"Squalid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that in this age, and especially in this country, there is an incessant flux and reflux of public opinion. Questions which in their day assumed a most threatening aspect have now nearly gone from the memory of men. They are "volcanoes burnt out, and on the lava and ashes and squalid scoria of old eruptions grow the peaceful olive, the cheering vine, and the sustaining corn." Such, in my opinion, will prove to be the fate of the present sectional excitement should those who wisely seek to apply the remedy continue always to confine their efforts within the pale ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 5: James Buchanan • James D. Richardson
... carried off to the Holborn Union; when the last clerk shall have engrossed the last parchment behind the last splash on the last of the mud-stained windows, which, all through the miry year, are pilloried out of recognition in Gray's Inn-lane. Then, shall a squalid little trench, with rank grass and a pump in it, lying between the coffee-house and South- square, be wholly given up to cats and rats, and not, as now, have its empire divided between those animals and a few briefless bipeds—surely called to the Bar by voices of deceiving ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... era dawned for Israel, too. The sun of humanity sent a few of its rays into the squalid Ghetto. Its walls fell before the trumpet blast of deliverance. On all sides sounded the cry for liberty. The brotherhood of man, embracing all, did not exclude storm-baptized Israel. The old synagogue had to keep pace with modern demands, and was arrayed in a new garb. Among those who designed ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... a whole; he did not fully realize his opportunities of individualism and discovery. He stood in his somber forest as the traveler sometimes stands in a village on the Alps when the mist has shrouded everything, and only the squalid hut, the stony field, the muddy pathway are in view. But suddenly a wind sweeps the fog away. Vast fields of radiant snow and sparkling ice lie before him; profound abysses open at his feet; and as he lifts his eyes the unimaginable peak of the Matterhorn ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... picturesque gorge of Omblze. Coach also to Bourdeaux, 16m. S., passing Saou, 9 m. S. from Crest (see map, p.56). Saou, pronounced Sou, pop. 1200, is a poor dirty village on the Vebre. Inn: H. Lattard. Mixed up with and built into the surrounding squalid houses are the remains of the abbey church and buildings of Saint Tiers, founded in the 9th cent. The best parts are the wall and square tower near the Mairie. The remains of the church are within the court ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... A squalid little town grew up out of the flying gravel as we approached, and we left our state coach at the custom-house, which seemed the chief public edifice. There the inspectors did not go through the form of ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... Considering how squalid many Chinese homes are, it is all the more astonishing to find such deep attachment to them. There exists in the language a definite word for home, in its fullest English sense. As a written character, it is supposed to picture the idea of a family, the component parts being ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... night he was returning to his rooms from the foul haunts of squalid dissipation and living death, when the thought of his own intolerable condition pressed on him with a heavier than usual weight. It was a very cloudy night, and he had long exceeded the usual college hours. The wind tossed about his clothes, and dashed in his face a keen impalpable ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... external encouragement to cring the poison out fully in the most virulent form of the complaint. The great point of 'The Duke of Bermondsey' consisted in the ridiculous contrast it exhibited between the wealth, dignity, and self-importance of the duke himself, and the squalid, miserable, shrinking poverty of the East-end purlieus from which he drew his enormous revenues. Ernest knew a little about the East-end from practical experience; he had gone there often with Ronald, on his rounds of mercy, and ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... in which he lived and carried on his business, still stands on Henley Street, in Stratford, much the same as it was four hundred and fifty years ago. It is a paltry hovel of two low stories, half timbered, with meagre windows, and must have been a squalid abode even in its prime. It is built flush with the sidewalk, having neither vestibule nor entry, and the rough broken pavement of the kitchen is sunken a step lower than the street. A huge open fireplace of unhewn gray stones yawns rudely in the wall ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... this spot, which in the heart of a Christian land retained the vestige of the old idolatry (for just such were the chapels that in the Pagan age were dedicated to the demon-saints of mythology), gathered six or seven miserable and squalid wretches, whom the Curse of the Leper had cut off from mankind. They set up a shrill cry as they turned their ghastly visages towards the horseman; and, without stirring from the spot, stretched out their gaunt arms, and implored charity in the name of the ...
— Zicci, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... from that squalid tenement down there to a place on the committee which was to receive the governor of the state. Over there to the left, next to Barrey's junk shop, was poor Ching Wo's laundry, into which Tom had hurled muddy ...
— Tom Slade with the Colors • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... bringing us nearer and nearer to the loftiest of the Riesengebirg range. Still the population appeared not to diminish. The villages, if poorer and meaner, were not less frequent than ever, and each individual cottage seemed to swarm with inmates. We were, however, greatly struck with the squalid and unhealthy appearance of these poor people. Unlike our own mountaineers, the inhabitants of the Bohemian hills seem to be a race every way inferior to the occupants of the plain. The men are short, thin, and apparently feeble, ...
— Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, Visited in 1837. Vol. II • G. R. Gleig
... was, at the time of which I write, occupied by the teachers' rooms, the dinner- room and kitchens, and some smaller bedrooms. On going into this building, I found one part, that nearest to the high road, converted into a poor kind of public-house, then to let, and having all the squalid appearance of a deserted place, which rendered it difficult to judge what it would look like when neatly kept up, the broken panes replaced in the windows, and the rough-cast (now cracked and discoloured) made white and whole. ...
— The Life of Charlotte Bronte - Volume 1 • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the intellectual life amid the ferociously squalid surroundings of Morano argues an enviable philosophic calm—a detachment bordering on insensibility. But perhaps we are too easily influenced by externals, in these degenerate times. Or things may have been better in days of old—who can tell? One always likes ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... moment recall the Bourbons, that Napoleon executed the Duc d'Enghien. It was to make an end of claims older than his own upon the allegiance of a people essentially and naturally monarchical. It was a crime, but it was not a squalid and foolish crime like the murder of Louis XVI. It belonged to the same category with the execution of Conradin of Hohenstaufen by Charles of Anjou—not, indeed, as to its mere atrocity, but as to its motives and its intent. It announced to the French people the advent ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... is unconnected with any honourable action, whose whole life has been one scene of skulking from dangers into which he had drawn others, and who is occupied from one end of the year to the other in devising plans of drawing enormous fortunes from squalid beggary."—Dr. Maginn. ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... Luck gave the squalid huts a long stare and turned away toward the corral and a low shed that served as a stable. A rusty old mower and a toothless rake and a rickety buckboard stood baking in the sun, and a few stunted hens fluttered away from their ...
