lonely vs. lonesome?

[Joanne M. Despres]

On 25 Aug 2002, at 21:48, Indigo Som wrote:
 Is "lonesome" regularly used outside of country or
> blues songs?
>
> Thanks,
> Indigo

I tend to think of this as a countryish variant, too.  I associate it
with the writings of Mark Twain. (For example, the opening
sentence of _A Connecticut Yankee_ is: "It was a soft, reposeful
summer landscape, as lovely as a dream, and as lonesome as
Sunday.")  I guess this has no bearing on contemporary use of the
word, but my search of a literature database indicates that it
showed up in authors who dealt in more "sivilized" subjects as well
-- Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, James, Wharton, Stevenson,
Norris, and Gibbon.  Twain had more hits than any individual author
in the database, though.

Joanne Despres