"Arid" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... there were here and there slopes of grass, and bushes of hoary-leaved camel-thorn, and long-spined shittim or acacia, nothing bearing fruit for human beings. There were strange howlings and crackings in the mountains, the sun glared back from the arid stones and rocks, and the change seemed frightful after the green meadows and broad ...
— The Chosen People - A Compendium Of Sacred And Church History For School-Children • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... wings, and soaring in circles, watching with telescopic sight the world beneath. At that great elevation they are in an exceedingly cool temperature, therefore they require no water; but some birds that make long flights over arid deserts, such as the Marabou stork, and the buzzard, are provided with water-sacks; the former in an external bag a little below the throat, the latter in an internal sack, both of which carry a large supply. As the birds of prey that I have enumerated, invariably appear ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... without a drop of water, until they arrived at a small running stream. Here they eagerly slaked their thirst; but, this being allayed, the calls of hunger became equally importunate. Ever since they had got among these barren and arid hills where there was a deficiency of grass, they had met with no buffaloes; those animals keeping in the grassy meadows near the streams. They were obliged, therefore, to have recourse to their corn meal, which they reserved for such emergencies. Some, however, were lucky enough to ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... along the pleasant path she had trodden with its little monuments to love at decent intervals amid the agreeable monotony of content, her heart and conscience misgave her lest she had counselled this young girl wrongly, committing her to the arid lovelessness which she herself ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... American trains is as a rule slower than that of English ones, though there are some brilliant exceptions to this rule. I never remember dawdling along in so slow and apparently purposeless a manner as in crossing the arid deserts of Arizona—unless, indeed, it was in travelling by the Manchester and Milford line in Wales. The train on the branch between Raymond (a starting-point for the Yosemite) and the main line went so cannily that the ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... fresh wreaths awry: "Brief is this fruit of joy to paltry man, Soon, soon departed, and thereafter, no, It may not be recalled."—As if, forsooth, It were their prime of evils in great death To parch, poor tongues, with thirst and arid drought, Or chafe for ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius
... become a hell of isolation. Time dulled the edges of his loneliness; solitude, if it hurts, sometimes cures too. But he was not yet cured of longing for that self-forbidden city in the North. He desired it—he desired the arid wilderness of its treeless streets, its incessant sounds, its restless energy; he desired its pleasures, its frivolous days and nights, its satiated security, its ennui. Its life had been his life, its people his people, and he longed for ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... the day, indeed, and sorely did La Malene tempt us to a halt. It is a little oasis of verdure and luxuriance between two arid chasms—flake of emerald wedged in a cleft of barren rock. The hamlet itself, like most villages of the Lozere, has a neglected appearance. Very fair accommodation, however, is to be had at the house of the brothers Montginoux, our boatmen for the next stage, and all ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... as any other. The Marquis, giving all the praise of manners and agreeability to Vienna, sums up all in one prodigious yawn. "The same evenings at Metternich's, the same lounges for making purchases and visits on a morning, the same idleness and fatigue at night, the searching and arid climate, and the clouds of execrable fine dust"—all conspiring to tell the great of the earth that they can escape ennui no more than ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... is where you will play your little comedy to-morrow; this is the spot which the queen has herself appointed, and every thing which takes place is at the express command of her majesty.' That entirely quieted me, arid I turned back to Paris overjoyed, in company with the countess and her companion. They kept me that night in their beautiful home, and on the next day we drove again to Versailles, where the countess had a small suite of apartments. She herself dressed me, ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... cried. "Believe that your happiness is everything to me; believe that I will take no unfair advantage of a hasty promise. Tell me that, of your own free will, you will be my wife, arid command me anything, that I may prove my devotion. It is so true, so honest,—Tullia, I adore you, I live only for you! Speak the word, and make me ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... capable of absorbing heat at an elevation of 190 miles. The probable range of temperature on the moon was discussed by Professor Very in 1898.[953] He concluded it to be very wide. Hotter than boiling water under the sun's vertical rays, the arid surface of our dependent globe must, he found, cool in the 14-day lunar night to about the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... home was situated at the foot of Mount Cicada, celebrated for its fruitful soil. From early youth his pleasure was to pass the night out on the mountain, now watching the stars, now contemplating the arid, desolate sides of Vesuvius. He tells how, in recalling those days—the only peaceful ones of his life—he used to think, as he looked up at the infinite expanse of heaven and the confines of the horizon, with ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... on the subject of her making the mistress of Broadwood understand that she and the girls now regarded their occupancy of that estate as absolutely over. He had already, several weeks before, picked a little at the arid tract of that indicated surrender, but in the interval the soil appeared to have formed again to a considerable thickness. It was disagreeable to him to call his parent's attention to the becoming course, and especially disagreeable to have to emphasise it and discuss it and perhaps clamour ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... mirage was even more vexatious than in the plains of Bohahire'h. In spite of our experience an excessive thirst, added to a perfect illusion, made us goad on our wearied horses towards lakes which vanished at our approach; and left behind nothing but salt and arid sand. In two days my cloak was completely covered with salt, left on it after the evaporation of the moisture which held it in solution. Our horses, who ran eagerly to the brackish springs of the desert, perished in numbers; after travelling about a quarter of a league ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, v3 • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... and, as it were, natural partizanship, was aggravated arid coloured by the Guelf and Ghibelline factions; and, in part explanation of Dante's adherence to the latter, you must particularly remark, that the Pope had recently territorialized his authority to a great extent, and that this increase of ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... as a moral agriculturist. Principles which admit of trickery? Certainly. Am I to blame if the field of human sympathy can't be cultivated in any other way? Consult my brother agriculturists in the mere farming line—do they get their crops for the asking? No! they must circumvent arid Nature exactly as I circumvent sordid Man. They must plow, and sow, and top-dress, and bottom-dress, and deep-drain, and surface-drain, and all the rest of it. Why am I to be checked in the vast occupation of deep-draining mankind? Why am I to be ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... satisfy their family and countrymen of their identity, and to recover the respect which was their due, by a public acknowledgment of their name, family, and rank. For this purpose, they invited all their relations arid connections to a magnificent entertainment, at which all the three travellers made their appearance in rich eastern habits of crimson satin. After the guests were seated, and before the Polos sat down, they put off their upper garments ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... globe, favours the communication by steam-power between both hemispheres, and almost from pole to pole; and while we hear of new discoveries that may make the air a motive power instead of steam, and thus render railway transit possible in arid deserts; and while the electric telegraph not only connects us with the continent of Europe, but is about to cross the Atlantic. With all these powers at command, men will not long be confined to the narrow boundaries ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 449 - Volume 18, New Series, August 7, 1852 • Various
... spoken; and everything dark, and painful and agonising, was spread out around him in its stead. He was as one who, having fallen asleep in a desert, has dreamt sweet dreams, and then suddenly wakes with the rising sun, to find nothing but arid desolation around him. ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... Pakistani and Saudi sources may also be active; power struggles among various groups for control of Kabul, regional rivalries among emerging warlords, traditional tribal disputes continue; support to Islamic fighters in Tajikistan's civil war; border dispute with Pakistan (Durand Line) Climate: arid to semiarid; cold winters and hot summers Terrain: mostly rugged mountains; plains in north and southwest Natural resources: natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, talc, barites, sulphur, lead, zinc, iron ore, salt, precious and semiprecious stones Land use: arable land: ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... west rose the sand-hill, dripping with loose gravel as with water, hollowed out at its base until its crest, bristling with coarse herbage, magnified against the sky, projected far out over the cottage roof. The sun was reflected from the sand in a great hollow of arid light. Jerome, nearing it, felt as if he were approaching an oven. The cottage door was shut, as were all the windows. However, he heard plainly the shrill wail of ...
— Jerome, A Poor Man - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... It was arid, yet somehow informing. It conveyed to me that a marshal had been cleverly put to needing ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... that, while crossing a wide and arid plain in Texas, his two dogs suffered greatly from thirst, and that between thirty and forty times they rushed down the hollows to search for water. These hollows were not valleys, and there were no trees in them, or any other difference ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... rise to little anxiety during the spring and summer of 1915 in consequence of the signal discomfiture which the Turks had suffered on the Canal early in the year; the arid tract known as the Sinai desert indeed provided a satisfactory defence in itself during the dry months. But as autumn approached, the prospect of Ottoman efforts against the Nile Delta had to be taken ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... pronounced by all wretched and useless. They can be described only by negative characters: without habitations, without water, without trees, without mountains, they support merely a few dwarf plants. Why then—and the case is not peculiar to myself—have these arid wastes taken so firm a hold on my memory? Why have not the still more level, the greener and more fertile pampas, which are serviceable to mankind, produced an equal impression? I can scarcely analyze these feelings; but it must be partly owing ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... fellow-feeling with humanity, remarkable in one whose enthusiasm for human nature was not large, whose ruling passion, until the circumstance of love tinctured it, had led him by ways which the bulk of men had pronounced arid and unsatisfying. Now this larger insight was making a finer character of him and planting, even at the core of his professional pursuits, something deeper than is generally to be found there. His experience, ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... direction of the Indies, east and west. He took a constant, though not always an honest, interest in the navy. He hated Holland for more reasons than one, but among these reasons was his hatred of England's most formidable and malicious trade competitor. He also disliked her arid and ugly Protestantism, and blood being thicker than water, he hated Holland for what he considered her shabby treatment of his youthful nephew, whose ultimate destiny was happily hidden from Whitehall. Among Charles's many dislikes must be included ...
— Andrew Marvell • Augustine Birrell
... problem which we shall try to solve in our future meditations. But first we must submit two preliminary observations. They will furnish us with two other theories concerning the application of all the mechanical means which we propose you should employ. An instance from life will refresh these arid and dry dissertations: the hearing of such a story will be like laying down a book, to work in ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... which are valuable in themselves should be desired, rather than those virtues which are useful in war; but how and by what means this is to be acquired is now to be considered. We have already assigned three causes on which it will depend; nature, custom, and reason, arid shown what sort of men nature must produce for this purpose; it remains then that we determine which we shall first begin by in education, reason or custom, for these ought always to preserve the most entire harmony with ...
— Politics - A Treatise on Government • Aristotle
... 25 or 30 miles in circuit, which is perhaps the most arid and barren island in the world, as it produces nothing but salt, all its water, wood, provisions, and every other necessary, coming from Persia, which is about 12 miles distant; but all the other islands thereabout are very fertile, and from them provisions are sent to Ormus. The ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... the rank luxuriance Of vegetation flourish and decay, Vanish and pass away insensibly, Perish from off the earth which nourished it, And time supplant its rich exuberance With arid wastes of bleak sterility; Wilt thou look down in silent unconcern When countless eons of denuding time Have rendered earth as barren as thyself, Bereft of verdure's last habiliment; When men, with all their passions and desires, Their ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... next A plain we reach'd, that from its sterile bed Each plant repell'd. The mournful wood waves round Its garland on all sides, as round the wood Spreads the sad foss. There, on the very edge, Our steps we stay'd. It was an area wide Of arid sand and thick, resembling most The soil that erst by Cato's foot was trod. Vengeance of Heav'n! Oh ! how shouldst thou be fear'd By all, who read what here my eyes beheld! Of naked spirits many a flock I saw, All weeping piteously, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... were seriously occupied in sacrificing each other's feelings on the altar of experimental cookery, in herding sheep with the assistance of paper novels, and in writing exceedingly long letters to the North. This wall-tent was the larva of the ranch. But the arid southern country proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them down in a delightful pasture-land, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... toiled painfully along over an arid, desert plain, beneath a burning sun. About noon on the fourth day they reached a vast swamp, probably near the Estauhatchee river. This swamp was bordered by a gloomy forest, with gigantic trees, and a dense, impervious underbrush, ever stimulated to wonderful luxuriance ...
— Ferdinand De Soto, The Discoverer of the Mississippi - American Pioneers and Patriots • John S. C. Abbott
... rewards without excitement. This atmosphere of his father's sterling industry was the best of Archie's education. Assuredly it did not attract him; assuredly it rather rebutted and depressed. Yet it was still present, unobserved like the ticking of a clock, an arid ideal, a tasteless stimulant ...
— Weir of Hermiston • Robert Louis Stevenson
... turtle-dove and recommenced his journey, following the course of the wind as it changed and chopped about to different points of the compass. The country gradually grew sadder and more arid; and, as night approached, the path led between bare and sombre rocks, a vast black mass among them being the tower wherein dwelt the witch whom the boy was in search of. The sight of the hideous place terrified him at first; but as he was brave—like every one whose aim is the ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... the then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, who aroused a storm of protest in the East against his "misguided attention to the desolate West." But few statesmen and fewer of the outside public in that day possessed the prophetic vision to perceive the future greatness of what were termed the "arid wastes" of Arizona and California. This was shown by the perfect hail of protest that swept to the White House when the terms of the Gadsden Treaty, drawn up by a man who as minister to a great minor republic had had ample opportunities to study at his leisure the nature ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... natives procure these gold necklaces, which they themselves work with great care, in exchange for their own products, for it usually happens that a country rich in cereals is devoid of gold. On the other hand, where gold and other metals are common, the country is usually mountainous, rocky, and arid; it is by exchanging products that commercial relations are established. The Spaniards derived satisfaction and encouragement from two sources: they had found plenty of gold, and chance had led them into an agreeable and fertile ...
— De Orbe Novo, Volume 1 (of 2) - The Eight Decades of Peter Martyr D'Anghera • Trans. by Francis Augustus MacNutt
... palatial mansions of a northern clime, we follow hero and heroine, with breathless interest, to the sun-scorched veldt and arid plains of Southern Africa. ...
— The Blunders of a Bashful Man • Metta Victoria Fuller Victor
... have been a frightful orgy, and now arid as the Sahara desert and quite as flat and dreary, the bachelor dinner was in truth more often than not, a sheep ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... of this now almost-forgotten race—the Saracen—are still to be found on the northern seaboard of Africa, in the kingdom called Morocco, where they strive to eke out a scant existence from the arid plains of that parched and ...
— In Eastern Seas - The Commission of H.M.S. 'Iron Duke,' flag-ship in China, 1878-83 • J. J. Smith
... sweetness of his rich and careless life. It was possible, if—if he could once meet the fate he shuddered from, once look at the bitterness of the life that waited for him, and enter on its desolate and arid waste without going back to the closed gates of his forfeited paradise to stretch his limbs within their shadow once more ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... Andalucia, as the Ebro divides the levels of Arragon. Spain abounds with brackish streams, Salados, and with salt-mines, or saline deposits, after the evaporation of the sea-waters. The central soil is strongly impregnated with saltpetre: always arid, it every day is becoming more so, from the singular antipathy which the inhabitants of the interior have against trees. There is nothing to check the power of evaporation, no shelter to protect or preserve moisture. The soil becomes more and ...
— A Supplementary Chapter to the Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... wheat lands. Irrigation is already practised over other vast acreages. This land is level to rolling, and is of sandy loam nature. It is deeply under-laid by layers of lava rock—in places thousands of feet thick. As in most arid climates the soil is rich in minerals but low in nitrogen and organic matter. Under irrigation production is amazing. The growing season is sufficiently long for Carpathian walnuts anywhere ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 44th Annual Meeting • Various
... very excellent for frying. In order to use this oil it requires to be purified by fire, and set in a flame, which must be suffered to die away of itself; the most greasy particles are thus consumed, and its arid qualities wholly destroyed. "When the Moors gather these fruits they drive their goats under the trees, and as the fruit falls the animals carefully nibble off the skins, and then ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... which, Johnson says, suits the stomach of middle life. Burke, for instance, is a sufficiently poetical politician to interest one just when one's sonneteering age is departing, but before one has come down quite to arid fact. Do you know anything of poor Sir Egerton Brydges?—this, in talking of sonnets—poor fellow, he wrote them for seventy years, fully convinced of their goodness, and only lamenting that the public were unjust and stupid enough not to admire them also. He lived in haughty ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... and public alike accept the certainty that during dry times lawns and parks and golf courses and sometimes human skins will have to do without the application of water for a spell, is a reality of life in some arid regions and is probably always going to be. Elsewhere it is, or should be, an element in the design planning of industries that use heavy quantities of water for cooling and such processes. All water ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... hospitable club. The residential quarter is happily situated on elevated ground, swept by refreshing breezes from the ocean. A large space is covered with good houses and well-kept lawns. The public gardens are a great feat of horticulture. The arid and sterile soil has been converted by liberal irrigation into a green oasis, containing groves of palms and a varied tropical vegetation. Needless to say the work is the achievement ...
— The Last Voyage - to India and Australia, in the 'Sunbeam' • Lady (Annie Allnutt) Brassey
... strictly complied with that standard is to be discarded on the ground that they stand convicted of partiality, we should be left with little to instruct subsequent ages beyond the dry records of men such as the laborious, the useful, though somewhat over-credulous Clinton, or the learned but arid Marquardt, whose "massive scholarship" Mr. Gooch dismisses somewhat summarily in a single line. Such writers are not historians, but rather compilers of records, upon the foundations of which ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... and a blacksmith shop it overreached itself." There was a tightening of lips as the members exchanged looks, but Mormon Joe went on, "One third of the work that you dry farmers put in trying to make ranches out of arid land," he addressed a row of tousled gentlemen on the front seat, "would bring you independence in a state where climatic conditions are ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... mortar. Where {16} the friends of George the First could have hunted and gunned and found refreshment in secluded country ale-houses, the friends of George the Third were familiar with miles of stony streets and areas of arid squares. London was not then the monster city that another century and a half has made it, but it was even more huge in its proportion to the size of any of its rivals, if rivals they could be called, among the large towns of England. The great city did not ...
— A History of the Four Georges and of William IV, Volume III (of 4) • Justin McCarthy and Justin Huntly McCarthy
... flat and arid country, in many parts of which there are salt lakes. In such parts as can be supplied with water, grain and other fruits of the earth are produced in abundance, and there are plenty of beasts of all kinds, as it is everywhere intersected and surrounded by fertile mountains, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... by he met a Tiger, and then a Wolf, and a Dog, arid an Eagle, and all these, when they saw the tender little morsel, said: "Lambikin! ...
— The Junior Classics, Volume 1 • Willam Patten
... first grey tufts of the Alpine club-moss, the first shrub of crowberry, or sea-green rose-root, with its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the two-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning of the Alpine world; the scramble over the arid waves of the porphyry sea aloft, as you beat round and round like a weary pointer dog in search of the hidden lake; the last despairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramid on Moel Meirch; the hasty gaze around, far ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... on the N.E. landing of the port. A palm beckoned us to the spring, but a single palm is often found where there is no well or water; and it is not true, as vulgarly supposed, that where there are date-palms there must be water. The country in this vicinity is a perfect desert, yet on this arid waste shepherds drive their flocks in the spring, and up to May and June. The captain considered Tripoli Vecchia, which is a very ancient port, and the site of a once famous city, more secure than that of Tripoli itself, though ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... they were to the north of the line on which I had been travelling. I therefore crossed the stream by a ford, at which I arrived in the afternoon, and with much regret left its pure waters to wander into what might prove an arid desert. I had, unfortunately, nothing in which I could carry water, so that I had to depend on the supply which I might find in my path. I pushed on as fast as I could. It was almost night, however, before I reached a pool of water. It was stagnant, and so bad tasted that I could ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston
... of gigantic papyrus, with sand bars dividing the current, and with always the vista for a greater or lesser distance down through the jungle along its banks. From our canvas chairs we could look through on one side to the arid country, and on the other ...
— The Land of Footprints • Stewart Edward White
... taken on board. Their bodies had been galled and emaciated by the chains they carried, by the slender store of dry farina—the only food provided for them—and by the precarious and scanty supply of water obtainable on the arid plains or in the tangled forests they had traversed. The first canoe-load was taken alongside the ship about four o'clock in the afternoon, and in an hour the whole were on board. This is reckoned the most favourable time for getting under-way, as darkness ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... chasms with glittering mist, paves rugged paths with its shimmering folds, and tenderly covers very deep in rose leaves, the clay feet of our idols. That wonderful light shines only once full upon us, but the memory of it streams all along the succeeding journey; follows us up the arid heights, throws its mellow afterglow on the darkening road, as we go swiftly down the slippery hill of life. It comes to all, as hope's happy prophecy, this sparkling prologue, and we never dream that it is the sweetest and best of the drama that follows; but let me tell ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... Fontainebleau. It was natural enough that to please the king the king's old Huguenot friend should be convicted of false citations from the fathers; but it would seem strange, were the motives unknown, that Henry should have been so intensely interested in this most arid and dismal of theological controversies. Yet those who had known and observed the king closely for thirty years, declared that he had never manifested so much passion, neither on the eve of battles nor of amorous assignations, as he then did for the demolition of Duplessis and ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... needed to establish a range of firm control specimens for the better identification of unknowns, particularly the wooden elements of tools—handles, moldings, and plane bodies—are frustratingly few in non-arid archaeological sites. When tracing the provenance of American tools there is the additional problem of heterogeneous origins and shapes—that is, what was the appearance of a given tool prior to its standardization in England and the United ...
— Woodworking Tools 1600-1900 • Peter C. Welsh
... cold, saturnine Pope of Geneva and the frank, exuberant hero of the German Reformation. Their doctrines were similar; there was a likeness between their mistakes; but what a diversity in their natures! Calvin was the perfect type of the theological pedant—vain, meagre, and arid; while Luther had in him, as Heine remarks, "something aboriginal"; and the world has, after all, profited by "the God-like brutality of ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... over a sterile plain, bore within its arms a little seed, torn with ruthless force from its matrix on a lofty tree, and dropped the seed upon the sand to perish. A bright winged beetle, weary with flight and languid with the chilly air, rested for a moment on the arid plain. The little seed dropped Aeolus served to satisfy the hunger of the beetle, which presently winged its flight to the margin of a swift running stream that had sprung from the mountain side, and cleaving a bed through rocks of granite, went gaily laughing ...
— The Jericho Road • W. Bion Adkins
... after turning all the sanctities of human nature into ridicule. Through these myths, as through a mist, we may discern the bitterness of that great, disenchanted, disappointed soul. The desert in which spirits of the stamp of Machiavelli wander is too arid and too aerial for the gross substantial bugbears of the vulgar conscience to inhabit. Moreover, as Varchi says, 'In his conversation Machiavelli was pleasant, serviceable to his friends, a friend of virtuous men, and, in a word, worthy of having received from nature either less genius ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volume 1 (of 7) • John Addington Symonds
... Ruzafa, where poets sang mournful strophes over the wane of the Valencian Moor, while beautiful maidens listened from behind the blossoming rose-bushes. And then the catastrophe came. In a torrent of steel, barbarians swept down from the arid hills of Aragon to appease their hunger in the bounty of the plain—the almogavares—naked, wild, bloodthirsty savages, who never washed. And as allies of this horde, bankrupt Christian noblemen, their worn-out lands ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... again, beyond the cliffs, stretched the Causses, vast, arid and barren plateaux, flat and featureless save for an occasional low, rounded mound, a menhir or a dolmen, and (if such may be termed features) great pits that opened in the earth like cold craters, which the countryfolk termed avens. A strange, bleak land, ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... nickel-plating, nor will such an unnecessary expenditure be made as was involved in the construction of the "West Shore"; nor will the feat of Gould and the Santa Fe be repeated of each building two hundred and forty miles, side by side, for construction profits, much of which is located in the arid portion of Kansas where there is never likely to be traffic for even one railway. Much of the republic is covered with closely parallel lines which would never have been built under national ownership, and this process will ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... waters into the Paraguay, is one of the most mysterious of rivers. Rising in Bolivia, its course can be traced down for some considerable distance, when it loses itself in the arid wastes, or, as some maintain, flows underground. Its source and mouth are known, but for many miles of its passage it is invisible. Numerous attempts to solve its secrets have been made. They have almost invariably ended disastrously. The Spanish traveller, Ibarete, set out with high hopes to travel ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... state in the dried mud, till the return of rains, and the rise of the waters in the great rivers, which flood the vast expanse of level surface, awaken them from their long slumber. These appearances are often exhibited over an arid surface of fifty or sixty leagues square—every where, in short, where the savannah is not traversed by any of the great rivers. On the borders, on the other hand, of the streams, and around the lakes, which in the dry season ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... constellations; her image, one, immortal, golden, rises on your eye as our western star at evening rises on the traveler from his home; no lowering cloud, no angry river, no lingering spring, no broken crevasse, no inundated city or plantation, no tracts of sand, arid and burning, on that surface, but all blended and softened into one beam of kindred rays, the image, harbinger, and promise of love, hope, and a brighter ...
— Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study • Compiled by Grenville Kleiser
... engineering skill of the directors of fountain construction at Versailles it must be remembered that it was from an arid plateau that hundreds of streams were made to spring from the earth. Thousands of laborers were employed to lay beneath the surface of the ground a net-work of canals and aqueducts to receive the tribute of water-courses directed hither from distant sources. ...
— The Story of Versailles • Francis Loring Payne
... becomes parish priest of Les Artaud, a well-nigh pagan hamlet in one of those bare, burning stretches of country with which Provence abounds. And here it is that 'La Faute de l'Abbe Mouret' opens in the old ruinous church, perched upon a hillock in full view of the squalid village, the arid fields, and the great belts of rock which shut in ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... chaff of arid Rad And that of equally dry-and-dusty Tory? CHAPLIN would feed you on preposterous fad, And GARDNER on—postponement! The old story! While the grass grows the horse may starve. Poor ass! Party would bring you to a ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, February 18, 1893 • Various
... the Azure Society were situate in Marloes Road—for no other reason than that it happened so. Though certain famous people inhabit Marloes Road, no street could well be less fashionable than this thoroughfare, which is very arid and very long, and a very long way off the ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... others on the question of temperance. It is true that Moslems, as a rule, are not hard drinkers. Men and races of men have their besetting sins. Drinking was not the special vice of the Arabs. Their country was too arid; but they had another vice of which Mohammed was the chief exemplar. Canon Taylor is doubtless correct also in the statement that the English protectorate in Egypt has greatly increased the degree of intemperance, and that in this respect the presence of European races generally has been ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... was part of the "old unhappy far-off things" that could only live henceforwards in fantastic arcades of glowing coal, out of all relation to future realities. Her new-born love for Raphael appeared as ancient and as arid as the girlish ambitions that had seemed on the point of blossoming when she was transplanted from the Ghetto. That, too, was in the flames, and should ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... in came the elder, and with him a young maiden, bearing with them their breakfast of curds arid cream and strawberries, and he bade them eat. So they ate, and were not unmerry; and the while of their eating the elder talked with them soberly, but not hardly, or with any seeming enmity: and ever his talk gat on to the drought, which was now burning up the down-pastures; and ...
— The Wood Beyond the World • William Morris
... laid on the shelf? Or put the case (For more grace) It were a female spectre— Now could you expect her To take much gust In long speeches, With her tongue as dry as dust, In a sandy place, Where no peaches, Nor lemons, nor limes, nor oranges hang, To drop on the drought of an arid harangue, Or quench, With their sweet drench, The fiery pangs which the worms inflict, With their endless nibblings, Like quibblings, Which the corpse may dislike, but can ne'er contradict— Hey, Mr. Ayrton? With all your rare tone— I ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... actual warfare, when a man goes out, sometimes alone and unattended, to find out what a well-armed enemy is doing and how many fighting men are to be expected in the morrow's battle. But just as Cervantes could "engender" the ingenious Don Quixote in a miserable prison, so Baden-Powell in the arid times of peace finds means of enjoying the fascinations of scouting. When out in India he used to spend many an early morning in practising, and he gives the result of one of these mornings in his little book on Scouting, which I would have you read in its entirety. It is a book ...
— The Story of Baden-Powell - 'The Wolf That Never Sleeps' • Harold Begbie
... hungry men with sumptuous fare, but most of the time they were forced to trust to the steadily diminishing stores of the provision wagons. This was especially the case when they left the grassy and flowery prairie and entered upon an arid plain, on which for months of the year no drop of rain or dew fell, while the whitened bones of men and beasts told of former havoc of starvation and drouth. The heated surface was in places incrusted with alkaline ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... fact that the Mirditi are not very numerous, but in close connection with their 18,000 people are the Shala with 500 houses and the Shoshi with 300. Tradition has it that they are descended from three brothers who set out from the arid village of Shiroka on Lake Scutari to seek their fortune. The most ancient, the most noble and important family of northern Albania is that of Gjomarkaj, whose seat is at Oroshi, the capital of the Mirditi. Despite enormous difficulties they succeeded in maintaining their own position and ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Alutaya belongs to that province. It is a rocky and arid land. However, it has plenty of domestic and useful animals, [the rearing of which forms], the careful industry of its natives. It is about thirty leguas across the open sea from the islands of Calamianes. About six leguas away is the island ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume XXI, 1624 • Various
... extensive country is composed of that stupendous level tract known as the "Llano Estacado," or "Staked Plain." Stretching hundreds of miles in every direction, this sandy plain, treeless, arid, with only here and there patches of stunted herbage, whitened by the bones of horses and mules, and by the more ghastly skeletons of too adventurous travelers, presents an area of desolation scarcely more than paralleled by ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... images of Christ into the road, and, showing no mercy to old men and women and children, to destroy all and spare none. And why? Ostensibly because one quite commonplace Austrian gentleman had been foully murdered, but really because a vain and ambitious and rapidly increasing nation, living on an arid and insufficient soil, had come to consider themselves the master-spirits of humanity, and therefore entitled to possess the earth, or at least give law ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... suggestions which are all around us in man and nature; it keeps alive our better part in places and circumstances when that better part might perish with disease and atrophy; it continually irrigates with benign influences the mind which might grow arid and barren, and so it enables all the little seeds and buds of our intellectual and moral nature to ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... stormed and carried by assault. Her girl's life in a country school and her uncle's very rigid and orthodox home had been devoid of emotion or experience; still, her mother had early sown seeds in her mind and spirit that even in the most arid soil were certain to flower into beauty when the time for flowering came; and intellectually Susanna was the clever daughter of clever parents. She was very immature, because, after early childhood, her environment ...
— Homespun Tales • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Lucullus was the elder, but Pompeius had the greater reputation, because he had oftener had the command, and enjoyed two triumphs. Fasces, wreathed with bay,[420] were carried before both generals in token of their victories. But, as Pompeius had made a long march through a country without water and arid, the bays upon his fasces were withered, which the lictors of Lucullus observing, in a friendly manner gave them bays out of their own, which were fresh and green. And this the friends of Pompeius interpreted as a good omen; for, in ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume II • Aubrey Stewart & George Long
... been miserably misused. He may have loved some woman, and married her, and begotten children by her; domestic affection may have warmed his being, just as it does that of many a day-laborer. But in the arid air of Wall Street all his intellectual and ethical possibilities will have wilted and died. Lust for greater riches and a mordant, ever-smouldering disappointment at not having attained them, will replace the healthier impulses of adolescence. Books will have no savor for him; men of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... she has garnered from the skies, over the plain and the valley: and the husbandman, before he has learned the marvels of science, worships the beneficent Naiad, who draws the waters of her fountain from heaven, and from her sanctuary in the groves showers them upon the arid glebe and adds new verdure to the plain. After science has explained to us the law by which these supplies of moisture are furnished by the trees, we still worship the beneficent Naiad: we would not remove the drapery of foliage that protects her fountain, nor drive her into exile ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... their voices in clamor to the sky. Jupiter, disturbed by the noise of their croaking, inquired the cause of their complaint. One of them said, "The Sun, now while he is single, parches up the marsh, and compels us to die miserably in our arid homes. What will be our future condition if he should beget ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... (and, for her kindness, one might say the filial) patroness of the all-eloquent and subtle divine. She died before the Restoration, and, consequently, before her spiritual director could have ascended the Episcopal throne. The title of Carbery was at that time an earldom; the earl married again, arid his second countess was also a devout patroness of Taylor. Having no peerage at hand, I do not know by what mode of derivation the modern title of the nineteenth century had descended from the old one of the seventeenth. I presume that some collateral branch of the original family had ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... God may be served more faithfully, and the gospel law and the said faith be spread and exalted the more, on this account. After mature deliberation with our brethren on these points, with their advice, arid at the humble solicitation of the aforesaid King Philip, by our apostolic authority, by perpetual tenor of these presents, to the praise and glory of the same Almighty God, as well as to the honor of His most glorious Mother and ever Virgin Mary and of all ...
— The Philippine Islands 1493-1898, Vol. 4 of 55 - 1576-1582 • Edited by E. H. Blair and J. A. Robertson
... more considerable but a quarter of a century ago this remote and lonely region interested no one but a few sportsmen and geographers. The results of recent exploration have been important and surprising. The arid sands have yielded not only ruins, statues and frescoes but whole libraries written in a dozen languages. The value of such discoveries for the general history of Asia is clear and they are of capital importance for our special ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... die, to disappear, to become part of the black, the foul-smelling slough of mud below? The drama in muslin was again unfolded, and she could read each act; and there was a 'curtain' at the end of each. The first was made of young, hopeful faces, the second of arid solicitation, the third of the bitter, malignant tongues of Bertha Duffy and her friend. She had begun to experience the worst horrors of a Castle ball. She was sick of pity for those around her, and her lofty spirit resented the insult that was ...
— Muslin • George Moore
... in due time at Toulon. The town is not very striking in itself. It is surrounded by an amphitheatre of mountains of hard magnesian limestone. These are almost devoid of vegetation. This it is which gives so arid an aspect to this part of the coast. Facing the south, the sun's rays, reflected from the bare surface of the rocks, place one at mid-day as if in the focus of a great burning mirror, and send every one in quest of shade. This intense temperature has its ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... of an arid and thick sand, Not of another fashion made than that Which by the feet of ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... have expected her to be. Emerson Crawford was the same bluff, hearty Westerner, a friend to tie to in sunshine and in storm. Even little Keith, just escaping from his baby ways, had the same tricks and mannerisms. Nothing was different except himself. He had become arid and hard and bitter, ...
— Gunsight Pass - How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West • William MacLeod Raine
... infinitely slow. Its disk was of the order of half a degree of arc, and it took a full hour to be fully obscured. And then there was at first no difference in the look of things save that the Mare Imbrium—the solidified, arid Sea of Showers—was as dark as the ...
— Operation: Outer Space • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the Emperor Ashoka, surnamed the Great, sometimes Piyadasi, sometimes Dharmashoka. He was the son of Bindusara, King of Magadha, arid grandson of Chandragupta, who drove ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... occur in the winter months in the temperate zone and they do not occur in arid regions. As epidemics have frequently prevailed in seacoast cities known to be in an insanitary condition, it has been generally assumed that the presence of decomposing organic material is favorable for the development of an epidemic and that, like typhoid fever and cholera, yellow ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... same time the most tormenting phenomenon occasioned by optical deception, is the "mirage," or, as commonly called by the Mexican travellers, "the lying waters." Even the experienced prairie hunter is often deceived by these, upon the arid plains, where the pool of water is in such request. The thirsty wayfarer, after jogging for hours under a burning sky, at length espies a pond—yes, it must be water—it looks too natural for him to be mistaken. He quickens his pace, enjoying in anticipation the pleasures of a refreshing draught; ...
— Monsieur Violet • Frederick Marryat
... its illusions; a desert mournful and flat, where everything was lost, reduced to one level, beneath the same monotonous immensity, the naive love of a child of twenty, a passionate duke's caprice, in which all was overwhelmed by an arid sand driven by blasting fates. Paul was conscious of that void, desired to escape it; but something held him back, like a weight which unrolls a chain, and in spite of the calumnies he heard, and notwithstanding the odd whims of the strange creature, he dallied deliciously ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... overcoats about her, wrapped up her feet, her legs, her knees, like a child being tucked up in bed. She suffered it arid thanked them with her eyes. A fine, cold rain was beginning to fall. They took the oars and went quietly home. Heavy clouds hung in the sky. The river was inky black. Lights showed in the windows of the houses here and there in the fields. ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... tide of events sets. Think of that great lawyer and great man, Sir Samuel Romilly. Through years of his practice at the bar, he himself, and all who knew him, looked to the woolsack as his certain destination. You remember the many entries in his diary bearing upon the matter; arid I suppose the opinion of the most competent was clear as to his unrivalled fitness for the post. Yet all ended in nothing. The race was not to the swift. The first favourite was beaten, and more than one outsider ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... pausing in the midst of the last letter to spell out the word "analysis," which he must have known would enrage her further. Then, quite casually, he wished to be told if she might know the local habitat of Mrs. Alys Brewster-Smith and a certain Cousin Emelene. His manner was arid. ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... up hill. Thousands of scrub-oaks, in every shade of bronze and russet, massed themselves on either hand, and in among them tufts of yellow asters shone, and here and there a belated gilia tossed its feathery plume. Scattered groups of pine trees that scorn the arid plains were lording it over the bolder slopes of the mountain side. The steep road went on its winding way, after the manner of its kind, dipping occasionally to meet a bridge of planks, beneath which flowed a stream of autumn colors. After a while ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... ambled tirelessly behind Alwa's plain-bred Arab pressed on past him, to curse the hag and bid her make horse-room for her betters. She sunk on the sand and begged of them. Laughingly, they asked her what a coin would buy in all that arid waste. ...
— Rung Ho! • Talbot Mundy
... crossing some stream with timber upon it, which they could see a long way off, and thus guide themselves to the water; but they little understood the nature of the country that was now before them. They knew not that they were entering upon the desert plains— those vast arid steppes that slope up to the foots of the Rocky Mountains—the ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... center of the square the blatant orator balanced himself on a stone trough which was arid and dust-choked. He harangued the group of unkempt men; sweating, blinking, apathetic men; slouchy men; men who were ticketed in attire and demeanor with all the squalid marks of idlers, vagrants, ...
— The Landloper - The Romance Of A Man On Foot • Holman Day
... To our utter disgust, after standing for hours in a siding of the station, chatting to all sorts and conditions of the species soldier, the order came to detrain. We drivers took the horses first to water, and then picketed them on an arid patch of ground near the station, where the gunners had meantime brought the guns and waggons. It was now dark, and there were no rations served out; very cold, too, and we had no kit, but it wasn't these things we minded, ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... trail which would lead definitely to success? In short, what relation existed between the "Terror" and the Great Eyrie? What connection was there between the phenomena of the Blueridge Mountains, arid the no less phenomenal performances of the ...
— The Master of the World • Jules Verne |