— The Heritage of the Sioux • B.M. Bower
... were weary from dancing and singing all day in the streets, it would be far pleasanter to drift about on the canal in the evening than to spend it tossing about on the husk mattresses in Giovanni's squalid house, and the children listened with eager ...
— The Italian Twins • Lucy Fitch Perkins
... for two days coal-heaving, and the night before he had found a cheap, squalid lodging where at any rate he was protected from the inclemencies of the weather; but to-night he was expecting Blakeney at the appointed hour and place. He had secured a cart of the ordinary ramshackle pattern used for carrying coal. Unfortunately ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... into hysterical screaming. Then the terror passed; and she saw, in a single piercing flash of insight, that what she had mistaken for ugliness was simply an impalpable manifestation of beauty. Beauty! Why it was everywhere! It was with her now in this squalid house, in the presence of this crippled old woman, unmoved by death, inured to poverty, screwing, grinding, pinching, like flint to the crying baby, and yet cherishing the blooms of her red geranium, her passionate horror of the ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... moved about the squalid rooms, arranging the primroses in broken bowls, and even teacups, with a sort of ministering grace I had never noticed in her before. Mother had always praised her nursing. She said her touch was so soft and firm, and her movement so noiseless; and she had once advised me ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... his steps Blythe now moved rapidly through the town by way of its landward environs. He passed through the squalid quarters of the improvident negroes and on beyond the picturesque shacks of the poorer mestizos. From many points along his course he could see, through the umbrageous glades, the house of Frank Goodwin on its wooded ...
— Cabbages and Kings • O. Henry
... be in the open was infinitely better than to be eating his heart out in a squalid prison camp. His health stood less chance of being undermined. As to the shells, he had grown so used to that form of danger that it hardly disturbed him ...
— Army Boys on the Firing Line - or, Holding Back the German Drive • Homer Randall
... the mere remnants and shadows of enemies. They are wholly disheartened and discouraged, their strength and energy, both of soul and body, being spent and gone, through the cold, the hunger, and the squalid misery they have endured. Their joints are benumbed, their sinews stiffened, and their forms emaciated. Their armor is shattered and broken, their horses are lamed, and all their equipments worn out and ...
— Hannibal - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... there was an amount of privation and suffering among that portion of the population connected with the lace trade, unknown in other parts of the kingdom, indeed, in the civilized world. . . . Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... little shop, De Vac threaded his way through the dirty lanes and alleys of ancient London, lighted at far intervals by an occasional smoky lantern, until he came to a squalid tenement but a short ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... from the inspector with great regret. For the rest of his journey he was alone. It was his first visit to the part of Ireland he was travelling through, and he looked with keen interest at the bogs, the scattered cottages, the lean cattle, scanty pasture lands, potato fields, patches of oats, and squalid towns. ...
— The Simpkins Plot • George A. Birmingham
... table, and walked round the bare, squalid room, listening attentively at the door, through which Brogard has just disappeared, and whence only muttered oaths and shuffling footsteps could be heard. He also ran up the rickety steps that led to ...
— The Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... door, into the long, narrow "Opera House." It was a dirty, cheerless hole, in spite of the brilliance of many oil lamps, shining among the flimsy decorations. At the end of the tunnel-shaped room was a rude stage, festooned with gaudy, squalid hangings, beneath which a painted siren was singing a song which Simon did not listen to. The floor of the auditorium was filled with chairs and tables in disorderly array, the occupants of which seemed to ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... true fortitude! Even Hawkhurst, though more commanding than the rest, with all his daring mien and scowl of defiance, looked nothing more than a distinguished ruffian. With the exception of Francisco, the prisoners had wholly neglected their personal appearance; and in them the squalid and sordid look of the mendicant seemed allied with ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... said about the healthy appearance and happy life of the members of this Colony, but as they have not been brought from the unhealthy, squalid misery of the city, this is not of so much interest. The women work in the vegetable gardens and with the stock, as well as in the home; and the older children help ...
— The Social Work of the Salvation Army • Edwin Gifford Lamb
... melted; to the north was a stretch of monotonous ground overgrown with a new suburb; but that was the camp of Sennacherib, the Assyrian whom the Angel of the Lord smote and his army of one hundred and four score and five thousand, before the morning. Yonder were squalid streets, older than any others. But the Kings had walked them; the Prophets had helped wear trenches in their stones; the heroes and the strong-hearted women of the ancient days had gone that way. ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... Tarzan had proceeded some two squares through the dense shadows of the squalid old tenements which line this dismal way when he was attracted by screams and cries for help from the third floor of an opposite building. The voice was a woman's. Before the echoes of her first cries had died Tarzan was bounding up the stairs ...
