Definition of "tenderhearted"

I am tender-hearted by nature, and have found my eyes moist many a time over the scream of a wounded hare.

1912, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Lost World […], London, New York, N.Y.: Hodder and Stoughton

The other patients in the ward, all but the Texan, shrank from him with a tenderhearted aversion from the moment they set eyes on him the morning after the night he had been sneaked in.

1961 November 10, Joseph Heller, “The Soldier in White”, in Catch-22 […], New York, N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, page 169