"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... seas—Amelia's love sails with him. He wanders through pathless, sandy deserts—Amelia's love clothes the burning sand with verdure, and the barren shrubs with flowers. Southern suits scorch his bare head, northern snows pinch his feet, tempestuous hail beats down on his temples, but Amelia's love lulls him to sleep in the midst of the storm. Seas, and mountains, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... or a vassal; I would delve the earth and lead a humble life, but lead it in my own way, and thank God for the freedom of it; choose my own comrades; live as I list, where I list; love as I list, where I list, and die when God pleases with the knowledge that my life had not been altogether barren. And that poor girl, Fanfulla! Think of her. She is to be joined in loveless union to such a gross, unfeeling clod as Gian Maria. Have ...
— Love-at-Arms • Raphael Sabatini
... extraordinary splendour. September rains after a dry summer washed the air and filled the tarns and becks. Wherever she went she was accompanied by that most delicious sound of falling waters. The clouds, which through July and August had been nothing but undefined, barren vapour, gathered themselves together and the interspaces of sky were once more brilliantly blue. Day after day earth and heaven were almost too beautiful, for it was painful that her finite apprehension should be unequal to such infinite loveliness. ...
— More Pages from a Journal • Mark Rutherford
... cutting in two the blue dome of the sky. Still farther on, they came upon stretches of straggling wild peach, olive, and lemon trees. Beyond again, tangles of hawthorn were interspersed with patches of dried weeds and grass. But as they neared the mining district the soil was bleak and barren. The mountain rivers were dry, and their beds made yawning gaps as though the earth had violently shuddered ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... half afraid and half delighted to be abroad so late alone, everybody and everything was in harmony with the hour and scene. Suddenly there fluttered into the car a snowy moth, astray from some flower garden in the country and quite bewildered and lost in the barren city. The beautiful creature fluttered into a lady's face and she screamed and struggled as though attacked by a rabid beast. "Oh, kill it! kill the horrid thing," she cried, while her attendant beat the air with his cane and ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden
... accident, or mated by wise paternal choice, infuse warmth into the coldness of the system under which they live. There are in all states of society some of such domesticity of nature that they will create a home around themselves under any circumstances, however barren. Besides, so kindly is human nature, that Love, uninvited before marriage, often becomes a guest after, and with Love always ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to-day the Old Testament still remains a great mine of historical, ethical, and religious truth. Some parts, like Genesis, Deuteronomy, Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah xl.-lv., and the Psalter, are richly productive. Others, like Numbers, Chronicles, and Esther, are comparatively barren. ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... drama is quite a barren field in Portuguese literature. The stage of Lisbon has been occupied almost exclusively by the Italian opera and Spanish comedy. Only one poet of any name has written in the Portuguese spirit. This was ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... century was almost barren of experiment. Emanuel Swedenborg, having invented a new religion, set about inventing a flying machine, and succeeded theoretically, publishing the result of his investigations ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... deepened as they neared the West. Out of the desert sea they came at last, And their hearts warmed to see that frozen land. O, first gray dawn that filtered through the dark! Bleak, glorious birth-hour of our northern states! They stood upon the shore like new created men; On barren solitudes of sand they stood, The conquered sea behind, the unconquered wilderness before. Some died that year beneath the cruel cold, And some for heartsick longing and the pang Of homes remembered and souls torn asunder. ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... If the father, when the child was first shown to him, stooped down and took it in his arms, it was received as a member of the family; if he left it unnoticed then it was doomed to death, and was exposed in some lonely or barren place to the mercy of the wild beasts, or of the first passer by. And even if a child escaped this fate, yet for the first seven or eight years of life he was kept in the gynaeceum, or women's apartments, and rarely or never saw his father's ...
— Seekers after God • Frederic William Farrar
... lust for Gold and Power not hideous spawn Of prehistoric reptiles, that had wings? Where e'er those crawled, they chawed all greening things And, when they mounted, how their lengths, full drawn, Basked barren in the sun before the dawn, Absorbing all its rays from budding Springs? These drain life's dawn and by impoverishings, Draw and reduce to ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... there alone, as was the custom, always however in the presence of the seneschal, of his varlets and the loiterers who remained outside the grill. When the countess saw the priest come who had charge of the masses said for children, and who received the said vows, she asked him if there were many barren women. To which the good priest replied, that he must not complain, and that the children were good revenue ...
