"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... grief and dejection. This was {55} indeed a terrible year for mankind. Demeter no longer smiled on the earth she was wont to bless, and though the husbandman sowed the grain, and the groaning oxen ploughed the fields, no harvest rewarded their labour. All was barren, dreary desolation. The world was threatened with famine, and the gods with the loss of their accustomed honours and sacrifices; it became evident, therefore, to Zeus himself that some measures must be adopted to appease the anger of the goddess. He accordingly despatched Iris ...
— Myths and Legends of Ancient Greece and Rome • E.M. Berens
... the efficiency of Russia's force. During the battle, Kamenski, the general-in-chief, a martinet and disciple of routine, had twice given the order for retreat, and it was Bennigsen's disobedience which made the conflict so indecisive that Russia claimed it as a victory. If a victory, it was a barren one, because a weak and venal administration of the commissary department had deprived the soldiers of sustenance at the critical moment. Kamenski, who was seventy-six years old, was retired on the ground of his health, and Bennigsen succeeded him, but the bad commissary ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... was barren of fruit, as these trees sometimes are, whole groves of them ceasing to bear for some mysterious reason only known to Nature. It was green now, but when suffering its yearly change the great scalloped leaves would take all imaginable tinges of gold and bronze and amber. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the various signatory powers, solemnly declared such to be our intention; and nothing is gained by reiterating our adherence to the principle, while refusing to provide any means of making our intention effectual. In the amended form the treaties contain nothing except such expression of barren intention, and indeed, as compared with what has already been provided in The Hague arbitration treaty, they probably represent not a step forward but a slight step backward, as regards the question of international arbitration. As such I do not think they should receive the sanction of this ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... oppression and poverty that the most able instructors in husbandry could have made nothing of them. A writer in the 'Farmer's Magazine' sums up his account of Scotland at that time in these words:—"Except in a few instances, it was little better than a barren waste."*[1] ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... curious that my father often spoke of his Cambridge life as if it had been so much time wasted, forgetting that, although the set studies of the place were barren enough for him, he yet gained in the highest degree the best advantages of a University life—the contact with men and an opportunity for his mind to grow vigorously. It is true that he valued at its highest the advantages which he ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... refined and subtle perversities as they are of admiring the beautiful form in which his full-blooded and exuberant imagination clothes his conceptions. He is an aesthete, but his aestheticism has never expressed itself in barren theory, but has always turned to life itself. He realized at the outset of his career that life is a physical thing, which we must compel to surrender all that it can offer us, which the artist must bend and shape to his own creative ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... could concede no more. The impression evidently left on him by Eunice's terrible outbreak, was far more serious than I had anticipated. I was myself depressed and ill at ease. No expressions of tenderness were exchanged between us. There was something horrible in our barren farewell. We merely clasped hands, at parting. He went his way—and ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... transverse branches; elsewhere throughout their length they were not only almost completely isolated, but divided by great tracts of pathless mountains and barren plains, rendering, except at the points mentioned, or by way of the sea, the transfer of troops from one to the other a difficult process. Therefore the branch lines (I. De Aar—Naauwpoort; 2. Stormberg—Rosmead) had a significance hardly inferior to that of the three ports, Cape Town, ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... bliss. Many of the genii delight in mischief; they surprise and mislead travelers, raise whirlwinds, and dry up springs in the desert. The Ghoul lives on the flesh of men and women, whom he decoys to his haunts in wild and barren places, in order to kill and devour them, and when he cannot thus obtain food, he enters the graveyards and feeds upon the bodies of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... of the islands, rising steeply from the sea, are rugged and mountainous; South Georgia is largely barren and has steep, glacier-covered mountains; the South Sandwich Islands are of volcanic origin ...
— The 1995 CIA World Factbook • United States Central Intelligence Agency
... actually had read the articles and could see nothing alluring in a prospect that contemplated barren, snow- swept wildernesses in the Andes. "The only advantage I can see in living up there," he said, with a sly wink at Barnes, "is that one has all the privileges of death without being put ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... This barren place yields somewhat to relieve, For I have found sufficient to content me, And more true bliss than ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... always?" asked her friend, leaning forward with an irresistible desire to win back the old-time love and confidence, too precious to be exchanged for a little brief excitement or the barren honor of "bagging a bird," to use Trix's elegant expression. Fanny understood it then, and threw herself into Polly's arms, crying, with a shower of grateful tears; "Oh, my dear! my dear! did you do ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... his companions launched a boat and went ashore. But it was no fair land to which they had come. Far inland great snow-covered mountains rose, and between them and the sea lay flat and barren rock, where no grass or green thing grew. It seemed to Leif and his companions that there was no good thing ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... before breakfast; or, if the far out-reaching sands were not then covered with water, later on in the day. We had also cricket and football on the common during the hours of relaxation spent in winter on the barren playground in the rear of the house. Sometimes, in our solemn walks under charge of the under-masters, we occasionally encountered "the opposition school" or college fellows belonging to a large educational institution near ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... sick. He had been hit vitally. This was what people thought! and it was true. They were "clean run to seed." He went to get his cart. (He did not speak to Kitty.) His home came before his eyes like a photograph: fences down, gates gone, houses ruinous, fields barren. It came to him as if stamped on the retina by a lightning-flash. He had worked—worked hard. But it was no use. It was true: they were "clean run to seed." He helped his mother and Kitty into the cart silently—doggedly. ...
— "Run To Seed" - 1891 • Thomas Nelson Page
... view of the injunction to increase and multiply, he can justify the large celibate class created by positive command of the Catholic church, not only by the ordination of priests, but by the constant urging of the church that women should become the barren brides of Christ by taking on them ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... which, if unreal at the outset, had become a thousand times more wearisome by repetition, passes on to a daring presentation of real life lived among all the squalor of actual poverty, not unskilfully interspersed with descriptions equally faithful of the barren coast-scenery among which he had been brought up. It has been already remarked how Crabbe's eye for rural nature had been quickened and made more exact by his studies in botany. There was little in the poetry then popular that reproduced ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... misery or bliss his fate, among the sage is deemed a fool. As one that quits the Amra bower, the bright Palasa's pride to gain Mocked by the promise of its flower, seeks its unripening fruit in vain, So I the lovely Amra left for the Palasa's barren bloom, Through mine own fatal error 'reft of banished Rama, mourn in gloom. Kausalya! in my early youth by my keen arrow, at his mark Aimed with too sure and deadly truth, was wrought a deed most fell ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... ground of uncontrolable necessity. If there be one, who concurs with the gentleman from Brunswick (Mr. Gholson) in the harmless character of this institution, let me request him to compare the condition of the slaveholding portion of this Commonwealth—barren, desolate, and seared as it were by the avenging hand of Heaven,—with the descriptions which we have of this same country from those who first broke its virgin soil. To what is this change ascribable? Alone to the withering and blasting ...
— An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans • Lydia Maria Child
... thee!" I would straightway cry, "A thousand years upon this barren earth Is death without her: for that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... thus could not extinguish a master's right to his slave in any Territory. "While the right continues in full force under ... the Constitution," he added, "and cannot be divested or alienated by an act of Congress, it necessarily remains a barren and worthless right, unless sustained, protected, and enforced by appropriate police regulations and local legislation, prescribing adequate remedies for its violation. These regulations and remedies must ...
— Stephen A. Douglas - A Study in American Politics • Allen Johnson
... "interrogation of Nature." There were, indeed, and had long been experimental philosophers, but the school doctors went not beyond Aristotle; and discovered nothing. As Mr. Spedding puts it, the boy Bacon asked himself, "If our study of nature be thus barren, our method of study must be wrong; might not a better method be found? . . . Upon the conviction 'This may be done,' followed at once the question, HOW may it be done? Upon that question answered followed the resolution to try ...
— Shakespeare, Bacon and the Great Unknown • Andrew Lang
... this leg of the journey was more or less screened from the view of the enemy, but now a wide barren space, swept by shell fire, lay before him. It was almost certain death to venture into that open field. Rene knew it, but did not hesitate. It was not that he feared for his own life, but that he did not wish to lose it before he had ...
— The Children of France • Ruth Royce
... was some thought of this that found expression in her passionate outburst when she learnt of the birth of Mary Stuart's child: "The Queen of Scots is lighter of a fair son; and I am but a barren stock." ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... necessary than even to regulate property, to take care that the increase of the people should not exceed a certain number; and in determining that, to take into consideration those children who will die, and also those women who will be barren; and to neglect this, as is done in several cities, is to bring certain poverty on the citizens; and poverty is the cause of sedition and evil. Now Phidon the Corinthian, one of the oldest legislators, thought the families and the number ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... jesuit e'er took in hand To plant a church in barren land; Nor ever thought it worth the while A Swede or Russ to reconcile. For where there is no store of wealth, Souls are not worth the charge of health. Spain in America had two designs: To sell their ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Volume II • Theophilus Cibber
... none other than Antioch. Half-an-hour more brought him within sight of another city, doubtless Aleppo. He still steered almost due east, though a point or two southward would be more direct, because he wished to avoid the Syrian desert; a breakdown in such a barren tract of country would mean a fatal delay. Soon afterwards he reached a broad full river, flowing rapidly between ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... "He that condemns himself to compose on a stated day, will often bring to his task an attention dissipated, a memory embarrassed, an imagination overwhelmed, a mind distracted with anxieties, a body languishing with disease: he will labour on a barren topick, till it is too late to change it; or, in the ardour of invention, diffuse his thoughts into wild exuberance, which the pressing hour of publication cannot suffer judgment to examine or reduce." Of this excellent ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... remorsefully of that other scout, that poor boy whom the spy had shot far away yonder to the north and eastward. Now she rose and journeyed again. Rare hours were those for Alice. They came at length into a low, barren land, of dwarfed and scrawny pines, with here and there a marshy flat; thence through a narrow strip of hickories, oaks, cypresses, and dwarf palmetto, and so on into beds of white sand and oyster-shells, ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... thy inland seas, The eternal forest girdling either shore, Its belt of dark pines sighing in the breeze, And rugged fields, with rude huts dotted o'er, Show cultivation unimproved by art, That sheds a barren chillness ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... to find something further wherewith to beguile the monotony of the way, and finding it barren, Mr. Ryde falls back ...
— Rossmoyne • Unknown
... little reputations with more ease than you now protect them. But these, my lord, are designs, which I am sure you harbour not, any more than the French king is contriving the conquest of the Swissers. It is a barren triumph, which is not worth your pains; and would only rank him amongst ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Volume 4 (of 18) - Almanzor And Almahide, Marriage-a-la-Mode, The Assignation • John Dryden
... disdain To check the lawless riot of the trees, To plant the grove, or turn the barren mould Oh happy he, whom, when his years decline, (His fortune and his fame by worthy means Attain'd, and equal to his mod'rate mind; His life approv'd by all the wise and good, Even envy'd by the vain) the peaceful groves Of Epicurus, from this stormy world Hereine in rest; ...
— The Botanical Magazine, Vol. 6 - Or, Flower-Garden Displayed • William Curtis
... of political and intellectual reaction in France was marked by the rise of the greatest of her modern institutions. There is the chief paradox of that age. While barren of literary activity and of truly civic developments, yet it was unequalled in the growth of institutions. This is generally the characteristic of epochs when the human faculties, long congealed by untoward restraints, suddenly burst their barriers and run riot ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... rest being composed of lava and ashes, or rocky heights and precipitous cliffs. Still, many of the portions which can be cultivated are of extraordinary fertility; and the contrast is very great between the richly-cultivated plains and valleys, and the leafy forests, with the barren, scorched, and burnt sides of the peak and its surrounding heights. I ought to have said that the houses of Santa Cruz are of several stories, with the verandahs one above another, looking into the interior courts, in which grow not only ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... some distance leaves the shore and ascends a range of barren hills containing slate, limestone and granite. Hardy trees become more abundant than the chestnut, and the mountains higher and more imposing, as we approach ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... baron may be a good, substantial, unpretending man, something after the manner of an American farmer. A German prince or duke, since the absorption of the smaller principalities of Germany by Prussia, may have nothing left him but a barren title and a meagre rent-roll. The Italian prince is even of less account than the German one, since his rent-roll is too frequently lacking altogether, and his only inheritance may be a grand but decayed palace, without means ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... patent medicine, it's a patent medicine whose field of operations is the solid earth! its clients the swarming nations that inhabit it! Why what is the republic of America for an eye-water country? Lord bless you, it is nothing but a barren highway that you've got to cross to get to the true eye-water market! Why, Washington, in the Oriental countries people swarm like the sands of the desert; every square mile of ground upholds its thousands upon thousands of struggling human creatures—and every ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 1. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the distant fires and lights which give to the vicinity of certain manufactories so preternatural an appearance, streaming red and wild over the waste. So abandoned by man appeared the spot, that you found it difficult to imagine that it was only from human fires that its bleak and barren desolation was illumined. For miles along the moor you detected no vestige of any habitation; but as you approached the verge nearest to the town, you could just perceive at a little distance from the main road, by which the common was intersected, a small, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... is the story of the renascence in Egypt. The mother-land of science and learning, after a wellnigh barren interval of 1,100 years since the Arab conquest, was now developed and illumined by the application of the arts with which in the dim past she had enriched the life of barbarous Europe. The repayment ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... shall stand, in thy defence, 'Gainst such dull rogues as now and then write sense. Thy style's the same, whatever be thy theme, As some digestion turns all meat to phlegm. He lyes, dear Ned, who says, thy brain it barren, Where deep conceits, like vermin breed in carrion. Thy stumbling founder'd jade can trot as high As any other Pegasus can fly. So the dull Eel moves nimbler in the mud, Than all the swift-finn'd racers of the flood. As skilful divers to the bottom fall, Sooner than those that cannot ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) - Vol. III • Theophilus Cibber
... children, that you will think that the prologue is over long for the play; but the foundations must be laid before the building is erected, and a statement of this sort is a sorry and a barren thing unless you have a knowledge of the folk concerned. Be patient, then, while I speak to you of the old friends of my youth, some of whom you may hear more of hereafter, while others remained ...
— Micah Clarke - His Statement as made to his three Grandchildren Joseph, - Gervas and Reuben During the Hard Winter of 1734 • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the gems. Here and there a bird gave a cry; no other sound awoke the silence. I never see the statue of the Roman youth, praying with outstretched arms, and open, empty, level palms, as waiting to receive and hold the blessing of the gods, but that outstretched barren heath rises before me, as if it meant the same thing as the statue—or were, at least, the fit room in the middle space of which to set the praying and ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... the barren woman, the Drinker of Life, but she had at least drunken without ostentation, and if she murdered with her own large hands, or staked men and women from a sheer lust of cruelty, there were none alive to ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... in partes centum diducere. Dicat Filius Albini, si de quincunce remota est Uncia, quid superet? poteras dixisse, triens. Eu! Rem poteris servare tuam. Redit uncia: quid fit? On Nature's pattern too I'll bid him look, And copy manners from her living book. Sometimes 'twill chance, a poor and barren tale, Where neither excellence nor art prevail, With now and then a passage of some merit, And Characters sustain'd, and drawn with spirit, Pleases the people more, and more obtains, Than tuneful nothings, ...
— The Art Of Poetry An Epistle To The Pisos - Q. Horatii Flacci Epistola Ad Pisones, De Arte Poetica. • Horace
... to make a cheerful, happy home! It is only the idle and vicious that need be really miserable. If God does not always give us plenty of money, he furnishes us with so many rich things in this world of his, that we may adorn even a lowly and barren place until it shall appear richer than the gayest palace. Maddie and Lolly found this out through Alice; and every day they hunted the woods for mosses and flowers, and their father made little ...
— Little Alice's Palace - or, The Sunny Heart • Anonymous
... extent, power, riches, and splendour of the kingdom of Bisnagar, bent his course towards the Indian coast; and after three months' travelling, joining himself to different caravans, sometimes over deserts and barren mountains, and sometimes through populous and fertile countries, arrived at Bisnagar, the capital of the kingdom of that name, and the residence of its maharajah. He lodged at a khan appointed for foreign ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... in which Jesus had this day prayed was not the one where he usually prayed on Mount Olivet. He commonly went to a cabin at a greater distance off, where, one day, after having cursed the barren fig-tree, he had prayed in great affliction of spirit, with his arms stretched out, ...
— The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ • Anna Catherine Emmerich
... by the volcanic crack between this and the continuation of the undulations to the south-west, which got lower and lower. Perhaps before the crack occurred that hill was like the others on the east and west of it, padded with red earth. It must have become barren by the great shock which caused the surface of the earth to divide, and which no doubt shook the surface deposits down. In examining its north-eastern neighbour it could be seen that it actually tumbled over when the ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... issued a charter, which empowered the barons to elect certain persons to draw up ordinances to reform the realm and the royal household. The powers of the committee were to last until Michaelmas, 1311. A barren promise that the king's concession should not be counted a precedent made Edward's submission seem a little less abject. Four days later the ordainers were appointed, the method of their election being based upon ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... a barren plain studded with clumps of trees led to the wood, to the little wood which had seemed to them to resemble the one at Kermarivan. Grainfields and hayfields bordered the narrow path, which lost itself in the young ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... main road, led them up a stream, walking in the water so that their footsteps might leave no trace, and thus away into the barren mountains which rose between them and the great swamp. On the crest of these mountains Alan turned and looked back towards Bonsa Town. There far across the fertile valley was the hateful, river-encircled place. There fell the great cataract in the roar of which he had lived for ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard
... in a weak and feeble state for twelve days longer, making twenty-six in all from the period of their shipwreck, and subsisting on what they could find on a barren and inhospitable land. But after the first four or five days, they suffered no hunger, for, as they themselves said, their misfortunes were so great as to banish its influence, and to deprive them of ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... of Tennessee, which were in possession of the Federals on the first of May. Kentucky has been opened to continual incursions of the Confederate armies. All this has been surrendered in order to gain this barren strip of country on the line of the railroad. The war, then, has been properly pronounced a failure in a military point of view. The convention meant that it has failed to restore the Union, and there is not a Republican in the land who ...
— The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes • James Quay Howard
... in time of need (citizens as well as servants, holding a ballot as well as a broom, I tell her), and bringing back to us the lowly, underfoot virtues of contentment and humility, which we do so need to carpet the barren and hungry thoroughfare of our ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... taught, I paint the cot As Truth will paint it and as bards will not. Nor you, ye poor, of lettered scorn complain: To you the smoothest song is smooth in vain; O'ercome by labour and bowed down by time, Feel you the barren flattery of a rhyme? Can poets soothe you, when you pine for bread, By winding myrtles round your ruined shed? Can their light tales your weighty griefs o'erpower, Or glad with airy mirth the ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum
... river, broad and deep, which was always silently rolling on to a vast undiscovered ocean. It had rolled on, ever since the world began. It had changed its course sometimes, and turned into new channels, leaving its old ways dry and barren; but it had ever been upon the flow, and ever was to flow until Time should be no more. Against its strong, unfathomable stream, nothing made head. No living creature, no flower, no leaf, no particle of animate or inanimate ...
— Some Christmas Stories • Charles Dickens
... the whole mind of the people, not only throughout Rome, but Italy, Gaul, Africa, and Asia. And for this we have to thank whom? Whom but ourselves? Ever since Hadrian—otherwise a patriot king—built his imageless temples, in imitation of this barren and lifeless worship; ever since the weak Alexander and his superstitious mother filled the imperial palace with their statues of Christ, with preachers and teachers of his religion; ever since the Philips openly and without shame professed his faith; ever, I say, ...
— Aurelian - or, Rome in the Third Century • William Ware
... seneschal, of his varlets and the loiterers who remained outside the grill. When the countess saw the priest come who had charge of the masses said for children, and who received the said vows, she asked him if there were many barren women. To which the good priest replied, that he must not complain, and that the children were good revenue to ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... by some persons from the islands that I must not expect to find every where a green and tropical verdure; for much of the country was barren, unfruitful lava. I was up on deck bright and early, to see this far-off part of the world. There was "Diamond Head" before me, an extinct volcanic mountain, of a sort of reddish dust-color, with ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... between my former practice and my present one is this: Formerly, when I rose, I began to pray as soon as possible, and generally spent all my time till breakfast in prayer, or almost all the time. At all events I almost invariably began with prayer, except when I felt my soul to be more than usually barren, in which case I read the word of God for food, or for refreshment, or for a revival and renewal of my inner man, before I gave myself to prayer. But what was the result? I often spent a quarter of an hour, or half an hour, or even an hour, on my knees, before being conscious to myself of ...
— The Life of Trust: Being a Narrative of the Lord's Dealings With George Mueller • George Mueller
... have been a quite marvellous experience, after those barren years, to feel yourself glowing with all the vitalities of youth once more; to bring young men to your feet with a glance and to fancy ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... which an artesian well was bored, and forthwith the waters gushed up through it and swept over all the dry desert, making it one emerald meadow. "So," said he, "it is the incarnate Jesus flowing up through our own dusty, barren desert humanity, and overflowing us with Heavenly life and grace, until what was once dreary and dead becomes a fruitful garden of the Lord." The discourse was like a chapter from one of Hamilton's savory volumes. ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... wrote the great Psalter which is chained to the choir and window of St. Peter's altar.[150] Ralph de Ross, and Heymer de Tunebregge,[151] also bestowed gifts of a similar nature upon the monks; but the book anecdotes connected with this monastic fraternity are remarkably few, barren of interest, and present no very exalted idea ...
— Bibliomania in the Middle Ages • Frederick Somner Merryweather
... very old man when we first met him. He died before we left that part of the country. His last illness was preceded by a drunken spree, during which some rougish boys painted a barren fig-tree on his bald head. He died soon afterward. Notwithstanding the efforts of those who prepared the body for burial, his head went to its last resting-place still marked by some of the paint that portrayed ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... than a mother's love for her only child. For "Willie's" sake the widow Tarbell had turned her back upon the dear New England woods and meadows, upon the tidy village where every man and woman was her friend; for his sake she had come to dwell among strangers in a strange and barren land. The old homestead had been sold, and with the meagre proceeds she had paid their way across the prairies, and had bought a little house and a lot of land on the outskirts of Springtown, while ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... which the French Revolution and a soldier's career had forced Castanier to neglect. The solemn words, "You will be happy or miserable for all eternity!" made but the more terrible impression upon him, because he had exhausted earth and shaken it like a barren tree; because his desires could effect all things, so that it was enough that any spot in earth or heaven should be forbidden him, and he forthwith thought of nothing else. If it were allowable to compare ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... (servants to have no work), Sunday-School again from 2 to 4, and Evening-Service at 6. The intervals were perhaps the greatest trial of all, from the efforts I had to make, to be less than usually sinful, by reading books and sermons as barren as the Dead Sea. There was but one rosy spot, in the distance, all that day: and that was 'bed-time,' which never could come ...
— Sylvie and Bruno • Lewis Carroll
... and has been in troubles: we hope he is not LIKE in the Bielfeld Portrait;—otherwise, how happy that we never had the honor of knowing him! Indeed, the Crown-Prince's Household generally, as Bielfeld paints it in flourishes of panegyric, is but unattractive; barren to the modern on-looker; partly the Painter's blame, we doubt not. He gives details about their mode of dining, taking coffee, doing concert;—and describes once an incidental drinking-bout got up aforethought by the Prince; which is probably in good ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... tongue of fire! Eye to pierce the deepest deeps and sweep the world! Ah Mother, prolific and full in all besides, yet how long barren, barren?) ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... fire holder. Yet the oaks, white and red, and the sugar and black maples are not far behind in value. Our American white ash and elm rank well up with the oaks, so does beech, while the softer woods fall behind. Moreover, trees grown on high, droughty, barren soil show greater heating power than those of the same variety which happen to stand ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... were heathens, and we must judge of them by the light which they possessed, and not by any standard acknowledged in the present civilised world. Bold, enterprising, and sagacious, their own country confined and barren, they looked on the wide ocean as the only worthy field for the employment of their energies. They loved it for itself, too; they were born on it, or within the sound of its surges; they lived on it, they fought on it, and it was their wish through life to die on it, as if only on its ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston
... sir, I think the execution of my barren commission needs no farther stay. Touching that small portion of mammon wherewith thou wouldst endow my master's passage across the seas, in his name I will venture ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... wing. Thus the whole army was in good position and in good condition. We had largely subsisted on the country; our wagons were full of forage and provisions; but, as we approached the sea-coast, the country became more sandy and barren, and food became more scarce; still, with little or no loss, we had traveled two-thirds of our distance, and I concluded to push on for Savannah. At Millen I learned that General Bragg was in Augusta, and that General Wade Hampton had been ordered ...
— The Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman, Complete • William T. Sherman
... by the state of cultivation. "If he finds fields well enclosed by ditches, carefully planted, and covered with rich crops, these fields, he says to himself; belong to the monks. Almost always, alongside of these fertile plains, is an area of ground badly tilled and almost barren, presenting a painful contrast; and yet the soil is the same, being two portions of the same domain; he sees that the latter is the portion of the abbe-commendatory." "The abbatial manse." said Lefranc de Pompignan, "frequently looks like the property of a spendthrift; ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... of pruning a grape- vine, is best learned by observation and experience. One can give principles rather than lay down rules. Like the vine, the currant tends to choke itself with a superabundance of wood, which soon becomes more or less barren. This is truer of some varieties than of others; but in all instances the judicious use of the pruning- knife doubles the yield. In view of the supposition that the leading shoot and all the branches were shortened in one-half when the plant was set out, I ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... have known God falsely with the intellect, yet felt Him truly with the heart,—and there be many, principally among the unlettered little ones of Christ's flock, who positively know that much that is dogmatically propounded to them of their Redeemer is cold, barren, unsatisfying, and utterly false, who yet can give no account of their certainties better than that of the inspired fisherman, "We know Him, and have seen Him." It was in such hours as these that Mary's deadly fears for the soul of her beloved ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... loud, it thunders o'er my head, And now in distance dies. But give me back my barren hills Where ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell
... more vigorous and original class of writers, must have appealed to Lanier. An editorial, May 12, 1866, entitled a "Plain Talk with American Writers", said: "In fact the literary field was never so barren, never so utterly without hope or life. . . . The era of genius and vigor that seemed ready to burst upon us only a few months ago has not been fulfilled. There is a lack of boldness and power. Men do not ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... groped their way to the third story, and into the lord of the castle's great banquet hall—which stood there cold and empty, like all the other rooms in the old house. They even groped their way to the upper story, which had but one big, barren room. The only place they did not think of exploring was the big stork-nest on the roof—where, just at this time, the lady owl awakened Akka, and informed her that Flammea, the steeple owl, had granted her request, and had sent her ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... then of gold and silver, because of the glow of mind which the upraised hands of admiration brought him, mistaking it for the real thing; but his life had been barren because it had not emptied itself for others, at any time, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... them. He constantly interposes between mankind and the malice of his wicked grandmother, whom, at times, he soundly cudgels. It was he who made lakes and streams: for once the earth was parched and barren, all the water being gathered under the armpit of a colossal frog; but Jouskeha pierced the armpit, and let out the water. No prayers were offered to him, his benevolent ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... at one another, and then, simultaneously, both pairs of eyes swung upward and searched the sky. A moment later Brady was examining the ground about the spot where Bradley's cap had lain. It was one of those little barren, sandy stretches that they had found only upon this stony plateau. Brady's own footsteps showed as plainly as black ink upon white paper; but his was the only foot that had marred the smooth, windswept surface—there was no sign that Bradley had crossed ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was the wordy dispute of two wretches who lied for the sake of lying, without succeeding in concealing from themselves that they did so. Each took the part of accuser in turn, and although the prosecution they instituted against one another proved barren of result, they began it again every evening with ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... in the grove of dead trees and the City was a barren, level waste of desert, over a mile of blasted sand. No trees or bushes marred the smooth, parched surface. Only an occasional wind, a dry wind eddying and twisting, blew the sand up into little rills. A ...
— The Crystal Crypt • Philip Kindred Dick
... a vast triangle, which was called the Delta, from the Greek letter delta, (Greek: D), which is of a triangular form. In ascending the river beyond the Delta, the fertile plain, at first twenty-five or thirty miles wide, grows gradually narrower, as the ranges of barren hills and tracts of sandy deserts on either hand draw nearer and nearer to the river. Thus the country consists of two long lines of rich and fertile intervals, one on each side of the stream. In the time of Xerxes the whole extent was densely ...
— Xerxes - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... On the other hand, he assured us, and showed us a map of it, that, if we went northward, the western shore of Africa went out into the sea above 1000 miles west, so that we should have so much and more land to travel afterwards; which land might, for aught we knew, be as wild, barren, and desert as this. And therefore, upon the whole, he proposed that we should attempt this desert, and perhaps we should not find it so long as we feared; and however, he proposed that we should see how far our provisions would carry ...
— The Life, Adventures & Piracies of the Famous Captain Singleton • Daniel Defoe
... of gratitude," said he sadly; "Heaven knows what either you or I have to be grateful for! Fortune has left to your proud name but these bare walls and a handful of barren acres; to me she gave a father's affection—not such as Nature had made it, but cramped ...
— Godolphin, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... day after weary day they watched in vain for signs of the thaw that would not come, breaking camp in the morning on one barren point, only to pitch camp again in the evening on another, guarding the prisoners every instant, for the trouble they were costing made the captors even more determined that, whatever was lost, Finnegan and ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... much news from the field to dispel the gloom in the South. The great battle of Chickamauga had been won not long before, but it was a barren victory. There were no more Fredericksburgs nor Chancellorsvilles to rejoice over. Gettysburg had come; the genius of Lee himself had failed; Jackson was dead and no one had ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... and again. The delicious hope pursued him. It was his secret, and he never gave it speech. But time passed, and no child was born. And Ruth herself saw that she was barren, and she began to cast down her head before her husband. Israel's hope was of longer life, but the truth dawned upon him at last. Then, when he perceived that his wife was ashamed, a great tenderness came over him. He had been thinking ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... the term adaptation awakens but the barren echo of an idea. In biology it still retains a certain standing, though its significance has, in recent years, been rapidly contracting, as the influence of the conception for which it stands has waned. Many biologists ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... told him of his life: "I have a mother,—Heartsrue is she called. And on the barren moorland is our home. My bow and arrows have I made myself To scare the eagles ...
— Parsifal - A Drama by Wagner • Retold by Oliver Huckel
... barren sand-bank, after all, offered but a feeble chance for life. Even if he did reach it, which was doubtful, what could he do? Starvation instead of drowning would be his fate. More than once it occurred to him that it would be better then and there to give up all ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... grounds, this is the tree which grew in the middle of the garden of Eden, and whose fruits were so alluring to our first mother. Others would have it call'd the Mandrake of Leah, persuaded it is the same whose juice made the before barren Rachel a ...
— The Ladies Delight • Anonymous
... Barren, barren, barren; beggars all, beggars all, Sir John: marry, good air. Spread Davy, spread Davy. ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... I have attempted to symbol the course of a Poet's mind from a state wherein thought is disordered, barren and uncultivated, to that which is ordered and swayed by the true Spirit of Poetry, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... sand-banks. The soil of a great part of this Green River valley is a whitish clay, into which the rain cannot penetrate, but which dries and cracks with the sun. In some places it produces a salt weed, and grass along the margins of the streams; but the wider expanses of it are desolate and barren. It was not until noon that Captain Bonneville reached the banks of the Seeds-ke-dee, or Colorado of the West; in the meantime, the sufferings of both men and horses had been excessive, and it was with almost frantic eagerness that they hurried ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... country nobody knows where, and as soon as your back is turned these wicked ones here will be scheming to get you put out of the way, and will share all your possessions among themselves; stay where you are among your own people, and do not go wandering and worrying your life out on the barren ocean." ...
— The Odyssey • Homer
... right to the title of harbor pilot. And if certain perquisites went with an otherwise barren office, that was to be expected. Who worked for nothing, or for the empty honor of it, ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... strikingly illustrated in the history of those great revolutionary events, which belong to the life and times of the Emperor Charlemagne. If any one period in history might be supposed to offer a barren and unprofitable picture of war, rapine, and bloodshed—unfeatured by characteristic differences, and unimproved by any peculiar moral, it is this section of the European annals. Removed from our present times by a thousand years, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... gardens within the gorge, while exactly in our front, a hundred yards across the deep ravine, was the rocky steep of the mountain side, densely clothed with ilex and arbutus, until the still higher altitudes banished all underwood, and the upper ranges of Troodos exhibited a surface of barren rocks clothed with tall pines and ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... scoffers sneer, I propose to hold That Beauty has mounted the Stair of Gold, To eat and eat, forever and aye, On a velvet rug from a golden tray. But the human spirit—that is my creed— Rots in the ground like a barren seed. That is my creed, abhorred by Man But approved by Cat since time began. Till Death shall kick at me, thundering "Scat!" I shall hold to that, ...
— Shapes of Clay • Ambrose Bierce
... of fertility slide into one another by insensible gradations; and differences of accessibility, that is, of distance from markets do the same; and since there is land so barren that it could not pay for its cultivation at any price; it is evident that, whatever the price may be, there must in any extensive region be some land which at that price will just pay the wages of the ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... and perplexed enough, but ever taking counsel of the pride of my own heart. And those poor children, with their hard, toilsome, barren lives before them, how they sang! their clear, young voices ringing out fearlessly, carelessly—they knew the words. I wondered if any one in the room appreciated the song as having inner truth ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... tanneries and mills are grouped, from which there are exhalations of smoke and steam. The mists of superstition that once overhung the spot seem at last to have taken on that form. Behind it the land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the earliest period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as complete as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging cabalistic webs from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine ...
— A Study Of Hawthorne • George Parsons Lathrop
... deal about the good time that is coming to this world, when it is to be girded with salvation. Holiness on the bells of the horses. The lion's mane patted by the hand of a babe. Ships of Tarshish bringing cargoes for Jesus, and the hard, dry, barren, winter-bleached, storm-scarred, thunder-split rock breaking into floods of bright water. Deserts into which dromedaries thrust their nostrils, because they were afraid of the simoom—deserts blooming into carnation ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage
... that circled the house, denuded of undergrowth, seeming always to be edging forlornly closer to the upstanding edifice for comfort because it was barren and unfriendly, too, the new-fallen snow lay shadowy and soft, clothing the barrenness with grace. Giant pine and spruce that had survived his invasion stood up proud and green under the crown of snow ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... It has long constituted one of the hardest of the many riddles with which our Scottish deposits exercise the patience and ingenuity of the geologist. I remember a time when, after passing a day under its barren scaurs, or hid in its precipitous ravines, I used to feel in the evening as if I had been travelling under the cloud of night, and had seen nothing. It was a morose and taciturn companion, and had no speculation in it. I might stand in ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... friends. What then must divine love desire! What is good but enjoyment, and divine good but eternal blessedness? All good is so named for its enjoyableness or blessedness. True, anything one is given or possesses is also called good, but again, unless it is enjoyable, it is a barren good, not in itself good. Clearly, then, eternal life is also eternal blessedness. This state of man is the aim of creation; that only those who come into heaven are in that state is not the Lord's fault but man's. That man is in fault will be ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... reposing at the base of the mountain which the Norwegian had indicated as our destination. Here, as it had been everywhere else, the scene was sublime; stamped against the blue sky, glaciers were above our heads, and green fields at our feet; and thousands of cascades leaping down the barren sides of the mountains which surrounded us north, east, and west, were not concealed from the eye by tree or shrub; but could be traced, inch by inch, from the flat summit of the mountains to the valleys that sloped to the water ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... the curtain risen on the actual play, they face the anxieties and glories of a changing world. Not without quarrels and barren hours, not free from ignorance and the discomfort of finding that between the mountain peaks they must for long gray periods dwell in the dusty valleys, they yet start their drama with the distinction of being able ...
— Free Air • Sinclair Lewis
... out; a dark day with clouds, and the sun shining upon little patches. The sea was here very deep and still, and had scarce a wave upon it; so that I must put the water to my lips before I could believe it to be truly salt. The mountains on either side were high, rough and barren, very black and gloomy in the shadow of the clouds, but all silver-laced with little watercourses where the sun shone upon them. It seemed a hard country, this of Appin, for people to care as much about as ...
— Kidnapped • Robert Louis Stevenson
... head of asparagus ever presumed to poke itself out of the ground, without the especial permission of Ceres, you may conceive what a terrible calamity had here fallen upon the earth. The husbandmen plowed and planted as usual; but there lay the rich black furrows, all as barren as a desert of sand. The pastures looked as brown in the sweet month of June as ever they did in chill November. The rich man's broad acres and the cottager's small garden patch were equally blighted. Every little girl's ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... that sour moorland. I tried to remember her song, and hummed it assiduously till I got some kind of version, which I shouted in my tuneless voice. For I was only a young lad, and my life had been bleak and barren. Small wonder that the call of youth set ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... detail of proof and dry matters of fact; yet, surely, the Religion of the moderns abounds in topics so incomparably noble and exalted as might kindle the flames of genuine oratory in the most frigid and barren genius much more might this success be reasonably expected from such geniuses as Britain can enumerate; yet no piece of this sort, worthy applause or notice, ...
— Essays on Wit No. 2 • Richard Flecknoe and Joseph Warton
... To claim, perchance, heroic song; Though sighed no groves in summer gale, To prompt of love a softer tale; Though scarce a puny streamlet's speed Claimed homage from a shepherd's reed; Yet was poetic impulse given, By the green hill and clear blue heaven. It was a barren scene, and wild, Where naked cliffs were rudely piled; But ever and anon between Lay velvet tufts of loveliest green; And well the lonely infant knew Recesses where the wallflower grew, And honeysuckle loved to crawl Up the low crag and ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... even to extol it beyond poetry. Jacob Levi of Mayence (Maharil), living at the beginning of the fifteenth century, is considered the founder of German synagogue music, but his productions remained barren of poetic and devotional results. He drew his best subjects from alien sources. At the time of the Italian Renaissance, music had so firmly established itself in the appreciation of the people that a preacher, Judah Muscato, devoted the first of his celebrated sermons to ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... heavy wagons to the hunting grounds they suffered the usual hardships of plains travel. The weather, as in most Texas winters, alternated between the extremes of heat and cold. There had been little rain; in consequence water was scarce. Twice they were forced to cross wild, barren wastes, where the pools had dried up, and they suffered terribly from thirst. On the first occasion the horses were in good condition, and they travelled steadily, with only occasional short halts, for over thirty-six hours, by which time they were across the waterless country. The ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... the dividing ridge, which is also painfully steep, especially near the foot, and crossed the rolling hollow with its three chalybeate brooks, beyond which lay our destination. Tuckey describes the hills between Boma and Nkulu as stony and barren, which is perhaps a little too strong. The dark red clay soil, dried almost to the consistency of laterite, cannot be loosened by rain or sun, and in places it is hardened like that of Brazilian Porto Seguro, where the people complain ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... might assume the reins of government without assembling the Cortez. The English minister at Paris was instructed to interpose in behalf of the French protestants, against whom a severe edict had been lately published; but his remonstrances produced no effect. England, in the meantime, was quite barren of such events as deserve a place in history. The government was now firmly established on the neck of opposition; and commerce flourished even under ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... Congress altogether barren of positive result; for it gave birth to that conception of a "Confederation of Europe," which, though never realised, has been one of the guiding ideas of nineteenth-century politics. As this solution of the world's problems is likely to be urged upon us with great insistency ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... was no food supply; the soldiers would starve to death. It was true that the ships of the Allies controlled the Adriatic, but without roads no adequate food supply could be forwarded to the retreating armies. Nor did those barren regions offer any local supply; the poverty-stricken natives could barely maintain themselves. The only alternative to a retreat through this wilderness was to escape south over the Greek frontier, where they could join the French and British forces ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... agreement, of differences, of residues, and of concomitant variations. The course which he marked out so laboriously and so ingeniously for Induction to follow was one which was found to be impracticable, and as barren of results as those deductive philosophies on which he lavished his scorn. He has left precepts and examples of what he meant by his cross-examining and sifting processes. As admonitions to cross-examine and to sift facts and phenomena they are valuable. Many of the observations ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... peace that precedes a war. For all these conquered nations are awake, and have an eye on Rome. Not on Greece as before, for Greece is barren and laid waste, and passes into the great silence. Do you know that Sulla and Mithridates have gone slaying and pillaging over Hellas, so that science and art have fled to the Egyptian Alexandria or the growing Byzantium? Do you know that ...
— Historical Miniatures • August Strindberg
... The proprieties of the Forest were being outraged. The women who envied Mary-Clare her daring fell upon her first. From their own misery and disillusionment, they sought to defend their position; create an atmosphere of virtue around their barren lives, by attacking the woman who refused to ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... brother. The correspondence which she read in that way was of a nature which exasperated her desire for vengeance almost to frenzy. For not only did she acquire the evidence of a happiness shared by them which humiliated in her the woman barren in all senses of the word, a stranger to voluptuousness as well as to maternity, but she gathered from it numerous proofs that the Countess cherished, with regard to her, a scorn of race as absolute as if Venice had been a city of the United States.... ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... help of a fisherman who acted as our pilot, we pulled on shore, and making our way over about four hundred yards of rock by the side of a small stream, we reached the dark fresh water Loch Coruisk, round which rose a circle of gigantic barren mountains of purple hue. On this side the sun was shining brightly, lighting up the pointed crags, while the other was thrown into the ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston
... flock of sheep that are even shorn, which come up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them. ...
— Mistress Penwick • Dutton Payne
... implacable waves: Here, where the wind walks royal, alone in his kingdom, and only Sounds to the sedges a wail as of triumph that conquers and craves. All these waters and wastes are his empire of old, and awaken From barren and stagnant slumber at only the sound of his breath: Yet the hunger is eased not that aches in his heart, nor the goal overtaken That his wide wings yearn for and labour as hearts that yearn after death. All the solitude sighs and expects with a blind expectation Somewhat unknown of its ...
— Studies in Song • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... lay in utter relaxation, caring for and observing nothing. And then, the sharp edge of his fatigue being broken, he slowly turned on his side and leaned his head on his palm, his elbow resting on the ground. It was a barren prospect that stretched out before him: lazy, shiftless land clear over the brow of the hill that sloped away to the house. The Fawcette place had not been worked to capacity for years, and there it lay, the waste ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... character, through the furnace of affliction. Those who bear fruit He purgeth, that they may bear more fruit. Through the sacred law, He speaketh to the unfruitful in tones of Sinai: and, in [10] the gospel, He saith of the barren fig-tree, "Cut it down; why ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... It was an irregular little bunch of buildings gathered along an arterial street which, after a run of three hundred yards or so, broke to pieces and scattered its dispersed shanties about a high, barren plain. It stood on the steep bank of a little river, and over against it, on a naked hill, was Uncle Sam's military village,—a fort by courtesy,—where, when not sleeping, black soldiers and white strolled about in the warm sun. When the little street was fairly awake, it presented ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... use asking for yourselves. This, I believe, is one of the reasons, perhaps the chief reason, why the fruits of God's Spirit are so little seen among us in these days; why our Christianity is become more and more dead, and hollow, and barren, while expensive and intricate laws and taxes are becoming more and more necessary every year; because our religion has become so selfish, because we have been praying for God's Spirit too little for each ...
— Sermons on National Subjects • Charles Kingsley
... if we can find a way down to the valley," he suggested. "If we get anything to eat it will have to come from trees. This plateau is barren of any form ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... ladies, as in the days gone by, when Arthur was King, a thousand years ago, when he held his court in the palaces of the lost land. And the Islands of Scilly, as men say, be the summits of the mountains, that towered once hoary and barren over the green forests and the rich cities." [This story is a veritable legend of the ...
— The White Rose of Langley - A Story of the Olden Time • Emily Sarah Holt
... long time wandered over barren scenes amidst rocks entirely devoid of vegetation, our eyes dwelt with pleasure on tufts of malpighia and croton, which we found in descending toward the coast. These arborescent crotons were of two new species,* very remarkable for their form, and peculiar to the peninsula of Araya. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... sexless workers, thronging, Angel-tended, round the convent doors, Wrought to Christian faith and holy order Savage hearts alike and barren moors. ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley |
