"Desolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... sufficiently subsided to permit of a wide view in every direction. The vista only served to increase our sense of loneliness and peril. We were a tiny chip tossed on the immensity of the waters, stretching away to the distant horizons. It was a vast scene of desolation, without another object to break its grim monotony—just those endless surges of gray-green water brightened by the touch of the sun. Again and again I swept my eyes about the circle in a vain effort to perceive something of hope; it was useless—we were alone ...
— Wolves of the Sea • Randall Parrish
... French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost its cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollow with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger of Roman resurrection here! The illusion is completely ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... suffered most severely. Several of the lodges had been altogether deserted, in consequence of the death of the proprietors; in which case the Indians frequently strip off the thick mats which form the outer covering of the wigwam, and leave the bare poles a perishing monument of desolation! This is only done when the head of the family dies. The property of which he has not otherwise disposed during his life, is then buried with him; and his friends continue, for a long period, to revisit the grave, and ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... the embanked winding river, which ran sluggishly along the edge of the fen; and as the party looked out over the garden and across the fen upon that November night, they seemed to be ashore in the midst of a sea of desolation, which spread beneath the night sky away and ...
— Dick o' the Fens - A Tale of the Great East Swamp • George Manville Fenn
... on the omnibus or a tramp uphill, and we find ourselves abruptly in the village street. Then did each page as I turned it over bring some fresh recollection of one's unspeakable sense of newness and desolation; the haunting fear of doing something ludicrous; the morbid dread of chaff and of being "greened," which even in my time had, happily, supplanted the old terrors of being tossed in a blanket or roasted at a fire. Even less, I venture to think, was one thrilled ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... poverty of the Egyptians was not the only cause why they built no more temples. Though the colossal statue of Amenhothes uttered its musical notes every morning at sunrise, still tuneful amid the desolation with which it was surrounded, and the Nile was still worshipped at midsummer by the husbandman to secure its fertilising overflow; nevertheless, the religion itself for which the temples had been built was fast giving way before the silent spread of Christianity. The religion ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Washington, amid the desolation of Valley Forge, had his heart torn by the suffering of his Patriot soldiers who bore all, suffered all, hoped all, determined to brave all that their country should be free. From amid that distress Washington sent his thanks for "the good things" ...
— The Story of Commodore John Barry • Martin Griffin
... supplicated, and when Liberty herself invited and beckoned to him from the senatorial order and from the curule chair? Betrayed and abandoned by those we had confided in, our next friendship, if ever our hearts receive any, or if any will venture in those places of desolation, flies forward instinctively to what is most contrary and dissimilar. Caesar is hence the visitant ...
— Imaginary Conversations and Poems - A Selection • Walter Savage Landor
... He had gazed on the slim grace of her figure, himself hidden behind Mrs. Bonner's spotless white lace curtains. He had watched her, his soul in his eyes, the woman he loved and who was not for him, could never be for him now, and there fell upon him a sense of desolation, of ...
— The Imaginary Marriage • Henry St. John Cooper
... me, remarked, that at that time there were seven meetings of friends in that part of Virginia, but that when he was there ten years ago, not a single meeting was held, and the country was literally a desolation. Soon after her decease, John Woolman began his labors in our society, and instead of disowning a member for testifying against slavery, they have for fifty-two years positively forbidden ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke
... her husband as the oxygen in the air, and he knew it, although demonstrating his knowledge rather quietly, perhaps. But she understood him, and enjoyed a little secret exultation over the strong man's almost ludicrous helplessness and desolation when her occasional absences suspended for a brief time their conjugal partnership. She surrounded the old people with a perpetual Indian-summer haze of kindliness, which banished all hard, bleak outlines ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... looked into the world. I am speaking for myself only; and I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God, drawn from the general facts of human society and the course of history, but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. The sight of the world is nothing else than the prophet's scroll, full of "lamentations, and ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... he goes skatin' stiff-laig about in a ring like I relates, arms bent, an' back arched; "let all the sons of men b'ar witness; an' speshully let a cowerin' varmint, named Sam Enright, size me up an' shudder! I'm the maker of deserts an' the wall-eyed harbinger of desolation! I'm kin to rattlesnakes on my mother's side; I'm king of all the eagles an' full brother to the b'ars! I'm the bloo-eyed lynx of Whiskey Crossin', an' I weighs four thousand pounds! I'm a he- steamboat; I've put a crimp in ...
— Wolfville Days • Alfred Henry Lewis
... up the valley to sleepy little towns where he could rest in the parlours of old inns, sometimes striking across country to this or that point of the sea-coast, or making his way to the nearer summits of Dartmoor, noble in their wintry desolation. He marked with delight every promise of returning spring. When he could only grant himself a walk of an hour or two in the sunny afternoon, there was many a deep lane within easy reach, where the gorse gleamed in masses of gold, and the ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... redeeming an oriental people from barbarism and heathenism to Christianity and civilized life, the whole might of the mother-country should have been massed in a tremendous conflict in Europe which brought ruin and desolation to the most prosperous provinces under her dominion, and sapped her own powers of growth, is one of the strangest coincidences ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... southward, day after day southward, sentinel there at my wheel; clear sunshine by day, when the calm pale sea sometimes seemed mixed with regions of milk, and at night the immense desolation of a world lit by a sun that was long dead, and by a light that was gloom. It was like Night blanched in death then; and wan as the very kingdom of death and Hades I have seen it, most terrifying, that neuter state and limbo of nothingness, when unreal sea and spectral sky, all boundaries lost, ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel
... covenant with Me by sacrifice." The writer in Genesis saw the promise in the rain-cloud, for the rainbow can only appear with the shining of the sun. The writer in Genesis saw in Noah a righteous man, worthy to escape the flood of desolation that swept away the wickedness around; there is no explanation apparent, at least on the surface, as to why the designer of the constellations made him, who issued from the ship and offered the sacrifice, a centaur—one who ...
— The Astronomy of the Bible - An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References - of Holy Scripture • E. Walter Maunder
... affection of the Jew, his kindness to his kindred, have become proverbial. But Shakespeare admits no such kindness in Shylock: when his daughter leaves Shylock one would think that Shakespeare would picture the father's desolation and misery, his sorrow at losing his only child; but here there is no touch of sympathy ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... or done to death under the name of Jesus in the dens of the Inquisition, or slaughtered by thousands in the sack of towns; if our wives and daughters had been shamed, if our houses had been burned, our goods taken, our liberties trampled upon, and our homes made a desolation, then, my reader, is it not possible that even in these different days you and I might have been cruel when our hour came? God knows alone, and God be thanked that so far as we can foresee, except under the pressure, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... defy shame, and even remorse; but how would it be if that support should fail? He had not been away yet twenty hours, and already there came creeping over her a chilling sense of helplessness and desolation. She knew her lover's violent passions and haughty temper, impatient of the most distant approach to insolence or even contradiction from others, too well not to be aware that such a man walked ever on ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... poetesses, and threw their beans, maize, and garden-tools into the corners of the desolate reception-rooms, from whose mildewed walls looked down a host of celebrities—brocaded doges, powdered princesses, and scarlet-robed cardinals, simpering drearily in their desolation," and "sad, haggard poetesses in sea-green and sky-blue draperies, with lank, powdered locks and meager arms, holding lyres; fat, ill-shaven priests in white bands and mop-wigs; sonneteering ladies, sweet and vapid in dove-colored stomachers and embroidered sleeves; jolly extemporary ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... time to think; you will do that, I'm sure. Go now, and leave me alone. If it is right, God will give me strength to do it, and perhaps He will comfort me in my desolation. But I do not know—I cannot tell. I must have time to think. Go now, if you please, sir," said ...
— The Moorland Cottage • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... projecting and dark turrets and eminences, reflecting back the lustre of the torch below. In this season, which ought to have been consecrated to reflection and silence, the daws, nestling in their abodes of desolation, aroused from their repose by the unusual glare, sailed over our heads in sable multitudes that added depth to the darkness of the sky, while, in their hoarsest maledictions, they seemed to warn off the intruders on "their ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... of the next winter and dry up perennial fountains. California has been a land of promise in its time, like Palestine; but if the woods continue so swiftly to perish, it may become, like Palestine, a land of desolation. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... employ:—But Voltaire has by one Publication rendered all arguments superfluous: He has told us, in his Candide, the merriest and most diverting tale of frauds, murders, massacres, rapes, rapine, desolation, and destruction, that I think it possible on any other plan to invent; and he has given us motive and effect, with every possible aggravation, to improve the sport. One would think it difficult to preserve the point of ridicule, in such a case, unabated by contrary emotions; ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... fourth evening, with a rather sad heart, Finn turned his back on the familiar trails, and hunted west and by south from the little gully in which he slept, heading toward the back ranges and the stony foot of Mount Desolation, that is. For a mile or more, even in this direction, he found that his evil fame preceded him, and no good hunting came his way. But presently a flanking movement to the eastward was rewarded by a glimpse ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... interesting than pleasant, for at all times the sentries had to keep straining their eyes in the darkness to see if a patrol of the enemy was coming to surprise them. On our return we saw some shells falling to the right in the shadowy desolation of what ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... to herself after that distressing interview, sat in the dusty desolation of Mrs. Maitland's room, her face hidden in her hands. She needn't have done it. That was her first clear thought. The strain of that dreadful hour alone in the dining-room, with Death behind the locked door, had been unnecessary! As she realized how unnecessary, she felt a resentment that ...
— The Iron Woman • Margaret Deland
... to the slander of the Duke of York,[227] declared that, if it were not for the Duke's good advice and counsel, he, my lord the Prince himself, and others in his company, would have been in great peril and desolation." "Moreover," (continued the Prince,) "the Duke, as though he had been one of the poorest gentlemen of the realm who would have to toil and struggle for the acquirement of his own honour and name, laboured, and ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 1 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... its rich products and fertile shores, by one tacit and universal consent, appear abandoned by all the European nations of the present age, and handed over to the ravages of extensive hordes of piratical banditti, solely intent on plunder and desolation. ...
— The Expedition to Borneo of H.M.S. Dido - For the Suppression of Piracy • Henry Keppel
... they search with indefatigable pains. These insects," he adds in a note, "appear in hot weather in formidable numbers: disrobing the fields and trees of their verdure, blossoms, and fruit; spreading desolation and destruction wherever they go.... They appeared in great numbers in IRELAND during a hot summer, and committed great ravages. In the year 1747 whole meadows and corn-fields were destroyed by them in SUFFOLK. The decrease of Rookeries in that County was thought to be the occasion of it. The ...
— The Farmer's Boy - A Rural Poem • Robert Bloomfield
... mid-winter, and found a scene of indescribable desolation, the fire having devastated so many familiar spots in the city's approach; depots in ashes and entire streets a wide waste. Finding no one to meet us, with the longed-for, loving welcome, we were tortured with fear, and went at once to ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... that if a little Van, drawn by a pony, could be fitted up with what is ordinarily required by the sick and dying, and trot round amongst these abodes of desolation, with a couple of nurses trained for the business, it might be of immense service, without being very costly. They could have a few simple instruments, so as to draw a tooth or lance an abscess, and ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... powder. In many days' journey I have not found a square copret of the country that did not suffer a visitation. If any human being escaped he must speedily have perished from starvation. For some twenty centuries the Pukes have been an extinct race, and their country a desolation in which no living thing can dwell, unless, like me, it is supplied ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... There is no reasoning coldly on the subject. The most cautious prudence, the most liberal sacrifices, and the meanest condescensions, have not insured the lives and fortunes of those who ventured to remain; and I know not that the absent require any other apology than the desolation of the country they have quitted. Had my friends who have been slaughtered by Le Bon's tribunal persisted in endeavouring to escape, they might have lived, and their families, though despoiled by the rapacity of the ...
— A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794 and 1795, • An English Lady
... menace to the horses' legs. Tradition, at least, said that horses' legs and riders' necks had been broken by the steed setting foot in one of these dangerous pitfalls: besides which, each chuck den was the hub centre of an area of desolation whenever located, as mostly it was, in the cultivated fields. Undoubtedly the damage was greatly exaggerated, but the farmers generally agreed that the woodchuck ...
— Rolf In The Woods • Ernest Thompson Seton
... loneliness and desolation had not come upon Barny until now; but he put his trust in the goodness of Providence, and in a fervent mental outpouring of prayer resigned himself to the care of his Creator. With an admirable fortitude, too, he assumed a composure ...
— Stories of Comedy • Various
... the land I care for, wert thou thence; A wilderness is populous enough, So Suffolk had thy heavenly company; For where thou art, there is the world itself, With every several pleasure in the world, And where thou art not, desolation. I can no more; live thou to joy thy life, Myself no joy in nought but that thou ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... view to be blotted from sight as the succeeding crash of thunder diminished to far titanic echoes. Where Soper's cabin had stood there was a wet, glistening heap of fallen logs and rafters, charred and twisted. The lightning flash had revealed more to the rider than the desolation of the burned and abandoned homestead. He saw with instant vividness the wrecked framework of his own plans. He heard the echo of Fadeaway's sneering laugh in the fury of the wind. He told himself that he had been duped and that he deserved it. Lacking physical strength ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... of Snowdon and Glencoe. But Ethel Harrogate had never before seen the southern parks tilted on the splintered northern peaks; the gorge of Glencoe laden with the fruits of Kent. There was nothing here of that chill and desolation that in Britain one associates with high and wild scenery. It was rather like a mosaic palace, rent with earthquakes; or like a Dutch tulip garden blown to ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... acts came near shaking this Union to the centre and desolating this fair land. The measures before us now, and the unyielding and uncompromising spirit are like then, and tend to the same sad and dangerous end—dissolution and desolation, disunion ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... yards behind our front lay the Ablaincourt Sucrerie, a dismal heap of polluted ruins, like all sugar factories the site of desperate fighting. Ablaincourt itself, a village freely mentioned in French dispatches during the Somme battle, was the very symbol of depressing desolation. Peronne, eight miles to the north-east, was out of view. Save for the low ridge of Chaulnes, whence the German gunners watched, and the shattered barn-roofs of Marchelepot—the former on our right, the latter directly to our front—the scene was mud, always mud, ...
— The Story of the 2/4th Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry • G. K. Rose
... true, terrible accidents happen even now, and indeed, had any one passed through a certain coal district on the day of which we speak, a scene of desolation and misery would have presented itself; for there had been a colliery accident!—a fearful explosion in a mine through some (as yet) unknown cause, and they were now bringing up the dead and dying. We too often, alas! read ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... neatly dressed roadsides are generally desirable, it does not follow that no shrubbery or sylvan tangles of trees should be allowed to grow on farms or by the wayside. A bare and rocky hill or knoll suggests images of bleak and barren desolation, cold blasts, and parching sun; while a hill clothed and capped with woods gives the impression of a rich and charming country. Therefore the land unsuitable for pasturage or cultivation on a farm had better be covered with clusters of trees or with forests; and frequently ...
— The Road and the Roadside • Burton Willis Potter
... even a sheep in sight, the side of the valley below us being a rugged mass of desolation, only redeemed by patches of whortleberry and purple heath with the taller ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... chapter of my life. I must turn to the work of peace now. I have no fireplace over which to hang the trusty blade. It is better to bury it here in the mountains in the midst of desolation, and forever to forget ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... impalpable, unlovely, soul-crushing suggestions of space illimitable; dancing and shimmering in the heat waves, it seems struggling to escape. When the wind blows, the dust-devils play tag among the low sage and greasewood; the Joshua trees, rising in the midst of this desolation, stretch forth their fantastically twisted and withered arms, seeming to invoke a curse on nature herself while warning the traveler that the heritage of this land is death. There is a bearing down of one's spirit in the midst of all this loneliness and desolation that envelops everything; ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... accursed Yankees. It served them right. If they had stayed in Connecticut, where they belonged, they would have kept out of harm's way. And with a blasphemy thinly veiled in phrases of pious unction, the desolation of the valley was said to have been contrived by the Deity with the express object of punishing these trespassers. But the cruelty of the Pennsylvania legislature was not confined to words. A scheme was devised ...
— The Critical Period of American History • John Fiske
... a great surprise awaited us. Instead of crowded streets and the hum of trade were deserted streets, closed shops and absolute desolation. For blocks the only persons seen were soldiers and refugees making their way to the gates. In one fine residence quarter an occasional woman peered through the front gates; in other sections all the houses were closed and ...
— The Critic in the Orient • George Hamlin Fitch
... Cregeen saw Peter Quilliam, he was sitting on the ridge of rock at the mouth of Ballure Glen, playing doleful strains on a home-made whistle, and looking the picture of desolation and despair. His mother was lying near to death. He had left Mrs. Cregeen, Kath-erine's mother, a good soul getting the name of Grannie, to watch and tend her while he came out to comfort his simple heart in this lone spot between the ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine
... almost the whole internal trade. They forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. They insulted with impunity the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal authorities of the country. They covered with their protection a set of native dependants who ranged through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared. Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master; and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated at Calcutta, while ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the throne of fashion. The world, uneasy about the form of bonnet to be worn this sorrowful year, and seeing you occupied with your internal discords, anxiously turned to London for help, and London henceforth dictates to all the modistes of the universe. City of desolation, I pity you! No more will you impose your sovereign laws, concerning Suivez-moi-jeune-homme[63] and dog-skin gloves. No more will your boots and shirt-collars reach, by the force of their reputation, the sparely-dressed inhabitants ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... would be an international calamity for that region to be denuded of its splendid big game. With resolute intent and judicial treatment that region can remain a rich and valuable hunting ground for five hundred years to come. Under falsely "liberal" laws, it can be shot into a state of complete desolation within ten ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... lone land, led by the music of an unseen river to see fair flowers, with light-awakened buds, salute the spring tide. Happily, they smile in the midst of nakedness, like sweet memories of laughing infancy, beaming around the desolation of ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... avoided all dangers in our way, and at last dropped anchor opposite a spot where a village had once stood. Fairburn and I recognised it as the one attacked by the Sooloo pirates. Tears started to the eyes of the poor people as they witnessed the desolation which had been wrought among their late habitations. Where, a few days before, they and their families had dwelt in peace and contentment, all was now silent and deserted. Not a human being was seen; their houses were charred ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... and the old dwelling stood like a haunted thing upon a blighted plain. The idlers, the teamsters, and the tents were gone,—all was silence,—and in the little front porch sat Mrs. Michie, weeping; the old gentleman stared at the desolation with a working face, and two small yellow lads lay dolorously upon the steps. They all seemed to brighten up as I appeared at the gate, and when I staggered from my horse, both of them took my hands. I ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... discovery was the water-parting of the Wady Rubayyigh with the Wady Rbigh, both feeders of the Sirr; this to the north, that to the south. The ruins, known as Umm el-Harb, "Mother of Desolation," are the usual basement-lines: they lie in the utterly waterless basin, our camping-ground, stretching west of Mar Rubayyigh, the big white reef. This "Mother" bears nearly north of Umm el-Karyt, in north lat. 26 33' 36" (Ahmed Kaptn): her altitude was ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... this desolation was largely due to the depredations of Mihiragula. In the Deccan and the extreme south there was also a special cause, namely the prevalence of Jainism, which somewhat later became the state religion in ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... doomed yet, perhaps, for many a cycle of years, to spread misery and desolation around me; and yet I love you with a feeling which has in it more of gratefulness and unselfishness than ever yet found a home within my breast. I would fain have you, although you cannot save me; there may yet be a chance, ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... unenviable fate for one of these restless and light-loving creatures, never again to see the sun; to live and die down here, all alone in the dank gloom, chained, as it were, to a few inches of land amid a desolation of black water. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... heedful hearts each solemn cadence falling Through twilight's misty veil, An echo seemed of spirit-voices calling With sad, beseeching wail; And thus outspake the mournful intonation: "Plead for us, brethren, plead!" From the drear depths of woe and desolation Our cry of bitter need Floats upward in the swell Of De Profundis bell. Then bowed each knee, the plaintive summons heeding, And rose the blended sigh. As incense-breath of fond, united pleading E'en to the throne on high: "Hear, Lord, the cry of fervent supplication ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... moral fabric lies in ruins. Their spirits are humiliated and debased by a sense of inferiority, and their native courage cowed and daunted by the superior knowledge and power of their enlightened neighbors. Society has advanced upon them like one of those withering airs that will sometimes breed desolation over a whole region of fertility. It has enervated their strength, multiplied their diseases, and superinduced upon their original barbarity the low vices of artificial life. It has given them a thousand superfluous wants, whilst it has diminished their means of mere existence. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... admiration and want of comprehension, and something of that pity with which boyhood is prone to regard the wildness of girlish aspirations. It was with hopes and tears united, that Theresa bade me farewell; and as I turned away to seek my quiet home, the old feeling of desolation and loneliness, which interest in my favorite had long dissipated, returned upon me with its depressing weight. Our walk to the parsonage was taken in unbroken silence, for Gerald, like myself, was busy with the future—to him a smiling world of compensation and promise, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 5. May 1848 • Various
... desolation which reigned between the Strand and the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close. More than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering, from the embrasure of a door, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... to retire from Congress," he said. "It is no place for me in times so insubstantial. There is darkness and beggary ahead for all your Southern race. There is a crisis coming which will be followed by desolation. The generation to which your parents belong is doomed! I open my arms to you, dear girl, and offer you a home never yet gladdened by a wife. Accept it, and leave Washington with me and with your brother. ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... No one was in sight. The house lay behind the sand-banks, the first ridge hiding even its chimney-smoke. He gazed along the beach, where the perpetual haze of spray seemed to have removed the light-house to a vast distance. A sense of desolation came over him with a rush, and with something between a gasp and a sob he turned his back to the sea and ran, his boots dangling from his ...
— The Ship of Stars • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... the top of this second precipice, we found winter and desolation under drizzling clouds which afforded but partial and transient glimpses of the world below. The surface at the summit of the cliffs was broad and consisted of large blocks of sandstone, separated by wide fissures full of dwarf ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... conquered so great a part of the world, Egypt doubtless was subdued, like the rest of the provinces, and Xenophon positively declares this in the beginning of his Cyropaedia, or institution of that prince. Probably, after that the forty years of desolation, which had been foretold by the prophet, were expired, Egypt beginning gradually to recover itself, Amasis shook off the yoke, and recovered ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... Napoleon. That great emperor had seemed to make war upon the very elements themselves, to have contended with Nature, and to have almost defeated Providence itself. The enemies of the North, more savage than Goth or Vandal, mounting the swift gales of a Russian winter, had carried death, desolation, and ruin, to the very gates of Paris. Wellington fought at Waterloo a bleeding and broken nation—a nation electrified, it is true, to almost superhuman energy by the genius of Napoleon, but a nation prostrate and bleeding nevertheless. Compare this, ...
— A Life of Gen. Robert E. Lee • John Esten Cooke
... that she is now in, that she should be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, more scattered than the Athenians; without head, without order, beaten, despoiled, torn, overrun; and to have endured every kind of desolation. ...
— The Prince • Niccolo Machiavelli
... hope which are fulfilled, or the words of the prophet of despair?" she insisted. "What saith Daniel of this hour? Did he not name it the abomination of desolation? Said he not that the city and the sanctuary should be destroyed, that there should be a flood and that unto the end of the war desolations shall be determined? Desolations, Costobarus! And Laodice is but a child and ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller
... the taste of the visitor. Earthquakes have played havoc with the buildings, but sufficient is left in the way of tunnels, grottoes, bathing ponds and dungeon-like rooms. Everywhere are signs of decay and desolation; nevertheless, it is possible, with a little knowledge of comparatively recent Javan history, to reconstruct the scenes enacted here in the days when the native sultans were more powerful in the land ...
— Across the Equator - A Holiday Trip in Java • Thomas H. Reid
... nothing and heard no noise. The monastery was the picture of desolation and solitude; the doors were all open, those of the cells, the chapel, and the refectory. In the refectory, a vast hall where the tables still stood in their places, Roland noticed five or six bats circling around; a frightened owl flew through ...
— The Companions of Jehu • Alexandre Dumas, pere
... world," said the Redeemer: and his followers dare not render unto Caesar, or temporal governments, that which belongs exclusively to God. Human coercion, in anything connected with religion, whether it imposes creeds, liturgies, or modes of worship, is Antichrist: whom to obey, is spiritual desolation, and if knowingly persevered in, ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... same office performed by man with greater delicacy, or absence of levity by those who witnessed it. This was the first moment of her consciousness. The inviolability of modesty for a moment rose paramount even to the desolation of her heart, and putting rudely aside the hand that reposed unavoidably upon her person, the poor woman started from her seat, and looked wildly about her, as if endeavouring to identify those by whom she was surrounded. But when she observed the ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson
... truly it did. It lifted in waves that mounted almost to the sky and swept forward with a savage eagerness as if to bear down upon and engulf and obliterate the little oasis of a village with its green productive fields, and reduce it again to the wastes of desolation from which it had been so painfully ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... was. Now, on reading Mr. Froude's or any other good history, we shall find that Warham was one of the leaders of that despondent party which will always have its antitype in England. Have we, too, not heard within the last seven years similar prophecies of desolation, mourning, and woe—of the Church tottering on the verge of ruin, the peasantry starving under the horrors of free trade, noble families reduced to the verge of beggary by double income-tax? Even such a prophet seems Warham to have been—of all people in that day, one of the last ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... respects, however, the Zetland dwellings stand a favourable comparison with those of the Western Islands. There is a bareness and desolation about the misery of a Harris house that is tenfold more depressing. It is a poor house and an empty one - a decaying, mouldy shell, without the pretence of a kernel. Whereas in Zetland there is usually a certain fulness. There ...
— Second Shetland Truck System Report • William Guthrie
... your poor neighbour turns angrily in his corner as he begins to be conscious of your weight. Then again you awake, but this time to find yourself confronted with only fields and steppes. Everywhere in the ascendant is the desolation of space. But suddenly the ciphers on a verst stone leap to the eye! Morning is rising, and on the chill, gradually paling line of the horizon you can see gleaming a faint gold streak. The wind freshens and grows keener, and you snuggle closer in your cloak; ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... slumbers, and wildly dreamed of shell and cannon ball, and bullets thick as hail, of foes met in deadly fray, of shielding my darling's form with mine—there, where all was smoke and darkness and blood and horror—and dying gladly in his stead. Or the scene changed from horror to desolation, and, with a dreadful sense of isolation on me, alone in the darkness I wandered up and down, blindly searching for him I never found; or finding him, perhaps, covered with ghastly wounds, and dead, quite dead; and then starting broad awake with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... struck her, with that heaviness, that she tottered on the marble floor. She did not sink down at his feet; she did not shut out the sight of him with her trembling hands; she did not utter one word of reproach. But she looked at him, and a cry of desolation issued from her heart. She saw she had no father upon earth, and ran out, orphaned, from his house. Another moment and Florence, with her head bent down to hide her agony of tears, was in ...
— Ten Girls from Dickens • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... ambassador at Paris had inquired or remonstrated with the French Government on the subject of the pretended military preparations. The flame, however, was thus kindled, which spread in due time from kingdom to kingdom; covering the whole earth with blood and desolation, wasting millions of lives in battle, siege, imprisonment, or massacre; and transferring all the rentals and industry of the people of England to the public creditors, to pay the interest of loans and other consequent ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... of the continent of Europe, passing now and then a solitary fisherman's house, or a settlement hidden from sight, though the stranger would never dream that any human being lived in this land of rocks and desolation. ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu
... in the fastness of a Canadian forest; and it is wonderful that so many men and women, out of love for a distant land whose subjects they had been, and whose cause they had espoused, should have sacrificed everything, and passed from comfortable homes and dearly- loved kindred to desolation and poverty. It shows of what unbending material they were made. With their strong wills and stronger arms they laid the foundation of another country that yet may rival the land whence they were driven. This act no doubt occasioned the settlement of the ...
— Life in Canada Fifty Years Ago • Canniff Haight
... surprising to me that you should have strength of mind to care for science, amidst the awful events daily occurring in your country. I daily look at the "Times" with almost as much interest as an American could do. When will peace come? it is dreadful to think of the desolation of large parts of your magnificent country; and all the speechless misery suffered by many. I hope and think it not unlikely that we English are wrong in concluding that it will take a long time for prosperity to return to you. It is an awful subject ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... given sign rained a deluge of corruption on a country miles in front, which they could not even discern. The infantry went over the top throwing bombs and piled themselves up into mounds of silence. Nations far away toiled day and night in factories—and all that they might achieve this repellant desolation. The innocence of the project made one smile—a handful of women sailing from America to reconstruct! To reconstruct will take ten times more effort than was required to destroy. More than eight hundred years ago William the Norman burnt ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... creed, the insurgent States were conquered provinces to be shaped into a paradise for the freedman and a hell for the rebel. His eye shot over the blackened southern land; he saw the carnage, the desolation, the starvation, and the shame; and like a battered old warhorse, he flung up his frontlet, sniffed the tainted breeze, and snorted ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... insalubrity will drive the inhabitants from Venice. I do not know how this may be; but the other causes I have mentioned seem likely to produce nearly the same effect. I remembered, as these ideas passed through my mind, a passage in which one of the sacred poets foretells the desertion and desolation of Tyre, "the city that made itself glorious in the ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... he said to his father and brothers; and so, dressed in the very best fashion of the time, he hurried down into the reception-hall, where Steger was waiting, and was off. His family, hearing the door close on him, suffered a poignant sense of desolation. They stood there for a moment, his mother crying, his father looking as though he had lost his last friend but making a great effort to seem self-contained and equal to his troubles, Anna telling Lillian not to mind, ...
— The Financier • Theodore Dreiser
... as if wishing to take the river at a leap. Cavalry, too, with their heavy-bodied Norman horses, their spurs digging the flanks, sabres bright and glistening and dangling at their sides, came at a canter, all seeming anxious to get over and meet the death and desolation awaiting them. Long trains of ordnance wagons, with their black oilcloth covering, the supply trains and quartermaster departments all following in the wake of their division or corps headquarters, escorts, ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... eight hundred mile from Omaha, an' with the team an' wagin we've got, that's nothin' if we find the gold, an' I calculate there ain't no doubt of that. The Speak looks like the best place we ever started fur, and we all hope you'll leave this Land o' Desolation, an' come with us. We like you, an' we want you to ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... fortresses drop one by one into his hands. The change of things has helped this bold system. Formerly there was but one road through a province—it led through the principal fortress—all the rest was mire and desolation. Thus the fortress must be taken before a gun or a waggon could move. Now, there are a dozen roads through every province—the fortress may be passed out of gun-shot in all quarters—and the "grand army" ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... with a dread which no man might measure, the glances which had just devoured his young but virile countenance passed to that of the father. They did not leave it again. "Son?" With what tenderness he spoke, but with what a ring of desolation. "I understand your effort and appreciate it; but it is a useless one. You cannot deceive these friends of ours—men who have known my life. If you were in the ravine that night, so was I. If you handled John Scoville's stick, ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... these interests, the sense of loneliness and desolation is always present. Her few letters give us occasional flashes of the old spirit, but the burden of them is inexpressibly sad. Her sympathies and associations led her toward a mild form of Jansenism, and as the evening shadows darkened, her thoughts turned to fresh speculations ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason
... evidently," says the leader, "lower than the ground on which we stood; we had, therefore, a complete view of the whole expanse, and there was a dreariness and desolation pervading the scene which strengthened ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... enjoyments through lies; who wrings Nature and all her resources to put a musket on his shoulder; who employs his intellect to hasten the hour of his death and to create diseases out of pleasures? When the rake of pestilence and the ploughshare of war and the demon of desolation have passed over a corner of the globe and obliterated all things, who will be found to have the greater reason,—the Nubian savage or the patrician of Thebes? Your doubts descend the scale, they go from heights to depths, ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac
... for a place where he could sleep till morning, presently found a Santon's tomb, a square of four walls with a date-tree in the central court and a granite gateway. The door was wide open; so he entered and would fain have slept, but sleep came not to him; and terror and a sense of desolation oppressed him for that he was alone amidst the tombs. So he rose to his feet and, opening the door, looked out and lo! he was ware of a light afar off in the direction of the city gate; then walking a little way towards it, he saw that it was on ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... was averse to a conflict which would involve all Europe and bring desolation in its train is shown by the following letter, written by his own hand, to George III. How different might the world have been to-day had the letter been received in the same spirit ...
— Drake, Nelson and Napoleon • Walter Runciman
... an instance in America, where the people are more educated than they are here, of total cessation from labor by a whole community or town, given over, as it were, to desolation. When I came through Manchester the other day, I found many of the most influential of the manufacturing capitalists talking very carefully upon a report which had reached them from a gentleman who was selected by the government ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey
... stood for a moment silent and motionless. They both listened to the dirge of their love and their happiness, and this simple, hearty song sounded to them horrible and awful in the boundless desolation of their hearts. At last the song ceased, and a voice, too well known ...
— The Merchant of Berlin - An Historical Novel • L. Muhlbach
... voyce, to detracte and slaunder their lorde, commonlie complaining howe hee consumed his life like an effeminate persone, without inferring or doyng anye profite to the Empire. To bee shorte, the matter came to suche desolation, as it might rather haue bene called a sedition then a murmure: and yet there was none so hardie as durst attempte to declare the same to the Emperour, knowing him to be of nature terrible, cruell, and rigorous, that with a woorde ...
— The Palace of Pleasure, Volume 1 • William Painter
... for me to do but to dissolve the bond that made my Effie mine. Sitting over the dim embers of my solitary hearth, I thought of this, and, looking round the silent room, whose only ornaments were the things made sacred by her use, the utter desolation struck so heavily upon my heart, that I bowed my head upon my folded arms, and yielded to the tender longing that could ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... the town in a gigantic amphitheatre, rugged and overbearing like Titans turned to stone. They seem, indeed, to wear a sombre insolence of demeanour as though the aspect of human kind moved them to lofty contempt. And in their magnificent desolation they offer a fit environment for the exploits of Byronic heroes. The handsome villain of romance, seductive by the complexity of his emotions, by the persistence of his mysterious grief, would find himself in that ...
— The Land of The Blessed Virgin; Sketches and Impressions in Andalusia • William Somerset Maugham
... as it is now, no greater contrast can be imagined with Porlock and St. Culbone, except that of Ilfracombe, with the grand desolation of Heddon's Mouth and the solitariness of Trentishoe or Morthoe. For both Ilfracombe and Minehead have become so popular for summer visiting that most of their original character is lost under a flood of new houses, trim streets and shops, which have grown to meet the requirements ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... Nevada is a name among names. Nevada! Pronounce the word aloud. Does it not evoke mountains and clear air, heights of untrodden snow and valleys aromatic with the pine and musical with falling waters? Nevada! But the name is all. Abomination of desolation presides over nine-tenths of the place. The sun beats down as on a roof of zinc, fierce and dull. Not a drop of water to a mile of sand. The mean ash-dump landscape stretches on from nowhere to nowhere, a ...
— Lin McLean • Owen Wister
... the trail where they found him, and, stuck in a candle-box, over the heap of stones above him, flutters lonesomely in the desolation of the mountain-side the little muslin rag that was once a flag. They call the hill on which he ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... heavens, sir," I thought, "is it decreed that you and I are to be authorized to murder each other next week; that my people shall be bombarding your cities, destroying your navies, making a hideous desolation of your coast; that our peaceful frontier shall be subject to fire, rapine, and murder?" "They will never give up the men," said the Englishman. "They will never give up the men," said the American. And the Christmas piece which the actors were ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... after the battle of Monmouth occurred the awful massacre of Wyoming. Tories and Indians, led by Colonel John Butler, descended into the happy valley, inhabited by settlers from Butler's native Connecticut, and spread fire, bloodshed and desolation. Hundreds of men, women and children perished, many of them by torture, and the survivors made their way back through the wilderness to Connecticut. Among the victims of this massacre was Anderson Dana, a ...
— The Land We Live In - The Story of Our Country • Henry Mann
... cracked, that they looked like overdone pie- crust; the designs of others were almost obliterated by the flies of many summers. Broken glasses, damaged frames, lop-sided hanging, and consignment of incurable cripples to places of refuge in dark corners, attested the desolation of the rest. The old room on the ground floor where the passengers of the Highflyer used to dine, had nothing in it but a wretched show of twigs and flower- pots in the broad window to hide the nakedness of the land, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... to his and he had the sense of a veil drawing aside to reveal a desolation. "For my father," ...
— The Grain Of Dust - A Novel • David Graham Phillips
... through Halicz in pursuit of the enemy. The victorious troops swept through a country, full of Jews, and utterly undefended. It was a garden of plenty, a rich and fertile country. Instead of presenting a picture of desolation and ruin after the Russian army had passed, its cattle still grazed in the fields, the fields were full of shocks of grain, and chickens, ducks, and swine wandered about the streets ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume II (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... they suffer no people of Europe to inhabite there savinge onely Spaniardes, any reasonable man that knoweth the barenes, desolation, and wante of men in Spaine, together with these eightene yeres civill warres that hath wasted so many thousandes of them in the Lowe Contries, must nedes confesse that they have very simple forces there. The provinces which he holdeth are indeede many, yet more denuded than ever was any empire since ...
— The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of - the English Nation. Vol. XIII. America. Part II. • Richard Hakluyt
... laugh. The soft, exquisitely feminine tones of this involuntary burst of pleasure, sounded in the ears of Ruth like a knell over the moral beauty of her child. Still subduing her feelings, she passed a hand thoughtfully over her own pallid brow, and appeared to muse long on the desolation of a mind that had once promised ...
— The Wept of Wish-Ton-Wish • James Fenimore Cooper
... acknowledged the grievous responsibility he had incurred by instantly sending in his resignation and withdrawing from court. In vain did Louis Philippe endeavor to persuade him to return; in vain did the queen herself, even amid the desolation of the first storm of grief, disclaim any imputation of blame to the count; in vain did the Duc de Nemours write with his own hand the urgent request that he would resume office, were it only for a time, in order to display to the world the conviction felt by every member of the royal family of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 17, - No. 97, January, 1876 • Various
... thy plantation; Grant us, Lord, a gracious rain; All will come to desolation, Unless thou return again. Lord, revive us! All our help ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... others were carried into slavery for years. Villages were sacked; the churches were looted; local trade was intercepted; the natives subject to Spain were driven into the highlands, and many even dared not risk their lives and goods near the coasts. The utmost desolation and havoc were perpetrated, and militated vastly against the welfare and development of the Colony. For four years the Government had to remit the payment of tribute in Negros Island, and the others lying between it and Luzon, ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... space of twenty-eight years were masters of the Upper Asia, namely, the two Armenias, Cappadocia, Pontus, Colchis, and Iberia; during which time they spread desolation wherever they came. The Medes had no way of getting rid of them, but by a dangerous stratagem. Under pretence of cultivating and strengthening the alliance they had made together, they invited the greatest part of them to a general ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... 'the valley of Achor for a door of hope,' and who is a very present help in time of trouble. The comfort I have is at present almost without alloy. It is only when earthly things pull me from my resting-place that I see the desolation of all earthly joys; and yet I am not excited, out as the Lord has enabled me to stay my mind on Him, He has kept me in perfect peace." When the beloved remains were removed into their last resting-place in Elgin Cathedral, she ...
— Excellent Women • Various
... should be left to the Confederacy when he finally closed in upon Lee, so that with his destruction or surrender there should be no excuse for prolonging the war. It was in furtherance of this plan that Sherman left ruin and desolation behind him as he blazed his way up from the South. The inhabitants of the region through which he was marching had, up to this time, been living in perfect security and Sherman intended to make war so hideous that they would have no desire to prolong the contest. He, accordingly, tore up the railroads, ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill |
