"Dismal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... flight; but better counsels prevailed, and the weapons were leaned against a tree where Bud could easily find them, in case he should muster courage enough to come after them. The return march through the woods was rendered less dismal by the numerous light-wood torches that were carried along the line; but there was not much opportunity for talking until the timber had been left behind, and the ranks were closed up on the ...
— True To His Colors • Harry Castlemon
... he has spent in searching out the truth; what wonderful intelligence of his had converted the shadow of a suspicion into the reality of an incontrovertible conviction; how a single word he casually overheard has been followed through weary days and dismal nights, till he has arrived, with all the evidence in his hands, ...
— Hatchie, the Guardian Slave; or, The Heiress of Bellevue • Warren T. Ashton
... far as it went. Our sudden exodus from Bedford Place had been determined upon immediately after Chad's dismal failure to locate the coal-field: Fitz having carried the day against Yancey, Kerfoot, and even the agent himself, who was beginning to waver under the accumulation ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... overawed at the spectacle. We had seen nothing like it before. We had never witnessed sublimity to be compared to that rising of sea-birds from Ailsa Craig. They were of countless varieties in kind and size, from the largest goose to the small marsh-bird, and of every conceivable variety of dismal note. Off they moved, in wild and alarmed rout, like a people going into exile; filling the air, far and wide, with their reproachful lament at the wanton cruelty which had ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, July 1878, No. 9 • Various
... TRAVELED SEVERAL MILES THROUGH the dark and dismal wood when we came suddenly upon a dense village built high among the branches of the trees. As we approached it my escort broke into wild shouting which was immediately answered from within, and a moment later a swarm of creatures of the same strange ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... mountain, and ran over a wild, rocky country, which looked, as Uncle Moses said, like the "abomination of desolation." No verdure appeared, no houses, no flocks, and herds—all was wild, and savage, and dismal. After passing over these lava fields, the party reached what is called the "Hermitage" —a kind of refreshment station near the foot of the cone. Resting here, for a little way they proceeded on foot. The path was now rugged and difficult, and ascended ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... bed, we sat for a long time talking and smoking. But even the bright fire and the soothing tobacco smoke did not wholly dispel the gloom of the place, and when we finally carried the candles into the bedroom, I felt a vague sense of dismal anticipation and apprehension. We left both doors open, so that the light from our room streamed across the corner of the sitting-room, and threw a great square of strong reflection on the studio carpet. ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... passed through several spacious rooms, in the same style of grandeur; but all appeared forsaken and desolate. A long gallery came next, it was very dark, just light enough to show that instead of a wall on one side, there was a grating of iron which parted off a dismal dungeon, from whence issued the groans of those victims whom the cruel giant reserved in confinement for ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... by Elizabeth Fry among the hardened criminals of Newgate, by simply reading to them the parable of the Prodigal Son? Princes and peers of the realm, it is said, counted it a privilege to stand in those dismal corridors, among felons and murderers, merely to share with them the privilege of witnessing the marvellous pathos which genius, taste, and culture could infuse into that ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... passed, and clouds and shadows and thick haze Fell and encompassed him. I might not see What hand upheld him in those dismal ways, Wherethrough he staggered with his misery. The creeping mists that trooped and spread around, The smitten head ...
— The Poems of Emma Lazarus - Vol. II. (of II.), Jewish Poems: Translations • Emma Lazarus
... infants, are as noisy as children the world over, and their dogs, which may number from 3 to 15, are so constituted that, when they are not fighting with one another, they may at any moment, without apparent motive or provocation, begin one grand dismal howl which, united to the crying of the babies and to the loud tones of their elders, produces a pandemonium. It is at meal times that the pandemonium waxes loudest, for at that time the half-starved dogs, in their efforts to get a morsel to eat, provoke the inmates to loud yells of "Sida, ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... contrast with the dismal source from which it escaped. "Escaped" is the word; for the fear that I should hasten my trial by exhibiting too great a gain in health, mental or physical, was already upon me; and it controlled much of my conduct during the succeeding months ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... was a dismal failure. Barbara Verne's eyes gazed softly at him out of the page, her gentle voice echoed in his ears, and the simple, straight-forward words of thanks that she had spoken thrust out of his mind the words of the great philosopher, as the youth ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... extraordinarily queer and dismal last night," said Rose to Clover as they stood a little aside from the rest on the platform. "I can't quite see what ails her. She looks thinner than when we came, and doesn't seem to know how to smile; depend upon it she's going to be ill, or something. I wish you ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... the path on the other side. The former alternative presented too many difficulties and dangers to be thought of without a shudder. In my present weak state of both mind and body, I should infallibly lose my way if I attempted it, and perish miserably amid the dismal and disgusting labyrinths of the hold. I proceeded, therefore, without hesitation, to summon up all my remaining strength and fortitude, and endeavour, as I best might, to clamber over ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... one door opening from the hall. In this room, let partly into the wall, was an iron safe in which the old man kept "the little money" that he had decided to invest in real estate. The window was protected by upright iron bars. At night, a gas-jet, turned low, threw dismal shadows about the room, and it was the old man's habit to light the gas at bed-time and to turn it off the first thing at morning. He had lighted the gas shortly after returning from Witherspoon's house and had gone to bed, and it must have been about one ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... Every detail of the room spoke to him eloquently of the man he had not seen for a year. Since his departure on furlough the battery had changed stations, marching across sixty miles of sand desert from Bunnoo to Dera Ishmael Khan, familiarly known as "Dera Dismal," a straggling station a ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... the least sign of excitement, and insisted on going down into the grub-room to feed two white mice before setting out for the "front." His two friends, however, weighed down with anxiety, and with dismal forebodings as to the result of the coming conflict, were obliged to seek support by informing "Rats" of what was about to take place, and begging him to give them the ...
