"Cheerless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The latter—ah, God! How he would have rejoiced in her! The spirit groaned within him at times in agonised longing for her; and the glories of the sweet spring days, in a land where spring is joyous and radiant beyond most, turned gray and cheerless in the shadow of his loss. What Might Have Been stabbed What Was to the heart and ...
— Pearl of Pearl Island • John Oxenham
... for uncounted time, and would plod on like this always,—chilled, numbed to the heart, moving through a frozen, lonely world far from the voices of men, remote from the multitudinous feet bent on the joyous errands of life.... She had sunk into a lethargy of body and mind, in which the cheerless physical atmosphere reflected the condition of being within,—something empty or dead, with a ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Sunday, Francesco called me at five. There was no visible sunrise that cheerless damp October morning. Grey dawn stole somehow imperceptibly between the veil of clouds and leaden waters, as my friend and I, well sheltered by our felze, passed into the Giudecca, and took our station before the church of the Gesuati. ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... Indians, still more sensible to the cold, perished by hundreds. As the Spaniards huddled round their wretched bivouacs, with such scanty fuel as they could glean, and almost without food, they waited in gloomy silence the approach of morning. Yet the morning light, which gleamed coldly on the cheerless waste, brought no joy to them. It only revealed more clearly the extent of their wretchedness. Still struggling on through the winding Puertos Nevados, or Snowy Passes, their track was dismally marked by fragments of dress, broken harness, golden ornaments, and other valuables plundered on their ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... at the cold, cheerless village of Bowes with a red nose, but with eager hopes. He found a little inn there, but he hardly knew whether to leave his bag or no. Lord Stapledean had said nothing of entertaining him at the Lodge—had ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope
... in the cheerless white hallway, his tall figure exaggerated in a long driving-cloak, his high features sharpened in the ...
— Shapes that Haunt the Dusk • Various
... the waning moon, When skies proclaim night's cheerless gloom, On tower, fort, or tented ground, The sentry walks his lonely round; And should a footstep haply stray Where caution marks the guarded way, Who goes there? Stranger, quickly tell, A friend. The word? Good-night. ...
— Charles Dickens and Music • James T. Lightwood
... humane exertions to discover his retreat were successful; he could not long have subsisted by himself, and even had he been so happy as to fall in with, and receive hospitable welcome from the natives, he must of necessity have lingered out a life of toilsome, cheerless hardship while a companion of their wanderings, and when unfitted for this by old age, he would, according to the custom of the country, have been left to die, unfriended and alone, upon the spot where ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... long as it was directed upon them. She was thinking deeply—swiftly—and perhaps it was at this moment that Wilhelmine von Graevenitz vowed her soul to worldly success; her indomitable will directed to the goal of worldly power at all costs and at all hazards. She rose shivering. It was cheerless and cold in her room; the momentary gleam of the winter sun had died away, and the sky was grey and heavy with coming snow. She unhooked her cloak from the peg, fastened it round her, and with her letter hidden ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... battle with the selfish world as best they could. Since that time, life had been long and dreary to the poor widow, whose hours were well-nigh ended, for ere to-morrow's sun was risen, she would have a better home than that dreary, cheerless room, while Dora, at the early age of twelve, ...
— Dora Deane • Mary J. Holmes
... you will remember Mr Venus, by the waning moon, When stars, it will occur to you before I mention it, proclaim night's cheerless noon, On tower, fort, or tented ground, The sentry walks his lonely round, ...
— Our Mutual Friend • Charles Dickens
... under their laws, which will be more just but not more severe nor more cheerless than ours; for it is a mistake to suppose that the dead love nothing but gloom; they love only the justice and the truth which are the eternal forms of happiness. From the depths of this justice and this truth in which they are all immersed, they ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck
... God pity the cheerless Widow Gray, And send from the halls of eternal day, The light of His peace to illumine ...
— War Poetry of the South • Various
... their home. She made a dissenting gesture without opening her eyes. She wished to be left alone, entirely alone, here in the orangery whither she had taken her dead child the night before. Archie, seeing that he could not persuade her immediately to leave the cheerless spot, spoke of other things. He was voluble about the cause of the fire, hinting at a dire "anarchistic" plot of some discharged workingmen. There was much talk in their neighborhood at this time of the efforts of "anarchists" to destroy rich people's ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... rule the night?" quoth I, and laughed. "The figure is more playful than exact, for whilst the moon is cold and cheerless, me you shall find ever warm and cordial. I could have wished, Monsieur de Chatellerault, that your gracing my board were due to a circumstance less untoward than ...
— Bardelys the Magnificent • Rafael Sabatini
... now people these cheerless primitive pit dwellings with their ancient inhabitants, and understand something of their manners of life and customs. Their rude abodes had probably cone-shaped roofs made of rafters lashed together at the centre, protected by an outside coat of peat, sods of turf, or rushes. ...
— English Villages • P. H. Ditchfield
... dreary twilight. The windows broken, the rusty sashes rattling in their frames, the deserted house a dull barrier dividing the glaring lights and bustle of the street into two long lines, and standing in the midst, cold, dark, and empty—presented a cheerless spectacle which mingled harshly with the bright prospects the boy had been building up for its late inmates, and came like a disappointment or misfortune. Kit would have had a good fire roaring up the empty chimneys, lights sparkling and shining through the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... are generally better, and the charges not subject to the caprice of the landlord; and, secondly, for the sake of society; for what on earth can be more horrible than to be shut up in a lone room, a stranger in a provincial town, to eat, drink, and pass the cheerless hour, a prey ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... difficult to classify him under any school. His stories are not analytical, nor is one conscious of that painstaking fidelity to art which is no longer classed among the minor virtues. When he fights, it is with wrong and oppression and the cheerless monotony of the lives of the poor; but he fights classes rather than individuals, although certain characters like Fielding the plagiarist, in 'Armorel of Lyonesse,' are studied from life. The village of bankrupts in 'All in a Garden Fair' is a whimsical conceit, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... whole stock of lemon syrup and lime juice, so that the salt meat on the "Southern Cross" will be counteracted in that way; and going round those islands we shall be ashore every few days. But what most surprises me is this: that when I am alone, as here at night in a great (for it is large) cheerless, lonely room, as I should have thought it once; though I can't help thinking of my own comforts at home, and all dear faces around me, though I feel my whole heart swelling with love to you all, still I am ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... woodlands | strewing, By a | river | hoarsely | roaring, Isa | -bella | strayed de | -ploring. 'Farewell | hours that | late did | measure Sunshine | days of | joy and | pleasure; Hail, thou | gloomy | night of | sorrow, Cheerless | night that | knows ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... in which he had set so much store by silence and good behaviour. Grief drove him to drink, and when nothing was left, even for that purpose, he retired—ill, helpless, and starving—into a broken-down, cheerless hovel. But certain of his former pupils—the same clever, witty lads whom he had once been wont to accuse of impertinence and evil conduct generally—heard of his pitiable plight, and collected for ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... he would be in Wolverhampton, amidst grimy streets and dirty houses, in a leaden-hued atmosphere laden with damp and the fumes of chimneys, practically alone, with days of monotonous work before him, and solitary evenings to be spent in cheerless inns. What wonder if this seemed some brief vision of paradise—the golden light and glowing color, the soft strains of music, the ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... children's faces for ages, can make their skin dark, and their hair crisp and curly, and their foreheads low? Or that sunshine and shadow, spring-time and autumn, summer's showers beating upon him and winter's snows falling about his path, can make him fair and free? Or that the dreary night and cheerless day of many changeless arctic years can make him short and fat and stolid as a seal? Surely not. These avail much; but other influences, indirect and obscure in their workings, but not the less essentially climatic, are required. Food, raiment, shelter, occupation, amusement, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... embers with a rueful face. "A cold hearth is more chilling than the mountains," she said; and she rose and went out of the poor little apartment, which, with all its poverty, would not have been cheerless had a bright fire glowed upon the neatly-kept hearth, and sat down upon the doorstep, where the sunlight ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various
... the first frost, were already falling from the branches, and, stamping their muddy feet on the outer steps, advanced into the vestibule. The wide corridor, flagged with black-and-white pavement, presented a cheerless aspect of bare walls discolored by damp, and adorned alternately by stags' heads and family portraits in a crumbling state of decay. The floor was thus divided: on the right, the dining-room and the kitchen; on the left, drawing-room and a billiard-hall. A stone ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... wav'ring sprite, Friend and associate of this clay, To what unknown region borne Wilt thou now wing thy distant flight? No more with wonted humour gay, But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn. ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... Her coming startles. Long she lies in wait, Makes many a feint, peeps forth, draws coyly back, Then, from some southern ambush in the sky, With one great gush of blossoms storms the world. A week ago the Sparrow was divine; The Bluebird, shifting his light load of song From post to post along the cheerless fence, Was as a rhymer ere the poet came; But now, O rapture! sunshine winged and voiced, Pipe blown through by the warm, wild breath of the West, Shepherding his soft droves of fleecy cloud, Gladness of woods, skies, waters, all in one, The Bobolink has come, and, like the soul ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [June, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... on the tow-line, the other shoving on the canoe. They fought the gale up to their waists in the icy water, often up to their necks, often over their heads and buried by the big, crested waves. There was no rest, never a moment's pause from the cheerless, heart-breaking battle. That night, at the head of Tagish Lake, in the thick of a driving snow-squall, they overhauled the Flora. Antonsen fell on board, lay where he had fallen, and snored. Churchill looked like a wild man. His clothes barely ...
— Lost Face • Jack London
... in that inscrutable silence denoting the crisis of a lifetime. Did his thoughts go back to that eventful hour when he was guiding a frail raft through the surging ice of the Monongahela? Knox was there animating the utterly cheerless scene by his loud commands to the men in charge of his precious artillery, for which the shivering troops were impatiently waiting. At three o'clock the last gun was landed. The crossing had required three hours more than ...
— The Campaign of Trenton 1776-77 • Samuel Adams Drake
... have never been brought into direct contact, and that once this power of realisation is acquired, the coldness is speedily dispelled. Nor can it be doubted that in the management of thought, the dream power often plays a most important part in alleviating human suffering; illuminating cheerless and gloomy lives, and breaking the chain of evil or ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... bare place! Even the vines look cheerless—and where have they put all the flowers? What a shame to send them away, and ...
— Agatha's Husband - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik (AKA: Dinah Maria Mulock)
... a knowledge of either horses or wines was a gentlemanly accomplishment. The indulgence extended to the vendor of wines did not extend to the maker or seller of beer. I remember the resentment of the school when the sons of a certain wealthy brewer were admitted; and those boys had, I imagine, a cheerless time of it in their schooldays. The eldest of those boys, being now the head of the family, is to-day a peer. But at that time, though brewers or brewers' sons might be admitted grudgingly to the company ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... o' chap can whistle when his work is mostly fun; A hundred want the pleasant jobs to every sturdy one That'll grab the dreary duty an' the mean an' lowly task, Or the drab an' cheerless service that life often has to ask; But somebody has to do it, an' the test of me an' you Is the way we face the labor that we ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... Henry V. an infinitely better world than they had supposed possible; but, until the present moment, Esclairmonde had never felt the slightest call to take a permanent place there. Now however the cloister, even if it were open to her, presented a gloomy, cheerless life of austerity, in comparison with human affection and matronly duty. And most vivid of all at the moment was the desire to awaken the tender sweetness that slept in those steady gray eyes, to see the grave, wise visage gleam with smiling affection, and to rest in having one to take thought ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... morning of our Lord's Sabbath, the twenty-ninth of June, 1862, I sat in my saddle at Savage's. The gloom was very cheerless. A feeling of hopeless vagabondism oppressed me. I remembered the Disinherited Knight, the Wandering Jew, Robinson Crusoe, and other poor errants in the wide world, and wondered if any of them ever looked so ruefully as I, when the last wagon of the Grand Army disappeared ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... miserliness growing rapidly upon his cankered mind, never afterwards removed from the lodgings he had hired on first arriving there. Thus madly hugging to himself sharp-pointed memories, which a sensible man would have speedily cast off and forgotten, the sour misanthrope passed a useless, cheerless, weary existence, to which death must have been a ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren
... disappeared, the tramp of a procession became audible, and soon torches glared feebly through the damp, cheerless dawn. The monarch descended from his state elephant, and, prostrating ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... standing hitherto, fell with a crash during this storm. The wind howled amid the cracking wood, and mingled its moans with the ominous roaring of the rain. The heavy clouds, driving along toward the east, hung on the ground like rays of vapor, and deep, cheerless gloom intensified ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... place, and fills the mind with agreeable, home-like feelings and meditations. It seemed as if the spirit, in the one case, were set loose and etherealized to enable it to spread itself over the plains of cold, cheerless, illimitable space, and left to dwell upon objects too wide to grasp, too indistinct to comprehend; while, in the other, it is recalled and concentrated upon matters circumscribed and congenial, things of which it has ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the swelling tide which each year sweeps thousands of black men and women and children from the sunlit monotony of the plantation to the sunless iniquity of the slums, from a drudgery that is not quite cheerless to a competition that is altogether merciless. But the teaching of agriculture, even in its elementary stages, presupposes a considerable amount of academic preparation. To be sure, a flourishing garden ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... Anna's ambition to secure a harbor for maritime commerce in the more sunny climes of southern Europe. St. Petersburg, far away upon the frozen shores of the Baltic, where the harbor was shut up with ice for five months in the year, presented but a cheerless prospect for the formation of a merchant marine. She accordingly revived the original project of Peter the Great, and waged war with the Turks to recover the lost province on the shores of the Euxine. Russia had been mainly instrumental in ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott
... Ulua, it has one interesting recollection attached to it, since on the same arid shores, Cortes disembarked more than three centuries ago. Unlike the green and fertile coast which gladdened the eyes of Columbus, the Spanish conqueror beheld a bleak and burning desert, whose cheerless aspect might well have deterred a feebler mind from going further in search of the paradise ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... officers were glad of me as a doctress and nurse may be easily understood. When a poor fellow lay sickening in his cheerless hut and sent down to me, he knew very well that I should not ride up in answer to his message empty-handed. And although I did not hesitate to charge him with the value of the necessaries I took him, still ...
— Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands • Mary Seacole
... region, the realm of departed souls. Still beneath this was the prison Tartarus, a pit deep and dark, made fast by strong gates of brass and iron. Sometimes the poets represent the gloomy regions beyond the ocean stream as the cheerless abode ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the negro, as to speak of slavery as a tolerable evil.... Those who look tenderly at the slave-owner, and with a cold heart at the slave, never seem to put themselves into the position of the latter. What a cheerless prospect, with not even a hope of change! Picture to yourself the chance, ever hanging over you, of your wife and your little children—those objects which nature urges even the slave to call his own—being torn from you, and sold like beasts to ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... the garden walk in vain We seek for Flora's lovely train; When the sweet hawthorn bower is bare, And bleak and cheerless is the air; When all seems desolate around, ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... king's coin. It is impossible for us to realize the hideous ferocity of such a state of society as this; the women were as bad as the men, furious beldames, dangerous as wild beasts, without pity, without shame, without remorse; and finding life so cheerless, so hopeless, so very very dark and miserable, that when there was nothing to be gained by killing any ...
— The Coming of the Friars • Augustus Jessopp
... instant did it suggest the full and passionate life which is the theme and the background of the play. Nor is this strange. A Midsummer Night's Dream is plainly beyond the powers of our theatre. Individual scenes were well done, but the whole was a cheerless piece of business. ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... been very happy, but for a mental anchor fast to that gloomy mood of the morning.... Hours had flown magically. It was past mid-afternoon.... There was one more picture that had held him, not for itself, but like the Japanese scene, for the thoughts it incited.... An aged woman in a cheerless room, bending over the embers of a low fire. In the glow, the weary old face revealed a bitter loneliness, and yet it was strangely sustained. The twisted hands held to the fire, would have fitted exactly about the waist of a ...
— Fate Knocks at the Door - A Novel • Will Levington Comfort
... fell all about her, as it had on the first night of their arrival, a month before, but now it seemed cold and cheerless, and gave an added sense of loneliness to the silent house. She did not go inside to read, as she had promised to do, but sat for the next hour looking out across the harbor. She could not blame Alice. She considered that Alice always ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... the top rail of the fence, his gaze roved over the sweep of valley, dull and cheerless in the early dawn, with a misty film rising up out of it to meet and mingle and evaporate in the far-flung colors of the slow-rising sun. Once his gaze concentrated on a spot in the distance. He detected movement, and watched, motionless, until he was certain. Half a mile it was to the ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer
... the morning succeeding this conversation, Mr. Stevens might have been seen in his dingy office, seated at a rickety desk which was covered with various little bundles, carefully tied with red tape. The room was gloomy and cheerless, and had a mouldy disagreeable atmosphere. A fire burned in the coal stove, which, however, seemed only to warm, but did not dry the apartment; and the windows were covered with ...
— The Garies and Their Friends • Frank J. Webb
... Bernardine had suffered a cheerless childhood in which dolls and toys took no leading part. She had no affection to bestow on any doll, nor any woolly lamb, nor apparently on any human person; unless, perhaps, there was the possibility ...
— Ships That Pass In The Night • Beatrice Harraden
... Headmaster left Uppingham for a visit to the sites which promised most favourably. A deep snow on the ground made the departure from home seem the more cheerless, but it had melted from the Welsh hills before we reached them. On Tuesday, the party—which now consisted of the Headmaster, two of the staff, and one of the Trustees (whose services on this occasion, and many others ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... the chill in the air of the cheerless room had suddenly accentuated itself, she arose, took a match-box from the mantel, and, stooping, lit ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... to Nan, shivering inside that cheerless cab, as if the world had stopped like a run-down watch, and that she alone, with her melancholy equipage, retained in all that vast stillness ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... round the drawing-room with satisfaction. At first it had borne the cheerless look of a house uninhabited, but she had quickly made it pleasant with flowers, photographs, and silver ornaments. The Sheraton furniture and the chintzes suited the style of her beauty. She felt that she looked in place in that comfortable ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... his way, and Paul raced upstairs two steps at a time and burst into the room he had left less than three hours ago in a mood so cheerless and despondent He kissed the letter and clapped it to his heart, and strolled up and down exulting. He was not to be dismissed; he was not to be sent ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... indulge in a morbid sentimental humor, dreaming over some "rare old poet" or blessed romance, to the exceeding great detriment of my household affairs, making my poor father sigh over a tough, badly cooked stake, and cheerless, dusty house; but these moods, to my credit be it told, were of rare occurrence; and I say now the best school for a dreaming, enthusiastic girl, who sighs for the realization of her fancy visions, is to place her in charge of some active duty—to make her feel it is exacted from her—that she must ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... his family gorging themselves on the solid eatables, a frost at Christmas is very pleasant. Poor people cowering in their rags before the door of a union, cold, hungry, and forlorn, or munching their dry bread in some cheerless garret, may not perhaps so fully appreciate its advantages; but then we all know that poor people never are contented, and seldom understand the fitness of things. Here in Paris, the numbed soldiers out in the open fields, and ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... cheerless anticipation of the evening's promise, the departing one stalked, like an exiled Stuart, to ...
— The Fortieth Door • Mary Hastings Bradley
... made away with all his property in so few years. And the manner being so invisible, the charge becomes stronger. Thus, labouring between the pain of misfortune and the want of means to resent suspicion, his cheerless chamber is all he can now call his home. But he has two good friends left-Franconia, and the old negro Bob. Franconia has procured a municipal badge for Daddy; and, through it (disguised) he seeks and ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... The children could not cluster around me as they did before, and I got on with the lesson very badly. I am sure Maria Perry has no gift at teaching little children, and I feel quite vexed and disappointed. This has not been a profitable Sunday, and I and now going to bed, cheerless ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... proper state; Nor into distant climes would Avarice roam, To fetch delights for Luxury at home: Bound by no ties which kept the soul in awe, They dwelt at liberty, and love was law!" "Mistaken youth! each nation first was rude, Each man a cheerless son of solitude, To whom no joys of social life were known, None felt a care that was not all his own; Or in some languid clime his abject soul Bow'd to a little tyrant's stern control; A slave, with slaves ...
— The Library • George Crabbe
... their eyes to regain their sight. A shrill wind pierced the slight covering of the litter, and blowing it aside, discovered the mist; or the gleaming of some wandering water, as it glided away over the cheerless waste. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... peasant-life, is usually considered her masterpiece in this genre. It was suggested to her, she tells us, by Holbein's dismal engraving of death coming to the husbandman, an old, gaunt, ragged, over-worked representative of his tribe—grim ending to a life of cheerless poverty and toil! ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... firm of solicitors which in its turn was served by the man who had received her. Romance and the clerk could never, she thought, meet under one roof. And such a roof! The room in which she sat was so dark, so gloomy, so bare and cheerless, that Juliet began to wonder whether she would not have been wiser not to have come. This was not a place, surely, which fond parents would choose for a long-deferred meeting with their child, after years of separation. She walked to the window, but the only view was of ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... hear the drum and fife, the blast of the bugle, and the playing of the band. It was glorious to look upon the star-spangled banner, waving in the breeze; but the excitement soon wore away. There were rainy days, comfortless and cheerless. Sometimes the rations were not fit to be eaten, and there was grumbling in the camp. There were days of homesickness, when the soldiers longed to break away from the restraints of camp life, and ...
— Winning His Way • Charles Carleton Coffin
... the intensity of the mental torture experienced by these unfortunate victims may, however, be conjectured from the fact that their senses at such junctures become so completely absorbed and overpowered by the cheerless prospect before them, that they oftentimes wander about in a state of temporary lunacy, without the power of exercising the slightest volition of the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... cluster of native huts. One of the inhabitants, on being boldly accosted, was good enough to point out the way, and so the re-united party—tired, wet, and with no prospect of dry clothing—took possession of the cheerless-looking dak bungalow. Things now began to improve. To our joy we found our ekkas with their contents drawn up in the yard. And while a fire was being encouraged into a blaze, and the lean fowl was being captured and slain on the back premises, we obtained dry garments—of ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... my dear son," said I. "Would to God we might always remain here happily together; but we are of different ages, and by the law of nature we must one day be separated. Consider, my dear son, if you should survive your brothers, how cheerless it would be to live quite alone on this desert island, without any one to close your eyes. But let us look at these trees; I see they are tamarind-trees; their fruit contains a pulp which is very useful in medicine, and which ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... the music's mist, Roamed, rapt, 'neath skies of amethyst. The cheerless streets grew summer meads, The Son of Phoebus spurred his steeds, And, wand'ring down the mazy tune, December lost its way in June, While from a verdant vale I heard The piping of ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... It was cheerless. When I say we made a camp it is misleading, for we could not swing our kettles for fear of the betraying smoke. We sat down stiffly, for the ground was still wet from the night dew, and we passed our bags of dried maize and jerked meat from hand to hand. I made some ado to eat cheerfully, for ...
— Montlivet • Alice Prescott Smith
... bleak and cheerless country, crossed by the ravines of a few sluggish creeks, the water of which was unpleasant to drink, and dotted at long intervals by ponds bitter with alkali. In places, stunted poplar bluffs cut against the sky, but, for the most part, there was only a rolling waste of dingy grass. ...
— Blake's Burden • Harold Bindloss
... the proper mean Of what mankind must give for what they gain, But, when I think of those whom dull routine And the pursuit of cheerless toil enchain, Who from their desk-chairs seeing a summer cloud Race through blue heaven on its joyful course Sigh sometimes for a life less cramped and bowed, I think I might have done a great deal worse; For I have ever gone untied and free, The stars and my high thoughts ...
— Poems • Alan Seeger
... "friend" passed through the door, into the long, narrow "Opera House." It was a dirty, cheerless hole, in spite of the brilliance of many oil lamps, shining among the flimsy decorations. At the end of the tunnel-shaped room was a rude stage, festooned with gaudy, squalid hangings, beneath which a painted siren ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... the room, the goggling Rowley, the extinguished fire; my mind reviewed the laughable incidents of the day and night; and I laughed out loud to myself—lonely and cheerless laughter!....... ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and ill-used. He would stay in town and have a thoroughly good time. As the idea struck him he looked round the studio. The corners were dismal and shadowy. Everything not in the immediate circle of the fire looked grey and cheerless. His easel, with a bit of drapery thrown across it, was like a spectre with outstretched arms. It suggested despair. He could think of no one whom he wanted to see. There wasn't a soul he knew whom he would not in this ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... without converse, one behind the other, as in a funeral procession, and the glimpse that he obtained of their faces seemed to denote that they were anxious and sad. Returning later, he passed them again in the same field, progressing just as slowly, and as regardless of the hour and of the cheerless night as before. It was only on account of his preoccupation with his own affairs, and the illness in his house, that he did not bear in mind the curious incident, which, however, he ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... through the east windows of this room, big, shapeless clouds of gray could be observed slowly driving along; it looked, in fact, like a cheerless and stormy ocean, monotonous in its uniform tint. Now and then showers of cold hail or rain tore away from this chaos, and, pitched hither and thither by howling winds, swept across the town or ...
— A Little Garrison - A Realistic Novel of German Army Life of To-day • Fritz von der Kyrburg
... a very late comer into that sea, and its former pupil, I accorded amused recognition to the characteristic aspect so well remembered from my days of training. The same old thing. A grey- green expanse of smudgy waters grinning angrily at one with white foam- ridges, and over all a cheerless, unglowing canopy, apparently made of wet blotting-paper. From time to time a flurry of fine rain blew along like a puff of smoke across the dots of distant fishing boats, very few, very scattered, and tossing restlessly on an ever dissolving, ever ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... lulled youth asleep with was a very cheerless threnody, but he brightened once more at praise of ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... anxiety; if so, in this respect it may be said to be next door to the beer-barrel, or to the use of spirits. If one man may soothe his feelings with this narcotic, another may stimulate them, when he is low and cheerless, with alcohol. The Apostle James says, "Is any merry, let him sing psalms." He does not say, Is any afflicted or low, let him smoke and drink! No; "let him pray," and depend upon God. Many a lesson which might be learned ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... dark when he reached home, and as the evening had closed in with a heavy rain, the house presented rather a cheerless appearance, particularly as, in consequence of Mrs. Noah's not expecting him that day, no fires had been kindled in the parlors, or in any room except the library. There a bright coal fire was blazing in the grate, and thither Guy repaired, finding, as he ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... very pleasant job in summer, but in early spring one of the most cheerless occupations conceivable short of gathering Iceland moss. The men wear waterproof boots, reaching up the thighs, and thick stockings inside these. But the water is icy cold. The cress plants are then not tall, as they ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... is not extinct," said Parkman twenty or thirty years ago; "in the cheerless wilds beyond the northern lakes, or among the solitudes of the distant west they may still be found, unchanged in life and character since the day when Louis the Great claimed ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... their ears by its irrational clamor to the voice of the Living God which whispers in these pages, through the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. It has fathered the doubt which to-day sits, cheerless and chill, within the hearts and homes of thousands who once rejoiced in the warmth and light of God, but who now accept the alternative their teachers thrust upon them—"all or none"—and throw away the Blessed Book wherein God of ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... the deep chair. She was losing her clear, sweet vision of that blessed night when Gaston and she had stood transfigured! If only she could have held to that, all would have been so simple—but with that fading glory gone she would be alone in a barren, cheerless place to act not merely for herself, ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... and roused herself. "The rooms look cheerless in winter without the open fireplaces we are ...
— The Irrational Knot - Being the Second Novel of His Nonage • George Bernard Shaw
... jesting, they pressed on until their advance guard met the plodding, cheerless, downcast refugees. The French peasants halted in their tracks, staring, unable to believe their eyes. Here, in the flesh, by thousands upon thousands, was the answer to their prayers. Perhaps it was not too late, after all. Here was new ...
— Aces Up • Covington Clarke
... and her mother were at church, and he had finished some work that he had brought from the bank, his former restlessness and sense of strangeness returned. The regular afternoon fog had thickened early, and, driving him back from a cheerless, chilly ramble on the hill, had left him still more depressed and solitary. In sheer desperation he moved some of the furniture, and changed the disposition of several smaller ornaments. Growing bolder, he even attacked ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... very tired, and now scarcely had his head pressed the pillow ere he was asleep, dreaming of 'Lena, whose presence was to shed such a halo of sunlight over his hitherto cheerless home. The ringing of the bell next morning failed to arouse him, but when Mrs. Aldergrass, noticing his absence from the table, inquired for him, Uncle Timothy answered, "Never mind, let him sleep—tuckered out, mebby—and you know we allus ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... imagination, rather than through being waited upon by a delegation of legal gentlemen commissioned with the duty of enlightening her. And the colossal set-piece of the evening having been duly exploded, no sequel whatever could expect anything better than relegation to the cheerless limbo of anticlimax. ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... looking restless and anxious, he sent her to the kitchen to get her dinner with Joseph; and with the master of the house, grim and saturnine, and Hareton absolutely dumb, I made a cheerless meal, ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... reason to anticipate the remarkable achievements which the future held in store for him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted him in far-away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in 1833, he had led a life of complete dependence, not altogether cheerless but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets were empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such conditions, it seemed ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... I forget how cheerless looked the earth when first I came above it, so dull and black, save where a few snowflakes had been drifted by the wintry winds; all else was bleak and bare. There was not a gleam of sunshine athwart the leaden sky to cheer us, nor a bird ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... been his own. The ready-to-hand food gave him leisure. His days were all dreams. Weary of crouching over the fire before the opening of his humpy, he began to wander in the flesh as he was wont to wander in mind. He was seen a mile away from the cheerless camp, where his companions, with ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... the room; And lo! it was cheerless and bare; Empty and drear as a hopeless tomb,— And the lady was not there; Yet the fire and the lamp drove out the gloom, As ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... It was a cheerless journey, harassed by thoughts and speculations that could be hardly considered illuminating. Curiously enough he had no thought of making a run for it to a district where he was still unknown. Why should he? There was not a guilty thought in his mind, ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... to be raining harder than it really is when you look at the weather through the window. Even in winter, though the landscape often seems cheerless and bare enough when you look at it from the fireside, still it is far better to go out, even if you have to brave the storm: when you are once out of doors the touch of earth and the breath of the fresh air gives you fresh life and energy. Men, like trees, ...
— The Pleasures of Life • Sir John Lubbock
... and shrunken a life as his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any subtraction but such as would put an end to it altogether. But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence was broken down—the support was snatched away. Marner's thoughts could no longer move in their old round, ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... coming to a sluggish stream, as quiet as the wood through which it crept, and following its slow windings, we at last heard a voice, and in the distance made out dark forms sitting on the earth beside that sombre water. We went on with caution, gliding from tree to tree and making no noise. In the cheerless silence of that place any sound would have shattered the stillness like a ...
— To Have and To Hold • Mary Johnston
... many exclamations over the cosy dressing room which Anne occupied. As is the case in most of the recently built theatres, the star's dressing room had been comfortably furnished and was in direct comparison to the cheerless, barn-like rooms that make life on the road ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... done your poor poet, in writing him so very obliging a letter, and the pleasure the enclosed beautiful verses have given him, came very seasonably to his aid, amid the cheerless gloom and sinking despondency of diseased nerves and December weather. As to forgetting the family of Glencairn, Heaven is my witness with what sincerity I could use those old verses which please me ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham
... I was to sit, and another still smaller above it, in which I was to sleep. I remember that I sat down, and looked disconsolate about me—everything seemed so cold and dingy. Yet how little is required to make a situation—however cheerless at first sight—cheerful and comfortable. The people of the house, who looked kindly upon me, lighted a fire in the dingy grate; and, then, what a change!—the dingy room seemed dingy no more! Oh the luxury of a cheerful fire after a chill night's journey! ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... its prisons in couleur de rose for my own private ends. I simply state what I saw on this and subsequent occasions, and am glad to say that in Yakutsk the condition of the political exiles was as satisfactory as it could possibly be made in such a rigorous climate and amidst such cheerless surroundings. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... just breaking, grey, cheerless, and chill, as I reached the cutter and stepped in on deck over her low bulwarks, wet to the skin, nerveless from exhaustion and hunger, and with my feet, elbows, and knees lacerated and bleeding from my battle with the rough ...
— Under the Meteor Flag - Log of a Midshipman during the French Revolutionary War • Harry Collingwood
... heat of summer, will never become too dry for the health of the vine. It is a sad spectacle to see the hopes of a whole summer frustrated by one cold night; to see the vines which promised an abundant crop but the day before, browned and wilted beyond all hopes of recovery, and the cheerless prospect before you, that it may occur every spring; or to see the finest crop of grapes, when just ripening, scorched and wilted by just one night's frost, fit for nothing but vinegar. Therefore, look well ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... all her speed, and the lieutenant felt the deck quiver as though it was in danger of being shaken out of her. But she was not followed by the Bellevite, and things began to look dark and somewhat cheerless to Christy. The firing came to an end, for the distance was becoming too great for it to be ...
— Within The Enemy's Lines - SERIES: The Blue and the Gray—Afloat • Oliver Optic
... forcibly than ever the barrenness of the room and of the house in general. True, his own home was very humble, and yet there was an air of comfort and refinement about it. The Duke home had always impressed him as being cold and cheerless and ugly. There were no protecting porches, no lawn, no flowers, and the barn yard had crept close up to the house. It was a place to work. The eating and the sleeping were provided, so that work could ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... clock struck nine, and he started up with a guilty feeling, but his limbs were stiff and he sank back again, blew two or three breaths on to the squirrel inside his waistcoat, and fell into a doze. As he dropped off into unconsciousness he seemed to see the big, cheerless house, almost destitute of furniture, where he lived with thirty or forty other boys. They trooped in with their organs and accordions, counted out their coppers to a man with a clipped moustache, who was blowing whiffs of smoke ...
— The Eternal City • Hall Caine
... head, in some suspicious den. Flashing through the shadow of the police lamp, in "Cow Bay," a forlorn female is seen, a bottle held tightly under her shawl. Sailing as it were into the bottomless pit of the house of the Nine Nations, then suddenly returning with the drug, seeking the cheerless garret of her dissolute partner, and there striving to blunt her feelings against the horrors ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... matter over, and bear me witness that I state the fact correctly. It is so; you cannot deny it. The very terms "religion," "devotion," "piety," "conscientiousness," "mortification," and the like, you find to be inexpressibly dull and cheerless: you cannot find fault with them, indeed, you would if you could; and whenever the words are explained in particulars and realized, then you do find occasion for exception and objection. But though you cannot deny the claims of religion used as a vague and general term, yet how irksome, cold, uninteresting, ...
— Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. VII (of 8) • John Henry Newman
... have seen another spring In floral beauty rise, And happy birds on gladsome wing Flit through the azure skies. Though sickness bowed my feeble frame Through winter's cheerless hours, Life's sinking torch resumes its flame ...
— Enthusiasm and Other Poems • Susanna Moodie
... but it was barred from those youthful and melancholy eyes: for Nature might tempt to a thousand thoughts, not of a tenor calculated to reconcile the heart to an eternal sacrifice of the sweet human ties. But a faint and partial gleam of sunshine broke through the aperture and made yet more cheerless the dreary aspect and gloomy appurtenances of the cell. And the young novice seemed to carry on within herself that struggle of emotions without which there is no victory in the resolves of virtue: sometimes she wept ...
— Leila, Complete - The Siege of Granada • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... stood pledged to your country. What were we not to expect from the first patriot of modern story? Your lordship will readily imagine that our expectations were boundless and indefinite. "Glorious and immortal man!" we cried, "go on in this untrodden path. We will no longer look with drooping and cheerless anxiety upon the misfortunes of Britain, we have a resource for them all. The patriot of Stowe is capable of every thing. He does not resemble the vulgar herd of mortals, he does not form his conduct upon precedent, nor defend it by example. Virtue of the first ...
— Four Early Pamphlets • William Godwin
... The daybreak came, gray, cheerless, very cold. A dense fog, white and raw, hung over the river; in the east, where the sun, they knew, was rising, they could only see the livid light of the still towering flames and pillars of black smoke ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various
... gray and cheerless. He was up with the first ray of light, shaved and dressed, and went over, under the gray-green pergola, to his father's house. He was up, also, and stirring about, for he had not been able to sleep. His gray eyebrows and gray hair looked rather shaggy ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... morning came, chill and cheerless. Mistress Croale stirred, moved, crept up rather than rose to a sitting position, and stretched herself yawning. Gibbie had risen and stood over her. She caught sight of him; absolute terror distorted her sodden face; she stared at him, then stared about her, like one who had suddenly ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... brothers, John Jacob Astor had to endure for some years a most cheerless and miserable lot. He lost his mother, too, from whom he had derived all that was good in his character and most of the happiness of his childhood. A step-mother replaced her, "who loved not Jacob," nor John Jacob. The father, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... certainly a cheerless set, and to me they all looked stony-eyed and heartless. I could not help it, I almost hated them; and to avoid them, went on deck, but a storm of sleet drove me below. At last I bethought me, that I had ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville |
