920

It was only a boy's fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a moment.

Youth and the Bright Medusa Willa Sibert Cather 1910

The utter pitiableness of the lone Negro being sent by this philosophy to fight the organized power of modern society went home to Ensal's heart.

The Hindered Hand or, The Reign of the Repressionist Robert E. [Illustrator] Bell 1902

But for beggars of unrivaled persistency I commend you to Port Said, for with a pitiableness, sincere or assumed, they dog your every footstep.

Shadow and Light An Autobiography with Reminiscences of the Last and Present Century Mifflin Wistar Gibbs 1885

And with a spasmodic attempt to play the squire of Mellor on his native heath, Richard Boyce rose, drew his emaciated frame to its full height, and stood looking out drearily to his ancestral lawns -- a picturesque and elegant figure, for all its weakness and pitiableness.

Marcella Humphry Ward 1885

Brigadier_, to create for us a sense of the pitiableness of man's tiny life, of the mere human seed which springs and spreads a while on earth, and dies under the menacing gaze of the advancing years.

A Desperate Character and Other Stories Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev 1850

To complete the pitiableness of her aspect, she shivered either with cold, or fear, or nervous excitement, so that you might have beheld her shadow vibrating on the fire-lighted wall.

The Blithedale Romance Nathaniel Hawthorne 1834

The tragic solemnity of a man who might have changed clothes with the nearest scarecrow without a perceptible difference, and whose life was evidently not ordered by any excessive self-respect, falling back on the dignity of human nature in order to be rid of a companion as disreputable as himself, is what makes the scene so grotesque, and yet in a sense so impressive, because it shows a lurking standard of conduct which no pitiableness of degradation could obliterate.

Joyous Gard Arthur Christopher Benson 1893