— The Triple Alliance • Harold Avery
... had trotted into the woods ahead, gave utterance to a hoarse, resounding bay, which sounded as though his voice had also changed, for it ended in a dismal squeaking howl that made ...
— Through Forest and Fire - Wild-Woods Series No. 1 • Edward Ellis
... Phil's Aunt Louise and the telegram; about his dismal dinner at the restaurant and the subsequent flight from the tomblike silence of the club; how he had decided, in desperation, to clean up his study, and how he had come across Doyle's notebook. He told it rather well; he had a reputation for that sort ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... it, for the wind howled around my compartment and whistled over the rudder aperture in a most dismal way. Whenever the rudder was changed, there was a new sound to the moaning. Still, as I looked back at the clouds, I saw that no wind was moving them. It was not wind, but only the air whistling ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... of them have no club to go to except the corner saloon or the pool room? Do you know that the only exercise a lot of your poor clerks, assistants and factory workers get is standing around on the street corners, that the only drama and comedy they ever see is in a dirty, stinking, germ-infected, dismal little movie theater in the slums; that the only music they ever hear is in the back room of a Raines Law hotel or ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... mighty power, and in the lives of the Saints and Martyrs and their teachings—how those that obeyed the Church and its priests were blessed, while those that broke its laws must surely enter the dismal fires of Hell. There were also bands of players who acted the religious stories taught by the priests in so vivid a manner that the peasants were thrilled and delighted; and while their cottages were bare and poor, ...
— A Treasury of Heroes and Heroines - A Record of High Endeavour and Strange Adventure from 500 B.C. to 1920 A.D. • Clayton Edwards
... opposite wall and that unillumined window? Was there no memory of the time when, in a previous contemplation of those dismal panes, he beheld stretching between them and himself, a long, low bench with a plain wooden tub upon it, from which a dripping cloth beat out upon the boards beneath a dismal note, monotonous as the ticking ...
— Initials Only • Anna Katharine Green
... was dawning. From my window I had watched the first pale light gather little by little beyond the distant trees, until the whole dismal scene had ...
— The Honourable Mr. Tawnish • Jeffery Farnol
... provide for themselves, than they had ever before enjoyed, and yet it was Slavery. Any reverse in the fortunes of our master would be disadvantageous to us. Oh, how this fearful uncertainty weighed upon us as we saw that our master was not prospering and increasing in wealth; but we had not the dismal fears of the loathsome slave-pen, rice swamps, and many other things we should have to fear in Virginia. We were still slaves, and yet we had so much greater chance to learn from the kind, intelligent people about us, so many ...
— Twenty-Two Years a Slave, and Forty Years a Freeman • Austin Steward
... appeared in things inanimate before the Destroyer came to the body on the bed. The Comte de Restaud could not bear the daylight, the Venetian shutters were closed, darkness deepened the gloom in the dismal chamber. The sick man himself had wasted greatly. All the life in him seemed to have taken refuge in the still brilliant eyes. The livid whiteness of his face was something horrible to see, enhanced as it was by the long dank locks of ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... standing there, he, too, seemed to realize that a turn had come in their affairs, and that courage rather than endurance was the quality most demanded from him. Facing the small group clustered in the dismal hall fraught with such unutterable associations, he ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... don't know nothin of. Meanwhile said world continners to resolve round on her own axletree onct in every 24 hours, subjeck to the Constitution of the United States, and is a very plesant place of residence. It's a unnatral, onreasonable and dismal life you're leadin here. So it strikes me. My Shaker frends, I now bid you a welcome adoo. You hav treated me exceedin well. Thank you kindly, ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 1 • Charles Farrar Browne
... they adjourned to Baltimore, where they are now sitting. This city was for ten days, the greatest scene of distress that you can conceive; every body but Quakers were removing their families and effects, and now it looks dismal and melancholy. The Quakers and their families pretty generally remain; the other inhabitants are principally sick soldiers, some few effective ones under General Putnam, who is come here to throw up lines, and prepare for the defence of the place, if General Washington should ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... them than they sprang hastily towards them, wagging their tails—or, more correctly speaking, their tail and a quarter. But on a nearer approach those sagacious animals discovered that the woman and her child were strangers, whereupon they set up a dismal howl, and fled towards the ship as fast as they ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... snail-pace the traitor time creeps by When one is out with fortune and undone! how tauntingly upon the dial's plate The shadow's finger points the dismal hour! Thus Wyndham, with hands clasped behind his back, Watching the languid and reluctant sun Fade from the metal disk beside the door. The hours hung heavy up there on the hill, Where life was little various at best And merriment had long since ta'en its flight. Sometimes he sat ...
— Wyndham Towers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... At that dismal period the whole district had been devastated with fire and sword, and there were old men amongst the crowd who well remembered the destruction of the former hall and village by the ferocious Danes. And now God had heard their litanies: "From the fury of the Northmen, ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... true, while Southey was not: but the remarkable thing about Coleridge was the exclusiveness of his contemplative tendencies, by which one set of faculties ran riot in his mind and life, making havoc among his powers, and a dismal wreck of his existence. The charm and marvel of his discourse upset all judgments during his life, and for as long as his voice remained in the ear of his enchanted hearers; but, apart from the spell, it is clear to all sober and trained thinkers that Coleridge wandered away from truth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... polite, Marie's to be sweet-tempered, Mrs. Hartwell's to be dictatorial, and her own to be pacifying as well as firm, had a hard time of it. If it had not been for two or three diversions created by little Kate, the meal would have been, indeed, a dismal failure. ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... was in very truth a ghastly desert when her art did not enliven it with its visions, a dismal, unrelieved desert, where everything was crushed and flattened beneath the same monotonous immensity, the ingenuous love of a boy of twenty and the caprice of an amorous duke, where everything was covered with dry sand blown about by the scorching winds of destiny. Paul was conscious ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... they should see, in that alone of all Greek cities, that the most important shrines were not adorned with Grecian spoils, nor with offerings obtained by the slaughter of men of their own race and blood, dismal memorials at best, but with spoils of the barbarian, whose inscriptions bore noble testimony to the justice, as well as the courage of the victors, telling how the Corinthians and their general, Timoleon, ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... measure, however, he was doomed to disappointment. Furthermore, Bess reverted to a wistful sadness that he had not observed in her since her recovery. His attempt to cheer her out of it resulted in dismal failure, and consequently in a darkening of his own mood. Hard work relieved him; still, when the day had passed, his unrest returned. Then he set to deliberate thinking, and there came to him the startling conviction that he must leave Surprise Valley and take Bess ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey
... down Sempronius and Richardo ran him to the Heart, Amaryllis, through the Negligence of the Officer, had an opportunity of escaping to a neighbouring House, where, he acquainted the Inhabitants with the dismal Tragedy; upon this Warrants were issu'd from the next Magistrates for Apprehension of Richard, but took Post for Germany, where secur'd himsef: in a famous Monastery. In great despair and confusion Amaryllis ...
— Tractus de Hermaphrodites • Giles Jacob
... about two hours and came back with a portly bag of gold pieces. He found us in the triclinium, Nebris lying on the sofa with me, and playing a dismal tune on her flageolet, Doris on the other sofa laughing at us. He lay down by Doris, spilled the gold on the inlaid dining table, divided it into four equal portions, pouched one, made me pouch another, ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... some thirty miles away. "The horses are hard and sound," he had said to the silent subaltern. "You should reach there Friday morning without fail and without fatigue, and ought to camp to-night at Dismal River. It's a long thirty miles, but you can easily make it." He meant Davies to be beyond recall in the event of disapproval, and that point secure, he didn't much care what head-quarters might ...
— Under Fire • Charles King
... fragrant groves; Or warrior-tribes with rites of blood implore, Whose night-fires gleam along the sullen shore Of HURON or ONTARIO, inland seas, [q] What time the song of death is in the breeze! 'Twas now in dismal pomp and order due, While the vast concave flash'd with lightnings blue, On shining pavements of metallic ore, That many an age the fusing sulphur bore, They held high council. All was silence round, When, with a voice most sweet yet most profound, ...
— Poems • Samuel Rogers
... view; I knew him well, and every truant knew: Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace The day's disasters in his morning face; Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee At all his jokes, for many a joke had he; Full well the busy whisper, circling round, Conveyed the dismal tidings when ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... not taken this resolution I should have died of ennui in that dimly-lighted house, among those sepulchral toys, in the presence of that pale phantom enveloped in a dismal wrapper, cut in the monkish style, and speaking in a trembling ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... demand practically regulate certain kinds of bargain, is no contribution to systematic efforts to discover some more moral regulator. Take all the invective that Mr. Carlyle has poured out against political economy, the Dismal Science, and Gospel according to M'Croudy. Granting the absolute and entire inadequateness of political economy to sum up the laws and conditions of a healthy social state—and no one more than the present writer deplores the mischief which the application of the maxims of political economy ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... was a tall, narrow building five stories in height, and with dismal underground dungeons. In this gloomy abode jail fever was ever present. In the hot weather of July, 1777, companies of twenty at a time would be sent out for half an hour's outing, in the court yard. Inside groups of six stood ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... ideal—a vision flung out in advance of our actual circumstances. If this golden rim were quenched, if life were no longer circled by an illusion (but was it an illusion after all?), then it would be too dismal an affair to carry to an end; so he wrote with a sudden spurt of conviction which made clear way for a space and left at least one sentence standing whole. Making every allowance for other desires, on the whole this conclusion appeared ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... and after frightful tortures were thrown into a second dungeon underneath the first, where light and air were almost wholly excluded. Such was Scotland in the reign of Charles Stuart II, and such a story seemed in keeping with the vast, dismal old fortress. ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... man of blood.—Next night—a dreary night! Cast on the wildest of the Cyclad Isles, Where never human foot had mark'd the shore, These ruffians left me.—Yet believe me, Arcas, Such is the rooted love we bear mankind, All ruffians as they were, I never heard A sound so dismal as their parting oars.— Then horrid silence follow'd, broke alone By the low murmurs of the restless deep, Mixt with the doubtful breeze that now and then Sigh'd thro' the mournful woods. Beneath a shade I sat me down, more heavily oppress'd, More desolate ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... more atrocious. Their captives were tortured to death for punishment or for ransom, or, it is to be feared, for the mere amusement of the bestial captors. The open country became everywhere a wilderness. The soldiers themselves began starving in the dismal desert. ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... arrange for a great parade, Benson warns the Labor leaders not to attempt to force any workingman to march. This causes the parade to turn out a dismal failure. ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... D'Artagnan stopped at the threshold and looked in at the pensive Porthos and then, as the sight of the innumerable garments strewing the floor caused mighty sighs to heave the bosom of that excellent gentleman, D'Artagnan thought it time to put an end to these dismal reflections, and coughed by way ...
— The Man in the Iron Mask • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... rat may drown a nation. A little boy in Holland saw water trickling from a small hole near the bottom of a dike. He realized that the leak would rapidly become larger if the water were not checked, so he held his hand over the hole for hours on a dark and dismal night until he could attract the attention of passers-by. His name is still held in grateful ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... the wind, the snow, the drifts, the white fleece flying on the breast of the gale even when there were no storm clouds above, blotting out the light of the sun and causing the great ball to be only a red, ugly, menacing thing in a field of dismal gray. Night after night the drifts swept, changing, deepening in spots where the ground had been clear before, smoothing over the hummocks, weaving across the country like the vagaries of shifting sands before they finally packed into hard, compressed mounds, to form bulwarks for newer ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... of range. In the hurry and confusion my wound was not properly attended to, and a brain fever set in, under which I had been suffering for a week; but the kind care of Capt. Hopkins and Mr. Smith, and the strength of my constitution, at last prevailed over the disease. Dismal as was this story, and the prospects it unfolded, my spirits, naturally buoyant, supported me, and I determined that when the ship should arrive in Boston I would leave her and return immediately to Cuba, to make an effort for the release of my friends. Wild as was this resolve, I grew better ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... giving way to the dismal dumps. These neurotic feelings are the limit, old man. You must get well, for you have to play Mitka in 'The Terrible Tsar' to-morrow. There is nobody else to do it. Drink something hot and take some castor-oil? Have you got the money for ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... She was pleased with it, and said it was worth quite ten shillings, and gave me a ragged old dress in exchange,—and something to buy a bit of print with to run up a dress for going out in the mornings to look for a place. And oh, ma'am, it was such a wretched, dismal, dark place she lived in; I didn't know how to abide it after the Orphanage; and yet I wouldn't have ...
— Daybreak - A Story for Girls • Florence A. Sitwell
... called, with a most unfilial disgust, "HIS OLD MAN." It appeared that, like most great actors, he was a very different personage before and behind the curtain. Kings, who are miserable and gloomy through the five acts of a dismal tragedy, and who must needs die at the end of it, are your merriest knaves over a tankard at the Shakspeare's Head. Your stage fool shall be the dullest dog that ever spoiled mirth with sour and discontented ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... different theories of its teaching which have been promulgated. There is no room here to enter upon the great question. Let it suffice to say that we seem to have in these words the soliloquy of a soul struggling with the problem of evil, sometimes borne down by a dismal skepticism, sometimes asserting his faith in the enduring righteousness. The writer's problem is the one to which Mr. Mallock has given an epigrammatic statement: "Is life worth living?" He greatly doubts, yet he strongly hopes. Much of the time ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... party was a dismal failure. As I have known her husband for years, I asked if I could ...
— The Log-Cabin Lady, An Anonymous Autobiography • Unknown
... you had the right? Now, Little Featherweight, have you ever been mixed up in any dark and dismal tragedy? ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... situated back in a piece of heavy timber and looked dismal enough, but Billy proposed that they should go there, more out of sheer bravado to show he was not afraid than to escape a ducking, for which he and Davie ...
— Beadle's Boy's Library of Sport, Story and Adventure, Vol. I, No. 1. - Adventures of Buffalo Bill from Boyhood to Manhood • Prentiss Ingraham
... stair only went down three steps, and then it came to a sudden end, and all below was a dark and dismal pit, which seemed bottomless. On looking more intently, however, they could at length see a glimmer of light, and hear the rippling of the waves of the lake, at a great depth below. The guide said that this was one of the oubliettes, that is, a place where men ...
— Rollo in Geneva • Jacob Abbott
... music, and little gasps of surprise and pleasure broke from her lips as the taxicab turned into Broadway. It was all so different from her other visit when she had come alone to find Oliver, sick with failure, in the dismal bedroom of that hotel. Now it seemed to her that the city had grown younger, that it was more awake, that it was brighter, gayer, and that she herself had a part in its brightness and its gaiety. ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... for the women and children; but there are reasons, in the same direction, why better social conditions would give the farmer himself decided benefits. The life, too, would be more attractive for both boys and girls, and would be divested of that naked and dismal gloom and dryness which now drive so much of the best farmer blood of the whole country to work-benches and counters,—to any position, in fact, which promises relief from the stifling isolation ...
— Village Improvements and Farm Villages • George E. Waring
... she spoken when the shuddering trees Shook, and the leaves divided, and the air Grew conscious of a god, and the grey seas Crawled backward, and a long and dismal blare Blew from some tasselled horn, a sleuth-hound bayed, And like a flame a barbed reed flew ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... silent meditation, for there was no one out in them. The boughs of the trees swished backward and forward in the storm, and the puddles at the crossings reflected the dismal yellow glare of the street lamps. Every one was housed to-night in the pretty detached cottages he passed, and he thought with growing wrath of the trivial errand on which he had been sent. "In happy homes he saw ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... was in keeping with the general dismal effect. La Cibot heard a heavy footstep, and the asthmatic wheezing of a virago within, and Mme. Sauvage presently showed herself. Adrien Brauwer might have painted just such a hag for his picture of Witches starting for the Sabbath; a stout, unwholesome slattern, five ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac
... "For a dismal, wretched, man-forsaken stretch of country it beats anything I ever saw," Walter exclaimed in disgust. "The river itself is about a half mile wide, but it twists, turns, and forks every few yards ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... and watched the gang-plank until the very moment of sailing, hoping that he might appear. But he did not come, and she went to her state-room and tried to forget him, and to think of something other than the reception awaiting her back in the dismal ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... nobody can spoil it but myself," said Armine. "And you know he said that one might make weakliness and sickness just as golden, by that great Love, as being up and doing. I was going to tell you, Babie, I was horridly wretched and dismal one day at Leukerbad when I thought mother and all were out of the way-gone out driving, I believe-and then Fordham came in. He had stayed in, ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... unbroken silence. It was a warm, sunshiny morning, but the brightness of the outer air was poorly reflected in the stuffy room, which though comfortably and even luxuriously furnished, conveyed the usual sense of dismal depression common to London precincts of the law. Two or three flies buzzed irritably now and then against the smoke-begrimed windowpanes, and the clerk's dreary preamble went on and on till Sir Francis closed his eyes and wondered whether ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... fearful folk, dismayed By threatened shortage of supplies, Let not your anxious hearts be swayed By croakers or their dismal cries; But, from Penzance to Galashiels, From Abertillery to Crieff, Remember that "one pound of eels Is better ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug 29, 1917 • Various
... Death-Night in her embodied form, a black image, of bloody mouth and bloody eyes, wearing crimson garlands and smeared with crimson unguents, attired in a single piece of red cloth, with a noose in hand, and resembling an elderly lady, employed in chanting a dismal note and standing full before their eyes, and about to lead away men and steeds and elephants all tied in a stout cord. She seemed to take away diverse kinds of spirits, with dishevelled hair and tied together in a cord, as also, O king, many mighty car-warriors divested of their ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... pleasant one. At the port where they had landed it was the rule that all emigrants who came ashore should be kept in one place till the Czar's agents came to examine them; and the place where they were kept was an old warehouse, very bare and dismal-looking, with nothing in it but a few old sails and some heaps of straw. Here they remained for two days, while the snow fell and the wind roared outside, their food being brought them by the soldiers of ...
— Harper's Young People, August 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... murdered also, And to the shades, the dismal shades below, My bailiff's faithful follower ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding
... and thrusting his arm through, he reached the lock, turned the key, and the door swung open with a dismal creak. ...
— The Bag of Diamonds • George Manville Fenn
... holding his under-jaw in his hand, looking very dismal and very frightened, for two reasons; one, because he thought that his jaw was broken, and the other, because he thought he ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... and poring in their one-windowed chambers over the minute preciousness of the labored canvas; how are they swept away and crushed into unnoticeable darkness! And in their stead, as the walls of the dismal rooms that enclosed them, and us, are struck by the four winds of Heaven, and rent away, and as the world opens to our sight, lo! far back into all the depths of time, and forth from all the fields that have been sown with human life, how the harvest of the dragon's teeth ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume III (of 3) • John Ruskin
... the dismal march went Grom, with his mate A-ya, and her two children, and the hairy little scout Loob, whose feet were as quick as his eyes and ears and nostrils, and whose sinews were as untiring as those of the gray wolf. Immediately behind these came the main body of the warriors, on a wide line ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... said Dorothea. "This funeral seems to me the most dismal thing I ever saw. It is a blot on the morning I cannot bear to think that any one should die and ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... Restitution in this same fateful month of March, 1629, could not but give the English Puritans great concern. Everywhere in Europe the champions of human freedom seemed worsted. They might well think that never had the prospect looked so dismal; and never before, as never since, did the venture of a wholesale migration to the New World so strongly recommend itself as the only feasible escape from a situation that was fast becoming intolerable. Such were ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske
... about him; he turned up his collar and watched the dim shapes of trees and hedges gather out of the night to meet the dismal dawn. He was cold and hungry ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... pointed towards Mr. Davis's garden; and, just as he was in the midst of his military exercises, a stone thrown by William hit him directly in one of his eyes. The fright and pain together made Harry drop the gun, which went off, and in a moment both gardens resounded with the most dismal shrieks and lamentations. Harry had received a blow in the eye with a stone, and the whole charge had entered William's leg; the sad consequences of which were, the one lost his eye, and the other ...
— The Looking-Glass for the Mind - or Intellectual Mirror • M. Berquin
... basin of potatoes to the door-sill and sat there, with his back turned to the dismal hut and his dying father, and his face looking out upon the green hills. He had always been a grave and thoughtful boy; and he had much to think of now. The deep sense of new duties and obligations that had come upon him with his father's words, ...
— Fern's Hollow • Hesba Stretton
... themselves away. My aunt and Miss Browne had a stateroom between them the size of a packing-box, and somebody turned out and resigned another to me. I retired there to dress for dinner after several dismal hours spent in attendance on Aunt Jane, who had passed from great imaginary suffering into the quite genuine anguish of seasickness. In the haste of my departure from San Francisco I had not brought ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... "Do leave off those dismal strains," said the parrot; "sing something to make us laugh; laughter is the sign of the highest order of intellect. Can a dog or a horse laugh? No, they can cry; but to man alone is the power of laughter given. Ha! ha! ha!" laughed ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... disappointment as a misshapen foot or crooked knee destroys the effect of neck and shoulder, produce at last an intolerable irritation. I had dismissed them all finally, and they had trailed away in the rain, a dismal procession of ...
— Five Nights • Victoria Cross
... He set off on a long walk now, passing the National Gallery to Regent Circus, then up Regent Street and Oxford Street, and along Oxford Street towards the West. He found himself in High Street Kensington, in Hammersmith, and then in those dismal regions where the country struggles with ...
— The Man Who Lost Himself • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... crimes and hatreds. They had been an ill-conditioned and not a happy race. When I heard the servant's step traversing that long gallery, as it seemed to the in haste to be gone, and when all grew quite silent, I began to feel a dismal sort of sensation, and lighted the pair of wax candles which I found upon the small writing table. How wonderful and mysterious is the influence of light! What sort of beings must ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... footstones for the dead snags that rot in the soft ooze. There are deadenings with the lowland corn growing high and rank below and the bleached, fire-blackened girdled trees rising above, barren of leaf and limb. There are long, dismal flats where in the spring the clotted frog-spawn clings like patches of white mucus among the weed stalks and at night the turtles crawl out to lay clutches of perfectly round, white eggs with tough, rubbery shells in the sand. There are bayous leading off to nowhere and sloughs ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... city. High up on the left I could discern a light or two, piercing the gloom of the sky; and I knew they shone from the wind-mills of Montmartre. In every other direction lay darkness; desolation swept by the night wind; silence broken only by the dismal howling of far-off watch-dogs. I might have been ten miles from Paris: even as I was a thousand miles from the man who had risen so happily ...
— In Kings' Byways • Stanley J. Weyman
... garden; such stuff one stored in match-boxes and pill-boxes, or packed in sacks of old glove fingers tied up with thread and sent off by waggons along the great military road to the beleaguered fortress on the Indian frontier beyond the worn places that were dismal swamps. And there were battles on ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... mountain," the old man said, "because of a conjunction of the stars unfavourable to study, and his class have gone to their homes for many weeks." He bowed again and led on along that corridor of dismal stone. The others followed, and still as Rodriguez went that famous name Saragossa ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... staples had been driven into the interstices of the stones above the heads of the Court and from each staple hung a lighted lantern, which with those at the belts of the guard standing round, illuminated the dismal chamber fairly well. To the left of the Court was a block draped in black and beside it stood the executioner with his arms resting on the handle of his axe. In the ceiling above his head was an iron ring and from this ring depended a rope, the noose of which dangled at the shoulder of the headsman, ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... the child's burial over, and the crowd dispersed, the cottage of the widow Cooper was once more abandoned to the cheerlessness and wo (sic) within. Very dismal was the night of that day to the two, the foolish mother and wretched daughter, as they sat brooding together, in deep silence, by the light of a feeble candle. The mother rocked a while in her easy-chair. The daughter, hands clasped in her lap, sat watching the candlelight in almost idiotic vacancy ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... and dismal spirit, that slips over all the pleasures of life and seizes and feeds upon misfortunes; like flies, that cannot stick to a smooth and polished body, but fix and repose themselves upon craggy and rough places, and like cupping-glasses, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... think it sun! But on the revel creeps a serpent, fanned and crimson, with multitudinous folds lapping the dancing creatures in one heaving carnage! The candles die.... The stars cannot pierce the writhing darkness.... Above on the immortal headlands sit the angels, looking down no more, for the dismal heap no longer throbs.... I must write this! Now! While I see it! That moaning flood ebbing to silence ... those rosy promontories lit with angel wings ... and over all as large and still as heaven, the cold, unweeping eyes ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... endure while waiting for a new day? I had already crossed so broad a stretch of dangerous ice that I saw it would be difficult to get back to the woods through the storm, before dark, and the attempt would most likely result in a dismal night-dance on the glacier; while just beyond the present barrier the surface seemed more promising, and the east shore was now perhaps about as near as the west. I was therefore eager to go on. But this wide jump ...
— Stickeen • John Muir
... stood still and listened. A low moaning sound was coming from somewhere over our heads. Holmes rushed to the door and out into the hall. The dismal noise came from upstairs. He dashed up, the inspector and I at his heels, while his brother Mycroft followed as quickly as his ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... to believe, and I don't believe it till I have some written and omnipotent instructions, in my pocket and am actually moving towards the sea. The youngest and keenest schoolboy returning home for his holidays is a calm, collected, impassionate and even dismal man of the world compared to me. I see little and am impressed by nothing; all things and men are assumed to be good, and none of them is given the opportunity of proving itself to be the contrary. As for the A.M.L.O. at any other port ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Oct. 10, 1917 • Various
... dead should be buried in wicker-work baskets, with fern-leaves for shrouds, so that the poor clay might the more easily return to mother earth. Those who favor cremation suffer again a still more frantic disesteem; and yet every one deplores the present gloomy apparatus and dismal observances of our occasions ...
— Manners and Social Usages • Mrs. John M. E. W. Sherwood
... verb scratch instead of screech she would have been nearer the mark. The puppies, Ruby and Remus, had, after the manner of the young, human and canine, not failed to distribute their malady among their elders, and the pack, straitly coupled, went for dismal constitutionals, and the kennels reeked to heaven of remedies, and Freddy's new hunter, Mayboy, from shortness of work, smashed the partition of the loose box and kicked his neighbour, Mrs. Alexander's cob, in ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Lady of Tears in that desert landscape of stubborn rocks and dismal hills. Weeping bitterly, She had uttered reproofs and threats; and a spring, which never in the memory of man had flowed excepting at the melting of the snows, had never ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... They could hear the hissing whine of fine hard snow tearing above their heads like volleys of shot, and the force of the wind reached them even in their shelter, bringing with it the flinty sting of the snow-dust. Beyond them the black barren was filled with a dismal moaning. Looking up, and yet seeing nothing in the darkness, Peter understood where the weird shriekings and ghostly cries came from. It was the wind whipping itself up the side and over the top ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... and the close air of dwellings, into the open fields, and under the soft, warm sunshine, and the softer light of a full moon. The loveliest season of the whole year—that transient but delightful interval between the storms of the "wild equinox, with all their wet," and the dark, short, dismal days which precede the rigor of winter—is now with us. The sun rises through a soft and hazy atmosphere; the light mist clouds melt gradually before him; and his noontide light rests warm and clear on still woods, tranquil waters, and grasses green ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... history gives us nothing but a dismal record of weary marches, sieges, battles, bombardments, conflagrations, and all the unimaginable brutalities and miseries of war. The war had now raged for thirty years. Hundreds of thousands of lives had been lost. Millions of ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... translations of the tragedies of Euripides which Ennius had furnished and Pacuvius continued to furnish. While patriotic considerations might set bounds to criticism in reference to the native chronicles, Lucilius at any rate directed very pointed shafts against "the dismal figures from the complicated expositions of Pacuvius"; and similar severe, but not unjust criticisms of Ennius, Plautus, Pacuvius—all those poets "who appeared to have a licence to talk pompously and to reason illogically"—are found in the polished author of the Rhetoric dedicated ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Many believed it to be almost uninhabitable. Pike, who (1806-7) marched across the plains from St. Louis to the neighborhood of Pikes Peak and on to the upper waters of the Rio Grande, and Long, who (1820) followed Pike, brought back dismal accounts of the country. Pike reported that the banks of the Kansas, the Platte, and the Arkansas rivers might "admit of a limited population," but not the plains. Long said the country west of Council Bluffs "is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by people ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... mournful sound of the great drum from the summit of the temple of the god of war. The priests were then sacrificing the hearts of ten of our companions to their accursed idols, and the sound of their dismal drum, which might be heard at almost three leagues off, might be imagined to be the music of the infernal deities. Soon after this, the horn of Guatimotzin was heard, giving notice to the Mexican officers either to make prisoners of their enemies, or to die ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... I felt lost in the throng of gay youths flitting about through the doors and among the corridors. Belonging to no particular group I felt isolated, and then even angry, and I remember in my heart that this first day was a dismal occasion for me. I looked at the professor with an ironical feeling, for he commenced his lecture with an introduction which, to my mind, was without sense. I decided at this first lecture that there was no need to write down everything ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... respectfully, and have a private glimpse of the beaming face under the broad-brimmed brown hat. As soon, too, as it was noised about that Calhoun's wagon was in town the women all came out to find Isabel. Sevier was dismal enough after the funeral, and needed heartening, and, as Byloe said, "That young woman hed spirit enough for all Haywood county." Isabel was an intimate friend of every woman in town. Sue Grayson hurried her in to read her last love-letter, and Mother Byloe consulted her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, September, 1878 • Various
... later he returned to New York, and opened a studio, but met with a reception so dismal and indifferent that, after a four years' desperate struggle, he was forced to abandon the fight and return to his father's farm. Anxious for any employment, he applied to Henry Plant, President of the Southern Express Company, for work. Mr. Plant was interested, and instead of ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson |
