Word: sordidness
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Dates: during 1880-1889
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...afternoon, Dr. Hale officiated, assisted by Dr. F. G. Peabody. In his address, Dr. Hale spoke of two classes of people, the one composed of those who go to their daily work without thought of future reward; the other, composed of those whose minds are filled with selfish and sordid purposes. People of the first class are successful simply because they have interest in the work itself. That interest is not purchased by bribery, is not caused by fear of consequences; but is present because God is working out his purposes through these earnest men and women...
Surely, my friends, surely there is nothing in the greatest office which the American people can confer, which should make your president necessarily mean, sordid, selfish, ambitious and untrustworthy. On the contrary, the solemn duties which confront him tend to a sacred sense of responsibility. The trust of the American people, and an appreciation of their mission before the nations of the earth, should make him a patriotic man; while the tales of distress which reach him from the humble and the lowly, from the afflicted and from the needy in every corner of the land, cannot but awake...
...even the continual presence of beauty cannot make its power felt in the sordid soul. The attraction that influences yonder natives is not aesthetic truth, but vulgar gossip...
...Corsair makes his first appearance in American poetry. "Hannah Bantry in the pantry," who employed her solitude in gnawing a mutton-bone, is the prototype of the "Marchioness." Hannah, to be sure, seems, in this instance, to have solaced her loneliness in a more sordid manner than the curious creature in Dickens's novel, but if Mother Goose had given us further glimpses of her heroine's character, we should, no doubt, find her more winsome...