— The Return of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... when men were scarcely ever induced to travel by liberal curiosity, or by the pursuit of gain, it was better that the rude inhabitant of the North should visit Italy and the East as a pilgrim, than that he should never see anything but those squalid cabins and uncleared woods amidst which he was born. In times when life and when female honour were exposed to daily risk from tyrants and marauders, it was better that the precinct of a shrine should be regarded with an irrational awe, than that there should be no refuge ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the ground.' Who shall trust a man's nimble eyes after this, when habit and credulity have taught him? Not an inch nearer the ground goes the horse of fact at a gallop than at a walk. But Dr. Holmes's vigilance helps him to somewhat squalid purpose in his studies of New England inland life. Much careful literature besides has been spent, after the example of Elsie Venner and the Autocrat, upon the cottage worldliness, the routine of abundant and common comforts achieved by a distressing ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... quick footsteps, and loud, merry voices. Traffic went on in the crowded mart, and pleasure was pursued in the luxurious halls of the noble. Here, flower-crowned guests reclined at the banquet, listening to sweet music, while yonder the squalid miser counted his gold, and there a fair young mother smiled upon her children. Just the same passions crowded into human hearts that day, just the same delusions were followed, the same pleasures felt, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 5 November 1848 • Various
... honeysuckle, reminded me of Lady Juliana,[B] who, when she said she could live in a desert with her lover, thought that it was a "sort of place full of roses." ... These laborers' cottages were certainly the poor dwellings of very poor people, but there was nothing unsightly, repulsive, or squalid about them—on the contrary, a look of order, of tidy neatness about the little houses, that added the peculiarly English element of comfort and cleanliness to the picturesqueness of their fragrant ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... was about the poorest part of the London suburbs then, and the house was a mean small tenement, with a wretched little back-garden abutting on a squalid court. Here was no place for new acquaintances to him: no boys were near with whom he might hope to become in any way familiar. A washerwoman lived next door, and a Bow-Street officer lived over the way. Many, many times has he spoken to me of this, and how he seemed at once to fall into a solitary ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... and shrunken limbs; it was then transfixed with spears, and allowed to remain exposed for three days. An open grave, the upturned soil of which seemed almost entirely composed of dead men's remains, waited to receive the dishonoured corpse, over which three or four Etas, squalid and degraded beings, were mounting guard, smoking their pipes by a scanty charcoal fire, and bandying obscene jests. It was a hideous and ghastly warning, had any cared to read the lesson; but the passers-by ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... those who had encouraged each other to trample on their lawful and hereditary sovereign. By a pathetic appeal to their humanity, he extorted that pity which is seldom refused to the fallen fortunes of a king; and while they beheld the abject posture and squalid appearance of the prisoner, his tears, his chains, and the marks of ignominious stripes, it was impossible to forget how recently they had adored the divine splendor of his diadem and purple. But an angry murmur arose in the assembly as soon as he presumed to vindicate his conduct, and to applaud ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... intemperate. He neglected his business, and his affairs went to gradual decay. He is now a drunkard, his property is wasted, his parents have died of broken hearts, his wife is pale and emaciated, his children ragged, and squalid, and ignorant. He is the tenant of some little cabin that poverty has erected to house him from the storm and the tempest. He is useless, and worse than useless: he is a pest to all around him. All the feelings of his nature are blunted; he has lost all shame; he procures ...
— Select Temperance Tracts • American Tract Society
... because he has—changed his mind. We can feel neither approval nor disapproval, sympathy nor antipathy, in such a deplorable conjunction of circumstances. All we wish is that we had not been called upon to contemplate it.[2] Maeterlinck, like Shakespeare, was simply dallying with the idea of a squalid heroism—so squalid, indeed, that neither he nor his predecessor had the courage to carry ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... Liege. For the most part the old city of lofty houses clings to a cliffside on the left bank, crowned by an ancient citadel of no modern defensive value. Whatever picturesqueness Liege may have possessed is effaced by the squalid and dilapidated condition of its poorer quarters. To the north broad fertile plains extend into central Belgium, southward on the opposite bank of the Meuse, the Ardennes present a hilly forest, stream-watered region. ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... horse at once," remarked Agias, a little abruptly. "Time presses." And he turned on his heel, and leaving the boy gaping after him, went into the squalid ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... considered this, both as scanty in itself, conferred on a few, and as a bribe for betraying Marcus Manlius, the sedition was irritated by the remedy. And now the crowd of Manlius' partisans was become more remarkable, both by their squalid attire and by the appearance of persons under prosecutions, and terror being removed by the resignation of the dictatorship, after the triumph had set both the tongues and thoughts of ...
— The History of Rome, Books 01 to 08 • Titus Livius
... for the advantage of individuals to be thought poor, so it was best for villages to appear squalid. The Marquis of Argenson writes in his journal: "An officer of the election has come into the village where my country-house is, and has said that the taille of the parish would be much raised this year; he had noticed that the peasants looked fatter than ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... not an amusing street, but poor and squalid, full of small lodging-houses, and little dingy shops; very few people were about, and in spite of Joshua's warning no one seemed even to notice ...
— Our Frank - and other stories • Amy Walton
... affluent stone piles on the boulevard to the cheap flat buildings of a cross street. His way lay through a territory of startling contrasts of wealth and squalor. The public part of it—the street and the sidewalks—was equally dirty and squalid, once off the boulevard. The cool lake wind was piping down the cross streets, driving before it waste paper and dust. In his preoccupation he stumbled ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... and color carried by wayfarers met the eye at every turn and made the whole scene appear like fairyland. But, alas, the following morning I was undeceived, for daylight revealed to my vision a very squalid and dirty city. We were carried to the largest hotel in Shanghai, where it seemed as though I were almost receiving a home greeting when the sign over the door told me that it was the Astor House! Still another surprise awaited me. Although ...
— As I Remember - Recollections of American Society during the Nineteenth Century • Marian Gouverneur
... was really not used to making any decision as definite and important as that of going out West alone. She had never been farther west than Jersey City; and her conception of the West was a hazy one of vast plains and rough mountains, squalid towns, cattle herds, and uncouth ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... shillings, and pence. Not so the Irish tenant. He has made what he calls improvements, he claims a quasi-ownership in the land, and has the characteristic Celtic attachment for the patch of ground forming his holding, however squalid it may be, however inadequate for his support. In short, in Ireland there is a dual ownership—that of the proprietor, who has no interest in the soil so long as the tenant pays his rent and fulfils the conditions ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... faded, and before his eyes stretched the disorder of his squalid room. He strove in vain to see Tahiti again. He knew there was singing among the trees and that the maidens were dancing in the moonlight, but he could not see them. He could see only the littered writing-table, the empty space where the type-writer had stood, and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... effect of the champagne, for Buel went back to his squalid room with his mind in the clouds. He wondered if this condition was the first indication of the swelled head Brant had talked about. Buel worked harder than ever at his proofs, and there was some growling at head-quarters because of the numerous corrections he made. These changes ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... CosmoIII. The group of the Wrestlers, exquisitely finished, wants animation. The Dancing Fawn, attributed to Praxiteles, is one of the most exquisite works of art that remains of the ancients. The head and arms were restored by Michael Angelo. In the Knife-Grinder, the bony square form, the squalid countenance, and the short neglected hair, express admirably the character of a slave, still more plainly written on his coarse hard hands and wrinkled brow. Among the paintings, six are by Raphael—all gems. 1120 Portrait of a Lady, painted when ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... these gipsies, amongst whom Meg Merrilies was a kind of queen, had lived for a long time unmolested in a few huts in a glen upon the estate of Ellangowan, at a place called Derncleugh. It was a miserable and squalid village, but for all that Mr. Bertram was determined to evict them and all their poor belongings. He was no doubt doing as the law directed him, but, as far as concerned the inhabitants of Derncleugh, he was acting ...
— The Junior Classics, V5 • Edited by William Patten
... Cycones him dismay, And blacke Laestrigones, a people stout; Then greedie Scilla, under whom there bay Manie great bandogs, which her gird about; 540 Then doo the AEtnean Cyclops him affray, And deep Charybdis gulphing in and out; Lastly the squalid lakes of Tartarie, And griesly feends ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... Below us, crowded between the levee and the row of houses, were dozens of squalid market-stalls tended by cotton-clad negroes. Beyond, across the bare Place d'Armes, a blackened gap in the line of houses bore witness to the devastation of the year gone by, while here and there a roof, struck by the setting sun, gleamed fiery red with its new tiles. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... and the fierce sun overhead Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, And the pale weaver, through his windows seen In Spitalfields, look'd ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... of his sin. No Northerner could have come so close to the heart of a Kentucky feud, and revealed it so perfectly, with the whimsicality playing through its carnage, or could have so brought us into the presence of the sardonic comi-tragedy of the squalid little river town where the store-keeping magnate shoots down his drunken tormentor in the arms of the drunkard's daughter, and then cows with bitter mockery the mob that comes ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... administrations. From the time of the Parnell divorce case onwards, the Irish question had brought to Liberals nothing but embarrassment and embitterment. The enthusiasm for Home Rule which grew steadily from 1886 up to the severance between Gladstone and Parnell had vanished in the squalid controversies of the "split." Moreover, now, by the action of Mr. Chamberlain, a new dividing line had been brought into British politics. The cry of Protection seemed in the opinion of all Liberals to menace ruin to British prosperity; ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... could have been white; shattered doors whose proper colour none could tell, and which, standing ajar, seemed to lead to nothing but darkness; weird women and gaunt children imparting a dismal life to the rows of ungainly dwellings;—all these made up a picture of squalid woe such as might well have appalled a stouter heart than poor Lady Oldfield's. And was she to find her delicately-nurtured son in such a place as this? They turned down one street, under the wondering eyes of ...
— Frank Oldfield - Lost and Found • T.P. Wilson
... come with me to the Rue Mouffetard, where there is a ball frequented solely by the lowest and poorest class of Paris strugglers for bread, such as the ragpickers and the street-sweepers. At first thought it seems improbable that the squalid wretches who can barely earn sous enough to live on, to whom fifty cents a day are fine wages, should have a ball. But all things are possible in Paris in the way of popular amusements. In the Rue Mouffetard, then, near the Rue Pot de Fer, we read on the wall of a gloomy building a yellow advertisement ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... now belongs to children. The church is at one end, bizarre buildings are on either side, the Dante statue is in the middle, and harsh gravel covers the ground. Everywhere are children, all dirty, and all rather squalid and mostly bow-legged, showing that they were of the wrong age to take their first steps on Holy Saturday at noon. The long brown building on the right, as we face S. Croce, is a seventeenth-century palazzo. For the rest, the architecture is chiefly ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... the hearth of his squalid mud hut with the mummies of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the all-powerful builders of the everlasting pyramids. Customs, conventions, codes, dynasties, states, nations come and go in incontinent succession. But, stronger than these, never disappearing, forever growing, from the earliest ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... morning among his foreign parishioners, who lived in the squalid section of the town, across the river. A frugal, law-abiding lot, they furnished the brawn needed in the three pulp factories and lived a life apart from the balance of the towns-people, bitterly but voicelessly ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... man, whose youth and courage are at their zenith, and whose brain is tuned to concert pitch, is thrown neck and crop out of squalid isolation into the melting pot of Manhattan, puzzling problems of readjustment must follow. Samson's half-starved mind was reaching out squid-like tentacles in every direction. He was saying little, seeing ...
— The Call of the Cumberlands • Charles Neville Buck
... house was set half a mile farther on in the narrowing ravine, and on the way we passed a desolate dwelling, squalid, set in the marsh, its battered verandas and open doors disclosing a wretched mingling of native bareness with poverty-stricken European fittings. On the tottering veranda sat a ragged Frenchman, bearded and shaggy-haired, and beside ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... which shone over Dr Humphreys' door at night was the one and only picturesque feature of Paradise Street—surely so named by an individual of singularly caustic and sardonic humour, for anything less suggestive of the delights of Paradise than the squalid and malodorous street so named it would indeed be difficult to conceive—and in the course of the four years during which it had been in position that lamp had become a familiar object to every man, woman, and child within a radius of at least a mile; for the ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... property of the plantation lords of the lowlands of North Carolina, who correspond to the pinchbeck barons of the rice districts of South Carolina. As there, the whites and negros we saw were of the lowest, most squalid type of humanity. The people of the middle and upland districts of North Carolina are a much superior race to the same class in South Carolina. They are mostly of Scotch-Irish descent, with a strong infusion of English-Quaker blood, and resemble much the best of the Virginians. ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy
... compound thus enclosed, and almost overtopping the cabin, were half a dozen peach and plum trees, veritable geyser jets of pink and white bloom. Behind, in a small clearing, was the stubble of last year's corn. Squalid and poor and mean enough a dwelling, a shiftless clearing, a dirty family of children—yes. But under its geyser jets of blossom that little gray cabin was the essence of the picturesque, with the forest wall rising ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... lost all his money in the Anglo-Bengalee Company (which, of course, went to pieces on Tigg's death), he sank lower and lower, till at last, a drunken, squalid old man, he eked out a miserable existence writing whining begging letters to the very people whom he had once labored so hard to ...
— Tales from Dickens • Charles Dickens and Hallie Erminie Rives
... confiscation had proceeded. Passengers hesitated to address their most intimate friends on meeting; the extent of calamity had rendered men suspicious even of those they loved most. Every one assumed the coarsest dress, and the most squalid appearance; an elegant exterior would have been the certain forerunner of destruction. At one hour only were any symptoms of animation seen: it was when the victims were conveyed to execution; the humane fled with horror from the sight, ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... and stain— London's squalid cope of pain— Pure as starlight, bold as love, Honouring our scant poplar-grove, That most heavenly voice of earth Thrills in passion, grief or mirth, Laves our poison'd air Life's ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... when in the neighborhood of buffalo, they would approach quite near to look at me, gazing intently with their great round eyes, then suddenly leap aside, and stretch lightly away over the prairie, as swiftly as a racehorse. Squalid, ruffianlike wolves sneaked through the hollows and sandy ravines. Several times I passed through villages of prairie dogs, who sat, each at the mouth of his burrow, holding his paws before him in a supplicating attitude, and yelping away most vehemently, energetically whisking his little tail with ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 7 • Charles H. Sylvester
... doorway and looked up and down the street with open disgust. "Come on down to Picardo's, Jack; what the deuce is there here to hold you? How a man that knows horses and the range, can stand for this—" he waved a gloved hand at the squalid street—"is something I can't understand. To me, it's like hell with the lid off. What's holding ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... added to the horrible effect, for the executioner's arm and scourge were of tremendous size; Sir Josseline stood miraculously tall, and the Jew, crouching, supplicating, sprawling, was the most distorted squalid figure, eyes ever beheld, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. IX - [Contents: Harrington; Thoughts on Bores; Ormond] • Maria Edgeworth
... he draws a picture of the Rome he knew, its social life and its physical features, its everyday sights and sounds, that brings it before us more clearly and sharply than even the Rome of Horace or Cicero. The drip of the water from the aqueduct that passed over the gate from which the dusty squalid Appian Way stretched through its long suburb; the garret under the tiles where, just as now, the pigeons sleeked themselves in the sun and the rain drummed on the roof; the narrow crowded streets, half choked with builders' carts, ankle-deep ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail
... blood and spoils they unveil the countenance, and proclaim that they have at length paid the debt of existence, and have proved themselves worthy of their country and parents. The cowardly and effeminate continue in their squalid disguise. The bravest among them wear also an iron ring [171] (a mark of ignominy in that nation) as a kind of chain, till they have released themselves by the slaughter of a foe. Many of the Catti assume this distinction, ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... descent into the depths of Deptford, how he set about humanising the shoeless, starving, conscience-little waifs who were drafted into his school, and how, before many months had passed, he never walked through the squalid streets of his own quarter without two or three loving little fellows all in tatters trying to touch the hem of his garment, while a group of the more timid followed him admiringly afar off. From the children, his good influence extended to the parents; and it was an almost every-day ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... perhaps is the greatest. Amon, originally an obscure provincial god of Thebes, became the supreme divinity of Egypt. Bel, originally a local god of Nippur, became in Babylon Lord of Hosts. But Jahveh, originally the tutelary god of squalid nomads, became the Deity of Christendom. The fact is one that any scholarship must admit. It is the indisputable ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... throat it was clear that her assailant had nearly strangled her. His intention was obvious. Though living in a poor room amid squalid surroundings, neighbors testified that Mrs. Mack is comparatively rich, being in fact a female miser, and this was doubtless known to her assailant. The old woman testified that she kept one hundred dollars in bills in the bureau drawer. ...
— Mark Mason's Victory • Horatio Alger
... and manner of Cesarini were so calm and rational that they changed the first impulse of Maltravers, which was that of securing a maniac; while the Italian's emaciated countenance, his squalid garments, the air of penury and want diffused over his whole appearance, irresistibly invited compassion. With all the more anxious and pressing thoughts that weighed upon him, Maltravers could not refuse the conference thus demanded. He dismissed the attendants, and motioned Cesarini ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book XI • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... knew to be the proprietor of the resort into which I had determined to penetrate. Also, from my early youth I had heard Jacob Ensley and the Last Chance spoken of in tones of dread disapproval. Before I should become really frightened I hurried down the hill, past the squalid and tumble-down mill cottages which I had never really seen before, where it seemed to me millions of children swarmed in and around and about, and at last arrived at the infamous social ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... wretchedness, which a fertile imagination might conceive to be combined with this social atmosphere! Convenient alike to every condition of humanity, it might be considered as flowing at once from the dungeons of despairing convicts, the cellars and garrets of squalid poverty, the busy haunts of avarice, the waste of luxury, and ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... degrees, M'bo sighted the gleam of fires through the tree stems away to the left, and we bore down on it, listening to its drum. Viewed through the bars of the tree stems the scene was very picturesque. The village was just a collection of palm mat-built huts, very low and squalid. In its tiny street, an affair of some sixty feet long and twenty wide, were a succession of small fires. The villagers themselves, however, were the striking features in the picture. They were painted vermilion all over their nearly naked bodies, and were dancing ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... the back of a long, level-topped hill, which rises solitary to the height of some five hundred feet above the far-stretching plain. Kipling likens it to a great ship, up the sides of which the steep road slopes like a gangway. At the foot lies the modern village, squalid but picturesque. ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... if anything, dirtier and more squalid than the first and second. There were several small rooms on the third floor, into one of which Mr. Tucker pushed his way. "Come in," he said. "Now you're at home. This is goin' to ...
— The Young Musician - or, Fighting His Way • Horatio Alger
... the Ville Lumiere resembled nothing so much as a huge world fair, with enormous caravanserais, gigantic booths, gaudy merry-go-rounds, squalid taverns, and huge inns. Every place of entertainment was crowded, and congregations patiently awaited their turn in the street, undeterred by rain or wind or snow, offering absurdly high prices for scant accommodation and disheartened at having their offers refused. ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... remain thus, I thought; the world is dead, and this squalid attire is a fitter mourning garb than the foppery of a black suit. And thus, methinks, I should have remained, had not hope, without which I do not believe man could exist, whispered to me, that, in such a plight, I should ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... of a brutal husband, she was spellbound. For years she had been deserted, but when one day he was supposed to be dying she was sent for that he might beg her forgiveness. She went and found that for four years he had been stone blind and that he had sunk so low that she shrank from the squalid house in which he was living. She took him away and stayed with him until his death, making the last days of ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... affectation of the modern decadent, and with him so genuine, grew upon him, and dragged him into more and more sorry corners of a life which was never exactly "gay" to him. His father, when he died, left him in possession of an old dock, where for a time he lived in a mouldering house, in that squalid part of the East End which he came to know so well, and to feel so strangely at home in. He drank the poisonous liquors of those pot-houses which swarm about the docks; he drifted about in whatever company came in his way; he let heedlessness ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... beard] A beard tied would give a very new air to that face, which had never been seen but with the beard loose, long, and squalid. (1773) ...
— Johnson's Notes to Shakespeare Vol. I Comedies • Samuel Johnson
... they were old hearth-mates of mine! Lost people, eyeing me with such a stare! Patient, satiric, devilish, divine; A gaze of hopeless envy, squalid care, Hatred, and thwarted love, ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... possible," asks an ancient philosopher, "that a man who has nothing, who is naked, houseless, without a hearth, squalid, without a slave, without a city, can pass a life that flows easily? See, God has sent you a man to show you that it is possible. Look at me who am without a city, without a house, without possessions, without a slave; ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... this evening, after he had finished touching the people, a man, dressed like a peasant in a loose brown frock, worsted stockings, and brogues, apparently of the lowest order, dark, ill-looking, and squalid, approached the Confessional to reveal some great crime. The confession was very long, so was the admonition of the Cardinal which followed it. The appearance of the Cardinal is particularly dignified and noble, and, as he bent down his head, joining it to that of this ruffian-like ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... a vicious temper. Comparatively, the worst horse in his string was a gentleman. Horse-trading and whiskey go arm-in-arm, accompanied by their copartners, profanity and tobacco-chewing. In the right hand of the horse-trader is guile and in his left hand is trickery. And this squalid, slovenly-booted, and sombrero'd gentleman of the outlands lived down to and even beneath all the vicarious traditions of his kind, a pariah of the waste places, tolerated in the environs of this or that desert town chiefly because of Young Pete, who was popular, despite the fact that he bartered ...
— The Ridin' Kid from Powder River • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... days he appeared in woman's attire, and even passed through the midst of his enemies unknown. But understanding his disguise was discovered, he assumed the habit of a travelling mountaineer, and wandered about among the woods and heaths, with a matted beard, and squalid looks, exposed to hunger, thirst, and weariness, and in continual danger of being apprehended. He was obliged to trust his life to the fidelity of above fifty individuals, and many of these were in the lowest paths of fortune. They knew that a price of thirty thousand pounds was set ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... the world can ill afford to lose. It is so bad because it is so good. Come here!" he drew his friend to the big window, and pointed to the mountains. "There is an art like those mountains, my boy—lonely, apart from the world; remotely above the squalid ambitions of men; Godlike in its calm strength and peace—an art to which men may look for inspiration and courage and hope. And there is an art that is like Fairlands—petty and shallow and mean—with only the fictitious ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright
... morning in the north east suburbs of London, a vast district many miles away from the London of Mayfair and St. James's, much less known there than the Paris of the Rue de Rivoli and the Champs Elysees, and much less narrow, squalid, fetid and airless in its slums; strong in comfortable, prosperous middle class life; wide-streeted, myriad-populated; well-served with ugly iron urinals, Radical clubs, tram lines, and a perpetual stream of yellow cars; enjoying in its main thoroughfares the luxury of grass-grown ...
— Candida • George Bernard Shaw
... that though wealth and hereditary elevation operate as an apology for many delinquencies, there are some which so irresistibly address themselves to the indignation of mankind, that, like death, they level all distinctions, and reduce their perpetrator to an equality with the most indigent and squalid of his species. Against Mr. Tyrrel, as the tyrannical and unmanly murderer of Emily, those who dared not venture the unreserved avowal of their sentiments muttered curses, deep, not loud; while the ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... of the Trojans, and the ships of the Greeks. Pluto himself, king of the nether world, trembled beneath, and leaped up from his throne, terrified, and shouted aloud, lest earth-shaking Neptune should rend asunder the earth over him, and disclose to mortals and immortals his mansions, terrible, squalid, which even the gods loathe. So great a tumult arose from the gods engaging in combat. Against king Neptune, indeed, stood Phoebus Apollo, having his winged shafts, and against Mars the azure-eyed goddess Minerva. Opposed to Juno stood the goddess of the golden bow, ...
— The Iliad of Homer (1873) • Homer
... must now forget ourselves, and bear the barrow to build the houses of God." The unawakened Lethington, and the gentry at large, merely dilapidated the houses of God, so that they became unsafe, as well as odiously squalid. That such fervent piety should grudge repairs of church buildings (many of them in a wretched state already) is a fact creditable rather to the thrift than to the state of grace of the Reformers. After all their protestations, ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... exiles to whom they afforded a home. There were villages and small towns in the Spanish Netherlands that had been literally depopulated. Large districts of country had gone to waste, and cane-brakes and squalid morasses usurped the place of yellow harvest-fields. The fog, the wild boar, and the wolf, infested the abandoned homes of the peasantry; children could not walk in safety in the neighbourhood even of the larger cities; wolves littered their young in the deserted farm-houses; two hundred persons, ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... sometimes raised it as high as three hundred thousand, it never fell beneath the smaller number. It may be hoped, and, for the honour of human nature, we are inclined to believe, there was a touch of insanity in this unnatural strain of ferocity; and the wild and squalid features of the wretch appear to have intimated a degree of alienation of mind. Marat was, like Robespierre, a coward. Repeatedly denounced in the Assembly, he skulked instead of defending himself, and lay concealed in some obscure garret or cellar, among his cut-throats, until a storm ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... of Christian truth, charity consists merely in supplying the natural wants of the neighbor by making him more comfortable in his external condition; and this is well, for there is little, if any, use in trying to improve the inner man while the outer is bowed down with want or squalid with impurity. This is the basis of the higher planes of charity, the first in time, though lowest in degree. There are those who think lightly of this form of charity, because it is lowest in degree, forgetting ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... need of such men, of such deeds, we felt more than ever, while compelled to turn a deaf ear to the squalid and shameless beggars of Liverpool, or talking by night in the streets of Manchester to the girls from the Mills, who were strolling bareheaded, with coarse, rude, and reckless air, through the streets, ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... took refuge in curses, with dire threats of violence. Mrs. Fry withdrew, and waiting for nightfall followed the woman: down a winding alley, past rows of rotting tenements, into a cellar below a ginshop. There, in this one squalid room, she found a dozen babies, all tied fast in cribs or chairs, starving, or dying of inattention. The woman, taken by surprise, did not grow violent this time: she fled, and Mrs. Fry, sending for two women Friends, took charge ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 2 of 14 - Little Journeys To the Homes of Famous Women • Elbert Hubbard
... in vain, but at length an old man in squalid attire, with long dishevelled gray locks and matted beard, appeared at the window of the watch ...
— The House of Walderne - A Tale of the Cloister and the Forest in the Days of the Barons' Wars • A. D. Crake
... a squalid hovel, and reeked of the earth out of which it was dug. Beyond the bedding, the red blankets, and the few plates and pots in the packing-case cupboard, there was not a sign of the owner, and Tresler found himself wondering as to what ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... of these great enterprises, which must have been so absorbing of time and energy, this busy man found opportunity and strength to search out the squalid back streets of New York, and to go from house to house of its wretched inhabitants, giving sympathy, speaking words of Christian love and instruction, and where they would receive them leaving the word of ...
— A Story of One Short Life, 1783 to 1818 - [Samuel John Mills] • Elisabeth G. Stryker
... Go thou and view it, All desolately sunk, The circle of the Druid, The cloister of the monk; The abbey boled and squalid, With its bush-maned, staggering wall; Ask by whom these were unhallow'd— Change, change hath ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... his efforts, he was unable to move. He himself was fastened by invisible bonds. And, trembling, obsessed by a monstrous vision, he watched the dismal preparations, the cutting of the condemned men's hair and shirt-collars, the squalid tragedy. ...
— The Crystal Stopper • Maurice LeBlanc
... was more vitally hers than his, to take it at all out of her hands. The early-falling dusk had favored an unnoticed advent for them, and there were other chances that had helped keep unknown their arrival together at Mrs. Westangle's in that squalid carryall, such as Miss Shirley's having managed instantly to slip indoors before the man came out for Verrian's suit-case, and of her having got to her own appointed place long before there was any descent of the company to ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that are most interesting to study. His use of photography in this matter is extraordinarily successful. Prof. Geddes has photographed a scene as it now is, with its background and distance and its squalid foreground, already ruined by the debris of the city—old tin pots and every [Page: 129] kind of rubbish—thrown down by the side of the stream, which is naturally beautiful. By manipulating the photographic plates he wipes out that which he does not want and introduces other features, ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... but on approaching the centre of the City they saw numbers in front of the cafes and even going to the theatre. Flashy carriages of thievish men who had enriched themselves under the new conditions, rolled frequently by. The basis of their power, the squalid element with jealous, insolent eyes, also ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... A squalid, hideous town, where streams run black With vomit of a hundred roaring mills,— Hither occasion calls me; and ev'n here, All in the sable reek that wantonly Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn, One may at least surmise the sky still blue. ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... Italy, there is much to do for womankind. Then, as now, the skies were blue, and the sun was bright and warm; then, as now, did the peasants dance and sing all the way from water-ribbed Venice to fair and squalid Naples, but with a difference. Now, there is a measure of freedom to each and all—then, justice was not only blind but went on crutches, and women were made to suffer because they were women and because they could not defend, ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger
... manager the scenery and appointments were contemptible, and this apparently did not matter a rap. An audience, five-sixths of it British, was enthralled by these players, although the scenery and the furniture of the indoor sets had no pretension to magnificence, were sometimes almost absurdly squalid. ...
— Our Stage and Its Critics • "E.F.S." of "The Westminster Gazette"
... at Liverpool Street. The squalid roofs of north-east London dripped miserably under a leaden sky. Not till the train reached the borders of Suffolk did a glint of sun fall upon meadow and stream; thence onwards the heavens brightened; the risen clouds gleamed above a shining shore. ...
— Our Friend the Charlatan • George Gissing
... the Austrian ozokerite and petroleum industry with the American. It is a good illustration of the difference between the lower class of Poles and Jews and the Yankee. Borislau, after twenty years' work, was unimproved, dirty, squalid, and brutal. It contained one school house, but no church nor printing office. None of its streets were paved, and, in the main road through the town, the mud came up to the hubs of the wagon wheels for over ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 401, September 8, 1883 • Various
... were heard. I looked. Some one came that way. It was a squalid-looking personage—a professional beggar, half-drunk. He landed upon my island, ...
— Tales From Bohemia • Robert Neilson Stephens
... visit the Gas Works, because she had once been driven through what was known at home as the Gas-House district on her way to the ferry, and her recollections of it were not altogether pleasant. As she recalled it it was in a rather squalid neighbourhood, and the odours emanating from it were not pleasing to what she called her "oil-factories." But here in Blunderland all was different. Instead of the huge ugly retorts rising up out of the ground, ...
— Alice in Blunderland - An Iridescent Dream • John Kendrick Bangs
... rich shadowy brown, and filled the air with a comfortable odour. Another wore age long neglect on every plank and seam; half its props had sunk or decayed, and the huge hollow leaned low on one side, disclosing the squalid desolation of its lean ribbed and naked interior, producing all the phantasmic effect of a great swampy desert; old pools of water overgrown with a green scum, lay in the hollows between its rotting timbers, ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... anniversary of the day when Ribaut and his companions, full of delighted anticipations, had explored the flowery borders of the St. John's. Dire was the contrast; for, within the homesick precinct of Fort Caroline, a squalid band, dejected and worn, dragged their shrunken limbs about the sun-scorched area, or lay stretched in listless wretchedness under the shade of the barracks. Some were digging roots in the forest, or gathering a kind ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... I lent myself more and more to the contemplation of that home picture, how restful and happy it grew! but poor old Wallencamp—for we were nearing the little settlement now, and the sun was fast westering—poor, squalid, solitary, beautiful Wallencamp, as I looked down upon it from the brow of Stony Hill, thrilled me with a troubled sense of some diviner, ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... betrayed his nativity. As the babbling voices rose and fell in alternations of argument that was almost quarrel, narrative that was sometimes diverting, and ribaldry that was never wit, it would seem as if the ruffianism of half Europe had called a conference in that squalid, horrible little inn. Guttural German notes mixed whimsically with sibilant Spanish and flowing Portuguese. Cracked Biscayan—which no Spaniard will allow to be Spanish—jarred upon the suavity of Italian accents, and through ...
— The Duke's Motto - A Melodrama • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... Uitenhoove at its close-from the block on which fell the honored head of Antony Straalen, to the obscure chair in which the ancient gentlewoman of Amsterdam suffered death for an act of vicarious mercy—from one year's end to another's—from the most signal to the most squalid scenes of sacrifice, the eye and hand of the great master directed, without weariness, the task imposed by ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... second year at college his father died suddenly, and the scanty sum required for his support stopped. Squalid poverty relieved by occasional gifts was Goldsmith's lot thenceforward. He would write street-ballads to save himself from actual starving, sell them for five shillings a-piece, and steal out of the college at night to hear them ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... character, but I have the capacity to love unselfishly, and I am at heart as faithful and as good as any other woman. But there is my birthright. I have had three years of sordid and utterly miserable life, teaching squalid, dirty, unlovable children things they had much better not know. I have lived here, here in Detton Magna, among the smuts and the mists, where the flowers seem withered and even the meadows are stony, where the people are hard and coarse as their ugly houses, where virtue ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... women of the homesteads and the men you chanced to meet — Were their faces sour and saddened like the 'faces in the street', And the 'shy selector children' — were they better now or worse Than the little city urchins who would greet you with a curse? Is not such a life much better than the squalid street and square Where the fallen women flaunt it in the fierce electric glare, Where the sempstress plies her sewing till her eyes are sore and red In a filthy, dirty attic toiling on for daily bread? Did you hear no sweeter ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... shiftless and without ambition for himself or his children, constantly looking for a new piece of land on which he might make a living without much work; his mother, in her youth handsome and bright, grown prematurely coarse in feature and soured in mind by daily toil and care; the whole household squalid, cheerless, and utterly void of elevating inspirations... Only when the family had "moved" into the malarious backwoods of Indiana, the mother had died, and a stepmother, a woman of thrift and energy, had taken charge of the children, the shaggy-headed, ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... attire of the Glasgow citizens, and the appearance and uniform of the royal guards filled him with admiration; but beyond the fashionable quarter it did not appear to him that Paris possessed many advantages over Glasgow, and the poorer class were squalid and poverty stricken to a far greater degree than anything he had seen in Scotland. But the chief points of attraction to him were the prisons. The Bastille, the Chatelet, and the Temple were points to which he was continually turning; ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... the habitual drunkards and the riffraff of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to recommend ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... cities. Then about the first of July the same peoples as pilgrims from Irak, Afghanistan, India, and beyond those countries even, there being an East and a Far East, and pilgrims from Arabia, crowded together, noisy, quarrelsome, squalid, accordant in but one thing—a determination to make the Hajj lest they might ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... perhaps the most squalid, as it certainly is one of the most splendid, among French literary names. The squalor belongs chiefly to the man, but the splendor is wholly the writer's. There is hardly another example in the world's literature of a union so ...
— Classic French Course in English • William Cleaver Wilkinson
... the squalid room. Peterson had begun to pack. A suitcase lay open on the narrow bed. The wrinkled gray-white counterpane was half covered ...
— The Lion's Mouse • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Her spotted breast, and gaping womb, imbrued With livid poison and our children's blood. 730 The crowd in stupid wonder fix'd appear, Pale ev'n in joy, nor yet forget to fear. Some with vast beams the squalid corse engage, And weary all the wild efforts of rage. The birds obscene, that nightly flock'd to taste, With hollow screeches fled the dire repast; And ravenous dogs, allured by scented blood, And starving wolves, ran howling to ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... an exception to the squalid slovenliness that disgraced the living rooms, where the curtains were yellow with smoke and dust, and where the child, evidently left to himself, littered every spot with his toys. Valerie's room and dressing-room were situated in the part ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... seven miles up the road, called for his newspaper, and got his jug filled, spent a couple of hours with us—put out, and was succeeded by two squalid Indians, with some skins to trade for corn juice and tobacco; they cleared out, and about two or three P. M., some movers came along; we had a little dicker with them, and that closed up the ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... In a squalid road which she had often to cross there was a butcher's shop, where great sides of good red beef with yellow fat were hung in the doorway. Coming home one evening after dark, she noticed in front of her a gaunt little girl ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... places—thatch off, or overgrown with grass—no chimneys, the smoke making its way through a hole in the roof, or rising in clouds from the top of the open door—dunghills before the doors, and green standing puddles—squalid children, with scarcely rags to cover them, gazing at ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... seemed slow to satisfy our ardent wishes. But nearer and nearer as we approached the shore, one by one all our illusions disappeared; the pleasant imagery vanished, and the stern reality of mangrove swamps, sandy and sunburnt beach, wretched and squalid huts, stared us in the face. Instead of the semi-Paradise distance had painted to our imagination, we found (and, alas! remained long enough to verify the fact) that the land of our temporary residence could be described in three words—sun, ...
— A Narrative of Captivity in Abyssinia - With Some Account of the Late Emperor Theodore, - His Country and People • Henry Blanc
... in one of these dismal streets there stood a still more dismal yard, bearing the name of Angel Court, as if there yet lingered among those grimy homes and their squalid occupants some memories of a brighter place and of happier creatures. Angel Court was about nine feet wide, and contained ten or twelve houses on each side, with one dwelling at the further end, blocking up the thoroughfare, and commanding ...
— Little Meg's Children • Hesba Stretton
... lofty. Near by, however, were many miserable hovels, with squalid inmates. But the old man's retreat was exceedingly comfortable; especially abounding in mats for lounging; his rafters were bowed down by calabashes ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... it open with a vigour which sent her staggering into a chair, and stepped into the squalid, reeking room. Hunched up in a chair, opposite the woman, sat ...
— The Admirable Tinker - Child of the World • Edgar Jepson
... not life: nor is it death—Oh, death would be welcome! For death means either (as you may imagine you believe) total extinction, or it means increased life, free from material trammels. But death in life is a monstrous thing; life, for example, spent in a chair in a squalid tailor's shop, doing over and over again the same piece of squalid, meaningless work, with ever another squalid year stretching out its length before you when the last one has been completed. Is life so endured life—the sacred Creative gift, imparted to all things, conscious ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... shabby and squalid in the extreme, and, being destitute of the means of making a coffin, had rolled the corpse up in such wretched materials as they happened to possess. One consequence of this was, that it was quite supple. On being lifted out of the canoe, the joints bent, and ...
— Fort Desolation - Red Indians and Fur Traders of Rupert's Land • R.M. Ballantyne |
