"Desolate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... soft, and of the most beautiful whiteness imaginable. We saw no deer near Port Bowen at any season, neither were we visited by their enemies the wolves. A single ermine and a few mice (Mus Hudsonius) complete, I believe, our scanty list of quadrupeds at this desolate and unproductive place. ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... dust." Another shrine robbed of its idol; another hearth left desolate. See, how the black clouds settle down and press more closely around that lonely widowed one. Grim Death mocks at his grief from the open grave, so soon to receive his heart's idol. Ay, remove the coffin lid; gaze with all the agonizing ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... old man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... he would push on and see what was to be done. I afterwards heard that he kept aloof until the Captain Pacha quitted, he then attack'd the gun boats in which about 2000 [Footnote: The garrison left at Psara] Turks were attempting to escape and destroyed nearly the whole of them. Now the Island is desolate and neutral having neither Greek nor Turk on it; but I hear that the Captain Pacha is going to adopt the miserable and contemptible policy of destroying its harbour, and then taking no more regard of the Island. I must say the want of unanimity in the Greek against the common enemy ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... some morning at breakfast you pick up a newspaper and read that a great earthquake has overwhelmed Messina, killing countless thousands and rendering an entire province desolate. You say, "How very terrible!"—after which you go blithely about your business, untroubled, undisturbed. But suppose that your little girl's pet pussy-cat happens to fall out of the fourth-story window. If you chance to be an author and ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... day it was of the poor he would help, of the desolate hearts he would cheer, of the weary lives he would encourage, that he thought; the world that had need of him should never find him hard of hearing when it called to him for help. And much he wondered—the poet Tiny sailing down ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... that the least imaginative of our party could picture the gigantic ruins of some mighty citadel, with its ramparts, bastions and towering castle. For many hours we were traversing this weird and desolate valley, and when the sun cast long shadows across our track as he sank to rest, his ruddy light falling upon the dark bowlders, polished with the sand storms of thousands of years, stray pieces of red granite would catch his rosy glint, and sparkle like ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... western and central low-lying, desolate portions of the country make up the great Garagum (Kara-Kum) desert, which occupies over 80% of the country; eastern part ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... way. I only provided myself with a small stock of provisions, and immediately mounted one of the horses from the captain's stable, which brought me past the rocky pass in a good hour. The road towards the temples here turns off to the right into desolate, barren mountain valleys, whose death-like stillness was unbroken by the breathing of an animal, or the song of a bird. This place was well calculated to ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... once brought from Stonehenge a tiny fragment of stone, not larger than a pin's head, and on putting this into an envelope and handing it to a psychometer who had no idea what it was, she at once began to describe that wonderful ruin and the desolate country surrounding it, and then went on to picture vividly what were evidently scenes from its early history, showing that that infinitesimal fragment had been sufficient to put her into communication with the records connected with ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... vast polinas—a space of soft, watery ice, which resembled the lakes of Siberia. All was bitter, cold, sterile, bleak, and chilling to the eye, which vainly sought a relief. The prospect of a journey over this desolate plain, intersected in every direction by ridges of mountain icebergs, full of crevices, with soft salt ice here and there, was dolorous indeed; and yet the heart of Ivan quaked not. He had now what he sought in view; he knew there was land beyond, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... in the snow where the wind had not covered them. A girl had left the village the day before my arrival, which made my task all the easier. So I went up into that vast, desolate silence, the fog closing in steadily, getting thicker and thicker, the trail getting narrower until at last it was a ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... rendered desolate one of the best granaries of the South, preventing them from raising another crop this year, and taking away from ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... garners it crackles and streams! As if they would rend up the earth from its roots, Rush the flames to the sky Giant-high; And at length, Wearied out and despairing, man bows to their strength! With an idle gaze sees their wrath consume, And submits to his doom! Desolate The place, and dread For storms the barren bed! In the blank voids that cheerful casements were, Comes to and fro the melancholy air, And sits despair; And through the ruin, blackening in its shroud, Peers, as it flits, the melancholy cloud. One human glance of grief upon the grave Of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... his riding-cloak around him and settled down squarely into the saddle. The desolate plains with the crying wind held the loneliness of the damned. Occasionally a wolf howled in the distance, or a wandering snipe cried as it lost itself among the stiffening reeds about the swampy levels, and through all he could hear the hoarse roar of the Kofn ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... of his going to sea was as follows. In 1770 the Falkland Islands, a desolate and then unimportant group, lying in the South Atlantic, to the eastward of Patagonia, were claimed as a possession by both Spain and Great Britain. The latter had upon them a settlement called Port Egmont, before which, in the year named, an overwhelming ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... at him, lying still against his white pillows. She looked and looked, and presently the tears began to slide silently down her cheeks. She did not lift her hands to wipe them away. She sat and cried silently, openly, like a desolate, unkindly treated child. ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... Harry, is d—— hot," said Barney; "and now that ould Bet Harramount hasn't been in it for many a long year, we may as well go to that desolate cabin there above, and shelter ourselves from the hate—not that I'd undhertake to go there by myself; but now that you are wid me I don't care if I take a peep into the inside of it, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... furnished a target for our cannoneers or plunder for our camps. A country better adapted to all good purposes of man, nor one more pleasing to the eye, hardly exists on earth; but before it was trodden by armies, it had become little less than desolate. The James River is as navigable as the Hudson, and flows through a region far more fertile, longer settled, more inviting, and of more genial climate; but there are upon the Hudson's banks more cities than there are rotten ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... was thick and dark and moist with clouds. Dick, despite the peace that seemed to hang over everything, was oppressed. The desolate house, even more than the sight of the field after the battle was over, brought home to him the meaning of war. It was not alone the death of men but the uprooting of a country for their children and their children's ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the 19th of August we sailed from this uninhabited extremity of the world, where the inhospitable climate affords neither food nor shelter, and not a tree or shrub of any kind grows amongst its barren rocks; but all is one desolate and expanded waste of ice, which even the constant beams of the sun for six months in the year cannot penetrate or dissolve. The sun now being on the decline the days shortened as we sailed to the southward; and, ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... commonly holding a lamb in his arms, who drives his flock to water at the pond opposite my window, is the only thing that gives token of the season. I am quite mortified at this on your account, for April, in general a month of great beauty here, will be as desolate as winter. Nevertheless you must come and see me, you and Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch, and perhaps you can continue to stay a day or two, or to come more than once. I want to see as much of you as I can, and I must change much, if I be in any condition to go to ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... places from 2 to 3 m. wide. They have, however, even on the top a certain picturesqueness, for the undulating tableland is relieved by copses, and diversified by little wooded "bottoms," scooped out by prehistoric torrents. Nearer the sea the uplands become more desolate, the "bottoms" are replaced by rocky combes, like the gorges at Cheddar and Burrington; villages become less frequent; and traces of discarded mines give a weirdness to the solitude. The moors are, however, healthy, ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... all the nice girls and fine boys of my acquaintance have their uncles or their grand-dads or their cousins to take them to those places; so, if I go, I must go alone. But I don't go. I can't bear the chill of seeing everybody happy, and knowing myself so lonely and desolate. Confound it, sir, I've too much heart to be happy under such circumstances! I'm too humane, sir! And the result is, I hate holidays. It's miserable to be out, and yet I can't stay at home, for I get thinking of Christmases ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... Staunton's character. She is a very amiable person, and has in reality, I believe, plenty of good sense; but she has allowed herself to fall into an exaggerated style of feeling and expression, which, I dare say, bewitched a girl like Helen, and now makes her find home cold and desolate.' ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Dragon into the pit. This was a rude and desolate hole, and its furniture of that extreme simplicity common to bear-pits in those barbarous times. From the middle of the stone floor rose the trunk of a tree, ragged with lopped boughs and at its top forking into sundry limbs possible ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... the handful of townspeople. Millionaires and paupers had fought side by side for the food, and then fought with one another after they got it. The town of Palo Alto and Stanford University had been sacked in similar fashion, we learned. Ahead of us lay a desolate, wasted land; and we thought we were wise in turning off to my place. It lay three miles to the west, snuggling among the first rolling ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... mountains; a great people and a strong: there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations. A fire devoureth before them, and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them. The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall they run. Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... regained her composure and looked up at him with a calm unwavering gaze that told him how much she had undergone and the strength of character she had gained during the fearful weeks that she had been marooned on this savage and desolate coast. ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... former pirates, of putting an offender on shore on some desolate cape or island, with a gun, a few shot, a flask of powder, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... unconvincing) attempt at a new picture. When you have left the green-covered kopjes of the Cape a few days before and come to anchor in Walvis Bay on a cold morning you think you have reached No-man's-land after a fast voyage. It is a first impression only. The place is desolate enough; it suggests the Sahara run straight into the sea, or the discomforting dreariness of Punta Arenas, ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... qualities that to say I passionately love her is a most impotent expression of what I feel: for to tenderness and ardour of affection must be added all that simplicity, purity, and grandeur of soul can inspire. To think of life without her is to think of a world sterile, desolate, and joyless: of a night to which day shall never succeed: and of existence arrested and chained ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the Yukon to Leadville, and cow-punchers in whose memories were stored the brands carried by the herds from Chihuahua to Assiniboia. There were men who had roped wild steers in the mesquite brush of the Nueces, and who, year in and year out, had driven the trail herds northward over desolate wastes and across the fords of shrunken rivers to the fattening grounds of the Powder and the Yellowstone. They were hardened to the scorching heat and bitter cold of the dry plains and pine-clad mountains. They were accustomed to sleep in the open, while the picketed horses ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... with a woman on either side supporting her. And she walked round and round her husband, with the tears rolling down her face, and she wailed the widow's wail, with her very heart in it. Why had he gone away and left her desolate? His was the spirit of fragrance like the scented sandal-wood; his was the arm of strength like the lock that barred the door. Gone was the scent of the sandal, broken and open the door; why had the bird flown and ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... haunt the tomb in which he lay, Grief-stricken, desolate, and lone; But Magdalene at break of day Found that her precious ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass
... sight of the shores of Newfoundland on the 5th of August, just one month from the day we took our last look of the British isles. Yet though the coast was brown, and rugged, and desolate, I hailed its appearance with rapture. Never did any thing seem so refreshing and delicious to me as the land breeze that came to us, as I thought, bearing health and gladness on ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... tree is a refuge for the coon and o'possum and other wild life. I have a hollow white oak on my farm I let stand because a family of squirrels is raised in it every year. I also have a bee tree and the bees help pollinate my fruit trees so they produce better. A world without trees would be a desolate place. The value of a park is ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... wound through desolate grounds to a huge clump of a house, square and prosaic, all plunged in shadow save where a moonbeam struck one corner and glimmered in a garret window. The vast size of the building, with its gloom and its deathly silence, struck a chill to the heart. Even Thaddeus Sholto seemed ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to a spot where stacks of hay and turf guarded a series of stone buildings, saying, "There's the Grange." The first glance was not encouraging—no sheep-station in Australia could seem more utterly desolate; but it improved on closer examination. The effects of cultivation were to be seen in the different colours of the fields round the house, where the number of stock grazing showed that more than ordinary means must have been taken to improve ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... this desire arose solely from selfish motives. The money he earned seemed to melt away almost as soon as he received it; to his surprise he found that he was not nearly so well off in regard to personal comfort as he had been formerly, and the house seemed to grow more dreary and desolate as the wintry days dragged slowly by. Sometimes—when he had the money—he sought forgetfulness in the society of Crass and the other frequenters of the Cricketers, but somehow or other he could ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... for beauty; I care not for riches: I am not the slave whom their tinsel bewitches: A bosom I seek That is true, like mine own,— Though pale be the cheek, And its roses all flown,— And the wearer be desolate, wretched, forlorn,— And alike from ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... with you!" said the cardinal, "and at once dismiss your archers, taking care not to style yourself mayor any more on pain of death." Guiton made no reply, and went his way quietly to his house, a magnificent dwelling till lately, but now lying desolate amidst the general ruin. He was not destined to reside there long; the heroic defender of La Rochelle was obliged to leave the town and retire to Tournay-Boutonne. He returned to La Rochelle to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... making a delta like that of the Nile, and forming a number of islands of various dimensions—some so large that a considerable portion of the city to the north of us stands on them, others containing only a few gardens and villas. The country surrounding the city seems barren and desolate in the extreme, either an arid steppe or a stagnant marsh telling of the agues and fevers afflicting those dwelling near it. To the north, however, not many versts from the city, rise the hills and woods, ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... thou be, His aid impart * To thee, who distant dwellest in my heart! Allah be near thee how so far thou fare; * Ward off all shifts of Time, all dangers thwart! Mine eyes are desolate for thy vanisht sight, * And start my tears-ah me, how fast they start! Would Heaven I kenned what quarter or what land * Homes thee, and in what house and tribe thou art An fount of life thou drain in greenth of rose, * While drink I tear drops for my sole desert? An thou ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... recognize the very place. 'Oh, what has become of my labor, my work, the sweet fruit of my care and of my sweat? Who has robbed me of my property? Who has taken my beans?' His young heart rises; the first feeling of injustice comes to pour its sad bitterness into it; tears flow in streams; the desolate child fills the air with groans and cries. I share his pain, his indignation; we seek, we inquire, we examine. At last we discover that the gardener has done ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... which had long been wanting to Lilias and Jane had suddenly returned, and they succeeded in making the room look surprisingly comfortable, compared with its former desolate aspect, before William came down, and renewed his ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rate for lunatics, and such like," answered Joe, gazing with disfavor at the bare trees and desolate looking bushes. "What have you boys been doing that you've got to spend a fortnight away from ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... have I, in my desolate years, Flogged a jaded heart in loud saloons; Often have I fled myself with tears, Wandering ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... acquainted with the valley will probably laugh to be told that the manor-house which most interested me was that of Knook, a poor little village between Heytesbury and Upton Lovell. Its ancient and towerless little church with rough, grey walls is, if possible, even more desolate-looking than that of Tytherington. In my hunt for the key to open it I disturbed a quaint old man, another octogenarian, picturesque in a vast white beard, who told me he was a thatcher, or had been one before the evil days came when he could work no ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... O Death, with hollow tone, And soundless step, and clammy hand— Lo, I am now no less alone Than in thy desolate, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... Mad! Was I indeed losing my reason? Was this the terrific meaning of my sleepless nights, my troubled thoughts, my strange inquietude? Fiercely I strode along, heedless whither I was going, till I found myself suddenly on the borders of the desolate Campagna. A young moon gleamed aloft, looking like a slender sickle thrust into the heavens to reap an over-abundant harvest of stars. I paused irresolutely. There was a deep silence everywhere. I felt faint and giddy: curious flashes of light danced past my eyes, and my limbs shook like those ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... proud of the responsibility of conducting a visitor to his home. At the far end of the hall the lad plunged into a narrow staircase, so narrow that a stout man could not have mounted it. Up four of these broken flights Carmen toiled after him, and then down a long, desolate corridor, which sent a chill into the very ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... would not leave her desolate, But with her went along, as a strong gard Of her chast person, and a faithfull mate 75 Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard: Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward,[*] And when she wakt, he waited diligent, With humble service to her will prepard: From her faire eyes he tooke ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... all broken away and some bits of wood had been rigged up roughly in its place. The partition which had once divided the hall from the entrance passage was all broken, both above the cross-beam and below, and all the bedding had been upset. The place looked rather desolate. There was a light burning in the ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... human than humanity itself. Nietzsche's Superman is cold and friendless. Achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of his bereavement. Mr. Shaw's sad Caesar says in his desolate pride, "He who has never hoped can never despair." The Man-God of old answers from his awful hill, "Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?" A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the steamer puffed away into the mysterious depths of one of the dark-blue fjords, and we were left on a desolate island, like Robinson Crusoe, with our worldly goods around us. Most of the natives we found so stupid that they could not understand our excellent Norse. One fellow, in particular, might as well have been a piece of mahogany as a man. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... one of the upper walks because it was desolate, and he could there speak to her, as he thought, without being heard. She had, almost unconsciously, made a faint attempt to lead him down upon the lawn, no doubt feeling averse to private conversation at the moment; ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... two hours they reached the Illinois, and, as they sprang on board, their baggage was seized by willing hands, and carried to the cabin, which had been stripped of nearly all its furniture, and presented, altogether, a desolate appearance. After a few moments' conversation with one of their new messmates, they learned that there were only fifteen men on board the vessel, including one sergeant and two corporals. These were the ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... human interest than here, where the old houses, in all their ugliness, have yet some imprint of the individuality of their tenants. Only on feast days does Little Italy, in Harlem, recall the Bend when it put on holiday attire. Anything more desolate and disheartening than the unending rows of tenements, all alike and all equally repellent, of the up-town streets, it is hard to imagine. Hell's Kitchen in its ancient wickedness was picturesque, at least, with its rocks and its goats and shanties. Since the negroes took possession ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... village on foot. I followed. We soon reached the trenches that had been made by the British troops before they evacuated the place. 'Awful rot giving this place up,' said the officer. 'These lines took us a week to dig.' From here Colenso lay exposed about two hundred yards away—a silent, desolate village. The streets were littered with the belongings of the inhabitants. Two or three houses had been burned. A dead horse lay in the road, his four legs sticking stiffly up in the air, his belly swollen. The whole place had evidently been ransacked and plundered ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that he has not much of any self to be alone with. He is in as desolate a condition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, who, having lost his wife and children, set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... leaping over the side of it, seemed to slide or drop down the rope like a monkey, and alighted (with impossible precision and placidity) seated on the edge of the wall, over which he kicked and dangled his legs as he grinned at Turnbull. The wind roared in the trees yet more ruinous and desolate, the red tails of the sunset were dragged downward like red dragons sucked down to death, and still on the top of the asylum wall sat the sinister figure with the grimace, swinging his feet in tune with the tempest; while above him, at the end of its tossing or tightened cord, the enormous iron ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the peace of the republic; [53] but the submission of Chrysostom was the indispensable duty of a Christian and a subject. Instead of listening to his humble prayer, that he might be permitted to reside at Cyzicus, or Nicomedia, the inflexible empress assigned for his exile the remote and desolate town of Cucusus, among the ridges of Mount Taurus, in the Lesser Armenia. A secret hope was entertained, that the archbishop might perish in a difficult and dangerous march of seventy days, in the heat of summer, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... of the road. The starving cur never moved, so intent was he on obtaining food, and thus it happened that a pitiful yelp of pain reached my ears, muffled by the closed window. The coupe whirled on its journey, and below, in the chill, desolate grayness of a winter afternoon, an ugly pup sat howling at the leaden skies, his right foreleg upheld, part of it dangling in a very unnatural manner. A pang of compassion for the dumb unfortunate stirred in my breast, but I sat still and watched. ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... beneath them the dead body of the Panther. He knew that it was kept until the savages might find a place to inter it, where it would be beyond the reach of the scalping knife. He gazed wistfully towards the castle, but there all seemed to be silent and desolate, and a feeling of loneliness and desertion came over him to increase the gloom ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... he went, hardly daring to raise his eyes to the alluring iniquities of the painted imagery which, gaudy in crimson and blue, still blazed out upon the desolate solitude, uninjured by that rainless air. But he was young, and youth is curious; and the devil, at least in the fifth century, busy with young brains. Now Philammon believed most utterly in the devil, and night and day devoutly prayed ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the upper air, and charged with an overmastering pathos as of the lamentations of angels. In the dimness and silence, in the aroused and exalted condition of his being, the strains seemed unearthly in their immense and desolate grandeur of sorrow, and their mournful and dark significance was now for him. Working within him the impression of vast, innumerable fleeing shadows, thick-crowding memories of all the ways and deeds of an existence fallen from its early ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... feeling more desolate and forsaken in its promptings than that realized by one who finds himself alone in a crowd. His inward solitude is more acutely realized by the contrast he sees about him, and he feels how much he is alone. Thus it was with the young traveller ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... clear of the houses and streets of Pera. The black clouds drove angrily down before the north wind, seeming to tear themselves in pieces on the stars, as one might tear a black veil upon steel nails. The wind swept the desolate country, and made the panes of the windows rattle even more loudly than did the hoofs and wheels upon the stony road. But the horses were strong, and the driver was not a shivering Greek, but a sturdy Turk, who could ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... I said, hoping to cheer him; 'but dreams pass away with the light—even with waking.' There I stopped, for before he spoke I saw the answer in his desolate ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... as each hour passed the redskins gained on us, until at last they could be seen with the naked eye. The harsh and cruel war-whoop of those blood-thirsty savages echoed and re-echoed back from the distant hills, and over the desolate plains until men and beasts were crazed to desperation. The lash was put to the already tired mules, and we strained every nerve to reach the crest of the next knoll, hoping against hope for succor. On they came, their warwhoops for scalps and the white man's blood was now continuous. ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... ancient Roman Arch; DAUBINET tells me its history in a vague kind of way, breaking off suddenly to say that I shall see it to-morrow, when, so he evidently wishes me to infer, the Roman Arch will speak for itself. Then we drive past a desolate-looking Museum. I believe it is a Museum, though DAUBINET's information is a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... that this earth can afford. But the sound of the church-going bell These valleys and rocks never heard, Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell, Or smiled when a sabbath appeared. Ye winds, that have made me your sport, Convey to this desolate shore Some cordial endearing report Of a land I must visit no more. My Friends, do they now and then send A wish or a thought after me? O tell me I yet have a friend, Though a friend I ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Emancipation that severed the relation binding them to their masters, left them in a very forlorn and deplorable condition. They were homeless and penniless in a country, that had been rendered more or less desolate, by the ravages of war and bloodshed. No provision had ever been made for the spread of intelligence among them. It has been estimated that only about five per cent of them at that time could read and write. Their homeless and illiterate condition rendered ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... Oh! friends who trifle cheerily with that dainty second course, what does your turbot cost? Reckon it up by rigid arithmetic, and work out the calculation when you are on your knees if you can. All over the North Sea that night there were desolate places that rang to the cry of parting souls; after vain efforts and vain hopes, the drowning seamen felt the last lethargy twine like a cold serpent around them; the pitiless sea smote them dumb; the pitiless sky, rolling over just and unjust, lordly peer ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... way was barren and uninteresting to a high degree, consisting of wide dusty plains scantily sown with barley, but unrelieved with trees or waters. The people are ignorant and brutal, though they boast themselves to be Old Castilians, which is however not the fact, as these desolate and benighted regions belong to what was once the kingdom of Leon. Their inhospitality is so great that I have been refused a glass of water in their villages, though I asked it in the name of God; though I have subsequently obtained it by paying for it, for their ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... he describes. He tells us of tribes without a chief, families without a nation to call their own, men in a state of isolation, wrecks of powerful tribes wandering at random amid the ice and snow and desolate solitudes of Canada. Hunger and cold pursue them; every day their life is in jeopardy. Amongst these men, manners have lost their empire, traditions are without power. They become more and more savage. Tanner ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Southern Pacific survey. At that time, just before the Gadsden treaty, the territory surveyed was in the republic of Mexico. These surveys were all made by order of the then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, who aroused a storm of protest in the East against his "misguided attention to the desolate West." But few statesmen and fewer of the outside public in that day possessed the prophetic vision to perceive the future greatness of what were termed the "arid wastes" of Arizona and California. This was shown by the perfect hail of protest that swept to ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... stars and the pitying angels looked down on the fierce conflict of grief and love and disillusion with which her desolate young soul wrestled alone through the long, midnight vigil. How should she separate these two beautiful faiths which had been enthroned as one in the happy depths of her guileless heart, without perilling her very trust ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... desolate little spot is the campo santo of San Gabriel; rather desolate, and very dusty. The ramshackle wooden crosses stagger wildly on the shapeless mounds; the dilapidated whitewashed railings, cracked and blistered by the sun, look much as though they might be bleached bones, tossed carelessly ...
— The Penance of Magdalena & Other Tales of the California Missions • J. Smeaton Chase
... handsome woman. I was hurriedly informed that the murder trial was in progress at St. Augustine; that Ashlock had given his testimony, and had availed himself of the chance to take a wife to share with him the solitude of his desolate hut on the beach at Indian River. He had brought ashore his wife, her sister, and their chests, with the mail, and had orders to return immediately to the steamer (Gaston or Harney) to bring ashore some soldiers ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... where nor how he went away, it is my will that his kingdom remain entire to his son; who, because he is too young, he not being yet full five years old, shall be brought up and instructed by the ancient princes and learned men of the kingdom. And because a realm thus desolate may easily come to ruin, if the covetousness and avarice of those who by their places are obliged to administer justice in it be not curbed and restrained, I ordain and will have it so, that Ponocrates ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his own, instead of these desolate ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... of Kamtschatka, stretching to the river Anadir on the North, and South to the Kurilian Islands, bathed on the east by the ocean, and on the west by the sea of Ochotsk, is, like many men, better than its reputation. It is supposed to be the roughest and most desolate corner of the world, and yet it lies under the same latitude as England and Scotland, and is equal in size to both. The summer is indeed much shorter, but it is also much finer; and the vegetation is more luxuriant than in Great Britain. The winter lasts long, and its discomforts ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... the desolate land, of the naked hillsides, of the moor marshes with their ghostly mists; the brooding of the watchful, solitary house, the horror of haunted twilights, of nightfall and of midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his cattle and she lay alone under the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... still wondering thus, replying from time to time to Montalvo in monosyllables, the sledge in front of them turned the corner of one of the eastern bastions and came to a halt. The place where it stopped was desolate and lonely, for the town being in a state of peace no guard was mounted on the wall, nor could any living soul be found upon the snowy waste that lay beyond the moat. At first, indeed, Lysbeth was able to see nobody at all, for by now the sun had gone down and her eyes were not accustomed ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... once were gay, When Nature's hand displayed Long waving rows of willows grey And clumps of hawthorn shade; But now, alas! your hawthorn bowers All desolate we see! The spoiler's axe their shade devours, And ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... home at last, in the small hours of the night, for there was nothing more that they could do till morning came to wake the world again—that wide desolate world of houses and roads, of byways and slums; that world in which, somewhere, was their ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... had arrived there the previous winter, after a march of over seven hundred miles from Massachusetts, the hillside, which now bloomed, was desolate and bleak. But few buildings had been erected, and about the only provisions obtainable were corn meal and water. All that had been changed as by magic, and many of the poor fellows had not known such comfort since leaving their homes in England, while most of ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... ungratified. It is not well to try to lift the curtain of the unseen, it is not well to call to heaven to show its glory, or to hell to give us touch and knowledge of its yawning fires. Knowledge comes soon enough; many of us will say that knowledge has come too soon and left us desolate. There is no bitterness like the bitterness of wisdom: so cried the great Koheleth, and so hath cried many a son of man following blindly on his path. Let us be thankful for the dark places of the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... desolate, And friends and schoolmates are in tears, While strangers wonder at the fate, Which crushed ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... is only a part. The curse goes far beyond the field of combat. The trampled dead and dying are but a tithe of the actual sufferers. There are desolate homes, far away, where want changes sorrow into madness. Wives wail by hearthstones where the household fires have died into cold ashes forever more. Like Rachel, mothers weep for the proud boys that lie stark beneath the pitiless stars. Under a thousand roofs—cottage roofs and palace roofs—little ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in the situation was in abeyance. He had an irritating consciousness that what should have been the problem of these people had been shifted upon himself in a manner most unfair of Fortune. The desolate face that he had left haunted his thoughts; and the girl's pride and obstinacy in binding him to secrecy made the ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... most of the prominent Negroes in the town, smashed the furniture, tore books to pieces, and cut pictures from their frames, all amid the most heartrending distress on the part of the women and children. That night the town was desolate, for all who could do so fled to Aiken ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... against more than 160,000 blacks and half-breeds, there are perhaps 5000 whites left to maintain the ethnic struggle, and the number of these latter is annually growing less. Many of the British islands have been almost deserted by their former cultivators: St. Vincent is becoming desolate: Tobago is a ruin; St. Martin lies half abandoned; St. Christopher is crumbling; Grenada has lost more than half her whites; St. Thomas, once the most prosperous, the most active, the most cosmopolitan of West Indian ports, is in full decadence. And while the white element is ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Never had he entered a more homelike place, large enough to be called a chateau, yet as cheerful as a winter's fire. And the daughter! Her French was the elegant speech of Tours, her German Hanoverian. Incomparable! And she was not married? Helas! How many luckless fellows walked the world desolate? And this was M. Fitzgerald the journalist? And M. Breitmann had also been one? How delighted he was to be here! All this flowed on with perfect naturalness; there wasn't a false note anywhere. At dinner he diffused a warmth and geniality which were infectious. Laura was pleased ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... we suffered so much as from thirst. That was terrible. Hour after hour passed by. No relief appeared. I began almost to wish that I had laid my head down alongside my poor friend and old shipmate, Delisle, in the desolate savannah near Ou Trou. The thought was wrong—rank ingratitude to the merciful providence which had preserved me—but it was human, I fear. How admirably our gallant fellows behaved! Scarcely a murmur or a grumble was heard. Again the sun went down. That night was one ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... irresistible invitation was accepted by several of the auditory, including the baronet, Dashall, and the Squire, who were gratified beyond their anticipations, with a sight of the great polar bear, the desolate inhabitant of a frigid and dismal clime, where Nature has forbid the vegetative, and stinted the growth of the animal creation, with the exception of the shaggy wanderer of the desert and the floundering leviathan of the ocean. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... his Watchmen, you will give seasonable warning to the Honourable Houses of Parliament, that now (after the losse of the opportunity of so many years) they would, in their places, repair the Houses of the LORD, that lyeth so long desolate, and promove the work of Reformation and Uniformity ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... and scrupulously clean, seemed strange and dreary after the little, smoky, earth-built living-rooms in which her peasantry were content to live, and she never had seemed to herself so completely desolate; but all the time she was so wearied out with her long and painful walk, that she had no sooner taken some food than she began ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thwart and bring to naught the will of Him that giveth not a castle a direction from a place except it pleaseth Him, and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all castles and all directions thereunto vanish out of the earth, leaving the places wherein they tarried desolate and vacant, so warning His creatures that where He will He will, and where He will ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the eye, the pleasant households, the group of delightful people. Why travel, then? We want the abnormal, the strong, the ugly, the unusual at least. We wish to be startled and stirred up and repelled. And we ought to be more thankful than we are that there are so many desolate and wearisome and fantastic places, and so many tiresome and unattractive people in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... but almost entirely desolate. All was ghastly in the raw, hard gleams of moonlight coming fitfully through the masses of flying cloud. The wind was rising, and the air was damp and cold. I looked round the room instinctively, and noticed that the fire was laid ready for lighting, and that there were small-cut ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... suitors. This of course is only the case with the younger women; the older women for one thing do not nag so much, and moreover they have usually children willing and able to support them. If they have not, their state is, like that of all old childless women in Africa, a very desolate one. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate. But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... boldly, "O king, thou hast brought us far away from our homes to a strange land; whence are we to get food here? No harvest will grow on these bare rocks, no meadows are spread out before our eyes. The whole land is bare and desolate." But the son of Zeus smiled and said, "O foolish men, and easy to be cast down, if ye had your wish ye would gain nothing but care and toil. But listen to me and ponder well my words. Stretch forth your hands and slay ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... ends; He howls as he hounds down his prey; and his lash Tears the hair of the timorous wan mountain-ash, That clings to the rocks, with her garments all torn, Like a woman in fear; then he blows his hoarse horn And is off, the fierce guide of destruction and terror, Up the desolate heights, 'mid an intricate error Of mountain ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... know no rest Till warm you lie Within that nest Which is her breast; Though why to thee Such joy should be Who carest not, While I must wait Here desolate, I cannot wot. O what I 'd do To come ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... sum of the scent of all these trees of art and cultivation is poor and insipid compared with the results of two or three indigenous plants that seem to shrink from flaunting their graces while casting sweetness on the desolate air. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... and Amroth led the way, through a long cleft, with rocks, very rough and black, on either side, and fallen fragments under foot. It was steep at first; but soon the rocks grew lower; and we came out presently on to a great desolate plain, with stones lying thickly about, among a coarse kind of grass. At each step I seemed to grow stronger, and walked more lightly, and in the thin fine air my horrors left me, though I still had a dumb sense of suffering which, strange ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... surrounded by the settlers, yet Philip as often escaped almost miraculously from their toils, and, plunging into the wilderness, would be lost to all search or inquiry until he again emerged at some far distant quarter, laying the country desolate. Among his strongholds were the great swamps or morasses which extend in some parts of New England, composed of loose bogs of deep black mud, perplexed with thickets, brambles, rank weeds, the shattered and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... round you not unpleasant; but eastward, over the River, nothing can be more in contrast. Oder is of swift current, of turbid color, as it rolls under Frankfurt Bridge,—Wooden Bridge, with Dam Suburb at the end;—a River treeless, desolate, as you look up and down; which has, evidently, often changed its course, since grinding down that alluvium as site for Frankfurt; and which, though now holding mainly to northward, is still given to be erratic, and destructive ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... there, Alexander, and we will drive to the harbor. There I will introduce you to the captain. It will be wise. Your father and brother are dearer to you than your sister; she is more important to me. If only I could go away myself—away from here, from the desolate house, and take ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... treading close together and in single file, making little noise. Straight across the desolate stretch of land that lay between the two lines of trenches they went, and, when half way, there came from the German side a sudden burst of star shells. These are a sort of war fireworks that make a brilliant illumination, and the enemy was in the habit of sending them up every night at intervals, ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... and they of the shanty order and generally stranded high upon the beach. One sees now and then, on the Illinois ridge, the cheap log or frame house of a "cracker," the very picture of desolate despair; but on the Kentucky shore are few signs of life, for the bottom lies so low that it is frequently inundated, and settlement ventures no nearer than two or three miles from the riverside. A fisherman comes occasionally into view, upon this wide expanse of wood and water and clay-banks; ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... What chymic filt'rings, I shall pass To where, O God, Thou lov'st to mass Thy rains upon the crags, and dim the sphere. So, when night's heart with keenest silence thrills, Take me, and weep me on the desolate hills." ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the barren waste around them in dismay. The floor of the valley was strewn with even larger rocks and bowlders than those on the surface above, and looked utterly pathless and desolate. "What do we do ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... the heiress; fully convinced that he was now on the high road to success. What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know. Something, however, I fear me, must have gone wrong, for he certainly sallied forth, after no very great interval, with an air quite desolate and chapfallen. Oh, these women! these women! Could that girl have been playing off any of her coquettish tricks? Was her encouragement of the poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival? Heaven only knows, not I! Let it suffice to ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... from her with a most desolate sensation; and, glancing at such phrases at the top, as 'My ever dearest and own Dora,' 'My best beloved angel,' 'My blessed one for ever,' and the like, blushed deeply, and ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... did not commit. And I call God to witness that I am innocent of the accusation brought against me; and that the true cause of my unjust condemnation was, and is, a private pique and personal enmity.... Listen, therefore, to justice,—to the humble entreaties of an aged father,—a desolate wife,—unhappy children,—who exist in misery, and who with tears of anguish ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... remembering how some of her friends had pitied her because she must always be uplifting his mood. She had never wearied nor found it an irksome effort. A serious sad thought came to her; when the hour of the inevitable parting came she prayed it might be her lot to be left desolate ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... marriage, on condition that thou serve me for hire eight pilgrimages: and if thou fulfil ten years, it is in thine own breast; for I seek not to impose a hardship on thee.'[FN364] A certain man once said to one of his friends whom he had not met for many days, 'Thou hast made me desolate, for that I have not seen thee this long while.' Quoth the other, 'I have been distracted from thee by Ibn Shihab: dost thou know him?' Quoth his friend, 'Yes, he hath been my neighbour these thirty years, but I have never spoken to him.' He replied, 'Verily thou forgettest Allah in forgetting—thy ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... These apprehensions were increased by the fact that the Crimean Tartars soon again began to make hostile demonstrations, and it was feared that they were moving only in accordance with suggestions which had been sent to them from Poland and Sweden, and that thus a triple alliance was about to desolate the empire. The Tartars commenced their march. But Boris met them with such energy that they were ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... dwells on the plains of Thibet (A desolate region of snow) Has for centuries made it a nursery pet, And surely the Tartar ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... see it in the difference between your country and mine. This land's smooth and well trimmed; everything in it has grown up little by little; its mellow ripeness is its charm. Ours is grand or rugged or desolate, but it's never merely pretty. The same applies to our people; they're bubbling over with raw, optimistic vigor, their corners are not rubbed off. Some of them would jar on overcivilized people, but not, I think, on any one with understanding." ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... Muslims, still at the present time govern countries as vast as our Europe, and nations of equal importance. We must not, like Bossuet, "overlook the universe in a universal history," and subordinate humanity to a small population confined to a desolate region around the Dead Sea.[3119] Human history is a thing of natural growth like the rest; its direction is due to its own elements; no external force guides it, but the inward forces that create it; it is not tending ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... occur to you, Mrs. Evelyn, that the streams which fertilize as they flow do but desolate if their ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... remains of Brambanam as "stupendous monuments of the science and taste belonging to a long-forgotten age, crowded together in the former centre of Hindu faith." A rough country road leads from the little white railway station, perched on a desolate plain, to these far-famed temples. A brown village, shaded by the dark foliage of colossal kanari-trees, shows the usual fragility of structure in basket-work walls and roofs of plaited palm-leaves, but the humble dwellings, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... resistance, for I admitted everything that could possibly be said, and lost all my spirit of independence in view of the impressive event that was coming. So I meekly took to the attic, and put up with the most forlorn and desolate quarters. One or two mornings after, I was aroused at an inhuman hour, and ordered in the most imperative tones to call in Dr. Lyman as quickly as possible, and haste after Mrs. Sweet. I hurried into my clothes ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... Christian powers and faith weakened by the treachery of Austria; her people degraded into robbers; a soldier's daughter, and keenly alive to the splendours of martial gallantry and glory; an orphan, too, and desolate—can it be wondered at if she surrendered, at once and for ever, to this generous and impassioned lover all the sympathies of her affectionate nature? She spoke not; but, as she leaned half-fainting on his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... but in the exercise of his more proper and special calling of vaqueano, or guide. Ghastly and pallid, with his arm supported in a sling, he is on the way back to Halberger's estancia, to complete the ruffian's task assigned to him by the Dictator of Paraguay, and make more desolate the home he had already enough ruined. But for his mischance in the biscachera, the rescuers would have found it empty on their return, and instead of a lost daughter, it would have been ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... that evening an accomplished violinist and they had given me permission to remain up later than usual so that I might hear him. The first sweep of his bow which preluded I know not what slow and desolate movement, sounded to me like an invocation to those dark woodland paths in which, in the deeps of night, one feels that he is lost and abandoned; as the musician played I had a vision of Gaspard mistaking his way at the cross-roads because of the rain, and ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... her? Yes; one of the seven words spoken while he hung on the cross told of changeless love in his heart for her. Mary was a woman of more than fifty, "with years before her too many for remembering, too few for forgetting." The world would be desolate for her when her son was gone. So he made provision for her in the shelter of a love in which he knew she would be safe. As he saw her led away by the beloved disciple to his own home, part of the pain of dying was gone ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... we be a feeble folk who greet her, But old in grief, and very wise in tears; Say that we, being desolate, entreat her That she forget us not in after years; For we have seen the light, and it were grievous To dim that dawning ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... traversed with the fishermen coming from the Tweed to the camp. The aspect of this place, the aspect of the changes man had wrought in it, was of a nature to produce a great effect upon a lively and delicate imagination like that of Athos. Athos looked at nothing but these desolate spots; Monk looked at nothing but Athos—at Athos, who, with his eyes sometimes directed towards heaven, and sometimes towards the earth, sought, thought, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... few gnarled trees that took off in a degree from the bleakness of its aspect. The house was of one story only, with a window on either side of the door, and no other appeared in sight; but a little smoke rising from the chimney seemed to promise a better reception than the desolate landscape and the girl's scanty dress ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... man dwelling therein, save a few priests only, and their wives, and their children, who are drawn to and fro in little carriages dragged by women. But the priest told me that during half the year the city was desolate, for that there came somewhat called "The Long," or "The Vac," and drave out the young priests. And he said that these did no other thing but row boats, and throw balls from one to the other, and this they were made to do, he said, that the young priests might learn to be ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... desolate. It had not that quality of hopelessness which lures to melancholy. New houses were going up. The last straw was that ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... is the greatest secret of its popularity. In spite of glaring faults, and almost a cruel disregard of the family's welfare, Rip Van Winkle has the audience with him from the very beginning. His ineffably sad but quiet realization of his desolate condition when his wife turns him out into the storm, leaves scarcely a dry eye in the theatre. His living in others and not in himself makes him feel the changes of his absence all the more keenly. His return ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... and garden were quite deserted as Trix approached Chorley Old Hall. The lawn was one great sheet of unbroken whiteness, flanked by frosted yew hedges, and very desolate. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... she. "Had you been so bold as to make this proposal to Claire's father, he would have called his servants to show you the door. For the sake of our name I ought to do the same; but I cannot do so. I am old and desolate; I am poor; my grandchild's prospects disquiet me; that is my excuse. I cannot, however, consent to speak to Claire of this horrible misalliance. What I can promise you, and that is too much, is that I will not be ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... free. Each calf was branded with the brand of the cow it was following. Sometimes in winter there was what we called line riding; that is, camps were established and the line riders traveled a definite beat across the desolate wastes of snow, to and fro from one camp to another, to prevent the cattle from drifting. But as a rule nothing was done to keep the cattle in any one place. In the spring there was a general round-up in each locality. Each outfit took part ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... that ghostly lithograph by Calame. It was a mere black spot on the white wall, but my inner vision scrutinized every detail of the picture. A wild, desolate, midnight heath, with a spectral oak-tree in the centre of the foreground. The wind blows fiercely, and the jagged branches, clothed scantily with ill-grown leaves, are swept to the left continually ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... prayer meeting at the Southern Baptist Church, in whose exercises her Northern and Eastern neighbors, thinly disguised as "Baal" and "Astaroth," were generally overthrown and their temples made desolate. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... compared to this for the multitude of inhabitants; and the whole land is plain, fruitful, and stored with good things. Old Misraim is two league distant from New Misraim, or Cairo; but the old city is now desolate, having many ruins of walls and houses, and not a few remains of the granaries and storehouses, built by Joseph, are still to be seen. In the same place, there is an artificial pillar, built by art of magic, the like of which is not in all the land. On the outside of the city, there are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... two danced madly, and as the wind freshened and came up from a new quarter, the sapless branches above rattled against one another like bones. The growing breeze seemed to clear the air and lighten it. He was passing the stile where a path led to old Mrs. Gibbon's desolate little cottage, in the middle of the fields, at some distance even from the lane, and he saw the light blue smoke of her chimney rise distinct above the gaunt greengage trees, against a pale band that was broadening along the horizon. As he passed the stile with his head ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the Dudley mansion-house,—for it kept its ancient name in spite of the change in the line of descent. Its spacious apartments looked dreary and desolate; for here Dudley Venner and his daughter dwelt by themselves, with such servants only as their quiet mode of life required. He almost lived in his library, the western room on the ground-floor. Its window looked upon a small plat of green, in the midst of which was a single grave marked by a plain ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... weather pretty fine so far, but the country sadly flooded; and, the lowlands being under water, the gaunt and leafless poplar trees are the most conspicuous objects of the landscape. Then for miles we travel along through a gloomy drizzling rain, the land looking most forlornly desolate. The arrival at Amiens, however, cheers us a little, and here we get a stretch and some refreshment. After leaving this place, always interesting for its beautiful Cathedral, the weather brightens up, and we reach Paris in good time ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... He divided the most determined of us—so many from each ship—into two bands and sent in two directions. We were to search, if necessary, through ten leagues. We went, but returned empty of news of clothed men. We found desolate forest, and behind that a vast, matted, low growth, impenetrable and extending far away. At last we determined that Felipe Garcia had seen white cranes. Unless ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... the purchase of that shabby black may have cost the desolate mourner and her orphan children the price of many a necessary meal. Ah, this putting of a poor family into black, and all the funeral trappings for pallbearers and mourners, what a terrible affair it is! what anxious thoughts! what bitter ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Tania sat with her small, pale face pressed against the dirty window pane, waiting for Madge to come and find her. She even hoped that a stranger might walk along close enough to the house for her to call for aid. But a dreary rain set in and all the countryside near Tania's prison house looked desolate. More than anything Tania feared the return of Philip Holt. Once he got hold of her again, she knew ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... for those five-hundred miles, and yet the Fizzer is expected because the Fizzer is due; and to a man who loves his harness no praise could be sweeter than that. Perhaps one of the brightest thoughts for the Fizzer as he "punches" along those desolate Downs is the knowledge that a little before eleven o'clock in the morning Anthony's will come out, and, standing with shaded eyes, will look through the quivering heat, away into the Downs for that tiny moving speck. When the Fizzer is late there, death will ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn |
