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More "Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books



... terror in a storm which shakes the house, while the Norns—the goddesses of fate—proclaim in the tempest his tempestuous career. Equally satisfactory it appears to have the modern champion of Norway—the typical modern Norseman—born on the bleak and wild Dovre Mountain,[1] where there is winter eight months of the year and cold weather during the remaining four. The parish of Kvikne, in Oesterdalen, where his father, the Reverend Peder Bjoernson, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... the responsibility of a locomotive engineer, it is necessary to ride a hundred miles or so in an engine. The author was given this privilege on a bleak, frosty day, early last winter. He was told by the officials that he took the ride at his own risk, and as a matter of personal favor, and that he must not interfere with the engineer or fireman in the ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... morning, showed symptoms of coming to five to three. In the meantime, by no means abashed at finding themselves the cynosure of so many eyes, the Englishmen proceeded to keep up their circulation by leap-frog and horse-play, for their jerseys were thin and the wind bleak. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... part of the hall the man Nogam moved hastily into view, his features twisted in a grimace of concern as he recognized the bleak misery of Sofia's face. His voice sounded ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.; perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells

... cry rings out; From the high watch-tower comes the shout. Awake, imperial German land— Ye by distant Danube dwelling, And where the infant Rhine is swelling, And where the bleak dunes pile their sand! For hearth and home keep watch, Sword from its scabbard snatch; Every hour For bitter fight Prepare aright— The day of combat is ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various

... evening of a bleak, cold March day, in an early year of this century, a woman, scantily clad, led a boy about eight years old, along the high-road towards the old city of Exeter. They crept close to the hedge-side to shelter themselves from the clouds of dust, ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... and disappear round behind the church, half her sorrow at losing him was swallowed up in the practical certainty that they would meet again before Christmas in their old home, and not in a stranger's house in the bleak North country. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson

... face peering from the iron lattice of the Den, no Arthur, no Nina there. Nothing but piles of snow upon the roof, snow upon the window-sills, snow upon the doorsteps, snow upon the untrodden walk, snow on the leafless elms, standing there so bleak and brown. Snow everywhere, as cold, as desolate as Edith's heart, and she bade Victor take her back again to the warm grate where she might perhaps forget how gloomy and sad, and ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... dropped a shovelful of hot coals, or rather as if some corrosive fluid had been spilled. I remained here a few moments, idly wondering what might have been the history of the former tenants, and what could have induced any one to build a house in a spot so bleak and exposed, where scarcely a pretence of soil offered itself for a garden. As I stood there, a singular impression came upon me that I was not alone. For a moment, and a moment only, I became conscious of another presence ...
— Not Pretty, But Precious • John Hay, et al.

... with hasty, stretch'd heads grow And strive for heav'n, but rooted here Lament the distance with a tear! The honeysuckles clad in white, The rose in red, point to the light; And the lilies, hollow and bleak, Look as if they would something speak; They sigh at night to each soft gale, And at the day-spring weep it all. Shall I then only—wretched I!— Oppress'd with earth, on earth still lie?" Thus speaks he to the neighbour ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan

... stood in the midst of a bleak moor, in the North Country, a certain village. All its inhabitants were poor, for their fields were barren, and they had little trade; but the poorest of them all were two brothers called Scrub and Spare, ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott

... But this he did do, thereby riding out of the district with which he was most thoroughly acquainted, and passing by cabins and patches of now deserted land which were strange to him. It was a poor, bleak, damp, undrained country, lying beyond the confines of his father's property, which in good days had never been pleasant to the eye, but which now in these days—days that were so decidedly bad, was anything but pleasant. It was one of those tracts of land which had been divided and subdivided ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... it, whether presented to them in the form of Catholicism or of Arianism.[317] The great marvel in their history, and their chief claim to the dominion of the world, was, that they had preserved so long, in the bleak regions in which the growth of civilisation was in every way retarded, the virtues together with the ignorance of ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton

... stairs in the higher regions of the house creaked under slowly-descending footsteps. In a minute more the first of the female servants made her appearance, with a dingy woolen shawl over her shoulders—for the March morning was bleak; and rheumatism and ...
— No Name • Wilkie Collins

... following the April 1999 coup d'etat - for operating expenses and public investment. In 2000-01, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $105 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak financial situation. The IMF approved a $73 million poverty reduction and growth facility for Niger in 2000 and announced $115 million in debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Further disbursements of aid occurred in 2002. Future ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... faced; or what a shadow seemed to fall across them as the parson uttered those fateful words, so terrible to one whose heart is not in them: What God hath joined together let no man put asunder. Death and not life awaited me on that bleak hillside, or so I thought, though the bridegroom at my side was the handsomest man I had ever seen and had rather exceeded than failed in his devotion to ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green

... of the old Fruit Markets and York Street shops, with their heads to the wall and their feet to the gutter. It was raining and cold that night, and the unemployed had been driven in from Hyde Park and the bleak Domain—from dripping trees, damp seats, and drenched grass—from the rain, and cold, and the wind. Some had sheets of old newspapers to cover them-and some hadn't. Two were mates, and they divided a Herald between them. One had a sheet ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... Spain moved towards the horizon, as in grand procession, and at the same time the Western hemisphere appeared. The hour of day at the longitude above which they hung was about the same as when they set out, but the sun shone far more directly upon the Northern hemisphere than then, and instead of bleak December, this was the leafy month ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor

... commenced. In a few days the cold wintry showers swept all the gorgeous crimson from the trees; and a bleak and desolate waste presented itself to the shuddering spectator. But, in spite of wind and rain, my little tenement was never free from the intrusion of Uncle Joe's wife and children. Their house stood ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie

... moments, too, when her tenderness flared into startling outbursts of bleak, cutting anger, giving way in the end to floods of hysterical tears. A couple of such tempests formed part of ...
— The Soul of a Child • Edwin Bjorkman

... McDonald Islands Heard Island - 80% ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak); McDonald Islands - ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... wind from the bleak north; tearing through the moaning pine forest, that tossed and swayed before the tempest, gnawing Catherine's nose and fingers, and snatching up, as it were, handfuls of snow, and hurling them in a rage through the air. Poor Catherine was nearly frozen, yet she struggled ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, V. 5, April 1878 - Scribner's Illustrated • Various

... beautiful than all other lands and the castle of the Duke, its ruler, lay beside a lake that was bluer than the deepest indigo. A long time ago the Knight Wendelin and his squire George chanced upon this lake, but they found nothing save waste fields and bleak rocks around it, yet the shores must formerly have borne a different aspect, for there were shattered columns and broken-nosed statues lying on the ground. Against the hillside there were remains of ancient walls that once, undoubtedly, had supported terraces ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... new country were developed, the women were given some respite from their spinning, weaving, and garment making. Much of their hard-won leisure was spent piecing quilts. In the rigorous climate of bleak New England there was great need of warm clothing and bedding, and the spare moments of the housekeeper were largely occupied in increasing her supply. To make the great amount of bedding necessary in the unheated sleeping rooms, every scrap and remnant ...
— Quilts - Their Story and How to Make Them • Marie D. Webster

... he was seldom rash. Enthusiasm is not common in the bleak northern dales, whose inhabitants are, for the most part, conservative and slow. Wind and rain had hardened him and he had inherited a reserved strength and quietness from ancestors who had braved the storms that raged about Ashness. Yet the north is not always stern, for now and then the gray sky ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss

... no doubt, that your letter to Adele has borne fruit (period). Miss Manwaring does splendidly as an amanuensis (period). Your judgment was always trustworthy (period). And address the envelope, of course, to Mrs. Cornwallis English. She is stopping, I hear, with the Lorimers at Bleak House—the grey stone house on the hill at the end ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance

... turn from them; turn we to survey 165 Where rougher climes a nobler race display, Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions tread, And force a churlish soil for scanty bread; No product here the barren hills afford, But man and steel, the soldier and his sword; 170 No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array, But winter ling'ring ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... ground, but under favorable conditions, as upon the wooded points and islands of Lake Umbagog, attaining a height of 50-60 feet, with a diameter of 10-15 inches. Extremely variable in habit. In thin soils and upon bleak sites the trunk is for the most part crooked and twisted, the head scrubby, stunted, and variously distorted, resembling in shape and proportions the pitch pine under similar conditions. In deeper soils, and in situations protected from ...
— Handbook of the Trees of New England • Lorin Low Dame

... carried good rosin torches in their hands, and the wild light, all gold and crimson against the rocks, shone as bright as a ship's flare and as far. Never have I seen such a thing, I say, and never shall. There were the three of them, like young deer on a bleak hillside, singing and laughing and leaping down, and, what's more, speaking to each other in an odd lingo, with here a word of French and there a word of German, and after that something that was beyond me and foreign ...
— The House Under the Sea - A Romance • Sir Max Pemberton

... afternoon Venice was a bleak and empty setting, the jewel gone. How vacant it looked, how vacant it was! We made not any effort to penetrate the galleries; I had no heart to urge my friend. For us the whole of Venice had become one bridge ...
— The Beautiful Lady • Booth Tarkington

... time, turning her face for a moment to catch the glory of the dying sun as it fell on his form, her eyes were arrested by the shape and aspect of a woman in the west gallery. It was the bleak barren countenance of the widow Jethway, whom Elfride had not seen much of since the morning of her return with Stephen Smith. Possessing the smallest of competencies, this unhappy woman appeared to spend her life in journeyings ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... vapors, Mountains, Bleak, foreboding, Mountains, Stark and overpowering. Torrents, Tumbling, crashing, Dragging boulders In their rushing, Lakes, Forlorn and lonesome Heather In magenta patches, Sheep, and cattle Black and somber, Winding roads Through massive passes. Rain, Sun, ...
— A Little Window • Jean M. Snyder

... portion of these ranges is properly the Cordilleras; while the eastern, which slopes towards the wide-extending plains of Brazil, forms the true Andes. The southern portion skirts the bleak shores of Patagonia in a single sierra, for a distance of nearly one thousand miles, in some parts rising to the height of seven thousand feet above the ocean. Entering Chili, the mountains rise higher and higher, till they culminate in the mighty peak of Aconcagua, the most lofty ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... having doors and windows of wattled basketwork. There were not enough huts to house the army nor camp-kettles for cooking. Blankets were so few that many of the men were without covering at night. In the warm summer weather this did not much matter but bleak autumn and harsh winter would bring bitter privation. The sick in particular suffered severely, for the hospitals were ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong

... was cold and bleak. It drizzled through the dreary hours, freezing as it fell. But to many loving hearts, its sleet and rain were not its gloom. On this day was laid to rest in Mother Earth the loved remains of one numbered in the health-seeking trio of the year before. ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen

... old "Permit days," in this secluded spot. Beyond this the long line of the Vermilion Hills hove in sight, and presently we reached the Vermilion River, the Wyamun of the Crees, and, before nightfall, the Nasookamow, or Twin Lake, making our camp in an open besmirched pinery, a cattle shelter, with bleak and bare surroundings, neighboured by the shack of a solitary settler. He had, no doubt, good reasons for his choice; but it seemed a very much less inviting locality than Stony Creek, which we came to next morning, approaching it through rich and massive spruce woods, the ground strewn ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair

... cold continued, accompanied by snow. They set forward on their bleak and toilsome way, keeping to the northeast, toward the lofty summit of a mountain which it was necessary for them to cross. Before they reached its base they passed another large trail, a little to the right of a point of the mountain. This they supposed to ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman

... confess I remained perfectly lost in thought for some minutes; nor did I ever feel, or could imagine so distinctly, how the stupendous and neglected works of creation are blended with the truest beauty; for, seen from the very mountains on which I stood, so rough, so barren, so bleak, the same rugged, straggling rocks, scattered over the opposite mountain, seemed soft as velvet and more delicate than the finished ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... garden of Eden. What has struck me powerfully is the immeasurably greater diversity and interest of human character and social conditions in a single civilised nation, than in equatorial South America, where three distinct races of man live together. The superiority of the bleak north to tropical regions, however, is only in their social aspect, for I hold to the opinion that, although humanity can reach an advanced state of culture only by battling with the inclemencies of nature in high latitudes, it is under the equator ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... MOANING CLIFF Carol finally tracks the uncanny "haunts" in the great, bleak house on "moaning cliff" ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin

... pew-opener (whose cough was very bad again) remembered, and the beadle gratified, and the sexton (who was accidentally on the doorsteps, looking with great interest at the weather) not forgotten, they got into the carriage again, and drove home in the same bleak fellowship. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... days, or years before I had been pushing along the trail to the coast, thinking little where I placed my feet and much of the eating that lay at Dalton Post House; and of other things thousands of miles from this bleak waste, where men exist in the hope of ultimate living, with kaleidoscope death by their side; other things that had to do with women's faces, bills of fare from which bacon and beans were rigidly excluded, and comforts of the flesh that some ...
— In the Time That Was • James Frederic Thorne

... after we left East St. Louis, and we were put on board the cars and secreted in the gentlemen's smoking car, in which there were only a few rebels. We arrived in Springfield about twelve o'clock at night. When we took the cars it was dark, bleak and cold. It was the 18th of March, and as we were without bonnets and clothing to shield us from the sleet and wind, we suffered intensely. The old trader, for fear that mother might make her escape, carried my brother, nine years of age, from one train to the other. We then took the cars for ...
— The Story of Mattie J. Jackson • L. S. Thompson

... strong man he looked. At any rate, his fight for his life when it came was a singularly weak one. The second winter after Louise's death was bitterly cold; he was overworked, and often without sleep. One bleak east-wind day struck home. He took to his bed with a chill, which turned to peritonitis; the system showed no power of resistance, ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... not to, here; the marvelous night stole in through all one's chinks, and brought in with it, whether one wanted them or not, enormous feelings—feelings one couldn't manage, great things about death and time and waste; glorious and devastating things, magnificent and bleak, at once rapture and terror and immense, heart-cleaving longing. She felt small and dreadfully alone. She felt uncovered and defenceless. Instinctively she pulled her wrap closer. With this thing of chiffon she tired to ...
— The Enchanted April • Elizabeth von Arnim

... sure, an earlier republic in Europe, Switzerland. But the Swiss maintained themselves by their isolation, their remoteness from other nations and from one another in their bleak mountain valleys. The Dutch, on the contrary, inhabited a flat sea-coast; they were traders; their very existence depended on intercourse with other lands. Hence they had to be ever alert in defence of their hard-won freedom. The spirit of nationality, of patriotism ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various

... Agassiz would perhaps say, not regarding the existence of some local glacier that descended from the higher grounds into the valley, but respecting the existence of the great polar glacier. I felt, however, in this bleak and solitary hollow, with the grooved and polished platforms at my feet, stretching away amid the heath, like flat tombstones in a graveyard, that I had arrived at one geologic inscription to which I still wanted ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... only Lettie who said it, yet the impression went about and fixed itself somehow, that I had given myself over to a life of luxury. I, who at this very time was starving of hunger and almost perishing of cold in a bleak wind-swept land. And to me for all this, there were neither ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter

... In the bleak three-cornered artists'-room she could faintly hear the descending impetuous velocities of the Ride of the Walkyries. She was waiting in her new yellow dress, waiting painfully. Otto rushed in, a glass ...
— Tales of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett

... behind a bank of grey clouds, the northeast wind came whistling insistently through the trees:—even that feeling of spring in the air had vanished. It was just a bleak grey winter's day now. Crystal felt herself shivering with cold. She drew her shawl more closely round her shoulders, then with eyes still wet with tears, but small head held well erect, she rose to her feet and walked rapidly back to ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy

... tribesmen have been slain by him, and their bones will ever rest on our hunting-ground, unmolested either by sire or son. He has met this day in deadly combat the gray wolves of the forest that destroyed our venison. They spared neither the deer nor its fawn; and to-night they sleep in death, high on the bleak mountain-side. The God of battle helps him in every strife, and no arm has yet been found able to cope with his. And we should be proud of such a friend to lead the hunt and move the ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes

... go to sea; cut my kind uncles and aunts, and sympathizing patrons, and leave no heavy hearts but those in my own home, and take none along but the one which aches in my bosom. Cold, bitter cold as December, and bleak as its blasts, seemed the world then to me; there is no misanthrope like a boy disappointed; and such was I, with the warmth of me flogged out by adversity. But these thoughts are bitter enough ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... blue Atlantic waves, and seeming to smile a welcome as the mariners gazed with eyes of joy and hope on the inviting arcades of its verdant forest depths. Never had the eyes of white men beheld this land of beauty before. English ships had sailed along the coast to the north, finding much of it bleak and uninviting. The caravels of Columbus had threaded the glowing line of tropic isles, and later ships had borne settlers to these lands of promise. But the rich southlands of the continent had never before been seen, and well ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris

... his parka and went through the door. The foyer was empty, and, like the one at the rocket landing, protected from the Antarctic blast only by a curtain of hot air. Outside that curtain, the light seemed to lose itself in the darkness of the bleak, snow-filled Wastelands. Mike ignored the snowscape and headed across the empty foyer ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... figs, oranges, and wine. Truly, if national character depended wholly on physical geography, we should be inclined to look in the valley of the Eurotas for the rich and luxurious Athens, and seek its stern and simple rival among the bleak hills and sterile plains of Attica. We had a short ride that afternoon up the valley of the Eurotas, with a keen north wind in our faces, and were not sorry to reach Kalyvia at an ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various

... little railway of twenty-five miles, from Zurich to Baden. Spain has its two small lines, from Madrid to Aranjuez, and from Barcelona to Mataro. Turkey and Greece, in the south-east; Portugal, in the south-west; Sweden and Norway,[1] in the bleak north, have yet to become members of the great ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various

... th' same ivrywhere. In anny part iv this fair land iv ours it shud be th' right iv anny man to get a divoorce, with alimony, simply be goin' befure a Justice iv th' Peace an' makin' an affydavit that th' lady's face had grown too bleak f'r his taste. Be Hivens, I'd go farther. Rather than have people endure this sarvichood I'd let anny man escape be jumpin' th' conthract. All he'd have to do if I was r-runnin' this Governmint wud be to put some ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne

... garden, now bleak with winter waste. Helen drew a red cloak about her shoulders, which Prescott thought singularly becoming. The snow was falling gently and the frosty air deepened the scarlet in her cheeks. The Harley house was ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler

... paced the deck, and watched the bleak shores of Cork fading in the distance, his thoughts were full of the banished Costellos, and he wondered with what eyes those exiles had looked their last on the Old Head of Kinsale a quarter of a millennium ago. Those fierce old chieftains, to whom the Ffrenches—proud county family ...
— Stories of Modern French Novels • Julian Hawthorne

... value. It taught him a certain self-reliance; it showed him that what was disagreeable was not necessarily intolerable. What Hugh needed to make him effective was a certain touch of the world, a certain hardness, which his home life did not tend to develop. And thus this bleak and uncheered episode of life gave him a superficial ordinariness, and taught him the need of conventional compliance with the ways of the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson

... said Moggy, "I should think a little of that stuff would do neither of us any harm; the night is rather bleak." ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat

... the scene of his exploit, rose early, rode fast, and by noon was plainly in the selvage of the great woods. The country was split into bleak ravines, a pell-mell of rocks and boulders, and a sturdy crop of black pines between them. An overgrowth of brambles and briony ran riot over all. Prosper rode up a dry river-bed, keeping steadily west, so ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett

... this situation was the more desirable because of all the parts above it being bleak and dreary. Round the shoulders of the upland, like the arch of a great arm-chair, ran a barren scraggy ridge, whereupon no tree could stand upright, no cow be certain of her own tail, and scarcely a crow breast ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore

... camp, is bleak and dreary and isolated. At the outset cases of typhus occurred there, and in a neat, secluded corner of the camp long lines of wooden crosses tell the tale of sadness. The first cross marked a Russian from far-away Vilna, the next a Tommy from London. East had met West in the bleak ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin

... the Peiwar and Shuturgurdan passes to Kabul; third, from Dera Ismail Khan through the Guleir Surwandi and Sargo passes to Ghazni; fourth, by Quetta to Kandahar and thence to Herat, or by Ghazni to Kabul. Besides these there are many steep, difficult, mule tracks over the bleak, barren, Sulimani range, which on its eastern side is very precipitous and impassable for any ...
— Afghanistan and the Anglo-Russian Dispute • Theo. F. Rodenbough

... hadn't thought of him since the one time they had met in Alexandria. That was a year ago. It seemed much longer. Since the Boss-man had exiled his cousin to that bleak rock to the east of Flora there had been no word of him. And now—he laughed a sharp bark of humorless annoyance—Douglas couldn't have timed it better ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone

... delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... motive, as Margaret knew from her own feelings. It would be different. Discordant as it was—with almost a detestation for all she had ever heard of the North of England, the manufacturers, the people, the wild and bleak country—there was this one recommendation—it would be different from Helstone, and could never remind them ...
— North and South • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell

... came to a dead halt sometimes, in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves across the track. Conversation began to flag. Cheerfulness gave place to grave concern. The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every mind, and extended its ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... a quarter of an hour to wait. Hilda dismissed Florrie, with final injunctions, and followed her trunk to the bleak platform. The old porter was very kind. She went to the little yellow bookstall. There, under her hand, was a low pile of The Five Towns Chronicle. Miracle! Miraculous George Cannon! She flushed with pride, with a sense of ownership, as she took a penny from ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett

... casement partially darkened, to the bleak north; various sketches on the walls; gaunt specimens of antique furniture, and of gorgeous Italian silks, scattered about in confused disorder; one large picture on its easel curtained; another as large, and half finished, before which stood the painter. ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Poland, Courland, and Livonia. I went on horseback as the most convenient manner of traveling. I was but lightly clothed, and of this I felt the inconvenience the more I advanced northeast. What must not a poor old man have suffered in that severe weather and climate, whom I saw on a bleak common in Poland lying on the road helpless, shivering, and hardly having the wherewithal to cover his nakedness? I pitied the poor soul: though I felt the severity of the air myself, I threw my mantle over him, and immediately I heard a voice from the heavens blessing me for that piece ...
— Stories to Read or Tell from Fairy Tales and Folklore • Laure Claire Foucher

... there is peace! It is cold and gray there in the early morning, and the hills are bleak and black, but I remember days when from this same spot I've watched the deep, soft blue and green; I've sat here as the hills were glowing in the changing evening lights and our valley grew dark and cold. What ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd

... was absent at a Shakespeare reading. Dr. Trenire had been out all day, a long round over bleak country, and had not been home more than an hour. Kitty had heard him come, and had longed—as she had never longed in the days when she was free to do as she liked—to go and superintend his meal, and hear all about his day. But she knew what a to-do there ...
— Kitty Trenire • Mabel Quiller-Couch

... thick and awkward sulphur setting, but with the afternoon the jewel faded to a distant dim phantom, from that to blank nothingness. As if satisfied with this piteous exit, the fog drew closer, keeping especially heavy watch upon the long and bleak line of the Marylebone Road, and taking the high and narrow house in which Cuckoo dwelt under its severest protection. Twilight wanted to come as the afternoon drew on, but it had been forestalled and was practically already there. Doubtless it did come, but no one was much the wiser. ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens

... long one, with few stoppages. The train flew on at a frightful pace through the hill country, where from the windows could be seen the bare bleak peaks of Cumberland, varied with nearer slopes of soft green grass and verdant valleys. On, on through the great grimy towns of the manufacturing counties; on and on through dark tunnels, swinging round curves, over rivers, skirting woods, still rushing on, with an occasional shriek and scream, ...
— Little Folks (October 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... and Jose sat and smoked and watched her every movement with keen, critical eyes. Were they not Spaniards who had danced all through their childhood and youth, as naturally as they breathed? About Gallito's mouth played the bleak smile which in him betokened content, while Jose could barely wait for her to finish her preliminary exercises before he besought her to let him join her. Even Mrs. Nitschkan laid down some fishing tackle with which she was engrossed ...
— The Black Pearl • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... from the cabin companion-way and leaned for a while on the taffrail, seeming to gaze at the town undulating over the hills, dwarfed by the distance. It was when she turned to go down again that Goodwin had a full view of her face, bleak and rigid, with greying hair drawn tightly back from the temples, as formal and blank as the face of a clock. It was told of her that she would sit knitting in her chair by the mizzen fife-rail while at the break of the poop a miserable man was being trodden ...
— Those Who Smiled - And Eleven Other Stories • Perceval Gibbon

... a time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The City ...
— A Christmas Carol • Charles Dickens

... him, the sense of personal love and aid towards the Lord and Master whom he served grew upon him. Neither the gazelle-eyed Ayesha nor the prosperous village life presented any great temptation. He would have given them all for one bleak day of mist on a Border moss; it was the appalling contrast with the hold of a Moorish galley that at times startled him, together with the only too great probability that he should be utterly incapable of saving poor little Ulysse ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... afternoon of bleak, early spring, Evelyn wandered alone on the shore where she had bidden Jim Willowby farewell. It was raining, and the sea was grey and desolate. The tide was coming in with a fierce roaring that seemed to fill ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell

... the ice on spar and jackstay, and the cracking, volleying sail, And the tatters of our voices blowing down the roaring gale ... I recalled the West Coast harbours just as plain as yesteryear— Nitrate ports, all dry and dusty, where they sell fresh water-dear— Little cities white and wicked by a bleak and barren shore, With an anchor on the cliff-side for to show you where to moor; And the sour red wine we tasted, and the foolish songs we sung, And the girls we had our fun with in the days when we were young; And ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 4th, 1920 • Various

... night and St Agnes' Eve; the snow fell heavily, caught into whirling eddies by the keen north wind. Hilarius and the Friar, crossing an empty waste of bleak unprotected heath, met the full force of the blast, and each moment the snow grew denser, the darkness more complete. They struggled on, breathless, beaten, exhausted and lost; Hilarius, leading the Friar by one hand, held the other across ...
— The Gathering of Brother Hilarius • Michael Fairless

... sunset and sunrise the twilight crept along the horizon from Occident to Orient. Further north the inhabitants of the Arctic circle were enjoying the light of their long summer day. What a contrast to the bleak night of cold and darkness that stretches with faint glimmerings of dawn through nearly half the year. The shores of the bay were high perpendicular banks, sharply cut like the bluffs at Vicksburg. There are several head-lands, but none project far enough to form harbors behind them. The bottom ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox

... Highland and Lowland will continue to hear in the monotony of the strain, the voice of the tempest, and the roar of the mountain torrent, in its abruptness they will see the beetling crag and the shaggy summit of the bleak Highland hill, in its obscurity and loud and tumid sounds, they will recognize the hollows of the deep glens and the mists which shroud the cataracts, in its happier and nobler measures, they will welcome notes of poetry ...
— The Celtic Magazine, Vol. 1, No. 1, November 1875 • Various

... bounding through the air Moves the bleak ice, and sheds a dazzling glare; The torn foundations on the surface ride, And wrecks of winter load ...
— The Rangers - [Subtitle: The Tory's Daughter] • D. P. Thompson

... joys and halved his burdens, tossing them from one of her fine shoulders to the other as if they were feathers. She swept into the quiet village life of Beulah like a salt sea breeze. She infused a new spirit into the bleak church "sociables" and made them positively agreeable functions. The choir ceased from wrangling, the Sunday School plucked up courage and flourished like a green bay tree. She managed the deacons, she braced up the missionary ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... queerly; slowly, and with a timidity not at all in keeping with the blundering assertiveness of the Pilgrim. When a young woman showed for a moment against the bleak twilight and then stepped inside, Charming Billy caught at the table for support, and the coat he was holding dropped to the floor. He did not say a word: ...
— The Long Shadow • B. M. Bower

... vale the village is sleeping, Sleeping the firs on the bleak rock above; Nought wakes, save grateful hearts, silently creeping Up to the Lord in the might ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley

... of the disciples. It is notable, too, how often Dickens uses the great Scripture phrases for his most dramatic climaxes. There are not in literature many finer uses of Scripture than the scene in Bleak House, where the poor waif Joe is dying, and while his friend teaches him the Lord's Prayer he sees the light coming. A Christmas season without Dickens's Christmas Carol would be incomplete; but there again is ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee

... brooms; and we were obliged to send word to this effect to our Portland patrons. The next morning Addison and I rode home on old Jim and Buckskin, with their harness tied up in a bundle before us. The wind was piercing and bleak; we were both so chilled as to be ill of a cold for several days afterward. The story that we had to tell at home was far from being an inspiriting one. Not only had we lost our load, traverse sleds and rack, but in due time we had a bill of ten dollars ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... for the fine arts; and Canova used to say that he was in love when but five years old. But these instances, however, prove nothing. Calf-love, as it is called in the country, is common; and in Italy it may arise earlier than in the bleak and barren regions of Lochynagar. This movement of juvenile sentiment is not, however, love—that strong masculine avidity, which, in its highest excitement, is unrestrained, by the laws alike of God and man. In truth, the feeling of this kind of love is the very reverse of the ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt

... bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes

... Nice. H. Carenio; coach daily to and from Menton, 14m. S. The road now ascends the Col di Brouis, 2871 ft., whence passengers in this direction have their last view of the Mediterranean. The descent is now made through bleak and barren mountains to Giandola, 39 m. N.E. from Nice, 1247 ft., at the base of lofty frowning rocks. Inns: trangers, Poste. Coach daily between this and Ventimiglia. To the E., on the Roja, ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... a couple of trading trips up to the city, took it upon his own responsibility to read the buoys and landmarks as far as he knew them. Keeping the lead constantly going, we quietly jogged up the river with a stiff breeze; the country bleak and bare, a region of half-redeemed swamp and lagoon: being in smooth water, our party all turned out; stores were rummaged, and a good breakfast provided upon the deck of the boat so recently swept by the green seas: the past ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power

... might starve. His mind was filled, as he himself says, with melancholy and dismal horror at the prospect of seamen and soldiers, worn to skeletons by hunger, drawing lots to decide who should die first amidst the "adamantine frosts" and "mountains of snow" of bleak and ...
— The Conquest of New France - A Chronicle of the Colonial Wars, Volume 10 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • George M. Wrong

... is, concealed from vulgar eye, The cave of Poverty and Poetry. Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess, Emblem of music caused by ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

... later they clattered briskly out of Boisvert, the thick grey mud flying from their horses' hoofs as they went, and took the road to France. For a couple of miles they rode steadily along under the unceasing rain and in the teeth of that bleak February wind. Then at a cross-road La Boulaye unexpectedly ...
— The Trampling of the Lilies • Rafael Sabatini

... inaccessible river that could be reached in three or four days? Did Cardenas really travel fifty leagues? I do not know, but I hazard the conjecture that the Hopis gave Cardenas as much wandering about as they could, took him to this terribly bleak and barren spot where even to-day one can scarcely prevail upon a Hopi or Navaho to guide him, in order that he might be discouraged from making further explorations in the neighborhood. The Hopis had no use for explorers ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James

... and the castle of the Duke, its ruler, lay beside a lake that was bluer than the deepest indigo. A long time ago the Knight Wendelin and his squire George chanced upon this lake, but they found nothing save waste fields and bleak rocks around it, yet the shores must formerly have borne a different aspect, for there were shattered columns and broken-nosed statues lying on the ground. Against the hillside there were remains of ancient ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... Gone were the laughing vales, the pale-green hills, the luring, feminine guise of nature, the soft-lapping waves upon a peaceful, shining shore. The spirit that rides the thunder had claimed these bleak and desolate ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... how These flow'rs with hasty, stretch'd heads grow And strive for heav'n, but rooted here Lament the distance with a tear! The honeysuckles clad in white, The rose in red, point to the light; And the lilies, hollow and bleak, Look as if they would something speak; They sigh at night to each soft gale, And at the day-spring weep it all. Shall I then only—wretched I!— Oppress'd with earth, on earth still lie?" Thus speaks he to the neighbour trees, And many sad soliloquies To springs and fountains doth ...
— Poems of Henry Vaughan, Silurist, Volume II • Henry Vaughan

... on, if the future of toil and dreary misery developed itself before him, the sense of personal love and aid towards the Lord and Master whom he served grew upon him. Neither the gazelle-eyed Ayesha nor the prosperous village life presented any great temptation. He would have given them all for one bleak day of mist on a Border moss; it was the appalling contrast with the hold of a Moorish galley that at times startled him, together with the only too great probability that he should be utterly incapable of saving poor little Ulysse ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge

... objects of the world but the bearing of such objects upon their will and person. With objects which have no such bearing there sounds within them a constant note: It is nothing to me, which is the fundamental base in all their music. Thus all things seem to them to wear a bleak, gloomy, strange, hostile aspect. It is only for their will that they seem to have any perceptive faculties at all; and it is, in fact, only a moral and not a theoretical tendency, only a moral and not an intellectual ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer

... were obliged to send word to this effect to our Portland patrons. The next morning Addison and I rode home on old Jim and Buckskin, with their harness tied up in a bundle before us. The wind was piercing and bleak; we were both so chilled as to be ill of a cold for several days afterward. The story that we had to tell at home was far from being an inspiriting one. Not only had we lost our load, traverse sleds and rack, but in due time we had ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens

... because they refused to submit to a king called Harold Fairhair, and when he pursued them to the Orkney and Faroe Islands they took refuge on the coasts of Iceland. There they settled, built themselves wooden houses, planted such crops as would grow in that bleak land, and founded a commonwealth. Little by little they left the old Viking life, and it lived only in their ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris

... shivering and blue, will tell you it is not cold at all, for he will permit no reproach to lie on his beloved land; but the traveller frequently becomes discouraged, and the American contingent, especially, blames those misleading English writers who, finding relief from their own bleak island in Italian climes, exaggerated the conditions by apostrophizing the country as "Sunny Italy" and for more than a century uttered such rhapsodies in its praise that the whole world credited them—until it acquired personal ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces Abroad • Edith Van Dyne

... in, were comforted by the news that the man who shot Larry Byrne was swinging for it in the county jail at Ballinscreen. But you never made such a mistake in your born lives. That man was out on the mountains in the bleak, bitter winter weather, was in hiding all day in the caves up there in the clouds on top of Croghan, and by night was coming down to the lonely mountain farmhouses to beg what would keep the life in his big hungry body. The man that swung for the murder was as innocent as yourself, and more betoken, ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan

... afterwards, and we are surprised to find that the farmer is safely housed, and that he has not been robbed upon a bleak moor on a dark stage. But we soon feel a sensation of awe, when we learn that before us is the interior of the very farm-house that is going to be murdered. The farmer and his wife go through the long-standing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various

... gentlemanlike than he had ever felt in his life or should doubtless ever feel again. It might have been enough—but somehow as they stood there with this immense clearance between them it wasn't. The clearance was like a sudden gap or great bleak opening through which there blew upon them a deadly chill. Too many things had fallen away, too many new rolled up and over him, and they made something within shake him to his base. It upset the full vessel, and though she kept ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James

... After that, grateful and content, White Fang lay at Grey Beaver's feet, gazing at the fire that warmed him, blinking and dozing, secure in the knowledge that the morrow would find him, not wandering forlorn through bleak forest-stretches, but in the camp of the man-animals, with the gods to whom he had given himself and upon whom he ...
— White Fang • Jack London

... on the bleak seabeach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair Lashed close to a ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey

... deodar and round the first bare boulder that marked the beginning of the Ladies' Mile. It lay rolled out before them, the Ladies' Mile, sinuous and grey and empty, along the face of the cliff; they could see from one end of it to the other. It was the bleak side of Jakko; even tonight there was a fresh springing coldness in it blowing over from the hidden snows behind the rims of the nearer hills. Madeline held up her face to it, and gave herself a moment of ...
— The Pool in the Desert • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... of mine can tell the spell Of garden ways I know so well?— A path that brings me through the frost Of winter, when the moon is tossed In clouds; beneath great cedars, weak With shaggy snow; past shrubs blown bleak With shivering leaves; to eaves that leak The tattered ice, whereunder is A fire-flickering window-space; And in the light, with lips to kiss, ...
— Poems • Madison Cawein

... But such bleak thoughts were short-lasting. For as soon as the tunnels and the stairway were cleared of smoke, Grim Hagen's army came pouring into the room. Grim Hagen had mustered at least two-thousand men. He had divided these into ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam

... Italian, one in Dutch occupation. In all, at a cost of nearly a quarter of a million, some fourscore distinct posts of observation were provided; among them such inhospitable, and all but inaccessible rocks in the bleak Southern Ocean, as St. Paul's and Campbell Islands, swept by hurricanes, and fitted only for the habitation of seabirds, where the daring votaries of science, in the wise prevision of a long leaguer by the elements, were supplied with stores for many months, or even a whole year. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... prospective history of the World from that event down to the Millennium. Considered as a narrator, Michael is very subject to dullness; were it not for the unfailing dignity and magniloquence of his diction, his tale would be merely a bleak compendium of the outlines of Scripture history; but to Raphael is committed the story of the war in Heaven and its amazing sequel,—a story containing passages so brilliant, and so little necessary to be narrated at length, that there is some flavour of inconsistency in Milton's apology ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... which, if nothing more, are at least delightful souvenirs. They form the golden thread in the tangled web of our existence, ever appearing amid the darker surface around, and throwing a fair halo of brilliancy on what, without it, were cold, bleak, and ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... Furthermore, the turning point in the war had been reached. Even before Washington's forces went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Burgoyne[153] had surrendered at Saratoga, on October 17, 1777; and, before the cold bleak winter at Valley Forge was over, the treaty of French alliance was signed on February 6, 1778. The torments at Valley Forge proved to be the birth of a new ...
— Drug Supplies in the American Revolution • George B. Griffenhagen

... While her husband was absent Marian made the country house on the Hudson her residence, but in many ways she sought opportunity to reduce the awful sum of anguish entailed by the war. She often lured Estelle from the city as her companion, even in bleak wintry weather. Here Strahan found her when on a leave of absence in the last year of the war, and he soon learned that he had another heart to lose. Marian was discreetly blind to his direct and soldier-like siege. Indeed, she proved the best ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe

... luxuriant green tracery all through the months of blossom and harvest. In winter the winds found many holes in the walls of the poor little hut, and the vine was black and leafless, and the bare lands looked very bleak and drear without, and sometimes within the floor was flooded and then frozen. In winter it was hard, and the snow numbed the little white limbs of Nello, and the icicles cut the brave, untiring ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various

... who are very numerous, were content to reside in their castles and houses, in that bleak and barren climate; and although some of them made frequent journeys to London, yet I do not remember any of their greatest families, till very lately, to have made England their constant habitation, before the Union: Or, if they did, I am sure it was generally to their ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift

... of the day I went into Emily's room. She had been growing worse for some time, and had been removed to the westerly room to be rid of the bleak winds. David was sitting on a low stool by her bedside, his head resting upon the bed, looking up in her face. She smiled as ...
— Atlantic Monthly,Volume 14, No. 82, August, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... some people whom already we have met, and to others whom thus far we have not met, were transacted in a lofty and rather bleak looking room at Scotland Yard between the hours of nine and ten A. M.; that is, later in the morning of the fateful day whose advent we have heard acclaimed from ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer

... seconds, unless the shadows upon the hills and the mountain eagles answered for such. Ian was the highly trained fencer, adept of the sword. Glenfernie's knowledge was lesser, more casual. But he had his bleak wrath, a passion that did not blind nor overheat, but burned white, that set him, as it were, in a tingling, crackling arctic air, where the shadows were sharp-edged, the nerves braced and the will steel-tipped. They ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... great London property came into the possession of the Grosvenor (Westminster) family. The house was rebuilt, and renamed Grosvenor House. Strype says: "The Earl of Peterborough's house with a large courtyard before it, and a fine garden behind, but its situation is but bleak in winter and not over healthful, as being too near the low meadows on the south and west parts." The house was finally ...
— Westminster - The Fascination of London • Sir Walter Besant

... duel continued with long lapses of silence while the moon grew to a disk of pale, liquid silver in the west, enduring through the bleak, chill time preceding the end of night, finally fading and disappearing as the far eastern distance began to glow with the ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... operating expenses and public investment. In 2000-01, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $105 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak financial situation. The IMF approved a $73 million poverty reduction and growth facility for Niger in 2000 and announced $115 million in debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... the spring the swallows all return, And the bleak bitter sea grows mild once more, With all its ...
— Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics • Bliss Carman

... own very successful Washington Irving. He drew largely upon the common stock of ideas, and dressed them up in a new, and what has proved to be a most attractive form. So, again, with Mr. Dickens. Read his "Bleak House" and you will find that he has been a most careful observer of men and things, and has thereby been enabled to collect a great number of facts that he has dressed up in different forms, but that is all he has done. He is in the condition of a man who had entered a large garden and collected ...
— Letters on International Copyright; Second Edition • Henry C. Carey

... padrone has relations at Sant' Agata, as I have told your eccellenza, and his vessel has lain on the beach near the castle many a bleak winter." ...
— The Bravo • J. Fenimore Cooper

... have given Venice an appreciation that will live in my mind with every delight of that dearest place in the world. But all the same you remain for me a dearest of friends, whether I see you framed by your Venice, or brightening up our bleak London, should you come there. In Venice, however, should I live and you be there next autumn, it will go hard with me if I do not meet ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting

... February, and it was a very bleak walk over the mountain; but Winthrop took it many a time. His mother now and then said when she saw him come in or go out, "Don't overtry yourself, my son! —" but he answered her always with his usual composure, or with one of those ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... Under these circumstances the wet soon found its way through Abe's boots and clothes. "Ne'er moind," he said to himself, "I'll find some dry claathes when I get there." So on he went over the rough bleak hill that wouldn't afford shelter for a rabbit, much less for a man, down the steep slope, through the running gutters of water. "Aye dear," said he, "I'm weshing my feet withaat taking my booits off." At the bottom of the hill, known as Stone's Wood Bottom, ...
— Little Abe - Or, The Bishop of Berry Brow • F. Jewell

... and pointed to the men, sturdy toilers starved out of bleak Dakota and axe-men farmers from the forests of Michigan. "Of these, and the rest who are coming by and by," he said. "Still, I don't want to go into that; and you seem angry. You haven't offered to shake ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss

... feelings which one never does talk of—there is no language that I ever learned which will express them. But I have never heard any music that could reach my soul like that which God gives us in the blossom season—the summer, the fall of late fruit—and the bleak, hard winter, when the clash of ice against ice has a sound that no man or ...
— Phemie Frost's Experiences • Ann S. Stephens

... the sheep, which went drifting past Hidden Water like an army without banners. But alas for Hidden Water and the army of sheep!—in this barren Winter the torrential rains did not fall, the grass did not sprout, and the flowers did not bloom. A bleak north wind came down from the mountains, cold and dry and crackling with electricity, and when it had blown its stint it died down in a ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge

... atmosphere, and also, as regards the landscape, in a completely different country, which latter fact we only fully appreciated with the morning light, as we drew near to Pretoria. The stranger landing at Delagoa Bay, and travelling through those bleak and barren mountains, might well ask himself the reason of the late prolonged and costly war; but as he approaches the Rand, and suddenly sees the rows and rows of mining shafts and chimneys, which are the visible ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson

... looks so odd to have to celebrate Christmas with a warm sun shining and all the trees in full leaf!" said Joyce. "That is why it never feels Christmas to me. I miss the home aspect,—frost and snow, and landscapes bleak and bare." ...
— Banked Fires • E. W. (Ethel Winifred) Savi

... the villa of my valued hostess, and my consequent migration at very short notice to Cannes. I started at night, and in the small hours of the morning I had to change trains at Genoa. As I paced the dark platform, the air was bleak and wintry, and, looking back with regret to the shining suns of Cyprus, I took my place at last in another train, shivering. For a few hours I slept. When I woke I was less uncomfortable. The air, unless this was mere fancy, ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock

... imagine to ourselves His Godlike eye penetrating at that moment every churchyard and every grave: the mausoleums of the great—the grassy sods of the poor; the marble cenotaph of the noble and illustrious slumbering under fretted aisle and cathedral canopy—the myriads whose requiem is chanted by the bleak winds of the desert or the chimes of the ocean! The child carried away in the twinkling of an eye—the blossom just opening, and then frost-blighted; the aged sire, cut down like a shock of corn in its season, falling withered and seared like the leaves of autumn; the young exulting in the prime ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff

... all the good days in the year, upon a Christmas eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting, foggy weather; and the city clocks had only just gone three, but it was ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... night the scheme was divulged to Dorothy, and she was in ecstasies. London had always sounded bleak and distant and terrible to her; and her heart had misgiven her at the idea of leaving her aunt. If only this thing might be arranged! When Brooke spoke the next morning of returning at once to his ...
— He Knew He Was Right • Anthony Trollope

... fabric melts away; Each Gothic arch, memorial-stone, And long, dim, lofty aisle, are gone; And lingering last, deception dear, The choir's high sounds die on my ear. Now slow return the lonely down, The silent pastures bleak and brown, The farm begirt with copsewood wild, The gambols of each frolic child, Mixing their shrill cries with the tone Of ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott

... by the Gulf and River St. Lawrence and Canada, and W. by James' Bay and Hudson's Bay. Its area is estimated at 420,000 sq. miles. The vast interior, inhabited by a few wandering Nascopie Indians, is little known; the coast, mainly but sparsely peopled by Eskimoes, is rugged, bleak and desolate. Seals abound, and the sea is well stocked with cod and other fish. The wild animals include deer (caribou), bears, wolves, foxes, martens, and otters. The Eskimo dogs are trained to draw sledges, to which they are attached in teams of ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe

... his sister's arrows, through soft dells of dreamy dew. Vext with gleams of Ladon's daughter, dashed along the son of Jove, Fast upon flower-trammelled Daphne fleeting on from grove to grove; Flights of seawind hard behind him, breaths of bleak and whistling straits; Drifts of driving cloud above him, like a troop of fierce-eyed Fates! So he reached the water-shallows; then he stayed his steps, and heard Daphne drop upon the grasses, ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall

... exclusive demesnes shimmered before Andrew's vision as remote as some radiant planetary choir. The stir on the field, however, excited him. The sun shone through a clear air on this late meeting of the season, investing it with an air of innocent holiday gaiety which stultified Bakkus's bleak description. And Andrew's great height overtopping the crowd afforded him a fair view ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... century; and towards the period of the Revolution, the last proprietor of Ravenswood Castle saw himself compelled to part with the ancient family seat, and to remove himself to a lonely and sea-beaten tower, which, situated on the bleak shores between St. Abb's Head and the village of Eyemouth, looked out on the lonely and boisterous German Ocean. A black domain of wild pasture-land surrounded their new residence, and formed ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott

... "her colour is remarkably good: it is not subject to any variation like ours. The bleak sea air does not dim the roses on her cheeks; while these young ladies look as blue and as cold as figures carved out of stone. Of course, Miss Leigh will think me very uncharitable in saying that Mrs. D. paints; ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... was long minister of the moorland parish of Balweary, in the vale of Dule. A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the Hanging Shaw. In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye was ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 5 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... perpendicularly, rattling on brass rods, the covers of empty beds blew about noiselessly near the bare floor all along the line, and I shivered to the very marrow. The soft wind of the tropics played in that naked ward as bleak as a winter's gale in an old barn at home. "Don't you let him start his hollering, mister," hailed from afar the accident case in a distressed angry shout that came ringing between the walls like a quavering call down a tunnel. The clawing hand hauled at my shoulder; he leered ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad

... ordered off to a new life, from which every instinct of his being shrank afraid. He was cursed with an imagination in excess of his brains, and in the haze of the future he saw two pictures with uncanny vividness—himself in bleak lodgings raising his head from Virgil, to wonder what they were doing at home to-night; and, contrasted with that loneliness, the others, his cronies, laughing along the country roads beneath the glimmer of the stars. They would be ...
— The House with the Green Shutters • George Douglas Brown

... begin their real un-understood life. At times it seemed impossible that it was the same world. Surely the sun that struck like a hammer in Jamaica could not be the gracious warm planet that gilded the gorse of the Antrim glens. And up the Baltic in mid-winter it was bleak as a candle, and even then in Antrim it had a great kindliness. Nor were the winds the same. The hot puffs of the Indian Ocean, the drunken, lurching flaws of Biscay Bay, the trades that worked steadily as ants, had not the human quality of the winds of the Nine Glens, that were ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne

... for something else from him, some warming, comforting assurance of help, some heartening, stimulating encouragement along that stark, bleak way. ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher

... picture-galleries, and then making an attempt to smoke a cigar in the Palace garden—for which crime I was nearly run through the body by a rascally sentinel—I was driven, perforce, into the great bleak lonely place before the Palace, with its roads branching off to all the towns in the world, which Louis and Napoleon once intended to conquer, and there enjoyed my favourite pursuit at leisure, and was meditating whether I should go back to "Vefour's" for dinner, or patronise ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray

... stain appeared in Warden's cheeks as his thoughts reverted to Lawler's return to Willets, after disposing of his cattle to the Red Rock buyer. And Warden's shoulders sagged a little, the smile faded and he glared malignantly at the bleak, gray clouds that sailed over town on the ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer

... blighted by drought, avoiding the great cracks which had opened in the dry earth and lay gaping like thirsty mouths for rain. The crops were burnt, and the land which had seemed so fertile looked bleak and sterile. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl

... tradesman's cart; and, as it was winter, there were no children playing in the garden. It was a rainy afternoon. A gray cloud of fog and soot hung from the whole sky. About a score of yellow leaves yet quivered on the trees, and the statue of Queen Anne stood bleak and disconsolate among the bare branches. I am afraid I am getting long-winded, but somehow that afternoon seems burned into me in enamel. I gazed drearily without interest. I brooded over the past; I ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald

... ruined castle loomed darkly, a ghastly monument of evil deeds. I looked about for the madman but saw him not. The weirdness of the place, the horror of its secret, crept into my blood. I became afraid. Down the bleak road I picked my way, glancing fearsomely over my shoulder. I fain would have ...
— The Black Wolf's Breed - A Story of France in the Old World and the New, happening - in the Reign of Louis XIV • Harris Dickson

... show me what she thought. But granting that our employer led a double and dubious life, who could she be, this mysterious woman who kept him company in the old tower? I knew from my own inspection how bleak and bare a room it was. She certainly did not live there. But in that case where did she come from? It could not be anyone of the household. They were all under the vigilant eyes of Mrs. Stevens. The visitor must ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle

... through it for the first time; and now, in strong contrast with that day, the heavy sky above him was a leaden gray, there was no greenness about the hills, which were still waiting for the cloak of winter snow that invests them with a certain beauty of its own. There was something painful in all this bleak and bare desolation for a man who was traveling to find a grave at his journey's end; the thought of that grave haunted him. The lines of dark pine-trees here and there along the mountain ridges against the sky seized ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac

... in the Westervelt, the reading took place on the open stage, which was bleak and draughty. The company sat in a funereal semicircle, with the author, the star, and the manager in a short line facing them. All the men retained their overcoats, for the morning was miserably raw, and at Helen's positive command kept their heads covered; ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland

... was not seasoned for such work, and considered not that a mind which had once been opened by knowledge, could ill endure the contraction of dark and perpetual ignorance. The approach, however, of winter, brought me acquainted with my mistake. It grew cold, it grew bleak; little guarded against the inclemency of the ——, I felt its severity in every limb, and missed a thousand indulgencies which in possession I had never valued. To rise at break of day, chill, freezing, and comfortless! no sun abroad, no fire at home! to go out in all weather ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... Cephissus winds his tortuous way to flow under grey willows, at the foot of barren stony hills, till his turbid waters lose themselves, no longer in the vast reedy swamps of the now vanished Copaic Lake, but in the darkness of a cavern in the limestone rock. Eastward, clinging to the slopes of the bleak range of which the hill of Panopeus forms part, were the ruins of Chaeronea, the birthplace of Plutarch; and out there in the plain was fought the disastrous battle which laid Greece at the feet of Macedonia. There, too, in a later age East and West met in deadly ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... journey westward," said they, "beyond the green Isle of Erin, is our father's hall. Seven days' journey northward, on the bleak Norwegian shore, is our father's hall. ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin

... us, chill and bleak and ravaging. The smoke from our chimneys went up in tall columns that lost themselves in the gray sky. The snow shut us in, and presently the wind lay in wait to blast us when we ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson

... in the throes of a blizzard. The wind howled and shrieked, heralding the approach of March, the Wind King's month of the year. Mrs. Davenport stood at a second story window of a room of the Gilsey House, and looked down idly on the bleak thoroughfare. She was a young-looking woman for her thirty-five years, and had an extremely sweet face, denoting kindliness ...
— A Little Florida Lady • Dorothy C. Paine

... would also imagine that she lives in a solid well-repaired square brown stone house with a cupola used as a conning tower and equipped with periscope and telescope and wireless. Furthermore, her house is situated on a bleak hill so that nothing impedes her view and that of her two pets, a magpie and a jackal. And the business in life of all three of them is to track down and destroy the good name of every woman who comes within range, especially if she is ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... flying was hilly, and he kept at a fairly high altitude. The map showed him that the great Taurus range lay between him and the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean. Within an hour and a half after leaving Constantinople he came in sight of its huge bleak masses stretching away to right and left, but still a hundred miles or more distant, although, on the right, spurs of the Cilician part of the range jutted out much nearer to him. On the right, too, he descried from his great height a broad and glittering expanse of water, which the map ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang

... Thames. The high road from the bridge over the Wey runs between double ribands of water; on one side lies the sunny, slow canal, edged with iris and forget-me-nots, and banked up higher than the road; on the other, a shady stream, dun and bleak-haunted. Before the road turns into Addlestone there is a field-path, breaking off at right angles, which leads to a wooden bridge crossing the clear, brown little Bourne, and beyond the bridge lies Chertsey Mead, one huge hayfield, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker

... ploughed up by the wheels of the artillery and waggons; everything like herbage was trodden into mire; broken carriages, arms, accoutrements, dead horses and men, were strewed over the heath. This was the third day after the battle: it was the beginning of November, and for three days a bleak wind and heavy rain had continued incessantly. There were still remaining alive several hundreds of horses, and of the human victims of that dreadful fight. I can speak with certainty of having seen more than four hundred men still living, unsheltered, without food, and without any human assistance, ...
— Captain Sword and Captain Pen - A Poem • Leigh Hunt

... solitary, lonesome, dreary-looking spot on that bleak winter day; and life inside those tiny houses was restricted and full of limitations. Denas thought of them all, but she weighed and measured the life without taking into account the love that sat on each hearthstone—the ...
— A Singer from the Sea • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr

... the man's divinest part Ruled triumphant in the heart, And, with shrinking, sudden start, The bleak old world ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster

... and seen the edge of our island home, but have you ever thought of that long line which runs away and away from your seaside place? Have you followed the smooth sandy bays and the outlines of the towering cliffs; have you passed the mouths of mighty rivers and so gone steadily on northward to the bleak coasts of Scotland where the waves beat on granite cliffs; have you rounded stormy Cape Wrath, and sailed in and out by all the deep-cut inlets on the west of Scotland, and thus come back to the very place from whence you started? If you can even imagine this ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton

... system led to, disorder which was not fully known until after his departure from France. Then people saw, at last, where all the golden schemes that had flooded upon popular credulity had borne us;—not to the smiling and fertile shores of Prosperity and Confidence, as may be imagined; but to the bleak rocks and dangerous sands of Ruin and Mistrust, where dull clouds obscure the sky, and where there is no ...
— The Memoirs of Louis XIV., His Court and The Regency, Complete • Duc de Saint-Simon

... McDonald Islands: Heard Island - bleak and mountainous, with a quiescent volcano; McDonald Islands - ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... reviving Molly's fire, which had almost gone out. She felt as she had felt only once before in her life, and that had been ten years previously, when her only child had died suddenly. She wished passionately that she were back in Calcutta with her husband. She hated the bleak English ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell

... in due time was felled, cut up, and carted to the station, and we removed our camp to the site of the operations. It was a bleak, wild place, three miles from the south mail track, and consisted only of a small slab hut or two with a wool shed and sheep yards. The owner, Mr. T. Moorhouse, had lately purchased the run, and was about to ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth

... blew strong and shattering, bleak and dreary, against the windows of the bedchamber at the back of the house. The complaint of the cedar tree, as the branches sawed upon one another, was long-drawn and loud. These sounds reached Iglesias in the sitting- room, where he sat, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... on the left, looking as if "Hollis" and "Stoughton" had been transplanted from Cambridge,—carried there in the night by orthodox angels, perhaps, like the Santa Casa. Away to my left again, but abreast of me, was the bleak, bare old Academy building; and in front of me stood unchanged the shallow oblong white house where I lived a year in the days of James Monroe ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's, under the railway bridge, past the Queen's theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see LEAH tonight, I wonder. I said I. Or the Lily of Killarney? Elster ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... shucking corn and tossing the bright golden ears into wagons that were placed between the rows for that purpose, while others were hauling the grain to their barns to store it away for the winter's use. The broad corn leaves rustling in the wind seemed to whisper, "Winter is coming with his cold, bleak storms to rob the earth of her summer splendor; but he will bring his beautiful coverlet of snow to protect her fields and to prepare them for the ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum

... the breezes that blow Through the gardens and walks of thy home, To murmur my love as I go And play with thy locks as I roam! For changeful the breezes and bleak— Now balmy, now chilly they blow— Yet they, love, are kissing thy cheek, O heart of my heart, not changeful my love towards thee— Eternal my ...
— Welsh Lyrics of the Nineteenth Century • Edmund O. Jones

... The bare trees showed but dimly through the gathering dusk. It was a bleak, cold outlook. Presently down the street came a man with a lighted torch and set the gas-flames to flickering in every ...
— The Governess • Julie M. Lippmann

... is my answer from this cold, bleak ridge Down to your valley: you may rest you there: The gulf is wide, and none can build a bridge That your gross weight ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various

... The sea lay dappled with light and shade as the sun and vagrant breezes played with it, while for miles along the coast the great cliffs were wrapt in a soft, quivering haze so that the lines and curves of their vari-coloured strata, and the bleak, sheer menace of their height, as they overhung the blue water lapping on the sands below, were screened ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler

... evening was full of eerie sounds—the creaking of fir boughs, the whistle of the wind in the tree-tops, the vibrations of strips of dried bark on the rail fences. But we carried summer and sunshine in our hearts, and the bleak unloveliness of the outer world only ...
— The Story Girl • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... be the Rattler camp, and inspected its display of tall smokestacks, high hoists, skeleton tramways, and bleak dumps. Before they could make any reply, the gate behind them slammed shut with a vicious bang that attracted their attention. They turned to see the watchman hurrying back up the road. Fixed to the barricade was a sign, crudely lettered, but ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... of late years been roofed over, and formed a portion of a dwelling-house and offices, the main portion being in the keep itself. The appearance of the tower from the outside, though highly picturesque, was bleak and comfortless, and gave a stranger the idea that it was more fitted for the habitation of sea-gulls and other wild fowl, than for the abode of man. But those who had once entered within its portal came out with a very different notion. And on a stormy, ...
— Washed Ashore - The Tower of Stormount Bay • W.H.G. Kingston

... Birmingham, now part of the modern town, lies Soho, in the suburb of Handsworth, which, in 1762, was a bleak and barren heath. ...
— Rides on Railways • Samuel Sidney

... reefs and broken by the estuaries of brawling rivers. In the southern portion the district known as 'the Emerald Coast' presents an almost subtropical appearance; the air is mild and the whole region pleasant and fruitful. But with this exception Brittany is a country of bleak shores and grey seas, barren moorland and dreary horizons, such a land as legend loves, such a region, cut off and isolated from the highways of humanity, as the discarded genii of ancient faiths might seek as a ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... was so anxious that the inspection of the boat should not be delayed, that an expedition to the Cove was arranged for the same afternoon. Accordingly the five young people walked across the bleak tableland together. Huge white clouds were rolling up from the south-west, obscuring every now and then the burning sun. A gentle breeze blew gaily across the bleak upland—a very different breath from that which twisted and gnarled the strong ...
— The Slave Of The Lamp • Henry Seton Merriman

... of the mountain and rock, Of the ocean, the mist, and the wind— Thou land of the torrent, the pine, and the oak, Of the roebuck, the hart, and the hind: Though bare are thy cliffs, and though barren thy glens, Though bleak thy dun islands appear, Yet kind are the hearts, and undaunted the clans, That roam ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... Cod in December, lest the venerable Matilda Emerson or the valetudinarian Joshua R. Coggswell should open up and founder in a blow. During the winter storms these skippers used to hug the kitchen stove in bleak farmhouses until spring came and they could put to sea again. The rigor of circumstances, however, forced others to seek for trade the whole year through. In a recent winter fifty-seven schooners were lost on the New England coast, most of which were unfit ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine

... discovered in her late perilous abandonment in the wilds of the Coast Range; to aver her intention to visit it again; to speak of it in a severely practical way as offering a far better site for the cottages of the young married couples just beginning life than the outskirts of towns or the bleak sand hills of San Francisco; and thence by graceful degrees into a dissertation upon popular fallacies in regard to hasty marriages, and the mistaken idea of some parents in not accepting the inevitable and making the best of it. She still found time to enter into an appreciative and exhaustive ...
— A First Family of Tasajara • Bret Harte

... flee from a maid in the pride of her purity," laughed Bertie. "But, Miss Leigh, must we positively go shivering across this bleak desert again?—isn't there some sheltered way ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... the direction of the cemetery, an owl sent out a mournful cry, and a furious baying from the dog behind the house sounded. He rose, walked to the window, and surveyed the bleak view through the curtains. He again noted the tall trees threshing in the wind, and the looming monuments. Still under the spell of pleasant day-dreams, Everett silently contemplated the gloomy aspect. He had forgotten the owl ...
— From the Valley of the Missing • Grace Miller White

... disposed, sang to our hearts' content. Some of the songs were appropriate to the scene; others strikingly the reverse. Bastard doggrel of the music-hall, such as, 'Around her splendid form, I weaved the magic circle,' sounded bald, bleak, and pitifully silly. 'We don't want to fight, but, by Jingo, if we do,' was in some measure saved by the vigour and unanimity with which the chorus was thrown forth into the night. I observed a Platt-Deutsch ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the flickering mirage the familiar forms of the Tihmah range, a ridge now broken into half a dozen blocks. I had ordered the caravan to march upon the Tuwayl el-Sk; but, after one hour and fifteen minutes, we found the tents pitched some three miles short of it, on a bleak and ugly wave of the Wghir. The Shaykhs swore, by all holy things, that this was the veritable Tuwayl; and a Bedawi, who declared that he knew where water lay in the neighbourhood, refused to show ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton

... the old town, with its red roofs, its quaint architecture, its crowded, narrow, picturesque streets. But this time they seemed almost deserted, and the whole effect of the place was bleak and dreary. The leaves had dropped from the trees, the flowers had faded, the vines that covered the cottage walls were brown and bare. He was pleasantly conscious of the warmth of a sable-lined coat he had brought from Russia two years before. He thrust his gloved hands deep into its capacious ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan

... rather a perception, or a sympathy, than a sentiment belonging to himself as an individual. He read Phoebe as he would a sweet and simple story; he listened to her as if she were a verse of household poetry, which God, in requital of his bleak and dismal lot, had permitted some angel, that most pitied him, to warble through the house. She was not an actual fact for him, but the interpretation of all that he lacked on earth brought warmly home to his conception; so that ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... enthusiastic devotees throw themselves beneath the wheels, and are instantly crushed to pieces, the infatuated victims of hellish superstition; when you think of the numerous Golgothas that bestud the neighboring plain, where the dogs, jackals and vultures seem to live on human prey; and of those bleak and barren sands that are forever whitened with the skulls and bones of deluded pilgrims which lie bleaching in the sun,"[53] you will be able to see an awful force of meaning in the words of our text, and to realize more fully the necessity of a revelation from God, for the preservation ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... of Peter. But no arguments protected anyone who clung to the old-fashioned ways of the vendetta or of brigandage or theft from being placed before a file of the Prince-Bishop's men. Tales are still recited in the primitive, bleak homes of Montenegro touching the great number of his subjects whom the poet put to death. But that was not the only penalty, for of the two European institutions with which he had embellished his capital one was a prison. The other was a printing-press, in which he had a childish ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein

... commanded the man to stand firm. In those days Martin found comfort in religion and became a power at the camp meetings; his prayers were renowned far and near, but the evil clutched him in an unguarded hour and one bleak, dreary springtime he met the Woman Mary and—let go! That was when Sandy was seven. He brought Mary to the cabin and almost shamefacedly explained, to ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock

... a small church called KINGSTON, posted on a knoll, and surrounded by a few trees which bespeak their bleak ...
— Brannon's Picture of The Isle of Wight • George Brannon

... we were on the top of a rock, without food or water, and with only so much powder and shot as each man carried in his pouch. Still, we had saved our lives and our horses, and had reason to be thankful. The spot was a bleak one to camp in, but we had no choice. To protect ourselves from the wind, we built up a hedge of brushwood, and lighted a fire. Food we could not hope to obtain until the morning, but Pierre and one of the ...
— Adventures in the Far West • W.H.G. Kingston

... the sparse ornaments were the offerings of kindred intellects, the steel engravings by Raphael Morghen marked the Via Sacra of a European tour, and the black-walnut desk with its bronze inkstand modelled on the Pantheon was the altar of this bleak temple of thought. ...
— Crucial Instances • Edith Wharton

... parted, the children looking on and slyly whispering among themselves. Radbourn looked back after awhile but the bare little hive had absorbed its little group, and was standing bleak as a tombstone and hot as a furnace on the naked plain in ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various

... all, but thou! For thou art single as the northern pole; As cold, as distant, and unreachable To what hath passion's warmth; and, though Thy life be at its summer solstice—bright With day—thy heart still turns to barren ice, More bleak than ...
— The Scarlet Stigma - A Drama in Four Acts • James Edgar Smith

... she wrote a few days later, "and my horizon looks bleak and lonely. I want to be alone where I can collect my thoughts, but, even when Katie is out, I cannot think, but sit by the window staring at the old women hanging up the clothes which everlastingly flap on the lines tied between ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood

... were neither frequent nor sumptuous; "all the delicacies of the season" hardly found their way to her table; and in her bleak little nest, for it was now winter, a thin and scanty shawl but coldly did the office ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... tears gush unbidden, when breathing adieu,— With the change of our years, our hearts are changed too! And, haply, the world, with its coldness, will chill My feelings at length, as bleak winter the rill. ...
— Lays of Ancient Virginia, and Other Poems • James Avis Bartley

... raw the north wind doth blow, Bleak in a morning early; All the hills are covered with snow, And winter's ...
— The Nursery Rhyme Book • Unknown

... pigeons, I plucked and tore apart The weeping, wailing daisies, And broke my lady's heart. At length I grew to manhood, I scarcely could believe I ever loved the lady, Or caused her court to grieve, Until a dream came to me, One bleak first night of Spring, Ere tides of apple blossoms Rolled in o'er everything, While rain and sleet and snowbanks Were still a-vexing men, Ere robin and his comrades ...
— General William Booth enters into Heaven and other Poems • Vachel Lindsay

... bristle-bearded face confronted her. "No, it ain't much of a fire yet, but our hired girl she joined a movin'-picture outfit, so us two he-things are doin' the best we can chasin' a breakfast." And the tramp, Overland Red, ragged, unkempt, jocular, rose from his knees beside a tiny blaze. He pulled a bleak flop of felt from his tangled hair in an over-accentuated ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs

... his funeral testified to the love which his neighbours bore him. He had never willingly been absent for long from his native town. His life, compared with that of Disraeli or Gladstone, seems almost bleak in its simplicity, varied as it was by so few excursions into other fields. But two strong passions enriched it with warmth and glow, his family affections and his zeal for the common good. These filled his heart, and he was content ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore

... on a military bridge, twisting in and out of valleys and speeding through villages, one saw who were guarding the army's secrets, but little of the army itself and few signs of transportation on a bleak, snowy day. At the outskirts of every village, at every bridge, and at intervals along the road, Territorial sentries stopped the car. Having an officer along was not sufficient to let you whizz by important posts. He must show his pass. Every sentry was a reminder ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... "Blake and bare, videtur ex contextu prorsus Nuda, sort. q. d. Bleak and Bare, dum enim nudi fumus eoque aeri expositi, prae frigore pallescimus. Ch. sol. 184. ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton

... handful we were—but she joined the Tertiary or Third Order of Franciscans, and wore always the grey habit, the girdle, and the cross. She went among the Indians christianizing them, remaining a long while at Soledad, a bleak and cheerless place, where she was also a great solace to the wives of the soldiers and settlers, whose children she taught. The Indians called her 'La Beata,' and by that name she was known in all California until she took the veil, and that was more than forty years later. And she was ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... across the street and after several ineffectual attempts the rusty lock was made to turn. I entered. Cold, bare and bleak was the sight of those empty rooms. The old lady had a touch of rheumatism, so she waited for me on the doorstep as I climbed the stairs to the third floor. The noise-proof back room where "The French Revolution" was writ, twice over, was so dark that I had to grope my way across to ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard

... islands, where the beauties of nature contend for pre-eminence with the glorious traditions of the past that centre round them. What spot on earth can surpass, or even be compared with, Amalfi in the perfect lustre of its setting? What loftier or bolder cliffs than those of Capri can the wild bleak headlands of the North Sea exhibit? The fertile lands of France cannot vie with the richness of the Sorrentine Plain, nor can any mountain on the face of the globe rival in human interest the peak of Vesuvius; ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan

... things. One gazing at the other isles of the group from a softly rocking caique out a little way on the sea divines instantly that she meant them for summer retreats, but these two, Oxia and Plati, off by themselves, bleak in winter, apparently always ready for spontaneous combustion in the heated months, for what were they designed? No matter—uses were found for them—fitting uses. Eremites in search of the hardest, grimmest places, ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 1 • Lew. Wallace

... he came to the shore. The sea was quite black and thick, and it was breaking high on the beach; the foam was flying about, and the wind was blowing; everything looked bleak. The fisherman was chilled with fear. He stood ...
— The Green Fairy Book • Various

... his gaze, the white-fleeced clouds wavered, shifting about uncertainly. As if loath to leave the devil-island they had guarded throughout the long night, they contracted slowly, niggardly exposing a line of rugged cliffs which shone bleak and gray in the ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton

... watched him putter, and she helped him; stayed late, and powerfully exhorted her successor. Mr. Wilkins revived and hoped that she would stay another week, but stay she could not. Once she knew that she was able to break away from the scrub-rag, that specter of the wash-room, and the bleak, frosted glass on the semi-partition in front of her desk, no wage could have helped her. Every moment ...
— The Job - An American Novel • Sinclair Lewis

... at different periods of the year. Each variety has a value of its own, and answers to some special requirement in its proper season under glass or in the open ground. In the darkest winter days we prize the glow of Tulips and Hyacinths for brightening our homes. And bleak days are not all past when Aconites and Snowdrops sparkle in beds and borders. The Anemones follow in March, and during the lengthening days of spring there are sumptuous beds of Hyacinths, Narcissi, and Tulips. When high summer begins to ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... intelligence, the firm union of sovereign states. This is all he has to sustain him now. He has laid up this food for the last hours, for this crisis of his soul. All souls must lay up something spiritual, even as they must lay up food for the winter of life, for the bleak bright hours ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters

... only knew where to find the lonely grave where strangers laid you, I would stretch myself upon it and die!" she sobbed, the tears in her cheeks mixing with the melting snow, as it flew into her pale face, driven by the bleak December gale. ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller

... The spring of 1805 came in cold, bleak and stormy, and along with it the malady returned. On May 9 the end came. Schiller died at the age of forty-five years and a few months, leaving a widow, two sons and two daughters. The news of his death fell cold on many a ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... Iona's isle. As in popular belief, with each returning eve of the nativity the miracles of the first Christmas happen again, so in these tales the thorn-tree blossoms anew and wonderful roses bloom in the bleak forest. ...
— Christmas in Legend and Story - A Book for Boys and Girls • Elva S. Smith

... son; a hard, blond giant; high cheeks, raw ruddied; high bleak nose jutting out with a steep fall to the long upper lip; savage mouth under a straight blond fringe, a shark's keen tooth pointing at the dropped jaw. Arched forehead drooping to the spread ears, blond eyebrows drooping over ...
— Mary Olivier: A Life • May Sinclair

... remember yet These you have lost, but you can never know One stands at their bleak graves whose eyes are wet ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... was falling, and the terminus looked bleak and cheerless as the train slowed down the long platform. Mason, still haggard, roused herself to step to the platform and look around as if expecting to see a familiar face, and in the midst of collecting her own impedimenta ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... rattled once more, and soon left the town behind us. The wild mountain tract which stretched on either side of the road presented one bleak and brown surface, unrelieved by any trace of tillage or habitation; an apparently endless succession of fern-clad hills lay on every side; above, the gloomy sky of leaden, lowering aspect, frowned darkly; the sad and wailing cry of the ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... heart of multitudinous Paris and London; hundreds of sympathizing friends, in both hemispheres, listened and prayed and hoped through a dreary twelvemonth. With the ripe autumn closed the quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various

... hardest time Who emigrate by land; For when they cook out in the wind They're sure to burn their hand. Then they scold their husbands round, Get mad and spill the tea,— I'd have thanked my stars if they'd not come out Upon this bleak prairie. ...
— Cowboy Songs - and Other Frontier Ballads • Various

... too, in ruin! It's silly wa's the win's are strewin! An' naething, now, to big a new ane, O' foggage green! And bleak December's winds ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various

... from her rapid walk, as she stepped into another temperature, across polished marble that struck a chill through the soles of her natty brown shoes, and so into the lofty drawing-room with pilasters and elaborate architraves to the doors. What a place for a sane man to build in bleak old Delverton, even before there was any Northborough to blacken and foul the north-east wind on its way from the sea! What a place for a sane man to buy; and yet, in its cool white smoothness, its glaring individuality, its alien air—how like ...
— The Shadow of the Rope • E. W. Hornung

... the pedestals on which I walked with such a penetrating sense of dizzy elevation, and which I had expected to find on a level with my eyes? Ay, the place is no more like what I expected than this bleak April day is like the glorious September with which it is incorporated in my memory. I look at the gardener, disappointment in my face, and tell him that the place seems sorrily shrunken from the high estate ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... time to come down himself in force to his far western province. Croesus was brought to battle in the first days of the autumn. The engagement was indecisive, but the Lydians, having no mind to stay out the winter on the bleak Cappadocian highlands and little suspicion that the enemy would think of further warfare before spring, went back at their leisure to the Hermus valley, only to hear at Sardes itself that the Persian was hot in pursuit. A final battle was fought under the very ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth

... windings, infested too by Pandours, the poor Prussian Main Body, on its wide parabolic circuit, has a time of it! Loses its pontoons, loses most of its baggage; obliged to set fire, not to the Pandours, but to your own wagons, and necessaries of army life; encamps on bleak heights; no food, not even water; road quite lost, road to be rediscovered or invented; Pandours sputtering on you out of every bush and hollow, your peasant wagoners cutting traces and galloping off:—such are the phenomena ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVIII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Seven-Years War Rises to a Height.—1757-1759. • Thomas Carlyle

... his righteous wrath went down before him, with nothing by which to recognize them except the pieces he had left of them. When he crossed the seas to plant his banners in the West, when he disembarked upon the bleak shores of America, the land which was one day to speak with the voice of a mighty prophet, then the infant just discovered in the bulrushes of the New World, he came with loins girded and all accoutred for the great work of founding ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various

... that she sickened under its weight. She had come prepared to see him die, as all men do when they have lived out their time, but she had not counted on seeing him die like this, with suffering in his bleak old eyes and a smile of derision ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... natives call it—away to the south-west; and that lofty bluff headland, north by west, now shining so white, as if formed of marble, is Fitfiel Head, or the White Mountain, I see by a note—not an unfit name either; and that high point to the south-east again is Sumburgh Head. What bleak and barren hills appear to the northward again! What a dreadful coast to make during the long nights of winter!" The captain shuddered. "Unless we find the interior more attractive, I shall wonder how my ancestors could have had so much partiality ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston

... led the exiles to a dismal, swampy stretch of ground about a mile from the village; and told them for the present to rest their bones in an old unfinished farmhouse {June 8th, 1722.}. The spot itself was dreary and bleak, but the neighbouring woods of pines and beeches relieved the bareness of the scene. It was part of Zinzendorf's estate, and lay at the top of a gentle slope, up which a long avenue now leads. It was a ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton

... how much he would both dare and do. The power of passive endurance of all three was most fully tried during that awful night. None of them flinched. Murray alone, however, never allowed himself for a moment to lose his consciousness. The rain and sleet came down with pitiless force; the bleak wind howled round them, the sea beat over them, the ceaseless breakers roared in their ears all the night through. Murray felt as if it would never come to an end. Every moment too the ship seemed as ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston

... dwells the secret governance of things, an unknowable and implacable fate—"Wyrd"—neither malign nor benevolent, but simply inscrutable. The peculiar cast of noble and desolate courage which this bleak conception gives to the poem is perhaps ...
— The Epic - An Essay • Lascelles Abercrombie

... intellectual autobiography. I have thrown together in the crudest way the elements of the problem I struggled with, but I can give no record of the subtle details; I can tell nothing of the long vacillations between Protean values, the talks and re-talks, the meditations, the bleak ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells

... and guest; and as if with the restlessness of his thoughts, the host arose from his seat, and passed through the porch and stood on the bleak rock under the light of the moon; and so seen, he seemed scarcely human, but some war-chief of the farthest time,—yea, of a time ere the deluge had shivered those rocks, and left beds on the land for the realm of that icy sea. ...
— Harold, Complete - The Last Of The Saxon Kings • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... taxes been led mainly by those who faced bleak economic futures or the loss of once-powerful positions and declining family status, one could agree with those who say that the reaction of Virginians to the Currency, Sugar, Stamp, or Tea Acts was primarily economic. However, ...
— The Road to Independence: Virginia 1763-1783 • Virginia State Dept. of Education

... gloom of his infancy with any deceptive gleams of January sunshine. A bitter north wind made a dreary howling among the leafless trees, and swept across the broad bare fields with merciless force—a bleak cruel new-year's-day, on which to go out a-pleasuring; but it was more in harmony with Ellen Carley's thoughts than brighter weather could have been; and she went to and fro about her morning's ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon

... which was suspended following the April 1999 coup d'etat - for operating expenses and public investment. In 2000, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $35 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak financial situation. ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... Institute, in which he was supplanted by the Board of Agriculture." His observations on the Larch, in vol. i. of his "Planting and Rural Ornament," and the zeal with which he recommends the planting of it on the infertile heathy flats of Surrey, Sussex, and Hampshire, on the bleak and barren heights of Yorkshire, Westmoreland, Cornwall, and Devon, and on the Welch and Salopean hills; and the powerful language with which he enforces its valuable qualities, merit the attention ...
— On the Portraits of English Authors on Gardening, • Samuel Felton

... honey, Alonzo looked at her—and looked at her—till he would have given an arm for another quick corner and a street-car to send his cheek against that veiled, cold cheek of hers again. It was not until they reached the alternate vacant lots and bleak Queen Anne cottages of the city's ragged edge that she broke ...
— In the Arena - Stories of Political Life • Booth Tarkington

... stopping a moment in his work, and looking at the bleak prospect round him—"I wonder if we're going ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... man, but a great man spoiled, that is, largely soured. He was never a Timon; but, while at best a Stoic, he was at worst a Cynic, emulous though disdainful, trying all men by his own standard, and intolerant of a rival on the throne. To this result there contributed the bleak though bracing environment of his early years, amid kindred more noted for strength than for amenity, whom he loved, trusted, and revered, but from whose grim creed, formally at least, he had to tear himself with violent wrenches apart; his ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... Whistler answered. "I should hate, for example, to be standing opposite a man who was a better shot than I, far away out in the forest, in the bleak, cold, early morning. Fancy me, the master, standing out in the open as a target to be shot at. Pshaw! It would be foolish and inartistic. I never mind calling a man out; but I always have the sense to know he is not ...
— Whistler Stories • Don C. Seitz

... This soulful cult of tradition, this clinging to the obvious and genteel as it were an anchor of safety—it nipped in the bud the monster-making faculty of low horizons and bleak, wintry stretches of earth. Bazhakuloff! Those Russians, it struck him, had been providentially sent to Nepenthe for his delectation and instruction. He was glad to have beheld a type of this nature, inconceivable in England. That grotesque, with three million followers! It had been a liberal ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... and near foundering (what a terrific sound that word had for me when I was a boy!) in his first gale of wind. Still, through all this, I must ask her (who was she, I wonder!) for the fiftieth time, and without ever stopping, Does she not fear to stray, so lone and lovely through this bleak way, And are Erin's sons so good or so cold, As not to be tempted by more fellow-creatures at the paddle-box or gold? Sir Knight, I feel not the least alarm, No son of Erin will offer me harm, For though they love fellow creatures with umbrella down again and golden ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... Juan de Ulua, it has one interesting recollection attached to it, since on the same arid shores, Cortes disembarked more than three centuries ago. Unlike the green and fertile coast which gladdened the eyes of Columbus, the Spanish conqueror beheld a bleak and burning desert, whose cheerless aspect might well have deterred a feebler mind from going further in search of the ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... khan—a great bleak building of four high outer walls, surrounding a courtyard that was a yard deep with the dung of countless camels, horses, bullocks, asses; crowded with arabas, the four-wheeled vehicles of all the Near East, and smelly with centuries ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... and even a dove-cot which in its fresher days some hand had placed upon the lawn, was now roofless and shattered, and lay prone upon the ground, a shapeless mass of collapsed boards. The lawn—if such it could be named—resembled a bleak shore, blackened with stranded wrecks of ships whose passengers had long years before gone down at sea. The broken windows in the dormitories were festooned with cobwebs that had housed long lines of ancestral spiders, and where a pane or two of glass remained among ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens

... New Holland. His voyage can easily be traced on our maps to-day. Voyaging westward through the Recherches group of islands, Flinders passed the low, sandy shore to a cape he named Cape Pasley, after his late Admiral; high, bleak cliffs now rose to the height or some five hundred feet for a distance of four hundred and fifty miles—the great Australian Bight. Young Franklin's name was given to one island, Investigator to another, Cape Catastrophe commemorated a melancholy ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... It has been a bleak early spring with snow on the uplands of Thrace. For those who travel from Paris to Constantinople on that Western moving shuttle, the Orient Express, there would be nothing to trouble the mind unpleasantly—except in that the more comfortable ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham

... three. In the meantime, by no means abashed at finding themselves the cynosure of so many eyes, the Englishmen proceeded to keep up their circulation by leap-frog and horse-play, for their jerseys were thin and the wind bleak. ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle

... fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, but I am going to try; so it will be no small comfort to have your company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women aforesaid, you are busied with them, whereas it seems bleak, melancholy work, this talking to the wind (for I have begun)—yet I don't think I shall let you hear, after all, the savage things about Popes and imaginative ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... progress to the cemetery. It was a dull, cold day. Alvina shivered as she stood on the bleak hillside, by the open grave. Her coat did not seem warm enough, her old black seal-skin furs were not much protection. The minister stood on the plank by the grave, and she stood near, watching the white ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence

... northeast storms, bleak winds, thunder-showers, flies, mosquitoes, Canada thistles, hot sunshine, cold snows, weeds, briers, thorns, wild beasts, snakes, alligators, and such like things, which they don't happen to like, and putting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various

... her crack-brained expedition, the very next morning, on the six-thirty train. I happened to be looking out sleepily and saw her trudging wearily past our house in the bleak gray of our mountain dawn, the inadequate little, yellow flame of her old fashioned lantern like a glowworm at her side. It seemed somehow symbolical of something, I did ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield

... belong to grandfatherly skippers who dared not venture past Cape Cod in December, lest the venerable Matilda Emerson or the valetudinarian Joshua R. Coggswell should open up and founder in a blow. During the winter storms these skippers used to hug the kitchen stove in bleak farmhouses until spring came and they could put to sea again. The rigor of circumstances, however, forced others to seek for trade the whole year through. In a recent winter fifty-seven schooners were lost on the New England coast, most of which were unfit for anything but ...
— The Old Merchant Marine - A Chronicle of American Ships and Sailors, Volume 36 in - the Chronicles Of America Series • Ralph D. Paine

... lonely wildernesses in the territory of savages, the incident would doubtless be leniently overlooked. And then he bethought himself of the horse,—a good horse, stout, swift, kindly disposed; a hard fate the animal had encountered,—abandoned here to starve in these bleak winter woods. Perhaps he might be lying there at the foot of the cliffs with a broken leg, suffering the immeasurable agonies of a dumb beast, for the lack of a merciful pistol-ball to put him at peace. Barnett could not resist the mute ...
— The Frontiersmen • Charles Egbert Craddock

... a rough road at the best of times, but on a bleak night with snow there is real danger. The trap will take you over in no time when it comes in, or as soon as it is ...
— Dick and His Cat and Other Tales • Various

... completely steel'd For all the terrors of the field; Mail'd for the arrow and the lance, Bore not unharm'd my smiling glance; At other times collected, brave, Recoiled when I that picture gave; As if their inmost heart, laid bare, Shrank from the bleak, ungenial air. ...
— The Lay of Marie • Matilda Betham

... fairer Golden Fleece Our more adventurous Argo fain would seek, But save, O Sons of Jove, Your blended light go with us, vain employ It were to rove This bleak Blind waste. To unimagined joy Guide us, immortal Brethren, ...
— Ethel Morton's Holidays • Mabell S. C. Smith

... varied to a considerable extent in its aspect, is yet universally shagged with forests, or deformed by marshes: moister on the side of Gaul, more bleak on the side of Norieum and Pannonia. [32] It is productive of grain, but unkindly to fruit-trees. [33] It abounds in flocks and herds, but in general of a small breed. Even the beeve kind are destitute ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus

... gladly have kept festival in London with my friends. But my journey was destined to bring me an adventure of a very remarkable character, which made me full amends for the loss of Christmas cheer at home. I crossed the Channel at night from Dover to Calais. The passage was bleak and snowy, and the passengers were very few. On board the steamboat I remarked one traveler whose appearance and manner struck me as altogether unusual and interesting, and I deemed it by no means a disagreeable circumstance that, on arriving at Calais, this man entered ...
— Dreams and Dream Stories • Anna (Bonus) Kingsford

... souls from Mother England came, And many days fared on a storm-tossed sea, Men, women, children, to be known to Fame For braving death for sacred Liberty. To our bleak, shelt'ring port they gave a name, And marked ...
— Edward MacDowell • Elizabeth Fry Page

... bitter and bleak howled the November blast, and ruthlessly drove the fleet against the shivering panes, exposed without, though shielded within by Venetian folding shutters, on that gray morning, when a passing whisper from most unlovely ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield

... on their route, struck them as "one of the most appalling objects" which they had seen, being a bleak rock twelve hundred feet high above the level of the lake, with a perpendicular face of its full height. The Indians say, that any one who can scale it, and "turn three times on the brink of its fearful wall, will live for ever." ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various

... shore of the Northern Sea, where the summer sun never sets, there stood long ago a grim bleak fortress, called the Tower of the North-West Wind. Before it stretched the sea, which thundered ceaselessly at its base, like a wolf that gnaws at the root of some noble oak. On either side of it glittered the blue fiord, dotted with numberless islets, throwing its long arms far inland. Behind it ...
— Boycotted - And Other Stories • Talbot Baines Reed

... mounted by many a weary path—up many a dark ravine. I was twelve or fourteen thousand feet above sea level, and although I had just parted from the land of the palm-tree and the orange, I was now in a region cold and sterile. Mountains were before and around me—some bleak and dark, others shining under a robe of snow, and still others of that greyish hue as if snow had freshly fallen upon them, but not enough to cover their stony surface. The plain before me was several ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid

... from headquarters brought by an officer!" cried the corporal. The relief had come! The man who but a second since stood on the bleak, dreary shore of despair, felt himself recalled to life at ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner

... intervening between this moment and that when death called to us out of the night, I have the haziest recollections. An excellent dinner was served in the bleak and gloomy dining-room by the mulatto, and the crippled author was carried to the head of the table by this same Herculean attendant, as lightly as though he had but ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer

... compound of the Basedi dak-bungalow standing on a high stone plinth. The untidy khansamah—the custodian of the rest-home—hurried on to the verandah to greet the unexpected visitor and show his "boy" where to put the sahib's bedding and baggage in a bleak room with a cane-bottomed wooden bed hung with ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly

... burning, she rebuked a rude fellow who came forward to save her life, assuring him that there was less contamination in the touch of fire than in that of man. Fortunately, the flames were extinguished, and the Phoenix of Portugal was permitted to descend, unburned, upon the bleak shores ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... will go to sea; cut my kind uncles and aunts, and sympathizing patrons, and leave no heavy hearts but those in my own home, and take none along but the one which aches in my bosom. Cold, bitter cold as December, and bleak as its blasts, seemed the world then to me; there is no misanthrope like a boy disappointed; and such was I, with the warmth of me flogged out by adversity. But these thoughts are bitter enough even now, for they have not yet gone quite away; and they must be uncongenial enough ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville

... resonance. Now and then Chilian Leverett made a comment, or asked a question, but she was not heeding them. Her heart and mind had wandered back to her father and that wonderful land where nothing ever seemed bleak, though in long hot droughts it was arid. But there were always temples, and palaces, and picturesque huts, and women and children in gay attire, old men kneeling somewhere, praying but keeping a sharp ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... valley.... Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would ...
— Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals • William James

... had the northern character which is, at present, exhibited only by the plants which live on the tops of our mountains. But, as the glacial epoch passed away, and the present climatal conditions were developed, the northern plants were able to maintain themselves only on the bleak heights, on which southern forms could not compete with them. And, in like manner, Forbes suggested that, after the glacial epoch, the northern animals then inhabiting the sea became restricted to the deeps in which they could ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... swung up over the slope, turning gradually, evidently to make a wide detour round the Ford, until Lucy's back was toward the monuments. Before her stretched the bleak, barren, dark desert, and through the opaque gloom she could see nothing. Lucy knew she was headed for the north, toward the wild canyons, unknown to the riders. Cordts and his gang hid in there. What might ...
— Wildfire • Zane Grey

... once what many had been at pains to mention to me before—that my father was not a temperate man. Nor did our cellar seem wholly bleak. He pressed wine upon me, and soon had finished a bottle himself, only to gesture Brutus to uncork a second. And all the while he regaled me with anecdotes of the gaming table and the vices of a dozen seaports. With hardly a pause he described a lurid succession of drinking bouts and gallant ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand

... eat a cake and a few dates. They literally fast all day long and take their one meal at about seven in the evening. I can't support this, and take tea in the morning, besides munching dates at intervals through the day. Nay, I feel ravenous, under the influence of the bleak air of The Desert. About an hour before sunrise all the people get up and make large fires, warming their feet and legs, for these are mostly bare and are very sensible to the cold. I'm sorry I've been ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... escort, pauses, if perchance he spy Vestige of somewhat strange and rare: so paus'd The sev'nfold band, arriving at the verge Of a dun umbrage hoar, such as is seen, Beneath green leaves and gloomy branches, oft To overbrow a bleak and alpine cliff. And, where they stood, before them, as it seem'd, Tigris and Euphrates both beheld, Forth from one fountain issue; and, like friends, Linger at parting. "O enlight'ning beam! O glory of our kind! beseech thee say What water this, ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... On a bleak mountain's sullen brow, A solitary outlaw stood, And view'd, through mist, ...
— Elegies and Other Small Poems • Matilda Betham

... below, and around me, are mountains piled on mountains in chaotic confusion. Some are bald and bleak; others exhibit traces of vegetation in the dark needles of the pine and cedar, whose stunted forms half-grow, half-hang from the cliffs. Here, a cone-shaped peak soars up till it is lost in snow and clouds. There, a ridge elevates its sharp ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... a feeling for what is beautiful as well as a knowledge of what is true. He is pre-eminently and primarily a colorist—he is, in fact, the introducer of color as a distinct element in French painting after the pale and bleak reaction from the Louis Quinze decorativeness. His color, too, is not merely the prismatic coloration of what had theretofore been mere chiaro-oscuro; it is original and personal to such a degree that ...
— French Art - Classic and Contemporary Painting and Sculpture • W. C. Brownell

... totally bald, the moral dome of his skull rising white above visionary eyes and a serious auburn beard. He was clothed in a bleak, smooth slate-gray suit, and at any climax of emphasis he lifted slightly upon his toes and relaxed again, shutting his lips tight on the finished sentence. "Your question," said he, "has often perplexed me. Sometimes they seem to prefer verse; sometimes prose stirs them greatly. We ...
— The Jimmyjohn Boss and Other Stories • Owen Wister

... are large and forbidding. And, certainly, no one can or should minimize the plight of millions of our friends and neighbors who are living in the bleak emptiness of unemployment. But we must and can give them good reason to ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Ronald Reagan • Ronald Reagan

... top of the mountain the two children shrank back into their mufflers, before the sweep of the wet, chill wind; but the mill was in sight—beyond the slope of bleak pastures outlined with stone walls—sunk deep in the valley beside a rapid mountain stream, a dim bulk already glimmering with points of light. Toward this the two little workwomen slopped ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer

... Valery-sur-Somme. It was in the month of February, and one of those luckless days on which cold, wind and rain all seem banded in league against the comfort of mankind: the sky, dull and lowering, presented to the eye nothing but a bleak, cheerless desert of gray, relieved only by troops of dark, inky clouds, which would at moments, as though flying the fury of a raging storm, roll pell-mell through the air like an army in rout, pouring down at ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various

... think'st That the bleak air, thy boisterous chamberlain, Will put thy shirt on warm? will these moss'd trees, That have outliv'd the eagle, page thy heels, And skip where thou point'st out? will the cold brook. Candied with ice, caudle thy morning taste, To ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson

... drifted on towards a bleak November, I became more and more absorbed, looking wistfully out of the windows, or sitting dreamily before the fire. I often thought of that better land, whither my angel-mother had flown years ago, my father had gone there now, too. Would it not be well if I were with them? Only one ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"

... follow When friendships decay, And from love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered, And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit This bleak world alone?" ...
— The Empire Annual for Girls, 1911 • Various

... Prince of Wales's Fort at the mouth of the Churchill River, on the north-west coast of Hudson Bay. Presumably he and the two "common white men" who were with him travelled on snowshoes and hauled small sledges after them. Travelling westward they passed over bleak hills with very little vegetation—"the barren grounds, where, in general, we thought ourselves well off if we could scrape together as many shrubs as would make a fire; but it was scarcely ever in our power to make any ...
— Pioneers in Canada • Sir Harry Johnston

... a colorless voice, with a comical forward stride of his crooked legs clothed in heavy boots, to which clods of mud were clinging. The mother looked around. The country was as bleak and dreary ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky

... late one evening. It was a bleak evening in March, but the fire—never more wanted—burned splendidly and lit up the sitting-room in style. Before it, in the easy-chair, Mr. Linden sat meditating. He might be tired—but Faith fancied she saw the shadow. She came up behind his chair, put both hands ...
— Say and Seal, Volume II • Susan Warner

... floor and went to the window and back. I don't know why I felt moved—a sudden sense of the cosiness came over me. The world looked wet and bleak outside. ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn

... or so of midnight, when they left the regular streets behind them, and entered on the deeper gloom of that neutral ground where the house was situated. The town lay in the distance, lurid and lowering; the bleak wind howled over the open space; all around ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... Lough Corrib (25 m. long) and Lough Mask (12 m. long), stretching N. and S., divide the county into East and West districts; the former is boggy, yet arable; the latter, including the picturesque district known as CONNEMARA, is wild and hilly, and chiefly consists of bleak morass and bogland; its rocky and indented coast affords excellent harbourage in many places; the Suck, Shannon, and Corrib are the chief rivers; the Slieve Boughta Mountains in the S. and in the W. the Twelve Pins (2395 ft.) are the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Oh! cold and bleak upon Mabel's cheek Came the blast of the storm-wind keen, And her tresses black, as the glossy back Of the raven, glanced between Her fingers slight, like the ivory white, As ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon

... February, 1807. The night was dark and intensely cold as the Russians, exhausted by the retreat of the day, took their positions for the desperate battle of the morrow. There was a gentle swell of land extending two or three miles, which skirted a vast, bleak, unsheltered plain, over which the wintry gale drifted the snow. Upon this ridge the Russians in double lines formed themselves in battle array. Five hundred pieces of cannon were ranged in battery, to hurl destruction into the bosoms ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott

... Dunraven Bleak, the managing editor of The Evening Balloon, sat at his desk in the center of the local-room, under a furious cone of electric light. It was six o'clock of a warm summer afternoon: he was filling his pipe and turning ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley

... Kentucky, the change had a perceptible and happy effect upon the spirits of the men. Night had closed around them, on the evening of the 7th, while they were still struggling through the ghastly defiles or up the difficult paths of the "Rebel trace," still environed by the bleak mountain scenery. During the night, they arrived at the confines of the beautiful "Blue Grass country," and when the sun arose, clear and brilliant, a lovely and smiling landscape had replaced the lowering, stony, dungeon like region ...
— History of Morgan's Cavalry • Basil W. Duke

... know the rapture of his kiss, the exquisite security of his enfolding arm. The To-come was before her—bleak, grey and bereft; the roseate hues of love's delight lay all in the Gone-by. Her love was of no avail. It had fluttered back to her, a ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay

... you remember yet These you have lost, but you can never know One stands at their bleak graves whose eyes are wet With thinking ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various

... as ashen as the face of Senator Arnold, bleak against the skyline, set back on a dandelion-covered lawn. Behind the wrought-iron fence, to the right of the house, the dogs watched ...
— The Mighty Dead • William Campbell Gault

... change from Lord Timon the rich, Lord Timon the delight of mankind, to Timon the naked, Timon the man-hater! Where were his flatterers now? Where were his attendants and retinue? Would the bleak air, that boisterous servitor, be his chamberlain, to put his shirt on warm? Would those stiff trees that had outlived the eagle turn young and airy pages to him, to skip on his errands when he bade them? Would the cool brook, when it was iced with winter, administer to him ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... here four years ago, America was bleak in spirit, depressed by the prospect of seemingly endless war abroad and of ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various

... Saxon in his chilly northern home, as well as to the Greek in the sunny southland. But, while the balmy air and clear sky of the south tended to refine men's thoughts and language, the rugged scenery and bleak storms of the north made them uncouth, bold, and energetic. Yet both the cultured Greek and the rude Saxon looked upon Nature with much the same eyes, and there was a strange resemblance in their manner of thinking and speaking. They saw, that, in all the phenomena which took ...
— The Story of Siegfried • James Baldwin

... Miss Elizabeth Philipse, Major John Colden, and Miss Philipse's negro boy, Cuff, all riding northward on the Albany post-road, a few miles above King's Bridge, but still within territory patrolled daily by the King's troops, constituted, on that bleak November evening in 1778, a group unusual to ...
— The Continental Dragoon - A Love Story of Philipse Manor-House in 1778 • Robert Neilson Stephens

... no gardens close up to the house, no flower-beds in the nooks and corners, no sweet shrubs peeping in at the square windows. Gardens there are, but they are away, half a mile off; and the great hall door opens out upon a flat, bleak park, with hardly a scrap around it which courtesy can ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope

... to reach the head of the long train. The halt was in a little depression of the bleak plain, and the train-men were in conference over a badly-derailed engine when Winton came up. A vast herd of cattle was lumbering away into the darkness, and a mangled carcass under the wheels of the locomotive sufficiently explained ...
— A Fool For Love • Francis Lynde

... and the temperature was exceedingly pleasant after the bleak air outside, where the raw wind blew ...
— Brave Tom - The Battle That Won • Edward S. Ellis

... for a moment, and then was lost again. But presently a wider and more pronounced break appeared which did not vanish; on the contrary, it widened, until presently a fitful gleam of wan and watery sunshine pierced through it and lighted up the bleak, desolate expanse of raging ocean for a few seconds. And almost simultaneously with the welcome appearance of this transient but welcome gleam of pallid sunshine, we became aware of a slight but unmistakable diminution in the fury of the gale; a change ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood

... north-wind blow Which leaves our English forests bleak and bare, Nor ever falls the swift white-feathered snow, Nor ever doth the red-toothed lightning dare To wake them in the silver-fretted night When we lie weeping for some sweet ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde

... under which people live. Among some of these may be mentioned Colonel George E. Waring, the sanitary engineer who really cleaned the streets of New York; General W. C. Gorgas, who led in the conquest of the great yellow fever plague; Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, still spending his life for the natives of bleak Labrador; and the famous French scientist, Louis Pasteur, who found out for us how to preserve milk and how to escape the dread hydrophobia. Such careers devoted to ameliorating the evils incident to civilization are of great value in stirring into active existence the latent spirit of service ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry

... the eccentric Duke of Brunswick, who died in Geneva, willed it the money to build; like most fac-similes, they are easily distinguishable from the original, and you must still go to Verona to see the tombs of the Scaligeri. But they have the real Mont Blanc at Geneva, bleak to the eye with enduring snow, and the Blue Rhone, rushing smooth and swift under the overhanging balconies of quaint old houses. With its neat quays, azure lake, symmetrical hotel fronts, and white steamboats, Geneva was like an admirable illustration ...
— A Little Swiss Sojourn • W. D. Howells

... grant of the surrounding country. He established his demesne here, naming the place Port Royal, while Champlain and De Monts, continuing their way around the Bay of Fundy, came at length to the bleak island of St. Croix, where ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... little oak copse, the lines of empty freight cars on the siding, and a mile of low meadow that lay between the cottage and the fringe of settlement along the lake. Through another window at the north the bleak prospect of Stoney Island Avenue could be seen, flanked on one side by a huge sign over a saloon. Near this window on a lounge lay ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... surprised to find Kennedya speciosa, (his original name for Clianthus Oxleyi), a plant discovered in July 1817, on sterile bleak open flats, near Regent's Lake, on the River Lachlan, in lat. 33 degrees 13 minutes S. and long. 146 degrees 40 minutes E. It is not common, I could see only three plants, of which one was in flower. This island is the Isle Malus of the French." ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... It was a bleak December morning; the first fine flakes of a cold, driving snowstorm were just beginning to sift down, and the squirrel was eager to finish harvesting his nuts in time. It was quite touching to see how hurried and anxious and nervous he was. I felt ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs

... must be the Rattler camp, and inspected its display of tall smokestacks, high hoists, skeleton tramways, and bleak dumps. Before they could make any reply, the gate behind them slammed shut with a vicious bang that attracted their attention. They turned to see the watchman hurrying back up the road. Fixed to the barricade was a sign, crudely lettered, ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton

... due time was felled, cut up, and carted to the station, and we removed our camp to the site of the operations. It was a bleak, wild place, three miles from the south mail track, and consisted only of a small slab hut or two with a wool shed and sheep yards. The owner, Mr. T. Moorhouse, had lately purchased the run, and was about to improve ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth

... through the open door, commanding green meads, two or three forest trees casting their boughs against the sky, a forest-clad mountain-side beyond, and close in by the door-jamb a nick of the blue Pacific. It is March in England, bleak March, and I lie here with the great sliding doors wide open in an undershirt and p'jama trousers, and melt in the closure of mosquito bars, and burn to be out in the breeze. A few torn clouds—not white, the sun has tinged them a warm pink—swim in heaven. In which blessed ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... kindly and genial, if we had the same chance of being so. But if Dr. Longley had a living of a hundred pounds a year, a fretful, ailing wife, a number of half-fed and half-educated little children, a dirty, miserable house, a bleak country round, and a set of wrong-headed and insolent parishioners to keep straight, I venture to say he would have looked, and been, a very different man in that railway-carriage running up to London. Instead of the genial smiles that delighted his fellow-travellers, (according to the newspaper-story,) ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various

... thing in the world," she continued. "All you have to do is to buy an abandoned farm on Long Island with a bleak sea-front, divide it up into corner lots, advertise the lots for sale on the instalment plan, elect your mayor, and Raffleshurst-by-the-Sea, swept by ocean breezes, fifteen cents from the Battery, ...
— Mrs. Raffles - Being the Adventures of an Amateur Crackswoman • John Kendrick Bangs

... convenient for geologizing. The house where we slept was situated at the foot of a mountain, on the summit of which are the mines of S. Pedro de Nolasko. Sir F. Head marvels how mines have been discovered in such extraordinary situations, as the bleak summit of the mountain of S. Pedro de Nolasko. In the first place, metallic veins in this country are generally harder than the surrounding strata: hence, during the gradual wear of the hills, they project above the surface of the ground. Secondly, almost every ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... Bleak, bleak the east wind sobs and sighs, And drowns the turret bell, Whose sad note, undistinguished, dies Unheard, ...
— Poems • (AKA Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte) Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell

... of Edelweiss is built along the side of the mountain, its narrow streets winding upward and past countless terraces to the very base of the rocky, jagged eminence at whose top, a full mile above the last sprinkling of houses, stands the isolated, bleak Monastery. The view from these upper streets, before one enters the circuitous and hidden Monastery road that winds afar in its climb, is never to be forgotten by the spectator, no matter how often he traverses the lofty thoroughfares. As far as the eye can reach, ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon

... all very well to ask a nervous fellow to Antwerp and amuse him and make him ever so jolly and comfortable—But why, when the bleak November wind sobs against the lattice and disturbs the dead ashes in the grate, when everything is damned queer and dark, and that sort of thing, you know—why should you make nervous fellows' flesh creep by talk ...
— In Bohemia with Du Maurier - The First Of A Series Of Reminiscences • Felix Moscheles

... watchers by the beacon on Pendle Hill in Lancashire. Two were stationed on either side of the north-eastern extremity of the mountain. One looked over the castled heights of Clithero; the woody eminences of Bowland; the bleak ridges of Thornley; the broad moors of Bleasdale; the Trough of Bolland, and Wolf Crag; and even brought within his ken the black fells overhanging Lancaster. The other tracked the stream called Pendle Water, almost from its source amid the neighbouring hills, ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... carriage-wheel, of which each turn abridges distance, or hearken to the splashing of a prow that distances the waves, and brings us nearer to the shore where we must descend from the heaven of our dreams on the bleak and barren ...
— Raphael - Pages Of The Book Of Life At Twenty • Alphonse de Lamartine

... "Religious poetry, sung to the harp as it passed from hand to hand, must have flourished in the monastery of the abbess Hild, and the kernel of Bede's story concerning the birth of our earliest poet must be that the brethren and sisters on that bleak northern shore spoke to each other in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.' "[1] of Melrose, an offshoot of Aidan's foundation, the sainted Cuthbert was an inmate. At Lindisfarne, where "he speedily learned the Psalms and some other books," the great Wilfrid was a ...
— Old English Libraries, The Making, Collection, and Use of Books • Ernest A. Savage

... The North-West Company's Fort is in latitude 61 deg. 11' 8" N.; longitude 113 deg. 51' 37" W., being two hundred and sixty statute miles distant from Fort Chipewyan, by the river course. The variation of the compass is 25 deg. 40' 47" E. The houses of the two Companies are small, and have a bleak northern aspect. There are vast accumulations of drift wood on the shores of the lake, brought down by the river, which afford plenty of fuel. The inhabitants live principally on the fish, which the lake at certain seasons furnishes in great abundance; ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin

... trainmen to bring the boxes of fruit to the office, Griffith led the way up the path formed by the bridge-service track. The rails had been kept shovelled clear from the February snowdrifts and ran straight out through the midst of the bleak unlovely buildings grouped near the edge of Michamac Strait, at the ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet

... was steep and bleak, And what though the road was hard? I stand at last on the mountain peak, With my ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster

... had thinned considerably, but it was still so misty that he could only just see the edge of the bleak shore where the little waves rolled in idly, looking gray and greasy under the fog. He leaned his arms on the sill, but aside from the seal-roar, everything seemed peaceful and the lad was just about to turn away from the window in the feeling ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler

... act upon it. Strike, but hear me! Kill me, but obey me! Do not elect this man." Truth is so terrible, even in fetters, that for a moment Syme's slender and insane victory swayed like a reed. But you could not have guessed it from Syme's bleak blue eyes. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton

... time that Eirek the Red sailed to the bleak shores of Greenland down to the brilliant exploit of Admiral Dewey in the Philippine Islands, how true it is, in view of each and every one of the events immortalized in this unequalled series of paintings, that, in the ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro

... Earl.—I love the violet, indeed, So modest in perfection, So gently sweet—yet more I need To soothe my heart's dejection. To thee alone the truth I'll speak, That not upon this rock so bleak Is ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various

... of which we are now about to descend, is the most celebrated mine in the great mining county of Cornwall. It stands on the sea coast, a little more than a mile to the north of St. Just. The region around it is somewhat bleak and almost destitute of trees. In approaching it, the eyes of the traveller are presented with a view of engine-houses, and piles of stones and rubbish, in the midst of which stand a number of uncouth yet picturesque objects, composed ...
— Deep Down, a Tale of the Cornish Mines • R.M. Ballantyne

... investiture, And that right round thy locks are native to; The heavens upon thy brow imperial, This huge terrene thy ball, And o'er thy shoulders thrown wide air's depending pall. What if thine earth be blear and bleak of hue? Still, still the skies are sweet! Still, Season, still thou hast thy triumphs there! How have I, unaware, Forgetful of my strain inaugural, Cleft the great rondure of thy reign complete, ...
— Poems • Francis Thompson

... his mother's jointure; the surplus left was scarcely visible in the executor's account. The hope of restoring the home and fortunes of his forefathers had long ceased. What were the ruined hall and its bleak wastes, without that hope which had once dignified the wreck and the desert? He wrote from St. Petersburg, ordering the sale of the property. No one great proprietor was a candidate for the unpromising ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... to the bleak Labrador coast and there in saving life made expiation. In dignity, simplicity, humor, in sympathetic etching of a sturdy fisher people, and above all in the echoes of the sea, Doctor Luke is worthy of ...
— Aladdin & Co. - A Romance of Yankee Magic • Herbert Quick

... to obstruct our walk. For the country was, if possible, more barren and desolate than about Christmas Harbour. And yet, if there be the least fertility in any part of this land, we ought to have found it in this, which is completely sheltered from the predominating bleak southerly and westerly winds. I observed, with regret, that there was neither food nor covering for cattle of any sort; and that, if I left any, they must inevitably perish. In the little cove where the boat waited for us (which I called Penguin Cove, as the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 15 (of 18) • Robert Kerr

... often has seen the beginning of exalted lives. Christianity began with a babe in a manger; Shakespeare first saw the light in a cottage at Stratford; Lincoln entered the world by way of a leaky cabin in Kentucky, and into the narrow limits of the Clemens home in Florida, on a bleak autumn day—November 30, 1835—there was born one who under the name of Mark Twain would live to cheer and comfort ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine

... satisfie whose pride and wilfull humour You have expos'd a sweet and hopefull Son To all the miseries that want can bring him, And such a Son, though you are most obdurate, To give whom entertainment Savages Would quit their Caves themselves, to keep him from Bleak cold and hunger: This dissembling woman, This Idol, whom you worship, all your love And service trod under her feet, designs you To fill a grave, or dead to lye a prey ...
— The Spanish Curate - A Comedy • Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher

... representation on them all. 'T is to be hoped, Mrs. Meredith, that 't will be met more kindly than our Parliamentary attempt at the same game. Ah, Miss Janice, your face is a pleasant sight to look at after the bleak banks of the Delaware, at which we've been staring and cursing for the ...
— Janice Meredith • Paul Leicester Ford

... in terms of human well-being and welfare had soared to fantastic heights before 1945. The devastation, during that year, of two moderate sized cities, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a foretaste of the increasingly bleak chances of human survival with the stockpiling of nuclear weapons far more destructive than the fission bombs used on the ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... dark-coloured throat, the red fox, white fox, squirrel, ermine, and black bear alike fell victims to his gun; whilst in the Petchora, when the weather permitted it, he caught, besides many other kinds of fish, a goodly proportion of salmon, nelma (a kind of salmon trout), bleak, sturgeon, sterlet, tochue, muksun, ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... Marenga Mkali waterless district; attack of fever; Ugogo; frantic conduct of the population; West Mvumi; the Sultan's exorbitant demand of honda; Matamburu, reasonableness of the Sultan of; Bihiwana; attack of intermittent fever; Kididimo, bleak aspect and bad water; Nyambwa, demonstrativeness of the people; Mizanza; benefit from quinine; visit from the Sultan; Little Mukondoku; Mukondoku Proper; commotion and cowardice; uproar in the camp; debate as to route; threatened mutiny; Munieka; Mabunguru Nullah; ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley

... a widow eighteen years old, landed in Scotland, she must have been aware of the thorny path she was to tread. It is impossible not to pity her, the spoiled darling of the gayest court of Europe, exposed to the bleak skies and bleaker winds of doctrines at Edinburgh. Endowed with high spirit, courage, no little cleverness and much charm, she might have mastered the situation had her character or discretion equaled her intellect and beauty. But, thwarted, nagged and bullied by men whose religion she hated, ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... some legendary spring, until at last, far, far away, the winding track stood still upon the shore, where St. Michael of the Mount rebuked the dragon from his throne of rock above the seething sea. But what was the wanderer's guide along the bleak unpeopled surface of the Cornish moor? The Wayside Cross! ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... means the only house visible from the cove. As you turned the southern point, a village was seen down the coast; and about half way between that and the pines was a wooden house, brown and weather-beaten, standing unsheltered on the bleak shore. Back of this house, shutting out all prospect but that of the ocean, was a tall cliff, covered with ragged yellow pines and stunted cedars, from which on stormy nights many a quivering flame had shot upward, luring ships to their ruin. Still, with this grim protest against ...
— A Noble Woman • Ann S. Stephens

... evidently built of anything that came to hand, with its houses squatted in haphazard, hasty fashion, and the country around bare and brown and bleak, San Francisco did not look attractive. But the bay was grand; and the hundreds of ships flying the flags of the United States, and England, and France and Spain and Mexico and Germany and Denmark and Sweden, were interesting beyond words. There were several United States ...
— Gold Seekers of '49 • Edwin L. Sabin

... the illustrious Fleming and the bold Welsh colonel, seem to start, for a brief moment, out of the three hundred years of sleep which have succeeded their energetic existence upon earth. And so, with the bleak winds of December whistling over the breakers of the North Sea, the two discoursed together, as they paced ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley









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