"Dismal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... soothsayers—their power—their greatness—their fall. We were more than impressed with the churches of St. Giovanni and St. Paolo, beneath which lay in awful depths the subterranean caverns said to be connected with the Coliseum. Gerald remained above while I followed the explorers through these dismal yawning gulfs seemingly ready to open and shut their victims in a living tomb. Streets ran in various directions; the mouldy, damp walls emitted a disagreeable watery vapor that rendered the air unbearable; stagnant pools lay on all sides. Is it not an appalling thought that these successive ...
— Lady Rosamond's Secret - A Romance of Fredericton • Rebecca Agatha Armour
... I was delighted to have secured some sort of companionship, for London, despite its multitudinous places of amusement, and its five millions of inhabitants, is but a dismal caravanserai to be left alone in. Moreover, the Yarraman's officers and I were old friends, and, if the truth must be told, my heart yearned for the sight of a ship and a talk ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby
... a matter; still less could the lady Catharine have had any interest in deceiving her so painfully. In fine, in whatever way she considered the subject, the conclusion at which she invariably arrived was, that this dismal intelligence was unquestionably true. When she had finished reading the letter, without shedding tears or showing any outward tokens of grief, with a composed face and apparently tranquil breast, she rose from her seat, entered an oratory, ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Miss Pillby and despised Miss Motley; and the greatest relief she knew to the dismal monotony of her days was a lonely walk by the river, with a shabby Wordsworth or a battered little volume of Shelley's minor poems for her companions. She possessed so few books that it was only natural for her to read those she had ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... there has been no little indecision as to the end and the means of securing the conquest of a country whose outlines are counted by thousands instead of hundreds of miles, and whose whole extent, it is too generally believed, forms a series of regions where dismal swamps, bayous, lagoons, dense forests, and all manner of impenetrabilities, bid defiance to any save the natives, and where the most deadly fevers are ever being born in the jungles and wafted on the wings of every summer morn over the whole plantation land. The truth ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... a pause, wheeling about. "Still harpin' on they Germans? Well, Mr Hambly, sir, I don't know how it strikes you, but I'm sick an' tired of them dismal blackguards." ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... hoped secretly that our way might continue to the water's edge; but instead, reaching the line of the elevated, we turned in and followed the old, black street above which the noisy trains ran. The street itself presented the appearance of a long line of darkened warehouses, broken occasionally by a dismal-looking dwelling, through the uncurtained windows of which we could see slattern housewives busy ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... queer and dismal last night," said Rose to Clover as they stood a little aside from the rest on the platform. "I can't quite see what ails her. She looks thinner than when we came, and doesn't seem to know how to smile; ...
— In the High Valley - Being the fifth and last volume of the Katy Did series • Susan Coolidge
... the window by which he had been standing, to the rough bed, and flung himself full length upon it. The only chair that dismal room contained was occupied by Kenneth. Galliard heaved a sigh ...
— The Tavern Knight • Rafael Sabatini
... "Board" to re-institute payment by results, and were they, with this end in view, to entrust the drafting of schemes of work in the various subjects to a committee of the wisest and most experienced educationalists in England, the resultant syllabus would be a dismal failure. For in framing their schemes these wise and experienced educationalists would find themselves compelled to take account of the lowest rather than of the highest level of actual educational achievement. What ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... a dismal groan, and clapping his hand over his mouth strove to make it pass muster as a yawn. It was evident that the malicious Mr. Smithson was deriving considerable pleasure from his discomfiture—the pleasure natural to the father ...
— Ship's Company, The Entire Collection • W.W. Jacobs
... London, where all the women are white and fair, and even the beggars in the streets are white, and he had arrived, with newly-earned gold coins in his pocket, to worship at the shrine of civilisation. The day of his landing was a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a wind-worried drizzle filtered down to the greasy streets, but he plunged boldly into the delights of Shadwell, and was presently cast up, shattered in health, civilised in costume, ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... now view the same spot! In our last visit, winter was on the face of the land, as well as on our minds; we were worn out with fatigue, mortification, and starvation; now, all was summer and sunshine. The dismal swamps had now become verdant meadows; we had plenty in the camp, vigour in our limbs, and hope ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... that people. The Salives have a great taste for music: in the most remote times they had trumpets of baked earth, four or five feet long, with several large globular cavities communicating with one another by narrow pipes. These trumpets send forth most dismal sounds. The Jesuits have cultivated with success the natural taste of the Salives for instrumental music; and even since the destruction of the society, the missionaries of Rio Meta have continued at San Miguel de Macuco a fine church choir, and musical instruction for the Indian youth. ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... hung beside a gate in the wall enclosure, the door opened apparently of itself, and a dismal scream ensued. The scream proceeded from a sea-gull, peering out of a kind of pen formed by a wooden paling in one corner of a grass-grown patch, half cabbage-garden, half excavated earth and rock; and the mysterious opening of the door was explained by a connecting ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... duchess dowager of Savoy, daughter of Maximilian, and sister of Philip. But the decline of his health put an end to all such thoughts; and he began to cast his eye towards that future existence which the iniquities and severities of his reign rendered a very dismal prospect to him. To allay the terrors under which he labored, he endeavored, by distributing alms and founding religious houses, to make atonement for his crimes, and to purchase, by the sacrifice of part of his ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part C. - From Henry VII. to Mary • David Hume
... slowly floated along the shingle canal, from Suffolk to the "Dismal," what raptures filled his soul! Here, in the recesses of that solemn mixture of trees and water, which they were rapidly approaching, he could commune with his own soul, as it were. Mr. P. had ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... mind (and yet for ever cursed be the memory of it) those dismal clouds, which lately orespread us, when we served the lusts of those immane Usurpers, greedy of power, that themselves might be under none; Cruel, that they might murther the Innocent without cause; Rich, with the publick poverty; strong, by putting the sword into the hands of furies, and prosperous ...
— An Apologie for the Royal Party (1659); and A Panegyric to Charles the Second (1661) • John Evelyn
... into a miry part of the country, with the woods so thick and the going so bad that we knew we could not make any progress. It was a veritable dismal swamp, where ...
— Three Times and Out • Nellie L. McClung
... to my new profession; I'm as gay and swell and gummy as can be; only all my boots leak; one pair water, and the other two simple black mud; so that my rig is more for the eye, than a very solid comfort to myself. That is my budget. Dismal enough, and no prospect of any coin coming in; at least for months. So that here I am, I almost fear, for the winter; certainly till after Christmas, and then it depends on how my bills 'turn out' whether it shall not be till spring. So, meantime, I must ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... infatuations that possessed her heart, she would stretch out her arms with a gesture of immense weariness the moment she was left alone. Solitude rendered her low spirited at once, for it brought her face to face with the emptiness and boredom within her. Extremely gay by nature and profession, she became dismal in solitude and would sum up her life in the following ejaculation, which recurred incessantly between ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... comes moaning through the casement and rustling the light leaves of the tall poplar as they rest against the window panes, and the great round tears as they fall with a dull, heavy drop, drop on his lonely pillow, are the only sounds that break the dismal stillness, excepting now and then, when a great sob, too mighty to be choked down, bursts from the little, overcharged heart. And then Harry fancies he feels, through the thin coverlet and torn night dress, the huge black ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 5, No. 6, June, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... icy mist. The reason lay in the subconscious mind of all on deck, for it was Christmas morning, 1916, and the thoughts of all were dwelling on past years in the cheery surroundings of English and Colonial homes—in vivid contrast to the dismal grey of the North Sea. To break the spell of memory both officers felt would be blasphemy, and yet a feeble attempt at conversation was made every now and then for ...
— Submarine Warfare of To-day • Charles W. Domville-Fife
... made into stiff mechanical figures, as dreary as Justice with her scales, or Fame blowing a trumpet on a monument. They belonged to that family of dismal personifications which it was customary to mark with the help of capital letters. Certainly they are a dismal and frigid set of beings, though they still lead a shivering existence on the tops of public monuments, and hold an occasional wreath over the ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... was growing so weak that Yeo gave him more cordial. After a pause Caranby resumed with a last effort, and very swiftly, as though he thought his strength would fail him before he reached the end of his dismal story. ...
— The Secret Passage • Fergus Hume
... jewelry—I can't ever get back to India on that!" He seemed to hear again the rasping voice of the vulpine caller at Monte Carlo: "Messieurs! Faites vos jeux! Rien ne va plus! Le jeu est fait!" And, if a dismal failure in Lender had been his Leipsic, the black week at Monaco had been his long drawn-out Waterloo! "I was a rank fool to go there," he growled, "and a greater fool to come over here! I might have got on easily ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage
... of that dismal watery level, the gradual uplifting of the cloudy firmament, the slowly defining blackness of objects above the glassy dark! Yes, she must be out on the fields; those were the tops of hedgerow trees. Which way did the river lie? Looking behind her, she saw the lines of black ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... preacher, do my love affairs amuse you as much as your dismal philosophy gives me the creeps? Dear Philip the Second in petticoats, are you comfortable in my barouche? Do you see those velvet eyes, humble, yet so eloquent, and glorying in their servitude, which flash on me as some one goes by? He is a hero, Renee, and he wears ...
— Letters of Two Brides • Honore de Balzac
... 1914 the British Fleet in the North Sea had settled down to the monotonous task of holding the coasts of Germany and the channels leading to them in a state of blockade. The work was dismal enough. The ships tossing from day to day on the always unquiet waters of the North Sea were crowded with Jackies all of whom prayed each day that the German would come from hiding and give battle. Not ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... further, that he had afterwards a Sight of those dismal Habitations which are the Portion of ill Men after Death; and mentions several Molten Seas of Gold, in which were plunged the Souls of barbarous Europeans, [who [5]] put to the Sword so many Thousands ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... sitting there, obsessed by his dismal meditations, when a shadow appeared in the doorway, and he looked up to see Rackliff, the stub of a cigarette in his fingers, gazing at him. For a full minute, perhaps, neither boy spoke; and then Herbert, tossing the smoking stub over ...
— Rival Pitchers of Oakdale • Morgan Scott
... that Germany is contemplating (as indeed she has always done) a quantity of dismal things to do, and is now, like the Walrus and the Carpenter, beginning to let them appear. She has taken the Turkish oysters out for a nice long walk, and when the war is over she proposes to sit down and eat them. And did she not also interfere ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... his mind was full of a girl he would never see again after to-morrow. What was the rascal doing over here? What had caused him to forsake the easy pluckings of Broadway in exchange for a dog's life on packet-boats, in squalid boarding-houses like this one, and in dismal billiard-halls? Wire-tapper, racing-tout, stool-pigeon, a cheater at cards, blackmailer and trafficker in baser things; in the next room, and he had let him go unharmed. Vermin. Pah! He was glad. The very touch of the man's collar had left a sense of defilement upon his ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... turning a wheel has a wonderful tendency to benumb the mind. It is a sort of attenuated variety of Ixion's punishment, and contributes a dismal chapter to the history of gaols. The brain gets muddled, the head grows heavy, and the body's centre of gravity seems to settle by degrees in a leaden lump somewhere between the eyebrows and the crown. Bathsheba felt the unpleasant symptoms after ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... it. The something more in garden life is the bale of hay before the horse's nose on the uphill road. Last year, for almost a week, we thought our garden quite as finished as the material and surroundings would allow,—it was a strange, dismal, hollow sort of feeling. However, it was soon displaced by the desire that I have to collect my best roses in one spot, add to them, and gradually form a rosary where the Garden Queen and all her family may have the best of air, ...
— The Garden, You, and I • Mabel Osgood Wright
... evil magic. A hundred years ago, at the end of the Napoleonic wars, the dreamers imagined that humanity would have done with its false prophets and lay the ghosts which have haunted it since it began to shake off the manners of the beasts. But a dismal succession of new falsehoods and new blind guides appeared. And now, in this so advanced age, we have to face the same possibility. There is much to excuse a despair; from which nothing can free us but a new enthusiasm. The evil magic must be overcome by magic of another kind, ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... There they remained motionless and mute in the obscurity that prevailed within the vehicle. Ever and anon a rapid flash from a gas lamp, cast a bright gleam on their faces. The sinister event that had brought them together, threw a sort of dismal dejection ...
— Therese Raquin • Emile Zola
... was on Stelton's tongue to blurt out what had happened two days previous, but an instinctive knowledge that Larkin would profit by the information restrained him, and he continued riding on in silence, a prey to dismal thoughts ...
— The Free Range • Francis William Sullivan
... opinion for continuing the war. 12. They accordingly prepared to punish his conduct with the most studied tortures. His eye-lids were cut off, and he was remanded to prison. After some days, he was again brought out from his dark and dismal dungeon, and exposed with, his face opposite the burning sun. At last, when malice was fatigued studying all the arts of torture, he was put into a sort of barrel, stuck full of spikes, and in this painful position he ...
— Pinnock's Improved Edition of Dr. Goldsmith's History of Rome • Oliver Goldsmith
... there," was his muttered reply. Nevertheless he followed me, though with less spirit than I liked, considering that my own manner was in a measure assumed and that I was not without sympathy—well, let me, say, for a dog who preferred howling a dismal accompaniment to his master's music, to keeping open watch over a neighborhood dominated by the unhallowed structure I now propose ...
— The Filigree Ball • Anna Katharine Green
... alone in the dark, "what a wicked boy I have been to-day! I stole an apple, and told two or three lies about it! I have made my papa and mamma unhappy, and my poor sisters, too! How could I do such things? And now I must spend all this night in this dismal place; and God will not take care of me because I am ...
— The Fairchild Family • Mary Martha Sherwood
... be in waiting, before the Royal procession entered; but being unknown, and of no high rank, I was not allowed to stand forward among the better people, but ordered back into a corner very dark and dismal; the verger remarking, with a grin, that I could see over all other heads, and must not set my own so high. Being frightened to find myself among so many people of great rank and gorgeous apparel, I blushed at the notice drawn upon me by this uncourteous fellow; and silently fell back ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Mr Barlow, "are the extracts which I have made from this very extraordinary story; and they are sufficient to show both the many accidents to which men are exposed, and the wonderful expedients which may be found out, even in the most dismal circumstances." "It is very true, indeed," answered Tommy; "but pray what became of these poor men at last?" "After they had lived more than six years upon this dreary and inhospitable coast," answered Mr Barlow, "a ship arrived there by accident, which took three of them on board, and carried ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... is, we suppose, our medical dossiers, doctors' records of the condition of their patients—could be revealed, it would be shown that many clever people have a fancy skeleton in their cupboards. By a fancy skeleton we mean, not some dismal secret of crime or shame, but a melancholy and apprehensiveness without any ground in outward facts. With the real skeleton doctors have nothing to do. He rather belongs to the province of Scotland Yard. If a man has compromised himself in some way, if he has been found ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... their circulation but on the weather. To-day was certainly the gloomiest in all the siege. It rained steadily night and morning, the steaming heat was overpowering, and we sludged about, sweating like the victims of a foul Turkish bath. Towards evening it suddenly turned cold. Black and dismal clouds hung over all the hills. The distance was fringed with funereal indigo. The wearied garrison crept through their duties, hungry and gaunt as ghosts. There was no heliograph to cheer us up, and hardly a sound of distant guns. The rumour ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson
... Cedars above whose roofs smoke wreathed in the still air like fantastic figures weaving a shroud to lower over the time-stained, melancholy walls. For once he was grateful to the forest because it had forbidden him to glance perpetually back at that dismal and pensive picture. Then he became aware of twigs hastily lopped off, of bushes bent and torn, of the uncovering, through these careless means, of an old path. Simultaneously there reached his ears the scraping of metal implements ...
— The Abandoned Room • Wadsworth Camp
... to find friends among the families of my father and mother; and if it were to end in my turning you, my aunt, and cousin out of the place you have believed to be your own, for so many years, my visit here would be a dismal failure, and I should bitterly regret having set foot ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... it would be dark like the back-end of evening; and there would be a glow of a rich, lurid brown, like the light of some strange conflagration; and here, for a moment, the fog would be quite broken up, and a haggard shaft of daylight would glance in between the swirling wreaths. The dismal quarter of Soho seen under these changing glimpses, with its muddy ways, and slatternly passengers, and its lamps, which had never been extinguished or had been kindled afresh to combat this mournful re-invasion ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... himself have called, with a most unfilial disgust, "HIS OLD MAN." It appeared that, like most great actors, he was a very different personage before and behind the curtain. Kings, who are miserable and gloomy through the five acts of a dismal tragedy, and who must needs die at the end of it, are your merriest knaves over a tankard at the Shakspeare's Head. Your stage fool shall be the dullest dog that ever spoiled mirth with sour and discontented looks. Jabez Buster, his employment being ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... political pamphlets; and very large full-bottomed wigs were just beginning to be worn with powder; and the face of Louis the Great, as his was handed in to him behind the bed-curtains, was, when issuing thence, observed to look longer, older, and more dismal daily.... ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... It was a dismal, rainy day. Long before morning, the storm had begun, and when the faint light had at last dawned in the east, the rain still pattered down on the leaves of Mister Robert Robin's big basswood tree, and fell in great drops from their tips. Robert Robin did not like the weather. ...
— Exciting Adventures of Mister Robert Robin • Ben Field
... plaster beneath. The whole place had a tone of yellowish-grey grime all over it, save where, in the centre of the room, on a rough double post, shaped like the guillotine, a scarlet cap of Liberty gave a note of lurid colour to the dismal surroundings. ...
— I Will Repay • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... alone, We too are one with our own richest past; And here that veiled, but ever smouldering fire Of race, which rarely seen yet never dies, Springs up afresh and warms us with its heat. And must they take away this treasure house, To us so full of thoughts and memories; To all the world beside a dismal place Lacking in all this modern age requires To tempt along the unfamiliar paths And leafy lanes of old time literatures? It takes some time for moss and vines to grow And warmly cover gaunt and chill stone walls Of stately buildings from the cold North Wind. The ...
— A Dome of Many-Coloured Glass • Amy Lowell
... of this last day of the voyage, when Pats, feeling the need of companionship in his misery, descended for a final interview with Solomon. Through a dismal part of the steamer he groped his way, until his eyes became accustomed to the gloom. Solomon heard his step and knew him from afar. He whined, pulled hard at his chain, and stood up on his hind legs, waving his front ...
— The Pines of Lory • John Ames Mitchell
... working away with all his energy at the heavy bar that secured the door, now and then giving a dismal little squeal, as in imagination he felt the sharp teeth of a ...
— The Banner Boy Scouts on a Tour - The Mystery of Rattlesnake Mountain • George A. Warren
... and settlings—sea-Pariahs, comprising all the lazy, all the inefficient, all the unfortunate and fated, all the melancholy, all the infirm, all the rheumatical scamps, scapegraces, ruined prodigal sons, sooty faces, and swineherds of the crew, not excluding those with dismal wardrobes. ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... exile, Selfridge made no complaints to Macdonald. That man of steel had no sympathy with the yearnings for the fleshpots. He was used to driving himself through discomfort to his end, and he expected as much of his deputies. Wherefore Wally took the boat at the time scheduled and waved a dismal farewell to wife and friends assembled ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... September 19th the inmates of Fort Caroline listened to the dismal moaning and creaking of the tall pines, the roar of the blast, and the fitful torrents of ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... Next morning I breakfasted with Jowett and his guests, found that return would be difficult: while as the young men were to return on Friday there would be no opposition to my departure on Thursday. The morning was dismal with rain, but after luncheon there was a chance of getting a little air, and I walked for more than two hours, then heard service in New Coll.—then dinner again: my room had been prepared in the Master's house. So, on Thursday, after yet another breakfast, I left by the noon-day train, after ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... awake, that first night, much puzzled by the noise, fearing that London would be all streets, a dismal place. When I fell asleep, I was waked continually by chiming bells. In the morning, early, I was roused by the musical calling made by milkmen on their rounds, with that morning's milk for sale. At breakfast my uncle told me not to go into the street without Ephraim, his man; for without ...
— Martin Hyde, The Duke's Messenger • John Masefield
... was pleased with it, and said it was worth quite ten shillings, and gave me a ragged old dress in exchange,—and something to buy a bit of print with to run up a dress for going out in the mornings to look for a place. And oh, ma'am, it was such a wretched, dismal, dark place she lived in; I didn't know how to abide it after the Orphanage; and yet I wouldn't have ...
— Daybreak - A Story for Girls • Florence A. Sitwell
... 1901, in Topeka, a candidate for the mayoralty, supposed to represent the liquor element, speaking on the afternoon of election day—bleak, dismal and shoe-top deep in snow and mud—said: "I will lose 1,000 votes on account of the weather as the women are out and they are opposed to me. It is impossible to ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various
... been, my senses would have cool'd To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rise and stir As ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... proved, unhappily, very infectious. It soon spread its baneful influence among the officers, and was by them communicated to the soldiery. The number of croakers in garrison became perfectly frightful, lugubrious looks and dismal prophecies being encountered every where. The severe losses sustained by H.M.'s 44th under Captain Swayne, on the 4th instant, had very much discouraged the men of that regiment; and it is a lamentable fact that some of those European soldiers, who were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... the wildest of the Cyclad Isles, Where never human foot had mark'd the shore, These ruffians left me.—Yet believe me, Arcas, Such is the rooted love we bear mankind, All ruffians as they were, I never heard A sound so dismal as their parting oars.— Then horrid silence follow'd, broke alone By the low murmurs of the restless deep, Mixt with the doubtful breeze that now and then Sigh'd thro' the mournful woods. Beneath a shade I sat me down, more heavily oppress'd, More desolate at heart, than e'er I felt ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... until some hours past midnight. Having been deprived of so much rest, during the previous two weeks and more, his slumbers were unusually heavy, and it was a late hour in the morning when he awoke, and the dismal weather adding to his drowsiness, he continued to lay and rest after consciousness had returned. His half-waking, half-dreaming meditations were broken in upon by a gentle tap at his bed-room door. In a moment he was wide awake, care for his child ...
— Eveline Mandeville - The Horse Thief Rival • Alvin Addison
... in her embodied form, a black image, of bloody mouth and bloody eyes, wearing crimson garlands and smeared with crimson unguents, attired in a single piece of red cloth, with a noose in hand, and resembling an elderly lady, employed in chanting a dismal note and standing full before their eyes, and about to lead away men and steeds and elephants all tied in a stout cord. She seemed to take away diverse kinds of spirits, with dishevelled hair and tied together in a cord, as also, O king, many mighty car-warriors ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... that he was right, and in the way of duty; and yet, though he braved it out so stoutly with Lillie, and though he marched out from her presence victoriously, as it were, with drums beating and colors flying, yet there was a dismal ...
— Pink and White Tyranny - A Society Novel • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... that you would like it," put in Joanna; "it is not one of the modern novels, and it has only one dismal catastrophe; it is the fine old novel by ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... had been standing silently, looking on with a sad heart at finding herself with a birthday on her hands, and no one to celebrate it with her, though for that matter all her birthdays had been rather dismal affairs at the best, in the Paris school, now shrank back at Mr. King's sudden summons, and hid behind ...
— Five Little Peppers Abroad • Margaret Sidney
... somewhat rough. It left the fertile meadows and vineyards at the base of the mountain, and ran over a wild, rocky country, which looked, as Uncle Moses said, like the "abomination of desolation." No verdure appeared, no houses, no flocks, and herds—all was wild, and savage, and dismal. After passing over these lava fields, the party reached what is called the "Hermitage" —a kind of refreshment station near the foot of the cone. Resting here, for a little way they proceeded on foot. ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... spent in visiting the important places in the vicinity of Hampton, one of which was Fortress Monroe, I took passage on a boat through the Dismal Swamp Canal to Albemarle Sound, and from thence through the sounds of North Carolina to the Neuse river, up which we steamed to Newbern, where I reported to Commander H. K. Davenport, on board the United States steamer Hetzel, who ordered me to report for duty to Acting Master J. A. J. ...
— Reminiscences of Two Years in the United States Navy • John M. Batten
... not help remarking: for instance, though Fitz is my closest friend, yet could I avoid seeing and being amused by his perplexity and his dismal efforts to be facetious? His eye wandered all round the little room with quick uneasy glances, very different from those frank and jovial looks with which he is accustomed to welcome you to a leg of mutton; and Rosa, ...
— A Little Dinner at Timmins's • William Makepeace Thackeray
... distasteful; uninviting; unwelcome; undesirable, undesired; obnoxious; unacceptable, unpopular, thankless. unsatisfactory, untoward, unlucky, uncomfortable. distressing; afflicting, afflictive; joyless, cheerless, comfortless; dismal, disheartening; depressing, depressive; dreary, melancholy, grievous, piteous; woeful, rueful, mournful, deplorable, pitiable, lamentable; sad, affecting, touching, pathetic. irritating, provoking, stinging, annoying, aggravating, mortifying, galling; unaccommodating, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... this project, so happily formed and so amicably conducted, failed of success, by the sudden death of the Norwegian princess, who expired on her passage to Scotland,[*] and left a very dismal prospect to the kingdom. Though disorders were for the present obviated by the authority of the regency formerly established, the succession itself of the crown was now become an object of dispute; and the regents could not expect that a controversy, which is not usually decided by reason ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... stock of provisions, resolved to dine together in memory of former times. But at so melancholy a Christmas dinner I do not recollect at any time to have been present. We dined in a barn; of plates, knives, and forks, there was a dismal scarcity; nor could our fare boast of much either in intrinsic good quality or in the way of cooking. These, however, were mere matters of merriment; it was the want of many well-known and beloved faces that gave us pain; nor were any other subjects discussed besides the amiable qualities ...
— The Campaigns of the British Army at Washington and New Orleans 1814-1815 • G. R. Gleig
... beauty, all out of drawing! They would recognize the flame quality in her. He imagined a joke about her being a fiery spirit, or nymph, naiad, whatever, from one of her native gas-wells. He began to sketch on a bit of paper from the table at his elbow vague lines that veiled and revealed a level, dismal landscape, and a vast flame against an empty sky, and a shape out of the flame that took on a likeness and floated detached from it. The sketch ran up the left side of the sheet and stretched across it. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... a dismal winter's night, very cold and gusty, with the wind whooping in the chimneys and blustering against the window-panes. A thin spatter of rain tinkled on the glass with each fresh sough of the gale, drowning for the instant the dull gurgle ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... therefore, that I may say, without risk of laying myself open to an action for slander, that a more filthy den than the osteria before which my charge and I alighted no imagination, however disordered, could conceive. It was a vast, dismal building, which had doubtless been the palace of some rich citizen of the republic in days of yore, but which had now fallen into dishonoured old age. Its windows and outside shutters were tightly closed, and had been so, apparently, from time immemorial; a vile smell of ...
— Stories By English Authors: Italy • Various
... Lady Chaffinch's ball, I was obliged to tear myself away from my kind aunt and my dear cousin, and with only Tom-tit for my companion, to return to this dismal Gorse Bush, which I used to think the sweetest of homes. Now I do nothing but wonder how long it will be before my aunt invites me to London again. Tom-tit brings me letters from the post-boy much oftener than before, ...
— Comical People • Unknown
... doubt Mountain saw that the paper was in no danger as it lay amongst the ashes, or she would have seized it at the risk of burning her own fingers, and ere she uttered the above passionate defence of her conduct. Perhaps George was absorbed in his dismal thoughts; perhaps his jealousy overpowered him, for he did not resist any further when she stooped down ...
— The Virginians • William Makepeace Thackeray
... weeks, and he worked hard and well. I think he overdid it in the editorials in our party organs under his influence in New York, Boston and other eastern cities—never a day without lugubrious screeds on the dismal outlook for Burbank if the other party should put up Simpson. But his Simpson editorials in big opposition papers undoubtedly produced an effect. I set for De Milt and his bureau of underground publicity the task of showing up, as far as it was prudent to expose intimate politics ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... the occasional tramp of feet, as the mutineers passed, one by one, down the ship's side into the boats. A few minutes more and these sounds ceased. He lifted up his head, listening eagerly; but he could hear nothing, save the dismal creaking of the bulkheads, the moaning of the wind, the monotonous swish, swish of the water washing across the deck outside with the roll of the ship, and the dull hum and crackling of the flames as they slowly ate ...
— The Voyage of the Aurora • Harry Collingwood
... men gave them no time, but running up to them, fired among them three ways, and then fell in with the butt-ends of their muskets, their swords, armed staves, and hatchets, and laid about them so well that, in a word, they set up a dismal screaming and howling, flying to save their lives ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... At that dismal period the whole district had been devastated with fire and sword, and there were old men amongst the crowd who well remembered the destruction of the former hall and village by the ferocious Danes. And ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... much aspire To (z) Mischief, threw them in the Fire: Equipt with neither Hat nor Shooe, I did my coming hither rue, And doubtful thought what I should do: Then looking round, I saw my Friend Lie naked on a Table's end; A sight so dismal to behold, One wou'd have judg'd him dead and cold, When wringing of his bloody Nose, By fighting got we may suppose; I found him not so fast asleep, Might give his friends a cause to weep: Rise (aa) ...
— The Sot-weed Factor: or, A Voyage to Maryland • Ebenezer Cook
... her in every direction, was dead. Matty had told her many times just how her mother had gone, and how often the gentle spirit had returned to hover over the beloved young daughter. Now the memory of it was enhanced by the roar of the wind and the dismal moaning of the tall pines. Virginia firmly believed that her mother, among other unearthly visitants, walked in the night when the blizzard kept up its incessant beating. She also believed that the sound through the pines—that roaring, ever-changing, ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... in his aspect; though it was rather ludicrous than otherwise, owing to the immense bagginess of the sailor-trowsers flapping about his lean shanks, to say nothing of the spare voluminousness of the pea-jacket. But Israel—how deplorable, how dismal his plight! Little did he ween that these wretched rags he now wore, were but suitable to that long career of destitution before him: one brief career of adventurous wanderings; and then, forty torpid years of pauperism. The coat was all patches. And no two patches were alike, and no one patch ...
— Israel Potter • Herman Melville
... wherever I should find an opening or any convenience of searching about for water, etc. When we were off the shoal point I mentioned where we had but 20 fathom water, we had in the night abundance of whales about the ship, some ahead, others astern, and some on each side blowing and making a very dismal noise; but when we came out again into deeper water they left us. Indeed the noise that they made by blowing and dashing of the sea with their tails, making it all of a breach and foam, was very ...
— A Voyage to New Holland • William Dampier
... was in keeping with the general dismal effect. La Cibot heard a heavy footstep, and the asthmatic wheezing of a virago within, and Mme. Sauvage presently showed herself. Adrien Brauwer might have painted just such a hag for his picture of Witches starting for ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... ecclesiastics were fairly pictured. The fundamental attitude of the law in regarding the slave as the creature of his master's convenience was shown with historic fidelity. But the book took its name from a negro, half-prophetic, half-crazed, who maintained in the Dismal Swamp a refuge for slaves, and purposed an uprising to conquer their freedom. To Southern imaginations it might well recall Nat Turner and the horrors of his revolt. Mrs. Stowe inevitably idealized everything she touched; and to idealize the leader of a servile ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... find a low grey canopy drawn over the valley, from which fell a steady drizzle of rain. The next day was like the first, and so on for nearly three months there was a perpetual mist in the valley, a long dismal succession of leaden skies hanging low. One of these days the three white friends, in company with Muata, paid a visit to the underground world to obtain a supply of sulphur to serve as a disinfectant and purifier—another idea of Venning's. They ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... my cubicle are still stacked the magazines and paper brought down by the relief ship. Nothing is changed at all except the company. It is almost dismal. I expect to see people come in through the door after a ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... night added a barbed point to it. She said nothing in reply, but turned her chair from the table towards the fire. Uncle, after making one more pause, blew a dismal wail and went ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... serious apprehensions of a famine were entertained. As the year rolled on, the same apprehensions prevailed in the more northern provinces; and a drought, such as before was never known, gave rise to the most dismal forebodings. The Shah ordered prayers to be put up at all the mosques in the city for rain, and the mollah bashi was very ...
— The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan • James Morier
... morning was a dismal meal. Mavis was genuinely sorry to leave the old ladies, who had, in a large measure, taken the place of the parents she ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... little party should hurry to the eastern side of the Susquehanna, and start for the settlements on the Upper Delaware. The nearest town was Stroudsburg, sixty miles distant, and the way led through a dismal forest. ...
— The Daughter of the Chieftain - The Story of an Indian Girl • Edward S. Ellis
... arrived, he urged to penetrate the swamp and storm the fort, but all hung back in awe of the dismal horrors of the place, and the danger of attacking such desperadoes in their savage den. The very Indian allies, though accustomed to bushfighting, regarded it as almost impenetrable, and full of frightful danger. Sublette was ...
— The Adventures of Captain Bonneville - Digested From His Journal • Washington Irving
... adventure in an unknown land was indeed enticing. In a few brief words he recalled my dismal forebodings of the life in an underground office in London, and contrasted it with a free existence in a fertile and abundant land, where I should be the guest and perhaps an official of its ruler. He urged me most strongly ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... played, and I lay smoking by the window listening. Wild, unearthly, and sometimes insufferably painful, were the improvisations of Blokeeta. The chords of the instrument seemed breaking with anguish. Lost souls shrieked in his dismal preludes; the half-heard utterances of spirits in pain, that groped at inconceivable distances from anything lovely or harmonious, seemed to rise dimly up out of the waves of sound that gathered under his hands. Melancholy human love wandered out on distant ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... solitary, stone blockhouse, which had been built, in the time of Henry VIII., at the extremity of a long narrow spit of sand and shingle projecting from the Hampshire coast towards the Isle of Wight. It was a rather dismal place; and the King's heart sank as he entered it, and was confronted by a grim fellow with a bushy black beard, who announced himself as the captain in command. The possibility of private assassination ...
— The Life of John Milton Vol. 3 1643-1649 • David Masson
... dashed out by Roche and his companions. They fell next upon those who were retired to their rest, some of whom, upon the shrieks of the man and boy who were murdered, rising hastily out of their beds and running up upon deck to see what occasioned those dismal noises, were murdered themselves before they well knew where they were. The mate and the captain were next brought up, and Roche went immediately to binding them together, in order to toss them overboard, as had been consulted. 'Twas in vain for ...
— Lives Of The Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences • Arthur L. Hayward
... instant to his eyes as if it had been but yesterday. That insistent bell brought the scene surging back to him: the dismal day; the drizzle; the few mourners; little David decked out in black, his fair hair contrasting with his gloomy clothes, his face swollen with weeping; the Dale hushed, it seemed in death, save for the tolling of the bell; and his love had left him and gone ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... your hand upon the bolt. Back into the dismal ranks! Back! Justice, whom they have thrust into a pit, ...
— Paris under the Commune • John Leighton
... camp-fire lessen the loneliness. Its very light deepens the surrounding dark, and its only use, after the evening meal is cooked, is merely to dispel the savage attack of the voracious mosquito and put the fear of man into the hearts of the prairie scavenger, the coyote, whose dismal howl awakens the echoes of the night at painfully certain intervals, and often drives sleep from the eyes ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... shore about two miles, only it's farther, as you have to make so many ups and downs over the rocks. Then you leave the shore and go through a low marshy stretch, sort of a Dismal Swamp, and then up a hill. After Ptolemy and I climbed to the top, we looked down and saw, hidden in a clump of lonely looking poplars, a small, rudely built house. We went down to explore and had ...
— Our Next-Door Neighbors • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... Villa Borghese, where Miriam and Donatello break into a dance and all the people who are wandering in the gardens join with them? The author meant this to be a burst of wild maenad gaiety. As such I do not recall a more dismal failure. It is cold at the heart of it. It has no mirth, but is like a dance without music: like a dance of deaf mutes that I witnessed once, pretending to keep time to the inaudible scrapings of a ...
— Four Americans - Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman • Henry A. Beers
... FRIDAY-FACE. A dismal countenance. Before, and even long after the Reformation, Friday was a day of abstinence, or jour maigre. Immediately after the restoration of king Charles II. a proclamation was issued, prohibiting all publicans from dressing any ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... strength derived from the vicinity of the habitations of his fellow-beings, as if, were anything untoward to happen, assistance was close at hand and ready to be proffered, but now he might die a thousand deaths, and none be the wiser for his wretched end. As these and other thoughts equally dismal chased each other through his mind, the silence became more and more oppressive (for it was only now and then, hitherto, a word had been uttered), and it was with an emotion of thankfulness and relief he heard it broken by the voice ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... goaded by cruel treatment into repeated insurrections. It was a fierce war of races and religions. The frightful sufferings of the Moors, under the pressure of this double fanaticism, form a long and gloomy chapter of Spanish history. The dismal tale continues until the cruel expulsion from the kingdom of nearly a million of this unhappy people ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... to, as it involves taking out big bits, undoing wither straps, etc., and you have to be ready to start at a moment's notice. There are thousands of acres of rich pasture all about, vast undeveloped wealth. Farms are very few and far between; mostly dismal-looking stone houses, without a trace of garden or adornment of any sort. There was a load off all our minds this night, for the H.A.C. had at last been in action and under fire. All went well and steadily. My friend Ramsey, the lead-driver ...
— In the Ranks of the C.I.V. • Erskine Childers
... houses will be heard; and one confused noise formed out of all together. Some will be seen striving to escape the danger, but know not where to direct their flight; others embracing for the last time their parents and relations; here the dismal shrieks of women and piercing cries of children fill one with pity; there the sighs and groans of old men, lamenting their unhappy fate for having lived so long as to be witnesses of their country's desolation. A further addition to ...
— The Training of a Public Speaker • Grenville Kleiser
... must have a horse hidden hard by, and a bit of a search disclosed it. When he returned with the animal, its owner had opened his eyes and was beginning to remember a few things. Will helped him to mount, and out of pure kindness tied him on; then he straddled his own pony, and towed the dismal ...
— Last of the Great Scouts - The Life Story of William F. Cody ["Buffalo Bill"] • Helen Cody Wetmore
... perilous voyage of eight days' sailing on the angry Baltic Seas,—escaping the dismal, infinite, vast, craggy rocks, seen and unseen, and the covered sands and dangerous coasts, in the highest storms,—it pleased Him who giveth bounds to the deep waters and stilleth the waves thereof, to conduct Whitelocke and all his people in safety to this haven. They were ...
— A Journal of the Swedish Embassy in the Years 1653 and 1654, Vol II. • Bulstrode Whitelocke
... Hath left in shadows dread, His burning idol all of blackest hue In vain with cymbals' ring They call the grisly king, In dismal dance about the furnace blue; The brutish gods of Nile as fast, Isis, and Orus, and the ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... with the other citizens, although in Thebes itself people always avoided them with a certain horror; only the paraschites, whose duty it was to open the body, bore the whole curse of uncleanness. Certainly the place where these people fulfilled their office was dismal enough. ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... homewards, I am always sure to find myself, before I reach my threshold, in company with at least half a dozen gossipping and well-meaning rustics. In other departments of reading, history and poetry are my delight. On a rainy or snowy day, when all looks sad and dismal without, my worthy friend and neighbour, PHORMIO, sometimes gives me a call—and we have a rare set-to at my old favourite volumes—the 'Lectiones Memorabiles et Reconditae' of WOLFIUS[172]—a ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin |
