"Dreary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... them was uncarpeted, and their footsteps sounded with hollow echoes under the roof. It was all but dark by this time; Mr. Hood found matches on the table and lit the lamp, which illuminated the bare whitewashed walls and sloping ceiling with a dreary dimness. There was no carpet on the floor, which creaked as they moved here and there. When her father was on the point of drawing down ...
— A Life's Morning • George Gissing
... to feel,' said Florence, 'as if the house was avoided. I should not like to think that the—his—the rooms upstairs were quite empty and dreary, aunt. I would rather stay here, for the present. Oh my ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the distant mountains bound my golden seas. Look at this continent of mine, fairest of created worlds, as she lies turning up to the sun's never failing caress her broad and exuberant breasts, overflowing with milk for her hundred million children." And the foreigner saw only dreary deserts, tenanted by sparse, ague-stricken pioneers and savages. The cities were log huts and gambling dens. But the frontiersman's dream was prophetic. In spite of his rude, gross nature, this early Western man was an idealist withal. He dreamed dreams and beheld visions. He ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... country, which shone like varnish, would chill our very souls. One might have thought that the Lord had packed the world in cotton to put it away in the storeroom for old worlds. I can assure you that it was dreary looking. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the parsonage with Mrs. Harris and her daughter, who had called on us the evening before. Snow had fallen during the night, and when we continued our march it was with the half-frozen slush crushing in and out, at every step, through our broken shoes. Before the close of this dreary New-Year's day we came upon the scene of one of those wild tragedies which are still of too frequent occurrence in those remote regions, isolated from the strong arm of the law. Our road led down and around the mountain-side, which on our right was a barren, rocky waste, ...
— Famous Adventures And Prison Escapes of the Civil War • Various
... O lonely island of the Rhine, Where seed was never sown, What harvest lay upon thy sands, By those strong reapers thrown? What saw the winter moon that night, As, struggling through the rain, She poured a wan and fitful light On marsh, and stream, and plain? A dreary spot with corpses strewn, And bayonets glistening round; A broken bridge, a stranded boat, A bare and battered mound; And one huge watch-fire's kindled pile, That sent its quivering glare To tell the leaders of the host The conquering Scots ...
— Lays of the Scottish Cavaliers and Other Poems • W.E. Aytoun
... judgment had always repudiated the doctor's theories as the wildest nonsense, yet he secretly hugged a belief in fantasy, and would have rejoiced to see that belief confirmed. The horrors that he witnessed in the dreary laboratory were to a certain extent salutary; he was conscious of being involved in an affair not altogether reputable, and for many years afterwards he clung bravely to the commonplace, and rejected all occasions of occult investigation. Indeed, on some homeopathic principle, he for some time ...
— The Great God Pan • Arthur Machen
... late here," he rejoined. "For him the true time then first begins who lays himself down. Men are not coming home fast; women are coming faster. A desert, wide and dreary, parts him who lies down to die from him who lies down to live. The former may well make haste, but here is ...
— Lilith • George MacDonald
... labors of herself and her associates were expended on the Satterlee Hospital, one of those vast institutions created by the Medical Department of the Government, which had over three thousand beds, each during those dark and dreary days occupied by some poor sufferer. In this great hospital these ladies found, for a time, full employment for the hearts and hands of the Committees who, on their designated days of the week, ministered to these thousands of sick and wounded men, and from the depot of supplies which the ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... have only passed the Red Sea. A dreary wilderness is still before us; and unless a Moses or a Joshua are raised up in our behalf, we must perish before we reach the promised land. We have nothing to fear from our enemies on the way. General Howe, it is true, has taken ...
— Patrick Henry • Moses Coit Tyler
... Dreary though it was, they were elated. Had not a Moses led them out of bondage up into this chamber of the mountains against the day of wrath that was to consume the Gentile world? And would he not smite the rocks for water? Would he not also be a Joshua to sit in judgment ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... took their places outside "on the box," and when the three other cars were lined up close the dark, dreary night under the trees, with the prospect of a man crawling around with malice aforethought, brightened up some. Even the moon peeked through the trees to make things look more pleasant, and to Belle company had never been so delightful before. ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... golden in name only, unless indeed the yellow mullock heaps or the bloom of the wattle-trees on the hillside gave it a claim to the title. But the gold was gone from the gully, and the diggers were gone, too, after the manner of Timon's friends when his wealth deserted him. Golden Gully was a dreary place, dreary even for an abandoned goldfield. The poor, tortured earth, with its wounds all bare, seemed to make a mute appeal to the surrounding bush to come up and hide it, and, as if in answer to its appeal, ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... looked on as an ordinary fact. The Austrian origin of the Duchess of Savoy formed a peg on which to hang unfriendly theories. It is impossible not to compassionate the poor young wife who now found herself Queen of a people which hated her race, after having lived since her marriage the most dreary of lives at the dismallest court in Europe. At first, as a bride, she seemed to have a desire to break through the frozen etiquette which surrounded her; it is told how she once begged and prayed her husband to take her for a walk under the Porticoes ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... sang together at the festivals, she in her sweet Quaker garb and demure Quaker beauty, he lithe, alert, and full of the joy of life and loving. As he sat so, thinking, he wondered where she was, and why he should be thinking of her now, facing the dreary sorrow of this pestilence and his own anger and vengeance. He nodded softly to the waving trees far down in the valley, for his thoughts had drifted on to his wife as he first saw her. She was standing bare-armed among the grape-vines by a wall of rock, the dew of rich life on her lip and ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... who loved him would not have been hasty to believe evil of him, that he had been safe in speaking to them as he really felt, and that he might look to them for something warmer and more sympathizing than such dreary eloquence. So when the revelation comes upon him of what was passing in them, he attributes it (and now he is unjust to them) to a falsehood of heart, and not to a blindness of under- standing. Their sermons, ...
— Froude's Essays in Literature and History - With Introduction by Hilaire Belloc • James Froude
... architecture adopted was the Mansard. As the standard of education was high, the schools soon became famous; and as the religion taught was broad, the pupils came from all Protestant denominations. On this subject the well-known historian, Kurtz, has almost told the truth. He informs us that during the dreary period of Rationalism, the schools established by the Brethren were a "sanctuary for the old Gospel, with its blessed promises and glorious hopes." It would be better, however, to speak of these schools as ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... in the case of Latin? The utility of expression does not enter into it, and the discipline of truth to elegant literary copy can be even so well attained from the study of our own tongue, which is lamentably neglected. In all this dreary language study, the youth's interest is dried up at its source. He is fed on formulas and rules; he has no outlet for invention or discovery; lists of exceptions to the rules destroy the remnant of his curiosity and incentive; ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... could rest for guidance—no tree, no upheaval of rock, no peculiarity of summit, no snake-like trail,—all about extended the same dull, dead monotony of brown, sun-baked hills, with slightly greener depressions lying between, interspersed by patches of sand or the white gleam of alkali. It was a dreary, deserted land, parched under the hot summer sun, brightened by no vegetation, excepting sparse bunches of buffalo grass or an occasional stunted sage bush, and disclosing nowhere ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... for birds and squirrels on the shore and fishes in the water are all the creatures that are near to make it otherwise, but it is not the sort of solitude to make one dreary. Come to Galilee for that. If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... felt like one freezing into ice. He could not speak nor move; how long this state remained he knew not. A long, troubled, dreary period seemed to pass, and then all was clear again. His wife had risen from the bed, and left the chamber. Little Harry had been removed from the crib, but Kate and Mary were still on the bed, with every ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... anyone. Alone and without anybody by thy side, thou shalt wander through diverse countries, O wretch, thou shalt have no place in the midst of men. The stench of pus and blood shall emanate from thee, and inaccessible forests and dreary moors shall be thy abode! Thou shalt wander over the Earth, O thou of sinful soul, with the weight of all ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... authoritatively presented. Again, a little group of periodicals sprang up in which were discussed, learnedly and pedantically, to be sure, but with keen intelligence, the questions that were interesting the great world outside. It is dreary business ploughing through these solemn, badly printed octavos and quartos. Of a sudden, however, one comes upon the first, and for thirty-six years the ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... port of Tampico gave little promise of aught so romantic and rare and exotic as the young French woman's coveted thrill of ecstasy. There was first the sand bar, which kept ships from coming up the deep Panuco to the town. Beyond there were lagoons and swamps mottling the flat, dreary, moisture-sodden, fever-scourged land. There were solemn pelicans, and such kind of grotesque bird as use only one leg, it being long enough for two, and never that to walk upon, so far as anybody had ever noticed. Such an old fellow would outline himself against the yellow loneliness, ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... the night on the bare ground, without any protection against the weather. To prevent us from being surprized in the night by the wandering Tartars, outguards were placed every night in three directions around our resting-place. During the greater part of this long and dreary journey, we were very ill off for water both for ourselves and our cattle, and we never saw any wild animals. One day we saw about forty horses, which we were told had escaped from a caravan of merchants the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... Crevel went downstairs together without speaking a word till they were in the street; but outside on the sidewalk they looked at each other with a dreary laugh. ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the stroke that tore him, he probably but felt the agonizing bodily laceration, but nothing more. Yet, when by this collision forced to turn towards home, and for long months of days and weeks, ahab and anguish lay stretched together in one hammock, rounding in mid winter that dreary, howling Patagonian Cape; then it was, that his torn body and gashed soul bled into one another; and so interfusing, made him mad. That it was only then, on the homeward voyage, after the encounter, that the final monomania seized him, seems all but certain from ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... 'Dear knows,' came the dreary answer. 'I think I'll awa' back to the camp.' Yet if he did not greatly desire Willie's company, ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... youth, Zambao-Zambino (Young-Man-Proud-of-His-Waist-Line) who rendered a solo by striking his distended anatomy with his clenched fist, varying the tone by relaxing or tightening the abdominal muscles. Whinney sang a very dreary arrangement of "Mandalay"—his one parlor trick; Swank did an imitation of Elsie Janis's imitation of Ethel Barrymore and I sang "The Wreck of the Julie Plante," an amusing ballad describing the loss by drowning ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... that contains nothing but nonsense confessed that fact in its preface, the world would have been saved a vast amount of dreary reading. Most of such volumes, however, are believed by their authors to be full of wisdom of the solidest kind; and confession, therefore, being impossible, the reader may learn the truth only through much tribulation. The writer of this book freely admits, at the outset, that ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... of a woman is not always governed by a sense of gratefulness. There are women whose hearts are like the grape, and give out their best juices to him who tramples on them. If anything is certain in all the coarse and dreary story of that Court, it is that Queen Caroline adored her husband—that she was too fond ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... tent, Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note, By thy cold, gray stones, oh, sea! Once upon a midnight dreary, A gentle knight was ...
— The Hilltop Boys on the River • Cyril Burleigh
... into these dreary fastnesses was to get on terms of familiarity with the quadrupedal rather than the bipedal inhabitants, I will leave the Bhootias, and proceed to describe my rencontres with the equally civilized four-footed denizens. I had in my employ Shikarees (gameseekers) of no ordinary ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... discovery and take possession of this new continent. But he soon ascertained, what indeed he might and ought to have ascertained in his first voyage, that what he deemed and represented to be the Terra Australis was only a dreary and inhospitable island, of small size, so very barren and useless, that it produces no tree or even shrub of any kind, and very little grass. On such an island, in such a part of the globe, no inhabitants could be looked for; but it is even ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... when he first entered it that night, he looked at the big room. How had he ever been able to think it cosy, home-like? It was dreary, forbidding, the sad hermitage of one who was resolved to turn his back on life, on the true life of close human relations, of inspiring intimacies, of that intercourse which should be as bread of Heaven ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... like a guardian angel until we got back to town late that afternoon. The hospital was not yet in shape, so 'Lige was taken to the rather dreary and homeless ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... which now met our view," says Cook, "was dreary enough. It seemed to be cut up into small islands, which though by no means high, were very black, and almost entirely barren. In the background, we saw high ground covered with snow, almost to the water's edge. It is the wildest shore ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... bleak and snowy waste, toilsomely dragging canoes, baggage, and provisions to the other stream. Here, too, they found a sheet of ice, and for some days longer trudged down the channel of the silent and dreary stream. Its banks had been desolated by Indian wars, and where once many flourishing villages rose there were to be seen only ashes ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... say, upon her part, that he was a morbid, dreary invalid, jealous beyond endurance, and that she suffered much at his hands, and separated from him only when she could endure his exactions no longer. He did not long survive the sundering of their relations, and died in ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... Essay on Man, in which Pope versified the deism which he learned from Bolingbroke, and which was characteristic of the upper circle generally. I need not speak of its shortcomings; didactic poetry of that kind is dreary enough, and the smart couplets often offend one's taste. I may say that here and there Pope manages to be really impressive, and to utter sentiments which really ennobled the deist creed; the aversion to narrow superstition; to the bigotry which 'dealt ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... three days or four. I remember myself grouped with Marion, talking sitting on our bed in her room, talking standing in our dining-room, saving this thing or that. Twice we went for long walks. And we had a long evening alone together, with jaded nerves and hearts that fluctuated between a hard and dreary recognition of facts and, on my part at least, a strange unwonted tenderness; because in some extraordinary way this crisis had destroyed our mutual apathy and made us ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... the very first his wife took a dislike to the place. She said it was too gloomy, and in spite of a lot of entertainments and parties—elaborate affairs they were, too—life there was dreary. They had lots of company, but Shadow Valley seemed to cast a gloom over the ...
— The Outdoor Girls in a Motor Car - The Haunted Mansion of Shadow Valley • Laura Lee Hope
... is omnipotent for her protection; but when the food, clothing, shelter, fire and lodging, medicine and nursing, comfort and entire condition and treatment of her poor blind slave throughout his dreary pilgrimage, is the question—ah! that, says the mouthpiece of the law, and the representative of 'public opinion,' 'CANNOT BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION.' Protection of slaves by ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... of a state which men think they might enjoy: it is no record of joy. But the fool's paradise would be dreary even for the fool; he is his own paradise, and will be. Our early fancy is no transcript of the divine method, and is sternly rejected by all who suspect a perfection hidden in the day. A few works ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... Callimachus. He was weary physically, and intended to retire early. AEmilia, who felt sorry enough for the plight of her rather distant cousin, had tried to console him and divert him with guitar[84] music, and had called in an itinerant piper,[85] but these well-meant efforts at amusement had been dreary failures. Drusus had just bidden his body-servants undress him, when he was informed that Agias had come from the Lentulan villa, ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... to Roma results disastrously at first, for he is doomed to many months of dreary waiting is denied audience with the pope, and even ordered to quit the city. But finally the tide turns; the pope, having learned of his mission, grants the long-desired audience, and after hearing the humble representations of the pleader, looks favorably ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... spoke to me and encouraged me, "Neber fear, massa," said he. "Him you tell me of, live up in sky, Him watch over us." We did not speak much, however; we could not, I do not know why. Oh, that was a dreary, awful night, not likely to be forgotten! Yet here I am alive. I shall never despair after that, and shall always feel, in however terrible a position I am placed, that a merciful God is watching over me, and that He will find means ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... he said. Alfieri, alive to Signor Marchetti's suppressed excitement, wondered who the visitor could be. The governor examined the card again. He gave his companion a rather dreary smile. ...
— The Wheel O' Fortune • Louis Tracy
... enough," agreed Jessie, and for a few minutes they sat silent, while the dreary, sodden, steaming streets of London, as, in their short experience, they had already begun to think of them, faded before the magic power of memory and they were once more back in camp—eating, swimming, walking, canoeing—subject always to the slightest ...
— Lucile Triumphant • Elizabeth M. Duffield
... was erected before the porch of Notre Dame. On one side appeared the two cardinals; on the other the four noble prisoners, in chains, under the custody of the Provost of Paris. Six years of dreary imprisonment had passed over their heads; of their valiant brethren the most valiant had been burned alive; the recreants had purchased their lives by confession; the Pope, in a full council, had ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... creature has just begun his servitude and brings into the dreary monotony a flash of the spirit which should ...
— The Woman Who Toils - Being the Experiences of Two Gentlewomen as Factory Girls • Mrs. John Van Vorst and Marie Van Vorst
... believe it unendurable," he told her firmly. "Whatever one has suffered, and however dreary the present, ...
— The Profiteers • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... language, [262] before this assembly, on the subject of life and death; considering as false, I suppose, what is told of the dead; that the bad, going a different way from the good, inhabit places gloomy, desolate, dreary, and full of horror. He accordingly proposed that the property of the conspirators should be confiscated, and themselves kept in custody in the municipal towns; fearing, it seems, that, if they remain at Rome, they may be rescued either by their accomplices in the conspiracy, or by a hired ...
— Conspiracy of Catiline and The Jurgurthine War • Sallust
... that looking round upon the dreary region, and seeing nothing but bleak fields, and naked trees, hills obscured by fogs, and flats covered with inundations, he did for some time suffer melancholy to prevail on him, and wished himself again safe at home—Travels of Will Marvel, Idler, ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... Ernest Maltravers was a hardy lover of nature, and neither snow nor frost could detain him from his daily rambles. So, about noon, he regularly threw aside books and papers, took his hat and staff, and went whistling or humming his favourite airs through the dreary streets, or along the bleak waters, or amidst the leafless woods, just as the humour seized him; for he was not an Edwin or Harold, who reserved speculation only for lonely brooks and pastoral hills. Maltravers delighted ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of gintlemen that undertakes to hold up their heads over soldiers like Doyle. Here, byes, dhrink now, but be off ag'inst his coming. He'll be here any minute. Take this to comfort ye, but kape still about this till ye see me ag'in—or Doyle. Now run." And with scant ceremony the dreary party was hustled out through a paved court-yard to a gate-way opening on a side street. Houses were few and scattering so far below the heart of the city. The narrow strip of land between the great ...
— Waring's Peril • Charles King
... a dreary country, almost uninhabited, save by the beasts of the chase, they rode for Banbury. Twice or thrice indeed they passed knots of wild uncouth men, in twos or threes, who might have been dangerous to the unattended traveller, but saw no prospect of ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... think that during this year's visiting Mrs. X. had really learned to regard me as a friend. At first I do not think she liked me very well, and I also found it hard cordially to like her. We were not naturally sympathetic. I am afraid that she often thought me hard; and she had a dreary, complaining way that tried me a great deal. But her good qualities commanded my respect and her misfortunes my pity; and on her my evident desire to befriend her gradually had its effect. Her first expression of real feeling ...
— Friendly Visiting among the Poor - A Handbook for Charity Workers • Mary Ellen Richmond
... ride that he had this day. The sky was heavy and overcast, it rained constantly, and the roads were in a more dreary condition even than usual. He splashed along through the mud with his servants behind him, wrapped in his cloak; and his own thoughts were not of a sufficient cheerfulness to compensate for the external discomforts. His political plane of thought was shot by a personal ...
— The King's Achievement • Robert Hugh Benson
... we served a very useful purpose. There was work to do, suggestions to be obtained, an overseer, decorator and landscape gardener with whom consultations were absolutely necessary; and nothing that X—— ever did was without its element of calculation. Why not make a gala affair of a rather dreary November task— ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... sat huddled in a corner of the little waiting-room counting the dreary minutes as she waited for her train. No one beside herself ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... bones were slung at the shoulders of the relatives, like fagots. Thus the procession slowly defiled along the forest pathways, with which the country of the Hurons was everywhere intersected; and as they passed beneath the dull shadow of the pines, they uttered at intervals, in unison, a dreary, wailing cry, designed to imitate the voices of disembodied souls winging their way to the land of spirits, and believed to have an effect peculiarly soothing to the conscious relics which each man bore. When, at night, they stopped to rest at some village on the ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... that happiness is in the air, without a glimpse of all that is meant by a peaceful life without care or ambition. There is that in the air and the sound of the river that sets you dreaming; the sands have a language, and are joyous or dreary, golden or wan; and the owner of the vineyard may sit motionless amid perennial flowers and tempting fruit, and feel all the stir of the world ...
— La Grenadiere • Honore de Balzac
... Toussaint was one of the dark deeds in his career. Reaching France, the captive was separated from his wife and children and confined in the dungeon of a dreary frontier castle. Here, one morning in April, 1803, Toussaint L'Ouverture, the negro liberator, was found dead. He had been starved to death, if we may accept the belief of ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... with it a slight disillusionment. The dining-room in Shamrock House is in the basement; chill and dreary of aspect, its windows always dirty and unopenable, because at the slightest excuse of an open window the small boys of the neighbourhood will make it their target for all kinds of filth. Rotting vegetables, ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... to be the compensating justice of Nature, the treasures of the earth are always hidden in the most unattractive, dismal, and dreary spots. At least all the mining places I ever visited are so located, and Bisbee is no exception. To get away from the cramped little village and its unsavoury restaurant, I established my first camp four miles south of it on a commodious and pleasant opening, where we could ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... two after Harold's return to England, the dreary old Confessor was found to be dying. After wandering in his mind like a very weak old man, he died. As he had put himself entirely in the hands of the monks when he was alive, they praised him lustily when he was dead. They had gone so far, already, as to persuade ...
— A Child's History of England • Charles Dickens
... his own people and of interest to all friends of humanity. If ever a fair land has been cursed with the wearisome breed of fault-finders, both indigenous and exotic, that land is the Philippines, so it is indeed refreshing to turn from the dreary waste of carping criticisms, pragmatical "scientific" analyses, and sneering half-truths to a story pulsating with life, presenting the Filipino as a human being, with his virtues and his vices, his loves and hates, his hopes ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... assumed command and betook himself to Winchester, a general without an army, but still able to check by his presence the existing panic, and ready to enter upon the trying, dreary, and fruitless work that lay before him. In April, 1757, he wrote: "I have been posted then, for more than twenty months past, upon our cold and barren frontiers, to perform, I think I may say, impossibilities; that is, to protect from the cruel ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Christmas time. Just when his own people far away in Canada were gathering about the blazing fire or jingling over the crisp snow in sleighs and cutters, the great winter rains commenced. Christmas day—his first Christmas in a land that did not know its beautiful meaning—was one long dreary downpour. It rained steadily all Christmas week. It poured on Newyear's day and for a week after. It came down in torrents all January. February set in and still it rained and rained, with only a short interval each afternoon. ...
— The Black-Bearded Barbarian (George Leslie Mackay) • Mary Esther Miller MacGregor, AKA Marion Keith
... terrible, when I'm roused," ejaculated Jos from the sofa, and made a grimace so dreary and ludicrous, that the Captain's politeness could restrain him no longer, and he and Osborne fired off a ringing ...
— Vanity Fair • William Makepeace Thackeray
... lively La Bruyere; but at the same moment, by his own admirable Reflections, confutes the dreary system he would establish. An opinion of the exhausted state of literature has been a popular prejudice of remote existence; and an unhappy idea of a wise ancient, who, even in his day, lamented that "of books there ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... half year of time and money, of dreary waiting, of daily humiliations at the hands of officers with minds diseased by suspicion, all of which would have been made up to us by the sight of this one great spectacle, was to the end absolutely lost to us. Perhaps we made ...
— Notes of a War Correspondent • Richard Harding Davis
... been cold, sharp and rather dreary on leaving New York, and warm clothing and coats were in demand. But in a day or so the balmy winds of the south began to make themselves felt, and the travelers were glad to ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... nearest neighbor Lived in affluence and squandered Wealth, while he an outcast wandered, And the night with shadowy wing Heard him this low moaning sing: "Sad and weary, poor and weary, Life to me is ever dreary!" Morning came; there was no sound Heard within. Men gathered round, Peering through the window-pane; They saw a form as if 't were lain Out for burial. Stiff and gaunt Lay the man who died in want. And methought I heard that day Angel voices ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... of ancient moats around the city, filled with lotus, the great pink-and-white blossoms giving joy to the eye as its roots gave food for the body. Slowly these stretches of loveliness were being turned into dreary levels of sand for the roadbed of a trolley. Even now the quiet of the city was broken by the clang of the street-car gong. I was taking ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... and sung loud beside him, sole songster left in the wintry woods, but which said, as plain as bird could say, could he have understood it, "See, the birds are not all dead in this dreary winter time. I am still here, a pledge from my brothers. When yon dim grey woods grow green, and the brown hollows are yellow with kingcups and primroses, the old melody you know so well shall begin again, and the thrush from the oak top shall answer ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... into dark abysses that had frightened him as a child, windows deep-set in the thick stone walls, corners round which he had crept in the dark on his way to his room, it seemed to him that those long, dreary years of patient waiting in New Zealand were as nothing, and that it was only yesterday that he had passed down that same way, his heart full of rage against his father, his one longing to get out and away to other countries where he should be his own ...
— The Wooden Horse • Hugh Walpole
... those dirty corners! Surely it is hard on a person of fourteen, who is as fond of enjoying herself as anybody else, to be made to wrestle with maps upstairs in a dreary room, when the sun is shining, and the voices of the children passing come up joyously to the prison windows, and all the world is out of doors! Letty thought so, and Miss Leech thought it hard on a person of thirty, and each tried to console the other, but neither knew how, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... remaining ten, nine, now in the third week of their abode under my roof, have recovered health, strength, and spirits, and bid fair to live to a good old age, if not prematurely cut off. One of them, more feeble than the others, needed and received especial attention. Him I tended through dreary days of east wind and rain in a box on the mantel-piece, nursing him through a severe attack of asthma, feeding and amusing him through his protracted convalescence, holding him in my hand one whole Sunday afternoon to relieve him of home-sickness and hen-sickness, and being rewarded at last by ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... coffee brewing. With a brisk, roaring fire on, I left for the spring to fetch some water, and to make my toilet. The leaves of the mountain goldenrod, which everywhere covered the ground in the opening, were covered with frozen particles of vapor, and the scene, shut in by fog, was chill and dreary enough. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... the mind and the mind's-workings, not the remains of earnest thought which has been frittered away by a long dreary course of preparatory study, by which all life has been evaporated. Never forget that there is in the wide river of nature something which every body who has a rod and line may catch, precious things which every ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... It was a dreary journey up that corkscrew footpath, inch-deep in running water, that led to the ordinary levels of life. Desmond kept his post by Lenox's head and shoulders, sheltering him still with the discarded coat, and clinging to the track's edge with supple, stockinged feet. But there was no ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver
... The dreary age wore on. Louis slept! The little brother sat with his chin in his hands, his heart cold, his eyes ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... elevated regions gave additional splendor to the stars, and heightened the magnificence of the firmament. The occasional rush and laving of the waters; the vague sounds from the surrounding wilderness; the dreary howl, or rather whine of wolves from the plains; the low grunting and bellowing of the buffalo, and the shrill neighing of the elk, struck the ear with an effect unknown in ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... country newspaper on the coast. I knew now the genesis of every didactic verse that "coldly furnished forth the marriage table" in the announcement of weddings in the rural press. I knew now who had read—and possibly indited—the dreary hic jacets of the dead in their mourning columns. I knew now why certain letters of the alphabet had been more tenderly considered than others, and affectionately addressed. I knew the meaning of the "Lines to Her who can best understand them," and I knew that they HAD been ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... near, Who had not where to rest His tired head? Who, in the dreary wilderness alone, Hungry and faint, had none to give Him bread; Listening t' the damp wind's low and sullen ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... shouting followed his clattering train up the valley on his daily tour of inspection. He left behind him a new-fledged hero in the person of Jabez Rockwell, whose bold tactics had won him a powder-horn and given his comrades the rarest hour of the dreary ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... when Frohman bought the play, and he cabled her that she was to do the title part. She afterward declared that this news changed the dull, dreary, soggy day into one that was brilliant and dazzling. "To play Chantecler," she said, "is an honor international in ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... advanced, when a gloomy procession wended its way into the village. The bodies of his two sons were brought home to Lawyer Barricini, each corpse thrown across a mule, which was led by a peasant. A crowd of dependents and idlers followed the dreary cortege. With it appeared the gendarmes, who always came in too late, and the deputy-mayor, throwing up his hands, and incessantly repeating, "What will Signor Prefetto say!" Some of the women, among them Orlanduccio's foster-mother, were tearing their hair and shrieking wildly. ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... march to the sea. He knew that it must be made sooner or later, and he knew, too, that its commencement would mark the beginning of the end of his association with Miss Harding, and that after that was ended life would be a dreary waste. ...
— The Mucker • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Moses, who gave so many imperishable things to his people, did not also give them the knowledge of fried fish, so that they might obey his behest, and rejoice, before the Lord. Nay, was it not because, while the manna fell, there could be no lack of fish to fry, that they lingered forty years in a dreary wilderness? Other delicious things there are in Jewish cookery—Lockschen, which are the apotheosis of vermicelli, Ferfel, which are Lockschen in an atomic state, and Creplich, which are triangular meat-pasties, and Kuggol, to which pudding has a far-away resemblance; and there ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... windows. It was a lonesome sound to a little girl so far from her mother and father, and Faith was already thinking to herself that this big house, with its shining yellow floors, its white window curtains, and its nearness to a well-traveled road, was a very dreary place compared to her cabin home, when her chamber door opened and in came her Aunt Prissy, smiling and happy as if a rainy day was just what she ...
— A Little Maid of Ticonderoga • Alice Turner Curtis
... killed at this moment will not have to pay their landlord. On reaching the Rond Point I can distinctly perceive a compact crowd round the Triumphal Arch, and I meet some tired National Guards who are returning from the battle. They are ragged, dusty, and dreary. "What has happened?"—"We are betrayed!" says one.—"Death to the ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... continued the Egyptian, in a tone of sadness. 'He must fasten his hope to something: is our common nature that you inherit when, aghast and terrified to see that in which you have been taught to place your faith swept away, you float over a dreary and shoreless sea of incertitude, you cry for help, you ask for some plank to cling to, some land, however dim and distant, to attain. Well, then, have not forgotten ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton
... this primitive fashion. The pipes used for opium-smoking in various parts of the East have small bowls; the drug is too costly to be used otherwise than in small portions at a time, and too powerful to need more than a few whiffs to produce the opium-smoker's dreary delirium. ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... and King William Streets, on the north, is the Charing Cross Hospital, founded 1818, and built on the present site in 1831, the architect being Decimus Burton. It is a dreary stuccoed building, with a rounded end, and contains nothing that specially marks it out from other ...
— The Strand District - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant
... of handwork and thought in such arts as we propose to deal with, happy careers may be found as far removed from the dreary routine of hack labour, as from the terrible uncertainty of academic art. It is desirable in every way that men of good education should be brought back into the productive crafts: there are more than enough of us ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... war-tried Loots and Subs. R.N., Thus by the Cam we meet again; And, as in wilder sterner days, We shared the ocean's dreary ways In fellowship of single aim, I never doubt we'll do the same By sunny Cam in happier times; And therefore, if through these my rhymes Some gentle banter slyly flits, Forgive ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... dim recesses A dreary dawning seems to glow! And even down the deep abysses Its melancholy quiverings throw! Here smoke is boiling, mist exhaling; Here from a vapory veil it gleams, Then, a fine thread of light, goes trailing, Then gushes up in fiery streams. The valley, ...
— Faust • Goethe
... dull and dreary, And chilly winds and eerie Are sweeping through the tall oak trees that fringe the orchard lane. They send the dead leaves flying, And with a mournful crying They dash the western window-panes with slanting lines of rain. My ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... days of dreary waiting, of slow, harassing convalescence. The patient did not seem to be alive to any outside thought. He gained strength very slowly, but he lay always silent, asking no questions, only when Mr. Linton entered the room showing any sign of interest. The ...
— A Little Bush Maid • Mary Grant Bruce
... indeed a formidable-looking barrier, this vast expanse of swamp, that stretched itself, mile after mile, right athwart the party's course, and its aspect was as dreary and depressing as one could well imagine. All along its margin the soil was soft, boggy and treacherous, to such an extent, indeed, that while making a preliminary investigation of the ground before definitely ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... kept his word; he took pains to be contented, and never said another word about Versailles, but tried to get all the pleasure he could from the dreary old palace and its garden, so different from that at Versailles, where the Dauphin had so much ground in which to work. Here in the garden, there was only one small corner set aside for the use of the royal family. This was surrounded by iron palings, through ...
— Ten Boys from History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... can do to avoid falling under the dominion of these uncanny fears and fancies, as we fall from middle age to age. A dreary, dispirited, unhappy, peevish old man or old woman is a very miserable spectacle; while, at the same time, generous, courteous, patient, modest, tender old age is one of the most beautiful things in the ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... in a strange land, the exile had again set foot on his native soil. He heard again the language of his nursery. He saw again the scenery and the architecture which were inseparably associated in his mind with the recollections of childhood and the sacred feeling of home; the dreary mounds of sand, shells and weeds, on which the waves of the German Ocean broke; the interminable meadows intersected by trenches; the straight canals; the villas bright with paint and adorned with quaint images and inscriptions. ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 4 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... wily Asquith, the eloquent yet unsubstantial George, and the immobile Grey, vanished out of his mind; all those representative exponents of the way things are done in Great Britain faded in the glow of his imaginative effort; he forgot the dreary debates, the floundering newspapers, the "bluffs," the intrigues, the sly bargains of the week-end party, the "schoolboy honour" of grown men, the universal weak dishonesty in thinking; he thought simply of a simplified and ideal government that governed. He thought ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... reading and even for writing. But in winter it was different. None of the railways now connecting the university town with the outside world had then been constructed, save that to the southward; and, therefore, during those long winters there was at least twice a week a dreary drive in wagon or sleigh sometimes taking all the better hours of the day, in order to reach the train from Binghamton to Syracuse. Coming out of my lecture-room Friday evening or Saturday morning, I was conveyed through nearly twenty-five miles of mud and slush or sleet and snow. On one ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... the army, sad and spiritless, turned its face toward the Loire, and marched—without music! Yes, one noted that detail. It was a funeral march; that is what it was. A long, dreary funeral march, with never a shout or a cheer; friends looking on in tears, all the way, enemies laughing. We reached Gien at last—that place whence we had set out on our splendid march toward Rheims ...
— Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc Volume 2 • Mark Twain
... The sleet and rain come driving down. Everything is raw and cold; everybody wet or damp. The passengers in wet mackintoshes, and the seamen in wet tarpaulins; Gravesend, with its dirty side to the river, and its dreary mud-bank exposed to sight; the alternate drizzle and down-pour; the muddle and confusion of the deck;—all this presented anything but an agreeable picture to look at. So I speedily leave the deck, in order to make a better acquaintance with what is to be ...
— A Boy's Voyage Round the World • The Son of Samuel Smiles
... "Crucianti" may mean either "tormenting" the spectator by reason of the slowness of its pace, or galling to the rider. "Quadrupedanti crucianti cauterio" is a phrase, both in sound and meaning, much resembling what our song-books call the "galloping dreary dun."] ...
— The Captiva and The Mostellaria • Plautus
... grave assent, but all the time I was thinking the day when that house ceased to haunt our offices, would be a very dreary one for the wags amongst our clerks. "Yes, I certainly shall advise Miss Blake to sell," repeated ...
— The Uninhabited House • Mrs. J. H. Riddell
... barren desert of polytheism—dark and dreary as were its gloomy domains—there were still, however, to be found some few oases of truth. The philosophers and sages of antiquity had, in the course of their learned researches, aided by the light of nature, discovered something of those inestimable truths ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... yours, too, Lee," she exclaimed, so earnestly that he felt his heart quiver. "I want to be happy; I want to be loved; I don't want to live a life of just dreary commonplaceness, alone, uncared for, with no outlook, with no prospect of joys. I want the most there is in happiness—every girl wants that; and this monotonous existence has been robbing me, stifling me, until sometimes I've been wild enough ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... me, who am lifeless and dead, back from the abode below, and hath brought me again into upper air, let him pay full penalty with his own death in the dreary shades beneath livid Styx. Behold, counter to my will and purpose, I must declare some bitter tidings. For as ye go away from this house ye will come to the narrow path of a grove, and will be a prey to demons all ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... stood out at every angle, many having fallen as far as they could, but only to be supported by their fellows. And as the boat went swiftly on in obedience to the sturdily-tugged oars, Nic forgot his troubles in wonder at the strangeness of the scene through which he passed, for it was dreary, horrible, and beautiful all in one. Rotting vegetation supplied the rich, muddy soil from which rose vine and creeper to climb far on high, and then, finding no further support, throw themselves into the air, to hang and swing where the bright sunshine penetrated. ...
— Nic Revel - A White Slave's Adventures in Alligator Land • George Manville Fenn
... me straight into one of the rooms at St. Crux—a room about as long as your street here—so dreary, so dirty, and so dreadfully cold that I shiver at the bare recollection of it. Miss Garth was for getting out of it again as speedily as possible, and so was I. But the housekeeper declined to let us off without first looking at a singular piece of furniture, the only ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... innocent child, who is suddenly snatched away, by her evil star, from the grandparents who adore her, and transferred to the care of an aunt and uncle. Monsieur Rogron and his sister Sylvia. A hard, gloomy couple, these two; retired shopkeepers, who live in a dreary house in the back streets of a dreary country town. Their celibacy weighs heavily upon them; they are miserly, and absurdly vain; morose, ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... thunderbolt, but these were not the names applicable to Him that rideth upon the heavens of heavens, which were of old. Again, when after a wild and tearful night the sun dawned in the morning, smiling on man—when after a dreary and deathlike winter spring came again with its sunshine and flowers, there were feelings of joy and gratitude, of love and adoration in the heart of every human being; but though there were names for the sun ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... enter into the same societies, I frequent the same scenes, and I wonder what it was that once entertained me. Yes, Matilda, the enchantment is dissolved. All the gay colours that anon played upon the objects around me, are fled. Chaos is come again. The world is become all dreary solitude and impenetrable darkness. I am like the poor mariner, whose imagination was for a moment caught with the lofty sound of the thunder, round whom the sheeted lightning gilded the foaming waves, and who then sinks for ...
— Italian Letters, Vols. I and II • William Godwin
... Some late excellent(3) Pamphlets, wherein these Gentlemen's political Principles are fully and clearly explained, shew of what signal Advantage it had been to the Numbers, Industry, Health, Wealth, and Beauty of this Kingdom, to indulge them a Property, even in our uncultivated Mountains, dreary Wastes, and noxious Marshes: Which Measure, should it appear in a true Light to our worthy Representatives, we may in a few Years more, hope to see Ireland one of the most beautiful, best-improved, best-conditioned Islands in the Universe. Our Bench is adorned ...
— An Essay on the Antient and Modern State of Ireland • Henry Brooke |
