"Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mexico. She searched the horizon for mountains, but there did not appear to be any. She received a vague, slow-dawning impression that was hard to define. She did not like the country, though that was not the impression which eluded her. Bare gray flats, low scrub-fringed hills, bleak cliffs, jumble after jumble of rocks, and occasionally a long vista down a valley, somehow compelling—these passed before her gaze until she tired of them. Where was the West Glenn had written about? One thing seemed ...
— The Call of the Canyon • Zane Grey
... Hall looked chilly and bleak, even though patches of sunlight were fighting the usual gloom. On the hearth-stone lay a scrap of white, doubtless Ricky's handkerchief. Val flung open the front door and stepped out on the terrace, drawing deep lungfuls ...
— Ralestone Luck • Andre Norton
... our worst weather, as we say,—worst for our health or convenience we must always mean. Think of a bleak and sleety March day. As the storm whirls against the house with strong blasts of rain and snow, our excitement increases by watching the swaying trees, and by listening to the shaking windows, while the lawless winds howl and rage around the corner. When ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... his home for Venice. He had married a Venetian wife, who, among the bleak mountains of the Katunska, was pining for the sun and warmth of her native city. But before leaving he laid down the lines for a powerful regime. A Prince-Bishop, or Vladika, was placed at the head of affairs, but, to help him in his difficult task, there was created a second office, that of ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... many tinkling bells. All this the King saw as he pondered much, who had not pondered before. Westward the Agnid mountains frowned in the distance guarding the river Eidis; behind them the fierce people of Zeenar lived in a bleak land. ...
— Time and the Gods • Lord Dunsany [Edward J. M. D. Plunkett]
... terror in a storm which shakes the house, while the Norns—the goddesses of fate—proclaim in the tempest his tempestuous career. Equally satisfactory it appears to have the modern champion of Norway—the typical modern Norseman—born on the bleak and wild Dovre Mountain,[1] where there is winter eight months of the year and cold weather during the remaining four. The parish of Kvikne, in Oesterdalen, where his father, the Reverend Peder Bjoernson, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the responsibility of a locomotive engineer, it is necessary to ride a hundred miles or so in an engine. The author was given this privilege on a bleak, frosty day, early last winter. He was told by the officials that he took the ride at his own risk, and as a matter of personal favor, and that he must not interfere with the engineer or fireman in the ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... morning, showed symptoms of coming to five to three. In the meantime, by no means abashed at finding themselves the cynosure of so many eyes, the Englishmen proceeded to keep up their circulation by leap-frog and horse-play, for their jerseys were thin and the wind bleak. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... part of the hall the man Nogam moved hastily into view, his features twisted in a grimace of concern as he recognized the bleak misery of Sofia's face. His voice sounded ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.; perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... cry rings out; From the high watch-tower comes the shout. Awake, imperial German land— Ye by distant Danube dwelling, And where the infant Rhine is swelling, And where the bleak dunes pile their sand! For hearth and home keep watch, Sword from its scabbard snatch; Every hour For bitter fight Prepare aright— The day of combat is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... evening of a bleak, cold March day, in an early year of this century, a woman, scantily clad, led a boy about eight years old, along the high-road towards the old city of Exeter. They crept close to the hedge-side to shelter themselves from the clouds of dust, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... and disappear round behind the church, half her sorrow at losing him was swallowed up in the practical certainty that they would meet again before Christmas in their old home, and not in a stranger's house in the bleak North country. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... face peering from the iron lattice of the Den, no Arthur, no Nina there. Nothing but piles of snow upon the roof, snow upon the window-sills, snow upon the doorsteps, snow upon the untrodden walk, snow on the leafless elms, standing there so bleak and brown. Snow everywhere, as cold, as desolate as Edith's heart, and she bade Victor take her back again to the warm grate where she might perhaps forget how gloomy and sad, and ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes
... dropped a shovelful of hot coals, or rather as if some corrosive fluid had been spilled. I remained here a few moments, idly wondering what might have been the history of the former tenants, and what could have induced any one to build a house in a spot so bleak and exposed, where scarcely a pretence of soil offered itself for a garden. As I stood there, a singular impression came upon me that I was not alone. For a moment, and a moment only, I became conscious of another presence ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.
... with hasty, stretch'd heads grow And strive for heav'n, but rooted here Lament the distance with a tear! The honeysuckles clad in white, The rose in red, point to the light; And the lilies, hollow and bleak, Look as if they would something speak; They sigh at night to each soft gale, And at the day-spring weep it all. Shall I then only—wretched I!— Oppress'd with earth, on earth still lie?" Thus speaks he to the neighbour ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan
... stood in the midst of a bleak moor, in the North Country, a certain village. All its inhabitants were poor, for their fields were barren, and they had little trade; but the poorest of them all were two brothers called Scrub and Spare, ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... But this he did do, thereby riding out of the district with which he was most thoroughly acquainted, and passing by cabins and patches of now deserted land which were strange to him. It was a poor, bleak, damp, undrained country, lying beyond the confines of his father's property, which in good days had never been pleasant to the eye, but which now in these days—days that were so decidedly bad, was anything but pleasant. It was one of those tracts of land which had been divided and subdivided ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... it, whether presented to them in the form of Catholicism or of Arianism.[317] The great marvel in their history, and their chief claim to the dominion of the world, was, that they had preserved so long, in the bleak regions in which the growth of civilisation was in every way retarded, the virtues together with the ignorance of ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... stairs in the higher regions of the house creaked under slowly-descending footsteps. In a minute more the first of the female servants made her appearance, with a dingy woolen shawl over her shoulders—for the March morning was bleak; and rheumatism and ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins
... following the April 1999 coup d'etat - for operating expenses and public investment. In 2000-01, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $105 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak financial situation. The IMF approved a $73 million poverty reduction and growth facility for Niger in 2000 and announced $115 million in debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Further disbursements of aid occurred in 2002. Future ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... faced; or what a shadow seemed to fall across them as the parson uttered those fateful words, so terrible to one whose heart is not in them: What God hath joined together let no man put asunder. Death and not life awaited me on that bleak hillside, or so I thought, though the bridegroom at my side was the handsomest man I had ever seen and had rather exceeded than failed in his devotion to ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... of the old Fruit Markets and York Street shops, with their heads to the wall and their feet to the gutter. It was raining and cold that night, and the unemployed had been driven in from Hyde Park and the bleak Domain—from dripping trees, damp seats, and drenched grass—from the rain, and cold, and the wind. Some had sheets of old newspapers to cover them-and some hadn't. Two were mates, and they divided a Herald between them. One had a sheet ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... Spain moved towards the horizon, as in grand procession, and at the same time the Western hemisphere appeared. The hour of day at the longitude above which they hung was about the same as when they set out, but the sun shone far more directly upon the Northern hemisphere than then, and instead of bleak December, this was the leafy month ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... commenced. In a few days the cold wintry showers swept all the gorgeous crimson from the trees; and a bleak and desolate waste presented itself to the shuddering spectator. But, in spite of wind and rain, my little tenement was never free from the intrusion of Uncle Joe's wife and children. Their house stood ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... moments, too, when her tenderness flared into startling outbursts of bleak, cutting anger, giving way in the end to floods of hysterical tears. A couple of such tempests formed part of ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman
... McDonald Islands Heard Island - 80% ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak); McDonald Islands - ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... wind from the bleak north; tearing through the moaning pine forest, that tossed and swayed before the tempest, gnawing Catherine's nose and fingers, and snatching up, as it were, handfuls of snow, and hurling them in a rage through the air. Poor Catherine was nearly frozen, yet she struggled ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... beautiful than all other lands and the castle of the Duke, its ruler, lay beside a lake that was bluer than the deepest indigo. A long time ago the Knight Wendelin and his squire George chanced upon this lake, but they found nothing save waste fields and bleak rocks around it, yet the shores must formerly have borne a different aspect, for there were shattered columns and broken-nosed statues lying on the ground. Against the hillside there were remains of ancient walls that once, undoubtedly, had supported terraces ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... new country were developed, the women were given some respite from their spinning, weaving, and garment making. Much of their hard-won leisure was spent piecing quilts. In the rigorous climate of bleak New England there was great need of warm clothing and bedding, and the spare moments of the housekeeper were largely occupied in increasing her supply. To make the great amount of bedding necessary in the unheated sleeping rooms, every scrap and remnant ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster
... he was seldom rash. Enthusiasm is not common in the bleak northern dales, whose inhabitants are, for the most part, conservative and slow. Wind and rain had hardened him and he had inherited a reserved strength and quietness from ancestors who had braved the storms that raged about Ashness. Yet the north is not always stern, for now and then the gray sky ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... no doubt, that your letter to Adele has borne fruit (period). Miss Manwaring does splendidly as an amanuensis (period). Your judgment was always trustworthy (period). And address the envelope, of course, to Mrs. Cornwallis English. She is stopping, I hear, with the Lorimers at Bleak House—the grey stone house on the hill at the end ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... turn from them; turn we to survey 165 Where rougher climes a nobler race display, Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions tread, And force a churlish soil for scanty bread; No product here the barren hills afford, But man and steel, the soldier and his sword; 170 No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array, But winter ling'ring ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... ground, but under favorable conditions, as upon the wooded points and islands of Lake Umbagog, attaining a height of 50-60 feet, with a diameter of 10-15 inches. Extremely variable in habit. In thin soils and upon bleak sites the trunk is for the most part crooked and twisted, the head scrubby, stunted, and variously distorted, resembling in shape and proportions the pitch pine under similar conditions. In deeper soils, and in situations protected from ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame
... carried good rosin torches in their hands, and the wild light, all gold and crimson against the rocks, shone as bright as a ship's flare and as far. Never have I seen such a thing, I say, and never shall. There were the three of them, like young deer on a bleak hillside, singing and laughing and leaping down, and, what's more, speaking to each other in an odd lingo, with here a word of French and there a word of German, and after that something that was beyond me and foreign ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton
... afternoon Venice was a bleak and empty setting, the jewel gone. How vacant it looked, how vacant it was! We made not any effort to penetrate the galleries; I had no heart to urge my friend. For us the whole of Venice had become one bridge ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington
... time, turning her face for a moment to catch the glory of the dying sun as it fell on his form, her eyes were arrested by the shape and aspect of a woman in the west gallery. It was the bleak barren countenance of the widow Jethway, whom Elfride had not seen much of since the morning of her return with Stephen Smith. Possessing the smallest of competencies, this unhappy woman appeared to spend her life in journeyings ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... vapors, Mountains, Bleak, foreboding, Mountains, Stark and overpowering. Torrents, Tumbling, crashing, Dragging boulders In their rushing, Lakes, Forlorn and lonesome Heather In magenta patches, Sheep, and cattle Black and somber, Winding roads Through massive passes. Rain, Sun, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder
... portion of these ranges is properly the Cordilleras; while the eastern, which slopes towards the wide-extending plains of Brazil, forms the true Andes. The southern portion skirts the bleak shores of Patagonia in a single sierra, for a distance of nearly one thousand miles, in some parts rising to the height of seven thousand feet above the ocean. Entering Chili, the mountains rise higher and higher, till they culminate in the mighty peak of Aconcagua, the most lofty ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... having doors and windows of wattled basketwork. There were not enough huts to house the army nor camp-kettles for cooking. Blankets were so few that many of the men were without covering at night. In the warm summer weather this did not much matter but bleak autumn and harsh winter would bring bitter privation. The sick in particular suffered severely, for the hospitals were ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... was cold and bleak. It drizzled through the dreary hours, freezing as it fell. But to many loving hearts, its sleet and rain were not its gloom. On this day was laid to rest in Mother Earth the loved remains of one numbered in the health-seeking trio of the year before. ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... old "Permit days," in this secluded spot. Beyond this the long line of the Vermilion Hills hove in sight, and presently we reached the Vermilion River, the Wyamun of the Crees, and, before nightfall, the Nasookamow, or Twin Lake, making our camp in an open besmirched pinery, a cattle shelter, with bleak and bare surroundings, neighboured by the shack of a solitary settler. He had, no doubt, good reasons for his choice; but it seemed a very much less inviting locality than Stony Creek, which we came to next morning, approaching it through rich and massive spruce woods, the ground strewn ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... cold continued, accompanied by snow. They set forward on their bleak and toilsome way, keeping to the northeast, toward the lofty summit of a mountain which it was necessary for them to cross. Before they reached its base they passed another large trail, a little to the right of a point of the mountain. This they supposed to ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... confess I remained perfectly lost in thought for some minutes; nor did I ever feel, or could imagine so distinctly, how the stupendous and neglected works of creation are blended with the truest beauty; for, seen from the very mountains on which I stood, so rough, so barren, so bleak, the same rugged, straggling rocks, scattered over the opposite mountain, seemed soft as velvet and more delicate than the finished ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... garden of Eden. What has struck me powerfully is the immeasurably greater diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a single civilised nation, than in equatorial South America, where three distinct races of man live together. The superiority of the bleak north to tropical regions, however, is only in their social aspect, for I hold to the opinion that, although humanity can reach an advanced state of culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high latitudes, it is under the equator ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... MOANING CLIFF Carol finally tracks the uncanny "haunts" in the great, bleak house on "moaning cliff" ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... pew-opener (whose cough was very bad again) remembered, and the beadle gratified, and the sexton (who was accidentally on the doorsteps, looking with great interest at the weather) not forgotten, they got into the carriage again, and drove home in the same bleak fellowship. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... days, or years before I had been pushing along the trail to the coast, thinking little where I placed my feet and much of the eating that lay at Dalton Post House; and of other things thousands of miles from this bleak waste, where men exist in the hope of ultimate living, with kaleidoscope death by their side; other things that had to do with women's faces, bills of fare from which bacon and beans were rigidly excluded, and comforts of the flesh that some ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne
... after we left East St. Louis, and we were put on board the cars and secreted in the gentlemen's smoking car, in which there were only a few rebels. We arrived in Springfield about twelve o'clock at night. When we took the cars it was dark, bleak and cold. It was the 18th of March, and as we were without bonnets and clothing to shield us from the sleet and wind, we suffered intensely. The old trader, for fear that mother might make her escape, carried my brother, nine years of age, from one train to the other. We then took the cars for ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson
... strong man he looked. At any rate, his fight for his life when it came was a singularly weak one. The second winter after Louise's death was bitterly cold; he was overworked, and often without sleep. One bleak east-wind day struck home. He took to his bed with a chill, which turned to peritonitis; the system showed no power of resistance, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... not to, here; the marvelous night stole in through all one's chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings—feelings one couldn't manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tired to ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim
... sure, an earlier republic in Europe, Switzerland. But the Swiss maintained themselves by their isolation, their remoteness from other nations and from one another in their bleak mountain valleys. The Dutch, on the contrary, inhabited a flat sea-coast; they were traders; their very existence depended on intercourse with other lands. Hence they had to be ever alert in defence of their hard-won freedom. The spirit of nationality, of patriotism ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the grooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid the heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one geologic inscription to which I still wanted ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... only Lettie who said it, yet the impression went about and fixed itself somehow, that I had given myself over to a life of luxury. I, who at this very time was starving of hunger and almost perishing of cold in a bleak wind-swept land. And to me for all this, there were neither ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... In the bleak three-cornered artists'-room she could faintly hear the descending impetuous velocities of the Ride of the Walkyries. She was waiting in her new yellow dress, waiting painfully. Otto rushed in, a glass ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... behind a bank of grey clouds, the northeast wind came whistling insistently through the trees:—even that feeling of spring in the air had vanished. It was just a bleak grey winter's day now. Crystal felt herself shivering with cold. She drew her shawl more closely round her shoulders, then with eyes still wet with tears, but small head held well erect, she rose to her feet and walked rapidly back to ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... tribesmen have been slain by him, and their bones will ever rest on our hunting-ground, unmolested either by sire or son. He has met this day in deadly combat the gray wolves of the forest that destroyed our venison. They spared neither the deer nor its fawn; and to-night they sleep in death, high on the bleak mountain-side. The God of battle helps him in every strife, and no arm has yet been found able to cope with his. And we should be proud of such a friend to lead the hunt and move the ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... go to sea; cut my kind uncles and aunts, and sympathizing patrons, and leave no heavy hearts but those in my own home, and take none along but the one which aches in my bosom. Cold, bitter cold as December, and bleak as its blasts, seemed the world then to me; there is no misanthrope like a boy disappointed; and such was I, with the warmth of me flogged out by adversity. But these thoughts are bitter enough ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... blue Atlantic waves, and seeming to smile a welcome as the mariners gazed with eyes of joy and hope on the inviting arcades of its verdant forest depths. Never had the eyes of white men beheld this land of beauty before. English ships had sailed along the coast to the north, finding much of it bleak and uninviting. The caravels of Columbus had threaded the glowing line of tropic isles, and later ships had borne settlers to these lands of promise. But the rich southlands of the continent had never before been seen, and well ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... his parka and went through the door. The foyer was empty, and, like the one at the rocket landing, protected from the Antarctic blast only by a curtain of hot air. Outside that curtain, the light seemed to lose itself in the darkness of the bleak, snow-filled Wastelands. Mike ignored the snowscape and headed across the empty foyer ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... figs, oranges, and wine. Truly, if national character depended wholly on physical geography, we should be inclined to look in the valley of the Eurotas for the rich and luxurious Athens, and seek its stern and simple rival among the bleak hills and sterile plains of Attica. We had a short ride that afternoon up the valley of the Eurotas, with a keen north wind in our faces, and were not sorry to reach Kalyvia at an ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... little railway of twenty-five miles, from Zurich to Baden. Spain has its two small lines, from Madrid to Aranjuez, and from Barcelona to Mataro. Turkey and Greece, in the south-east; Portugal, in the south-west; Sweden and Norway,[1] in the bleak north, have yet to become members of the great ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... th' same ivrywhere. In anny part iv this fair land iv ours it shud be th' right iv anny man to get a divoorce, with alimony, simply be goin' befure a Justice iv th' Peace an' makin' an affydavit that th' lady's face had grown too bleak f'r his taste. Be Hivens, I'd go farther. Rather than have people endure this sarvichood I'd let anny man escape be jumpin' th' conthract. All he'd have to do if I was r-runnin' this Governmint wud be to put some ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... garden, now bleak with winter waste. Helen drew a red cloak about her shoulders, which Prescott thought singularly becoming. The snow was falling gently and the frosty air deepened the scarlet in her cheeks. The Harley house was ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... paced the deck, and watched the bleak shores of Cork fading in the distance, his thoughts were full of the banished Costellos, and he wondered with what eyes those exiles had looked their last on the Old Head of Kinsale a quarter of a millennium ago. Those fierce old chieftains, to whom the Ffrenches—proud county family ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne
... value. It taught him a certain self-reliance; it showed him that what was disagreeable was not necessarily intolerable. What Hugh needed to make him effective was a certain touch of the world, a certain hardness, which his home life did not tend to develop. And thus this bleak and uncheered episode of life gave him a superficial ordinariness, and taught him the need of conventional compliance with the ways of the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... said Moggy, "I should think a little of that stuff would do neither of us any harm; the night is rather bleak." ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... the scene of his exploit, rose early, rode fast, and by noon was plainly in the selvage of the great woods. The country was split into bleak ravines, a pell-mell of rocks and boulders, and a sturdy crop of black pines between them. An overgrowth of brambles and briony ran riot over all. Prosper rode up a dry river-bed, keeping steadily west, so ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... this situation was the more desirable because of all the parts above it being bleak and dreary. Round the shoulders of the upland, like the arch of a great arm-chair, ran a barren scraggy ridge, whereupon no tree could stand upright, no cow be certain of her own tail, and scarcely a crow breast ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... camp, is bleak and dreary and isolated. At the outset cases of typhus occurred there, and in a neat, secluded corner of the camp long lines of wooden crosses tell the tale of sadness. The first cross marked a Russian from far-away Vilna, the next a Tommy from London. East had met West in the bleak ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... the Peiwar and Shuturgurdan passes to Kabul; third, from Dera Ismail Khan through the Guleir Surwandi and Sargo passes to Ghazni; fourth, by Quetta to Kandahar and thence to Herat, or by Ghazni to Kabul. Besides these there are many steep, difficult, mule tracks over the bleak, barren, Sulimani range, which on its eastern side is very precipitous and impassable for any ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough
... hadn't thought of him since the one time they had met in Alexandria. That was a year ago. It seemed much longer. Since the Boss-man had exiled his cousin to that bleak rock to the east of Flora there had been no word of him. And now—he laughed a sharp bark of humorless annoyance—Douglas couldn't have timed it better ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... motive, as Margaret knew from her own feelings. It would be different. Discordant as it was—with almost a detestation for all she had ever heard of the North of England, the manufacturers, the people, the wild and bleak country—there was this one recommendation—it would be different from Helstone, and could never remind them ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... came to a dead halt sometimes, in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves across the track. Conversation began to flag. Cheerfulness gave place to grave concern. The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every mind, and extended its ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... a quarter of an hour to wait. Hilda dismissed Florrie, with final injunctions, and followed her trunk to the bleak platform. The old porter was very kind. She went to the little yellow bookstall. There, under her hand, was a low pile of The Five Towns Chronicle. Miracle! Miraculous George Cannon! She flushed with pride, with a sense of ownership, as she took a penny from ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... casement partially darkened, to the bleak north; various sketches on the walls; gaunt specimens of antique furniture, and of gorgeous Italian silks, scattered about in confused disorder; one large picture on its easel curtained; another as large, and half finished, before which stood the painter. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Poland, Courland, and Livonia. I went on horseback as the most convenient manner of traveling. I was but lightly clothed, and of this I felt the inconvenience the more I advanced northeast. What must not a poor old man have suffered in that severe weather and climate, whom I saw on a bleak common in Poland lying on the road helpless, shivering, and hardly having the wherewithal to cover his nakedness? I pitied the poor soul: though I felt the severity of the air myself, I threw my mantle over him, and immediately I heard a voice from the heavens blessing me for that piece ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher
... there is peace! It is cold and gray there in the early morning, and the hills are bleak and black, but I remember days when from this same spot I've watched the deep, soft blue and green; I've sat here as the hills were glowing in the changing evening lights and our valley grew dark and cold. What ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... was absent at a Shakespeare reading. Dr. Trenire had been out all day, a long round over bleak country, and had not been home more than an hour. Kitty had heard him come, and had longed—as she had never longed in the days when she was free to do as she liked—to go and superintend his meal, and hear all about his day. But she knew what a to-do there ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... thick and awkward sulphur setting, but with the afternoon the jewel faded to a distant dim phantom, from that to blank nothingness. As if satisfied with this piteous exit, the fog drew closer, keeping especially heavy watch upon the long and bleak line of the Marylebone Road, and taking the high and narrow house in which Cuckoo dwelt under its severest protection. Twilight wanted to come as the afternoon drew on, but it had been forestalled and was practically already there. Doubtless it did come, but no one was much the wiser. ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... long one, with few stoppages. The train flew on at a frightful pace through the hill country, where from the windows could be seen the bare bleak peaks of Cumberland, varied with nearer slopes of soft green grass and verdant valleys. On, on through the great grimy towns of the manufacturing counties; on and on through dark tunnels, swinging round curves, over rivers, skirting woods, still rushing on, with an occasional shriek and scream, ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... and Jose sat and smoked and watched her every movement with keen, critical eyes. Were they not Spaniards who had danced all through their childhood and youth, as naturally as they breathed? About Gallito's mouth played the bleak smile which in him betokened content, while Jose could barely wait for her to finish her preliminary exercises before he besought her to let him join her. Even Mrs. Nitschkan laid down some fishing tackle with which she was engrossed ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... from the cabin companion-way and leaned for a while on the taffrail, seeming to gaze at the town undulating over the hills, dwarfed by the distance. It was when she turned to go down again that Goodwin had a full view of her face, bleak and rigid, with greying hair drawn tightly back from the temples, as formal and blank as the face of a clock. It was told of her that she would sit knitting in her chair by the mizzen fife-rail while at the break of the poop a miserable man was being trodden ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon
... a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The City ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens
... him, the sense of personal love and aid towards the Lord and Master whom he served grew upon him. Neither the gazelle-eyed Ayesha nor the prosperous village life presented any great temptation. He would have given them all for one bleak day of mist on a Border moss; it was the appalling contrast with the hold of a Moorish galley that at times startled him, together with the only too great probability that he should be utterly incapable of saving poor little Ulysse ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... afternoon of bleak, early spring, Evelyn wandered alone on the shore where she had bidden Jim Willowby farewell. It was raining, and the sea was grey and desolate. The tide was coming in with a fierce roaring that seemed to fill ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the ice on spar and jackstay, and the cracking, volleying sail, And the tatters of our voices blowing down the roaring gale ... I recalled the West Coast harbours just as plain as yesteryear— Nitrate ports, all dry and dusty, where they sell fresh water-dear— Little cities white and wicked by a bleak and barren shore, With an anchor on the cliff-side for to show you where to moor; And the sour red wine we tasted, and the foolish songs we sung, And the girls we had our fun with in the days when we were young; And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various
... night and St Agnes' Eve; the snow fell heavily, caught into whirling eddies by the keen north wind. Hilarius and the Friar, crossing an empty waste of bleak unprotected heath, met the full force of the blast, and each moment the snow grew denser, the darkness more complete. They struggled on, breathless, beaten, exhausted and lost; Hilarius, leading the Friar by one hand, held the other across ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless
... sunset and sunrise the twilight crept along the horizon from Occident to Orient. Further north the inhabitants of the Arctic circle were enjoying the light of their long summer day. What a contrast to the bleak night of cold and darkness that stretches with faint glimmerings of dawn through nearly half the year. The shores of the bay were high perpendicular banks, sharply cut like the bluffs at Vicksburg. There are several head-lands, but none project far enough to form harbors behind them. The bottom ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... Highland and Lowland will continue to hear in the monotony of the strain, the voice of the tempest, and the roar of the mountain torrent, in its abruptness they will see the beetling crag and the shaggy summit of the bleak Highland hill, in its obscurity and loud and tumid sounds, they will recognize the hollows of the deep glens and the mists which shroud the cataracts, in its happier and nobler measures, they will welcome notes of poetry ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various
... bounding through the air Moves the bleak ice, and sheds a dazzling glare; The torn foundations on the surface ride, And wrecks of winter load ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson
... joys and halved his burdens, tossing them from one of her fine shoulders to the other as if they were feathers. She swept into the quiet village life of Beulah like a salt sea breeze. She infused a new spirit into the bleak church "sociables" and made them positively agreeable functions. The choir ceased from wrangling, the Sunday School plucked up courage and flourished like a green bay tree. She managed the deacons, she braced up the missionary ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... queerly; slowly, and with a timidity not at all in keeping with the blundering assertiveness of the Pilgrim. When a young woman showed for a moment against the bleak twilight and then stepped inside, Charming Billy caught at the table for support, and the coat he was holding dropped to the floor. He did not say a word: ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... vale the village is sleeping, Sleeping the firs on the bleak rock above; Nought wakes, save grateful hearts, silently creeping Up to the Lord in the might ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... of the disciples. It is notable, too, how often Dickens uses the great Scripture phrases for his most dramatic climaxes. There are not in literature many finer uses of Scripture than the scene in Bleak House, where the poor waif Joe is dying, and while his friend teaches him the Lord's Prayer he sees the light coming. A Christmas season without Dickens's Christmas Carol would be incomplete; but there again is ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... brooms; and we were obliged to send word to this effect to our Portland patrons. The next morning Addison and I rode home on old Jim and Buckskin, with their harness tied up in a bundle before us. The wind was piercing and bleak; we were both so chilled as to be ill of a cold for several days afterward. The story that we had to tell at home was far from being an inspiriting one. Not only had we lost our load, traverse sleds and rack, but in due time we had a bill of ten dollars ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... for the fine arts; and Canova used to say that he was in love when but five years old. But these instances, however, prove nothing. Calf-love, as it is called in the country, is common; and in Italy it may arise earlier than in the bleak and barren regions of Lochynagar. This movement of juvenile sentiment is not, however, love—that strong masculine avidity, which, in its highest excitement, is unrestrained, by the laws alike of God and man. In truth, the feeling of this kind of love is the very reverse of the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... Nice. H. Carenio; coach daily to and from Menton, 14m. S. The road now ascends the Col di Brouis, 2871 ft., whence passengers in this direction have their last view of the Mediterranean. The descent is now made through bleak and barren mountains to Giandola, 39 m. N.E. from Nice, 1247 ft., at the base of lofty frowning rocks. Inns: trangers, Poste. Coach daily between this and Ventimiglia. To the E., on the Roja, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black
... a couple of trading trips up to the city, took it upon his own responsibility to read the buoys and landmarks as far as he knew them. Keeping the lead constantly going, we quietly jogged up the river with a stiff breeze; the country bleak and bare, a region of half-redeemed swamp and lagoon: being in smooth water, our party all turned out; stores were rummaged, and a good breakfast provided upon the deck of the boat so recently swept by the green seas: the past ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... might starve. His mind was filled, as he himself says, with melancholy and dismal horror at the prospect of seamen and soldiers, worn to skeletons by hunger, drawing lots to decide who should die first amidst the "adamantine frosts" and "mountains of snow" of bleak and ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong
... is, concealed from vulgar eye, The cave of Poverty and Poetry. Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... later they clattered briskly out of Boisvert, the thick grey mud flying from their horses' hoofs as they went, and took the road to France. For a couple of miles they rode steadily along under the unceasing rain and in the teeth of that bleak February wind. Then at a cross-road La Boulaye unexpectedly ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini
... inaccessible river that could be reached in three or four days? Did Cardenas really travel fifty leagues? I do not know, but I hazard the conjecture that the Hopis gave Cardenas as much wandering about as they could, took him to this terribly bleak and barren spot where even to-day one can scarcely prevail upon a Hopi or Navaho to guide him, in order that he might be discouraged from making further explorations in the neighborhood. The Hopis had no use for explorers ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James |
