Grief loosed the lips of her he had not wed,
And all the passion that through heavy years,
Had masked in smiles, unmasked itself in tears.
Agnei'a (3 syl.), wifely chastity, sister of Parthen'ia or maiden chastity. Agneia is the spouse of Encra'tês or temperance. Fully described in canto x. of The Purple Island, by Phineas Fletcher (1633). (Greek, agneia, "chastity.")
Ag'nes, daughter of Mr. Wickfield the solicitor, and David Copperfield's second wife (after the death of Dora, "his child wife"). Agnes is a very pure, self-sacrificing girl, accomplished, yet domestic.—C. Dickens, David Copperfield (1849).
Agnes, in Molière's L'École des Femmes, the girl on whom Arnolphe tries his pet experiment of education, so as to turn out for himself a "model wife." She is brought up in a country convent, where she is kept in entire ignorance of the difference of sex, conventional proprieties, the difference between the love of men and women, and that of girls for girls, the mysteries of marriage, and so on. When grown to womanhood she quits the convent, and standing one evening on a balcony a young man passes and takes off his hat to her, she returns the salute; he bows a second and third time, she does the same; he passes and repasses several times, bowing each time, and she does as she has been taught to do by acknowledging the salute. Of course, the young man (Horace) becomes her lover, whom she marries, and M. Arnolphe loses his "model wife." (See PINCH-WIFE.)
Elle fait l'Agnès. She pretends to be wholly unsophisticated and verdantly ingenuous.—French Proverb (from the "Agnes" of Molière, L'École des Femmes, 1662).
Agnes (Black), the countess of March, noted for her defence of Dunbar against the English.
Black Agnes, the palfry of Mary queen of Scots, the gift of her brother Moray, and so called from the noted countess of March, who was countess of Moray (Murray) in her own right.
Agnes (St.), a young virgin of Palermo, who at the age of thirteen was martyred at Rome during the Diocletian persecution of A.D. 304. Prudence (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens), a Latin Christian poet of the fourth century, has a poem on the subject. Tintoret and Domenichi'no have both made her the subject of a painting.—The Martyrdom of St. Agnes.