Word: dourness
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Perhaps the most prolific hymn writer of all was Methodism's Charles Wesley, who turned out the words of some 7,000. Hymns were an important means of spreading the Methodist doctrine of salvation for all, as opposed to the dour Puritan teaching of predestination. Wesley's most successful effort: Jesu, lover of my soul, of which Henry Ward Beecher said: "I would rather have written that hymn than to have the fame of all the kings that ever sat upon the earth." Brother John Wesley, a busy hymn writer himself, issued some precepts to choirs which, thinks...
...which her life and times are portrayed as brilliantly as if her pen had been dipped (as her proud husband put it) in "grains as of gold." She achieved this perfection of correspondence while suffering from periodic bouts of sleeplessness, racking headaches, and the cares of looking after dour, excessively difficult Thomas-a combination of circumstances that at one period brought her to the very verge of lunacy...
...with Pity. Even among the innumerable literary pessimists of Paris, 48-year-old Marcel Aymé sets something of a record in his skepticism about the human, race. A dour man with big ears and a considerable resemblance to Buster Keaton, he has a reputation for his provoking silences in company. (When André Gide kindly congratulated him on one of his plays recently, Aymé stared at the old master without saying a word.) In his books, there are only two emotions Aymé has any use for, humor and pity...
...Hasty Heart" didn't make much of a splash when it opened on Broadway a few seasons ago. John Patrick's play about a dour, friendless Scot in a British army hospital in Burma was perhaps a trifle unconventional for New York audiences. The fact that the Scot is slowly dying, although he doesn't know it, gave the play an undertone of tragedy. "The Hasty Heart" fared better in summer stock, where it has become a standby...
...Ford movies is an inordinate preoccupation with horses. This movie casts Katherine Hepburn as the Queen of Scots in a pretty free historical interpretation of how she wound up in the Tower of London. Miss Hepburn displays two emotions alternatively through the picture; her usual breathless unhappiness, and a dour sadness. She indicates the latter by quivering her lower jaw, an operation which resembles nothing so much as a successful attempt to suppress a sneeze...