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More "Barrenness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... think the thoughts of the noblest and brightest intellects, are prepared for the discovery and selection of all that is great and noble in nature. The greatest natural genius cannot subsist on its own stock: he who resolves never to ransack any mind but his own will be soon reduced, from mere barrenness, to the poorest of all imitations; he will be obliged to imitate himself, and to repeat what he has before often repeated. When we know the subject designed by such men, it will never be difficult to guess what kind of work ...
— Seven Discourses on Art • Joshua Reynolds
... from the bottom, and finally he was compelled to go down half a mile farther, where he made the descent only to find himself in a dense jungle of rose-bushes, willows, and other plants. We had to cut a way in to relieve him. The luxuriant growth of these plants seemed to indicate that the barrenness of the plateau was due not so much to aridity as to the peculiar rock formation, which, disintegrating easily under the frosts and rains, prevented the accumulation of soil. The soil was washed away by every rain and ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... brilliant, though waste, whiteness of the land, gave to the sea by contrast a dark and livid tinge. A landscape covered with snow, though abstractedly it may be called beautiful, has, both from the association of cold and barrenness, and from its comparative infrequency, a wild, strange, and desolate appearance. Objects, well known to us in their common state, have either disappeared, or are so strangely varied and disguised, that we seem ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... on her face! She could never have been a mother. Oh, you may smile, sir; but all my life I have been a reader of the human face; and there is in the aspect of some women the barrenness as of stone—no mother's throb in their bosom—no mother's kiss ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the common mistake of men of the world who are the representatives of an old order of things at the time when that order is doomed and dying. He could not read the signs of the times; and confounded the barrenness of death with the barrenness of a winter which might be followed by a new spring and summer; he believed that the old life-tree of Catholicism, which in fact was but cumbering the ground, might bloom again ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude
... awe-inspiring menace in its dry, bleaching, monotonous levels. He felt more keenly than ever his own helplessness in such a situation and congratulated himself on having fallen in with his two guides. He wondered that the plain had not impressed him more deeply with its desolation and barrenness when he came out to the ranch. But he had no doubt of the ability and good faith of his two companions and he drew his horse a little nearer to them ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... not but see with what demonstrations of wisdom and goodness the governing providence of God directs the events of things in this world, which, they said, appeared in their circumstances: for if, pressed by the hardships they were under, and the barrenness of the country where they were, they had searched after a better to live in, they had then been out of the way of the relief that happened to them ...
— The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... exclaimed Sophron, 'how useless to them are all the blessings of their climate! How much rather would I inhabit the stormy top of Lebanon, amid eternal snows and barrenness, than wallow in the vile sensuality of such a country, or breathe an ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... Aden from the sea, though picturesque, is not inviting, giving one an idea of great barrenness. The mountains and rocks have a peaked aspect, like a spear pointed at one, as much as to say "Better keep off." People who land for the first time, however, are agreeably disappointed by finding that every opportunity for encouraging vegetation and imparting its cheerful effect to ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... did not turn against the work that was brought to you— your teaching, and house, and mother, and Dot, and even Jack—all that came first, and you knew it; you have worked in the corner of the vineyard that was appointed to you, and never murmured over its barrenness and narrow space, and so you are ripe and ready for any great work that may be waiting for you in the future. 'Faithful in little, faithful in much'—how often have I applied ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... feel in myself," quaintly writes another, "a great want of that spirituality of mind which New Zealand is so very unfavourable for; because of the continual scenes of evil that there is before our eyes, and for want of Christian society. So that you must excuse my barrenness of writing, and give me all the ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... Sir George Beaumont, describes Belshazzar's Feast as a "phenomenon." Bulwer declared that Martin was "more original and self-dependent than Raphael or Michael Angelo." In the Last Essays of Elia there is one by Charles Lamb entitled Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of Modern Art. The name of Martin is not mentioned, but several of his works are unmistakably described. "His towered architecture [Lamb is writing of Belshazzar's Feast] are of the highest order of the material ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... we make brief extracts. "There has been a reviving of religion of late amongst us, but your labors have been much more remarkably blessed than mine. May God send you hither with the like blessing as He has sent you to some other places, and may your coming be a means to humble me for my barrenness and unprofitableness, and a means of my instruction and enlivening. I want an opportunity to concert measures with you, for the advancement of the kingdom and glory ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... shadows danced macabre in the light of the candles; they were the only furniture of that part of the rough dwelling that the owner shuffled through as quickly as he could to save his guest from spying too closely the barrenness of the land. He went first to the outer door with the candle before he said good night, drew back great bars, and opened the oak. The sky was studded with pale golden stars; the open air was dense with the ...
— Doom Castle • Neil Munro
... volleys of heavy thunder were mingled with the gusts of wind and rain which swept over the city, and which lashed the fair southern sea into a dark semblance of such angry waves as wear away northern coasts into bleak and rocky barrenness. It was disappointing weather to multitudes, for it was the feast-day of one of the numerous saints whose names fill the calendar of the Roman Church,—and a great religious procession had been organized to march from the market-place to the Cathedral, in which two or ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... that the long contemplation of rectangular solids, planes, and straight lines in Froebel's gifts should tend towards too great rigidity and barrenness of imagination in inventive work, it is obviously within our power, as has been shown, to vary this mathematical exactness, which is no doubt less agreeable to the child than the graceful image of his own fancy (could he attain it), by introducing ...
— Froebel's Gifts • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... she asked, bewildered by the barrenness of the spot on which the topsy turvy house had stood for so ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris
... formlessness the more lovingly and richly. She has unrolled on it a carpet of various and solemn-tinted stuffs, where pale breadths of rusted bents sometimes mellow into strips of verdurous pasture, sometimes deepen into belts of embrowned peat-beds, sometimes take a yellower barrenness in parched flats, still briny and unreclaimed, and shaggy with bristling reeds. It is a wilderness, but not unrelieved with here and there an oasis, where, like islands left high and dry in a deserted ocean ...
— Uppingham by the Sea - a Narrative of the Year at Borth • John Henry Skrine
... and the life of the home is still deeply religious; Jewish mothers do not go out to work in factories, they are more concerned with the service of the home than with anything outside of the home. They are very old-fashioned, and they are very happy: they consider barrenness the greatest ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... cheap, heavily ruled, glazed paper that is sold alongside plug tobacco and pearl buttons and safety pins in the Indian traders' stores. Staring from under her straight brows at that folded letter, Annie-Many-Ponies had a swift, clear vision of the little store set down in the midst of barrenness and dust, and of the squaws sitting wrapped in bright shawls upon the platform while their lords gravely purchased small luxuries within. As a slim, barefooted papoose, proud of her shapeless red calico slip buttoned unevenly ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... herself, pleaded for herself, striven to rouse his sympathy and compassion, so that, within the sombre barrenness of her ill-starred life, one spot there might be where the loving kindness of human charity had fallen and made it bright. He remembered how he had answered her—coldly, sternly, crushing down her awakening soul with the same callous indifference which ...
— The Rider of Waroona • Firth Scott
... Protesteth his devotion is my price— Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal? I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush, What set me off a-writing first of all. An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang! For, be it this town's barrenness—or else The Man had something in the look of him— His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. So, pardon if—(lest presently I lose In the great press of novelty at hand The care and pains this somehow stole from me) I bid thee take the thing while fresh ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... are an angel! I have told you so before, and it may be a proof of the barrenness of my resources to tell you so again, but it is true. God forgive me, my precious! I should like to see the man whose heart could harden while such a woman ...
— Vagabondia - 1884 • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... place of secretary to a Napoleon was far more desirable than that of the minister himself. As soon as he became the friend and secretary of Canalis he did a great amount of labor for him, but by the end of eighteen months he had learned to understand the barrenness of a nature that was poetic through literary expression only. The truth of the old proverb, "The cowl doesn't make the monk," is eminently shown in literature. It is extremely rare to find among literary men a nature and a talent that are in perfect accord. The faculties are not the man himself. ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... led me into the Greenland seas, so chance sent me into a Greenland port. It was a choice little harbor, a good way north of the Arctic Circle,—fairly within the realm of hyperborean barrenness,—very near the northernmost border of civilized settlement. But civilization was exhibited there by unmistakable evidences;—a very dilute civilization, it is true, yet, such as it was, outwardly recognizable; for Christian habitations and Christian beings were in sight ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 117, July, 1867. • Various
... and biting winds had gradually been left behind, and Nature, coy and uncertain at first, had, with the advance into the South, grown bolder. They had come from the land of bleakness and barrenness—from the place of leafless trees—into the region of Summer, almost in a day and night. They had exchanged ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Florida - Or, Wintering in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... comforts of life, and expose your wives and children to famine and all the evils of poverty. We do not dispute the soundness of this conclusion neither—but we utterly deny that it has any application to the people of Liberia. Away with all the false notions that are circulating about the barrenness of this country. They are the observations of such ignorant or designing men, as would injure both it and you. A more fertile soil and a more productive country, so far as it is cultivated, there is not, we believe, on the face of the earth. Its hills and its plains ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... day ended. But oh, the emptiness of the morrow! Life without a crime, without a single noble sentiment to brighten it!—no comic uncles, no creamy angels! Oh, the barrenness and dreariness of life! Even my mother at ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of the ovaries, their tubes, the womb, the testicles and their excretory ducts, as referred to under "Excess of venereal desire," are causes of barrenness. In this connection it may be said that the discharges consequent on calving are fatal to the vitality of semen introduced before these have ceased to flow; hence service too soon after calving, or that of a cow which has had the womb or genital passages injured so as to keep up a mucopurulent ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... and dispirited in this alien place, he wondered if he wished himself back. But the moment he actually realised himself at home, and felt the tension of barrenness which it meant, felt the curious and deadly opposition of his wife's will against his own nature, the almost nauseating ache which it amounted to, he pulled himself together and rejoiced again in his new surroundings. ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... of his peaceful as prosperous reign. One thing only disturbed his happiness, which was, that he was pretty old, and had no children, though he had so many wives. He knew not what to attribute this barrenness to; and what increased his affliction was, that he was likely to leave his kingdom without a successor. He dissembled his discontent a long while; and, what was yet more uneasy to him, he was constrained ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments Volume 1 • Anonymous
... progressed swiftly toward finality. The Englishman came from among women. For months he had been in a torment of desolation. Cummins' wife was to him like a flower suddenly come to relieve the tantalizing barrenness of a desert; and with the wiles and ways of civilization he sought to breathe ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... and branched, And with a flame of living green lit all The barrenness about. And still it grew— Until it touched the pillars of the earth, And lapped its boundaries, the far and near, And under it, as brethren in a tent, The nations made their home, and ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace
... time, conclamatum est, especially goats, whose mouths and breath is poison to trees; they never thrive well after; and Varro affirms, if they but lick the olive-tree, they become immediately barren. And now we have mention'd barrenness, we do not reckon trees to be sterile, which do not yield a fruitful burden constantly every year (as juniper and some annotines do) no more than of pregnant women: Whilst that is to be accounted a fruitful tree which yields its product every second or third ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... difficult purchase. The quantity of labour which any particular quantity of them can purchase or command, or the quantity of other goods which it will exchange for, depends always upon the fertility or barrenness of the mines which happen to be known about the time when such exchanges are made. The discovery of the abundant mines of America, reduced, in the sixteenth century, the value of gold and silver in Europe to about a third of what it had been before. As it cost less labour ...
— An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations • Adam Smith
... had been popular in Ascalon, mainly because of the barrenness of the country, which offered no convenient branches except on the cottonwoods along the river. Wagon tongues upended and propped by neckyokes had been known to serve in their time, and telegraph poles when the railroad built through. ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... salt water ends, the aspect of the country changes, not gradually, but suddenly; on the one hand absolute barrenness, on the other exuberant vegetation; and wherever irrigation brings a drop of water, plants spring up, and the sterile dust becomes fertile soil. The contrast is most striking. We had passed Lake Mareotis, and on either side of the railroad stretched fields ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... we feel utterly helpless before that lovely life of His. Given the conditions—the hidden power within, and the old outlets of growth shut off—the sun will do the rest; out of the midst of apparent lifelessness, of barrenness, of difficulty, the blossoms will be drawn forth. Do not let us "limit the Holy One of Israel" by putting off His power to work this miracle into a distant future. How hopeless the naked wood of a fruit tree ...
— Parables of the Cross • I. Lilias Trotter
... to apply these as touchstones. Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl's Theory of Poetry in England, which aims at giving us a representative selection of the theoretical things which were said in England about poetry between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes one wonder at the barrenness of men's thoughts about so fruitful a world as that of the poets. Mr. Cowl's book is not intended to be read as an anthology of fine things. Its value is not that of a book of golden thoughts. It is an ordered selection of documents chosen, ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... fresh vegetation in the dry season. Perhaps the dense shade, the long period during which the land remains under water, and the excessively rapid desiccation when the waters retire, all contribute to the barrenness of these Ygapos. The higher and drier land is everywhere sandy, and tall coarse grasses line the borders of the broad alleys which have been cut through the second-growth woods. These places swarm with carapatos, ugly ticks belonging to the genus ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... either side of her. Wherever she set her blessed foot, there was at once a dewy flower. The violets gushed up along the wayside. The grass and the grain began to sprout with tenfold vigor and luxuriance, to make up for the dreary months that had been wasted in barrenness. The starved cattle immediately set to work grazing, after their long fast, and ate enormously all day, and got up at midnight to eat more. But I can assure you it was a busy time of year with the farmers, when they found the summer coming upon them with such a rush. Nor must ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... fearful responsibility of involving the reputation of such bodies as the S. Archaeol. Dahom., or the Acad. Lit. et Scient. Kamtschat. I cannot but think that the early editions of Shakspeare and Milton would have met with more rapid and general acceptance, but for the barrenness of their respective title-pages; and I believe that, even now, a publisher of the works of either of those justly distinguished men would find his account in procuring their admission to the membership of learned bodies on the Continent,—a ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... improved methods. Posidonius constructed an orrery, which exhibited the diurnal motions of the sun, moon, and five planets. Posidonius calculated the circumference of the earth to be two hundred and forty thousand stadia by a different method from Eratosthenes. The barrenness of discovery, from Hipparchus to Ptolemy, in spite of the patronage of the Ptolemies, was owing to the want of instruments for the accurate measure of time, like our clocks, to the imperfection of astronomical tables, ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... gable, or even a mossy stone remains to claim the "passing tribute" of a sigh, or a vain regret for the golden days of our Irish Church. Yet its very barrenness of ruins made it dearer to my heart, for one never clings more fondly to the memory of a dear friend than when all mementoes of him are lost. As warned by the stroke of the town-clock, I hurried down to the station to be whirled away to Dublin, I thought that perhaps my ...
— Donahoe's Magazine, Volume 15, No. 2, February 1886 • Various
... in a projecting promontory, which their guide told them was the Cape of Terracina. But their attention was arrested by an object which was much nearer than this. Through that gray Campagna,—whose gray hue, the result of waste and barrenness, seemed also to mark its hoary age,—through this there ran a silver thread, with many a winding to and fro, now coming full into view, and gleaming in the sun, now retreating, till it was ...
— Among the Brigands • James de Mille
... case, and we think that a word or two is misplaced. I wish some time you would consider the case under the following point of view. If sterility is caused or accumulated through Natural Selection, then, as every degree exists up to absolute barrenness, Natural Selection must have the power of increasing it. Now take two species, A and B, and assume that they are (by any means) half-sterile, i.e. produce half the full number of offspring. Now try and make (by Natural Selection) A and B absolutely sterile when crossed, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... of a railway station there will be a swamp, and instead of a turnpike gate, a wood. Mighty towns and spacious cities will shrink into obscure villages; smiling and fertile districts relapse into original barrenness; kinsfolk and acquaintance be put nearly out of sight. There are no mails; there is no penny post; the last new novel will not reach you. The Bishop of Exeter may become a cardinal, or Colonel Sibthorpe commander of the forces, ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... voice crying in the wilderness," and not one of the men I have picked out as specially typical of the period instituted any new departure either in practice or in science. They were servile followers, when not of the Greeks, of the Arabians. This is attested by the barrenness of the century and a half that followed. One would have thought that the stimulus given by Mundinus to the study of anatomy would have borne fruit, but little was done in science during the two and a half centuries ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... to be reduced to slavery and degradation. Babylonia to utter barrenness and desolation; but a different and still more incredible doom is pronounced in the Bible upon Judea and its people. The land was to be emptied of its people, and remain uncultivated, retaining all its former fertility, while the people were ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Her fall had brought her renovatingly to earth, and the saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a barrenness to her sensibilities. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... negroes, lies waste and uninhabited, except by wild beasts; the negroes having abandoned it and gone farther south for fear of the Moors, and the Moors not thinking it worth inhabiting by reason of its barrenness; and indeed, both forsaking it because of the prodigious number of tigers, lions, leopards, and other furious creatures which harbour there; so that the Moors use it for their hunting only, where they go like an army, two or three thousand men at ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... my Dictophone to a fussy "afternoon" and record the word evacuations, the footless conversation, the forced pleasantries, the set sentences that mingle into a hum and buzz. A wilderness of words in a barrenness ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... the earth and grass and trees had grown sweeter to me. I thought how barren, though I had not known it, the world had been before this transformation, and how unendurable to me would be a return of that barrenness. ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... before her wedding year is out." A curse equivalent to barrenness. The work of digging roots was ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... spoke to him about the barrenness of her existence, as there was nobody she could go to see, and nothing to amuse her or distract her thoughts. She wished to ...
— Sentimental Education, Volume II - The History of a Young Man • Gustave Flaubert
... the region to which most of the Seminole have been driven by the advances of civilization, is, taken all in all, unlike any other part of our country. In climate it is subtropical; in character of soil it shows a contrast of comparative barrenness and abounding fertility; and in topography it is a plain, with hardly any perceptible natural elevations or depressions. The following description, based upon the notes of my journey to the Big Cypress Swamp, indicates the character of the country ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley
... women live licentiously and have few children, will you maintain that it is their business to have few children? And what would become of your towns if the remote country districts, with their simpler and purer women, did not make up for the barrenness of your fine ladies? There are plenty of country places where women with only four or five children are reckoned unfruitful. In conclusion, although here and there a woman may have few children, what difference does it make? [Footnote: Without this the race would necessarily diminish; ...
— Emile • Jean-Jacques Rousseau
... in the morning, ascending the hill-range by a steep winding footpath up one of its ridges, which, in respect to its barrenness and soil, resembled the descent I had from Yafir. After completing eleven miles' march, the caravan crested the hill opposite Ras[21] Galweni, travelled a short way on the flat of the summit, and encamped in the evening amongst some thick jungle on its north ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... vision of transfiguration—that illumined Zion radiant with splendor? Across the river, lighted by the evening's after-glow of fire, rose a celestial city, with towers, spires, and battlements glittering as if sheathed in burnished gold. Sunshine and distance had dispelled all traces of the region's barrenness, and for a few memorable moments, while we watched it breathlessly, its sparkling bastions seemed to beckon us alluringly to its magnificence; then, fading like an exquisite mirage created by the genii of the desert, it swiftly sank into the desolation from which the sun had summoned it, ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... but his heavy lips merely worked in a crazy barrenness of sound. With a vague, clumsy idea of covering up his confusion, he started to ...
— No Clue - A Mystery Story • James Hay
... be well learnt from a very clever and interesting little book of Professor Geikie's, on 'The Scenery of Scotland, as affected by its Geological Structure.' How far the plants and trees affect not merely the general beauty, the richness or barrenness of a country, but also its very shape; the rate at which the hills are destroyed and washed into the lowland; the rate at which the seaboard is being removed by the action of waves—all these are branches of study which is becoming ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... diminishing rapidly in importance as it slid into the past, and Johnny was facing a problem quite as great, was harboring ambitions quite as dazzling, as when he rode a sweaty horse across the barren stretches of the Rolling R Ranch and dreamed the while of soaring far above the barrenness. ...
— The Thunder Bird • B. M. Bower
... same opportunity for cruelty and injustice, without being exposed to the same risks: we will compel them to abjure vital clergymen by a public test, to deny that the said William Wilberforce has any power of working miracles, touching for barrenness or any other infirmity, or that he is endowed with any preternatural gift whatever. We will swear them to the doctrine of good works, compel them to preach common sense, and to hear it; to frequent Bishops, Deans, and other High Churchmen; and to appear, once in ...
— Peter Plymley's Letters and Selected Essays • Sydney Smith
... inscrutable, unchanged, irreducible. The mightiness of its calm was a smiting thing. The awesomeness of its chill, indifferent nights, the unsparing ardors of its merciless noons, the measureless expanses of its levels, the cold barrenness of its hills—these things did not invite as to the bosom of a welcoming mother; they repelled, as with the chill gesture of a stranger turning ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... The scene of barrenness was here and there interrupted by the spreading branches of the larch and cedar, which threw their gloom over the cliff, or athwart the torrent that rolled in the vale. No living creature appeared, except the izard, scrambling among the rocks, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... Privilege by Licence from the Pope, which, if it could have been converted into a Prohibition, might have sav'd that Duke's Life: In regard their Country is wholly inland, and the River Tagus famous for its Poverty, or rather Barrenness; their Holy Father indulges the Natives with the Liberty, in lieu of that dangerous Eatable, of eating all Lent time the Inwards of Cattle. When I first heard this related, I imagin'd, that the Garbidge had been intended, but I was soon after ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... he returned. "How does it come then," he next said, "that with this barrenness of our intercourse I know so ...
— The Awkward Age • Henry James
... into him; arising to what climate soever he turn him, like that Sun of Righteousness that sent him, with healing in his wings, and new light to break in upon the chill and gloomy hearts of his hearers, raising out of darksome barrenness a delicious and fragrant spring of saving knowledge and good works. Can a man thus employed find himself discontented or dishonoured for want of admittance to have a pragmatical voice at sessions and jail deliveries? or because he may not as a judge sit out the wrangling noise ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... in a lonely central figure in a scene, the outline cuts so sharply against the horizon. Nan's eyes seemed riveted on it as she listened to Phillis's voice; it seemed to her as immovable as a Sphinx, its rigidity lending a sort of barrenness and forlornness to the landscape, a black edition of human nature set under a ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... Could he have looked into Jean's soul, he would have seen that it was seared with the fresh memory of iron bars and high walls and her dad who never saw any roses; and that the contrast between their beauty and the terrible barrenness that surrounded him was like a blow ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... mixed schools, without at once interfering with Catholic conscience. No such teaching is attempted, as a general rule, we believe, in the Public Schools of the United States, and hence we have only a vague announcement of moral precepts, the utter futility and barrenness of which must be evident to every one. Catholics, agreeing with very many enlightened and zealous Protestants, believe that secular education, administered without religion, is not only vain, but exceedingly pernicious; that it is ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... imprisonment, disgrace, repulse, [1796] contumely, calumny, abuse, injury, contempt, ingratitude, unkindness, scoffs, flouts, unfortunate marriage, single life, too many children, no children, false servants, unhappy children, barrenness, banishment, oppression, frustrate ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... lives; and where there seemed no hope of serving she shrank from fruitless confidences. She was beginning to feel this to be the case with Bessy Amherst. To touch the rock was not enough, if there were but a few drops within it; yet in this barrenness lay the pathos of the situation—and after all, may not the scanty spring be fed ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... together. And on this day also, the Athenians carry about the Eiresione, a bough of the olive tree garlanded with wool, just as Theseus had before carried the suppliants' bough, and covered with first-fruits of all sorts of produce, because the barrenness of the land ceased on that day; and ...
— Plutarch's Lives, Volume I (of 4) • Plutarch
... opening in the trees above. The grass was waving strangely in that area of moonlight. It moved, although there was no breeze to move it. And there was an almost sudden edge, beyond which the blades thinned out quickly to barrenness. ...
— Happy Ending • Fredric Brown
... more than a Prophet, a landscape which in its sublimity excited the imagination as powerfully as any gigantic form of the Elijah could have done, even though Michel Angelo had drawn it. It is meant to represent, and does perfectly represent, an illimitable desert, a boundless surface of barrenness and desolation, where Nature can bring forth nothing but seeds of death, and the only tree there is dead and withered, not a leaf to be seen nor possible. The only other objects, beside the level of the desert, either smooth with sand or rough with ragged rock, are a range of dark ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... latter times—would not have murdered his wife with a pillow—if he had murdered her at all—and would not have brought forward on the stage the bed-room of a jealous husband, with his wife expecting his approach. The barrenness of the stage in Shakspeare's time was an advantage in a scene like this;—when people were told to fancy that old bench was a bed, and that the close-shaved stripling reclining on it was a woman—the imagination was set down to a feast of its own: the scanty scenery ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... Egypt's sceptre should pass again to the hand of Egypt's true and Royal race. But when my father, the old High Priest Amenemhat, whose only child I was, she who was his wife before my mother having been, for what crime I know not, cursed with barrenness by Sekhet: I say when my father came in and saw what the dying woman had done, he lifted up his hands towards the vault of heaven and adored the Invisible, because of the sign that had been sent. And as he adored, the Hathors[*] filled my dying mother with the Spirit of ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard
... discord of the Mahometans, and their personal esteem for the character of Frederic. The enemy of the church is accused of maintaining with the miscreants an intercourse of hospitality and friendship unworthy of a Christian; of despising the barrenness of the land; and of indulging a profane thought, that if Jehovah had seen the kingdom of Naples he never would have selected Palestine for the inheritance of his chosen people. Yet Frederic obtained ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... social machine, organized to its minutest details, and regulated through all its processes; these at first may lead the visitor from the New World to suppose that he has fallen upon some region of persevering formality, where all is frost and show, perpetual glitter and unmeaning barrenness. But pierce these formal barriers of etiquette, dissolve by the requisite appliances this superficial frost-work of the English circles, and none, it is believed, will have any just reason to complain of coldness and reserve. By the social barriers spoken of, are ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, April 1844 - Volume 23, Number 4 • Various
... his heart. And if your faith also is little, and your spending money also is run low, try this way of love and imagination. If you have a better way, then go on with it and be happy yourself and helpful to others; but if your faith is at a standstill and is stricken with barrenness, try my counsel of putting more heart and more inward eye, more holy love and more heavenly joy, into your frigid ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... such the tyrants, who, under the reigns of Valerian and Gallienus, dismembered the provinces, and reduced the empire to the lowest pitch of disgrace and ruin, from whence it seemed impossible that it should ever emerge. As far as the barrenness of materials would permit, we have attempted to trace, with order and perspicuity, the general events of that calamitous period. There still remain some particular facts; I. The disorders of Sicily; II. The tumults of Alexandria; and, III. The rebellion of the Isaurians, which ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... salons of palaces and the cells of monasteries. Had they been scattered over the land and seen by the people, they might have kept alive the spark that kindled their creators. But exclu-siveness is inevitably followed by barrenness. When the great race of Spanish artists ended, these matchless works were kept in the safe obscurity of palaces and religious establishments. History was working in the interests of this Museum. The pictures were held by the clenched dead hand of the Church and the throne. They could not be ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity, no perpetual gloom or unceasing sunshine; nor are the nations here described either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private and social virtues; here are no Hottentots without religion, polity, ...
— A Voyage to Abyssinia • Jerome Lobo
... tumultuously from the mountains, twisted in its canyon bed and squirmed away to westward and northward after making a gigantic loop that took it almost to the Line. To the south, a ranch at Willow Spring, where a stubborn cattleman hung on in spite of growing barrenness due to the hated sheep, was forty miles away. To east and west was no ...
— Louisiana Lou • William West Winter
... islands amidst the northern seas, beaten by storm, and chilled by ice-drift, and tormented by furious pulses of contending tide, until the roots of the last forests fail from among the hill ravines, and the hunger of the north wind bites their peaks into barrenness; and, at last, the wall of ice, durable like iron, sets, deathlike, its white teeth against us out of the polar twilight. And, having once traversed in thought this gradation of the zoned iris of the earth in all its material vastness, let us go down nearer to it, and watch the parallel ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... skeleton-like prison frameworks at the unglazed windows were in keeping with the dreadful spirits of these unregenerate anchorites. The forlorn apartments were piled one above the other until the historic cylinder of stone opened to the sky. In contrast to the barrenness of the gray inclosures, through the squares of the windows throbbed the blue and gold, green and lilac, of Italian ...
— Nathaniel Hawthorne • George E. Woodberry
... his duty to keep in order: a difficult task, which he accomplished so well as to gain the special commendation of the King, and even the goodwill of the Highlanders themselves. He was five years among these northern hills, battling with ill-health, and restless under the intellectual barrenness of his surroundings. He felt his position to be in no way salutary, and wrote to his mother: "The fear of becoming a mere ruffian and of imbibing the tyrannical principles of an absolute commander, or giving way insensibly to the temptations of power till I became proud, insolent, and intolerable,—these ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... was a land of desolation, radiant in its barrenness. For every rock, every foot of ground, was made of crystal. Nearby hills were visions of loveliness where the colors of a million rainbows quivered and flashed. Veins of metal showed the rich blues and greens of peacock coloring. Others were scarlet, topaz, green, and ...
— Two Thousand Miles Below • Charles Willard Diffin
... a very fine one, and I do not think its grandeur has ever been done justice to in description. Its attributes are all gigantic: it has the picturesque ruggedness of the Appenines, without their barrenness; since the valleys lying between the ridges, wherever they have been cleared, give evidences of the richest soil. A view from any hill top, however, shows these clearings to be mere specks in the surrounding forest, which yet clothes richly the sides of ...
— Impressions of America - During the years 1833, 1834 and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Tyrone Power
... the barrenness of this desert land necessitated these wandering tribes to migrate to adjacent areas of greater fertility. To the north lay the fertile valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates and the coast of the Mediterranean Sea; to the west lay the land of the Egyptians. Time and time again, ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks
... when the chilling blasts whistled around our dwelling, and everything seemed sealed up with perpetual frost, the ice and snow would be smoking around the spring. Thus, like a steady stream, let your graces flow, unaffected by the drought or barrenness of others, melting ...
— A Practical Directory for Young Christian Females - Being a Series of Letters from a Brother to a Younger Sister • Harvey Newcomb
... no child. This barrenness, which, from month to month, brought floods of tears from her eyes, was long the cause of Brigitte's scorn; she reproached the poor woman bitterly for being fit for nothing, not even to bear children. The old maid, who had longed to love her brother's child ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... once, and once only. The visit was too painful to himself, and he felt also to Christine, to be repeated. The hideous barrenness of the place seemed an outrage to her delicacy and made the refinement of her beauty seem cruelly out of place. But more than all, when Noel looked on the untidy negligence and brutal insensibility ...
— A Beautiful Alien • Julia Magruder
... preparations for wintering there. Magellan, perceiving that the voyage would be a long one, in order that the provisions might last longer, ordered the rations to be diminished. The Spaniards endured this with patience for some days, but alarmed at the length of the winter and the barrenness of the land, at last petitioned their admiral Magellan, saying that it was evident that this continent extended an indefinite distance south-wards, and that there was no hope of discovering the end of it, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1803 • Emma Helen Blair
... mountains, he was of the opinion of Dr Johnson that "an eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvests is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility" and that "this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveller" (Works, ed. 1787, ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... omnibus may want only a power of articulate expression to bring before us some of the deepest of all problems. The parish clerk and the grocer—or whatever may be the proverbial epitome of human dulness—may swell the chorus of lamentation over the barrenness and the hardships and the wasted energies and the harsh discords of life which is always 'steaming up' from the world, and to which it is one, though perhaps not the highest, of the poet's functions to make us duly sensible. Crabbe, like all realistic writers, must be studied ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... It is this barrenness of invention that the ingenious Goldoni has so well exposed in one of his plays, in the following speech, addressed ...
— A Treatise on the Art of Dancing • Giovanni-Andrea Gallini
... the productions of the dry (we cannot call them high) grounds: the swamps, with which this coast abounds, are still more fruitful, and abundantly compensate the avidity and barrenness of the soil around them. They bear rice in such plenty, especially the marsh about New Orleans, "That the inhabitants reap the greatest advantage from it, and reckon it the manna of the land." [Footnote: ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... hides a gulf of waters more dead than those of the dreadful Dead Sea, rise between me and the honest, brave face of Silas,—dreary flats, whose wastes are not figured in utter barrenness by the awful African deserts, where ranks upon ranks of women, like Jessie at least in love and fidelity, must stand, or—"where is the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... preserves a woman in the one case will preserve her in the other. There is one argument which I scarce know how to deliver before you, sir; but—if a woman hath lived with her first husband without having children, I think it unpardonable in her to carry barrenness into a second family. On the contrary, if she hath children by her first husband, to give them a second father ...
— Amelia (Complete) • Henry Fielding
... possibilities. Struggling artists, weary souls lingering in the shadow of cold disdain! In our self-centered century, what inspiration do we offer them? The past may well look with pity at the poverty of our civilisation; the future will laugh at the barrenness of our art. We are destroying the beautiful in life. Would that some great wizard might from the stem of society shape a mighty harp whose strings would resound ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... round the well three times in a direction Deishal—that is from east to west, according to the course of the sun. They also drink of the water and bathe in it. These operations are accounted a certain remedy for various diseases. They are particularly efficacious for curing barrenness, on which account it is frequently visited by those who are very desirous of offspring. All the invalids throw a white stone on the Saint's cairn, and leave behind them as tokens of their gratitude and confidence ...
— Chronicles of Strathearn • Various
... passed the light by nearly half a mile, the road went up a slight hill, and the keeper led the way at right angles along a ridge of rock. It was rough almost beyond believing, but its very barrenness had made it useful. As the keeper had shrewdly hoped, the swirling blizzard had left its rough length bare, when all the lower ground was deep in snow. For the hundredth time since he had been on the station, Eric had to admit the ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Life-Savers • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... a farming country around here," remarked Dave, as he looked at the general barrenness of the aspect. Here and there were clumps of trees and patches of rough grass, ...
— Dave Porter in the Gold Fields - The Search for the Landslide Mine • Edward Stratemeyer
... p. 105. l. 21. —Sudra like. The lowest caste who are not privileged, and indeed have no disposition in the native barrenness of their minds to study ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... Canadian thorn—a great improvement on the old snake fence of rough split timber which prevails all through the colony. What a difference it would make in the aspect of the country if these green hedgerows were in general use! It would take from the savage barrenness given to it by these crooked wooden lines, that cross and recross the country in all directions: no object can be less picturesque or more unpleasing to the eye. A new clearing reminds one of a large turnip field, divided by hurdles ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... the higher female education in the United States was fairly represented by this company of young women, with a great deal that was elevated in aim, and earnest in intention, it was characterized by much confusion, much waste of power, and much barrenness of result, and ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... food for the consumption of its inhabitants, and as yet the demand for exportation is limited to the simple requirements of a few thousand tributary nomads. The orchards and green areas about the villages render the whole scene, as usual, beautiful in comparison with the surrounding barrenness, but that is all. Compared with our own green hills and smiling valleys, the Valley of Herat would scarcely seem worth all the noise that has been made about it. There has been a great amount of sentiment ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... account of his journey: A Tour through Sicily and Malta in a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esquire, of Somerly, in Suffolk, from Patrick Brydone, F.R.S. Near Catania he saw some lava covered with a scanty soil, incapable of producing either corn or vines; he imagined from its barrenness that ...
— Castellinaria - and Other Sicilian Diversions • Henry Festing Jones
... hills. At length it entered upon a settlement where the land was lean and rocks lifted their frowning heads above the surface. The few houses were poor, standing out grey and gaunt in the midst of this weird barrenness. But at every door Midnight was accustomed to stop. Well did she know the little voices which welcomed her, and the tiny hands which stroked her soft nose, or held up some dainty morsel of bread, potatoes or grass. But to-day there was none of this. She knew when ...
— The Fourth Watch • H. A. Cody
... Brussels, which city he reached on the 4th December, filling every hotel and hospital with his sick soldiers, and having left one-third of his numbers behind him. He had manifested his own military skill in the adroit and successful manner in which he had accomplished the relief of Paris, while the barrenness of the result from the whole expedition vindicated the political sagacity with which he had remonstrated against his ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Earth Mother needed light that her eyes might be opened, that she might bear children and escape the disgrace of her barrenness. To Yaeethl the Clever, Yaeethl the Cunning, went Klingatona-Kla, weeping, and of the Raven begged aid. And Yaeethl took pity on her and promised that she should have Kayah, the Light, ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne
... the Baron, who was wholly indifferent to the matter, nearly had old Jorrocks pitched over the mare's head by applying the furze-bush (which he had got from the boy) to her tail while Mr. Jorrocks was sitting loosely, contemplating the barrenness of the prospect. The sherry was still alive, and being all for fun, he shuffled back into the saddle as soon as the old mare gave over kicking; and giving a loud tally-ho, with some minor "hunting noises," which ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... the hilltops when we arose. Everything, even the barrenness, was beautiful. We have had frosts, and the quaking aspens were a trembling field of gold as far up the stream as we could see. We were 'way up above them and could look far across the valley. We ...
— Letters of a Woman Homesteader • Elinore Pruitt Stewart
... an imagination as boundless as the range of nature in the scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth."[443] Wordsworth disapproved of Scott's method in description. He is quoted as having said: "Nature does not permit ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... should be as full and explicit as Bottiger, with the advantage of writing upon a theme more familiar to us Europeans of this day, than any parallel theme even in our own national archaeologies of two centuries back. United, however, with his great reading, this barrenness of the subject is so far an advantage for Hartmann, as it yields a strong presumption that he has exhausted it. The male costume of ancient Palestine is yet to be illustrated; but, for the female, it is probable that little could be added to what Hartmann has collected; [Footnote 1] and that ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... 28, for 'absence of the detail of private life' read 'barrenness in Oldys's biography of ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... having contributed much that is excellent to the literature of the world, and in its roll of famous literary men are to be found names which would redeem any country from the charge of intellectual barrenness. Spinoza, Erasmus, and Hugo de Groot (Grotius), to name no others, form a trio whose influence upon the thought of the world, and upon the movements which make for human progress, has been beyond estimation, and which still belongs to-day to the ...
— Dutch Life in Town and Country • P. M. Hough
... stratification, or their granitic form, and though not covered with dense masses of climbing plants, like those in moister eastern climates, there is still the idea conveyed that most of the steep sides are fertile, and none give the impression of that barrenness which, in northern mountains, suggests the idea that the bones of the world are sticking ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone
... Middle Ages. "Each famous author of antiquity whom I recall," he indignantly exclaims, "places a new offense and another cause of dishonor to the charge of later generations, who, not satisfied with their own disgraceful barrenness, permitted the fruit of other minds and the writings that their ancestors had produced by toil and application, to perish through shameful neglect. Although they had nothing of their own to hand down to those who were to come after, they robbed ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... confession costs me more than appears on the surface. My irony when I think of myself tastes bitter on the palate. There was something barren in the clay from which God formed the Ploszowskis, since on that soil everything springs up and grows so luxuriously, yet produces no fruit. Truly, if with this barrenness, this powerlessness to act, I possessed the abilities of a genius, it would be a strange kind of genius,—a genius without portfolio, as there are ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... of the "khiva" resulted in disappointment. The immediate impression that the boys received was one of cave-like barrenness. In the half-light only a gray monotony met the eye. Yet under this ghostlike pall, forms soon began to appear. In the center of the chamber stood what was apparently an altar. In spite of its burden of dust an elevation could be seen about eight inches high ...
— The Air Ship Boys • H.L. Sayler
... great stress has been laid on the savage custom of exposing the children whom their parents could not maintain; whilst the man of sensibility, who thus, perhaps, complains, by his promiscuous amours produces a most destructive barrenness and contagious flagitiousness of manners. Surely nature never intended that women, by satisfying an appetite, should frustrate the very purpose ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... yet, believe me, and I am not swayed by resentment, these speeches so justly poized, this silent deference, when the animal spirits of other young people were throwing off youthful ebullitions, were not the effect of thought or humility, but sheer barrenness of mind, and want of imagination. A colt of mettle will curvet and shew his paces. Yes; my dear girl, these prudent young men want all the fire necessary to ferment their faculties, and are characterized ...
— Posthumous Works - of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman • Mary Wollstonecraft
... forest no longer, In the sunshine the leaflets expand: With barrenness cursed be the land That is bathed with the ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... The severe barrenness of the staircase made them very grave. An attendant, superbly attired in a red waistcoat and a coat trimmed with gold lace, who seemed to be awaiting them on the landing, increased their emotion. It ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... let this thought equalise all states. Let him do with us as with the waves of the sea, and whether he takes us to his bosom, or casts us upon the sand, that is, leaves us to our own barrenness, all is well. ...
— Letters of Madam Guyon • P. L. Upham
... Colour, Features, Strength, Agility, Beauty (or the want of it) Complexions, Hair, Dyet, Inclinations, and Customs that seem not due to Education. As to their Women (besides the other things) may be observed their Fruitfulness or Barrenness; their hard or easy Labour, &c. And both in Women and Men must be taken notice of what diseases they are subject to, and in these whether there be any symptome, or any other Circumstance, ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... head of this poor maid, much of which, as it was spoken rapidly in an ancient form of Hebrew, we did not understand. He cursed her living, dying, and after death. He cursed her in her love and hate, wedded or alone. He cursed her in child-bearing or in barrenness, and he cursed her children after her to all generations. Lastly, he declared her cut off from and rejected by the god she worshipped, and sentenced her to death at the hands of any who could slay her. So horrible was that curse that ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... enjoy an intercourse with women, you must carefully conceal from them all that you have told me; they will not be willing to sow the flowers of their love upon the rocks or lavish their caresses to soothe a sickened spirit. Women will discover the barrenness of your heart and you will be ever more and more unhappy. Few among them would be frank enough to tell you what I have told you, or sufficiently good-natured to leave you without rancor, offering their friendship, like the woman who ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... ornaments, a hat without any feathers, a head with its locks not artistically arranged, and a coat that suffers from a paucity of ribbons. Heavens! what lovers are these! what stinginess in dress! what barrenness of conversation! It is not to be allowed; it is not to be borne. I ...
— The Pretentious Young Ladies • Moliere
... the Antonines came a "period of sterility and barrenness in human beings." Bounties were offered for marriage. Penalties were devised against race-suicide. "Marriage," says Metellus, "is a duty which, however painful, every citizen ought manfully to discharge." ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... altered. But the small iron porch, little longer than the width of the doorway, must be supplanted by a broad veranda, the roof of which should be supported by massive colonial pillars, in keeping with the grounds, and curative of the barrenness ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt
... irritability after intoxication. II. 1. Natural actions catenated with daily habits of life. 2. With solar periods. Periods of sleep. Of evacuating the bowels. 3. Natural actions catenated with lunar periods. Menstruation. Venereal orgasm of animals. Barrenness. III. Periods of diseased animal actions from stated returns of nocturnal cold, from solar and lunar influence. Periods of diurnal fever, hectic fever, quotidian, tertian, quartan fever. Periods of gout, pleurisy, of fevers ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... effect a turning round of the soul. This is true, at least, when the matters dealt with are such as have engaged us here. It may be true, too, of those who discern and urge the arguments, just as well as of those upon whom they urge them. But the immediate barrenness of much patient and careful reasoning should not make us think that it is lost labour. One way or other it will some day bear its fruit. Sometimes the intellect is the servant of the heart. At other times the heart must follow slowly upon the heels ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... with intellectual sterility. They go to college; they travel abroad; they hire the dearest masters; they keep libraries among their furniture; and some of them buy works of art. But, for all that, their brains wither under luxury, often by their own vices or tomfooleries, and mental barrenness is the result. He who violates Nature's law must suffer the penalty, though he have millions. The fruits of intellect do not grow among the indolent rich. They are usually out of the republic of brains. Work or starve is Nature's motto; starve mentally, starve morally, even if you are rich enough ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... recover much of that first winter of school. It was not an experience to remember for its charm. Not one line of grace, not one touch of color relieved the room's bare walls or softened its harsh windows. Perhaps this very barrenness gave to the poetry in our readers an appeal that seems magical, certainly it threw over the faces of Frances Babcock and Mary Abbie Gammons a lovelier halo.—They were "the big girls" of the school, that is to say, they were seventeen or eighteen ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... SWISS SCHOOLS.—In contrast to the barrenness of the last period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries present us with a brilliant constellation of writers in every department of letters, whose works form an era in the intellectual development of Germany unsurpassed in many respects by any other in the history of literature. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... and mixed with clay, Is naughty for hops, any manner of way. Or if it be mingled with rubbish and stone, For dryness and barrenness ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... to the disagreeable present. In the sombre light she stumbled against a screen covered with paper painted to look like lacquer-work, and, as the slip-shod old nurse in her serre-tete motioned her forward, she had a dismal sense of a lodging-house interior, a bourgeois barrenness enhanced by two engravings after Leopold Robert, depressingly alien from that dainty boudoir atmosphere ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... the last moment, and then took up his job at the Golden Brier, apparently as depressed by the continued barrenness of their mutual labors as Philip was himself. After that, Philip fought his battle alone, day after day, and slow work it was; he could scarcely see that he made ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 7. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Reformation brought them a translation of it, the Bible was the book most read—it was often the only book which was read—in humble English homes. Familiarity with the words had not yet trampled the sacred writings into practical barrenness. No doubts or questions had yet risen about the Bible's nature or origin. It was received as the authentic word of God Himself. The Old and New Testament alike represented the world as the scene of a struggle between good and evil ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... spreading desolation; and, next to looking on the sea when its waves dance to the music of a hurricane, I loved to gaze on the heath-covered wilderness, where the blue horizon only girded its purple bosom. It was no season to look upon the heath in the beauty of barrenness, yet I purposely diverged from the main road. About an hour, therefore, after I had descended from the region on the Lammermoors, and entered the Lothians, I became sensible I was pursuing a path which was not forwarding my footsteps to Edinburgh. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... The daisies sprout, the little birds do sing, Herbs, gums, and plants do vaunt of their release. So when that all our English Wits lay dead, (Except the laurel that is ever green) Thou with thy Fruit our barrenness o'erspread, And set thy flowery pleasance to be seen. Such fruits, such flow'rets of morality, Were ne'er before brought out ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... to the barrenness of the ground, which was objected as a discouragement, the Diggers answered they would use their endeavours, and leave the success to God, who had promised to make the barren ground fruitful. They carry themselves civilly and fairly in the country, and ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... forests, the latter for Inca graves and mines of precious metals. The middle basin (130 miles in length) is covered with vast quantities of volcanic debris, the outpourings of Cotopaxi, Tunguragua, and Altar, on one side, and of Chimborazo and Caraguairazo on the other. Nothing relieves the barrenness of the landscape but hedges of century plant, cactus, and wild heliotrope, which border the roads. Whirlwinds of sand are often seen moving over the plain. The mean temperature is 61 deg..5. Here exist, we can not say thrive, the cities of Riobamba, Ambato, and Tacunga, already ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... such aliment as makes the seed abound, and restores the exhaustion of nature that the faculties may freely operate, and remove impediments obstructing the procreating of children. Then, since diet alters the evil state of the body to a better, those subject to barrenness must eat such meats as are juicy and nourish well, making the body lively and full of sap; of which faculty are all hot moist meats. For, according to Galen, seed is made of pure concocted and windy superfluity of blood, whence we may conclude, that ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... think Bob looks as happy as can be,' put in Miss Amabel briskly. 'I don't think the children were prepared for the barrenness and dreariness of an English winter. They have come from the land of brilliant flowers and sunshine, ...
— Bulbs and Blossoms • Amy Le Feuvre
... Abram dwelt near the oak called Ogyges,—the place belongs to Canaan, not far from the city of Hebron. But being uneasy at his wife's barrenness, he entreated God to grant that he might have male issue; and God required of him to be of good courage, and said that he would add to all the rest of the benefits that he had bestowed upon him, ever since he led him out of Mesopotamia, the gift of children. Accordingly Sarai, at God's command, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... takes on an acute form known as aridity or barrenness in all things that pertain to God. The most virtuous souls are not always exempt from this. It is a dislike, a distaste that amounts almost to a disgust for prayer especially, a repugnance that threatens ...
— Explanation of Catholic Morals - A Concise, Reasoned, and Popular Exposition of Catholic Morals • John H. Stapleton
... pleasant residence; and though the ship was not engaged, nor the least preparation made for so long a voyage, still the delights and wide-spreading advantages of Pantisocracy formed one of their everlasting themes of conversation; and, considering the barrenness of the subject, it was in no common degree amusing, to hear these young enthusiasts repel every objection to the practicability of their scheme, and magnify the condition to which it was to introduce them; where thorns and briars were, no doubt, to be expelled, ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... and how the mothers would be wounded through their children. In that country, where children were regarded as the crown and glory of womanhood, the currents of nature would be so completely reversed by the madness of hunger and pain that barrenness would be esteemed fortunate; and in a country where length of days had been considered the supreme blessing of life they would long and cry for sudden ...
— The Trial and Death of Jesus Christ - A Devotional History of our Lord's Passion • James Stalker
... The barrenness of the earth and the severity of the skies in these dreary countries, are such as might be expected to confine the mind wholly to the contemplation of necessity and distress, so that the care of escaping death from cold and hunger, should ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson - Volume IV [The Rambler and The Adventurer] • Samuel Johnson
... intellectual sterility. They go to college; they travel abroad; they hire the dearest masters; they keep libraries among their furniture; and some of them buy works of art. But, for all that, their brains wither under luxury, often by their own vices or tomfooleries, and mental barrenness is the result. He who violates Nature's law must suffer the penalty, though he have millions. The fruits of intellect do not grow among the indolent rich. They are usually out of the republic of brains. Work or starve is Nature's motto; starve mentally, starve morally, ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... Baluse. By these, every sort of magic, enchantment, and witchcraft was forbidden; and the punishment of death decreed against those who in any way evoked the devil, compounded love-philters, afflicted either man or woman with barrenness, troubled the atmosphere, excited tempests, destroyed the fruits of the earth, dried up the milk of cows, or tormented their fellow-creatures with sores and diseases. All persons found guilty of exercising ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Jehoshaphat put to flight the armies of the Ammonites, and the song of faith will disperse our adversaries and lift our sinking hearts into strength and victory. Beloved, is it the dark hour with us? the winter of barrenness and gloom? Oh, let us remember that it is God's chosen time for the education of faith and that He conceals beneath the surface, precious and untold harvests of unthought-of fruit! It will not be always winter, it will not be always night, ...
— Days of Heaven Upon Earth • Rev. A. B. Simpson
... the political history of the weary middle period of the reign suggests, to those who make the history of the state the criterion of every aspect of the national fortunes, a corresponding barrenness and lack of interest in other aspects of national life. Yet a remedy for Henry's misrule was only found because the age of political retrogression was in all other fields of action an epoch of unexampled progress. The years during which the strong centralised ...
— The History of England - From the Accession of Henry III. to the Death of Edward III. (1216-1377) • T.F. Tout
... he destroyed the grove she had consecrated, and broke the most filthy idol, and burnt it at the brook Kedron. Dr. Cumberland inserts, that the import of the word Peor, or Baal Pheor, is he that shews boastingly or publicly, his nakedness. Women to avoid barrenness, were to sit on this filthy image, as the source of fruitfulness; for which Lactantius and Augustine justly deride ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... a charming description of the country to which he was bound; the unsuspicious Africans listened to him with apparent joy and satisfaction, and seemed remarkably fond of his European trinkets, food and clothes. He pointed out to them the barrenness of the country, and their naked and wretched condition, and promised, if any of them were weary of their miserable circumstances, and would go along with him, he would carry them to a plentiful land, where they ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 1 • Alexander Hewatt
... there was nothing but short brown grass. In most places, however, the leafless, sprawling mesquites were scattered rather thinly over the ground, cutting off an extensive view and merely adding to the melancholy barrenness of the landscape. The road was nothing but a couple of dusty wheel-tracks; the ground was parched, and the grass cropped close by the gaunt, starved cattle. As we drove along buzzards and great hawks occasionally soared overhead. Now and then we passed lines of wild-looking, long-horned ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... Martin. Wilkie, in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, describes Belshazzar's Feast as a "phenomenon." Bulwer declared that Martin was "more original and self-dependent than Raphael or Michael Angelo." In the Last Essays of Elia there is one by Charles Lamb entitled Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of Modern Art. The name of Martin is not mentioned, but several of his works are unmistakably described. "His towered architecture [Lamb is writing of Belshazzar's Feast] are of the highest order ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy ...
— The Short-story • William Patterson Atkinson
... these mountains, and looks down over the province of Abra, he sees an exceedingly broken land (Plates I and II), the subordinate ranges succeeding one another like the waves of the sea. The first impression is one of barrenness. The forest vanishes, and in its place are long grassy slopes, broken here and there by scattered pines and lower down by dense growths of the graceful, feathery bamboo. But this lack of trees is more fancied than real, for as one proceeds down any of the valleys he meets with side canyons, ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... senseless imitation of Italy, combined with an equally senseless imitation of detail in nature that produced nothing worthy of the name of original or genuine art. It is not probable that the Reformation had any more to do with this than with the decline in Italy. It was a period of barrenness in both countries. The Italian imitators in Germany were chiefly Rottenhammer (1564-1623), and Elzheimer (1574?-1620). After them came the representative of the other extreme in Denner (1685-1749), who thought to be great in portraiture by the minute imitation of hair, freckles, and three-days'-old ...
— A Text-Book of the History of Painting • John C. Van Dyke
... carefully cultivated mowing-field, in front of an old red homestead,—such patches of land wear a beautiful and tender green, which no other season will equal; because, let the grass be green as it may hereafter, it will not be so set off by surrounding barrenness. The trees in our orchard, and elsewhere, have as yet no leaves; yet to the most careless eye they appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if, by one magic touch, they might instantaneously ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... very strange. To overreach or deceive a God who created the heavens and the earth, is altogether beyond the power of puny mortals. Let not therefore those who bend the knee, while the heart is unbent, and raise the voice of thankful devotion, while all within is frost and barrenness, fancy they have stolen a march upon their Deity; for surely if the lord liveth, he judgeth rightly of these things. But it were vain to expect that those who think God is related to his creatures as a despot is related to his slaves, will hope to please that God by ...
— An Apology for Atheism - Addressed to Religious Investigators of Every Denomination - by One of Its Apostles • Charles Southwell
... dungeon-like chamber, without a window and with but the one door through which they had entered. The table, two chairs, a stove and a bunk built against one of the log walls were all that Howland could see. But it was not the barrenness of what he imagined was to be his new prison that held his eyes in staring inquiry on Croisset. It was the look in his companion's face, the yellow pallor of fear—a horror—that had taken possession of it. The half-breed closed and bolted the door, and then sat down beside the table, ...
— The Danger Trail • James Oliver Curwood
... them—Domestic Cookery, Etiquette for Ladies, and Hints on the Breeding of Poultry. An ugly little clock, ticking noisily in a black case, and two candlesticks of base metal placed on either side of it, completed the ornaments on the chimney-piece. Neither pictures nor prints hid the barrenness of the walls. I saw no needlework and no flowers. The one object in the place which showed any pretensions to beauty was a looking-glass in an elegant gilt frame—sacred to vanity, and worthy of the ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins
... the cheap, heavily ruled, glazed paper that is sold alongside plug tobacco and pearl buttons and safety pins in the Indian traders' stores. Staring from under her straight brows at that folded letter, Annie-Many-Ponies had a swift, clear vision of the little store set down in the midst of barrenness and dust, and of the squaws sitting wrapped in bright shawls upon the platform while their lords gravely purchased small luxuries within. As a slim, barefooted papoose, proud of her shapeless red calico slip buttoned unevenly up the back with huge white buttons, ...
— The Phantom Herd • B. M. Bower
... tragedy progressed swiftly toward finality. The Englishman came from among women. For months he had been in a torment of desolation. Cummins' wife was to him like a flower suddenly come to relieve the tantalizing barrenness of a desert; and with the wiles and ways of civilization he ...
— The Honor of the Big Snows • James Oliver Curwood
... present age with the barbarism of antiquity, great stress has been laid on the savage custom of exposing the children whom their parents could not maintain; whilst the man of sensibility, who thus, perhaps, complains, by his promiscuous amours produces a most destructive barrenness and contagious flagitiousness of manners. Surely nature never intended that women, by satisfying an appetite, should frustrate the very purpose for which it ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... overshadow such gleams of sunlight, by censure or cruel mockery, and when I affirm most earnestly that such flutterings of vague expectation never animated my poor heart, so cold, so empty, so unbelieving, it is not that I hold it outside and above such an influence. I only lay bare the barrenness of its nature and the trustless reserve that always made the world around me seem wrapped in a gloomy pall, that inspired me with suspicion, if not ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... intoxication. II. 1. Natural actions catenated with daily habits of life. 2. With solar periods. Periods of sleep. Of evacuating the bowels. 3. Natural actions catenated with lunar periods. Menstruation. Venereal orgasm of animals. Barrenness. III. Periods of diseased animal actions from stated returns of nocturnal cold, from solar and lunar influence. Periods of diurnal fever, hectic fever, quotidian, tertian, quartan fever. Periods of gout, pleurisy, of fevers with arterial debility, and with arterial strength, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... peace may be imputed to the discord of the Mahometans, and their personal esteem for the character of Frederic. The enemy of the church is accused of maintaining with the miscreants an intercourse of hospitality and friendship unworthy of a Christian; of despising the barrenness of the land; and of indulging a profane thought, that if Jehovah had seen the kingdom of Naples he never would have selected Palestine for the inheritance of his chosen people. Yet Frederic obtained from the sultan the ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... renovatingly to earth, and the saving naturalness of the woman recreated her childlike, with shrouded recollections of her strange taste of life behind her; with a tempered fresh blood to enjoy aimlessly, and what would erewhile have been a barrenness to her sensibilities. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was different now. Into this empty house had danced the girl. Her gay presence discovered its barrenness. There was not a chair on which she could sit, not a dish ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson
... the more flattering that she had let him lead her where he would in the long gallops of Richmond Park, though she knew them so much better than he did. Looking back on it all, he was mystified by the barrenness of his speech; he felt that he could say 'an awful lot of fetching things' if he had but the chance again, and the thought that he must go back to Littlehampton on the morrow, and to Oxford on the twelfth—'to that beastly exam,' ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... not only the dryness of the method and the barrenness of the system which revolted Erasmus. It was also the qualities of his own mind, which, in spite of all its breadth and acuteness, did not tend to penetrate deeply into philosophical or dogmatic speculations. For it was not only scholasticism ...
— Erasmus and the Age of Reformation • Johan Huizinga
... the miracle worked in Brie during the last two centuries. Here, however, not only is a town lacking, but also the great residences which sometimes give life to these hopeless deserts, where civilization languishes, where the agriculturist sees only barrenness, and the traveller finds not a single inn, nor that which, perchance, he ...
— The Village Rector • Honore de Balzac
... You have clothed the barrenness of the dreary plain with gardens, orchards and forests. You have been at work with God and glorified a vast empire, and now he has blessed the work of your hands. Instead of the air sodden with tears and tremulous with the wail of widows and orphans, you are welcomed with the joy of children and ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... than a Prophet, a landscape which in its sublimity excited the imagination as powerfully as any gigantic form of the Elijah could have done, even though Michel Angelo had drawn it. It is meant to represent, and does perfectly represent, an illimitable desert, a boundless surface of barrenness and desolation, where Nature can bring forth nothing but seeds of death, and the only tree there is dead and withered, not a leaf to be seen nor possible. The only other objects, beside the level of the desert, either smooth with sand ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 88, February, 1865 • Various
... dramatic poets, hence the mighty fertility of each; hence the life and activity of this—the comparative torpor and barrenness of every other—species of poetry. To add to the pre-eminence of the art, the applauses of the many were sanctioned by the critical canons of the few. The drama was not only the most alluring form which the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... exhaustion of nature that the faculties may freely operate, and remove impediments obstructing the procreating of children. Then, since diet alters the evil state of the body to a better, those subject to barrenness must eat such meats as are juicy and nourish well, making the body lively and full of sap; of which faculty are all hot moist meats. For, according to Galen, seed is made of pure concocted and windy superfluity of blood, whence we may conclude, that there ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous
... yawning chasm itself held no fascination for me. I could appreciate its dizzy depths, its vastness, its marvelous color effects, and its weird contours. I could feel the immensity of it, and it repelled instead of attracted. I seemed to see its barrenness and desolation, the cruel deception of its poisonous springs, and its insurmountable walls. I could visualize its hapless victims wandering frantically about, trying to find the way out of some blind coulee, until, exhausted and thirst-crazed, they lay down to die under the sun's pitiless glare. ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... waters at Plombieres. The matter being arranged between husband and wife, Madame Bonaparte was delighted to go to the springs of Plombieres which she had desired to visit for a long time, knowing, like every one else, the reputation these waters enjoyed for curing barrenness in women. ...
— The Private Life of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Constant
... as to where he should make his stand. He moved his army eastward, establishing his camp first at Korla and then moving it on to Turfan, 900 miles distant from Kashgar. The greatest efforts of this ruler only availed to place 15,000 men at the front, and the barrenness of the region compelled him to distribute them. The Ameer was at Turfan with 8,500 men and twenty guns. His second son was at Toksoun, some miles in the rear, at the head of 6,000 more and five guns. There were several smaller detachments between Korla and the front. Opposed to these was the ...
— China • Demetrius Charles Boulger
... Alfonso did not attend to his requisitions for supplies. The candid and good-natured poet intimates that the duke might have given him the appointment rather for the governor's sake than the people's; and the cold, the loneliness and barrenness of the place, and, above all, his absence from the object of his affections, oppressed him. He did not write a verse for twelve months: he says he felt like a bird moulting[22]. The best thing got out of it was an anecdote for posterity. The poet was riding out one ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... the one, when found, will usually very soon lead to the other. Twisting or Curving is one of the most positive signs of previous inflammation, stricture and twisting or distortion of the seminal ducts, and hence sterility or barrenness. In such especially are the remarkable effects of the Civiale Treatment the most noticeable. We can say with positiveness, and prove it by case after case, that by no other method can such rapid and perfect restoration of the organs to a natural and healthy state be ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... under exile as we would have wished. Unlike Victor Hugo at Guernsey, he was alone, and surrounded by savages. Yet even Victor Hugo lifted up his voice in bitter complaint. Seneca failed to anticipate that, in spite of the barrenness of Corsica, it would some day produce a man who would jostle his Roman Caesar for first place on ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... also is run low, try this way of love and imagination. If you have a better way, then go on with it and be happy yourself and helpful to others; but if your faith is at a standstill and is stricken with barrenness, try my counsel of putting more heart and more inward eye, more holy love and more heavenly joy, into ...
— Bunyan Characters (Second Series) • Alexander Whyte
... voice is silenced. What a pity that in a moment of passion the tyrant took his life! Let him sleep! Rest will be sweet to one who expended his young strength with such spendthrift extravagance! Such men are rare! Ages flower thus but once, and then years of barrenness! But as we turn to the death of Jesus, other feelings than those of pity or regret master us. We are neither surprised, nor altogether sorry. We do not recognise that there is in any sense an end of his work—rather it is the beginning. The corn of wheat has fallen into the ground to die, that ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... which, not long ago, suffered a very uncommon, and unexpected calamity. The sand of the shore was raised by a tempest in such quantities, and carried to such a distance, that an estate was overwhelmed and lost. Such and so hopeless was the barrenness superinduced, that the owner, when he was required to pay the usual tax, desired rather to resign ...
— A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland • Samuel Johnson
... elegance did he find a law of conformity; each tree was a law unto itself, tall and strong and slender, youthful and buoyant, opening fond arms to the blue sky. The absence of the sap-greens of England conveyed at first an impression of barrenness, but that wore off, and the artistic side of his nature fed upon the soft harmonies of faded grass and subdued green foliage nursing misty purples in its shade. The ground was his bed and chair and table; never ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... Universe and others already mentioned is testified to in a remarkable manner by our use of Language. We denominate the want of Feeling Cold or Frigidity—in respect to the Mind or the individual character. The absence of Thought and Knowledge, or, in other words, Intellectual Barrenness, is called Darkness or Obscurity of the Mind. While the lack of Will or Purpose in the Mind is said to be the absence of Tension or Strain (the great Musical term); and the Stillness or quiet hence resulting may be appropriately designated as the Silence of the Mind; Musical Silences ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... glorious, luxuriant growth? With him barren waste—but for her did there not grow in the field of life some things which were everlasting? With the quickness with which he saw everything he saw that it was the picture of his own barrenness could show her most surely the ...
— The Glory Of The Conquered • Susan Glaspell
... scenes he recorded; whereas, whoever trusted to imagination would soon find his own mind circumscribed and contracted to a few favourite images, and the repetition of these would sooner or later produce that very monotony and barrenness which had always haunted descriptive poetry in the hands of any but the patient worshippers of truth."[443] Wordsworth disapproved of Scott's method in description. He is quoted as having said: "Nature ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... SAXONIC AND SWISS SCHOOLS.—In contrast to the barrenness of the last period, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries present us with a brilliant constellation of writers in every department of letters, whose works form an era in the intellectual development ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... energy not unworthy of Burke at his fiercest, he denounces the fallen and impotent regality of the popes as temporal sovereigns. 'A monarchy sustained by foreign armies, smitten with the curse of social barrenness, unable to strike root downward or bear fruit upward, the sun, the air, the rain soliciting in vain its sapless and rotten boughs—such a monarchy, even were it not a monarchy of priests, and tenfold more because it is one, stands out a foul blot ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... her feet without Winthrop's strong arm; although in many a rough pitch and steep rise of the way, young hickories and oaks lent their aid to her hand that was free. Mosses and lichens, brown and black with the summer's heat, clothed the rocks and dressed out their barrenness; green tufts of fern nodded in many a nook, and kept their greenness still; and huckleberry bushes were on every hand, in every spare place, and standing full of the unreaped black and blue harvest. And in the ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... to his infinite joy he saw the golden curls in their proper place on the old settle by the stove, while the regular quiet breathing assured him that the child had not yet waked from sleep. As he softly tiptoed around, seeking the outfit he needed for his great adventure, the barrenness of the house, the poverty of it, struck him for the first time. God knows he had never thought of "things," except as he had needed them for himself or others; and now he wished suddenly that he had more of them for the child's ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... fruit unless a staminate variety is planted near. I have never considered this an objection against a variety; for why should any one wish to raise only one variety of strawberry? All danger of barrenness in pistillate kinds is removed absolutely by planting staminate sorts in the same bed. In nurserymen's catalogues pistillate varieties are marked "P.," and the purchaser has merely to set out the plants within a few feet of some perfect flowering ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... of feeling in which he had considered the Morrison tragedy—from his growing barrenness of heart towards Phoebe—he had sprung at a bound into this ecstasy, this expansion of the whole man. It brought with it a vivid memory of the pictures he was engaged upon. By the time he turned homeward, and the light was failing, he was counting the days till he could return ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... prejudices, between the lovers of forsaken Canary, and the terrors of our females at the barrenness of an Arabian desert, which lasted for twenty years, at length the custom was universally established; nor were there wanting some reflecting minds desirous of introducing the use of this liquid among the labouring classes of society, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the rational creature in several ways. First by way of ministration, in so far as irrational creatures minister to the needs of man. In this sense the Lord said to man (Gen. 3:17): "Cursed is the earth in thy work," so that its barrenness would be a punishment to man. Thus also David cursed the mountains of Gelboe, according to Gregory's expounding (Moral. iv, 3). Again the irrational creature is related to the rational creature by way of signification: and thus our Lord cursed the fig tree in signification of Judea. Thirdly, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas
... side. I do not quite understand your case, and we think that a word or two is misplaced. I wish some time you would consider the case under the following point of view. If sterility is caused or accumulated through Natural Selection, then, as every degree exists up to absolute barrenness, Natural Selection must have the power of increasing it. Now take two species, A and B, and assume that they are (by any means) half-sterile, i.e. produce half the full number of offspring. Now try and make (by Natural Selection) A and B absolutely sterile when crossed, ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... with women, you must carefully conceal from them all that you have told me; they will not be willing to sow the flowers of their love upon the rocks or lavish their caresses to soothe a sickened spirit. Women will discover the barrenness of your heart and you will be ever more and more unhappy. Few among them would be frank enough to tell you what I have told you, or sufficiently good-natured to leave you without rancor, offering their friendship, like the woman who now ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... been most generous in offering improvements and repairs before they were even asked for. Deb had blighted these unbusiness-like overtures on her own account, and Frances herself had said the rudest things about them and him—but not lately. In the utter dullness and barrenness of her life, she had been glad to accept the civilities of anything in the shape of a man—to try her 'prentice hand on any material. All the armoury of the born beauty was hers, and she knew as well how to use each weapon effectively as a blind kitten knows how to suck milk. They were easily successful ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... are some few heads of ancient statues; but several of them are defaced by modern additions. I foresee that you will be very little satisfied with this letter, and I dare hardly ask you to be good-natured enough to charge the dulness (sic) of it on the barrenness of the subject, and to overlook the stupidity ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... should have added with modern applications: and when he discovers that "Gay Bacchus" is translated from Augurellus, he ought to have remarked that the latter part is purely Parnell's. Another poem, "When Spring Comes On," is, he says, taken from the French. I would add that the description of "Barrenness," in his verses to Pope, was borrowed from Secundus; but lately searching for the passage which I had formerly read, I could not find it. "The Night Piece on Death" is indirectly preferred by Goldsmith to Gray's "Churchyard;" but, in my ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... accepts it. My friends, I have heard the vows which Paaker has poured out over our pure altars, like hogwash that men set before swine. Pestilence and boils has he called down on Mena, and barrenness and heartache on the poor sweet woman; and I really cannot blame her for preferring a battle-horse to a hippopotamus—a Mena to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... curious facts elicited. Nothing memorable was done, but much that was memorable was said—for the great orator had still a free press, and a home audience to instruct and elevate. The truth is, the barrenness of these two sessions was due to the general prosperity of the country, more even than to the dexterous management of Major Hobart and the Cabinet balls of Lord Westmoreland. There was, moreover, hanging over the minds ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee
... through a bright translucent clay, whose air was almost musical with the clear, glittering cold. On our starboard beam, like a pile of glaciers in Switzerland, lay this Staten Land, gleaming in snow-white barrenness and solitude. Unnumbered white albatross were skimming the sea near by, and clouds of smaller white wings fell through the air like snow-flakes. High, towering in their own turbaned snows, the far-inland pinnacles loomed up, like the border of some other world. Flashing walls and ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... of our enemy and the lusts of our heart have covered it. At the same time, a daily repetition of contrition and compunction washes off the stains which we discover in our souls, and strongly incites us, by the fervor and fruitfulness of our following life, to repair the sloth and barrenness of the past. Prayer must be made our main assistant in every step of this spiritual progress. We must pray that God would enable us to search out and discover our own hearts, and reform whatever is amiss in them. If we do this sincerely, God will undoubtedly grant our requests; will lay ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... left but a few smoldering brush-patches, the smoke continued to lift and give us sundry glimpses of the black desolation that spread to the north. So far as we knew, the wind had carried no sparks across the river to fire the south side and drive us back to the barrenness of the burned lands. And with the certainty that Lyn was safe, and that we were beyond disputing masters of the situation, came consciousness of hunger and great bodily weariness. It was almost twenty-four hours since we had eaten, and we were simply ravenous. As a start toward ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... Rearing Horse in the foreground. Le Neve stood and looked with open eyes of delight. It was the first beautiful view he had seen since he came to Cornwall; but this at least was beautiful, almost enough so to compensate for his first acute disappointment at the barrenness and ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen
... would be confusing and that more play of mind might be dangerous. This is that "Scholasticism" and "Mediaevalism" against which the modernists inveigh or under which they groan; and to this intellectual barrenness may be added the offences against taste, verisimilitude, and justice which their more critical minds may discern in many an act and pronouncement of their official superiors. Thus both their sense for ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Binder, with uplifted hands. "By Heaven, prince, you are a second Moses. You know how to strike a rock so that a silver fountain shall gush from its barrenness." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... Canton, in China, the souls of unborn children are kept in the garden of two deities called "Flower-Grandfather" and "Flower-Grandmother," and when to these have been made by a priest sacrifices of hens or swine, the children are let out and thus appear among men. As a charm against barrenness, these people put white paper into a basket and have the priest make an invocation. The white paper represents the deities, and the ceremony is called ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... shape of its leaf resembles the form of the spleen. "No herbe maie be compared therewith," says one of the oldest Herbals, "for his singular virtue to help the sicknesse or grief of the splene." Pliny ordered: "It should not be given to women, because it bringeth barrenness." Vitruvius alleged that in Crete the flocks and herds were found to be without spleens, because they browsed on this fern. The plant was supposed when given medicinally to diminish the size of ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... to path, searching amid the briars and thistles, which already cast an aspect of ruin over the deserted place; she explored its most hidden corners with the painful perseverance of despair; but the same barrenness spread around her wherever she turned. On this once fertile spot, which she had entered with such joyful faith in its resources, there remained but a few poor decayed roots, dropped and forgotten amid tangled ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... repulsive enough. Even the gentlemen's seats had to them an air of neglect and desolation, and the new plantations of larch and fir with which they had then begun to be surrounded, gave an impression of rawness, barrenness, and lack of geniality. Nor less in large towns, as in Glasgow, were they struck by the dulness and dreariness in the aspect and demeanour of the dim 'common populations.' They saw and felt these things as keenly as any could do. But, unlike ordinary travellers, ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... children: Insomuch that they do now every year precisely bear a young son, or a daughter, yea somtimes two at a time. It is thereby also very necessary that the good woman her self consult with some experienced Midwives, and old Doctresses; to the end, that those distempers which are the occasion of barrenness, might be the better ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... public are seldom agreeable in private conversation, whether their faculty be natural, or acquired by practice and often venturing. Natural elocution, although it may seem a paradox, usually springeth from a barrenness of invention and of words, by which men who have only one stock of notions upon every subject, and one set of phrases to express them in, they swim upon the superficies, and offer themselves on every occasion; ...
— The Battle of the Books - and Other Short Pieces • Jonathan Swift
... five miles, to the water of Pendle, a barren and dreary tract. Dr. Whitaker observes of this and the neighbouring forests, and the remark even yet holds good, "that they still bear the marks of original barrenness, and recent cultivation; that they are still distinguished from the ancient freehold tracts around them, by want of old houses, old woods, high fences; (for these were forbidden by the forest laws;) by peculiarities of dialect and manners in ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... plants, too, rising from wherever the overflow from the fountains permeated the sand, quite unseen in the broad sunshine, but showing its effect in a blush of green which gradually grew less and less, till at a few hundred yards from the rocks and pools it died right away and all was arid barrenness once more. ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... eucalyptus, there groups of pine parasols above some ruined walls, were all the vegetation which met Alba Steno's eye. But the scene accorded so well with the moral devastation she bore within her that the barrenness around her in her last walk ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... "live and flourish that our young bride may have a fine baby before a year is over; for if you die too quickly it is a sign of barrenness, and you will stick up there like ...
— The Devil's Pool • George Sand
... graceful palmetto, I pass rude sea-headlands and enter Pamlico sound through an inlet, and dart my vision inland; O the cotton plant! the growing fields of rice, sugar, hemp! The cactus guarded with thorns, the laurel-tree with large white flowers, The range afar, the richness and barrenness, the old woods charged with mistletoe and trailing moss, The piney odor and the gloom, the awful natural stillness, (here in these dense swamps the freebooter carries his gun, and the fugitive has his conceal'd hut;) O the strange fascination of these half-known half-impassable swamps, ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... he often looked longingly back upon the life he had left, until his nose inhaled again the scent of the sage-brush and his eyes smarted with alkali dust. He regretted the desolate prairies, the wide reaches of barrenness accursed of the Creator, the wild chaos of the mountain canons, the horror of the Bad Lands, the tingling cold of winter in the Black Hills. But the Republic holds so high the privilege of serving her that, ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... court as well as the simplicity and sincerity of tangled vines and gnarled olives on the hillside. He had seen, with those eyes which overlooked nothing, the pomps and vanities of power, the fret and fever of ambition, the impotence and barrenness of much of that activity in which multitudes of men spend their lives under the delusion that mere stir and bustle mean progress and achievement. Out of Syracuse, with its petty court about a petty tyrant, Theocritus had come back to the sea and the sky and the ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... heir prove sickly, what speculations on his demise! The worldly stake is so enormous, that the ties of nature are dissolved, and a brother rejoices at a brother's death! One generation is not sufficient to remove these feelings; the barrenness of his marriage bed, or the weakly state of his children, are successively speculated upon by the presumptive heir. Let it not be supposed that I would infer this always to be the fact. I have put ...
— Newton Forster - The Merchant Service • Captain Frederick Marryat
... beautiful parts of the old poetry. His extracts are, in general, nothing more than free paraphrases. Wishing to popularize the Beowulf, he used as a medium of translation a peculiarly stilted kind of blank verse. He dressed the poem out in elegant phrases in order to hide the barrenness of the original. Manifestly he feared the roughness, the remoteness of the poem in its natural state. He feared to offend a nation of readers reveling in the medievalism of Scott and Byron. Aliteral Latin translation was inserted to ...
— The Translations of Beowulf - A Critical Biography • Chauncey Brewster Tinker
... birthday. Because of it, they had given him actual food for the first time in years: a cake, conspicuous in its barrenness of candles; a glass of real vegetable juices; a dab of potato; an indescribable green that might have been anything at all; and a little steak. A succulent, savory-looking piece ...
— Life Sentence • James McConnell
... where a snail couldn't have outrun him, and when the sky streaked red and orange and the sun came up, he stood still and looked for a camp, and when he saw nothing at all but bare rock and bushes of the kind that love barrenness, he crawled under the nearest shade, tied William fast to the bush and slept. You don't realize your thirst so much when you are asleep, and you are saving your strength instead of wearing it out in the ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... works, but singularly silly. I tackled some Tacitus too. I got them with a dreadful French crib on the same page with the text, which helps me along and drives me mad. The French do not even try to translate. They try to be much more classical than the classics, with astounding results of barrenness and tedium. Tacitus, I fear, was too solid for me. I liked the war part; but the dreary intriguing at Rome ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Its general aspect recalls a small town of the western highlands of Scotland. Many of the houses, square, white-washed, and grey-slated, possess small greenhouse-porches, gay with fuchsias and pelargoniums, in pleasing contrast to the prevailing barrenness. A small cathedral, Christ Church, and an imposing barracks, generally occupied by a company of marines, stand in the midst of the town. The Government House might be taken for an ...
— World's War Events, Vol. I • Various
... this alien place, he wondered if he wished himself back. But the moment he actually realised himself at home, and felt the tension of barrenness which it meant, felt the curious and deadly opposition of his wife's will against his own nature, the almost nauseating ache which it amounted to, he pulled himself together and rejoiced again in his new surroundings. Her will, her will, her terrible, implacable, cunning will! What was there in ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... the soul. This is true, at least, when the matters dealt with are such as have engaged us here. It may be true, too, of those who discern and urge the arguments, just as well as of those upon whom they urge them. But the immediate barrenness of much patient and careful reasoning should not make us think that it is lost labour. One way or other it will some day bear its fruit. Sometimes the intellect is the servant of the heart. At other times the heart must follow slowly upon the ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... the fertility of the globe has been set on foot. The accumulations of vegetable mould in the primeval forests have been converted into grain, and sent to England, leaving permanent barrenness in what should be prolific plains; and the deposits of the Chincha and Ichaboe Islands have been imported in myriads of tons, to replace in our own land the resources of which it is bereft by the civic consumption of ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher
... And not a chromo. I had been used to chromos for years, and I saw now that without my suspecting it a passion for art had got worked into the fabric of my being, and was become a part of me. It made me homesick to look around over this proud and gaudy but heartless barrenness and remember that in our house in East Hartford, all unpretending as it was, you couldn't go into a room but you would find an insurance-chromo, or at least a three-color God-Bless-Our-Home over the door; and in the parlor we had nine. But here, even in ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... stream just where it greens the tiny valley and then slips between huge lava-rock ledges to join the larger stream. Jase would have stopped there and called home the sheltered little green spot in the gray barrenness. But Marthy went on, up the farther hill and across the upland, another full day's ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... for what seems to us the philosophy of this matter. If we are right, it is no more than a first furrow in the crust of a soil which hitherto the historians have been contented to leave in its barrenness. If they are conscientious enough not to trifle with the facts, as they look back on them from the luxurious self-indulgence of modern Christianity, they either revile the superstition or pity the ignorance which ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... out as specially typical of the period instituted any new departure either in practice or in science. They were servile followers, when not of the Greeks, of the Arabians. This is attested by the barrenness of the century and a half that followed. One would have thought that the stimulus given by Mundinus to the study of anatomy would have borne fruit, but little was done in science during the two and ...
— The Evolution of Modern Medicine • William Osler
... had been coeval with the beginning of the world. The granite was capped with mica-slate, and this in the lapse of ages had been worn into strange finger- shaped points. These two formations, thus differing in their outlines, agree in being almost destitute of vegetation. This barrenness had to our eyes a strange appearance, from having been so long accustomed to the sight of an almost universal forest of dark-green trees. I took much delight in examining the structure of these mountains. The complicated and ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... on 14th May. The institution of a Board of Agriculture (which Hussey, Sheridan, and Fox opposed as a piece of jobbery) and the renewal of the Charter of the East India Company were the chief practical results of that session. But the barrenness of the session, the passing of the Traitorous Correspondence Bill, and the hardships connected with the balloting for the militia stirred the Radical Clubs to redoubled energy; so that home affairs for two or three years centred in their propaganda and ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... authority, such as the statement that he was 'matre natus diu sterili.' This, however, has been shown to rest on a wrong reading of Q. Serenus Sammonicus' Liber Medicinalis, xxxii., in a passage dealing with the barrenness of women, 'hoc poterit magni quartus [liber] monstrare Lucreti,' where partus, the reading of the oldest edition, was used. This, and other considerations, show that the vita does not rest on any ancient sources, beyond those which ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... breaking on a frowning coast, she shows us smooth basins whose shores are soft and wooded to the water's edge, and into which empty wonderful tidal rivers, whose courses, where the tide-water has flowed out, lie like curving bands of bright brown satin among the green fields. She has no barrenness, no unsightliness, no poverty; everywhere beauty, everywhere riches. She is ...
— Bits About Home Matters • Helen Hunt Jackson
... the foundations have been withdrawn by the continued activity of a long volcanic chain which traverses the Archipelago from end to end. And therefore, strange as it may seem at first sight, the fertile island of Java, with its rich plains and abundant vegetation—so unlike the traditional barrenness of a volcanic region—is the ...
— A Visit to Java - With an Account of the Founding of Singapore • W. Basil Worsfold
... people. Piran, the patron saint of tinners, would hardly have called down such a curse, though he might have done so if greatly provoked. But if not metalliferous, much of the parish is exceptionally fertile and verdant, in contrast to the barrenness of the Goonhilly Downs. Without attempting to decide authoritatively as to the personality of Keverne, we may at least be amused by the curious story told about him, which brings a strong touch of human nature into the record of one who ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... that that school of the law, as he called it, would bring no real holiness either to others or himself, but must teach a man to despair of himself and of any claims or merits of his own. And, indeed, as we know from all that had gone before, it was not simply the external barrenness of the regulations of Church and convent, or a sense of imperfect fulfilment on his part, that caused his restlessness of conscience; what gave him the deepest anxiety and harassed him the most were those very inward stirrings, which revealed ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin
... rooms this condition is changed, for in a long perspective the ceiling comes into sight and consciousness. There would be a sense of barrenness and poverty in a long stretch of plain surface or unbroken colour over a vista of decorated wall, and accordingly the ceilings of large and important rooms are generally broken by ...
— Principles of Home Decoration - With Practical Examples • Candace Wheeler
... his thought. He had not risen yet to the conception of the real barrenness and squalor of the life he ...
— A Spoil of Office - A Story of the Modern West • Hamlin Garland
... propose to take California, from the forty-second degree of north latitude down to the thirty-second. We propose to take ten degrees along the coast of the Pacific. Scattered along the coast for that great distance are settlements and villages and ports; and in the rear all is wilderness and barrenness, and Indian country. But if, just about San Francisco, and perhaps Monterey, emigrants enough should settle to make up one State, then the people five hundred miles off would have another State. And so this disproportion ...
— The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster • Daniel Webster
... sea makes up for the barrenness of the country by having some of the richest fishing banks in the world. Hence, in addition to being farmers, the Icelanders have always been fishermen who brought means of sustenance from the sea—usually ...
— Seven Icelandic Short Stories • Various
... in proportion as the resources of the country, and the supplies afforded by the Esquimaux towards the support of their children, were pretty accurately ascertained. It is true that they live in a country, as those do on the Labrador coast, of hopeless barrenness, and endure almost a perpetual winter's blast; but the success of the faithful devoted Moravian Missionaries, on the coast of Labrador, and on that of Greenland, in their labours, privations, and perseverance, ...
— The Substance of a Journal During a Residence at the Red River Colony, British North America • John West
... nature of marriage," but that "absolute indissolubility does not attach to marriage by the law of nature." He adds: "if we consider marriage as it is an office of nature for the propagation of the race, it is hard to render a reason why for the wife's barrenness the husband should not be allowed to put her away, or marry another." (De Matrimonio, I. ii., d. 13, n. 7.) We proceed to prove that "a certain inseparability is of the nature of marriage," so that marriage may truly be said to be indissoluble by the ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... his devotion is my price— Suppose I write what harms not, though he steal? I half resolve to tell thee, yet I blush, What set me off a-writing first of all. An itch I had, a sting to write, a tang! For, be it this town's barrenness—or else The Man had something in the look of him— His case has struck me far more than 'tis worth. So, pardon if—(lest presently I lose In the great press of novelty at hand The care and pains this somehow ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... faults which a variety may have are partial barrenness or shy bearing and poor filling quality. In this last respect the worst sinners are the larger varieties, and in point of filling quality, medium and small-sized varieties will, in nearly all cases, be found to have the greatest range of adaptability. ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... was gratifying to the eyes of the traveller—such a fine country in the midst of so much barrenness; for he knew that most of the surrounding region was little better than a wild karoo. The whole of it to the north for hundreds of miles was a famous desert—the desert of Kalihari—and these cliffs were a part of its southern border. The ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... house, not a tree near. One would have thought it a deserted house, but that a thin wreath of smoke lazily stole up from one of the brown chimneys; and graceful as that was, it took nothing from the hard, stern barrenness below, which told of a worse poverty than that ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... wondering how he had offended her, and how he could make amends. Could he have looked into Jean's soul, he would have seen that it was seared with the fresh memory of iron bars and high walls and her dad who never saw any roses; and that the contrast between their beauty and the terrible barrenness that surrounded him was like ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... accompanied with greater or less inability to perfect seed, so in animals, the same process may be carried far enough to produce sterility. Instances are not wanting, and particularly among the more recent improved Short-horns, of impotency among the males and of barrenness in the females, and in some cases where they have borne calves they have failed to secrete milk for their nourishment.[3] Impotency in bulls of various breeds has not unfrequently occurred from too high feeding, ...
— The Principles of Breeding • S. L. Goodale
... morning. It is of a circular figure, and may be about 24 Leagues in Compass; the land is of a height sufficient to be seen 12 or 15 Leagues, and of a very broken, uneven Surface, and hath more the appearance of barrenness than fertility. Last night we saw smoke up it, and this morning some people, and therefore must be inhabited. Yesterday Lieutenant Gore, having the Morning Watch at the time we first saw this Island, thought he saw land bearing South-South-East and South-East by East; but I, ...
— Captain Cook's Journal During the First Voyage Round the World • James Cook
... investigation of the furfuroid group will take its stand upon a much more adequate basis than heretofore. On the view of 'furfural-yielding' being co-extensive with 'pentose or pentosane,' not only were a number of important facts obscured or misinterpreted, but there was a barrenness of suggestion of genetic relationships. As the group has been widened very much beyond these limits, it is clear that if any group term or designation is to be retained that of 'furfuroid' is 'neutral' in character, and equally applicable to saturated substances ...
— Researches on Cellulose - 1895-1900 • C. F. Cross
... which would be compulsory by reason of the earth's barrenness, is a parable. The murderer is hunted from place to place, as the Greek fable has it, by the furies, who suffer him not to rest. Conscience drives a man 'through dry places, seeking rest, and finding none.' All sin makes us homeless wanderers. There is but one home for the heart, one ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers • Alexander Maclaren
... earth and grass and trees had grown sweeter to me. I thought how barren, though I had not known it, the world had been before this transformation, and how unendurable to me would be a return of that barrenness. ...
— An Enemy To The King • Robert Neilson Stephens
... been pacing along, half asleep in the blistering heat of midday, among the cactus and the greasewood and those depressing, yellowish weeds that pretend to be clothing the desert with verdure, when they are merely emphasizing its barrenness. Starr had been half asleep too, riding with one leg over the saddle horn to rest his muscles, and with his hat brim pulled down over his eyebrows to shade his eyes from the pitiless glare of New Mexico sunlight. Rabbit might be depended upon to dodge the prairie ...
— Starr, of the Desert • B. M Bower
... Spaniards, in erecting this fortress, was to have fortified the straits, so as to have excluded all other nations from any passage into the South Sea: but, besides the barrenness of the soil, and excessive severity of the climate their most implacable enemies, the Indians, frequently assailed them, so that they were reduced to the last extremity of distress. All the stores they had brought from ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr
... foreboding enters when man enters. Where his corn grows amid the cinders of primeval things, his wanton gashes on tree and land, his beastly pollution of the wild, crystal waters, all the restlessness, and barrenness, and filth, and sordid deformity he calls his ...
— The Reckoning • Robert W. Chambers
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