dolefulness

It looked like a snow angel, but also like a mummy — an image of both levity and dolefulness, neither all good nor all bad.

This is a dolefulness wherein your bones – the same ones which craved warmth all winter – are brittle again not from the cold, but from the sun.

But in “The Night Stages” it arrives late, and Ms. Urquhart’s unremitting dolefulness has already deadened our nerve endings to the heartache she wants to conjure.

Where the network’s “True Detective” occasionally broke its dolefulness with the slyest, philosophically artful wink at an audience riveted by its mystery, “The Leftovers” grafts more unhappiness onto unhappiness.

For the Merry-man's dolefulness there is ample cause, and he himself laments how ridiculous it is that "a poor heart-broken man must needs be merry or he will be whipped."