"Disheartening" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... financial burden, and so vexatious and disheartening the bickering and ingratitude, that Penn thought seriously of selling his governorship; and it was in the market for several years awaiting a purchaser. Indeed, in 1712, he had so far perfected a bargain to transfer his proprietary ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... course) The windings of my way through many years. Short as in retrospect the journey seems, It seemed not always short; the rugged path, And prospect oft so dreary and forlorn, Moved many a sigh at its disheartening length. Yet feeling present evils, while the past Faintly impress the mind, or not at all, How readily we wish time spent revoked, That we might try the ground again, where once (Through inexperience as we now perceive) ...
— The Task and Other Poems • William Cowper
... native city, the more I recalled to myself doubtingly the circumstances, prospects, and hopes with which I had left home; and it was with a very disheartening feeling that I now returned, as it were, like one shipwrecked. Yet, since I had not very much with which to reproach myself, I contrived to compose myself tolerably well: however, the welcome was not without emotion. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... great encouragement to Beth to find that Aunt Grace Mary was obliged to take pains with her writing. All the other grown-up people Beth knew, seemed to do everything with such ease, it was quite disheartening. Beth was allowed a pencil, a sheet of paper, and some lines herself now, and Aunt Grace Mary was taking great pains to teach her to write an Italian hand. Beth was also trying to learn: "because there ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... the ground cold. It destroys the good physical condition of the soil that may have been secured by much tillage, causing the soil particles to pack together. It compels plant-roots to form at the surface of the ground. It delays seeding and cultivation. An excess of water is more disheartening than absolute soil poverty. The remedy is only in its removal. The level of dead water in the soil must be below the surface—three feet, two and one half feet, four feet,—some reasonable distance that will make possible a friable, aerated, warm, friendly feeding-ground ...
— Crops and Methods for Soil Improvement • Alva Agee
... gorges of Anti-Lebanon, we entered a wide, disheartening plain, bounded by an amphitheatre of dreary mountains. Our horses had had no water for twenty-four hours, and we had had no refreshment of any kind for twenty. After two hours of more hard riding I came to another range of mountains, from beyond which opened the view of Damascus, from which the ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... herself, and no longer allow the intruder to keep her from the place which belonged to her alone. The old countess's power of persuasion had strengthened her courage, and the unwonted energy of the weak, more than yielding woman, exerted so startling and at the same time disheartening an effect upon the wearied, tortured young creature that she attempted no resistance. The entreaties of the leech and kind Herr Teufel, however, induced her to persist a short ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... met with an equally disheartening response. Miss Carmichael sat up straight, pushed back the persistent curls from her face, and bent every energy towards the achievement of ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... disheartening disappointment, but I held my tongue, and knowing that my old friend and correspondent, George Liverm of Cambridge, N. E., possessed an imperfect copy, which he and Mr. Crowninshield, after the noble example of the 'Lincoln Nosegay,' ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... plantation, one boy of about my age was struck by a parrot shell while climbing from the boat into the fort. We were told of the perils we were to meet, both before and after we reached our destination. For one of the most disheartening things was the sad report of the survivors of those whose places we were to fill. As the rowboats left them on John's island wharf and as we were about to embark they told us of the great danger to which we would be exposed,—of ...
— My Life In The South • Jacob Stroyer
... What can be finer, I say, than to die for Queen and country? Would not every mother have her son shed his blood for liberty and freedom?... No, Jeremy, not another. You've had quite enough. It would indeed be a disheartening sight if we elders were to watch our sons and grandchildren turning their ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... de Montejo, son of the Adelantado, was sent by his father from Tobasco, in 1537, to attempt again the conquest of Yucatan. He made a settlement at Champoton, and after two years of the most disheartening experiences at this place, a better fortune opened to the Spaniards. The veteran Montejo made over to his son all the powers given to him by the Emperor, together with the title of Adelantado; and the new governor established himself at Kimpech in 1540, ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... disheartening record underwent a complete change in 1576, when the son of the Bungo feudatory, a youth of some sixteen years, and, two years later, the feudatory himself, Otomo, embraced the Christian faith. In the first ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... opportunity to do any military work whatsoever. The very best men, men like Lawton, Young, Chaffee, Hawkins, and Sumner, to mention only men under or beside whom I served, remained good soldiers, soldiers of the best stamp, in spite of the disheartening conditions. But it was not to be expected that the average man could continue to grow when every influence was against him. Accordingly, when the Spanish War suddenly burst upon us, a number of inert elderly captains and field officers were, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... of the feud. The witch declared that if Lochbuy's wife should on the morning of that day give him and his men food unasked, he would be victorious, but if not, the result would be the reverse. This was a disheartening response for the unhappy votary, his wife being ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... Vincennes, on the east side of the Wabash, is a sandy plain. A gentleman who escaped the ravages of fever in that place, and who was much engaged in nursing the sick and consoling the dying, stated to me that nothing was so disheartening as the cloudless sky and burning sun that continued unchanged for weeks in succession. Mortality prevailed to a great extent along the banks of the Wabash. Hindostan, a town on the east fork of White river, ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... were the disheartening influence of the day on those who had nothing to apprehend, what must its effect have been on the poor captives! Woful indeed. The two monks suffered a complete prostration of spirit. All the resolution ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... plunder, it is true; if the settlers of the Hampshire Grants were to be driven incontinently from their homes as Ten Eyck and the Governor declared, somebody must benefit by the circumstance, and the sheriff's men hoped to be of the benefited party. But this armed opposition was disheartening. When the chorus of groans rose from the surrounding forest, his men as well as himself, knew that they had fallen into ambush, and this ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... is the prospect of what is to come, not the sensation of what is passing, that affects me. The loss of youth is melancholy enough; but to enter into old age through the gate of infirmity is most disheartening. My health and spirits make me take but slight notice of the transition, and under the persuasion of temperance being a talisman, I marched boldly on towards the descent of the hill, knowing I must fall at last, but not suspecting that I should stumble by the way. This confession explains the mortification ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... fail," said Lucian decisively, and with this disheartening prophecy he left Link to his ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... whether he were sufficiently sound in faith to adopt the clerical persuasion. Not that he supposed him to be anything like a confirmed unbeliever: but he thought it probable that these doubts, these strange, dark, disheartening suggestions of the Devil, that so surely infect certain temperaments and measures of intellect, were tormenting poor Septimius, and pulling him back from the path in which he was capable of doing so much good. So he came this afternoon to talk seriously with him, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... scarcity of writing materials, and no fowling-pieces, so that we could not even look forward to the prospect of obtaining some sport to enable us to pass the time, and to assist in furnishing our ill-supplied table. Altogether, our prospect was gloomy and disheartening in the extreme, nor could any of us discover a ray of light in the distance to cheer our spirits. Happily, sailors are not apt to moan and groan except when they are more comfortable than they have ever been before in their lives on ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... lay eggs," said the stork-mamma. "But with you it's only once in a way, whereas I lay eggs every year; but neither of us is appreciated—that's very disheartening." ...
— What the Moon Saw: and Other Tales • Hans Christian Andersen
... disheartening talk with the PM today. It seems the whole business of setting a date was an error from beginning to end. No one gave any such promise. It dare not be denied now, however, for fear of the effect upon the public. I must begin to think seriously ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... vine-sheltered porches; none of those grass-plots or smoothly shorn lawns, which hospitably invite the imagination into the sweet domestic interiors of English life. Everything, however sunny and luxuriant may be the scene around, is especially disheartening in the immediate neighborhood of an ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the remoter regions of the West as well as the older society of the East. In 1888 he brought out the result of his studies in two volumes that were filled with admiration for the United States and with disheartening observation upon its practices. One of its chapters cut so close that its victim brought suit for libel, but American opinion accepted the book as a friendly picture and regarded attacks upon it as further evidence of its inherent truth. Probably no book in a generation so profoundly influenced ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... resorts around the plaza in search of gossip that was rumored to be in circulation at Loring's expense. He found the gossipers easily enough, but had greater difficulty in reaching their authorities. It proved disheartening work, for the further he went the less he learned—each tale bearer having apparently added to the pile of his informant, as Petty should have had sense enough to know would be the case. But at last he ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... Frankfort financial magnate, and by birth a Hebrew. In the conversation that ensued between this lady and Baron Rothschild, the latter said: "Madam, my sympathies are entirely with your country; but is it not disheartening to think that there are men in Europe who are lending their money and trying to induce others to lend it for the strengthening of human slavery? Madam, NONE BUT A CONVERTED ...
— Volume I • Andrew Dickson White
... search for work was a difficult and disheartening task. He who has encountered it, however, has had an experience whose value far more than equals its unpleasantness. A man out of work needs the God that cares for the sparrows, as much as the man whose heart is torn with ingratitude, or crushed under a secret crime. ...
— Home Again • George MacDonald
... face to face might, deal him a cowardly blow from behind. The thought of afflicting that saintly man, of serving as the implement to strike him in his ardent charity, cruelly grieved Pierre. And how bitter and disheartening it was to find the most hideous questions of pride and money, ambition and appetite, running riot with the most ferocious egotism, beneath the quarrels of those leaders of the Church who ought only to have contended together in love ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... threw a momentary brightness over the scene, but after their departure every thing looked more gloomy and disheartening than before. The fort itself was a deep, dark, damp, gloomy-looking place, inclosed in high walls, where the sunlight rarely penetrated. If we ascended to the parapet, we saw nothing but uncouth State flags, representing palmettos, pelicans, and ...
— Reminiscences of Forts Sumter and Moultrie in 1860-'61 • Abner Doubleday
... managed to make 2 or 3 miles in a S.W. (?) direction under sail by alternately throwing her aback, then filling sail and pressing through the narrow leads; probably this will scarcely make up for our drift. It's all very disheartening. The bright side is that everyone is prepared to exert himself to the utmost—however poor the result of our ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... giant nation. We see those brave colonists who have planted the banner of human liberty upon the inhospitable shores push ever onward, ever extending the fringe of civilization, struggling against disheartening obstacles, fighting wild beasts and savage men, but pushing on with indomitable courage. We see the historical gathering at Philadelphia, resulting in that document embodying Jefferson's superb crystallization of popular opinion that 'all men are ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... resigns his bishopric (July 4), to become archbishop of Manila. On the next day he reports to the king his arrival at Manila, and the present condition of affairs in the islands, which is very disheartening. The Mindanao pirates have ravaged the coasts, and carried away many captives. The richest part of the city, including the merchandise stored in the warehouses, has been destroyed by fire; and the ships from Mexico arrived too late for the merchants to ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XII, 1601-1604 • Edited by Blair and Robertson
... certainly disheartening. They were one hundred and fifty miles from their nearest cache, and nearly three hundred from the nearest settlement, already greatly used up, needing rest and plenty of food; in a country that forbade any extended tramping inland to cut off corners, on a river in most places either too rough ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... and protected in France by Catherine de' Medici. In the nativity drawn by Basilio and Ruggiero the elder, the principal events of Catherine's life were foretold with a correctness which is quite disheartening for those who deny the power of occult science. This horoscope predicted the misfortunes which during the siege of Florence imperilled the beginning of her life; also her marriage with a son of the king of France, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... disheartening event in civilization since the Russians made their separate peace with Germany, and infinitely more unworthy on our part than it was on that of the Russians. They were threatened with starvation and ...
— The Progressive Democracy of James M. Cox • Charles E. Morris
... is guided by a master's teaching! His progress does not know the misery of those wearisome breakdowns. What was I to do before the disheartening wall that every now and then rose up and barred my road? I followed d'Alembert's precept in his advice to young mathematical students: 'Have faith and go ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... religious faith, some the most degraded, others the most exalted, should live on the same soil, among the same people, is indeed a disheartening truth, enough almost to shake one's belief in the common origin and the common destinies of the human race. And yet we must not shut our eyes to the fact that amongst ourselves, too, men who call themselves Christians are almost as widely separated ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... a discouraging and disheartening effect upon Margaret's mind, only served to arouse her to new vigor and determination. She had been somewhat timid and fearful in the earlier part of her troubles, when she had only a husband to think of and to care for. But now she had a son; and the maternal instinct seemed ...
— Margaret of Anjou - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... and down the narrow ways, And up the valley where the free winds sweep, The earth is folded in an ermined sleep That mocks the melting mirth of myriad Mays. Departed her disheartening duns and grays, And all her crusty black is covered deep. Dark streams are locked in Winter's donjon-keep, And made to shine with keen, unwonted rays. O icy mantle, and deceitful snow! What world-old liars in your hearts ye are! ...
— The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... any fate, Lafayette started on the long, wearisome journey northward. There were rivers deep and swift to cross; the roads were bad and the wintry storms made them worse. Floating ice crowded the fords. Rain and hail and snow and slush made up a disheartening monotony. ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... The prospect was disheartening enough. The river had narrowed to less than a hundred yards in width and wound and twisted amongst the waste of marsh that stretched desolately ahead and astern as far as the eye could see. To the east and west the marsh extended back at ...
— The Boy Chums in the Forest - or Hunting for Plume Birds in the Florida Everglades • Wilmer M. Ely
... It was rather disheartening to approach the extremity of the island, and upon entering a long narrow valley our guide assured us that although no apparent exit existed, we should ascend a precipitous path and immediately see the point of Cape St. Andrea. The valley narrowed to a point without any visible path. ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker
... of information which is secured by reading Dr. Woodson's book, a perusal of it can not help but increase one's respect for a race which under the most disheartening and discouraging circumstances strove so heroically and persistently to cultivate its mind and allowed nothing to turn it aside ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Vol. I. Jan. 1916 • Various
... pause, during which Carmichael's face had changed, "you are incorrigible. For years we have been trying to make you a really good and wise man, both by example and precept, and you are distinctly worse than when we began—more lazy, miserly, and uncharitable. It is very disheartening. ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren
... Hotel de Londres is large and well kept, and, like all Spanish hotels, charges on the good American plan of so much per day. One gratefully appreciates this, after juggling every few days with disheartening lists of accumulated coffees and eggs and dinners and rooms and mineral waters and service and bougies, and the others. The infinitude of microscopic book-keeping made necessary by the Continental system is a thought to shudder at. For the rest, the hotel is only unsatisfying because it seems in ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... only in the streets. There are not even any kago, or palanquins, except one for the use of the same physician. The paths are terribly rough, according to the testimony of the strong peasants themselves; and the distances, particularly in the hottest period of the year, are disheartening. Ponies can be hired; but my experiences of a similar wild country in western Izumo persuaded me that neither pleasure nor profit was to be gained by a long and painful ride over pine-covered hills, through slippery gullies and along torrent-beds, ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... nearly put a stop to my researches in ornithology. I shall relate it, merely to show how far enthusiasm—for by no other name can I call my perseverance—may enable the preserver of nature to surmount the most disheartening difficulties. I left the village of Henderson, in Kentucky, situated on the banks of the Ohio, where I resided for several years, to proceed to Philadelphia on business. I looked to my drawings before my departure, placed them carefully in a wooden box, and gave them in charge of a relative, ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... on being worthy of the honors of print and pay. I shall be very glad to hear from him or you soon.' At this time the remaining Scenes of Clerical Life were unwritten, and the criticisms upon 'Amos' had rather a disheartening effect upon the author, which the editor hastened to remove as soon as he became sensible of them, by offering to accept the tale. He wrote to Mr. Lewes, 'If you think it would stimulate the author to ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... of the European system I am now animadverting upon. But I shall stop this tone and style of animadversion. I am sick at heart with the parallel of contrasts between our barbarian and civilized social systems: it is so unsatisfactory, it is so disheartening, and takes away all hope, all faith in the progress and perfectibility of the human race. One thing, however, is certain, that unless we can bring our minds to form a just appreciation of ourselves, unless we can learn to know ourselves, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... City Governor was just giving some directions, as he stood beside the depression in which Kohlhaas had placed Herse, when a messenger, whom the horse-dealer's wife had sent on after him, put in his hands the disheartening letter from his lawyer in Dresden. The City Governor, who, while speaking with the doctor, noticed that Kohlhaas let a tear fall on the letter he had just read, approached him and, in a friendly, cordial way, asked him what misfortune ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... The Minister wished the job on me, and I with some elements of executive ability myself gave the worst part of it to Nasmith, the Vice-Consul-General. Modifications became necessary every few minutes, and Leval and I were running around like stricken deer all day, seeing the disheartening number of government officials who were concerned, having changes made and asking for additional trains. During the afternoon more and more Germans came pouring into the Consulate for refuge, until there were over two thousand of them there, terribly ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... desponding condition, and under these disheartening circumstances, we stood to the westward, with a crazy ship, a great scarcity of fresh water, and a crew so universally diseased, that there were not above ten foremast men in a watch capable of doing duty, and even some of these lame and unable to go aloft. At last, at day-break on the 9th ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... o'clock in the morning Sir Moses received a letter from Monsieur Cremieux, informing him that he had started for Cairo. Sir Moses, who felt himself in duty bound not to quit his post for fear of injuring his cause, determined, notwithstanding the disheartening state of politics, to go to the Pasha and ask for an answer to the petition that he had presented on the day after ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... America declared war, and approximately a year later when her weight began to be felt, the Allies suffered reverses that were thoroughly disheartening and were almost disastrous. Russia, who had conducted a powerful offensive in 1916, began to retreat in the summer of 1917 and was thereafter no longer a military factor.[5] Italy had driven back the Austrians in ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... journal of America, not usually harsh or cynical in its treatment of native authorship, did not even give it a place among its "Critical Notices," but dropped a small-print extinguisher upon it in one of the pages of its "List of New Publications." Nothing could be more utterly disheartening than the unqualified condemnation passed upon the story. At the same time the critic says that "no one can read 'Morton's Hope' without perceiving it to have been written by a person of uncommon resources ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... Vimpany; and there are times when the cheery old devil exercises fascinations over me. I declare you're spoiling the eyebrows that I admire by letting them twist themselves into a frown! After the trouble I have taken to clear your mind of prejudice against an unfortunate man, it's disheartening to find you so hard on the poor fellow's faults and so blind to ...
— Blind Love • Wilkie Collins
... disheartening struggle, this hewing for herself a way along the rocky paths of prejudice, and many had been the thorns under her feet. Though she kept a brave heart and never faltered, she had tired inevitably of the perpetual effort ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... chained down under the harsh inspection of Strength and Force, whose threats serve only to excite a useless compassion in Vulcan, who is nevertheless forced to carry them into execution; then his solitary complainings, the arrival of the womanly tender ocean nymphs, whose kind but disheartening sympathy stimulates him to give freer vent to his feelings, to relate the causes of his fall, and to reveal the future, though with prudent reserve he reveals it only in part; the visit of the ancient Oceanus, a kindred ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel
... should be expressed by the books on her table. These volumes, frequently renewed, and almost always damp from the press, bore names generally unfamiliar to Mrs. Leveret, and giving her, as she furtively scanned them, a disheartening glimpse of new fields of knowledge to be breathlessly traversed in Mrs. Ballinger's wake. But to-day a number of maturer-looking volumes were adroitly mingled with the primeurs of the press—Karl Marx jostled Professor Bergson, and the "Confessions of St. ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... slowly in a long remorseless meal that will not end until he be destroyed. He is shut out from his fellows. As they approach he must cry, 'Unclean! unclean!' that all humanity may be warned from his precincts. He must abandon wife and child. He must go to live with other lepers, in disheartening view of miseries similar to his own. He must dwell in dismantled houses or in the tombs. He is, as Trench says, a dreadful parable of death. By the laws of Moses (Lev. 13:45; Numb. 6:9; Ezek. 24:17) he was compelled, as if he were mourning for his own decease, to bear about him the emblems of ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... that you are famishing, foretells that you are meeting disheartening failure in some enterprise which you considered a promising success. To see others famishing, brings sorrow to others as well ...
— 10,000 Dreams Interpreted • Gustavus Hindman Miller
... hair-breadth escapes of a life of adventures, instead of disheartening young people, seem frequently to recommend a trade to them. A tender mother, among the inferior ranks of people, is often afraid to send her son to school at a sea-port town, lest the sight of the ships, and the conversation and adventures of the ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... I, after listening to this disheartening recital—"supposing that your relatives will not help you, have you any plans laid to meet such a contingency? 'Hope for the best and provide for the worst' is a favourite motto of your friend Bob; and I really think it is singularly applicable ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... security only when supported by its solidarity. Only something as intuitively impelling as the desire for life could have called forth the labor and love and sacrifice that have been lavishly expended in the disheartening and incredibly tedious work of labor organization. The upbuilding of the labor movement has seemed at times like constructing a house of cards: often it was hardly begun before some ill wind cast it down. It has cost many of its creators exile, imprisonment, starvation, ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... America any reasonable prospect he may have entertained in Europe. These difficulties are, indeed, such as would often stagger the resolution of most emigrants, if they had not before them, in every part of America, examples of men who must have encountered and have overcome equally, if not more disheartening hardships, before they attained a state of comfortable affluence."—Quart. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... was creditable, and gave hopes to Clarendon's friends. But when the words were repeated, they were found to be disheartening to the conspirators, who thereupon carried their complaints to the King. "They had tried to serve him, and now knew not how to behave themselves." Their weapons would be gone, if the King indulged ...
— The Life of Edward Earl of Clarendon V2 • Henry Craik
... the Craigie House was a good neighbor, approachable and deferential. He was even interested in local Cambridge politics. On the larger political issues of his day his Americanism was sound and loyal. "It is disheartening," he wrote in his Cambridge journal for 1851, "to see how little sympathy there is in the hearts of the young men here for freedom and great ideas." But his own sympathy never wavered. His linguistic talent helped him to ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... His soul was still disquieted and cast down by the dull phenomenon of Dublin. He had emerged from a two years' spell of revery to find himself in the midst of a new scene, every event and figure of which affected him intimately, disheartened him or allured and, whether alluring or disheartening, filled him always with unrest and bitter thoughts. All the leisure which his school life left him was passed in the company of subversive writers whose jibes and violence of speech set up a ferment in his brain before they passed out of it into ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... otherwise take from becoming a member of Parliament. But to go through it and then not to become a member is base indeed! To go through it and to feel that you are probably paying at the rate of a hundred pounds a day for the privilege is most disheartening. Silverbridge, as he backed up Tregear in the uncomfortable work, congratulated himself on the comfort of having a Mr. Sprugeon and a Mr. Sprout who could manage his borough for him ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope
... disheartening; the boats were no longer available; the water was gaining on the vessel; and the rockets and blue lights, as they darted into the air, served but to show them the rugged face of the high rocks, which appeared ...
— Narratives of Shipwrecks of the Royal Navy; between 1793 and 1849 • William O. S. Gilly
... himself to be cool—mentally, of course, bodily coolness was quite out of the question—all the way along, with looking upon Berber as the end of his voyage. And here he had to go on another two hundred miles, and up another tedious cataract. It was very disheartening. ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... to the kitchen (where the drenched and weary postman was receiving the hospitable attentions of the servants) to make inquiries. The disheartening answer returned was that the newspaper could not have arrived as usual by the morning's post, or it must have been put into the bag along with the letters. No such accident as this had occurred, except on one former occasion, since the beginning ...
— The Queen of Hearts • Wilkie Collins
... brother-in-law of his failure and distress; and when Eve, Mme. Chardon, and David each secretly sent money to their poet, it must be plain to the reader that the three hundred francs they sent were like their very blood. The overwhelming news, the disheartening sense that work as bravely as she might, she made so little, left Eve looking forward with a certain dread to an event which fills the cup of happiness to the full. The time was coming very near now, and to herself she ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... the speculation was a failure. This conviction was mutual and profound. The cow was not only gone, but she had shown such disinclination to be domesticated, and such a misapprehension of the true purpose of life, that the prospect was truly disheartening. ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray
... to have my food with the peons (men), which was rather disheartening. I tried to eat in the kitchen, but the French cook kicked me out, and for ten months I fed with the peons; they were very good fellows. The second and the book-keeper had meals together. The second-manager ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... a disheartening evening. We played progressive euchre for a silly prize, and we all got shuffled up wrong and had to stay so. Then the major did amateur conjuring till we nearly died. I was thankful to sneak out-of-doors and smoke ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne
... night, dreaming dreams of future success, but awoke to a disheartening sense of pain and impotence. There were no letter-carriers in the village, and Gus seldom had reason for frequenting the post-office unless on a bright day, to meet the girls. As he should not begin work to-day, however, he thought he would stroll in that direction. The office, a mere box ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... certainly fits this play quite as well as the one it now bears. The whole play is emphatically love's labour: its main interest throughout turns on the unwearied and finally-successful struggles of affection against the most stubborn and disheartening obstacles. It may indeed be urged that the play entitled Love's Labour's Won has been lost; but this, considering what esteem the Poet's works were held in, both in his time and ever since, is so very improbable as to be hardly worth dwelling upon. There ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... all this work was, it was but the smallest part of his work. Richelieu found that his officers were cheating his soldiers in their pay and disheartening them; in face of the enemy he had to reorganize the army and to create a new military system. He made the army twice as effective and supported it at two-thirds less cost than before. It was his boast in his "Testament," that, from a mob, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... moments, the faster they seem to pass. An autumn day had long given place to night, ere they verified this last piece of intelligence, and acquired some definite aim for their exertions; but neither liked to compare notes with the other, nor express his own disheartening reflection that Nina might be wandering so late, bewildered, lonely, and unprotected, through the labyrinths ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... good God has not given us a special kind of men upon whom to devolve the duty of seeing to the observance of the understandings that we call laws. Like all else that men do, this work is badly done. The best that we can hope for through all the failures, the injustice, the disheartening damage to individual rights and interests, is a fairly good general result, enabling us to walk abroad among our fellows unafraid, to meet even the tribesmen from another valley without too imminent ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... That disheartening view of the foreign and mechanical nature of the real world which our sciences and our industrial arts have impressed upon the minds of so many of us; that contempt for superstition; that denial of the supernatural, which seems to the typical modern man the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... mercantile worlds, as much as one would naturally expect. For these men are the pioneers of Christian explorations in the southern world—the precursors of all the ocean voyages that led to the discoveries of Prince Henry, Da Gama, Columbus, and Magellan,—the first who directly challenged the disheartening theories of geographers, such as Ptolemy, the inaction and traditionalism of the Arabs, and the elaborate falsities of story tellers, who, in the absence of real knowledge, had a grand ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... with what celerity every thing, even moderately valuable in the scientific publications of this country, finds its way into their pages. This ought to encourage our men of science. They have a larger audience, and a wider sympathy than they are perhaps aware of; and however disheartening the general diffusion of smatterings of a number of subjects, and the almost equally general indifference to profound knowledge in any, among their own countrymen, may be, they may rest assured that not a fact they may discover, nor a good ...
— Decline of Science in England • Charles Babbage
... It is somewhat disheartening to find that when Mr. Wright returned for the last time to the Cooper's Creek depot, namely, so recently as the first week in May—that is, five months after Burke set out on his final excursion—he did not think it necessary to make any examination of ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... myself, but ascended the range and had a very extensive view. Far to the north and east the horizon was as level and uniform as that of the sea; apparently spinifex everywhere; no hills or ranges could be seen for a distance of quite thirty miles. The prospect was very cheerless and disheartening. Windich went on the only horse not knocked up, in order to find water for the horses. I followed after his tracks, leading the two poor done-up horses. With difficulty I could get them to walk. Over and through the rough range I managed ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... was begun, but just at the critical point, and when we were all most prayerfully hoping against hope, as it were, that this time he would round the dangerous curves of it gracefully and come to a grand finish, there was a most disconcerting and disheartening squeak. It was pathetic, ghastly. As one man we wilted. What would Culhane say to that? We were not long in doubt. "Great Christ!" he shouted, looking back and showing a countenance so black that it was positively ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... scarcity of water, and a crew so universally diseased that there were not above ten foremast men in a watch capable of doing duty, and even some of these lame and unable to go aloft; under these disheartening circumstances, I say, we stood to the westward; and on the 9th of June, at daybreak, we at last discovered the long-wished-for ...
— Anson's Voyage Round the World - The Text Reduced • Richard Walter
... wheeze; fen, fen, fen; tinky, tinky, tinky; cr'annch. I shall certainly come to be condemned at last. I have been drinking too much for two days running. I find my moral sense in the last stage of a consumption, and my religion getting faint. This is disheartening, but I trust the devil will not overpower me. In the midst of this infernal torture Conscience is barking and yelping as loud as any of them. I have sat down to read over again, and I think I do begin to spy out something with beauty and design in it. I perfectly accede to all your alterations, ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... words," says Hamlet. Even as veteran writers for the press have come through disheartening experience to a realizing sense of the futility of printer's ink must our academic pundits begin to suspect the futility of art and letters. Words however cleverly writ on paper are after all but words. "In a nation of blind men," we are told, "the ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... him on all sides. To find such qualities alike in bad folk and good folk, in handsome people as in ugly, proved utterly disheartening. ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... was the way that Roger Inch took it, our senior sergeant. 'But you'll allow 'tis disheartening to be set aside for a lawyer-fellow that, a year ago, had never groomed horse-hair but on his own wig.' And so—but less kindly—the rest ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... Algidus, just beyond Alba Longa, repulsed an army sent against them, and surrounded its camp. We can imagine the clattering of the hoofs on the hard stones of the Via Latina as five anxious messengers, who had managed to escape before it was too late, hurried to Rome to carry the disheartening news. All eyes immediately turned in one direction for help. There lived just across the Tiber a member of an old aristocratic family, one Lucius Quintius, better known as Cincinnatus, because that ...
— The Story of Rome From the Earliest Times to the End of the Republic • Arthur Gilman
... disappearance of the ex-Premier in the midst of this upheaval caused the report to spread that all the members of the corrupt camarilla which had surrounded him were to be arrested, but the President soon publicly disclaimed any intention of doing so,— which appears to have been a fatal mistake. It is disheartening to have to state that nearly all the Allied Legations in Peking had been in intimate relations with this gang—always excepting the American Legation whose attitude is uniformly correct—the French ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... journey were not enviable. He had enough faith to fear God, but not to trust and obey. The thought recurred with disheartening frequency, "If God is against this, He will thwart me ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... we do not bow to mandarins, as long as the Academy of Sciences does not replace the pope, politics as a whole and society, down to its very roots, will be nothing but collection of disheartening humbugs. We are floundering in the after-birth of the Revolution, which was an abortion, a failure, a misfire, "whatever they say." And the reason is that it proceeded from the Middle Ages and Christianity. The idea of equality (which is all the ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... disorder of her first attempt as follows: "I must confess that the first four weeks were disheartening; the children could not settle to a task for more than a few moments; they showed no perseverance, no initiative; at times they followed one another like a flock of lambs; when one child took up an object, all the others wanted to imitate him, sometimes ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... part of his thoughtfulness, wanting to put everybody at their ease. And I'm sure if there's one thing more disheartening than another, it is to have two of your friends standing up side by side, as stiff as a couple of pokers, without so much as a word. I know I am too ready to enter into conversation with strangers; but ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... letter; in this he told Mr. Rich that he (Triplet) was aware what a quantity of trash is offered every week to a manager, how disheartening it must be to read it at all, and how natural, after a while, to read none. Therefore, he (Triplet) had provided that Mr. Rich might economize his time, and yet not remain in ignorance of the dramatic treasure that ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... he could not sleep, he wondered why it is that one never day-dreams unpleasant obstacles and disheartening failures into one's air castles. Why was it that, just when it had seemed to him that his dream was miraculously come true; when he found himself complete master of the Double-Crank where for years ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower
... because each was the fruit of their long meditations. Incapable of boldly looking forward, each beginning seemed to them an end. Though absolutely free, they were imprisoned in their own simplicity, which would have been disheartening had either given a meaning to their confused desires. They were poets and poem both. Music, the most sensual of arts for loving souls, was the interpreter of their ideas; they took delight in repeating the same harmony, letting ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... arose, attended by material disasters, which no precaution will certainly avert; and failing in the support which was supposed sure, defeat ensued. But these reverses were not without their uses, as subsequent events clearly demonstrated. Accepting the conditions, which were most disheartening, Mr. David and his partner addressed themselves to the work of securing their creditors and restoring their fortunes. It was a long and weary struggle, demanding persistent application, economy, and careful management. They were subjected to painful imputations and occasional rebuffs, ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2 • Various
... were therefore inexplicable to me, and if I had carried them out I would probably have been cut off by the enemy. My burghers were also getting restless, and asked me why, while all the other commandos were retiring, we did not move. Cronje's surrender had had a most disheartening effect on them; there was, in fact, quite a panic among them. I mounted a high kopje from which I could see the whole Orange Free State army, followed by a long line of quite 500 carts and a lot of cattle, in full retreat, and enveloped in great clouds of red dust. To the right ...
— My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War • Ben Viljoen
... half-formed and then abandoned projects were among the stepping-stones of his career. A plan or an idea, once conceived, was certain to be shaped, developed and matured; and whatever the result, it left up disheartening effect, no feeling of distrust, to cripple ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... Petrograd should think more of their country and less of their own pockets. The unquestioning courage of the simple Russian soldiers! Every one ready to die—and yet nothing to back them up. It was disheartening. ...
— Trapped in 'Black Russia' - Letters June-November 1915 • Ruth Pierce
... my head and trying to make a guess as to what sort of employment it could be which needed such curious qualifications. A strong physique, a resolute nature, a medical training, and a knowledge of beetles—what connection could there be between these various requisites? And then there was the disheartening fact that the situation was not a permanent one, but terminable from day to day, according to the terms of the advertisement. The more I pondered over it the more unintelligible did it become; but at the end of my meditations I always came back to the ground fact that, ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... pursued, "is trying to get on in commercial life, but has no money, and finds it difficult and disheartening to make a beginning. Now I want somehow to help him ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Ishmaels—"their hands against every man and every man's hand against them,"—and though the pleasant summer weather brought many sunshiny days and starlit nights, the cold, damp, and dismal days took all the poetry out of this roving life, and sodden forests and relentless foes brought dreary and disheartening hours. Trust me, boys, this so-called "free and jolly life of the bold outlaw," which so many story-papers picture, whether it be with Brian Boru in distant Ireland, nine hundred years ago, or in Sherwood Forest with Robin Hood, or with some "Buckeye Jim" ...
— Historic Boys - Their Endeavours, Their Achievements, and Their Times • Elbridge Streeter Brooks
... had spoken through him. And so here goes! up with the Ark and the trumpets, and out on to the hot sand for the march! It would have been a great deal easier to have stopped in the tents. It was disheartening work marching round thus. The sceptical spirit in the host—the folk of whom there are many great-grandchildren living to-day, who always have objections to urge when disagreeable duties are crammed up against their faces—would have enough ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... perseverance, and he was gifted with an unaristocratic amount of energy. When an idea once took possession of his brain, he patiently and diligently brought the embryo thought to fruition, in spite of all disheartening obstacles. He was narrow-minded and selfish when any interests save his own and those of his mother and son were at stake. These were the only two beings whom he loved, and he only loved them because they were his—a portion of himself; and it was merely himself that he ...
— Fairy Fingers - A Novel • Anna Cora Mowatt Ritchie
... this disheartening discovery chanced to be the 25th of the month—our regular pay-day, and I had my month's salary in my pocket when I left the office about eleven o'clock to go to my boarding-house. At the nearest street corner I met the ...
— Branded • Francis Lynde
... thrown him to Longstreet's right, manoeuvring Meade out of his position. But in this matter, too, Lee's judgment was probably good. Changing his plan of attack would have been a partial confession of defeat, to some extent disheartening his men. The Union Sixth Corps, fresh and free, General John Sedgwick at its head, was sure to have pounced on any troops seeking to trouble Meade's left, and, had Meade been successfully flanked and forced back, he would have retired to Pipe Creek ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XII • John Lord
... adoption. Canada may not possess mines of gold or silver, but she possesses all those advantages of climate, geological structure, and position, which are essential to greatness and prosperity. Her long and severe winter, so disheartening to her first settlers, lays up, amidst the forests of the West, inexhaustible supplies of fertilising moisture for the summer, while it affords the farmer the very best of natural roads to enable him to carry his wheat and other produce to market. It is a remarkable fact, that hardly a lot of ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... with none of the hard, consistent strength and intelligence of your make-believe heroine in a book, so disheartening an example to our faltering impulses for good. She has been infinitely human and pathetically fallible; she has cried out and hesitated and complained and done the wrong thing and wept and failed and still fought on, till to think ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... best solution of my difficulties, I took the type-written pages to a number of charitable friends and asked them to read what I had said, and give me the benefit of their advice. The experience was rather disheartening. Each and every man had his own prejudices and his own hobbies and preferences. They all wanted to know why, where and how I dared to omit their pet nation, their pet statesman, or even their most beloved criminal. With some of them, ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... man a holy and sacred being on the strength of a speculation too learned not to have something of the arbitrary in its composition; proclaiming him God,—that is, essentially good and orderly in all his powers, in spite of the disheartening evidence which he continually gives of his doubtful morality; attributing his vices to the constraint in which he has lived, and promising from him in complete liberty acts of the purest devotion, because in the myths in which humanity, according to this philosophy, has painted itself, ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... afterwards strayed forth again, and crossed London Bridge. Thence I rambled rather drearily along through several shabby and uninteresting streets on the other side of the Thames; and the dull streets in London are really the dullest and most disheartening in the world. By and by I found my way to Southwark Bridge, and so crossed to Upper Thames Street, which was likewise very stupid, though I believe Clenman's paternal house in "Little Dorrit" stands thereabouts. . . . . Next, I got into Ludgate Hill, near St. Paul's, and being quite foot-weary, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Yet he must go on living. To live was the dominant instinct. A man did not put on or off the desire to live as he put on or off his coat. But life promised nothing. It was going to be a sorry affair. It struck Hollister with disheartening force that an individual is nothing—absolutely nothing—apart from some form of social grouping. And society, which had exacted so much from him, seemed peculiarly indifferent to the consequences of those imperative ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the files of the Sun Dial, and it is disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this sediment of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives of a newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... generosity including so many spiders, not to speak of the dangerous winged members of the c'lection. On account of these latter, he jocosely professed himself to be anxious lest the tops of some of the jars might work loose—and altogether he was the most disheartening man they had ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... which nature looks out at us, almost ludicrous in its melancholy. In such a poem as that from which I have quoted, it is as though we saw nature with a drip on the end of its nose. Mr. Hardy's is something different from a tragic vision. It is a desolate, disheartening, and, in a way, morbid vision. We wander with him too ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... to the surface of the lake, and now went whirling and swelling upward, in a way to lead the listener to fancy that the viewless winds might, for once, be seen. For a single painful instant, in one of those disheartening moments of despair that will come over the stoutest, his hand was about to relinquish its hold of the baron, and to make the last natural struggle for life; but that fair and modest picture of maiden loveliness and truth, which had so long ...
— The Headsman - The Abbaye des Vignerons • James Fenimore Cooper
... seemed almost miraculous. We had lost twenty days at the beginning of our voyage, and at its close had been almost taken by an English squadron. Under these circumstances, how rapturously we inhaled the balmy, air of Provence! Such was our joy, that we were scarcely sensible of the disheartening news which arrived from all quarters. At the first moment of our arrival, by a spontaneous impulse, we all repeated, with tears in our eyes, the beautiful lines which Voltaire has put into the mouth of ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... be disheartening work learning a musical instrument. You would think that Society, for its own sake, would do all it could to assist a man to acquire the art of playing a musical instrument. ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... many: every one to whom he broached the subject declared it to be impossible, prophesying that the extension of the settlement westward would forever be obstructed by their unscalable heights. Blaxland, however, was not intimidated by these disheartening predictions; and, in 1811, he started out on a short journey of investigation, in company with three Europeans and two natives. On this trip he found that by keeping on the crowning ridge or dividing water-shed between the streams running into the Nepean and those that fed what ...
— The Explorers of Australia and their Life-work • Ernest Favenc
... is well nigh intolerable to humanity. The palpable results of it can hardly fail to be disheartening to any normal being. And out of this disheartenment will inevitably come a yearning, more or less unconscious, but more and more appealing, for something different and something better, a yearning for true and unquestionable leadership, which can inflame the imagination, inspire new faith, ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... un-negotiable, so at 8.30 p.m. last night, to the intense disappointment of all, instead of forging ahead, we had to retire half a mile so as to get on a stronger floe, and by 10 p.m. we had camped and all hands turned in again. The extra sleep was much needed, however disheartening ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... river, or "hill," up which they were desired to carry the tents, provisions, etcetera, necessary for their encampment, was so steep and encumbered with wood and scrub, that it might of itself have formed a sufficiently disheartening obstacle to men less accustomed to hardships; nevertheless, they braced themselves to it with wonted vigour, pushed through the scrub, felled trees to facilitate their ascent, and climbed like monkeys ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne
... advice I give to reject every insincerity in writing seem cruel, because it robs the writer of so many of his effects—-if it seem disheartening to earnestly warn a man not to TRY to be eloquent, but only to BE eloquent when his thoughts move with an impassioned LARGO—if throwing a writer back upon his naked faculty seem especially distasteful to those ...
— The Principles of Success in Literature • George Henry Lewes
... prosecution of his secret designs. But ever since the consultation in Dendermonde the Prince of Orange had made up his mind to quit the service of the King of Spain on the first favorable opportunity, and till better days to leave the country itself. A very disheartening experience had taught him how uncertain are hopes built on the multitude, and how quickly their zeal is cooled by the necessity of fulfilling its lofty promises. An army was already in the field, and a far stronger one was, he ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... The unsettled and disheartening times disturbed all the relations of artists. There is but little record of Cherubini for several years. A significant passage in a letter written in 1814, speaking of several military marches written for a Prussian band, indicates ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... boy, travelled on foot, sometimes singing as they marched. So they began the long and terrible journey, the later horrors of which I dare not give in the words here set down. The first weeks were painful and disheartening, although they still had food. Their chief discomfort arose from the extreme cold at night and the tortures from the sand-flies and mosquitoes on their exposed bodies, which they tried to remedy by covering themselves with sand, ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... for him, father?" Maria exclaimed. "We are not tired of thanking him, but he hates being thanked. If he would only get into some terrible scrape, Giulia and I would set out to rescue him at once; but you see he gets out of his scrapes before we hear of them. It is quite disheartening not to be ...
— The Lion of Saint Mark - A Story of Venice in the Fourteenth Century • G. A. Henty
... on other days have been expelled from the room without hope of return, today were greeted with a mild "Don't do that, please, O'Hara," or even the ridiculously inadequate "O'Hara!" It was perfectly disheartening. O'Hara began to ask himself bitterly what was the use of ragging at all if this was how it was received. And the moments were flying, and his promise to Renford and Harvey ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... opportunity to keep her house in order troubled the child, for her days were zealously planned by her enthusiastic guardians. Beulah came at ten o'clock every morning to give her lessons. As Jimmie's quest for work grew into a more and more disheartening adventure, she had difficulty in getting him out of bed in time to prepare and clear away the breakfast for Beulah's arrival. After lunch, to which Jimmie scrupulously came home, she was supposed to work an hour at her modeling clay. Gertrude, who ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... cloak of February's snow, sun-touched by the freshly risen luminary, the white expanses glinting; all the rocks and ledges and the barren shapes were covered. But under summer's frank sunlight Egypt was as disheartening a spectacle as a racked old horse, ribs and hip bones outthrust, waiting ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... up. Our Parish Church yard has a sad, forsaken appearance; if it had run to seed and ended in nothing, or had been neglected and closed up by an army of hypochondriacs, it could not have been more gloomy, barren, or disheartening. The ground should be looked after, and the stones preserved as much as possible. It is a question of shoes v. gravestones at present, and, if there is not some change of position, the shoes ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... credit that she would ever become the wise, helpful woman that she had once warmly desired to see herself. Her own defects were now familiar and sorely disheartening to her, and she had grown aware that she could not by inspiration set and preserve in smooth, swift motion the various wheels of Otter, not even if—unlooked for and undesired sequel!—she received express permission to dance upon the head ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... had been entrusted to him, and he had not ceased to wonder why the pirates had not murdered him and all his crew, and thrown them overboard. He hoped that in time he and his men might reach Georgetown, or some other port, but it would be slow and disheartening work under the circumstances. ...
— Mrs. Cliff's Yacht • Frank R. Stockton
... over his disheartening Environments and limitations, till, At last, well knowing that the outside world Would yield him favors never found at home, He rose determinedly one July dawn— Even before the call for breakfast—and, Climbing the alley-fence, and bitterly Shaking his clenched fist at the woodpile, ...
— A Child-World • James Whitcomb Riley
... feeling that he had spiked the guns of his young adversary, the revulsion and disappointment of defeat were all the more disheartening. He would like to have believed his tale a false one, but that was not easy. On a closer inspection of the paper which Maurice Walton had brought to him, he discovered a water-mark in the paper showing that it had only been manufactured the year ...
— Tom, The Bootblack - or, The Road to Success • Horatio Alger
... seemed to multiply as the francs in one's pockets diminished. And when the cable was finally dispatched it was either lost on the way, or reached its destination only to call forth, after anxious days, the disheartening response: "Impossible at present. Making every effort." It is fair to add that, tedious and even irritating as many of these transactions were, they were greatly eased by the sudden uniform good-nature of the French functionary, who, for the first ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... service as had been the custom of the Hurminster churches; and the singing, such as it was, depended on the thin shrill voices of the children, assisted by Lady Adela and the mistress; the sermon was dull and long, and altogether there was something disheartening about the whole. ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... surround us. And to this let us add that there are natures in which all deep emotion is so entirely associated with the ideal, that real and particular manifestations of it are repugnant to them as something alien; and this without the least insincerity, though with a vicious and disheartening inconsistency. Rousseau belonged to this class, and loved man most when he saw men least. Bad as this was, it does not justify us in denouncing his love of man as artificial; it was one side of an ideal ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... on base, Stars wanting three runs to tie, Scott, a weak batter, at the plate! The situation was disheartening. Yet there sat Delaney, shot through and through with some vital compelling force. He saw only victory. And when the very first ball pitched to Scott hit him on the leg, giving him his base, Delaney got to ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... therefore, before his experiment at farming failed and with the aid of his father-in-law he entered business as a real estate broker in St. Louis. But for this calling he had no qualification whatsoever, and after a disheartening experience in attempting to secure the post of county engineer, he accepted his father's suggestion that he join his brothers in the leather business in Galena, Illinois, and retired there with his family in ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... should be written virginibus puerisque; but it is certain that every word of Charles Dickens was so written, even when he set himself (as he sometimes did) to describe animal natures and the vilest of their sex. Dickens is a realist in that he probes the gloomiest recesses and faces the most disheartening problems of life: he is an idealist in that he never presents us the common or the vile with mere commonplace or repulsiveness, and without some ray of humane and genial charm to which ordinary eyes ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... been frightfully disheartening. Where the busy city had stood was now a level plain of white ashes, so deep that not a house-top could be seen, and only the upper walls of the great theatre and the amphitheatre were visible. Digging into the fleecy ashes, ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... am very poorly, and the trial of it is that I cannot see any positive prospect of a definite, speedy recovery. But it will come; I have never seriously doubted it. God won't let me finish off in this disheartening manner—disheartening, I mean, to my comrades, and to those I have to leave with the responsibility of keeping the Banner flying. God will still do wonders, in ...
— The Authoritative Life of General William Booth • George Scott Railton
... . . At a moderate computation, about 9,000 emigrants have, or, within the next month, will have, left this port for America. It is to be hoped their anticipations will be realised. There can be little fear, however, that their condition could be worse, or their prospects more disheartening than those which the 'potato famine' in this country, little mended by the promise of Indian corn, had occasioned. La faim chasse le loup hors du bois. To starve, or emigrate, are the only ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... and also disheartening, part of the process was, that, owing to the general activity on board, he came again and again to the same faces in different parts of the vessel, but he so frequently missed seeing others that hope was kept alive ...
— The Young Trawler • R.M. Ballantyne
... the forester with joy, this news threw him into dark despair. If Helen turned out to be rich his case was even more hopeless than he had imagined it to be. It was sweet to be so defended, so rescued, but it was also disheartening. With wealth added to the grace which he adored in her, she was lifted far ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... condition. Moreover, both nerves and mind found relief and rest in the consciousness that the decisive step had been taken. She was no longer shuddering and recoiling from a past in which each day had revealed more disheartening elements. Her face was now toward a future that promised a refuge, ...
— He Fell in Love with His Wife • Edward P. Roe
... Paris; in and out of which, not vagabonds, but well-dressed women, with white veils and great fans, were passing and repassing; the perfect absence of resemblance in any dwelling-house, or shop, or wall, or post, or pillar, to anything one had ever seen before; and the disheartening dirt, discomfort, and decay; perfectly confounded me. I fell into a dismal reverie. I am conscious of a feverish and bewildered vision of saints and virgins' shrines at the street corners—of great numbers of friars, monks, and soldiers—of vast red curtains, waving in the doorways ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... the unsatisfactory and disheartening turmoil in which we are at present. It's the mad bull and the china shop, and, nota bene, we are the china shop. People want to see if Italy has cut off our noses, or what! A very kind anxiety certainly, but so horribly ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... men, struck deep into my heart: My thinned ranks told the woeful tale of the fierce struggles, indescribable by words, through which my division had passed since 7 o'clock in the morning; and this, added to our hungry and exhausted condition, was naturally disheartening. The men had been made veterans, however, by the fortunes and misfortunes of the day, and as they went into their new places still confident of final success, it was plain to see that they felt a self-confidence inspired by the ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... educated of the East. These men, year after year, without leadership, without encouragement, without the support and generally against the covered or open hostility of their neighbours, under most disheartening official conditions kept the torch alight. They had no wide theory of forestry to sustain their interest; they could certainly have little hope of promotion and advancement to a real career; their experience with ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... hill, and our men are fortified on it. May God be praised, to whom be a thousand thanks given; for He, without our knowledge or our expectations, has disposed this matter thus—blinding this Moro and disheartening him, so that, having been defeated, he should surrender to our governor, and give himself up without more bloodshed. We are trying to secure Dato Ache; if we succeed in this, I shall advise you. Now there ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... forenoon Ladysmith and the little garrison left behind for its defence was the target of Long Tom on Pepworth Hill. The fugitives from Kainguba brought in disheartening reports and the Boers seemed to be threatening from the north. W. Knox, a Horse Artillery officer who had been left in command, anticipated an attack which he had little chance of meeting successfully with the scanty force at his disposal and sent an urgent message to White, who at noon ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... will raise the self-respect of the lower classes. But the effect of such laws must be slow and gradual; and the error which has most contributed to that delay in the progress of freedom, which is 'so disheartening to every liberal mind,'[272] is the confusion as to the true causes of misery. Thus, as he has already urged, professed economists could still believe, so long after the publication of Adam Smith's work, that it was 'in the power of the justices of the ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... the whole business became wretched. Even his greatest admirers were compelled to acknowledge that Mr Turnbull had lost much of his unction, and that except the Spirit were poured down upon them from on high, their prospects were very disheartening. For even the best men in the Church, as, following apostolic example without regard to circumstance, they called each separate community of the initiate, were worldly enough to judge of the degree of heavenly favour shown them, not by the ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... hinderance. It was to him a most delightful chance which had thrown Russell in his way under such peculiar and ridiculous relations to Rita; and to take advantage of this was a happy thought, which filled him with such exultation that for a time he almost lost sight of the darker and more disheartening side of this affair. ...
— A Castle in Spain - A Novel • James De Mille
... more disheartening than being obliged to gather results out of the fraction left behind by past plunderers. In these royal tombs there had been not only the plundering of the precious metals and the larger valuables by the wreckers of ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 12 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... poisoned by port wine, which from its color he had mistaken for claret. The dingy look of the chop-house, and of the little mahogany-colored box in which he ate his dinner, contrasted sadly with the gay saloons of Paris. Everything looked gloomy and disheartening. Poverty stared him in the face; he turned over the few shillings he had of change; did not know what was to become of him; ...
— The Crayon Papers • Washington Irving
... loan on behalf of Ireland, noticed elsewhere. He gave an appalling picture of the state of the English poor, showing that, in Manchester alone, nearly thirty thousand workmen and labourers were out of employment, while the prospect of the augmentation of the unemployed there was disheartening. The grant for Ireland was especially opposed by two members of the house, who, while they sympathised beyond most other members with the political agitators of Ireland, looked upon her material condition without an equally warm interest, and regarded her rather from ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... courage came back, determination strengthened. She began again to write. But tears brimmed her eyes and spoilt the letter once more. It was disheartening work. ...
— Polly of Lady Gay Cottage • Emma C. Dowd |