— Droll Stories, Complete - Collected From The Abbeys Of Touraine • Honore de Balzac
... fields with which danger and hardship, wonder and mystery are ever associated. The country itself embraces great contrarieties of scenery and topography—the rich farm, the expansive cattle ranch, the broad lonely prairie watered by majestic rivers, the barren desert, the lofty plateau, the secluded mining settlement, and vast mountain ranges furrowed by torrents into black caons where sands of gold lie heaped ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... meaning seek, thine anguish plead; But, leaving straining thought and stammering word, Across the barren azure pass to God; Shooting the void in silence, like a bird— A bird that shuts his wings for ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... of really civilised country was obtained at this period. On the way, the cultivated areas round Ramleh[5] were visible as far as the eye could reach. This was indeed a very pleasant change from the barren and uncultivated tracts—the interminable stretches of rocky and boulder-strewn ground, intersected by apparently unbounded areas ...
— Through Palestine with the 20th Machine Gun Squadron • Unknown
... he had the Land, he had my love too; this Gentleman's the Heir, and he'll maintain it. Pray be not angry, Sir, at what I say; or if you be, 'tis at your own adventure. You have the out- side of a pretty Gentleman, but by my troth your inside is but barren; 'tis not a face I only am in love with, nor will I say your face is excellent, a reasonable hunting face to court the wind with; nor they're not words, unless they be well plac'd too, nor your sweet Dam-mes, nor your hired Verses, nor telling me of Clothes, nor Coach and Horses, no ...
— The Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher - Vol. 2 of 10: Introduction to The Elder Brother • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher
... sketches, the deep blue light which turns the rocks into turquoise and emerald or the silvery look of the diver as he plunges into the waves. Twice in their course the cliffs reach a height of thirteen hundred feet above the sea, but their grandeur is never the barren grandeur of our Northern headlands; their sternest faces are softened with the vegetation of the South; the myrtle finds root in every cranny and the cactus clings to the bare rock front from summit to base. A cliff wall hardly inferior in grandeur to that ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... her rich. She built splendid cities and became great. But the same story of destruction is to be read in the history of Sicily. Now the entire island does not raise a million and a half bushels of wheat altogether. The soil is barren. The cities have nearly all fallen into ruin. The people are scattered. Thousands have come to America, seeking a poor living at the lowest wages because at home there was no chance to earn even the little they require. They allowed ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... Rock desert of Nevada a playa lake spreads over an area fifty miles long and twenty miles wide. In summer it disappears; the Quinn River, which feeds it, shrinks back one hundred miles toward its source, leaving an absolutely barren floor of clay, ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... Such occasions rejoiced their hearts, over the profits they thus derived from the struggles of the unhappy natives to recover their freedom, and it may likewise without sin be supposed that their ingenuity was not barren in suggesting devices for ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt
... work continued and finally, at the end of three weeks, the dry barren plain had been transformed into a small city. Towering above the city, the Administration Building glistened in the light of their new sun, Wolf 359, and streets named after the colonists radiated from it in all directions, like the spokes of ...
— The Space Pioneers • Carey Rockwell
... greatest of them; their heads are under the woman's feet. What have I not done to aid him! At his instance, I went to the archbishop, to implore one of the princes of the Church for succour. I knelt to an ecclesiastic. I did a ludicrous and a shameful thing, knowing it in advance to be a barren farce. I obeyed his wish. The tale will be laughable. I obeyed him. I would not have it on my conscience that the commission of any deed ennomic, however unwonted, was refused by me to serve Alvan. You are my witness, Tresten, that for a young woman of common honesty I was ready to pack ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... over the burning sands of Arabia. Weary and thirsty were they, for they had not for days had herbage to crop, or water to drink, as they trod, mile after mile, the barren waste, where the sands glowed red like a fiery sea. And weary were the riders, exhausted with toil and heat, for they dared not stop to rest. The water which they carried with them was almost spent; some of the skins which had held it flapped ...
— The Children's Portion • Various
... to a more healthy place a little farther along the coast, where the ships could anchor and be sheltered from the north wind. But the soldiers began to grumble and be discontented, and to say that it was time to return with their spoil, and not linger upon those barren shores until they had brought the whole Mexican nation about their ears. Fortunately at this juncture five Indians made their appearance in the camp, and were taken to the general's tent. They were quite different from the Mexicans in dress ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... I think the execution of my barren commission needs no farther stay. Touching that small portion of mammon wherewith thou wouldst endow my master's passage across the seas, in his name I will venture to ...
— Cromwell • Alfred B. Richards
... never alluded to it. This is only natural, for the men of our day have no moral sense. France seems to me every day more devoid of any part in the great work of renovating the life of humanity. A dry, anti-critical, barren, and petty orthodoxy, of the St. Sulpice type; a hollow and superficial imitation full of affectation and exaggeration, like Neo-Catholicism; and an arid and heartless philosophy, crabbed and disdainful, like the University, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... extensive piece of low flat ground, intersected by numerous rivulets, which, uniting at a short distance from the beach, formed a deep and rapid stream, near the mouth of which we landed. This spot was, I think, the most barren I ever saw, the ground being almost entirely covered with small pieces of slaty limestone, among which no vegetation appeared for more than a mile, to which distance Mr. Ross and myself walked inland, following the banks of the stream. ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... another's lives; and divested of Yuga, people will become atheists and thieves. And they will even dig the banks of streams with their spades and sow grains thereon. And even those places will prove barren for them at such a time. And those men who are devoted to ceremonial rites in honour of the deceased and of the gods, will be avaricious and will also appropriate and enjoy what belongs to others. The father will enjoy what belongs to the son; and ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... not remove mountains, but it has certainly made the Northland. No Christian martyr ever possessed greater faith than did the pioneers of Alaska. They never doubted the bleak and barren land. Those who came remained, and more ever came. They could not leave. They "knew" the gold was there, and they persisted. Somehow, the romance of the land and the quest entered into their blood, the spell of it gripped hold of them and would not let them go. Man after man of ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... close in to barren and isolated Sala-y-Gomez, the POCAHONTAS had spoken the Chilian corvette O'HIGGINS, bound from Easter Island to Valparaiso. The captain of the corvette entertained the American master courteously, and explained his ship's presence so far to ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... fate of all conquered people; the terror of which hurried men from habitations to which they were but little attached, to seek security and repose under any climate that, however in other respects undesirable, might afford them refuge from the fury of their enemies. Thus the bleak and barren regions of the North, not being peopled by choice, were peopled as early, in all probability, as many of the milder and more inviting climates of the Southern world; and thus, by a wonderful disposition of the Divine Providence, a life of hunting, which does not ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... related of his political campaign in the North, upon the barren banks of the Neva, which, in causing much entertainment to the inhabitants of the fertile banks of the Seine, has not a little displeased ...
— Memoirs of the Court of St. Cloud, Complete - Being Secret Letters from a Gentleman at Paris to a Nobleman in London • Lewis Goldsmith
... first meal on the porch overlooking the mountains, listening to the breeze in the vines. It was heavenly sweet after the barren squalor of their Cripple Creek home, and they did little but gaze ...
— Money Magic - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... me began a sort of swamp with reeds which hardly moved to the air, and this gradually merged into a sheet of water above and beyond which were hills, barren and not very high, which took the last of the daylight, for they looked both southward and to the west. The more I watched the extraordinary and absolute scene the less I heard of the low voices about me, and ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... Dislodging from a region scarce of prey To gorge the flesh of lambs or yeanling kids, On hills where flocks are fed, flies toward the springs Of Ganges or Hydaspes, Indian streams; But in his way lights on the barren plains Of Sericana, where Chineses drive With sails and wind their cany waggons light: So, on this windy sea of land, the Fiend Walked up and down alone, bent on his prey; Alone, for other creature in this place, Living or lifeless, to be found was none; None yet, but store hereafter from the earth ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... newspapers, treating his adversaries with studied insolence, and declaring to them that, if the Chamber had its rights, the king also had his, and that force must settle the matter in such a case. To get rid of these barren struggles, he took advantage of the first incident of foreign politics. The Schleswig-Holstein question furnished him with the ...
— A History of The Nations and Empires Involved and a Study - of the Events Culminating in The Great Conflict • Logan Marshall
... willingness and faculty to oblige, up to the heights of magnanimity and love. Insight we must have, or we shall run against one another and miss the way to our food; but intellect is selfish and barren. The secret of success in society is a certain heartiness and sympathy. A man who is not happy in the company cannot find any word in his memory that will fit the occasion. All his information is a little impertinent. ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... desert, to say nothing of transforming the desert into a Garden of Eden. So moral and social and intellectual and political reformers may well go to Ezekiel, and learn that the 'river of the water of life,' which is to heal the barren and refresh the thirsty land, must come from below the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... draws in the air a great figure of the Cross. "By this sign I dispel your sorceries! As this Spear shall close the wound it made, let this lying splendour fall to wreck and desolation!" As if shaken by an earthquake, the palace crumbles to ruin; the garden withers away and turns to a barren waste; like broken and wilted flowers the women are seen bestrewing the ground; Kundry falls to earth with a great cry. And Parsifal, departing, turns on the ruined wall for a last word to her,—painfully ...
— The Wagnerian Romances • Gertrude Hall
... can be little danger of sinking into barren formulae, into glib aesthetic prattle about Renascence, in a movement of which one expression is the purification of those plaguy, if picturesque, Closes, which are the foul blot upon the beautiful Athens of the North. Those ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... all are haunted,—there soundeth in our ear, A low and restless moaning, that we struggle not to hear. Yet still it soundeth, the faint cry of the dark deeps of the soul,— Dark, barren, restless, as the sea which doth for ever roll Hither and thither, bearing still some half-shaped form of good, The flickering shadow of the moon upon the "moon-led flood." And ever, 'mid all the joys and weary cares of life, Through the ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... this time, "these most exciting days of the war are among the most barren of exciting topics for private correspondence. The 'atmosphere' here is unchanging—to us—and the British are turning their best side to us continuously. They are increasingly appreciative, and they see more and more clearly that our coming into the war is all that saved them from ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume II • Burton J. Hendrick
... of his own brow or not at all. The history of the abolition of slavery in America could not be written with Massachusetts left out; the history of Massachusetts herself, since the Revolution, would be but a dreary, barren waste without the chapter of her part ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... and suffering part of mankind. And yet he never allowed those high aims to clash with one another: he did not degrade his intellect to the sophistical office of finding reasons for a policy arising from mere emotion, nor did he permit it to run waste in barren speculations, which might have excited admiration, but never could have done any good. This is the reason why so many persons have been unable to understand him as the prophet of utilitarianism. A man of such exquisite feeling, of such pure conscientiousness, of such self-denying life, must ...
— John Stuart Mill; His Life and Works • Herbert Spencer, Henry Fawcett, Frederic Harrison and Other
... course, we did not want to move to Three, and we had already had rocket-ships for hundreds of generations. We have never been able to reach Six with them, but we visited Three long ago; and every one who went there came back as soon as he could. We detest land. It is hard, barren, unfriendly. We have everything, here upon Dasor. Food is plentiful, synthetic or natural, as we prefer. Our watery planet supplies our every need and wish, with one exception; and now that we are assured ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... in this century has come to the aid of the genealogist, and given to the results of the latter's somewhat discredited labors a vitality and meaning which it seemed impossible that dry and dusty pedigrees and barren tables of descent should ever possess. We have always selected our race-horses according to the doctrines of evolution, and we now study the character of a great man by examining first the history of ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... dry and barren spot, and happen to strike a vein of living water, it bubbles up, overflows, and moistens the surrounding earth, clothing it with beautiful verdure and smiling flowers. So it is in the resurrection. The life which had been concentrated in the soul alone, overflows to the body, giving ...
— The Happiness of Heaven - By a Father of the Society of Jesus • F. J. Boudreaux
... the most feasible way to that end. The whole world is in that temper that gives significance to the words of President Wilson when a day or two ago he said: "Any man who resists the present tides that run in the world will find himself thrown upon a shore so high and barren that it will seem as if he had been separated from his human kind forever." Unless, he might have added—he has and can demonstrate a better plan. The two chief arguments against it, that it will take away from our individual rights ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... an old pit-frame on a barren moor, gaunt, against the yellow west. Gourlay saw bars of iron, left when the pit was abandoned, reddened by the rain; and the mounds of rubbish, and the scattered bricks, and the rusty clinkers ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown
... shutting out the entrance of the harbour. On the shores around were seen numberless hamlets of every hue, the rich foliage of the tropical trees and shrubs, giving a cheerful aspect to the surrounding barren slopes, as did the bright green jalousies of most of the residences, and the flowering trees which rose among them, to the city. In every open space visible were seen slaves hurrying here and there with heavy loads, seamen of all ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... countries as they were long ago, we should hardly know them. In certain lands the forests have been cut down, the wild creatures driven away, and the soil so carelessly cultivated that it has become poor. In other lands Nature's gifts have been carefully used; even the barren deserts have been turned into green fields and blooming gardens ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... in his bedroom. Captain Baster hoped for an invitation to lunch (he hinted as much) but he was disappointed. In the end he returned to The Plough, chafing furiously; he felt that his morning had been barren. ...
— The Terrible Twins • Edgar Jepson
... the Saintes' Legend of Cupid: There may he see the large woundes wide Of Lucrece, and of Babylon Thisbe; The sword of Dido for the false Enee; The tree of Phillis for her Demophon; The plaint of Diane, and of Hermion, Of Ariadne, and Hypsipile; The barren isle standing in the sea; The drown'd Leander for his fair Hero; The teares of Helene, and eke the woe Of Briseis, and Laodamia; The cruelty of thee, Queen Medea, Thy little children hanging by the halse*, *neck For thy Jason, that was of love so false. Hypermnestra, Penelop', Alcest', ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... sentences, laughing at the seller of opulent Frankfurter sausages and nodding pleasantly to the lovely ladies in short, spangled skirts, who, with beckoning glances, sought their eyes. The air reverberated with an August evening's heat and seemed sweating. Its odor modulated from sea-brine to Barren Island, and the wind hummed. The clatter was striking; ardent whistling of peanut steam-roasters, vicious brass bands, hideous harps, wheezing organs, hoarse shoutings and the patient, monotonous cry of the fakirs and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... clear weather, a pleasant, sometimes an even too low temperature, and peaceful seas, a condition which the captain assured me was constant, the low temperature being due to the South Polar or Humboldt current. The absolute barren condition of this whole coast is also indirectly due to this current, the temperature of the sea being so much below that of the land that evaporation and condensation do not take place. After passing some guano islands on December 9th we landed at Callao, ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... again till Barrow was "hull down" behind him. To the north was the Arctic, treacherous, nursing hurricanes, ice-sheathed; but close aboard, not a quarter of a mile off his counter, stretched a gray and gloomy land, barren, bleak as a dead ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... standards. Men ask, why should we obey this or that law of God, man or our moral nature, if it bars the way to our enjoyment? "Let us eat and drink for to-morrow we die"; and eating and drinking they go out into a wild and barren land of sorrow. Again men seek happiness through the abundance of things; as if a human soul, born in the image of God, could be ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... includes all others."[271] "If Natural Theologians were content to stop where they prove a superior something to exist, Atheists might be content to stop there too, and allow Theologians to dream in quiet over their barren foundling."[272] "If I supposed that the Christian meant no more than that something exists independently of Nature, that it may be boundless, that it may be limited, that it may be one, that it may be many beings, if I supposed nothing ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... interior, is one of unceasing astonishment at the inconceivable multitude of deserted tanks, the hollows of which are still to be traced; and the innumerable embankments, overgrown with timber, which indicate the sites of vast reservoirs that formerly fertilised districts now solitary and barren. Every such tank is the landmark of one village at least, and such are the dimensions of some of them that in proportion to their area, it is probable that hundreds of villages may have been supported by a single one of these great ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... useful unless it calls up living things in the soul. To read a mystic book truly is to invoke the powers. If they do not rise up plumed and radiant, the apparitions of spiritual things, then is our labor barren. We only encumber the mind with useless symbols. They knew better ways long ago. "Master of the Green-waving Planisphere,... Lord of the Azure Expanse,... it is thus we invoke," cried ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell
... spiritualism lies in the fact that the most amazing phenomena come in opposition to the will of both the psychic and the sitters. We may not secure a single movement to-night, and, indeed, we may have two or three barren sittings, but I am confident that in the end you will be satisfied. I am going to attempt to put Mrs. Smiley to sleep now, and when she is in her trance we can discuss her ...
— The Shadow World • Hamlin Garland
... was Burr's country-seat. The whole property is now in the heart of the city and is worth millions, where once it brought thousands. Mr. Astor boldly bought those wild lands, including swamps, rocky knolls, and barren commons, which lay at waste from Canal street onward to Bloomingdale, and while others affected to laugh at his judgment, the correctness of that judgment is now quite apparent. A case similar in character is that of the late eccentric ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No. 2, August, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... our prison-chamber, they expected that, according to our custom, something should be spoken out of the Word for our mutual edification. I felt myself, it being my turn to speak, so empty, spiritless, and barren, that I thought I should not have been able to speak among them so much as five words of truth with life and evidence. At last I cast mine eye upon this prophecy, when, after considering awhile, methought I perceived something ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... owner a certain proportion of the yield of the land—generally one quarter—either in kind or in money. The landlord may, indeed, refuse the right of settlement in the first instance, which would very rarely occur, since most people who own barren tracts of rock and heath are only too glad to promote any kind of cultivation. But when the landlord has once allowed the right, the right itself is constituted thereby into a possession of which the ...
— Saracinesca • F. Marion Crawford
... the Scriptural foundation of their rites and belief they are referred to Matthew xix., 12: "and there be eunuchs which have made themselves for the kingdom of Heaven's sake," etc.; and Mark ix., 43-47; Luke xxiii., 29: "blessed are the barren," etc., and others of this nature. As to the operation itself, pain is represented as voluntary martyrdom, and persecution as the struggle of the spirit of darkness with that of light. They got persons to join the order by monetary offers. Another method was to take into ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... earliest conscious emotion was that of sympathy—it all appeared so unspeakably pathetic, so homesick, so dismally forlorn and barren. Then that half-upturned face riveted his attention and seemed to awaken a vague, dreamy memory he found himself unable to localize; it reminded him of some other face he had known, tantalizing from its dim indistinctness. Then ...
— Beth Norvell - A Romance of the West • Randall Parrish
... fruit trees, to seek out and perfect edible roots and herbs at once for man and cattle. We owe to the Dutch that scurvy and leprosy have been banished from England, that continuous crops have taken the place of barren fallows, that the true rotation of crops has been discovered and perfected, that the population of these islands has been increased and that the cattle and sheep in England are ten times what they were in numbers and three times what they were in ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... plain, with the hot sun beating upon its southern slopes, wears a terribly forbidding aspect. There is nothing of the grandeur of snow, or glaciers, or deep forests, to excite curiosity or adventure; no trace of gardens or waterfalls. From base to summit all seems gray, barren, silent—dead, bleached bones of mountains, overgrown with scrubby bushes, like gray moss. But all mountains are full of hidden beauty, and the next day after my arrival at Pasadena I supplied myself with bread and eagerly set out to give myself to ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... of the mists altogether, and emerged on to the higher valleys of the Alps—vast, sterile, the white snow-plains glittering in the sun, except where the rocks showed through in points of intense black. There were no longer any pines. They were in a world of snow and barren rocks and brilliant sunlight, with a cold luminous blue sky overhead; themselves the only living creatures visible; their voices sounding strangely distinct in ...
— The Beautiful Wretch; The Pupil of Aurelius; and The Four Macnicols • William Black
... a lady bright, A full-born beauty new and exquisite? She fled into that valley they pass o'er Who go to Corinth from Cenchreas' shore; And rested at the foot of those wild hills, The rugged founts of the Peraean rills, And of that other ridge whose barren back Stretches, with all its mist and cloudy rack, South-westward to Cleone. There she stood About a young bird's flutter from a wood, 180 Fair, on a sloping green of mossy tread, By a clear pool, wherein she passioned To see herself ...
— Keats: Poems Published in 1820 • John Keats
... choice, me judice, of nearly balanced evils. To have defeated it would have been to invest Stanley with the cheap honours of a petty martyrdom. To have affirmed it is, I fear, to have given a new impetus to the barren, unspiritual negations ...
— Fifteen Chapters of Autobiography • George William Erskine Russell
... ashy brown, and so to a deadly white, this last color forming a thin ring, running in a long line around the slope. And then? Nothing. Bare, brown, hard earth, glittering with grains of alkali, but otherwise dead and barren. Not a tuft of grass, not a stick of brushwood, not even a stone, but only the vast ...
— Black Spirits and White - A Book of Ghost Stories • Ralph Adams Cram
... upon his head as a rebel No man could reveal secrets which he did not know Of high rank but of lamentably low capacity Pope excommunicated him as a heretic Preventing wrong, or violence, even towards an enemy They could not invent or imagine toleration Uunmeaning phrases of barren benignity ...
— Quotations From John Lothrop Motley • David Widger
... ground so stony that if they had sprung up they would soon have withered away. The pioneers in the work for the redemption of women found an unbroken field, not fallow from lying idle, but arid and barren, filled with the unyielding rocks of prejudice and choked with the thorns of conservatism. It required many years of labor as hard as that endured by the forefathers in wresting their lands from undisturbed nature, before the ground was even broken to receive the seed. Then followed the ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... insisted that the matter of most consequence was the grip with which they held their convictions and their willingness to sacrifice the interests on which they could lay their hands, in loyalty to some nobler faith. He taught that beliefs by hearsay are not only barren but ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... prize away, Due to the deeds of many a dreadful day? A prize as small, O tyrant! match'd with thine, As thy own actions if compared to mine. Thine in each conquest is the wealthy prey, Though mine the sweat and danger of the day. Some trivial present to my ships I bear: Or barren praises pay the wounds of war. But know, proud monarch, I'm thy slave no more; My fleet shall waft me to Thessalia's shore: Left by Achilles on the Trojan plain, What spoils, what conquests, shall ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... San Diego they met a Western miner named George Brown, who told them stories of a lonely desert island off the coast of Lower California, where he was about to open a copper-mine for the company for which he was general manager. The more he talked of this lonesome isle and of how barren and desolate it was the more Mrs. Stevenson was fascinated with it, and when he finally invited them, in true Western fashion, to accompany him thither, she joyfully accepted. In the early part of January she took passage with her little party, consisting of herself, ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... barren, barren; beggars all, beggars all, Sir John: marry, good air. Spread Davy, spread ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... world kin. There is not one high wall, but two high walls between the classes and the masses, so-called, and that erected in self-defence by the exploited is the higher and more difficult to climb. On the one side is a disciplined, fortified Gibraltar, held by the gentry; then comes a singularly barren and unstable neutral zone; and on the other side is the vast chaotic mass. In Under Town, I notice, a gentleman is always gen'leman, a workman or tramp is man, but the fringers, the inhabitants of the neutral zone, are called persons. For example: "That man ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... very moment: "France has too many colonies already—far more in Asia, in Africa, in America, in Oceania than she can fructify. In this way she is immobilizing territories, continents, peoples, which nominally she takes over. And it is childish and imprudent to take barren possession of them, when other states allege their power to utilize them in the general interest. By acting in this manner, France, do what she may, is placing herself in opposition to the world's ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Sargent, in his "Dealings with the Dead," speaks at length of the latter custom, which prevailed to an inordinate extent in Boston. In smaller settlements some out-of-the-way spot was chosen for a common burial-place, in barren pasture or on lonely hillside, thus forcibly proving the ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... barren since time began. Yet do I dream of motherhood, when man One day at last shall look upon my charms And give me towns, ...
— Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp • Various
... little trouble for some one, but if love go with it, then it becomes great and worthy at once, for it is part of the giver's very self. It is not what a man gives, but how he gives it, that matters. Gold and silver coming from a full purse and a cold heart, is a barren gift compared to the widow's mite, ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... word uttered between them. There had been only that one moment in which her soul looked back upon him with a glance of tenderness, before she was gone from him beyond recall. He came to himself, out of the confused agony of his grief, as the sun was setting. He found himself in a wild and barren wilderness of savage rocks, with a small black tarn lying at his feet, which just caught the glimmer of the setting sun on its lurid surface. The silence about him was intense. Gray clouds stretched ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... the Old Testament I beg to suggest that he is overlooking a very important bit. The Old Testament commands no class of people to abstain from wine, except the Jewish priesthood, and they ONLY WHILE PERFORMING THEIR SACRED OFFICES. An angel of the Lord did command the barren Manoah to stay sober awhile and she should conceive and bear a son; and I imagine that something equally as miraculous might happen to Luther Benson under similar circumstances. David recounts as one of God's mercies that he giveth ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... early spring The flower-girls to the city bring, O, healing-bright to wintry eyes As primrose-gold 'neath northern skies— But O for fit thing to compare With the joy I have in the thought of her! So all day long doth her holy face Bring fragrance to the barren place, And whensoe'er it comes nearest me, ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... the motionless figures, and finally rode off up the ridge, unconsciously following the tracks left by the fleeing Indian. If the girl ever occurred to him, he gave no sign of remembrance, and she uttered no word. Lying on her side, her eyes wide open, she watched him ride away, across the barren space, until the slow-moving pony topped the ridge, and disappeared on the other side. Twice the man turned and glanced back into the valley, but saw nothing except the black blotches on the snow. Molly made no motion, no outcry. She preferred death there ...
— Molly McDonald - A Tale of the Old Frontier • Randall Parrish
... which they had to pass en route was destitute of water. The red men told them additionally that the valley (meaning the Sacramento) was beautiful, and that the streams were full of beaver. All of this information the trappers found was true. For four days they travelled over a barren country, where not one drop of water could be found. At each night's camping-place, small allowances of water from the tanks was distributed by the commander to each man and animal. A guard was then stationed over the remainder to prevent any accident from depriving the company of this now ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters
... place look inviting enough, but when the people came close, they were again disappointed; there were not more than three score and ten palm tress, and there were of stunted growth owing to a lack of water, for in spite of the presence of twelve wells of water, the soil was so barren and sandy that the wells were not sufficient to water it. [85] Here again the marvelous intercession of God in favor of the fate of Israel is shown, for the scant supply of water at Elim, which had hardly sufficed for seventy palm trees, satisfied sixty myriads of the wandering people ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME III BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... days to derision, Our loves into corpses or wives, And marriage and death and division Make barren our lives?' ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... yonder: When thou hast knocked this world asunder, Come if it will the other may! Up from this earth my pleasures all are streaming, Down on my woes this earthly sun is beaming; Let me but end this fit of dreaming, Then come what will, I've nought to say. I'll hear no more of barren wonder If in that world they hate and love, And whether in that future yonder There's a Below and ...
— Faust • Goethe
... merchant, Mr Thompson, and committed their property to his care—i.e. the hull of the good ship Roving Bess—the rent of which he promised to collect monthly—and Ned's curious property, the old boat and the little patch of barren sand, on which it stood. The boat itself he made over, temporarily, to a poor Irishman who had brought out his wife with him, and was unable to proceed to the diggings in consequence of the said wife having fallen into a ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... tether of the faculties tends to make them accept present knowledge, and present things, as all that can be attained to. This is all— there is nothing more—is the iterated preaching of house-life. Remain; becontent; go round and round in one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables, old age and death. Of all the inventions of casuistry with man for ages has in various ways which manacled himself, and stayed his own advance, there is none equally potent with ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... fell away from this barren study. She was obsessed by the Natcha-Kee-Tawaras. They seemed to have fascinated her. Which of them it was, or what it was that had cast the spell over her, she did not know. But she was as if hypnotized. She longed ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... teachers are constantly plied. Can one who for years has waged a battle for the American teacher and American musical education answer this question without bias? Can we who trace the roots of our lineage back to barren Plymouth or stolid New Netherland judge the ...
— Great Pianists on Piano Playing • James Francis Cooke
... scene presented still another lesson to the eye: between the Parisian leaning on the parapet and the cathedral lay the "Terrain" (such was the ancient name of this barren spot), still strewn with the ruins of the Archiepiscopal Palace. When we contemplate from that quay so many commemorating scenes, when the soul has grasped the past as it does the present of this city of Paris, then indeed Religion seems to have alighted ...
— The Brotherhood of Consolation • Honore de Balzac
... General Lacy surprised.... Attempt on Lafayette at Barren hill.... General Howe resigns the command of the British army.... Is succeeded by Sir H. Clinton.... He evacuates Philadelphia, and marches through the Jerseys.... A council of war which decides against attacking the British on ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 3 (of 5) • John Marshall
... imagination is royalty. He who claims the name of artist must rise to that vision of a loftier reality—a more true because a more beautiful world—which only imagination can reveal. A truer world, —for the world of facts is not and cannot be true. It is barren, incoherent, misleading. But behind every fact there is a truth: and these truths are enlightening, unifying, creative. Fasten your hold upon them, and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... This great barren valley, which has already been alluded to, enters the main valley of Copiapo a little above the town: it runs at first northerly, then N.E., and more easterly into the Cordillera; I followed its dreary course ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin |
