"Desolate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... longing for some closer communion than she had known before drew her toward this church, of which Derrick Jaynes was the rector. The door was unlocked, and the slender black figure slipped in unobserved. In the big empty church her desolate little moan was all unheard and unheeded, as she knelt at the altar sobbing, "Oh, God, I don't know what will become of me if you do not help me now! Oh, show ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... the head of the island by means of a skiff, and, ascending the high grounds on the shore of the mainland, proceeded in a northwesterly direction, through a tract of country excessively wild and desolate, where no trace of a human footstep was to be seen. Legrand led the way with decision; pausing only for an instant, here and there, to consult what appeared to be certain landmarks of his own contrivance upon a ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... his fury, and devoted a part of the captured treasures to reinstate some of the glories he had destroyed; but it was too late; he could not reanimate the dead, nor raise from its ruins the stupendous Temple of the Sun. Palmyra became desolate; its very existence was forgotten, until about a century ago, when some English travellers discovered it by accident. Thus the blind fury of one man extinguished life, happiness, industry, art, and intelligence through a vast extent of ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... (7.) Joel calls him the hidden one; as it is said (Joel ii. 20), "I will remove far from you the hidden one," i.e., the tempter who remains hidden in the heart of man; "and I will drive him into a land barren and desolate," i.e., where the children of men do not usually dwell; "with his face toward the former sea," i.e., with his eyes set upon the first Temple, which he destroyed, slaying the disciples of the wise that were in it; "and his hinder part toward the latter sea," i.e., with his eyes set on the second ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... prevent her and the child she had in her arms from falling on the flure. She had seen enough, God help her!—for she took labor that instant, and, in about two hours, afterwards, was stretched a corpse beside her husband, with her heart-broken and desolate orphans in an uproar of outher misery about them. That was the end of Larry M'Farland and Sally Lowry; two that might have done well in the world, had they taken care of themselves—avoided, fairs and markets—except ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... must destroy! The negro huts on several of the plantations that we passed through were the most miserable human habitations I ever beheld. The wretched hovels at St. Annie's, on the Hampton estate, that had seemed to me the ne plus ultra of misery, were really palaces to some of the dirty, desolate, dilapidated dog kennels which we passed to-day, and out of which the negroes poured like black ants at our approach, and stood to gaze at us as ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... brought to us. As we sat by the fire a small table was brought near us, and on it lay the album in which we were expected to enter our names. Many notable autographs we found here, and despite the gladness we felt in adding ours to the number, there was still a sad, desolate thought: those most distinguished had all passed away. The mountains remained, their glory undiminished; but the human beings climbing their heights, and exulting in the grandeur of heaven and earth, had vanished like ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... arid, for whose reclamation water is available, if properly conserved. There are about two hundred and thirty million acres from which the forests have been cut but which have never yet been cleared for the plow and which lie waste and desolate. These lie scattered all over the Union. And there are nearly eighty million acres of land that lie under swamps or subject to periodical overflow or too wet for anything but grazing, which it is perfectly feasible to drain and protect and redeem. The Congress can at once direct ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighted in thee, and ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... stream of carts and horse-back riders was headed for the Driving Club, where there was tennis and the new game of golf. But Sommers turned his horse into the disfigured Midway, where the Wreck of the Fair began. He came out, finally, on a broad stretch of sandy field, south of the desolate ruins of the Fair itself. The horse picked his way daintily among the debris of staff and wood that lay scattered about for acres. A wagon road led across this waste land toward the crumbling Spanish convent. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... yes! You are her friend, Monsieur; I remember perfectly. Oh, no, no, no! she is not here any more. She has left us. She sings no longer at L'Abbaye. We are desolate; we are inconsolable. We pleaded, but she was firm. She has gone. Where? Ah, Monsieur, so many ask that; but alas! we do ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... standing amid the stunted shrubs on the hill of San Lucido, had looked out on the arid plain before him. It was all brown and grey, the desolate ground strewn with huge granite boulders, treeless; and for the wretched sheep who fed there, thin and scanty grass; the shepherd, in his tattered cloak, sat on a rock, moodily, paying no heed to his flock, dully ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... small place, at some little distance from the dwellings of the citizens, and was surrounded by a thick grove of sycamores mingled with pine trees. The townsfolk had long retired to rest, and the streets were empty and desolate. Not even the shadow of a monk flitted by him as he passed, with his torch flaring in the wind, and casting an awful and almost magical light upon the houses, painted, according to the fashion of the time and country, in broad ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... must be the window where Nancy waved good-by to her lover, and there were the flower-beds into which he had fallen headlong from his horse,—only a desolate corner now with the grass and tall weeds grown quite up to the scaling wall, and the wooden shutters tightly closed. I wondered whether they had ever been ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Desolate as she was, Madam Liberality would have hugged her grief if she could have had her old consolation, and been happy in the happiness of another. Darling never said she was not happy. It was what she left out, not what she put into the long letters she sent from India ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... dear ones are 'not suffered to continue by reason of death.' He who gave them all their sweetness is with us still, and has all the sweetness which He lent them for a time. So if we have Christ with us we cannot be desolate. Looking on all the men, who in their turn have helped forward His cause a little way, we should let their departure teach us His presence, their limitations His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Sanquhar, a small town in Dumfriesshire, on June 22nd, 1680. Exactly a month later Claverhouse's troopers (though, as I have said, not commanded by Claverhouse himself) came upon the Cameronians in a desolate spot among the wilds of Ayrshire, known as Aird's Moss. Richard Cameron was killed at the first charge: Donald Cargill and Hackston of Rathillet were made prisoners. Both were taken to Edinburgh and executed, the latter with ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... drifting down upon a barren region of naked crags, dark, frowning rock-masses, broken and tumbled, as though by some great cataclysm of nature. Mountains upon the Moon could not be more desolate of aspect. ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... and professional disgrace, but financial ruin which confronted the broken officer as he bade good-bye to his regiment at its desolate quarters in California, after fifteen years of service to the army. He was absolutely without money and, at the age of thirty-two, it was by no means easy for him to begin life all over again and earn his own living at a new ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... note: landlocked; the western and central low-lying, desolate portions of the country make up the great Garagum (Kara-Kum) desert, which occupies over 80% of the ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... some lone bird Without a mate, My lonely heart is desolate; I look around And cannot trace, a friendly smile, a welcome face. Even in crowds I'm still alone, because ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... not believe," mamma replied, "that any other spot upon the globe, not even Robinson Crusoe's island, could now seem so desolate and shut off from all communication as our home in the woods did then. You must remember that there were no railways in 1826, which fact made us still more remote from the rest of the world. Now, with the railways spreading ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... at Aldershot embodies in itself all these changes; and is, indeed, an epitome of the results of this awakening. Anything more desolate than its aspect when it was first established it would be impossible to imagine. Long 'lines' of huts, planted in a wilderness of gorse, heather, and sand, dimly lit, and miserably appointed; 'women that were ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... gray and cheerless. A few flakes of snow fell. There was every indication of a heavy storm. They were high above a desolate and wild country now, hovering over a sparsely settled region where they could see great forests, stretches of snow-covered rocks, and ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... Roman. Britain was almost the only province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities. Roman camps still crowned hill and down. The old divisions of the land remained to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new settlers. The Roman church, the Roman country-house, was left standing, though reft of priest and lord. But ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... church and implored the Virgin for help; and from that church she went to another and another and another; church after church, and still church after church, and so spent all the day until three o'clock on her knees in agony and tears; then dragged herself home and sat down comfortless and desolate, to count the minutes, and wait, with an outward show of calm, for what had been ordained for her—happiness, or endless misery. Presently she heard the clank of a sabre—she had not known before what music was in that sound!—and her son put his ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... her head. She did not hear the footsteps of the men upon the soft prairie, and they did not at once reveal themselves, but stood a little way back listening to her. She had ceased her song, and was gazing beyond intently. On the naked limb of a desolate, thunder-riven tree that stood apart from its lush, green-boughed neighbours, sat a lonely thrush in seeming melancholy. Every few seconds he would utter a note of song. Sometimes it was low and sorrowful, ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... They reached the desolate home, and Bob broke the news to the old man. As Mary poured forth her story of the discovery in Trubus' office, her father's face lighted ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... miserable country. The tenantry are turned out of the cottages by scores at a time. As many as 203 men, women, and children have been driven upon the roads and ditches by way of one day's work, and have now no resource but to beg their bread in desolate places, or to bury their griefs, in many instances for ever, within the walls of the Union workhouse. Land agents direct the operation. The work is done by a large force of police and soldiery. Under the protection of the latter, 'the Crowbar Brigade' advances to the devoted township, takes ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... pass through the chalk that lies in that desolate lane with memories of more silent and happier hills; it all depends on what the chalk means to you: you may be unfamiliar with it and in that case you will not notice it; or you may have been born among those thyme-scented hills and yet have no errant fancies, so that you will not think ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... government of all, by a part, for the sake of a part. It may be a single-headed despotism, or a despotism of many heads; but whether a Cyclops or a Hydra, it is alike "the abomination which maketh desolate." Its ultimate consequence is plain to foresee—poverty to a nation, ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... of Rosapenna are described as being composed of "hills and dales, and undulating swells, smooth, solitary, and desolate, reflecting the sun from their polished ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... little cemetery with its rude snake fence encircling it. The coffin was taken from the sleigh and carefully lowered into the grave; then the men took off their hats and we sang another hymn. It sounded very sweet in that wild desolate spot, and the poor mother stood enveloped in a blanket at the head of the open grave, and, with her eyes fixed on her daughter's coffin, joined in the singing. Then I read the remainder of the service, and, ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... mentioned. In it we find the mineral matter to have been broken up, transported, and accumulated without the influence of those conditions which ordinarily serve to mix rock debris with organic matter during the process by which it is broken into bits. When vegetation came to preoccupy the fields made desolate by glacial action, it found in most places more than sufficient material to form soils, but the greater part of the matter was in the condition of pebbles of very hard rock and sand grains, fragments of silex. Fortunately, the broken-up state of this material, by exposing ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... and birch-lined roads leading by white farm-houses to the village, all speaking of cheer and freedom to the prosperous and the happy, but to the unfortunate and the indebted, of meshes invisible but strong as steel. But, before, no lonesome marshes, no desolate forest, no farm or village street, but the free blue ocean, rolling and tumbling still from the force of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... seek rest in the country, and how, seeing the name of a village on the map that touches his imagination, he takes the train, feeling convinced he will find there an Arcadian simplicity. But the village he catches sight of from the carriage window is a morose and lonely village, in the midst of desolate plains. And worse than Nature are the human beings he sees at the station; they lurk in corners, they scrutinise his luggage, and gradually he believes them all to ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... lava or molten stone, which cannot be removed, whereas the tufa or volcanic ashes can be with ease removed from Pompeii, which it has filled up lightly. After having refreshed in a cottage in the desolate town, we proceed on our journey eastward, flanked by one set of heights stretching from Vesuvius, and forming a prolongation of that famous mountain. Another chain of mountains seems to intersect our course in an opposite direction and descends ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... "Of desolate Judea. Every scene Which thou so oft, while sitting on thy knee, Wouldst sing of, weeping, thro' my mind has been Successive; when from yon ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... about half an hour, and then disappeared. In the evening of July the 12th, we saw the rocks near the island of Madeira, which our people call the Deserters, from Desertes, a name which has been given them from their barren and desolate appearance: The next day we stood in for the road of Funchiale, where, about three o'clock in the afternoon, we came to an anchor. In the morning of the 14th, I waited upon the governor, who received me with great politeness, and saluted me with eleven ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... of war had brought to ruin. It is fashionable to assume that those who undertook the political rehabilitation of the Southern States merely rounded out the ruin that the war had wrought—merely ploughed up the desolate land and sowed it with salt. Perhaps the gentler judgments of the future may recognize that their task was a difficult one, and that wiser and honester men might have failed as egregiously. It may even, in time, be conceded that some good came out ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... dusky weeds Sadden the eye; and they who wear them not Have mourning in their hearts, or lavish tears Of sympathy on griefs too deeply lodged For man's weak ministry. A happy Christmas! Ah me! how many hearths are desolate! How many a vacant seat awaits in vain The loved one who returns not! Shall we drain The cheerful cup—a health to absent friends? Whom do we pledge? the living or ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... rocks, and clamber up the mountain's sides the fall storms have driven away these many months past. And the lighthouse keeper out there on the point; the old fru on the mountain farm, and the mountain peasant and his house-folk go their accustomed ways, and do not run about on the desolate heather-fields. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... redoubled their lamentations. They ran with pikes and mattocks to the mountain, and searched till evening to find the opening by which their children had disappeared, without being able to find it. At last, the night falling, they returned desolate ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... Paris, the weather pretty fine so far, but the country sadly flooded; and, the lowlands being under water, the gaunt and leafless poplar trees are the most conspicuous objects of the landscape. Then for miles we travel along through a gloomy drizzling rain, the land looking most forlornly desolate. The arrival at Amiens, however, cheers us a little, and here we get a stretch and some refreshment. After leaving this place, always interesting for its beautiful Cathedral, the weather brightens up, and we reach Paris ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... the jagged crags. The road wound through narrow mountain-passes, nearly choked up with huge fragments of rock, the parent mountains on either hand rising perpendicularly to an enormous height; and where a ravine yawned, as if to cheer the heart and eye saddened and wearied by the desolate monotony of stony fell and inhospitable hill, a forest of firs would creep, sloping, to their very summits. Far above our heads, only the fleecy clouds breaking into a variety of forms as they moved slowly along the mountain sides, and the raven's hoarse cry, or the shrill scream of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... coupe darted around the corner, taking the centre of the road. The starving cur never moved, so intent was he on obtaining food, and thus it happened that a pitiful yelp of pain reached my ears, muffled by the closed window. The coupe whirled on its journey, and below, in the chill, desolate grayness of a winter afternoon, an ugly pup sat howling at the leaden skies, his right foreleg upheld, part of it dangling in a very unnatural manner. A pang of compassion for the dumb unfortunate stirred in my breast, but I sat still and watched. He tried to walk, but the effort was a failure, ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... things, which might not be eaten by the Israelites; also in Isaiah ii. we read that in that day when the Lord alone shall be exalted, "a man shall cast his idols of silver and his idols of gold ... to the moles and to the bats"—for they especially haunt waste and desolate places. ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... slope of Croaghaun is abrupt and in parts precipitous, and its jagged flanks, together with the serrated ridge of the Head and the view over the broken coast-line and islands of the counties Mayo and Galway, attract many visitors to the island during summer. Desolate bogs, incapable of cultivation, alternate with the mountains; and the inhabitants earn a scanty subsistence by fishing and tillage, or by seeking employment in England and Scotland during the harvesting. The Congested ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... bastion, has he tried to rehabilitate the past, and to summon from their lonely and forgotten graves upon the neighbouring battlefield, or in quiet church-yards, it may be, far beyond the sea, the groups of war-scarred veterans who once peopled the now desolate fort. ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... single strain of humanity, pathos, or reverence in that diary, save that reflected from Keseberg's last act before being hurried away from that desolate cabin? Or could there be a falser, crueler, or more heartless account brought to bereaved children than Fallon's purported description of the father's body found in ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... clearly did he prove the criminality of our supineness in the cause of God." The text was Isaiah's (liv. 2, 3) vision of the widowed church's tent stretching forth till her children inherited the nations and peopled the desolate cities, and the application to the reluctant brethren was couched in these two great maxims written ever since on the banners of the missionary ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... me," she muttered to herself as she hastily darted from the window. "Ay, they exult. They point to me—me, the abandoned—the desolate—soon to be the disgraced! But, no! no! that shall never be. They shall never have that triumph, which is always so grateful a subject of regale to ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... joyous singing around our fire at night, no more cheerful projects, no more the hope of being the first to announce the glad Evangel among pagan populations. The veldt we traversed seemed to have lost its poetry and to have become desolate. To add to our misfortunes the epidemic seized our oxen. We lost first one and then a second,—altogether eight. Those which were left, tired and lean, dragged slowly and with pain the waggons which before they had drawn along with such vigour. At last we were in sight of Mabolela, and arrived ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... was a cold autumn day; the way looked jagged and bare, the meadow gray and yellow; while frost had begun to appear here and there on the roadside. Disappointment is a dreadful companion. He felt himself so small and desolate, walking there; but Lars was everywhere before him, like a giant, his head towering, in the dusk of evening, to the sky. It was his own fault that this had been the decisive battle, and the thought grieved him sorely: he had staked too much upon a ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... signs fore tell otherwise than folly, dotage, madness, gross ignorance, despair, obstinacy, a reprobate sense, [6590]a bad end? What else can superstition, heresy produce, but wars, tumults, uproars, torture of souls, and despair, a desolate land, as Jeremy teacheth, cap. vii. 34. when they commit idolatry, and walk after their own ways? how should it be otherwise with them? what can they expect but "blasting, famine, dearth," and all the plagues of Egypt, as Amos denounceth, cap. iv. vers. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... flows through its marble streets. You are there one day when the sea has receded: the plain is a pestilent marsh; the temples, the theatres, the lofty gates have sunken and crumbled, and the wild-brier runs over them; and, as you grow pensive in the most desolate place in the world, a bandit lounges out of a tomb, and offers to relieve you of all that which creates artificial distinctions in society. The higher the civilization has risen, the more abject is the desolation of barbarism that ensues. The most ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a cruel double-magic. For in the very hour that my homesick soul had surrendered itself to the dream of the shadow that had turned back on the dial, I realised all the desolate days and homesickness of all the men penned in far-off places ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... on the east shore of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the St Joseph river. This was the most inaccessible of the posts on the Great Lakes. The garrison here lived lonely lives. Around them were thick forests and swamps, and in front the desolate waters of the sea-like lake. The Indians about St Joseph had long been under the influence of the French. This place had been visited by La Salle; and here in 1688 the Jesuit Allouez had established a mission. In 1763 the post was held by Ensign Francis Schlosser ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... rebuilt, the rails, heated red-hot in fires made of burning ties, were twisted around trees or telegraph poles. Stations, machine shops, cotton bales, cotton gins and presses were burned. Along the line of march, a strip of country sixty miles wide was made desolate. ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... thought nor heard. His eyes were close to a window of thick glass. Below him was a shrinking, dwindling landscape, wind-swept and desolate. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... thee, my Beltane, for thou dost love me yet, even as I love thee—thou lonely man-child! God pity thee, and me also!" and, crying thus, forlorn and desolate, the Duchess Helen rode upon her ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... for several minutes in a bleak and desolate valley of introspection wherein Mr. Wordsley dared not intrude. There was a certain grandeur about his great, dark visage, his falciform nose and meaty jowls as he stood there. Mr. Wordsley began to ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... in this once happy spot. Not a voice, not a sound. Oh, Wallace!" cried he, throwing up his venerable arms, "thy house is left unto thee desolate, and I am to be the fatal messenger." With the last words he struck into a deep ravine which led to the remotest solitudes of the glen, and pursued his way in dreadful silence. No human face of Scot or English cheered or scared him as ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Africa. He stood on the very edge of the cape one July midnight—that is, it was midnight by the clock—and saw the sun descend nearly to the horizon, and then begin to rise again. Far to the northward stretched the deep blue waters of the Arctic Ocean; close around him was a bleak, dreary, desolate landscape. A few blades of grass sprouted at the edge of the cape. Further back, in places sheltered from the winds, the ground was clothed in rich verdure, and adorned with flowers. Still further inland were little patches of dwarf birch, scarcely a foot high, crouching close to ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Valerie! All my life I perish, thou knowest it, for a companion of my sex, of my age. Thou art my angel, Valerie, but thou art a woman, and soon, too, thou wilt leave me. Alone, a hermit in my chateau, my heart desolate, how to support life? It is for this that I cry to the friend of my house to return to his country, the country of his race; to bring here his respected father, to plant a vineyard, a little corn, a little fruit,—briefly, to live. Observe!" ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... process of ignoring all objections, refusals and obstacles. And lo! in this manse of lonely Koekensee we have a problem! Elizabeth, tongue in cheek, in the mask of IBSEN!... I couldn't get myself to believe in the ineffable preoccupations of Herr Dremmel that made so desolate a pastor's wife; nor could I see the later enchanting Ingeborg in the little negligible mouse of the episcopal study (though I liked them both); and, as I said, I entirely refused to accept the bishop. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... they could. Of course, the impressive order of march at the beginning could not be maintained throughout the gruelling expedition. A thousand miles across swamp and coulees and rivers, over areas of waste and desolate prairie, where fires had swept every vestige of grass away, through sections where flies and drought and excessive heat, turning into cold as the autumn approached, played the inevitable havoc. All these elements combined to throw that ordered line into confusion ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... the lamentations of a Dean from darkest Deanery, now transported to the Grace-haunted region of Overton! When first I set foot in this desolate waste, my primary impulse was to lift my venerable voice in a piercing wail of anguish. Only my overwhelming respect for the powers which sit sternly in Overton Hall, and a well-founded fear that I might be bundled off the campus ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... which he published, on hearing that the Duke of Argyle was making preparations to march against him, for burning the towns and villages, and destroying the corn and forage, between Dumblane and Perth. This act of destruction, from the effects of which the desolate village of Auchterarder has never recovered, was determined on, in order that the enemy might be incommoded as much as possible upon their march; it added to the miseries of a people already impoverished by the taxes and contributions which the Jacobites ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... all, on the right, is Storm King mountain, its granite rocks and precipices showing darkly here and there, as if its huge white mantle were old and ragged indeed. One might well shiver at the lonely, desolate wastes lying beyond it, grim hills and early-shadowed valleys, where the half-starved fox prowls, and watches for unwary rabbits venturing from their coverts to nibble the frozen twigs. The river, which above the Highlands broadens out into Newburgh Bay, has become a snowy ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... it had grown quite dusk. They were now come to a very wild and desert place, overgrown with shaggy bushes, and so silent and solitary that nobody seemed ever to have dwelt or journeyed there. All was waste and desolate, in the gray twilight, which grew every moment more obscure. Perseus looked about him rather disconsolately, and asked Quicksilver whether they had a great ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... would not inhabit it, and told tales of smugglers and pirates who made it their haunt, with other fanciful stories which always seem to linger about the sea, and in which there was not the faintest shadow of truth. Desolate and neglected, it stood there year after year, till, one day, Skipper Ben brought down carpenters and masons on the "White Gull," and straightway they went at work upon the old house. Doors went up, windows went in, a piazza pushed itself out towards the sea-front, and there was great ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... the outward aspects of my life in exile, because the sojourn of these years amid the hills and forests taught a natural leechcraft which was to stand me in good stead in coming years, and may stand in equal stead other souls desolate as mine. Like the Nile brimming over the fields, a flood of joy from nature overlaid my parched being, enriching it with a fertile loam, and shielding it from the irritations of the world. I lay fallow beneath the still, sunlit waters, unharrowed ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... passed, and fashions changed. Low streets and squalid tenements supplanted the rich fields and fruitful orchards, which had once rendered it so pleasant an abode. Its haughty lords abandoned it for a more stately palace nigh the forum, and for long years it had remained tenantless, voiceless, desolate. But dice, and wine, and women, mad luxury and boundless riot, had brought its owner down to indigence, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... love, kiss My burning, breaking being; So when cold death Will put out the light In some wilderness Of far forsaken life Might each kiss blossom Into a lotus and a Shephali.[2] And in the desolate hours Of loneliness of traveling In the dusk of despair One petal of these Will cheer the vagrant souls That tread the pathway Of love's forsaking. Or, when Death will sow This Soul of mine On the lake-shore ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... who defies and spurns him. Creon avenges himself by seizing on Antigone and Ismene. Nothing can be more dramatically effective than the scene in which these last props of his age are torn from the desolate old man. They are ultimately restored to him by Theseus, whose amiable and lofty character is painted with all the partial glow of colouring which an Athenian poet would naturally lavish on the Athenian Alfred. We are next introduced to Polynices. He, like Creon, has sought ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... March 13. This is a most desolate-looking place, flat and sandy, and covered with camps and storehouses for a mile along the river. A line of intrenchments encloses the whole, some seven miles long, resting on the river at each end. There is a long wharf just built out to deep water, at the end of which the Atlantic is discharging. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... invited the weary pilgrim to tarry and rest within their refreshing shade; no garden, gay with flowers, rang with childish laughter, as the little ones plucked their fragrant blossoms; but rugged hills, frowning rocks, and desolate sand beaches, assumed the place of waving woods, smiling corn-fields, and blooming orchards; while for the melodious notes of woodland songsters, was heard the wild cry of the stormy petrel, or the shrill ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... pointing to the gushing water, said, 'E questo si chiama il Tevere a Roma!' ('And this is called the Tiber at Rome!') ... We followed the stream from the spot where it issued out of the beech-forest, over barren spurs of the mountains crested with fringes of dark pine, down to a lonely and desolate valley, shut in by dim and misty blue peaks. Then we entered the portals of a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees everywhere around us and impenetrable foliage above our heads, the deep silence only broken by fitful songs of birds. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... fitting spot, he finally fixed upon the remote hamlet of Redcar, far up on the bleak coast of Redcar, in Yorkshire. It was not far from Whitby, where we had been two or three years before. The gray German Ocean tumbled in there upon the desolate sands, and the contrast of the scene with those which we had been of late familiar with made the latter, no doubt, start forward intensely in the romancer's imagination. So there he wrote and wrote; and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the severe journey, and accompanied by a guide who knew the forest ways, he set out, a fugitive from justice. Both he and his pilot carried pistols in holster and provisions in saddle-bags. Their route lay through a desolate region sparsely settled by pioneers, and not yet relinquished by wandering aborigines, nor by the bear and the catamount. The month of February was spent before they reached the valley of the Tombigbee, a distance of two hundred miles from the ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... grown quite dusk. They were now come to a very wild and desert place, overgrown with shaggy bushes and so silent and solitary that nobody seemed ever to have dwelt or journeyed there. All was waste and desolate in the gray twilight, which grew every moment more obscure. Perseus looked about him rather disconsolately and asked Quicksilver whether they had a great deal farther ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... thing for themselves to win— Through pathless woods, through home-bred fogs, Through stony plains, through treacherous bogs, Long, long, have followed faces fair, Fair soul-less faces, vanished into air, And darkness is around them and above, Desolate of aught to love, And through the gloom on every side, Strange dismal forms are dim descried, And the air is as the breath From the lips of void-eyed Death, And the knees are bowed in prayer To the Stronger than despair— Then the ever-lifted cry, Give us light, or we shall die, Cometh to the ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... lover weeps, unconsoled, So desolate is her gloom; But a voice falls softly through the air, Whispering comfort to her despair, 'Love here ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... own! On the verandah she stopped very suddenly again. Her mother was sitting in the drawing-room at her writing bureau, quite alone. There was nothing remarkable in the expression of her face except its utter immobility. But she looked desolate! Fleur went upstairs. At the door of her room she paused. She could hear her father walking up and down, up and down ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... these absolute strangers, than amongst her own vassals. Even the farm-kitchen, large, stone-built, and scrupulously clean, seemed strange and dreary after the little, smoky, earth-built living-rooms in which her peasantry were content to live, and she never had seemed to herself so completely desolate; but all the time she was so wearied out with her long and painful walk, that she had no sooner taken some food than she began to doze in ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... part, my heart echoed the Princess's wish. I was in favour of abandoning the yacht and trusting to the chances of the island. As the sun rose higher we got glimpses of this through the windows, and the verdure looked inviting after so many weary weeks of desolate water. The tops of the hills seemed barren, but I had no doubt that there was more fertility in the valleys, which were not swept by the bluff winds of the wild sea. But the Prince was obstinate, and, relying upon his luck, was ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... An empty slow sea swells towards us— At first it was only like a weary Moth, which crawled over the last houses. Now it is a black bleeding hole. It has already buried the city and half the sky. Ah, had I flown— Now it is too late. My head falls into Desolate hands. On the horizon an apparition like a shriek Announces Terror ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... that he was not only landlord of the desolate inn, but cook, garcon; in fact, the whole personnel. He lived there absolutely alone, and was the only European in this Arab village lost in the great spaces of the Sahara. This information I drew from him while he waited upon me at dinner, which I ate in solitude. My companions of the ...
— "Fin Tireur" - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... an expression of Plato or some other philosopher appears to me exceedingly elegant, who, when a tempest had driven his ship on an unknown country and a desolate shore, during the alarms with which their ignorance of the region inspired his companions, observed, they say, geometrical figures traced in the sand, on which he immediately told them to be of good cheer, for he ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... appeared in their chariots, at perfect peace with one another, and cleansed of all earthly stain. Then the living were happy with the dead; long separated families were once more united, and the hearts that had been desolate for fifteen long years were again filled with joy. The night sped quickly by in tender conversation, and when morning came, all the dead mounted into their chariots and disappeared. Those who had come to meet them prepared to leave the river, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... Moses, half an hour's march from the Red Sea, surrounded by our camels and camel-men, we stared at the desert, and the emotion and the ecstasy of solitude came over us. We longed to plunge headlong into the dim, luring immensity, to run with the wind blowing over the desolate dunes. So we ran, and reaching the heights, we looked down on a larger wilderness, over which trailed a dying gleam of daylight, fallen from the yellow sky through a rent made by the wind in the cloudy veil. But so sinister was the desert in the winter wind, that from some remote, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... ebb when Newton was left in this desolate situation. After some minutes passed in bitterness of spirit, his natural courage returned; and, although the chance of preservation was next to hopeless, Newton rose up, resolved that he would use his best efforts, and trust to Providence for their success. His first idea ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... of homes prostrated by the emigrating throe. Does this matter-of-fact bearing conceal an infinite tenderness, a pity that dare not show itself for fear of unmanly collapse? Are they secretly broken by the sight of the desolate nursery, the dismantled crib, the forgotten clockwork monkey lying in a corner of the cupboard where the helpless Urchin laid it with care before he and his smaller sister were deported, to be out of the way in the final storm? Does the o'ermastering pathos of a ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... was made to Johnson Island; it was merely an unimportant, arid, barren island; but the old boatswain was no less proud of giving his name to a few desolate rocks. He even wanted to carve it on a high peak. During this excursion, Hatteras had carefully explored these lands, even beyond Cape Washington; the melting of the snow sensibly changed the country; ravines and hillocks ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... she understood. She was suddenly ashamed to bring her own happiness into this desolate and widowed presence, and the kisses with which, mutely, she tried to comfort her friend, were almost a plea ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the grand estates of this ancient house. For a long period, the Counts of Mediana had not inhabited the chateau of Elanchovi, and it had fallen into a state of neglect and partial decay, presenting a somewhat wild and desolate aspect. However, at the beginning of the year 1808, during the troubles of the French invasion, the Count Don Juan, then head of the family, had chosen it as a safe residence for his young wife Dona Luisa, whom ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets, dwellings, shops, everything—and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere handful of miners still remaining, had seen the town spring up spread, grow and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They had long ago ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... religious aversion to taking away life in any form, permit the increase of these desolate creatures till in the hot season they become so numerous as to be a nuisance; and the only expedient hitherto devised by the civil government to reduce their numbers, is once in each year to offer a reward for their destruction, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... lonely cabin and its raw field of stumps. The angry, low-lying clouds and the hastening dusk of an early April day had by this time cast the gloom of semi-darkness over the scene. Spasmodic bursts of lightning laid thin dull, unearthly flares upon the desolate land, and the rumble of apple-carts filled the ear with promise of disaster. The chickens had gone to roost; several cows, confined in a pen surrounded by the customary stockade of poles driven deep into the earth and ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... the loftiest genius cannot ignore them; the sublimest charity must begin with them. They are their own exceeding great reward; their self-sacrifice is infinite joy; and the selfishness which discards them is repaid by loneliness and a desolate old age. Yet these, though the most tender and intimate portion of human life, do not form its whole. It is given to noble souls to crave other interests also, added spheres, not necessarily alien from these; larger knowledge, larger action also; duties, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... divined the loneliness which overwhelmed the widow, and this proof of her sympathy was the passport to Mrs. Greyson's heart. Loneliness was the feeling of which Helen was most of all conscious. The death of even an indifferent acquaintance often may seem to desolate the earth from its simple irremediableness, and much more does the removal of one near to us make the world ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... passing a series of wharves, and beyond these a tract of waste, desolate bank very gloomy in the half light and apparently boasting no habitation of man. The activities of the Greenwich bank seemed remote, and the desolation of the Isle of Dogs very near, touching them ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Freddy were hauling in their lines and delivering breakfasts along the shore, one of the trig motors from the Boat Club was bearing a tall, broad-shouldered passenger, bronzed by sun and storm, to the Life-Saving Station, whose long, low buildings stood on a desolate spit of sand that jutted out into the sea beyond Shelter Cove. It was Uncle Sam's farthest outpost. The Stars and Stripes floating from its flagstaff told of his watchful care of this perilous stretch of shore that his sturdy sons paced by day and night, alert to ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... interested I spoke loud, to let them know it was I, and that I was in earnest. I admonished them all to let whisky alone. Told some of its pernicious effects; how much money it cost, how many lives it had taken, how many tears it had caused to flow and how many homes it had made desolate. ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... have told you, on a lonely island. Somewhat north of the Equator, ten thousand miles away from Her. Wistfully, he said it was quite the right spot. He could feel it. So we helped him, the China-boys and I, to build a little hut, up on stilts, thatched with palm leaves. Very desolate it is. On all sides the burnished ocean, hot and breathless. And the warm, moist heat, close around, still and stifling. Like a blanket, dense, enveloping. But he said it was the spot. I don't know. He has been there now three years. He said he could do it there—if ever. From time to time ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... desolate grandeur, vast expanses compassed by endless mountain-ranges that chill the bright skies with never-melting snows. The countless peaks look down on the clouds, while far below the clouds wind valleys that the sunlight never reaches. Twisting ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... now," she whispered, with a desolate sigh. "Sing to me, and keep the evil spirit quiet for a little while. To-morrow, if I'm strong enough, we'll talk ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... same relation to surrounding islands that a mother-ship bears to a flock of submarines. Westward her coast is rocky and forbidding, being nothing but a succession of frowning headlands that rise almost perpendicularly from the sea. It is one of the most desolate stretches of coast in moderate latitudes, for no one lives there, nor has ever lived there, except a few hermit ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... gut almost blocked by a fallen boulder, with only a passage wide enough to let through horse and rider single file, a way that could be easily barricaded or masked so that none would suspect any opening in the cliff. The second led by a winding way through a desolate region, over rock that left no sign and wound by twists and turns that none but the initiated could follow. The place, accidentally discovered, was perfect ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... a poor man's family was a serious subject: such was the hopeless condition of a useful mechanic ready for work even in the desolate forests skirting the haunts of the savage. So fares it with the DISJECTA MEMBRA of towns and villages, when such arrangements are left to the people themselves ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... Went, once an important Roman station, and for a long time after the departure of the Romans a celebrated British city, now a poor desolate place consisting of a few old-fashioned houses and a strange-looking dilapidated church. No Welsh is spoken at Caer Went, nor to the east of it, nor indeed for two or three miles before you reach it from ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... appearance, finding all the rooms in the cleared state incidental to ball preparations—all the chairs and tables shrunk up to the walls; and even the drawing-room, where the chaperons were to sit, looking some degrees more desolate than the drawing-room of a ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be borne, or their effects overcome. If disastrous war should sweep our commerce from the ocean, another generation may renew it; if it exhaust our treasury, future industry may replenish it; if it desolate and lay waste our fields, still, under a new cultivation, they will grow green again, and ripen to future harvests. It were but a trifle even if the walls of yonder Capitol were to crumble, if its lofty pillars should fall, and ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... consoled. But then she recollected her new relation, Mr. Reynolds, her grandfather, whom she had never seen, who had for years disowned her—treated her mother with injustice. She could scarcely think of him with complacency: yet, when his age, his sufferings, his desolate state, were represented, she pitied him; and, faithful to her strong sense of duty, would have gone instantly to offer him every assistance and attention in her power. Lady Berryl assured her that Mr. Reynolds had positively forbidden ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... as they looked like white men, had chosen to go on foot, and not one of their Lipan friends had accompanied them. If they were men to be "watched" at any other time, even the sharp eyes of Indian suspicion saw no need for it among the desolate solitudes of ...
— The Talking Leaves - An Indian Story • William O. Stoddard
... the house might be rat-ridden and desolate. The coulee might wear always the look of emptiness; but here, under the bluff by the spring, and in the room Jean called hers, one felt the air of occupancy that gave the lie to ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... a fine fellow, and so shrewd and good-humoured. To the Certosa, on a hill two miles from Florence; very large convent, formerly very rich, and had near forty monks, now reduced to seven residents, though there are a few more who belong to it, but who are absent. It is in good repair, but looks desolate. There is an old monk, Don Fortunatus by name, who understands English and speaks it tolerably, delights in English people and books, received us in his cell, which consists of two or three little apartments, not uncomfortable and commanding a beautiful ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Alas! the light came all too soon, and brought infinite sighing and sobbing. A thought suddenly broke loose in Oakwich, and up spake an old Oakwichian. "Oh! and oh! and woe is me for my miserable land now, now about to be bereft of her children! All her strength destroyed, all her loveliness laid desolate!" ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... used to look upon my condition with the utmost regret. I had nobody to converse with, but now and then this neighbour; no work to be done, but by the labour of my hands; and I used to say, I lived just like a man cast away upon some desolate island, that had nobody there but himself. But how just has it been - and how should all men reflect, that when they compare their present conditions with others that are worse, Heaven may oblige ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... took him round and about the world, so to speak, they cast him away on tropical beaches, they left him dismasted on desolate seas, they involved the most startling interventions and the most inconvenient consequences—there were interludes of penetrating philosophy. For some years the suspicion had been growing up in Mr. Britling's mind that in planting this persuasion in his ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... family can make a green land desolate," returned the Lizard. "Small things can do much mischief, as you will learn when you grow older. There is nothing safe from Locusts. They have even been known in the Strait of Ormuz to settle on a ship, and, by devouring the sails and cordage, oblige the ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... and persons were hated alike. I hope the same thing may not be true at present. It may chance that on this subject Master Porson will get stung through his coffin, before he is many years deader. However, if this particular variation troubles the waters just around itself (for it would desolate a Popish village to withdraw its local saint), yet carrying one's eye from this Epistle to the whole domains of the New Testament—yet, looking away from that defrauded village to universal Christendom, we must exclaim—What ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... tropical sky, rivals the verdure of an English April. The rice-fields yield an increase such as is elsewhere unknown. Spices, sugar, vegetable oils, are produced with marvellous exuberance. The rivers afford an inexhaustible supply of fish. The desolate islands along the sea-coast, overgrown by noxious vegetation, and swarming with deer and tigers, supply the cultivated districts with abundance of salt. The great stream which fertilises the soil is, at the same time, the chief highway of Eastern commerce. On its banks, and on those of its tributary ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... brandy, and deliberately emptied it, to the astonished edification of beholders, into my boots! literal fact, and it kept my feet comfortable all night long. And so, wrapped all in double clothing, sped I my rapid way, varying what I had before seen by passing through desolate Bodmin, and its neighbourhood of rock, moor, and sand: hot coffee at Liskeard, morning broke soon after, then the glorious sun over the sea. Hamoaze, the ferry, and Devonport at 1/2 past 8. Much as I longed to get home, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Muhammadan guide Shivaji was born. Whether it was actually upon the rough walls of this small chamber that Shivaji's eyes first rested is open to considerable doubt, and probably they are but a small portion of a once spacious mansion which covered the surrounding area, now relic-strewn and desolate, and in which the family of the chieftain resided. These crumbling halls, the shrine of Shivabai, and the outwork at the extreme north point of the hill are the only remains directly connected with Maratha supremacy. The out-work ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... animals were. They did not know from what place they had come. They wondered why they had come to their land. Perhaps you would like to know. They were musk sheep that had come from the cold, cold north. They were used to treeless, desolate places. They were used to eating moss and young shoots of the willow. They looked something like sheep and something like oxen. Sometimes they are called musk oxen. They looked something like the bison. Sometimes they are called ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... and came in a few hours to a country where there were no mountains more—only hills, with great stretches of desolate heath. Here and there was a village, but that brought him little pleasure, for the people were rougher and worse mannered than those in the mountains, and as he passed through, the children came ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... smiling, and now—nay, my dear, dear friend, do not turn from me, and look so utterly wretched. Do not you see me! What can be the matter!" The Lady Anne looked up in her friend's face with so piteous and desolate a look, that she began to fear her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... out in the garden two or three times on a leash; but he had no thought of escape. The Master had left him, and bade him stay there; and his heart was empty and desolate within him. Now and again his dark eyes filled with moisture, and the sadness of his face was so wonderfully striking as to impress the Misses Sandbrook, who, truth to tell, were not over and above intelligent, nor even very kind-hearted. They had not half the kindly good-nature of their ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... maintained a stout opposition to his proceedings, as repugnant both to humanity and honor. This was Sanchez de Vargas and the cruel commander was revenged on him by abandoning him to his fate in the desolate region where he was now found by his countrymen. *13 [Footnote 13: An expedition more remarkable than that of Orellana was performed by a delicate female, Madame Godin, who, in 1769, attempted to descend the Amazon in an open boat to its mouth. She was attended by seven persons, two of ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... no mate [9] has he near him—while I Can draw warmth from the cheek of my Love; As blest and as glad, in this desolate gloom, As if green summer grass were the floor of my room, And ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... doleful, dreary phenomenon that overtook us ten miles down the valley. I had seen it but it had made no impression on my tortured mind. The great god of day had sprung up out of the earth to smile upon me—or at me—and I had let him go unnoticed, so black and desolate was the memory of the night he destroyed! I had only a vague recollection of the dawn. The thing that caused me the most concern was the discovery that we had run the last half of our journey in broad ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... 'There lay,' he writes, 'the burnt and slaughtered bodies, together with those wounded by bullets and axes. The last agonies and the moans and lamentations were dreadful to hear.... The houses were converted into heaps of stones, so that I might say with Micah, "We are made desolate;" and with Jeremiah, "A piteous wail may go forth in his distress." With Paul I say, "Brothers, pray for us." I have every evening, during a whole month, offered up prayers with the congregation, on the four points of our fort, under the blue sky.... ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... breathed forth such a spirit from them that they could give being and existence to everything that they willed and desired. At times they spread golden tents and went in and out of them, at other times in places that appeared to be quite waste and desolate they made wonderful plants and trees to grow up, which actually offered their perfect fruit that appeared in a bright golden radiance; of which it was related that they were the magical nourishment and food on which the inhabitants of this land were ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... do not ill-treat children. It is only women, who adore them, that kill them and ill-use them accordingly. She will be my little benefactress, God bless her! I may love her more than I ought, being yours, for my home is desolate without her; but that is the only fault you shall ever find with me. There ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... was worth more than ever before. The workingman talked loudly, and held his head high. Was it the result of having served in one or more campaigns? Had he in the background of his mind a vision of dying men and desolate villages, seen so often on the battlefield? However it was, he became violent and quarrelsome, indifferent alike to wounding and death, and learned to make use of the knife ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... could have died without a murmur. But with my life as a physician is bound up the knowledge of great secrets and the future of man. This it was, when we missed the caravan, tried for a short cut and wandered to this desolate ravine, that ate into my soul, and, in five days, has changed my ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... in which Bruno passed his childhood. His paternal home was situated at the foot of Mount Cicada, celebrated for its fruitful soil. From early youth his pleasure was to pass the night out on the mountain, now watching the stars, now contemplating the arid, desolate sides of Vesuvius. He tells how, in recalling those days—the only peaceful ones of his life—he used to think, as he looked up at the infinite expanse of heaven and the confines of the horizon, with the towering volcano, that this ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... since the lower Yukon is impassable by the end of September, and, at any rate, in view of the prospects of short rations, it would have been rash to try. The consequence would be that they would have to remain on that desolate island during nine months of almost Arctic winter, for the river does not open again till the end of June. Here they would be absolutely without employment unless they chose to stack wood for the steamboat companies, and their only amusements (save the mark) would be ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... morning there was the McKinley Fork to cross the first thing, and it was a difficult and disagreeable task. This stream, which drains the Muldrow Glacier and therefore the whole northeast face of Denali, occupies a dreary, desolate bed of boulder and gravel and mud a mile or more wide; rather it does not occupy it, save perhaps after tremendous rain following great heat, but wanders amid it, with a dozen channels of varying depth but uniform blackness, the inky solution of the shale which the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... surmount the two doors of my apartment. It covers my bed, where I toss and groan; it beats in through my closed lids; it is accompanied by the most vulgar, though the most human, sounds. I spring up to call for some help, some remedy; but there is no bell, and I feel desolate and weak. There is only a strange orifice in the wall, through which the traveller in distress may transmit his appeal. I fill it with incoherent sounds, and sounds more incoherent yet come back to me. I gather at last ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... threw it open, and leant forth and gasped for air. Heaven was serene and still, as morning came coldly forth amongst the waning stars; and the haunts of men, in their thoroughfare of idleness and of pleasure, were desolate and void. Nothing, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Dorada at two o'clock in the morning. Moonlight and dawnlight lent an air of mystery and beauty to the solitary country; there was a sort of vast stillness over the land, as the boat glided to her moorings in the early morning. Nothing could be heard but the chirping of a bicho, or the desolate neigh of one of the horses that awaited them by the little quay. The stars shone and twinkled overhead, and the air was clear and cool and marvellously still. Black John woke the travellers up and told them it was time to disembark; and Purvis, to whom sleep seemed ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... and need, Agnes; the sun does not shine on a more desolate man than I am,—one more utterly alone in the world; there is no one left to love me. Agnes, can you not love me a little?—let it be ever so little, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... at a time when families were gathering cheerily each about a single fireside, Mr. Mitchelbourne was riding alone through the muddy and desolate lanes of Suffolk. The winter was not seasonable; men were not tempted out of doors. There was neither briskness nor sunlight in the air, and there was no snow upon the ground. It was a December of dripping branches, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... time only. I will not enter particularly into the questions, whether or not the people will continue to work for wages, whether they will remain quiet,—or on the other hand, whether the Island will be suffered to become desolate, and the freed slaves relapse into barbarism, &c. These things have been speculated about, and gloomy predictions have had their day; the time has now come for the proof. People do not buy land and houses, and rent ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... years more. The year 1322 saw an invasion of England by King Robert and a counter-invasion of Scotland by Edward II, who destroyed the Abbey of Dryburgh on his return march. This expedition was, as usual, fruitless, for the Scots adopted their usual tactics of leaving the country waste and desolate, and the English army could obtain no food. In October of the same year King Robert made a further inroad into Yorkshire, and won a small victory at Biland Abbey. At last, in March, 1323, a truce was made for thirteen years, but as Edward II ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait |
