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More "Desolate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... must destroy! The negro huts on several of the plantations that we passed through were the most miserable human habitations I ever beheld. The wretched hovels at St. Annie's, on the Hampton estate, that had seemed to me the ne plus ultra of misery, were really palaces to some of the dirty, desolate, dilapidated dog kennels which we passed to-day, and out of which the negroes poured like black ants at our approach, and stood to gaze at us as ...
— Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation - 1838-1839 • Frances Anne Kemble
... brought to us. As we sat by the fire a small table was brought near us, and on it lay the album in which we were expected to enter our names. Many notable autographs we found here, and despite the gladness we felt in adding ours to the number, there was still a sad, desolate thought: those most distinguished had all passed away. The mountains remained, their glory undiminished; but the human beings climbing their heights, and exulting in the grandeur of heaven and earth, had vanished like ...
— Scenes in Switzerland • American Tract Society
... arid, for whose reclamation water is available, if properly conserved. There are about two hundred and thirty million acres from which the forests have been cut but which have never yet been cleared for the plow and which lie waste and desolate. These lie scattered all over the Union. And there are nearly eighty million acres of land that lie under swamps or subject to periodical overflow or too wet for anything but grazing, which it is perfectly feasible to drain and protect and redeem. The Congress can at once direct ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Woodrow Wilson • Woodrow Wilson
... no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah, and thy land Beulah: for the Lord delighted in thee, and ...
— Elsie at Nantucket • Martha Finley
... stream of carts and horse-back riders was headed for the Driving Club, where there was tennis and the new game of golf. But Sommers turned his horse into the disfigured Midway, where the Wreck of the Fair began. He came out, finally, on a broad stretch of sandy field, south of the desolate ruins of the Fair itself. The horse picked his way daintily among the debris of staff and wood that lay scattered about for acres. A wagon road led across this waste land toward the crumbling Spanish convent. ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... yes! You are her friend, Monsieur; I remember perfectly. Oh, no, no, no! she is not here any more. She has left us. She sings no longer at L'Abbaye. We are desolate; we are inconsolable. We pleaded, but she was firm. She has gone. Where? Ah, Monsieur, so many ask that; but alas! we do ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... standing amid the stunted shrubs on the hill of San Lucido, had looked out on the arid plain before him. It was all brown and grey, the desolate ground strewn with huge granite boulders, treeless; and for the wretched sheep who fed there, thin and scanty grass; the shepherd, in his tattered cloak, sat on a rock, moodily, paying no heed to his flock, dully ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... small place, at some little distance from the dwellings of the citizens, and was surrounded by a thick grove of sycamores mingled with pine trees. The townsfolk had long retired to rest, and the streets were empty and desolate. Not even the shadow of a monk flitted by him as he passed, with his torch flaring in the wind, and casting an awful and almost magical light upon the houses, painted, according to the fashion of the time and country, in broad ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 399, Supplementary Number • Various
... must be the window where Nancy waved good-by to her lover, and there were the flower-beds into which he had fallen headlong from his horse,—only a desolate corner now with the grass and tall weeds grown quite up to the scaling wall, and the wooden shutters tightly closed. I wondered whether they had ever been ...
— Colonel Carter of Cartersville • F. Hopkinson Smith
... Desolate as she was, Madam Liberality would have hugged her grief if she could have had her old consolation, and been happy in the happiness of another. Darling never said she was not happy. It was what she left out, not what she put into the long letters she sent from India ...
— A Great Emergency and Other Tales - A Great Emergency; A Very Ill-Tempered Family; Our Field; Madam Liberality • Juliana Horatia Gatty Ewing
... dear ones are 'not suffered to continue by reason of death.' He who gave them all their sweetness is with us still, and has all the sweetness which He lent them for a time. So if we have Christ with us we cannot be desolate. Looking on all the men, who in their turn have helped forward His cause a little way, we should let their departure teach us His presence, their limitations His ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... Sanquhar, a small town in Dumfriesshire, on June 22nd, 1680. Exactly a month later Claverhouse's troopers (though, as I have said, not commanded by Claverhouse himself) came upon the Cameronians in a desolate spot among the wilds of Ayrshire, known as Aird's Moss. Richard Cameron was killed at the first charge: Donald Cargill and Hackston of Rathillet were made prisoners. Both were taken to Edinburgh and executed, the latter with ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... drifting down upon a barren region of naked crags, dark, frowning rock-masses, broken and tumbled, as though by some great cataclysm of nature. Mountains upon the Moon could not be more desolate of aspect. ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... and professional disgrace, but financial ruin which confronted the broken officer as he bade good-bye to his regiment at its desolate quarters in California, after fifteen years of service to the army. He was absolutely without money and, at the age of thirty-two, it was by no means easy for him to begin life all over again and earn his own living at a new ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... note: landlocked; the western and central low-lying, desolate portions of the country make up the great Garagum (Kara-Kum) desert, which occupies over 80% of the ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... some lone bird Without a mate, My lonely heart is desolate; I look around And cannot trace, a friendly smile, a welcome face. Even in crowds I'm still alone, because ...
— Mischievous Maid Faynie • Laura Jean Libbey
... not believe," mamma replied, "that any other spot upon the globe, not even Robinson Crusoe's island, could now seem so desolate and shut off from all communication as our home in the woods did then. You must remember that there were no railways in 1826, which fact made us still more remote from the rest of the world. Now, with the railways spreading ...
— The Story of a Summer - Or, Journal Leaves from Chappaqua • Cecilia Cleveland
... at Aldershot embodies in itself all these changes; and is, indeed, an epitome of the results of this awakening. Anything more desolate than its aspect when it was first established it would be impossible to imagine. Long 'lines' of huts, planted in a wilderness of gorse, heather, and sand, dimly lit, and miserably appointed; 'women that were ...
— From Aldershot to Pretoria - A Story of Christian Work among Our Troops in South Africa • W. E. Sellers
... gray and cheerless. A few flakes of snow fell. There was every indication of a heavy storm. They were high above a desolate and wild country now, hovering over a sparsely settled region where they could see great forests, stretches of snow-covered rocks, and ...
— Tom Swift in the Caves of Ice • Victor Appleton
... Roman. Britain was almost the only province of the Empire where Rome died into a vague tradition of the past. The whole organization of government and society disappeared with the people who used it. Roman roads indeed still led to desolate cities. Roman camps still crowned hill and down. The old divisions of the land remained to furnish bounds of field and farm for the new settlers. The Roman church, the Roman country-house, was left standing, though reft of priest and lord. But ...
— History of the English People, Volume I (of 8) - Early England, 449-1071; Foreign Kings, 1071-1204; The Charter, 1204-1216 • John Richard Green
... church and implored the Virgin for help; and from that church she went to another and another and another; church after church, and still church after church, and so spent all the day until three o'clock on her knees in agony and tears; then dragged herself home and sat down comfortless and desolate, to count the minutes, and wait, with an outward show of calm, for what had been ordained for her—happiness, or endless misery. Presently she heard the clank of a sabre—she had not known before what music was in that sound!—and her son put his ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... her head. She did not hear the footsteps of the men upon the soft prairie, and they did not at once reveal themselves, but stood a little way back listening to her. She had ceased her song, and was gazing beyond intently. On the naked limb of a desolate, thunder-riven tree that stood apart from its lush, green-boughed neighbours, sat a lonely thrush in seeming melancholy. Every few seconds he would utter a note of song. Sometimes it was low and sorrowful, ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... They reached the desolate home, and Bob broke the news to the old man. As Mary poured forth her story of the discovery in Trubus' office, her father's face lighted ...
— Traffic in Souls - A Novel of Crime and Its Cure • Eustace Hale Ball
... miserable country. The tenantry are turned out of the cottages by scores at a time. As many as 203 men, women, and children have been driven upon the roads and ditches by way of one day's work, and have now no resource but to beg their bread in desolate places, or to bury their griefs, in many instances for ever, within the walls of the Union workhouse. Land agents direct the operation. The work is done by a large force of police and soldiery. Under the protection of the latter, 'the Crowbar Brigade' advances to the devoted township, takes ...
— The trade, domestic and foreign • Henry Charles Carey
... pass through the chalk that lies in that desolate lane with memories of more silent and happier hills; it all depends on what the chalk means to you: you may be unfamiliar with it and in that case you will not notice it; or you may have been born among those thyme-scented hills and yet have no errant fancies, so that you will not think ...
— Tales of War • Lord Dunsany
... government of all, by a part, for the sake of a part. It may be a single-headed despotism, or a despotism of many heads; but whether a Cyclops or a Hydra, it is alike "the abomination which maketh desolate." Its ultimate consequence is plain to foresee—poverty to a nation, ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... of Rosapenna are described as being composed of "hills and dales, and undulating swells, smooth, solitary, and desolate, reflecting the sun from their polished ...
— Poems • Denis Florence MacCarthy
... little cemetery with its rude snake fence encircling it. The coffin was taken from the sleigh and carefully lowered into the grave; then the men took off their hats and we sang another hymn. It sounded very sweet in that wild desolate spot, and the poor mother stood enveloped in a blanket at the head of the open grave, and, with her eyes fixed on her daughter's coffin, joined in the singing. Then I read the remainder of the service, and, ...
— Missionary Work Among The Ojebway Indians • Edward Francis Wilson
... mentioned. In it we find the mineral matter to have been broken up, transported, and accumulated without the influence of those conditions which ordinarily serve to mix rock debris with organic matter during the process by which it is broken into bits. When vegetation came to preoccupy the fields made desolate by glacial action, it found in most places more than sufficient material to form soils, but the greater part of the matter was in the condition of pebbles of very hard rock and sand grains, fragments of silex. Fortunately, the broken-up state of this material, by exposing ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... and birch-lined roads leading by white farm-houses to the village, all speaking of cheer and freedom to the prosperous and the happy, but to the unfortunate and the indebted, of meshes invisible but strong as steel. But, before, no lonesome marshes, no desolate forest, no farm or village street, but the free blue ocean, rolling and tumbling still from the force of ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 9 • Various
... seek rest in the country, and how, seeing the name of a village on the map that touches his imagination, he takes the train, feeling convinced he will find there an Arcadian simplicity. But the village he catches sight of from the carriage window is a morose and lonely village, in the midst of desolate plains. And worse than Nature are the human beings he sees at the station; they lurk in corners, they scrutinise his luggage, and gradually he believes them all to ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... lava or molten stone, which cannot be removed, whereas the tufa or volcanic ashes can be with ease removed from Pompeii, which it has filled up lightly. After having refreshed in a cottage in the desolate town, we proceed on our journey eastward, flanked by one set of heights stretching from Vesuvius, and forming a prolongation of that famous mountain. Another chain of mountains seems to intersect our course in an opposite direction and descends ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... "Of desolate Judea. Every scene Which thou so oft, while sitting on thy knee, Wouldst sing of, weeping, thro' my mind has been Successive; when from yon ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... about half an hour, and then disappeared. In the evening of July the 12th, we saw the rocks near the island of Madeira, which our people call the Deserters, from Desertes, a name which has been given them from their barren and desolate appearance: The next day we stood in for the road of Funchiale, where, about three o'clock in the afternoon, we came to an anchor. In the morning of the 14th, I waited upon the governor, who received me with great politeness, and saluted me with eleven ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... of war had brought to ruin. It is fashionable to assume that those who undertook the political rehabilitation of the Southern States merely rounded out the ruin that the war had wrought—merely ploughed up the desolate land and sowed it with salt. Perhaps the gentler judgments of the future may recognize that their task was a difficult one, and that wiser and honester men might have failed as egregiously. It may even, in time, be conceded that some good came out ...
— The Wife of his Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and - Selected Essays • Charles Waddell Chesnutt
... dusky weeds Sadden the eye; and they who wear them not Have mourning in their hearts, or lavish tears Of sympathy on griefs too deeply lodged For man's weak ministry. A happy Christmas! Ah me! how many hearths are desolate! How many a vacant seat awaits in vain The loved one who returns not! Shall we drain The cheerful cup—a health to absent friends? Whom do we pledge? the living or ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... rocks, and clamber up the mountain's sides the fall storms have driven away these many months past. And the lighthouse keeper out there on the point; the old fru on the mountain farm, and the mountain peasant and his house-folk go their accustomed ways, and do not run about on the desolate heather-fields. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... redoubled their lamentations. They ran with pikes and mattocks to the mountain, and searched till evening to find the opening by which their children had disappeared, without being able to find it. At last, the night falling, they returned desolate ...
— The Red Fairy Book • Various
... Paris, the weather pretty fine so far, but the country sadly flooded; and, the lowlands being under water, the gaunt and leafless poplar trees are the most conspicuous objects of the landscape. Then for miles we travel along through a gloomy drizzling rain, the land looking most forlornly desolate. The arrival at Amiens, however, cheers us a little, and here we get a stretch and some refreshment. After leaving this place, always interesting for its beautiful Cathedral, the weather brightens up, and we reach Paris ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... the jagged crags. The road wound through narrow mountain-passes, nearly choked up with huge fragments of rock, the parent mountains on either hand rising perpendicularly to an enormous height; and where a ravine yawned, as if to cheer the heart and eye saddened and wearied by the desolate monotony of stony fell and inhospitable hill, a forest of firs would creep, sloping, to their very summits. Far above our heads, only the fleecy clouds breaking into a variety of forms as they moved slowly along the mountain sides, and the raven's hoarse cry, or the shrill scream of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... coupe darted around the corner, taking the centre of the road. The starving cur never moved, so intent was he on obtaining food, and thus it happened that a pitiful yelp of pain reached my ears, muffled by the closed window. The coupe whirled on its journey, and below, in the chill, desolate grayness of a winter afternoon, an ugly pup sat howling at the leaden skies, his right foreleg upheld, part of it dangling in a very unnatural manner. A pang of compassion for the dumb unfortunate stirred in my breast, but I sat still and watched. He tried to walk, but the effort was a failure, ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... things, which might not be eaten by the Israelites; also in Isaiah ii. we read that in that day when the Lord alone shall be exalted, "a man shall cast his idols of silver and his idols of gold ... to the moles and to the bats"—for they especially haunt waste and desolate places. ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... slope of Croaghaun is abrupt and in parts precipitous, and its jagged flanks, together with the serrated ridge of the Head and the view over the broken coast-line and islands of the counties Mayo and Galway, attract many visitors to the island during summer. Desolate bogs, incapable of cultivation, alternate with the mountains; and the inhabitants earn a scanty subsistence by fishing and tillage, or by seeking employment in England and Scotland during the harvesting. The Congested ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... bastion, has he tried to rehabilitate the past, and to summon from their lonely and forgotten graves upon the neighbouring battlefield, or in quiet church-yards, it may be, far beyond the sea, the groups of war-scarred veterans who once peopled the now desolate fort. ...
— Neville Trueman the Pioneer Preacher • William Henry Withrow
... single strain of humanity, pathos, or reverence in that diary, save that reflected from Keseberg's last act before being hurried away from that desolate cabin? Or could there be a falser, crueler, or more heartless account brought to bereaved children than Fallon's purported description of the father's body found in ...
— The Expedition of the Donner Party and its Tragic Fate • Eliza Poor Donner Houghton
... clearly did he prove the criminality of our supineness in the cause of God." The text was Isaiah's (liv. 2, 3) vision of the widowed church's tent stretching forth till her children inherited the nations and peopled the desolate cities, and the application to the reluctant brethren was couched in these two great maxims written ever since on the banners of the missionary ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... me," she muttered to herself as she hastily darted from the window. "Ay, they exult. They point to me—me, the abandoned—the desolate—soon to be the disgraced! But, no! no! that shall never be. They shall never have that triumph, which is always so grateful a subject of regale to ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... joyous singing around our fire at night, no more cheerful projects, no more the hope of being the first to announce the glad Evangel among pagan populations. The veldt we traversed seemed to have lost its poetry and to have become desolate. To add to our misfortunes the epidemic seized our oxen. We lost first one and then a second,—altogether eight. Those which were left, tired and lean, dragged slowly and with pain the waggons which before they had drawn along with such vigour. At last we were in sight of Mabolela, and arrived ...
— Native Races and the War • Josephine Elizabeth Butler
... was a cold autumn day; the way looked jagged and bare, the meadow gray and yellow; while frost had begun to appear here and there on the roadside. Disappointment is a dreadful companion. He felt himself so small and desolate, walking there; but Lars was everywhere before him, like a giant, his head towering, in the dusk of evening, to the sky. It was his own fault that this had been the decisive battle, and the thought grieved him sorely: he had staked too much upon a ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... signs fore tell otherwise than folly, dotage, madness, gross ignorance, despair, obstinacy, a reprobate sense, [6590]a bad end? What else can superstition, heresy produce, but wars, tumults, uproars, torture of souls, and despair, a desolate land, as Jeremy teacheth, cap. vii. 34. when they commit idolatry, and walk after their own ways? how should it be otherwise with them? what can they expect but "blasting, famine, dearth," and all the plagues of Egypt, as Amos denounceth, cap. iv. vers. ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... flows through its marble streets. You are there one day when the sea has receded: the plain is a pestilent marsh; the temples, the theatres, the lofty gates have sunken and crumbled, and the wild-brier runs over them; and, as you grow pensive in the most desolate place in the world, a bandit lounges out of a tomb, and offers to relieve you of all that which creates artificial distinctions in society. The higher the civilization has risen, the more abject is the desolation of barbarism that ensues. The most ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... a cruel double-magic. For in the very hour that my homesick soul had surrendered itself to the dream of the shadow that had turned back on the dial, I realised all the desolate days and homesickness of all the men penned in far-off places ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... on the east shore of Lake Michigan, at the mouth of the St Joseph river. This was the most inaccessible of the posts on the Great Lakes. The garrison here lived lonely lives. Around them were thick forests and swamps, and in front the desolate waters of the sea-like lake. The Indians about St Joseph had long been under the influence of the French. This place had been visited by La Salle; and here in 1688 the Jesuit Allouez had established a mission. In 1763 the post was held by Ensign Francis Schlosser ...
— The War Chief of the Ottawas - A Chronicle of the Pontiac War: Volume 15 (of 32) in the - series Chronicles of Canada • Thomas Guthrie Marquis
... rebuilt, the rails, heated red-hot in fires made of burning ties, were twisted around trees or telegraph poles. Stations, machine shops, cotton bales, cotton gins and presses were burned. Along the line of march, a strip of country sixty miles wide was made desolate. ...
— A Brief History of the United States • John Bach McMaster
... thought nor heard. His eyes were close to a window of thick glass. Below him was a shrinking, dwindling landscape, wind-swept and desolate. ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... thee, my Beltane, for thou dost love me yet, even as I love thee—thou lonely man-child! God pity thee, and me also!" and, crying thus, forlorn and desolate, the Duchess Helen rode upon her ...
— Beltane The Smith • Jeffery Farnol
... for several minutes in a bleak and desolate valley of introspection wherein Mr. Wordsley dared not intrude. There was a certain grandeur about his great, dark visage, his falciform nose and meaty jowls as he stood there. Mr. Wordsley began to ...
— The Marooner • Charles A. Stearns
... in this once happy spot. Not a voice, not a sound. Oh, Wallace!" cried he, throwing up his venerable arms, "thy house is left unto thee desolate, and I am to be the fatal messenger." With the last words he struck into a deep ravine which led to the remotest solitudes of the glen, and pursued his way in dreadful silence. No human face of Scot or English cheered or scared him as ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... Africa. He stood on the very edge of the cape one July midnight—that is, it was midnight by the clock—and saw the sun descend nearly to the horizon, and then begin to rise again. Far to the northward stretched the deep blue waters of the Arctic Ocean; close around him was a bleak, dreary, desolate landscape. A few blades of grass sprouted at the edge of the cape. Further back, in places sheltered from the winds, the ground was clothed in rich verdure, and adorned with flowers. Still further inland were little patches of dwarf birch, scarcely a foot high, crouching close to ...
— Harper's Young People, March 30, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... Valerie! All my life I perish, thou knowest it, for a companion of my sex, of my age. Thou art my angel, Valerie, but thou art a woman, and soon, too, thou wilt leave me. Alone, a hermit in my chateau, my heart desolate, how to support life? It is for this that I cry to the friend of my house to return to his country, the country of his race; to bring here his respected father, to plant a vineyard, a little corn, a little fruit,—briefly, to live. Observe!" ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... process of ignoring all objections, refusals and obstacles. And lo! in this manse of lonely Koekensee we have a problem! Elizabeth, tongue in cheek, in the mask of IBSEN!... I couldn't get myself to believe in the ineffable preoccupations of Herr Dremmel that made so desolate a pastor's wife; nor could I see the later enchanting Ingeborg in the little negligible mouse of the episcopal study (though I liked them both); and, as I said, I entirely refused to accept the bishop. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 28, 1914 • Various
... they could. Of course, the impressive order of march at the beginning could not be maintained throughout the gruelling expedition. A thousand miles across swamp and coulees and rivers, over areas of waste and desolate prairie, where fires had swept every vestige of grass away, through sections where flies and drought and excessive heat, turning into cold as the autumn approached, played the inevitable havoc. All these elements combined to throw that ordered line into confusion ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... the lamentations of a Dean from darkest Deanery, now transported to the Grace-haunted region of Overton! When first I set foot in this desolate waste, my primary impulse was to lift my venerable voice in a piercing wail of anguish. Only my overwhelming respect for the powers which sit sternly in Overton Hall, and a well-founded fear that I might be bundled off the campus ...
— Grace Harlowe's Golden Summer • Jessie Graham Flower
... which he published, on hearing that the Duke of Argyle was making preparations to march against him, for burning the towns and villages, and destroying the corn and forage, between Dumblane and Perth. This act of destruction, from the effects of which the desolate village of Auchterarder has never recovered, was determined on, in order that the enemy might be incommoded as much as possible upon their march; it added to the miseries of a people already impoverished by the taxes and contributions which the Jacobites ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745. - Volume I. • Mrs. Thomson
... all, on the right, is Storm King mountain, its granite rocks and precipices showing darkly here and there, as if its huge white mantle were old and ragged indeed. One might well shiver at the lonely, desolate wastes lying beyond it, grim hills and early-shadowed valleys, where the half-starved fox prowls, and watches for unwary rabbits venturing from their coverts to nibble the frozen twigs. The river, which above the Highlands broadens out into Newburgh Bay, has become a snowy ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... it had grown quite dusk. They were now come to a very wild and desert place, overgrown with shaggy bushes, and so silent and solitary that nobody seemed ever to have dwelt or journeyed there. All was waste and desolate, in the gray twilight, which grew every moment more obscure. Perseus looked about him rather disconsolately, and asked Quicksilver whether they had a great ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... would not inhabit it, and told tales of smugglers and pirates who made it their haunt, with other fanciful stories which always seem to linger about the sea, and in which there was not the faintest shadow of truth. Desolate and neglected, it stood there year after year, till, one day, Skipper Ben brought down carpenters and masons on the "White Gull," and straightway they went at work upon the old house. Doors went up, windows went in, a piazza pushed itself out towards the sea-front, and there was great ...
— Culm Rock - The Story of a Year: What it Brought and What it Taught • Glance Gaylord
... the outward aspects of my life in exile, because the sojourn of these years amid the hills and forests taught a natural leechcraft which was to stand me in good stead in coming years, and may stand in equal stead other souls desolate as mine. Like the Nile brimming over the fields, a flood of joy from nature overlaid my parched being, enriching it with a fertile loam, and shielding it from the irritations of the world. I lay fallow beneath the still, sunlit waters, unharrowed ...
— Apologia Diffidentis • W. Compton Leith
... passed, and fashions changed. Low streets and squalid tenements supplanted the rich fields and fruitful orchards, which had once rendered it so pleasant an abode. Its haughty lords abandoned it for a more stately palace nigh the forum, and for long years it had remained tenantless, voiceless, desolate. But dice, and wine, and women, mad luxury and boundless riot, had brought its owner down to indigence, ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 1 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... love, kiss My burning, breaking being; So when cold death Will put out the light In some wilderness Of far forsaken life Might each kiss blossom Into a lotus and a Shephali.[2] And in the desolate hours Of loneliness of traveling In the dusk of despair One petal of these Will cheer the vagrant souls That tread the pathway Of love's forsaking. Or, when Death will sow This Soul of mine On the lake-shore ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... who defies and spurns him. Creon avenges himself by seizing on Antigone and Ismene. Nothing can be more dramatically effective than the scene in which these last props of his age are torn from the desolate old man. They are ultimately restored to him by Theseus, whose amiable and lofty character is painted with all the partial glow of colouring which an Athenian poet would naturally lavish on the Athenian Alfred. We are next introduced to Polynices. He, like Creon, has sought ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... March 13. This is a most desolate-looking place, flat and sandy, and covered with camps and storehouses for a mile along the river. A line of intrenchments encloses the whole, some seven miles long, resting on the river at each end. There is a long wharf just built out to deep water, at the end of which the Atlantic is discharging. ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... invited the weary pilgrim to tarry and rest within their refreshing shade; no garden, gay with flowers, rang with childish laughter, as the little ones plucked their fragrant blossoms; but rugged hills, frowning rocks, and desolate sand beaches, assumed the place of waving woods, smiling corn-fields, and blooming orchards; while for the melodious notes of woodland songsters, was heard the wild cry of the stormy petrel, or the shrill ...
— Woman As She Should Be - or, Agnes Wiltshire • Mary E. Herbert
... pointing to the gushing water, said, 'E questo si chiama il Tevere a Roma!' ('And this is called the Tiber at Rome!') ... We followed the stream from the spot where it issued out of the beech-forest, over barren spurs of the mountains crested with fringes of dark pine, down to a lonely and desolate valley, shut in by dim and misty blue peaks. Then we entered the portals of a solemn wood, with gray trunks of trees everywhere around us and impenetrable foliage above our heads, the deep silence only broken by fitful songs of birds. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science Vol. XV., No. 85. January, 1875. • Various
... fitting spot, he finally fixed upon the remote hamlet of Redcar, far up on the bleak coast of Redcar, in Yorkshire. It was not far from Whitby, where we had been two or three years before. The gray German Ocean tumbled in there upon the desolate sands, and the contrast of the scene with those which we had been of late familiar with made the latter, no doubt, start forward intensely in the romancer's imagination. So there he wrote and wrote; and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... the severe journey, and accompanied by a guide who knew the forest ways, he set out, a fugitive from justice. Both he and his pilot carried pistols in holster and provisions in saddle-bags. Their route lay through a desolate region sparsely settled by pioneers, and not yet relinquished by wandering aborigines, nor by the bear and the catamount. The month of February was spent before they reached the valley of the Tombigbee, a distance of two hundred miles from the ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... grown quite dusk. They were now come to a very wild and desert place, overgrown with shaggy bushes and so silent and solitary that nobody seemed ever to have dwelt or journeyed there. All was waste and desolate in the gray twilight, which grew every moment more obscure. Perseus looked about him rather disconsolately and asked Quicksilver whether they had a great deal farther ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... thing for themselves to win— Through pathless woods, through home-bred fogs, Through stony plains, through treacherous bogs, Long, long, have followed faces fair, Fair soul-less faces, vanished into air, And darkness is around them and above, Desolate of aught to love, And through the gloom on every side, Strange dismal forms are dim descried, And the air is as the breath From the lips of void-eyed Death, And the knees are bowed in prayer To the Stronger than despair— Then the ever-lifted cry, Give us light, or we shall die, Cometh to the ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... lover weeps, unconsoled, So desolate is her gloom; But a voice falls softly through the air, Whispering comfort to her despair, 'Love here ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... own! On the verandah she stopped very suddenly again. Her mother was sitting in the drawing-room at her writing bureau, quite alone. There was nothing remarkable in the expression of her face except its utter immobility. But she looked desolate! Fleur went upstairs. At the door of her room she paused. She could hear her father walking up and down, up and down ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... these absolute strangers, than amongst her own vassals. Even the farm-kitchen, large, stone-built, and scrupulously clean, seemed strange and dreary after the little, smoky, earth-built living-rooms in which her peasantry were content to live, and she never had seemed to herself so completely desolate; but all the time she was so wearied out with her long and painful walk, that she had no sooner taken some food than she began to doze in ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... part, my heart echoed the Princess's wish. I was in favour of abandoning the yacht and trusting to the chances of the island. As the sun rose higher we got glimpses of this through the windows, and the verdure looked inviting after so many weary weeks of desolate water. The tops of the hills seemed barren, but I had no doubt that there was more fertility in the valleys, which were not swept by the bluff winds of the wild sea. But the Prince was obstinate, and, relying upon his luck, was ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... An empty slow sea swells towards us— At first it was only like a weary Moth, which crawled over the last houses. Now it is a black bleeding hole. It has already buried the city and half the sky. Ah, had I flown— Now it is too late. My head falls into Desolate hands. On the horizon an apparition like a shriek Announces Terror ...
— The Verse of Alfred Lichtenstein • Alfred Lichtenstein
... that he was not only landlord of the desolate inn, but cook, garcon; in fact, the whole personnel. He lived there absolutely alone, and was the only European in this Arab village lost in the great spaces of the Sahara. This information I drew from him while he waited upon me at dinner, which I ate in solitude. My companions of the ...
— "Fin Tireur" - 1905 • Robert Hichens
... an expression of Plato or some other philosopher appears to me exceedingly elegant, who, when a tempest had driven his ship on an unknown country and a desolate shore, during the alarms with which their ignorance of the region inspired his companions, observed, they say, geometrical figures traced in the sand, on which he immediately told them to be of good cheer, for he ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... appeared in their chariots, at perfect peace with one another, and cleansed of all earthly stain. Then the living were happy with the dead; long separated families were once more united, and the hearts that had been desolate for fifteen long years were again filled with joy. The night sped quickly by in tender conversation, and when morning came, all the dead mounted into their chariots and disappeared. Those who had come to meet them prepared to leave the river, ...
— National Epics • Kate Milner Rabb
... Moses, half an hour's march from the Red Sea, surrounded by our camels and camel-men, we stared at the desert, and the emotion and the ecstasy of solitude came over us. We longed to plunge headlong into the dim, luring immensity, to run with the wind blowing over the desolate dunes. So we ran, and reaching the heights, we looked down on a larger wilderness, over which trailed a dying gleam of daylight, fallen from the yellow sky through a rent made by the wind in the cloudy veil. But so sinister was the desert in the winter wind, that from some remote, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... ebb when Newton was left in this desolate situation. After some minutes passed in bitterness of spirit, his natural courage returned; and, although the chance of preservation was next to hopeless, Newton rose up, resolved that he would use his best efforts, and trust to Providence for their success. His first idea ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... of homes prostrated by the emigrating throe. Does this matter-of-fact bearing conceal an infinite tenderness, a pity that dare not show itself for fear of unmanly collapse? Are they secretly broken by the sight of the desolate nursery, the dismantled crib, the forgotten clockwork monkey lying in a corner of the cupboard where the helpless Urchin laid it with care before he and his smaller sister were deported, to be out of the way in the final storm? Does the o'ermastering pathos of a ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... was made to Johnson Island; it was merely an unimportant, arid, barren island; but the old boatswain was no less proud of giving his name to a few desolate rocks. He even wanted to carve it on a high peak. During this excursion, Hatteras had carefully explored these lands, even beyond Cape Washington; the melting of the snow sensibly changed the country; ravines and hillocks ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... she understood. She was suddenly ashamed to bring her own happiness into this desolate and widowed presence, and the kisses with which, mutely, she tried to comfort her friend, were almost a plea ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of the grand estates of this ancient house. For a long period, the Counts of Mediana had not inhabited the chateau of Elanchovi, and it had fallen into a state of neglect and partial decay, presenting a somewhat wild and desolate aspect. However, at the beginning of the year 1808, during the troubles of the French invasion, the Count Don Juan, then head of the family, had chosen it as a safe residence for his young wife Dona Luisa, whom ...
— Wood Rangers - The Trappers of Sonora • Mayne Reid
... the city. When the mines gave out the town fell into decay, and in a few years wholly disappeared—streets, dwellings, shops, everything—and left no sign. The grassy slopes were as green and smooth and desolate of life as if they had never been disturbed. The mere handful of miners still remaining, had seen the town spring up spread, grow and flourish in its pride; and they had seen it sicken and die, and pass away like a dream. With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They had long ago ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... religious aversion to taking away life in any form, permit the increase of these desolate creatures till in the hot season they become so numerous as to be a nuisance; and the only expedient hitherto devised by the civil government to reduce their numbers, is once in each year to offer a reward for their destruction, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... lonely cabin and its raw field of stumps. The angry, low-lying clouds and the hastening dusk of an early April day had by this time cast the gloom of semi-darkness over the scene. Spasmodic bursts of lightning laid thin dull, unearthly flares upon the desolate land, and the rumble of apple-carts filled the ear with promise of disaster. The chickens had gone to roost; several cows, confined in a pen surrounded by the customary stockade of poles driven deep into the earth and ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... the loftiest genius cannot ignore them; the sublimest charity must begin with them. They are their own exceeding great reward; their self-sacrifice is infinite joy; and the selfishness which discards them is repaid by loneliness and a desolate old age. Yet these, though the most tender and intimate portion of human life, do not form its whole. It is given to noble souls to crave other interests also, added spheres, not necessarily alien from these; larger knowledge, larger action also; duties, ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... divined the loneliness which overwhelmed the widow, and this proof of her sympathy was the passport to Mrs. Greyson's heart. Loneliness was the feeling of which Helen was most of all conscious. The death of even an indifferent acquaintance often may seem to desolate the earth from its simple irremediableness, and much more does the removal of one near to us make the world ...
— The Pagans • Arlo Bates
... passing a series of wharves, and beyond these a tract of waste, desolate bank very gloomy in the half light and apparently boasting no habitation of man. The activities of the Greenwich bank seemed remote, and the desolation of the Isle of Dogs very near, touching them ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Freddy were hauling in their lines and delivering breakfasts along the shore, one of the trig motors from the Boat Club was bearing a tall, broad-shouldered passenger, bronzed by sun and storm, to the Life-Saving Station, whose long, low buildings stood on a desolate spit of sand that jutted out into the sea beyond Shelter Cove. It was Uncle Sam's farthest outpost. The Stars and Stripes floating from its flagstaff told of his watchful care of this perilous stretch of shore that his sturdy sons paced by day and night, alert to ...
— Killykinick • Mary T. Waggaman
... interested I spoke loud, to let them know it was I, and that I was in earnest. I admonished them all to let whisky alone. Told some of its pernicious effects; how much money it cost, how many lives it had taken, how many tears it had caused to flow and how many homes it had made desolate. ...
— The Bark Covered House • William Nowlin
... have told you, on a lonely island. Somewhat north of the Equator, ten thousand miles away from Her. Wistfully, he said it was quite the right spot. He could feel it. So we helped him, the China-boys and I, to build a little hut, up on stilts, thatched with palm leaves. Very desolate it is. On all sides the burnished ocean, hot and breathless. And the warm, moist heat, close around, still and stifling. Like a blanket, dense, enveloping. But he said it was the spot. I don't know. He has been there now three years. He said he could do it there—if ever. From time to time ...
— Civilization - Tales of the Orient • Ellen Newbold La Motte
... desolate grandeur, vast expanses compassed by endless mountain-ranges that chill the bright skies with never-melting snows. The countless peaks look down on the clouds, while far below the clouds wind valleys that the sunlight never reaches. Twisting ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... now," she whispered, with a desolate sigh. "Sing to me, and keep the evil spirit quiet for a little while. To-morrow, if I'm strong enough, we'll talk ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... same relation to surrounding islands that a mother-ship bears to a flock of submarines. Westward her coast is rocky and forbidding, being nothing but a succession of frowning headlands that rise almost perpendicularly from the sea. It is one of the most desolate stretches of coast in moderate latitudes, for no one lives there, nor has ever lived there, except a few hermit ...
— The Harbor of Doubt • Frank Williams
... gut almost blocked by a fallen boulder, with only a passage wide enough to let through horse and rider single file, a way that could be easily barricaded or masked so that none would suspect any opening in the cliff. The second led by a winding way through a desolate region, over rock that left no sign and wound by twists and turns that none but the initiated could follow. The place, accidentally discovered, was perfect ...
— Rimrock Trail • J. Allan Dunn
... a poor man's family was a serious subject: such was the hopeless condition of a useful mechanic ready for work even in the desolate forests skirting the haunts of the savage. So fares it with the DISJECTA MEMBRA of towns and villages, when such arrangements are left to the people themselves ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... Went, once an important Roman station, and for a long time after the departure of the Romans a celebrated British city, now a poor desolate place consisting of a few old-fashioned houses and a strange-looking dilapidated church. No Welsh is spoken at Caer Went, nor to the east of it, nor indeed for two or three miles before you reach it from ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... appearance, finding all the rooms in the cleared state incidental to ball preparations—all the chairs and tables shrunk up to the walls; and even the drawing-room, where the chaperons were to sit, looking some degrees more desolate than the drawing-room of a ...
— My Young Alcides - A Faded Photograph • Charlotte M. Yonge
... be borne, or their effects overcome. If disastrous war should sweep our commerce from the ocean, another generation may renew it; if it exhaust our treasury, future industry may replenish it; if it desolate and lay waste our fields, still, under a new cultivation, they will grow green again, and ripen to future harvests. It were but a trifle even if the walls of yonder Capitol were to crumble, if its lofty pillars should fall, and ...
— Washington's Birthday • Various
... consoled. But then she recollected her new relation, Mr. Reynolds, her grandfather, whom she had never seen, who had for years disowned her—treated her mother with injustice. She could scarcely think of him with complacency: yet, when his age, his sufferings, his desolate state, were represented, she pitied him; and, faithful to her strong sense of duty, would have gone instantly to offer him every assistance and attention in her power. Lady Berryl assured her that Mr. Reynolds had positively forbidden ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. 6 • Maria Edgeworth
... as they looked like white men, had chosen to go on foot, and not one of their Lipan friends had accompanied them. If they were men to be "watched" at any other time, even the sharp eyes of Indian suspicion saw no need for it among the desolate solitudes of ...
— The Talking Leaves - An Indian Story • William O. Stoddard
... the house might be rat-ridden and desolate. The coulee might wear always the look of emptiness; but here, under the bluff by the spring, and in the room Jean called hers, one felt the air of occupancy that gave the lie to ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... a fine fellow, and so shrewd and good-humoured. To the Certosa, on a hill two miles from Florence; very large convent, formerly very rich, and had near forty monks, now reduced to seven residents, though there are a few more who belong to it, but who are absent. It is in good repair, but looks desolate. There is an old monk, Don Fortunatus by name, who understands English and speaks it tolerably, delights in English people and books, received us in his cell, which consists of two or three little apartments, not uncomfortable and commanding a beautiful ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William - IV, Volume 1 (of 3) • Charles C. F. Greville
... Alas! the light came all too soon, and brought infinite sighing and sobbing. A thought suddenly broke loose in Oakwich, and up spake an old Oakwichian. "Oh! and oh! and woe is me for my miserable land now, now about to be bereft of her children! All her strength destroyed, all her loveliness laid desolate!" ...
— Our Young Folks, Vol 1, No. 1 - An Illustrated Magazine • Various
... used to look upon my condition with the utmost regret. I had nobody to converse with, but now and then this neighbour; no work to be done, but by the labour of my hands; and I used to say, I lived just like a man cast away upon some desolate island, that had nobody there but himself. But how just has it been - and how should all men reflect, that when they compare their present conditions with others that are worse, Heaven may oblige ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... took him round and about the world, so to speak, they cast him away on tropical beaches, they left him dismasted on desolate seas, they involved the most startling interventions and the most inconvenient consequences—there were interludes of penetrating philosophy. For some years the suspicion had been growing up in Mr. Britling's mind that in planting this persuasion in his ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... family can make a green land desolate," returned the Lizard. "Small things can do much mischief, as you will learn when you grow older. There is nothing safe from Locusts. They have even been known in the Strait of Ormuz to settle on a ship, and, by devouring the sails and cordage, oblige the ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... and persons were hated alike. I hope the same thing may not be true at present. It may chance that on this subject Master Porson will get stung through his coffin, before he is many years deader. However, if this particular variation troubles the waters just around itself (for it would desolate a Popish village to withdraw its local saint), yet carrying one's eye from this Epistle to the whole domains of the New Testament—yet, looking away from that defrauded village to universal Christendom, we must exclaim—What ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... tropical sky, rivals the verdure of an English April. The rice-fields yield an increase such as is elsewhere unknown. Spices, sugar, vegetable oils, are produced with marvellous exuberance. The rivers afford an inexhaustible supply of fish. The desolate islands along the sea-coast, overgrown by noxious vegetation, and swarming with deer and tigers, supply the cultivated districts with abundance of salt. The great stream which fertilises the soil is, at the same time, the chief highway of Eastern commerce. On its banks, and on those of its tributary ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... brandy, and deliberately emptied it, to the astonished edification of beholders, into my boots! literal fact, and it kept my feet comfortable all night long. And so, wrapped all in double clothing, sped I my rapid way, varying what I had before seen by passing through desolate Bodmin, and its neighbourhood of rock, moor, and sand: hot coffee at Liskeard, morning broke soon after, then the glorious sun over the sea. Hamoaze, the ferry, and Devonport at 1/2 past 8. Much as I longed to get home, ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... Muhammadan guide Shivaji was born. Whether it was actually upon the rough walls of this small chamber that Shivaji's eyes first rested is open to considerable doubt, and probably they are but a small portion of a once spacious mansion which covered the surrounding area, now relic-strewn and desolate, and in which the family of the chieftain resided. These crumbling halls, the shrine of Shivabai, and the outwork at the extreme north point of the hill are the only remains directly connected with Maratha supremacy. The out-work ...
— By-Ways of Bombay • S. M. Edwardes, C.V.O.
... animals were. They did not know from what place they had come. They wondered why they had come to their land. Perhaps you would like to know. They were musk sheep that had come from the cold, cold north. They were used to treeless, desolate places. They were used to eating moss and young shoots of the willow. They looked something like sheep and something like oxen. Sometimes they are called musk oxen. They looked something like the bison. Sometimes they are called ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... and came in a few hours to a country where there were no mountains more—only hills, with great stretches of desolate heath. Here and there was a village, but that brought him little pleasure, for the people were rougher and worse mannered than those in the mountains, and as he passed through, the children came ...
— The Princess and the Curdie • George MacDonald
... smiling, and now—nay, my dear, dear friend, do not turn from me, and look so utterly wretched. Do not you see me! What can be the matter!" The Lady Anne looked up in her friend's face with so piteous and desolate a look, that she began to fear her ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various
... out in the garden two or three times on a leash; but he had no thought of escape. The Master had left him, and bade him stay there; and his heart was empty and desolate within him. Now and again his dark eyes filled with moisture, and the sadness of his face was so wonderfully striking as to impress the Misses Sandbrook, who, truth to tell, were not over and above intelligent, nor even very kind-hearted. They had not half the kindly good-nature of their ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... maintained a stout opposition to his proceedings, as repugnant both to humanity and honor. This was Sanchez de Vargas and the cruel commander was revenged on him by abandoning him to his fate in the desolate region where he was now found by his countrymen. *13 [Footnote 13: An expedition more remarkable than that of Orellana was performed by a delicate female, Madame Godin, who, in 1769, attempted to descend the Amazon in an open boat to its mouth. She was attended by seven persons, two of ...
— The History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William H. Prescott
... no mate [9] has he near him—while I Can draw warmth from the cheek of my Love; As blest and as glad, in this desolate gloom, As if green summer grass were the floor of my room, And ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... doleful, dreary phenomenon that overtook us ten miles down the valley. I had seen it but it had made no impression on my tortured mind. The great god of day had sprung up out of the earth to smile upon me—or at me—and I had let him go unnoticed, so black and desolate was the memory of the night he destroyed! I had only a vague recollection of the dawn. The thing that caused me the most concern was the discovery that we had run the last half of our journey in broad ...
— A Fool and His Money • George Barr McCutcheon
... 'There lay,' he writes, 'the burnt and slaughtered bodies, together with those wounded by bullets and axes. The last agonies and the moans and lamentations were dreadful to hear.... The houses were converted into heaps of stones, so that I might say with Micah, "We are made desolate;" and with Jeremiah, "A piteous wail may go forth in his distress." With Paul I say, "Brothers, pray for us." I have every evening, during a whole month, offered up prayers with the congregation, on the four points of our fort, under the blue sky.... ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... breathed forth such a spirit from them that they could give being and existence to everything that they willed and desired. At times they spread golden tents and went in and out of them, at other times in places that appeared to be quite waste and desolate they made wonderful plants and trees to grow up, which actually offered their perfect fruit that appeared in a bright golden radiance; of which it was related that they were the magical nourishment and food on which the inhabitants of this land were ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... do not ill-treat children. It is only women, who adore them, that kill them and ill-use them accordingly. She will be my little benefactress, God bless her! I may love her more than I ought, being yours, for my home is desolate without her; but that is the only fault you shall ever find with me. There ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... was worth more than ever before. The workingman talked loudly, and held his head high. Was it the result of having served in one or more campaigns? Had he in the background of his mind a vision of dying men and desolate villages, seen so often on the battlefield? However it was, he became violent and quarrelsome, indifferent alike to wounding and death, and learned to make use of the knife ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... could have died without a murmur. But with my life as a physician is bound up the knowledge of great secrets and the future of man. This it was, when we missed the caravan, tried for a short cut and wandered to this desolate ravine, that ate into my soul, and, in five days, has changed my ...
— The Dynamiter • Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny van de Grift Stevenson
... in which Bruno passed his childhood. His paternal home was situated at the foot of Mount Cicada, celebrated for its fruitful soil. From early youth his pleasure was to pass the night out on the mountain, now watching the stars, now contemplating the arid, desolate sides of Vesuvius. He tells how, in recalling those days—the only peaceful ones of his life—he used to think, as he looked up at the infinite expanse of heaven and the confines of the horizon, with the towering volcano, that this ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... since the lower Yukon is impassable by the end of September, and, at any rate, in view of the prospects of short rations, it would have been rash to try. The consequence would be that they would have to remain on that desolate island during nine months of almost Arctic winter, for the river does not open again till the end of June. Here they would be absolutely without employment unless they chose to stack wood for the steamboat companies, and their only amusements (save the mark) would be ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... morning there was the McKinley Fork to cross the first thing, and it was a difficult and disagreeable task. This stream, which drains the Muldrow Glacier and therefore the whole northeast face of Denali, occupies a dreary, desolate bed of boulder and gravel and mud a mile or more wide; rather it does not occupy it, save perhaps after tremendous rain following great heat, but wanders amid it, with a dozen channels of varying depth but uniform blackness, the inky solution of the shale which the ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... surmount the two doors of my apartment. It covers my bed, where I toss and groan; it beats in through my closed lids; it is accompanied by the most vulgar, though the most human, sounds. I spring up to call for some help, some remedy; but there is no bell, and I feel desolate and weak. There is only a strange orifice in the wall, through which the traveller in distress may transmit his appeal. I fill it with incoherent sounds, and sounds more incoherent yet come back to me. I gather at last ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... threw it open, and leant forth and gasped for air. Heaven was serene and still, as morning came coldly forth amongst the waning stars; and the haunts of men, in their thoroughfare of idleness and of pleasure, were desolate and void. Nothing, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Dorada at two o'clock in the morning. Moonlight and dawnlight lent an air of mystery and beauty to the solitary country; there was a sort of vast stillness over the land, as the boat glided to her moorings in the early morning. Nothing could be heard but the chirping of a bicho, or the desolate neigh of one of the horses that awaited them by the little quay. The stars shone and twinkled overhead, and the air was clear and cool and marvellously still. Black John woke the travellers up and told them it was time to disembark; and Purvis, to whom sleep seemed ...
— Peter and Jane - or The Missing Heir • S. (Sarah) Macnaughtan
... and need, Agnes; the sun does not shine on a more desolate man than I am,—one more utterly alone in the world; there is no one left to love me. Agnes, can you not love me a little?—let it be ever so little, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... at a time when families were gathering cheerily each about a single fireside, Mr. Mitchelbourne was riding alone through the muddy and desolate lanes of Suffolk. The winter was not seasonable; men were not tempted out of doors. There was neither briskness nor sunlight in the air, and there was no snow upon the ground. It was a December of dripping branches, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... time only. I will not enter particularly into the questions, whether or not the people will continue to work for wages, whether they will remain quiet,—or on the other hand, whether the Island will be suffered to become desolate, and the freed slaves relapse into barbarism, &c. These things have been speculated about, and gloomy predictions have had their day; the time has now come for the proof. People do not buy land and houses, and rent ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... years more. The year 1322 saw an invasion of England by King Robert and a counter-invasion of Scotland by Edward II, who destroyed the Abbey of Dryburgh on his return march. This expedition was, as usual, fruitless, for the Scots adopted their usual tactics of leaving the country waste and desolate, and the English army could obtain no food. In October of the same year King Robert made a further inroad into Yorkshire, and won a small victory at Biland Abbey. At last, in March, 1323, a truce was made for thirteen years, but as Edward II ...
— An Outline of the Relations between England and Scotland (500-1707) • Robert S. Rait
... Of all desolate places, the one at which I was ditched was the limit. It was called a flag-station, and it consisted of a shanty dumped inconsequentially into the sand and sagebrush. A chill wind was blowing, night was coming on, and the solitary telegraph operator who lived in the shanty ...
— The Road • Jack London
... Joy of the desolate, Light of the straying, Hope, when all others die, fadeless and pure, Here speaks the Comforter, in GOD'S name saying— "Earth has no sorrow ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... also a rumbling monotone preceding each of these vehement interruptions. The Abbe Bardin was pointing out to her that, unmarried, her son would return to Tonquin, that Lizerolles would be left deserted, her house would be desolate without daughter-in-law or grandchildren; and, as he drew these pictures, he came back, again and again, ...
— Jacqueline, v3 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... moon hung low in the west like a lamp. A chequered mantle of light and shadow lay over the mountain-barrier of India's north-western frontier, and over the desolate levels through which the train, with its solitary English passenger, sauntered at the rate of seven miles an hour. Even this degree of speed was clearly something of an achievement, attainable only by incessant halting to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... myself as presenting a picture of rural abundance, mingled with rural comfort, that one seldom sees in the old world, where the absence of enclosures, and the concentration of the dwellings in villages, leave the fields naked and with a desolate appearance, in spite of their high tillage ...
— The Redskins; or, Indian and Injin, Volume 1. - Being the Conclusion of the Littlepage Manuscripts • James Fenimore Cooper
... the bank. Tiredness and hunger had weakened him, and whatever for should he walk on, wherever to, to which goal? No, there were no more goals, there was nothing left but the deep, painful yearning to shake off this whole desolate dream, to spit out this stale wine, to put an end to this miserable ...
— Siddhartha • Herman Hesse
... of the Montauk appeared more desolate than ever, after the departure of so many of her passengers. So long as her decks were thronged there was an air of life about her, that served to lessen disquietude, but now that she was left by all in the steerage, ...
— Homeward Bound - or, The Chase • James Fenimore Cooper
... suffering to the besiegers. At Antioch they had been distressed chiefly by famine: in place of this wretchedness they had here the greater miseries of thirst. The enemy had carefully destroyed every place which might serve as a receptacle of water; and in seeking for it over miles of desolate country they were exposed to the harassing attacks of Moslem horsemen. Nor had visions and miracles improved the morals or discipline of the camp; and the ghost of Adhemar of Puy appeared to rebuke the horrible sins which ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... recognised; only our actions, or rather that midnight deed of ours, had she misinterpreted. She would not admit it to me, but I still believe she feared it was a dead body that we had shipped at dead of night to hide away in that desolate tower. ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... great chair to one of the ministers, who took his place in it and read passages from the Bible to his companions. And thus, with prayers and pious conversation, and frequent singing of hymns, which the breezes caught from their lips and scattered far over the desolate waves, they prosecuted their voyage, and sailed into the harbor of Salem in the month ...
— True Stories from History and Biography • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... "How desolate it is!" said Dave. "Not a sign of a house or hut anywhere! It's as bad as being in the far West of our country ...
— Dave Porter in the Far North - or, The Pluck of an American Schoolboy • Edward Stratemeyer
... had gone to bed, they began to talk about the doctor's family. It was the last night they were to spend in the old house, and they felt a little sad as they climbed into the mahogany four-poster bedstead, for the room looked desolate. The curtains had been packed, and all the furniture was gone ...
— Peggy in Her Blue Frock • Eliza Orne White
... The Fen monasteries remained desolate for 100 years. During that period the lands were constantly being seized by different intruders. It was not till the time of Alfred the Great, who came to the throne in 871, that the invasions of the Danes were finally checked, ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... says to me: The waters which thou sawest, where the harlot sits, are peoples and multitudes, and nations and tongues. (16)And the ten horns, and the beast, these will hate the harlot, and will make her desolate and naked, and will eat her flesh, and will burn her up with fire. (17)For God put it into their hearts to do his will, and to form one purpose, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words ...
— The New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. • Various
... the Curate's eyes? Fair as the vision was, he would have banished it if he could, and hated himself for being capable of conjuring it up at such a time. Was it for him to profit by the great calamity which would make his brother's house desolate? He could not endure the thought, nor himself for finding it possible; and he was ashamed to look in Gerald's face with even the shadow of such an imagination on his own. He tapped at the library ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... short, sheep-cropped grass of Salisbury Plain growing among all these uncouth bowlders. I am not sure that a misty, lowering day would not have better suited Stonehenge, as the dreary midpoint of the great, desolate, trackless plain; not literally trackless, however, for the London and Exeter Road passes within fifty yards of the ruins, and another road ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... dock. Scarcely has the gang plank been lowered than horse and rider dash over it and are off at a furious gallop. Away on the jet black steed goes Johnnie Frey, the first rider, with the mail that must be hurled by flesh and blood over 1,966 miles of desolate space—across the plains, through North-eastern Kansas and into Nebraska, up the valley of the Platte, across the Great Plateau, into the foothills and over the summit of the Rockies, into the arid Great Basin, over the Wahsatch range, into ...
— The Story of the Pony Express • Glenn D. Bradley
... I, in my desolate years, Flogged a jaded heart in loud saloons; Often have I fled myself with tears, Wandering under pallid, ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... statue when I get home," she said—"a statue which will personify Nevada and represent the tameless, desolate, changeless, magnificent beauty and the self-sufficient loneliness of the desert. I can see it in my mind's eye now. It will probably be the finest ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, November, 1878 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... their native tongue and his. So convinced is he that the native idiom of the people is the shortest road to their heart and understanding, that he has prepared a catechism and Christian doctrine in the modern Mixtec, which has been printed. The town itself is desolate; the plaza is much too large, and dwarfs the buildings which surround it, and signs of desolation and decay mark everything. With the fondness which Mexicans show for high-sounding and pious inscriptions, the municipality has painted, upon the side of the town-house, in full sight for a long ...
— In Indian Mexico (1908) • Frederick Starr
... occupied at the West End; but then City offices are poor places, and there are certain City occupations which seem to enjoy the greater credit the poorer are the material circumstances by which they are surrounded. Turning out of a lane which turns out of Lombard Street, there is a desolate, forlorn-looking, dark alley, which is called Hook Court. The entrance to this alley is beneath the first-floor of one of the houses in the lane, and in passing under this covered way the visitor to the place finds himself in a small paved square ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... word and I knew it stood for a horrible kind of punishment common enough among the buccaneers, in which the offender is put ashore with a little powder and shot and left behind on some desolate and ...
— Treasure Island • Robert Louis Stevenson
... true," cried the Electress, casting her eyes around the room, "it does look a little dilapidated and desolate here, and care ought indeed to have been taken to refurnish your apartments and give them a more comfortable aspect. You know, Frederick, we only expect to tarry here for a short time, and think of returning to Prussia ...
— The Youth of the Great Elector • L. Muhlbach
... stayed for no explanations: she extricated herself from the tinker party, and, filled with a righteous wrath, went forth to look for her son. From a plantation three fields away came the asphyxiated bleats of the horn and the desolate bawls of Patsey Crimmeen. Mrs. Alexander decided that it was better for the present to leave the personnel of the Craffroe Hunt to ...
— All on the Irish Shore - Irish Sketches • E. Somerville and Martin Ross
... contain his excitement. He hovered in front of the telephone, waiting for it to ring. Then, at a quarter to five, just when he felt he couldn't stand it any longer, and was about to ring up his wife instead of waiting for her to ring him up, he saw a burly shadow behind the glass door, and gave a desolate sigh. That shadow could only be thrown by one person, and that person was his Worship the Mayor of Bursley. His Worship entered the private office with mayoral assurance, pulling in his wake a stout old lady whom he introduced as his aunt from Wolverhampton. ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... name; Along the ways wheredown my feet have passed I see the years with little triumph crowned, Exulting not for perils dared, downcast And weary-eyed and desolate for shame Of having been unstirred of all the sound Of the deep music of the men that move Through the world's days ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... the main, very nearly due east and west. They seldom rise to any great elevation,—the promontory of Aspatogon, about five hundred feet high, being the highest land on the Atlantic coast of the Province. The general aspect of the shore is low, rocky, and desolate, strewn often with huge boulders of granite or quartzite,—and where not bleak and rocky, it is covered with thick forests of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 79, May, 1864 • Various
... of them, and recognised his work as part of the carrying out of his sworn bond. He had grown to be almost the right hand of Sergius Thord; wherever Thord sought supporters, he helped to obtain them,—wherever the sick and needy, the desolate and distressed, required aid, he somehow managed to secure it,—and next to Thord,—and of course Lotys, —he was the idol of the Socialist centre. He never spoke in public,— he seldom appeared at mass meetings; but his influence was always felt; and he made himself and ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... plain, If thou shouldst find my love, oh bid him come! And tell him, on these mountains I remain Even as a lamb who cannot find her home: And tell him, I am left all, all alone, Even as a tree whose flowers are overblown: And tell him, I am left without a mate Even as a tree whose boughs are desolate: And tell him, I am left uncomforted Even as the grass upon ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... This track laid across highlands, which divide the confluent waters of the Missouri from those of the Mississippi. Indians, wild beasts, starvation, thirst, were the dangers of the way. This journey, which led into the vast and desolate parts of Arkansas, was replete with incidents and adventures ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... led the Dragon into the pit. This was a rude and desolate hole, and its furniture of that extreme simplicity common to bear-pits in those barbarous times. From the middle of the stone floor rose the trunk of a tree, ragged with lopped boughs and at its top forking into sundry limbs ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... causeless malice, wantonly Heaped ruin, vice, and slavery? Nature?—no! Kings, priests, and statesmen blast the human flower Even in its tender bud; their influence darts Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins Of desolate society." ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... sixteen miles from the nearest station. The three-mile trail which led from the village would have been easier to travel could it have boasted a corduroy road. What a site for a hotel! Yet the hotel did not materialize, and the "view" neither fed nor warmed nor clothed the patient proprietors of the desolate spot. ...
— McClure's Magazine, January, 1896, Vol. VI. No. 2 • Various
... realized how little profit was to be gained by voyages to the cold and desolate north, they turned southward to warmer waters. Here, of course, they came upon the Spaniards, who had no disposition to share with foreigners the profitable trade of the New World. Though England and Spain were not at war, the English "sea dogs," ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... granite rock and heather slopes upward across the prospect from south to north, a huge stone stands on it in a naturally impossible place, as if it had been tossed up there by a giant. Over the brow, in the desolate valley beyond, is a round tower. A lonely white high road trending away westward past the tower loses itself at the foot of the far mountains. It is evening; and there are great breadths of silken green in the Irish sky. The sun ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... constantly in demand on all sides, she went about his house like a smiling worker of miracles, and Richard watched her. When she went home to her sister for a day or two he missed her strangely, and wandered about the empty rooms with a desolate sense of loss. ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... man who devised the plan that might have saved Texas from slavery, and thereby prevented the Civil War, and which did thereafter save Kansas; if he had been only remembered as the spiritual friend and comforter of large numbers of men and women who were desolate and stricken by poverty and sorrow; if he had been only a zealous lover of his country, comprehending, as scarcely any other man has comprehended, the true spirit of the American people; if he had been any one of these things, as he has been, it would be enough ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... children, the most beautiful creatures in the island. Now the whole existence of this man, who was once so happy and so much envied, is changed. The smiling cottage, that hung over the gulf like a swan over a transparent lake, is sad and desolate; the little enclosure, with its hedges of lilac and hawthorn, where joyous groups used to come and sit at the close of day, is silent and deserted. No human sound dares to trouble the mourning of this saddened solitude. Only towards evening the waves of the sea, compassionating such great misfortunes, ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... for her little ones, how unwelcome she was as a girl when sons were wanted. She showed me how her troubles as a daughter bound to her mother's side differed from those of a boy cast out upon the world of school and college life. My desolate neglect seemed to me a paradise compared to that contact with a millstone under which her soul was ground until the day when her good aunt, her true mother, had saved her from this misery, the ever-recurring pain of which she now related ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... the scarlatina at Naples, and have been very desolate, I fear, without a female servant or friend near them. They probably were indisposed towards Naples by their own illness (which was slight, however; the scarlet fever is always slight in Italy they say), and by their father's more serious ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... and imitative civilisation under the aegis of Imperial Rome: he had not learnt to love the arts of peace and he cultivated none but those of war; he was by choice a warrior and a sailor, a wanderer to other lands, a plougher of the desolate places of the "vasty deep," yet withal a lover of home, who trod at times, with bitter longing for his native land, the thorny paths of exile. To him physical cowardice was the unforgivable sin, next to treachery to his lord; for the loyalty of thane to his chieftain ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... true service of Christ. It was impressed upon my young mind, that God was filled with anger and wrath; and still I was told that I must love him with my whole heart. I am sorry to say it, but I fear I had no true love for him at that time. If the path in which I have walked has been desolate and dreary, I do not desire that others should walk in it. If God is seen in his true loveliness, the young, as well as the old, will love ...
— Our Gift • Teachers of the School Street Universalist Sunday School, Boston
... was real enough, after all. There was no sham in Mary Lou's faint, after the funeral, and Virginia, drooping about the desolate house, looked shockingly pinched and thin. There was a family council in a day or two, and it was at this time that Susan meant to suggest that the boarding-house be carried on between ...
— Saturday's Child • Kathleen Norris
... laid down all kinds of episcopicide to no avail, he refused to be disillusioned. I told him that on the occasion of my last visit to the Megatherium—Thackeray, I explained—a Royal Academician, with whom I had a slight acquaintance, reading desolate "The Hibbert Journal" in the smoking-room, embraced me as fondly as the austerity of the place permitted and related a non-drawing-room story which was current at my preparatory school—and that in the library I ran into ...
— Jaffery • William J. Locke
... cultural, or perhaps the conventional, residue left over in these cases where civilisation has gone stale through inefficiency of the minimal dose is not properly to be found fault with; it is of a blameless character, conventionally; nor is there any intention here to cast aspersion on the desolate. The like effects of the like causes are to be seen in the American colleges and universities, where business principles have supplanted the pursuit of learning, and where the commercialisation of aims, ideals, tastes, occupations and personnel is following much the same lines that have led ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... the battle of Perryville, Mrs. McMeens' husband lost his life from excessive exertions while in attention to the sick and wounded. Being deprived of her natural protector, she returned to her home in Sandusky, which was made desolate by an additional sacrifice to the demon of secession. While at home, not content to sit idle in her mourning for her husband, she was busily occupied in aiding the Sanitary Commission in obtaining supplies, of which she so well knew ...
— Woman's Work in the Civil War - A Record of Heroism, Patriotism, and Patience • Linus Pierpont Brockett
... million acres of land in the West, at present arid, for whose reclamation water is available, if properly conserved. There are about two hundred and thirty million acres from which the forests have been cut but which have never yet been cleared for the plow and which lie waste and desolate. These lie scattered all over the Union. And there are nearly eighty million acres of land that lie under swamps or subject to periodical overflow or too wet for anything but grazing, which it is perfectly feasible to drain ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... they passed in town were small and desolate in contrast to the expanse of huge snowy yards and wide street. They crossed the railroad tracks, and instantly were in the farm country. The big piebald horses snorted clouds of steam, and started to trot. The carriage squeaked ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... to have realized that she was alone in a wild country, for she wrung her hands and said: "Oh! what shall I do in this desolate country without a relative or a friend; it would have been better if I had been killed when my poor father and mother were. O, kind sir, what will I do?" and she sobbed as if her ...
— Thirty-One Years on the Plains and In the Mountains • William F. Drannan
... Now it stood desolate, with its leaves drooping in fever-hot inertia. The squirrel sat gloomily silent on the branches, panting under its fur, and the oriole's splendour of orange and jet had ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... I persuaded myself that he had certainly remained with Mr Hilton, and that had we arrived in safety we should have had the happiness of seeing him. Now should he return to the settlement, what would be his feelings to find it desolate, and to suppose, as he must, that we had shared the fate ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... of her principles, which would have made themselves felt, even if she had openly shared my love. I decided that I would add no fuel to my flames, and felt certain that they would go out of their own accord. By leaving my love thus desolate it would die of exhaustion. I argued like a fool. I forgot that it is not possible to stop at friendship with a pretty woman whom one sees constantly, and especially when one suspects her of being in love herself. At its height friendship becomes love, and the palliative ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... watching him depart—slowly, slowly. No doubt, in that humble lane there were many sad hearts; but no heart so heavy as that of the still, quiet child, when the form she had watched was to be seen no more, and, still standing on the desolate threshold, she gazed into space, and ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... might be rat-ridden and desolate. The coulee might wear always the look of emptiness; but here, under the bluff by the spring, and in the room Jean called hers, one felt the air of occupancy that gave the lie ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... the world grew worse, so the abbot grew more lonely. Desolate and unsupported, he was still unable to make up his mind to the course which he knew to be right; but he slowly strengthened himself for the trial, and as Lent came on, the season brought with it a more special call to effort; he did not fail to recognise ...
— Short Studies on Great Subjects • James Anthony Froude
... mound; Woe to the City of Falsehood,(244) Nought but oppression within her! As a well keeps its waters fresh 7 She keeps fresh her evil; Violence and spoil are heard throughout her, Ever before Me sickness and wounds. Jerusalem, be thou corrected, 8 Lest from thee My soul doth break, Lest I lay thee a desolate waste, ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... an awful silence. Max was so deeply impressed by the girl's words, her looks, her manner, by the gloom of the cold, dark passage, by the desolate appearance of the two deserted buildings before which they stood, that his first impulse was an overpowering desire to run away. Acting upon it he even took a couple of rapid steps in the direction of the street he had left, passing the girl and ...
— The Wharf by the Docks - A Novel • Florence Warden
... Whence came ye So many, and so many, and such glee? Why have ye left your bowers desolate, Your lutes, and gentler fate? 'We follow Bacchus, Bacchus on the wing A-conquering! Bacchus, young Bacchus! Good or ill betide We dance before him thorough kingdoms wide! Come hither, Lady fair, and joined ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... as I was returning towards my centre from an exploration, and she received me with cries of delight and presented me with a big garland of flowers—evidently made for me and me alone. The thing took my imagination. Very possibly I had been feeling desolate. At any rate I did my best to display my appreciation of the gift. We were soon seated together in a little stone arbour, engaged in conversation, chiefly of smiles. The creature's friendliness affected me exactly as a child's might have done. We passed each other flowers, and she kissed ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... that lined the trail gave a desolate air to the bleak, white prospect. The whole of that northern world offered little promise to the traveler, little inducement to leave the ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... propriety of having remained in that desolate territory when, as spring approached, the shrunken cows died one after another in giving birth to the calves which had matured in their slowly perishing bodies, but he made no sign or admission of ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... that she would wait for him till he had made a Name in literature, or proved his ability in some definite manner. There was no indication that any one else was in the way; everything pointed to a contrary probability. But there is nothing so desolate as the heart of a lover whose fair one ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... then of sea, Greece left behind, Messina and the Lipari Islands past; and the blue outline of Sardinia and Corsica began to keep pace with them as they neared the narrow straits of Bonifacio between them. The passengers came up to watch the rocky desolate shores slip by so close, and Captain Burgenfelder was on ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... would succeed a labyrinth of bare passages and pillared galleries, with the family procession already preparing in the quadrangle below, through the carriages and luggage being brought together by the servants for the day's journey. Then breakfast in another painted chamber, damp-stained and of desolate proportions; and then the departure, which, to her timidity and sense of not being grand enough for her place in the ceremonies, was always an uneasy thing. For then the courier (who himself would have been a foreign gentleman of high mark in the Marshalsea) would present himself to report ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... go to an island in the Bitter Waters, an island naked and barren and desolate, covered only with brine-spattered stone, swept with cold winds and the biting sea-spray. Here they live always, breaking stone upon one another, with no food but the broken stones and no drink but the ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... stood open, where the aulas were strewn with the debris of household stuff which the fleeing citizens had abandoned. A deserter had already told Glaucon of his father's death; he was not amazed therefore to find the house of his birth empty and desolate. But everywhere else, also, it was to call back memories of glad days never to return. Here was the school where crusty Pollicharmes had driven the "reading, writing, and music" into Democrates and himself ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... of the Perryman farm lie extensive wolds rising rapidly into desolate regions where sheep can scarcely find pasture. In this region Toller concealed himself. About two miles beyond the old quarry, on a slaty hillside, he found a deep pit, which had probably been used as a water-hole in prehistoric times; and here he built himself a hut. He made the ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... pleasant walks and drives, a visitor now and then, Mr. and Mrs. Goldwin Smith among the number, rest and peace in a magnificent city built for enjoyment,—what more could we have asked to make our visit memorable? Many watering-places look forlorn and desolate in the intervals of "the season." This was not the time of Brighton's influx of visitors, but the city was far from dull. The houses are very large, and have the grand air, as if meant for princes; the shops ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... flagellated with an intolerable heat and—now that the shooting is relaxed—oppressed with a benumbing, sodden silence—the silence of a primordial world. Such a silence as must have brooded over the Face of the Waters on the Eve of Creation—desolate, desolate, as though a colossal, invisible pillar—a pillar of the Infinitely Still, the pillar of Nirvana—rose forever into the empty blue, human life an atom of microscopic dust crushed under its basis, and at the summit God Himself. And I find time to ask myself why, ...
— A Deal in Wheat - And Other Stories of the New and Old West • Frank Norris
... catastrophe, however frightful the slaughter, however total the eclipse, we surmount our sorrows and find ourselves still smiling when the storm is overpast. I remember once penetrating into the wild and desolate interior of New Zealand. From a jagged and lonely eminence I surveyed a landscape that almost frightened one. Not a house was in sight, nor a road, nor one living creature, nor any sign of civilization. I looked in every direction at what seemed to have been the work of angry ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... straightway said, "Arise and enter in the name of Allah." So I arose and went in after her and we gave not over going till we reached a saloon. When I examined the place, I found it neither handsome nor pleasant, but desolate and dreadful without symmetry or cleanliness; indeed, it was loathsome to look upon and there was in it a foul smell. After this inspection I seated myself amiddlemost the saloon, misdoubting; and lo and behold! as I sat, there came down on me from the dais ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... glory of the heather had passed, though here and there a clump of brilliant yellow gorse remained. The telegraph posts, leaning away from the wind, seemed somehow scantier; the road stretched between them, lonely and desolate. From a farmhouse in the bosom of the tree-hung hills lights were already twinkling, and when he reached the edge of the moor, and the sea spread itself out almost at his feet, the shapes of the passing steamers, with their ...
— Nobody's Man • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... withering away, is robbed of all its shining tints; not all their associates, living still, though grieving, can avail to save the rest. The palaces and joyous precincts empty now, the Devis all alone and desolate, sitting or asleep upon the dusty earth, weep bitterly in recollection of their loves. Those who are born, sad in decay; those who are dead, beloved, cause of grief; thus ever struggling on, preparing future ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... so," said the girl, with tremulous anxiety, "what universal ruin! What is there on earth that could fill its place? If the empire falls into the power of the barbarians, Rome will be made desolate, and all the provinces laid waste ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... to. There seems to be a notion in the Old Country that we earn our money easily, but it's very wrong. We'll take that man's case as an example. He has a little, desolate holding up in the bush of Ontario, a hole chopped out of the forest and studded all over with sawn-off fir-stumps. On it is a little two-roomed log shack. In all probability there isn't a settlement within two or three leagues of the spot. Now, as a rule, a place of that kind won't produce enough ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... by the Bedouin Arabs, and there—(as if in startling contradiction to the dead and buried cities of Syria, etc.)—it has—as was equally predicted—discovered the numerous cyclopic cities of Bashan standing perfect and entire, yet "desolate and without any to dwell therein,"—cities wrapped, as it were, in a state of mortal trance, and patiently awaiting the prophesied period of their future revival and rehabitation; some of them of great size, as Um-el-Jemal (probably the Beth-gamul of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... hidden sun was making a silent glory. It was a dead sea, if you will. No gleam of sail, near or afar, lit up its loneliness. No flash of sea bird, poised for its prey, or beating slowly over the desolate waste, broke the heavy dulness that lay upon the breast of the deep. The sky stooped down and blackened the still waters; and anear, beneath the cliff on which we were standing, a faint fringe of foam alone was proof that the ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... the pleasant relations of yesterday. A steamship soon becomes the world itself to its passengers, and the little events of each day assume an exaggerated importance. To be at odds with one's fellows on board means a rather desolate position for the young person fond of society, and this one moodily wished the miserable voyage over as he blinked in the sunshine, with his ...
— All Aboard - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... sighed, and was consoled. But then she recollected her new relation Mr. Reynolds, her grandfather, whom she had never seen, who had for years disowned her—treated her mother with injustice. She could scarcely think of him with complaisancy; yet, when his age, his sufferings, his desolate state, were represented, she pitied him; and, faithful to her strong sense of duty, would have gone instantly to offer him every assistance and attention in her power. Lady Berryl assured her that Mr. Reynolds had positively forbidden her going to him; and that he had assured ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... main, And the ripple was hurrying back again. Nature lived in sadness now; Sadness lived on the maiden's brow, As she watched, with a fixed, half-conscious eye, One lonely leaf that trembled on high, Till it dropped at last from the desolate bough— Sorrow, oh, sorrow! 'tis winter now. And her tears gushed forth, though it was but a leaf, For little will loose the swollen fountain of grief: When up to the lip the water goes, It needs but a ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... port was Nantucket. They happened to arrive there just before a thunder-shower, and Charlie Hubbard was much struck with the wild, desolate look of the island. He pointed out to Hazlehurst the fine variety of neutral tints to be traced in the waves, in the low sand-banks, and the dark sky forming the back-ground. Nantucket is a barren spot, indeed, all but bare of vegetation; scarcely a shrub will ...
— Elinor Wyllys - Vol. I • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... the people of those cities with the sound of the gospel, with a loud voice, of the desolation and utter abolishment which awaits them if they do reject these things; for if they do reject these things, the hour of their judgment is nigh, and their house shall be left unto them desolate. Let him trust in me, and he shall not be confounded, and a hair of his head shall not fall to ...
— The Book of Religions • John Hayward
... wait? Oh, love, how can I wait Until the sunlight of your eyes shall shine Upon my world that seems so desolate? Until your hand-clasp warms my blood like wine; Until you come again, oh, love of mine, How can ...
— Poems of Passion • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... kyng wes dede, That Scotland had to stere{1} and lede, The land sex yhere and mayr perfay{2} Wes desolate efftyr his day. The barnage{3} off Scotland, at the last, Assemblyd thame, and fandyt{4} fast To chess{5} a kyng, thare land to stere, That off awncestry cummyn were Off kyngis that aucht{6} that reawt{'e}{7}, And mast{8} had rycht thare ...
— English Dialects From the Eighth Century to the Present Day • Walter W. Skeat
... she has carried out for decades with energy and unflinching consistency, at a moment when she is sure of being supported by England, merely because she has from opportunist considerations come to terms with us about a desolate corner of Africa. No importance can be attached to this idea, in spite of the views expounded by the Imperial Chancellor, v. Bethmann-Hollweg, in his speech of November 9, 1911. We need not, therefore, regard this convention as definitive. It is as liable to revision as the Algeciras treaty, and ...
— Germany and the Next War • Friedrich von Bernhardi
... at the ship's beef and a biscuit, as to be often the subject of his messmates' jokes. That morning even he could eat but little, though both felt it to be a duty they owed to themselves to take enough to sustain nature. It was while these two forlorn and desolate mariners sat there on the windlass, picking, as it might be, morsel by morsel, that they first entered into a full and frank communication with each other, touching the realities of their present situation. After a good deal had passed between them, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... for several red kangaroos. The ground every where bore signs of being frequently visited by high winds; for on the sides exposed to the south and south-east it was strewed with the trunks of large trees. They saw but one native in this desolate region, and he fled from their approach, preferring the enjoyments of his rocks and woods, with liberty, to any intercourse with them. These hills appearing to extend very far to the northward an impassable barrier seemed fixed ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... syndicate that was supposed to be backing the enterprise with ample funds, and for this reason the Pointers had prolonged their California sojourn beyond the usual term. Seaboard, it was said, would prove eventually to be much more important than a short line of new railroad developing a desolate stretch of the Pacific: it was to be used as a club upon one of the older railroads. The best families of the State were heavily interested in it, the younger generation of bloods expecting by means of it to rival the railroading exploits ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... great favorite with his grandmother, who taught him to read. She had a sincere love of the Sacred Scriptures, which she did not neglect to inculcate into the youthful heart of her grandson. In the neighborhood,—at that time an almost desolate spot,—a school was conducted where the master admitted several Colored children, with the whites, to the benefits of his instructions. It was a "pay school," and thither young Banneker was sent at a very tender age. His application to his studies was equalled by none. When the other ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... flare and fade On desolate sea and lonely sand, Out of the silence and the shade What is the voice of strange command Calling you still, as friend calls friend With love that cannot brook delay, To rise and follow the ways that wend Over the ...
— The Song of the Sword - and Other Verses • W. E. Henley
... in the district where they were said to have happened, and if they had happened, then they must be punished. After this, when he had reached Carnuntum, a city of the Illyrians, now indeed in a desolate and ruinous state, but still very convenient for the general of an army, he from thence sallied out whenever either chance or skill afforded him an opportunity; and by the possession of this post in their neighbourhood, he checked ...
— The Roman History of Ammianus Marcellinus • Ammianus Marcellinus
... your farms have been ravished and impoverished by the war. Vicksburg, the city of hills, everywhere bears marks of war. The Mississippi valley is desolate. You have been deprived of your property in the negro, ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz
... blew off, and the beach was visible on the right,—long, low, desolate, a shore of interminable sand, over which the breakers leaped and ran like hordes of wild horses with streaming tails and manes. Not a sign of vegetation was to be seen on that barren coast, nor any trace of human existence, save here a lonely house on the ridge, ...
— The Drummer Boy • John Trowbridge
... walk with you beyond the fields," he urged. "The streets are just as dangerous for you as this desolate place." ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... frivolous, and her religion a mere twilight of wilful and self-induced delusion—she in her turn shall fall like Lucifer, son of the morning, and the double oceans which sweep her illimitable shores shall only plash to future empires a more sad, a more desolate, and a more ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, February, 1886. - The Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 2, February, 1886. • Various
... could clearly see, for the ship was now liable to founder at any moment; indeed the wonder to me was that she remained afloat so long, for she had by this time sunk so deep that her channels were completely buried, only showing when she rolled heavily away from us. Poor old barkie! what a desolate and forlorn object she looked as we pulled away from her, with little more than her bulwarks showing above water, with the seas making a clean breach over her bows continually, as she rolled and plunged with sickening sluggishness to the great ridges of steel-grey water that incessantly ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... other hope is at an end, to join with her in the daring deed of putting Aegisthus to death: a proposal which Chrysothemis, not possessing the necessary courage, rejects as foolish, and after a violent altercation she re-enters the house. The chorus bewails Electra, now left utterly desolate. Orestes returns with Pylades and several servants bearing an urn with the pretended ashes of the deceased youth. Electra begs it of them, and laments over it in the most affecting language, which agitates Orestes to such a degree ...
— Lectures on Dramatic Art - and Literature • August Wilhelm Schlegel trans John Black
... about twenty thousand warriors finally moved upon Jerusalem. They found the city well walled and in the midst of a desolate region where neither food nor water, nor the materials to construct the apparatus necessary for the capture of the town, were to be found, The opportune arrival at Jaffa of galleys from Genoa furnished the besiegers with supplies, and, in spite of all the difficulties, the ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... to be shut out by the natural barrenness of its soil and sandstone-rocks from any prospect of ever supplying food to the colonies of civilized man. So that, while the whole of New Holland is an interesting country from its natural peculiarities, and even the desolate portion of it adds, by its very desolation, a deep interest to the adventures of those persons who have had the courage to attempt to explore it; yet the chief prospects of Australia's future importance seem to be confined to its line of coast,—no narrow limits in an island ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden
... tilled field of about two acres: before it stood a small kitchen-garden, and at one end of it an open shed half filled with firewood. A thin wreath of blue smoke curling through its single chimney gave to the house, thanks to the desolate appearance of all the country around, an attractive look which on a finer day it might ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... soft, and of the most beautiful whiteness imaginable. We saw no deer near Port Bowen at any season, neither were we visited by their enemies the wolves. A single ermine and a few mice (Mus Hudsonius) complete, I believe, our scanty list of quadrupeds at this desolate and unproductive place. ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... dust." Another shrine robbed of its idol; another hearth left desolate. See, how the black clouds settle down and press more closely around that lonely widowed one. Grim Death mocks at his grief from the open grave, so soon to receive his heart's idol. Ay, remove the coffin lid; gaze with all the agonizing ...
— Words of Cheer for the Tempted, the Toiling, and the Sorrowing • T. S. Arthur
... old man you just remember was rocked in; there is the ruin of the bedstead he died on; that ugly slanting contrivance used to be put under his pillow in the days when his breath came hard; there is his old chair with both arms gone, symbol of the desolate time when he had nothing earthly left to lean on; there is the large wooden reel which the blear-eyed old deacon sent the minister's lady, who thanked him graciously, and twirled it smilingly, and in fitting season bowed ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... he would push on and see what was to be done. I afterwards heard that he kept aloof until the Captain Pacha quitted, he then attack'd the gun boats in which about 2000 [Footnote: The garrison left at Psara] Turks were attempting to escape and destroyed nearly the whole of them. Now the Island is desolate and neutral having neither Greek nor Turk on it; but I hear that the Captain Pacha is going to adopt the miserable and contemptible policy of destroying its harbour, and then taking no more regard of the Island. I must say the want of unanimity in the Greek against the common enemy ...
— Charles Philip Yorke, Fourth Earl of Hardwicke, Vice-Admiral R.N. - A Memoir • Lady Biddulph of Ledbury
... some morning at breakfast you pick up a newspaper and read that a great earthquake has overwhelmed Messina, killing countless thousands and rendering an entire province desolate. You say, "How very terrible!"—after which you go blithely about your business, untroubled, undisturbed. But suppose that your little girl's pet pussy-cat happens to fall out of the fourth-story window. If you chance to be an author and ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... day it was of the poor he would help, of the desolate hearts he would cheer, of the weary lives he would encourage, that he thought; the world that had need of him should never find him hard of hearing when it called to him for help. And much he wondered—the poet Tiny sailing down ...
— My First Cruise - and Other stories • W.H.G. Kingston
... that the least imaginative of our party could picture the gigantic ruins of some mighty citadel, with its ramparts, bastions and towering castle. For many hours we were traversing this weird and desolate valley, and when the sun cast long shadows across our track as he sank to rest, his ruddy light falling upon the dark bowlders, polished with the sand storms of thousands of years, stray pieces of red granite would catch his rosy glint, and sparkle like ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1157, March 5, 1898 • Various
... western and central low-lying, desolate portions of the country make up the great Garagum (Kara-Kum) desert, which occupies over 80% of the country; eastern part ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... way. I only provided myself with a small stock of provisions, and immediately mounted one of the horses from the captain's stable, which brought me past the rocky pass in a good hour. The road towards the temples here turns off to the right into desolate, barren mountain valleys, whose death-like stillness was unbroken by the breathing of an animal, or the song of a bird. This place was well calculated to ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... once brought from Stonehenge a tiny fragment of stone, not larger than a pin's head, and on putting this into an envelope and handing it to a psychometer who had no idea what it was, she at once began to describe that wonderful ruin and the desolate country surrounding it, and then went on to picture vividly what were evidently scenes from its early history, showing that that infinitesimal fragment had been sufficient to put her into communication with the records connected with ...
— Clairvoyance • Charles Webster Leadbeater
... vast polinas—a space of soft, watery ice, which resembled the lakes of Siberia. All was bitter, cold, sterile, bleak, and chilling to the eye, which vainly sought a relief. The prospect of a journey over this desolate plain, intersected in every direction by ridges of mountain icebergs, full of crevices, with soft salt ice here and there, was dolorous indeed; and yet the heart of Ivan quaked not. He had now what he sought in view; he knew there was land beyond, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... in the snow where the wind had not covered them. A girl had left the village the day before my arrival, which made my task all the easier. So I went up into that vast, desolate silence, the fog closing in steadily, getting thicker and thicker, the trail getting narrower until at last it was a ...
— Where the World is Quiet • Henry Kuttner
... rendered desolate one of the best granaries of the South, preventing them from raising another crop this year, and taking away from ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... garners it crackles and streams! As if they would rend up the earth from its roots, Rush the flames to the sky Giant-high; And at length, Wearied out and despairing, man bows to their strength! With an idle gaze sees their wrath consume, And submits to his doom! Desolate The place, and dread For storms the barren bed! In the blank voids that cheerful casements were, Comes to and fro the melancholy air, And sits despair; And through the ruin, blackening in its shroud, Peers, as it flits, the melancholy cloud. One human glance of grief upon the grave Of ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. III • Kuno Francke (Editor-in-Chief)
... his riding-cloak around him and settled down squarely into the saddle. The desolate plains with the crying wind held the loneliness of the damned. Occasionally a wolf howled in the distance, or a wandering snipe cried as it lost itself among the stiffening reeds about the swampy levels, and through all he could hear the hoarse roar of the Kofn ...
— A Modern Mercenary • Kate Prichard and Hesketh Vernon Hesketh-Prichard
... of his going to sea was as follows. In 1770 the Falkland Islands, a desolate and then unimportant group, lying in the South Atlantic, to the eastward of Patagonia, were claimed as a possession by both Spain and Great Britain. The latter had upon them a settlement called Port Egmont, before which, in the year named, an overwhelming ...
— The Life of Nelson, Vol. I (of 2) - The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain • A. T. (Alfred Thayer) Mahan
... at him, lying still against his white pillows. She looked and looked, and presently the tears began to slide silently down her cheeks. She did not lift her hands to wipe them away. She sat and cried silently, openly, like a desolate, unkindly treated child. ...
— The Rose Garden Husband • Margaret Widdemer
... Harry, is d—— hot," said Barney; "and now that ould Bet Harramount hasn't been in it for many a long year, we may as well go to that desolate cabin there above, and shelter ourselves from the hate—not that I'd undhertake to go there by myself; but now that you are wid me I don't care if I take a peep into the inside of it, ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton
... furnished a target for our cannoneers or plunder for our camps. A country better adapted to all good purposes of man, nor one more pleasing to the eye, hardly exists on earth; but before it was trodden by armies, it had become little less than desolate. The James River is as navigable as the Hudson, and flows through a region far more fertile, longer settled, more inviting, and of more genial climate; but there are upon the Hudson's banks more cities than there are rotten ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... was thick and dark and moist with clouds. Dick, despite the peace that seemed to hang over everything, was oppressed. The desolate house, even more than the sight of the field after the battle was over, brought home to him the meaning of war. It was not alone the death of men but the uprooting of a country for their children and their children's ...
— The Rock of Chickamauga • Joseph A. Altsheler
... the 19th of August we sailed from this uninhabited extremity of the world, where the inhospitable climate affords neither food nor shelter, and not a tree or shrub of any kind grows amongst its barren rocks; but all is one desolate and expanded waste of ice, which even the constant beams of the sun for six months in the year cannot penetrate or dissolve. The sun now being on the decline the days shortened as we sailed to the southward; and, ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... commonly holding a lamb in his arms, who drives his flock to water at the pond opposite my window, is the only thing that gives token of the season. I am quite mortified at this on your account, for April, in general a month of great beauty here, will be as desolate as winter. Nevertheless you must come and see me, you and Mr. and Mrs. Bennoch, and perhaps you can continue to stay a day or two, or to come more than once. I want to see as much of you as I can, and I must change much, if I be in any condition to go to ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... places from 2 to 3 m. wide. They have, however, even on the top a certain picturesqueness, for the undulating tableland is relieved by copses, and diversified by little wooded "bottoms," scooped out by prehistoric torrents. Nearer the sea the uplands become more desolate, the "bottoms" are replaced by rocky combes, like the gorges at Cheddar and Burrington; villages become less frequent; and traces of discarded mines give a weirdness to the solitude. The moors are, however, healthy, ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... all the nice girls and fine boys of my acquaintance have their uncles or their grand-dads or their cousins to take them to those places; so, if I go, I must go alone. But I don't go. I can't bear the chill of seeing everybody happy, and knowing myself so lonely and desolate. Confound it, sir, I've too much heart to be happy under such circumstances! I'm too humane, sir! And the result is, I hate holidays. It's miserable to be out, and yet I can't stay at home, for I get thinking of Christmases ...
— Christmas - Its Origin, Celebration and Significance as Related in Prose and Verse • Various
... Staunton's character. She is a very amiable person, and has in reality, I believe, plenty of good sense; but she has allowed herself to fall into an exaggerated style of feeling and expression, which, I dare say, bewitched a girl like Helen, and now makes her find home cold and desolate.' ...
— Abbeychurch - or, Self-Control and Self-Conceit • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Dragon into the pit. This was a rude and desolate hole, and its furniture of that extreme simplicity common to bear-pits in those barbarous times. From the middle of the stone floor rose the trunk of a tree, ragged with lopped boughs and at its top forking into sundry limbs possible ...
— The Dragon of Wantley - His Tale • Owen Wister
... the handful of townspeople. Millionaires and paupers had fought side by side for the food, and then fought with one another after they got it. The town of Palo Alto and Stanford University had been sacked in similar fashion, we learned. Ahead of us lay a desolate, wasted land; and we thought we were wise in turning off to my place. It lay three miles to the west, snuggling among the first rolling ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... mountains; a great people and a strong: there hath not been ever the like, neither shall be any more after it, even to the years of many generations. A fire devoureth before them, and behind them a flame burneth: the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them. The appearance of them is as the appearance of horses; and as horsemen, so shall they run. Like the noise of chariots on the tops of mountains shall they leap, like the noise of a flame of fire that devoureth ...
— The Bush Boys - History and Adventures of a Cape Farmer and his Family • Captain Mayne Reid
... regained her composure and looked up at him with a calm unwavering gaze that told him how much she had undergone and the strength of character she had gained during the fearful weeks that she had been marooned on this savage and desolate coast. ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... former pirates, of putting an offender on shore on some desolate cape or island, with a gun, a few shot, a flask of powder, ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... unconvincing) attempt at a new picture. When you have left the green-covered kopjes of the Cape a few days before and come to anchor in Walvis Bay on a cold morning you think you have reached No-man's-land after a fast voyage. It is a first impression only. The place is desolate enough; it suggests the Sahara run straight into the sea, or the discomforting dreariness of Punta Arenas, ...
— With Botha in the Field • Eric Moore Ritchie
... qualities that to say I passionately love her is a most impotent expression of what I feel: for to tenderness and ardour of affection must be added all that simplicity, purity, and grandeur of soul can inspire. To think of life without her is to think of a world sterile, desolate, and joyless: of a night to which day shall never succeed: and of existence arrested and chained ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... the Yukon to Leadville, and cow-punchers in whose memories were stored the brands carried by the herds from Chihuahua to Assiniboia. There were men who had roped wild steers in the mesquite brush of the Nueces, and who, year in and year out, had driven the trail herds northward over desolate wastes and across the fords of shrunken rivers to the fattening grounds of the Powder and the Yellowstone. They were hardened to the scorching heat and bitter cold of the dry plains and pine-clad mountains. They were accustomed to sleep in the open, while the picketed horses ...
— Rough Riders • Theodore Roosevelt
... with a woman on either side supporting her. And she walked round and round her husband, with the tears rolling down her face, and she wailed the widow's wail, with her very heart in it. Why had he gone away and left her desolate? His was the spirit of fragrance like the scented sandal-wood; his was the arm of strength like the lock that barred the door. Gone was the scent of the sandal, broken and open the door; why had the bird flown and ...
— Things as They Are - Mission Work in Southern India • Amy Wilson-Carmichael
... haunt the tomb in which he lay, Grief-stricken, desolate, and lone; But Magdalene at break of day Found that her precious ...
— The Mountain Spring And Other Poems • Nannie R. Glass
... sight of the shores of Newfoundland on the 5th of August, just one month from the day we took our last look of the British isles. Yet though the coast was brown, and rugged, and desolate, I hailed its appearance with rapture. Never did any thing seem so refreshing and delicious to me as the land breeze that came to us, as I thought, bearing health and gladness on ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... tree is a refuge for the coon and o'possum and other wild life. I have a hollow white oak on my farm I let stand because a family of squirrels is raised in it every year. I also have a bee tree and the bees help pollinate my fruit trees so they produce better. A world without trees would be a desolate place. The value of a park is ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... wound through desolate grounds to a huge clump of a house, square and prosaic, all plunged in shadow save where a moonbeam struck one corner and glimmered in a garret window. The vast size of the building, with its gloom and its deathly silence, struck a chill to the heart. Even Thaddeus Sholto seemed ...
— The Sign of the Four • Arthur Conan Doyle
... to a spot where stacks of hay and turf guarded a series of stone buildings, saying, "There's the Grange." The first glance was not encouraging—no sheep-station in Australia could seem more utterly desolate; but it improved on closer examination. The effects of cultivation were to be seen in the different colours of the fields round the house, where the number of stock grazing showed that more than ordinary means must have been taken to improve ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... this desire arose solely from selfish motives. The money he earned seemed to melt away almost as soon as he received it; to his surprise he found that he was not nearly so well off in regard to personal comfort as he had been formerly, and the house seemed to grow more dreary and desolate as the wintry days dragged slowly by. Sometimes—when he had the money—he sought forgetfulness in the society of Crass and the other frequenters of the Cricketers, but somehow or other he could ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... for beauty; I care not for riches: I am not the slave whom their tinsel bewitches: A bosom I seek That is true, like mine own,— Though pale be the cheek, And its roses all flown,— And the wearer be desolate, wretched, forlorn,— And alike from ...
— The Baron's Yule Feast: A Christmas Rhyme • Thomas Cooper
... with you!" said the cardinal, "and at once dismiss your archers, taking care not to style yourself mayor any more on pain of death." Guiton made no reply, and went his way quietly to his house, a magnificent dwelling till lately, but now lying desolate amidst the general ruin. He was not destined to reside there long; the heroic defender of La Rochelle was obliged to leave the town and retire to Tournay-Boutonne. He returned to La Rochelle to ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... making a delta like that of the Nile, and forming a number of islands of various dimensions—some so large that a considerable portion of the city to the north of us stands on them, others containing only a few gardens and villas. The country surrounding the city seems barren and desolate in the extreme, either an arid steppe or a stagnant marsh telling of the agues and fevers afflicting those dwelling near it. To the north, however, not many versts from the city, rise the hills and woods, ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... thou be, His aid impart * To thee, who distant dwellest in my heart! Allah be near thee how so far thou fare; * Ward off all shifts of Time, all dangers thwart! Mine eyes are desolate for thy vanisht sight, * And start my tears-ah me, how fast they start! Would Heaven I kenned what quarter or what land * Homes thee, and in what house and tribe thou art An fount of life thou drain in greenth of rose, * While drink I tear drops for my sole desert? An thou ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... recognize the very place. 'Oh, what has become of my labor, my work, the sweet fruit of my care and of my sweat? Who has robbed me of my property? Who has taken my beans?' His young heart rises; the first feeling of injustice comes to pour its sad bitterness into it; tears flow in streams; the desolate child fills the air with groans and cries. I share his pain, his indignation; we seek, we inquire, we examine. At last we discover that the gardener has done ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... which had long been wanting to Lilias and Jane had suddenly returned, and they succeeded in making the room look surprisingly comfortable, compared with its former desolate aspect, before William came down, and renewed his ...
— Scenes and Characters • Charlotte M. Yonge
... rate for lunatics, and such like," answered Joe, gazing with disfavor at the bare trees and desolate looking bushes. "What have you boys been doing that you've got to spend a fortnight away from ...
— The Grammar School Boys Snowbound - or, Dick & Co. at Winter Sports • H. Irving Hancock
... have I, in my desolate years, Flogged a jaded heart in loud saloons; Often have I fled myself with tears, Wandering ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... acquainted with the valley will probably laugh to be told that the manor-house which most interested me was that of Knook, a poor little village between Heytesbury and Upton Lovell. Its ancient and towerless little church with rough, grey walls is, if possible, even more desolate-looking than that of Tytherington. In my hunt for the key to open it I disturbed a quaint old man, another octogenarian, picturesque in a vast white beard, who told me he was a thatcher, or had been one before the evil days came when he could work no ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... O Death, with hollow tone, And soundless step, and clammy hand— Lo, I am now no less alone Than in thy desolate, ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... Mad! Was I indeed losing my reason? Was this the terrific meaning of my sleepless nights, my troubled thoughts, my strange inquietude? Fiercely I strode along, heedless whither I was going, till I found myself suddenly on the borders of the desolate Campagna. A young moon gleamed aloft, looking like a slender sickle thrust into the heavens to reap an over-abundant harvest of stars. I paused irresolutely. There was a deep silence everywhere. I felt faint and giddy: curious flashes of light danced past my eyes, and my limbs shook like those ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli
... proud of the responsibility of conducting a visitor to his home. At the far end of the hall the lad plunged into a narrow staircase, so narrow that a stout man could not have mounted it. Up four of these broken flights Carmen toiled after him, and then down a long, desolate corridor, which sent a chill into the very ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... would not leave her desolate, But with her went along, as a strong gard Of her chast person, and a faithfull mate 75 Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard: Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward,[*] And when she wakt, he waited diligent, With humble service to her will prepard: From her faire eyes he tooke ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... all broken away and some bits of wood had been rigged up roughly in its place. The partition which had once divided the hall from the entrance passage was all broken, both above the cross-beam and below, and all the bedding had been upset. The place looked rather desolate. There was a light burning in the ...
— Grettir The Strong - Grettir's Saga • Unknown
... human than humanity itself. Nietzsche's Superman is cold and friendless. Achilles is so foolishly fond of his friend that he slaughters armies in the agony of his bereavement. Mr. Shaw's sad Caesar says in his desolate pride, "He who has never hoped can never despair." The Man-God of old answers from his awful hill, "Was ever sorrow like unto my sorrow?" A great man is not a man so strong that he feels less than other men; he is a man so strong ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the steamer puffed away into the mysterious depths of one of the dark-blue fjords, and we were left on a desolate island, like Robinson Crusoe, with our worldly goods around us. Most of the natives we found so stupid that they could not understand our excellent Norse. One fellow, in particular, might as well have been a piece of mahogany as a man. ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... one of the upper walks because it was desolate, and he could there speak to her, as he thought, without being heard. She had, almost unconsciously, made a faint attempt to lead him down upon the lawn, no doubt feeling averse to private conversation at the moment; ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... two hours they reached the Illinois, and, as they sprang on board, their baggage was seized by willing hands, and carried to the cabin, which had been stripped of nearly all its furniture, and presented, altogether, a desolate appearance. After a few moments' conversation with one of their new messmates, they learned that there were only fifteen men on board the vessel, including one sergeant and two corporals. These were the ...
— Frank on a Gun-Boat • Harry Castlemon
... human interest than here, where the old houses, in all their ugliness, have yet some imprint of the individuality of their tenants. Only on feast days does Little Italy, in Harlem, recall the Bend when it put on holiday attire. Anything more desolate and disheartening than the unending rows of tenements, all alike and all equally repellent, of the up-town streets, it is hard to imagine. Hell's Kitchen in its ancient wickedness was picturesque, at least, with its rocks and its goats and shanties. Since the negroes took possession ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... village on foot. I followed. We soon reached the trenches that had been made by the British troops before they evacuated the place. 'Awful rot giving this place up,' said the officer. 'These lines took us a week to dig.' From here Colenso lay exposed about two hundred yards away—a silent, desolate village. The streets were littered with the belongings of the inhabitants. Two or three houses had been burned. A dead horse lay in the road, his four legs sticking stiffly up in the air, his belly swollen. The whole place had evidently been ransacked and plundered ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... one hates to be alone with himself, the chances are that he has not much of any self to be alone with. He is in as desolate a condition as a certain Mr. Pease of Oberlin, who, having lost his wife and children, set up his own tombstone and chiseled upon it ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... leaping over the side of it, seemed to slide or drop down the rope like a monkey, and alighted (with impossible precision and placidity) seated on the edge of the wall, over which he kicked and dangled his legs as he grinned at Turnbull. The wind roared in the trees yet more ruinous and desolate, the red tails of the sunset were dragged downward like red dragons sucked down to death, and still on the top of the asylum wall sat the sinister figure with the grimace, swinging his feet in tune with the tempest; while above him, at the end of its tossing or tightened cord, the enormous iron ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the peace of the republic; [53] but the submission of Chrysostom was the indispensable duty of a Christian and a subject. Instead of listening to his humble prayer, that he might be permitted to reside at Cyzicus, or Nicomedia, the inflexible empress assigned for his exile the remote and desolate town of Cucusus, among the ridges of Mount Taurus, in the Lesser Armenia. A secret hope was entertained, that the archbishop might perish in a difficult and dangerous march of seventy days, in the heat of summer, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon
... of the road. The starving cur never moved, so intent was he on obtaining food, and thus it happened that a pitiful yelp of pain reached my ears, muffled by the closed window. The coupe whirled on its journey, and below, in the chill, desolate grayness of a winter afternoon, an ugly pup sat howling at the leaden skies, his right foreleg upheld, part of it dangling in a very unnatural manner. A pang of compassion for the dumb unfortunate stirred in my breast, but I sat still and watched. ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... beneath them the dead body of the Panther. He knew that it was kept until the savages might find a place to inter it, where it would be beyond the reach of the scalping knife. He gazed wistfully towards the castle, but there all seemed to be silent and desolate, and a feeling of loneliness and desertion came over him to increase the gloom ...
— The Deerslayer • James Fenimore Cooper
... he went, hardly daring to raise his eyes to the alluring iniquities of the painted imagery which, gaudy in crimson and blue, still blazed out upon the desolate solitude, uninjured by that rainless air. But he was young, and youth is curious; and the devil, at least in the fifth century, busy with young brains. Now Philammon believed most utterly in the devil, and night and day devoutly prayed ...
— Hypatia - or, New Foes with an Old Face • Charles Kingsley
... the upper air, and charged with an overmastering pathos as of the lamentations of angels. In the dimness and silence, in the aroused and exalted condition of his being, the strains seemed unearthly in their immense and desolate grandeur of sorrow, and their mournful and dark significance was now for him. Working within him the impression of vast, innumerable fleeing shadows, thick-crowding memories of all the ways and deeds of an existence fallen from its early ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... feeling more desolate and forsaken in its promptings than that realized by one who finds himself alone in a crowd. His inward solitude is more acutely realized by the contrast he sees about him, and he feels how much he is alone. Thus it was with the young traveller ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray
... clear of the houses and streets of Pera. The black clouds drove angrily down before the north wind, seeming to tear themselves in pieces on the stars, as one might tear a black veil upon steel nails. The wind swept the desolate country, and made the panes of the windows rattle even more loudly than did the hoofs and wheels upon the stony road. But the horses were strong, and the driver was not a shivering Greek, but a sturdy Turk, who could ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... I said, hoping to cheer him; 'but dreams pass away with the light—even with waking.' There I stopped, for before he spoke I saw the answer in his desolate ...
— Dracula's Guest • Bram Stoker
... as each hour passed the redskins gained on us, until at last they could be seen with the naked eye. The harsh and cruel war-whoop of those blood-thirsty savages echoed and re-echoed back from the distant hills, and over the desolate plains until men and beasts were crazed to desperation. The lash was put to the already tired mules, and we strained every nerve to reach the crest of the next knoll, hoping against hope for succor. On they came, their warwhoops for scalps and the white man's blood was now continuous. ...
— Dangers of the Trail in 1865 - A Narrative of Actual Events • Charles E Young
... ancient Roman Arch; DAUBINET tells me its history in a vague kind of way, breaking off suddenly to say that I shall see it to-morrow, when, so he evidently wishes me to infer, the Roman Arch will speak for itself. Then we drive past a desolate-looking Museum. I believe it is a Museum, though DAUBINET's information is a ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... that this earth can afford. But the sound of the church-going bell These valleys and rocks never heard, Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell, Or smiled when a sabbath appeared. Ye winds, that have made me your sport, Convey to this desolate shore Some cordial endearing report Of a land I must visit no more. My Friends, do they now and then send A wish or a thought after me? O tell me I yet have a friend, Though a friend I ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... Emancipation that severed the relation binding them to their masters, left them in a very forlorn and deplorable condition. They were homeless and penniless in a country, that had been rendered more or less desolate, by the ravages of war and bloodshed. No provision had ever been made for the spread of intelligence among them. It has been estimated that only about five per cent of them at that time could read and write. Their homeless and illiterate condition rendered ...
— The Choctaw Freedmen - and The Story of Oak Hill Industrial Academy • Robert Elliott Flickinger
... Oh! friends who trifle cheerily with that dainty second course, what does your turbot cost? Reckon it up by rigid arithmetic, and work out the calculation when you are on your knees if you can. All over the North Sea that night there were desolate places that rang to the cry of parting souls; after vain efforts and vain hopes, the drowning seamen felt the last lethargy twine like a cold serpent around them; the pitiless sea smote them dumb; the pitiless sky, rolling over just and unjust, lordly peer ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... way was barren and uninteresting to a high degree, consisting of wide dusty plains scantily sown with barley, but unrelieved with trees or waters. The people are ignorant and brutal, though they boast themselves to be Old Castilians, which is however not the fact, as these desolate and benighted regions belong to what was once the kingdom of Leon. Their inhospitality is so great that I have been refused a glass of water in their villages, though I asked it in the name of God; though I have subsequently obtained it by paying for it, for their ...
— Letters of George Borrow - to the British and Foreign Bible Society • George Borrow
... he describes. He tells us of tribes without a chief, families without a nation to call their own, men in a state of isolation, wrecks of powerful tribes wandering at random amid the ice and snow and desolate solitudes of Canada. Hunger and cold pursue them; every day their life is in jeopardy. Amongst these men, manners have lost their empire, traditions are without power. They become more and more savage. Tanner ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... Southern Pacific survey. At that time, just before the Gadsden treaty, the territory surveyed was in the republic of Mexico. These surveys were all made by order of the then Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, who aroused a storm of protest in the East against his "misguided attention to the desolate West." But few statesmen and fewer of the outside public in that day possessed the prophetic vision to perceive the future greatness of what were termed the "arid wastes" of Arizona and California. This was shown by the perfect hail of protest that swept to ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady
... stars and the pitying angels looked down on the fierce conflict of grief and love and disillusion with which her desolate young soul wrestled alone through the long, midnight vigil. How should she separate these two beautiful faiths which had been enthroned as one in the happy depths of her guileless heart, without perilling her very trust ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... handsome woman. I was hurriedly informed that the murder trial was in progress at St. Augustine; that Ashlock had given his testimony, and had availed himself of the chance to take a wife to share with him the solitude of his desolate hut on the beach at Indian River. He had brought ashore his wife, her sister, and their chests, with the mail, and had orders to return immediately to the steamer (Gaston or Harney) to bring ashore some soldiers ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... where nor how he went away, it is my will that his kingdom remain entire to his son; who, because he is too young, he not being yet full five years old, shall be brought up and instructed by the ancient princes and learned men of the kingdom. And because a realm thus desolate may easily come to ruin, if the covetousness and avarice of those who by their places are obliged to administer justice in it be not curbed and restrained, I ordain and will have it so, that Ponocrates ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... married, if he had had children, a wife, a home of his own, instead of these desolate ...
— Grey Roses • Henry Harland
... of Kamtschatka, stretching to the river Anadir on the North, and South to the Kurilian Islands, bathed on the east by the ocean, and on the west by the sea of Ochotsk, is, like many men, better than its reputation. It is supposed to be the roughest and most desolate corner of the world, and yet it lies under the same latitude as England and Scotland, and is equal in size to both. The summer is indeed much shorter, but it is also much finer; and the vegetation is more luxuriant than in Great Britain. The winter lasts long, and its discomforts ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... the desolate land, of the naked hillsides, of the moor marshes with their ghostly mists; the brooding of the watchful, solitary house, the horror of haunted twilights, of nightfall and of midnights now and then when Greatorex was abroad looking after his cattle and she lay alone under the ...
— The Three Sisters • May Sinclair
... still wondering thus, replying from time to time to Montalvo in monosyllables, the sledge in front of them turned the corner of one of the eastern bastions and came to a halt. The place where it stopped was desolate and lonely, for the town being in a state of peace no guard was mounted on the wall, nor could any living soul be found upon the snowy waste that lay beyond the moat. At first, indeed, Lysbeth was able to see nobody at all, for by now the sun had gone down and her eyes were not accustomed ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard
... once were gay, When Nature's hand displayed Long waving rows of willows grey And clumps of hawthorn shade; But now, alas! your hawthorn bowers All desolate we see! The spoiler's axe their shade devours, And ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... home at last, in the small hours of the night, for there was nothing more that they could do till morning came to wake the world again—that wide desolate world of houses and roads, of byways and slums; that world in which, somewhere, was their ...
— The Girls of St. Olave's • Mabel Mackintosh
... had arrived there the previous winter, after a march of over seven hundred miles from Massachusetts, the hillside, which now bloomed, was desolate and bleak. But few buildings had been erected, and about the only provisions obtainable were corn meal and water. All that had been changed as by magic, and many of the poor fellows had not known such comfort since leaving their homes in England, while most of ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... ungratified. It is not well to try to lift the curtain of the unseen, it is not well to call to heaven to show its glory, or to hell to give us touch and knowledge of its yawning fires. Knowledge comes soon enough; many of us will say that knowledge has come too soon and left us desolate. There is no bitterness like the bitterness of wisdom: so cried the great Koheleth, and so hath cried many a son of man following blindly on his path. Let us be thankful for the dark places of the ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... is only a part. The curse goes far beyond the field of combat. The trampled dead and dying are but a tithe of the actual sufferers. There are desolate homes, far away, where want changes sorrow into madness. Wives wail by hearthstones where the household fires have died into cold ashes forever more. Like Rachel, mothers weep for the proud boys that lie stark beneath the pitiless stars. Under a thousand roofs—cottage roofs and palace roofs—little ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... in the situation was in abeyance. He had an irritating consciousness that what should have been the problem of these people had been shifted upon himself in a manner most unfair of Fortune. The desolate face that he had left haunted his thoughts; and the girl's pride and obstinacy in binding him to secrecy made the ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... most of the prominent Negroes in the town, smashed the furniture, tore books to pieces, and cut pictures from their frames, all amid the most heartrending distress on the part of the women and children. That night the town was desolate, for all who could do so fled to Aiken ...
— A Social History of the American Negro • Benjamin Brawley
... against more than 160,000 blacks and half-breeds, there are perhaps 5000 whites left to maintain the ethnic struggle, and the number of these latter is annually growing less. Many of the British islands have been almost deserted by their former cultivators: St. Vincent is becoming desolate: Tobago is a ruin; St. Martin lies half abandoned; St. Christopher is crumbling; Grenada has lost more than half her whites; St. Thomas, once the most prosperous, the most active, the most cosmopolitan of West Indian ports, is in full decadence. And while the white element is ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... Never had he entered a more homelike place, large enough to be called a chateau, yet as cheerful as a winter's fire. And the daughter! Her French was the elegant speech of Tours, her German Hanoverian. Incomparable! And she was not married? Helas! How many luckless fellows walked the world desolate? And this was M. Fitzgerald the journalist? And M. Breitmann had also been one? How delighted he was to be here! All this flowed on with perfect naturalness; there wasn't a false note anywhere. At dinner he diffused a warmth and geniality which were infectious. Laura was pleased ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... we suffered so much as from thirst. That was terrible. Hour after hour passed by. No relief appeared. I began almost to wish that I had laid my head down alongside my poor friend and old shipmate, Delisle, in the desolate savannah near Ou Trou. The thought was wrong—rank ingratitude to the merciful providence which had preserved me—but it was human, I fear. How admirably our gallant fellows behaved! Scarcely a murmur or a grumble was heard. Again the sun went down. That night was one ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... irresistible invitation was accepted by several of the auditory, including the baronet, Dashall, and the Squire, who were gratified beyond their anticipations, with a sight of the great polar bear, the desolate inhabitant of a frigid and dismal clime, where Nature has forbid the vegetative, and stinted the growth of the animal creation, with the exception of the shaggy wanderer of the desert and the floundering leviathan of the ocean. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... his Watchmen, you will give seasonable warning to the Honourable Houses of Parliament, that now (after the losse of the opportunity of so many years) they would, in their places, repair the Houses of the LORD, that lyeth so long desolate, and promove the work of Reformation and Uniformity ...
— The Acts Of The General Assemblies of the Church of Scotland
... and scrupulously clean, seemed strange and dreary after the little, smoky, earth-built living-rooms in which her peasantry were content to live, and she never had seemed to herself so completely desolate; but all the time she was so wearied out with her long and painful walk, that she had no sooner taken some food than she began ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thwart and bring to naught the will of Him that giveth not a castle a direction from a place except it pleaseth Him, and if it please Him not, will the rather that even all castles and all directions thereunto vanish out of the earth, leaving the places wherein they tarried desolate and vacant, so warning His creatures that where He will He will, and where He will ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the eye, the pleasant households, the group of delightful people. Why travel, then? We want the abnormal, the strong, the ugly, the unusual at least. We wish to be startled and stirred up and repelled. And we ought to be more thankful than we are that there are so many desolate and wearisome and fantastic places, and so many tiresome and unattractive people in ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... but almost entirely desolate. All was ghastly in the raw, hard gleams of moonlight coming fitfully through the masses of flying cloud. The wind was rising, and the air was damp and cold. I looked round the room instinctively, and noticed that the fire was laid ready for lighting, and that there were small-cut ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... suitors. This of course is only the case with the younger women; the older women for one thing do not nag so much, and moreover they have usually children willing and able to support them. If they have not, their state is, like that of all old childless women in Africa, a very desolate one. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate. But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... boldly, "O king, thou hast brought us far away from our homes to a strange land; whence are we to get food here? No harvest will grow on these bare rocks, no meadows are spread out before our eyes. The whole land is bare and desolate." But the son of Zeus smiled and said, "O foolish men, and easy to be cast down, if ye had your wish ye would gain nothing but care and toil. But listen to me and ponder well my words. Stretch forth your hands and slay ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... ends; He howls as he hounds down his prey; and his lash Tears the hair of the timorous wan mountain-ash, That clings to the rocks, with her garments all torn, Like a woman in fear; then he blows his hoarse horn And is off, the fierce guide of destruction and terror, Up the desolate heights, 'mid an intricate error Of mountain ...
— Lucile • Owen Meredith
... know no rest Till warm you lie Within that nest Which is her breast; Though why to thee Such joy should be Who carest not, While I must wait Here desolate, I cannot wot. O what I 'd do To come ...
— English Poems • Richard Le Gallienne
... sum of the scent of all these trees of art and cultivation is poor and insipid compared with the results of two or three indigenous plants that seem to shrink from flaunting their graces while casting sweetness on the desolate air. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... and Amroth led the way, through a long cleft, with rocks, very rough and black, on either side, and fallen fragments under foot. It was steep at first; but soon the rocks grew lower; and we came out presently on to a great desolate plain, with stones lying thickly about, among a coarse kind of grass. At each step I seemed to grow stronger, and walked more lightly, and in the thin fine air my horrors left me, though I still had a dumb sense of suffering which, strange ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... surrounded by the settlers, yet Philip as often escaped almost miraculously from their toils, and, plunging into the wilderness, would be lost to all search or inquiry until he again emerged at some far distant quarter, laying the country desolate. Among his strongholds were the great swamps or morasses which extend in some parts of New England, composed of loose bogs of deep black mud, perplexed with thickets, brambles, rank weeds, the shattered and ...
— The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. • Washington Irving
... round you not unpleasant; but eastward, over the River, nothing can be more in contrast. Oder is of swift current, of turbid color, as it rolls under Frankfurt Bridge,—Wooden Bridge, with Dam Suburb at the end;—a River treeless, desolate, as you look up and down; which has, evidently, often changed its course, since grinding down that alluvium as site for Frankfurt; and which, though now holding mainly to northward, is still given to be erratic, and destructive ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... there, Alexander, and we will drive to the harbor. There I will introduce you to the captain. It will be wise. Your father and brother are dearer to you than your sister; she is more important to me. If only I could go away myself—away from here, from the desolate house, and take ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... treading close together and in single file, making little noise. Straight across the desolate stretch of land that lay between the two lines of trenches they went, and, when half way, there came from the German side a sudden burst of star shells. These are a sort of war fireworks that make a brilliant illumination, and the enemy was in the habit of sending them up every night at intervals, ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... and they of the shanty order and generally stranded high upon the beach. One sees now and then, on the Illinois ridge, the cheap log or frame house of a "cracker," the very picture of desolate despair; but on the Kentucky shore are few signs of life, for the bottom lies so low that it is frequently inundated, and settlement ventures no nearer than two or three miles from the riverside. A fisherman comes occasionally into view, upon this wide expanse of wood and water and clay-banks; ...
— Afloat on the Ohio - An Historical Pilgrimage of a Thousand Miles in a Skiff, from Redstone to Cairo • Reuben Gold Thwaites
... What chymic filt'rings, I shall pass To where, O God, Thou lov'st to mass Thy rains upon the crags, and dim the sphere. So, when night's heart with keenest silence thrills, Take me, and weep me on the desolate hills." ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... the barren waste around them in dismay. The floor of the valley was strewn with even larger rocks and bowlders than those on the surface above, and looked utterly pathless and desolate. "What do we do ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... the heiress; fully convinced that he was now on the high road to success. What passed at this interview I will not pretend to say, for in fact I do not know. Something, however, I fear me, must have gone wrong, for he certainly sallied forth, after no very great interval, with an air quite desolate and chapfallen. Oh, these women! these women! Could that girl have been playing off any of her coquettish tricks? Was her encouragement of the poor pedagogue all a mere sham to secure her conquest of his rival? Heaven only knows, not I! Let it suffice to ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving
... from her with a most desolate sensation; and, glancing at such phrases at the top, as 'My ever dearest and own Dora,' 'My best beloved angel,' 'My blessed one for ever,' and the like, blushed deeply, and ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... did not commit. And I call God to witness that I am innocent of the accusation brought against me; and that the true cause of my unjust condemnation was, and is, a private pique and personal enmity.... Listen, therefore, to justice,—to the humble entreaties of an aged father,—a desolate wife,—unhappy children,—who exist in misery, and who with tears of anguish ...
— Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber - Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge • James Aitken Wylie
... remembering how some of her friends had pitied her because she must always be uplifting his mood. She had never wearied nor found it an irksome effort. A serious sad thought came to her; when the hour of the inevitable parting came she prayed it might be her lot to be left desolate ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... marriage, on condition that thou serve me for hire eight pilgrimages: and if thou fulfil ten years, it is in thine own breast; for I seek not to impose a hardship on thee.'[FN364] A certain man once said to one of his friends whom he had not met for many days, 'Thou hast made me desolate, for that I have not seen thee this long while.' Quoth the other, 'I have been distracted from thee by Ibn Shihab: dost thou know him?' Quoth his friend, 'Yes, he hath been my neighbour these thirty years, but I have never spoken to him.' He replied, 'Verily thou forgettest Allah in forgetting—thy ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... These apprehensions were increased by the fact that the Crimean Tartars soon again began to make hostile demonstrations, and it was feared that they were moving only in accordance with suggestions which had been sent to them from Poland and Sweden, and that thus a triple alliance was about to desolate the empire. The Tartars commenced their march. But Boris met them with such energy that they were ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... dwells on the plains of Thibet (A desolate region of snow) Has for centuries made it a nursery pet, And surely the Tartar ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... see it in the difference between your country and mine. This land's smooth and well trimmed; everything in it has grown up little by little; its mellow ripeness is its charm. Ours is grand or rugged or desolate, but it's never merely pretty. The same applies to our people; they're bubbling over with raw, optimistic vigor, their corners are not rubbed off. Some of them would jar on overcivilized people, but not, I think, on any one with understanding." ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... Muslims, still at the present time govern countries as vast as our Europe, and nations of equal importance. We must not, like Bossuet, "overlook the universe in a universal history," and subordinate humanity to a small population confined to a desolate region around the Dead Sea.[3119] Human history is a thing of natural growth like the rest; its direction is due to its own elements; no external force guides it, but the inward forces that create it; it is not tending ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... occur to you, Mrs. Evelyn, that the streams which fertilize as they flow do but desolate if their ...
— Queechy • Susan Warner
... remains of Brambanam as "stupendous monuments of the science and taste belonging to a long-forgotten age, crowded together in the former centre of Hindu faith." A rough country road leads from the little white railway station, perched on a desolate plain, to these far-famed temples. A brown village, shaded by the dark foliage of colossal kanari-trees, shows the usual fragility of structure in basket-work walls and roofs of plaited palm-leaves, but the humble dwellings, ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings
... resistance, for I admitted everything that could possibly be said, and lost all my spirit of independence in view of the impressive event that was coming. So I meekly took to the attic, and put up with the most forlorn and desolate quarters. One or two mornings after, I was aroused at an inhuman hour, and ordered in the most imperative tones to call in Dr. Lyman as quickly as possible, and haste after Mrs. Sweet. I hurried into my clothes ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... Christian powers and faith weakened by the treachery of Austria; her people degraded into robbers; a soldier's daughter, and keenly alive to the splendours of martial gallantry and glory; an orphan, too, and desolate—can it be wondered at if she surrendered, at once and for ever, to this generous and impassioned lover all the sympathies of her affectionate nature? She spoke not; but, as she leaned half-fainting on his ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... but in the exercise of his more proper and special calling of vaqueano, or guide. Ghastly and pallid, with his arm supported in a sling, he is on the way back to Halberger's estancia, to complete the ruffian's task assigned to him by the Dictator of Paraguay, and make more desolate the home he had already enough ruined. But for his mischance in the biscachera, the rescuers would have found it empty on their return, and instead of a lost daughter, it would have been ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... that evening an accomplished violinist and they had given me permission to remain up later than usual so that I might hear him. The first sweep of his bow which preluded I know not what slow and desolate movement, sounded to me like an invocation to those dark woodland paths in which, in the deeps of night, one feels that he is lost and abandoned; as the musician played I had a vision of Gaspard mistaking his way at the cross-roads because of the rain, and ...
— The Story of a Child • Pierre Loti
... her? Yes; one of the seven words spoken while he hung on the cross told of changeless love in his heart for her. Mary was a woman of more than fifty, "with years before her too many for remembering, too few for forgetting." The world would be desolate for her when her son was gone. So he made provision for her in the shelter of a love in which he knew she would be safe. As he saw her led away by the beloved disciple to his own home, part of the pain of dying was gone ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... we be a feeble folk who greet her, But old in grief, and very wise in tears; Say that we, being desolate, entreat her That she forget us not in after years; For we have seen the light, and it were grievous To dim that dawning ...
— Kipling Stories and Poems Every Child Should Know, Book II • Rudyard Kipling
... traversed with the fishermen coming from the Tweed to the camp. The aspect of this place, the aspect of the changes man had wrought in it, was of a nature to produce a great effect upon a lively and delicate imagination like that of Athos. Athos looked at nothing but these desolate spots; Monk looked at nothing but Athos—at Athos, who, with his eyes sometimes directed towards heaven, and sometimes towards the earth, sought, thought, ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... few gnarled trees that took off in a degree from the bleakness of its aspect. The house was of one story only, with a window on either side of the door, and no other appeared in sight; but a little smoke rising from the chimney seemed to promise a better reception than the desolate landscape and the girl's scanty dress ...
— From the Memoirs of a Minister of France • Stanley Weyman
... man dwelling therein, save a few priests only, and their wives, and their children, who are drawn to and fro in little carriages dragged by women. But the priest told me that during half the year the city was desolate, for that there came somewhat called "The Long," or "The Vac," and drave out the young priests. And he said that these did no other thing but row boats, and throw balls from one to the other, and this they were made to do, he said, that the young priests might learn to be ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... is the greatest secret of its popularity. In spite of glaring faults, and almost a cruel disregard of the family's welfare, Rip Van Winkle has the audience with him from the very beginning. His ineffably sad but quiet realization of his desolate condition when his wife turns him out into the storm, leaves scarcely a dry eye in the theatre. His living in others and not in himself makes him feel the changes of his absence all the more keenly. His return ...
— Great Fortunes, and How They Were Made • James D. McCabe, Jr.
... and garden were quite deserted as Trix approached Chorley Old Hall. The lawn was one great sheet of unbroken whiteness, flanked by frosted yew hedges, and very desolate. ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... she. "Had you been so bold as to make this proposal to Claire's father, he would have called his servants to show you the door. For the sake of our name I ought to do the same; but I cannot do so. I am old and desolate; I am poor; my grandchild's prospects disquiet me; that is my excuse. I cannot, however, consent to speak to Claire of this horrible misalliance. What I can promise you, and that is too much, is that I will not be ...
— The Widow Lerouge - The Lerouge Case • Emile Gaboriau
... free. Each calf was branded with the brand of the cow it was following. Sometimes in winter there was what we called line riding; that is, camps were established and the line riders traveled a definite beat across the desolate wastes of snow, to and fro from one camp to another, to prevent the cattle from drifting. But as a rule nothing was done to keep the cattle in any one place. In the spring there was a general round-up in each locality. Each outfit took part ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... that ghostly lithograph by Calame. It was a mere black spot on the white wall, but my inner vision scrutinized every detail of the picture. A wild, desolate, midnight heath, with a spectral oak-tree in the centre of the foreground. The wind blows fiercely, and the jagged branches, clothed scantily with ill-grown leaves, are swept to the left continually ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery - Riddle Stories • Various
... prayer meeting at the Southern Baptist Church, in whose exercises her Northern and Eastern neighbors, thinly disguised as "Baal" and "Astaroth," were generally overthrown and their temples made desolate. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... compared to this for the multitude of inhabitants; and the whole land is plain, fruitful, and stored with good things. Old Misraim is two league distant from New Misraim, or Cairo; but the old city is now desolate, having many ruins of walls and houses, and not a few remains of the granaries and storehouses, built by Joseph, are still to be seen. In the same place, there is an artificial pillar, built by art of magic, the like of which is not in all the land. On the outside of the city, there are ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 1 • Robert Kerr
... two danced madly, and as the wind freshened and came up from a new quarter, the sapless branches above rattled against one another like bones. The growing breeze seemed to clear the air and lighten it. He was passing the stile where a path led to old Mrs. Gibbon's desolate little cottage, in the middle of the fields, at some distance even from the lane, and he saw the light blue smoke of her chimney rise distinct above the gaunt greengage trees, against a pale band that was broadening along the horizon. As he passed the stile with his head ...
— The Hill of Dreams • Arthur Machen
... the Dudley mansion-house,—for it kept its ancient name in spite of the change in the line of descent. Its spacious apartments looked dreary and desolate; for here Dudley Venner and his daughter dwelt by themselves, with such servants only as their quiet mode of life required. He almost lived in his library, the western room on the ground-floor. Its window looked upon a small plat of green, in the midst of which was a single grave marked by a plain ...
— Elsie Venner • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... weather pretty fine so far, but the country sadly flooded; and, the lowlands being under water, the gaunt and leafless poplar trees are the most conspicuous objects of the landscape. Then for miles we travel along through a gloomy drizzling rain, the land looking most forlornly desolate. The arrival at Amiens, however, cheers us a little, and here we get a stretch and some refreshment. After leaving this place, always interesting for its beautiful Cathedral, the weather brightens up, and we reach Paris in good time ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... He divided the most determined of us—so many from each ship—into two bands and sent in two directions. We were to search, if necessary, through ten leagues. We went, but returned empty of news of clothed men. We found desolate forest, and behind that a vast, matted, low growth, impenetrable and extending far away. At last we determined that Felipe Garcia had seen white cranes. Unless ...
— 1492 • Mary Johnston
... the purchase of that shabby black may have cost the desolate mourner and her orphan children the price of many a necessary meal. Ah, this putting of a poor family into black, and all the funeral trappings for pallbearers and mourners, what a terrible affair it is! what anxious thoughts! what bitter ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... Tania sat with her small, pale face pressed against the dirty window pane, waiting for Madge to come and find her. She even hoped that a stranger might walk along close enough to the house for her to call for aid. But a dreary rain set in and all the countryside near Tania's prison house looked desolate. More than anything Tania feared the return of Philip Holt. Once he got hold of her again, she knew ...
— Madge Morton's Victory • Amy D.V. Chalmers
... for those five-hundred miles, and yet the Fizzer is expected because the Fizzer is due; and to a man who loves his harness no praise could be sweeter than that. Perhaps one of the brightest thoughts for the Fizzer as he "punches" along those desolate Downs is the knowledge that a little before eleven o'clock in the morning Anthony's will come out, and, standing with shaded eyes, will look through the quivering heat, away into the Downs for that tiny moving speck. When the Fizzer is late there, death will ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... desirable to bury the dead close to the habitation of the surviving members of the household. Some Japanese authorities declare that in the very earliest ages there was no burial, and that corpses were merely conveyed to desolate places, and there abandoned to wild creatures. Be this as it may, we have documentary evidence, of an unmistakable sort, concerning the early funeral-rites as they existed when the custom of burying had become established,—rites weird and strange, and having nothing in common with ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... I found on a gravel walk a poor little unfledged birdie, sitting calmly looking up into the air, as if he hoped that some help would come to him, some pitying hand and heart have compassion upon his desolate condition. ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... am so minded, being a maid forlorn and desolate, a poor wanderer destitute of kith, of kin, of hope, of love, and all that maketh life sweet. ...
— The Geste of Duke Jocelyn • Jeffery Farnol
... tangle at my feet. Something at the same moment rang sharply, like a falling coin. I stooped, and there, sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an iron shoe-buckle. The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy. I held it in my hand, and the thought of its owner appeared before me like the presence of an actual man. His weather-beaten face, his sailor's hands, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the capstan, the very foot that had once worn that buckle ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... difficult and stony path, winding through bleak wastes of gray rock, till we reached a lofty pass in the mountain range. The wind swept through the narrow gateway with a force that almost unhorsed us. From the other side, a sublime but most desolate landscape opened to my view. Opposite, at ten miles' distance, rose a lofty ridge of naked rock, overhung with clouds. The country between was a chaotic jumble of stony hills, separated by deep chasms, with ...
— The Lands of the Saracen - Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily, and Spain • Bayard Taylor
... superstitious as to think that the glorious Virgin would leave her seat at her Son's right hand to come and dwell in a desolate country, but she was desirous to see the hallowed spot of which she had so often heard, and further she was sure that if there were a means of escaping from a danger, the monks would certainly find it out. At last ...
— The Tales Of The Heptameron, Vol. I. (of V.) • Margaret, Queen Of Navarre
... clearness, the afternoon that Rose had come into her kitchen to say in a quiet, toneless voice, "They think, Anna, that they will have to take off his foot." She saw, as clearly as if her nursling were there in this whitewashed little cell, the look of desolate, dry-eyed anguish which had ...
— Good Old Anna • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... letter which I had brought from Rome, inquired for Craigen-puttock. It was a farm in Nithsdale, in the parish of Dunscore, sixteen miles distant. No public coach passed near it, so I took a private carriage from the inn. I found the house amid desolate heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart. Carlyle was a man from his youth, an author who did not need to hide from his readers, and as absolute a man of the world, unknown and exiled on that hill-farm, as if holding on his own terms what is best ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IX (of X) - America - I • Various
... the propriety of having remained in that desolate territory when, as spring approached, the shrunken cows died one after another in giving birth to the calves which had matured in their slowly perishing bodies, but he made no sign or ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... woods that lined the trail gave a desolate air to the bleak, white prospect. The whole of that northern world offered little promise to the traveler, little inducement to leave the warmth of ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... humanity to prevent its growth where it can grow without wrong to others, or to plant an inferior stock where the superior can take root and flourish.' 'By Africans,' said the missionaries; 'this is African soil; and if mission stations are established on its desolate tracts, people will be drawn to them from the far interior, the community will grow rapidly, those enlightened by Christianity here will desire in their turn to enlighten their friends beyond, and thus the Gospel teaching will spread until all Africa stretches out its hands to God.' Coupled ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick
... followed winding valleys, and at length limped into sight of a lonely camp at the foot of a crag. The light was fading when he reached it, though a lurid sunset glowed behind the black firs on the crest of a ridge, and the place had a desolate look. Most of the shacks were empty, there were rings of branches with a litter of old cans about them where tents had been pitched, but a few toiling figures were scattered about a strip of track. It was comforting to see them, but Prescott ...
— Prescott of Saskatchewan • Harold Bindloss
... of the living—is first a great surprise, and then a ridiculous comfort. It follows you about. When you miss it, you go back to look for it—to find the miserable object racing frantically to meet you. Lonely? The Poles are not more desolate. There is no place as forlorn as that where man once was established and busy, where the patient work of his hands is all round, but where silence has fallen like a secret so dense that you feel that if it were ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... thankful that it was only early summer the Fourth of July, the second anniversary of the Declaration of Independence-and that the foliage was heavy and green on the slopes of the mountain. In this mass of greenery the desolate column was now completely hidden from any observer in the valley, and he believed that other crowds of fugitives would be hidden in the same manner. He felt sure that no living human being would be left in the valley, that it would ...
— The Scouts of the Valley • Joseph A. Altsheler
... with the Arctic ice, offers for his redemption a series of pictures of self-sacrifice, tenderness, honor, courage, and piety. No hope of profit drew the seamen of all maritime nations into the dismal and desolate ice-floes that guard the frozen North. No lust for gold impelled them to brave the darkness, the cold, and the terrifying silence of the six-months Arctic night. The men who have—thus far unsuccessfully—fought with ice-bound nature for access to the Pole, were impelled ...
— American Merchant Ships and Sailors • Willis J. Abbot
... his postman's knock on the shut oak door, heard it reverberate through the silent house, saw the grim elder man and his gristly hand, gave up the green letter from China, and strode away. There is a clump of trees growing all alone in the wold, desolate, mournful, by day, by night full of ill omen, far off from all other trees as wold-hut from other houses. Near it stands wold-hut. Not today did Amuel stride briskly on with all the new winds of autumn ...
— Tales of Three Hemispheres • Lord Dunsany
... vast sums to restore this edifice; which will probably be soon as desolate as the Castle of Heidelberg, with which, however, it could never stand a comparison, either in point of situation or architecture. There are some handsome walks near the palace, which extend along ...
— A tour through some parts of France, Switzerland, Savoy, Germany and Belgium • Richard Boyle Bernard
... would never be realised. He was free once more. Free! He need give up none of his projects, and life still was in his hands for him to do what he liked with. He felt no exhilaration, but only dismay. His heart sank. The future stretched out before him in desolate emptiness. It was as though he had sailed for many years over a great waste of waters, with peril and privation, and at last had come upon a fair haven, but as he was about to enter, some contrary wind had arisen and drove him out again into ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... 1836; the performances are vaudevilles, little melodrama, and farces. The admission is from 6d. to 2s. 6d. It contains 1,226 places. The Place de la Bastille is now before us, and still may be seen the desolate remains of the great plaster cast of the enormous elephant, intended by Napoleon to have been placed on this spot, which is now decorated with what is called the Column of July. The capital is said to be the largest piece of bronze ever cast, the height is 163 feet, and it is surmounted by an ...
— How to Enjoy Paris in 1842 • F. Herve
... a long time it seemed as if there was not, and I was ready to say, "Anything will do," when we cautiously entered another door; a light was struck, and though the place was deplorable enough, it did not look so desolate, and it had evidently lately been occupied, for there was a half-burned candle standing on a rough stool, and to this candle Brace applied ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... shall all those prophecies hold true, except they be coincident with Rev. xvii. 16, 17, and that time is yet to come, when God shall put it in the hearts of kings to "hate the whore (of Rome), and they shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire"? It is foretold that God shall do this great and good work even by those kings who have ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... right-hand side of the track to Melbourne. We all knew it was there, but it had extremely few visitors, owing to its unapproachable surrounding of bushes, and its bad repute from a countless guard of huge and ferocious mosquitos. Without outlet for its extra-briny waters, and in its desolate solitude, it might have aspired to be a sort of tiny Dead Sea. With the advance of Sandridge this evil-omened southern Avernus came in for better consideration, and by 1854, with a cutting into the Bay, it had become a ready-made ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... country like England, with six or eight shillings a week, and no cow, no pig, no fruit for the market, no house, garden, or field of their own; but, on the contrary, constant anxiety, the fear of a master on whom they are constantly dependent, and the desolate prospect of ending their days in ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... was not much inferior,[*] besides that they were more hardened against such extremities, it was but a melancholy reflection, that the two nations, while they continued their furious animosities, should make desolate that fertile island, which might serve to the subsistence ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... end of his journey, Malcolm came upon a bare moorland waste, on the long ascent of a low hill,—very desolate, with not a tree or house within sight for two miles. A ditch, half full of dark water, bordered each side of the road, which went straight as a rod through a black peat moss lying cheerless and dreary on all sides—hardly less so where the sun gleamed from the surface of some stagnant pool filling ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... hunted in the woods my dear Mus-kin-gum would stand and wave to me, tomorrow night 'neath the light of the moon, with my son's hand in mine—together he and I will leap from that rock into the valley below,—the once lovely valley now so desolate. Do not refuse me,' she cried, as many protested suggesting others not so young. 'No, I will gladly make the sacrifice for my dear ...
— How Ethel Hollister Became a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson
... perished in the icy waters? No, my friend, no; and if there had been no wine served at your board that night, three human lives which have, alas! been hidden from us by death's eclipse would be shedding light and warmth upon many hearts now sorrowful and desolate. Three human lives, and a fourth just going out. There is responsibility, and neither you nor I can escape it, Mr. Birtwell, if through indifference or design we permit ourselves to become the instruments ...
— Danger - or Wounded in the House of a Friend • T. S. Arthur
... heart, stopped since my mother's death, burst out in fresh and terrible torrents, and I could have fallen at her feet and worshiped her. They were singing the second act, but I did not hear the music. Slowly the desolate loneliness of my position became clear to me. I knew that I could not speak, but I would have given a part of my life to touch her hand with mine and call her "sister." I sat through the opera until I could stand it no longer. I felt that I was suffocating. Valentine's love seemed like ...
— The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man • James Weldon Johnson
... blotted out. Fifty-eight myriads of men were slaughtered in the course of the invasions and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine and disease and fire was past all investigating. Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate, an event of which the people had had indications even before the war. The tomb of Solomon, which these men regarded as one of their sacred objects, fell to pieces of itself and collapsed and many wolves and hyenas rushed howling ...
— Dio's Rome, Volume V., Books 61-76 (A.D. 54-211) • Cassius Dio
... the little Swedish town of Carlscrona, and the desolate island Hveen, on which Tycho de Brahe passed the greater portion of his life, occupied with stellar observations and calculations. Now came a somewhat dangerous part, and one which called into action all the careful ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... for hundreds of them were at the point of starvation. The police courts were constantly crowded, and often overflowed and filled the morgue. Misery, disappointment, want, and hunger made men commit crimes the very thought of which would have caused them to shudder a year ago. One day a desolate looking striker was warming his feet in a cheap saloon when a well-dressed stranger came and sat near him and asked the ...
— Snow on the Headlight - A Story of the Great Burlington Strike • Cy Warman
... priests," said the young Jewess. "We had sons of Aaron, and a temple, and an altar, and a holy oracle, whereby the Blessed One made known His will in all matters of doubt and perplexity to His people. But where are they now? The mountains of Zion are desolate, and the foxes walk upon them. The light has died out of the sacred gems, even if they themselves were to be found. We have walked contrary to Him,— ah! where is the unerring prophet that shall tell us how we did it?—and He walks contrary to us, and is punishing us seven times for our sins. We ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt
... two, she thought. In the dusky depths of the great chancel gleamed the white marble of the beautiful altar, guarded by St. Peter with his keys and St. Paul with his naked two-edged sword; and above the altar was the dead Christ on Calvary, with His desolate mother and the despairing Magdalene and ...
— A Romance Of Tompkins Square - 1891 • Thomas A. Janvier
... came driving by. The huge gates of the prison opened slowly and swallowed it. It was the van containing the meat for the prisoners. The child followed it with a desolate expression. ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... forego pride when I look on thee, and think that thou lovest me. Sweet Prince, tell me again of thy palace by the Lake of Como; it is so pleasant to hear of thy splendors since thou didst swear to me that they would be desolate without Pauline; and when thou describest them, it is with a mocking lip and a noble scorn, as if custom had ...
— The Lady of Lyons - or Love and Pride • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... expecting to see his companions. He saw no one. He was absolutely alone in that desolate brooding land. Something dreadful had happened! Was he the only one to be safely transported from the third dimension? Had some horrible accident occurred? ...
— Hellhounds of the Cosmos • Clifford Donald Simak
... of his life came to him in the death of his dearly loved mother in 1818. The boy mourned for her as few children mourn even for the most loving parent. Day after day he went from the home made desolate by her death to weep on her ...
— Eclectic School Readings: Stories from Life • Orison Swett Marden
... "We are all desolate that you cannot go with us, Surigny," declared Dalny, also holding out his hand. Dan, too, shook hands with Surigny. Then the international plotter led the two Americans to ...
— Dave Darrin on Mediterranean Service - or, With Dan Dalzell on European Duty • H. Irving Hancock
... gave me leave Sir, will it pass for a seizable Story in future Ages. That Lewis XIV should make War in order to Restore James II and keep above 40000 Men in constant Pay, and never employ any of them that way. Twenty thousand Horse would have laid the Three Kingdoms desolate in a few Weeks, but was there so much as one single Dragoon employ'd that way? Was not King James forced to melt his Canon and debase the Coin with it, whilst Lewis XIV could send vast Remittances to Constantinople to Support the Turk? Were not 300000 ...
— Memoirs of Major Alexander Ramkins (1718) • Daniel Defoe
... a picture too—not the less vivid because only her own imagination had painted it. Her deep, dreamy eyes passed over the landscape actually before them without catching one of its details: they were looking on a desolate stony plain, cracked and calcined by a fierce Indian sun—a few plumy palms in the background, and the rocky bed of a river half dried up—in the foreground a crowd of wild barbaric soldiery, with savage, swarthy features, bareheaded or white-turbaned; mingled with these were horsemen ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... sack-cloth, strewn with ashes, Seated on a desolate throne 'Mid the spectral walls of stately domes And the skeletons of regal homes, Francisco weeps while westward thrashes Through the wrecks of mansions, stricken prone By the rock of earth and sweep of flame Which, unheralded and unbidden, came In the greatness ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... Sonne, Alonso They haue bereft; and doe pronounce by me Lingring perdition (worse then any death Can be at once) shall step, by step attend You, and your wayes, whose wraths to guard you from, Which here, in this most desolate Isle, else fals Vpon your heads, is nothing but hearts-sorrow, And a ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... world than to see it in hell fire, for he must see it there or here: now if he sees it here, this is the place of prayer; here is the preaching of the word, which is God's ordinance, to beget faith. Besides, here God applieth promises of mercy to the desolate, and Christ also hath protested that he that cometh to him he 'will in no wise cast ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... been buried, and long lines of kings, wrapping stately robes about them, have lain down to die. Thrones have been overturned, armies and navies have been mustered and scattered, land and sea have been peopled and made desolate, as the thronging tribes and races have lived their little life and passed away. Babylon and Assyria, India and Arabia, Egypt and Persia, Rome and Greece,—each of these has had its lands and conquests, its song and story, its wars and tumults, its wrath ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... rustic seat, and a Latin motto on a marble slab. The spring at once reminded me of a greater body of water—a river, at some little distance farther on, which ran between the trees on one side, and the desolate open country on the other. Ascending from the glade, I found myself in one of the narrow woodland paths, familiar to me ...
— The Guilty River • Wilkie Collins
... the true spirit of prophecy in these words? Solomon has passed away, and all his magnificence; the pleasant land is to this day desolate under the power of the Turk; but the LORD has loved Israel for ever, and soon a King shall reign in Mount Zion "before His ancients gloriously." But meanwhile this KING, all unseen to human sense, is reigning, and to those who come to Him in no sordid spirit, but ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... Rollant great loss of his men sees, His companion Olivier calls, and speaks: "Sir and comrade, in God's Name, That you keeps, Such good vassals you see lie here in heaps; For France the Douce, fair country, may we weep, Of such barons long desolate she'll be. Ah! King and friend, wherefore are you not here? How, Oliver, brother, can we achieve? And by what means our news to him repeat?" Says Oliver: "I know not how to seek; Rather I'ld die than shame come of this ...
— The Song of Roland • Anonymous
... stood was isolated by deep ravines from the other hills of desolate gray and scanty green. Beyond the western range lay the Valley of Aijalon, and beyond that the rich Plain of Sharon with iridescent hues of green and blue and silver, and beyond that the yellow line of the sand-dunes broken by the white spot of Jaffa, and beyond that the azure breadth of ...
— Out-of-Doors in the Holy Land - Impressions of Travel in Body and Spirit • Henry Van Dyke
... scene, that word, is a condensed volume of consolation for yearning and desolate hearts. What a majesty in those tears! He had just been discoursing on Himself as the Resurrection and the Life—the next moment He is a Weeping Man by a human grave, melted in anguished sorrow at ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... the pedestrians reached, after an hour's walk since parting with Rufus, was a desolate looking spot. Some fallow fields were covered with thistles, docks, fire-weed and stately mulleins, with, here and there, an evening primrose, one or two of which the lawyer inserted in his flower-press. ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... No; that would not make me unhappy. It would make me very happy, Patty, to see you married to a man you would love;—very, very happy; though my days would be desolate without you.' ...
— Victorian Short Stories • Various
... husband loves me no longer!" she cried in more than the bitterness of death. "He loves that false siren in place of me, his true wife. He gives her all the tender words, all the warm caresses he used to lavish on me. His heart is won from me. I am desolate! I am desolate, and I shall die! I shall die! But oh, how much I must suffer before I can die, for I am so strong to suffer! Ah, how I wish I might die at once, or that suicide were ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... said. "I arrived in this desolate, God-forsaken spot just ten days ago. Until now I've hunted and fished every day, but I didn't get anything but a cold. It was very good, of its kind—I couldn't speak above a whisper ...
— Lavender and Old Lace • Myrtle Reed
... Prince was traversing the Long Island in poverty and danger, a desolate wanderer wanting the common necessaries of life, but still patient and cheerful ever hoping once more to assemble his faithful Highlanders,—living at one time four days in a desert island, then putting to sea ...
— Memoirs of the Jacobites of 1715 and 1745 - Volume III. • Mrs. Thomson
... its purified doctrine had been preached, and its reasonable worship offered, under the same roofs that had protected priest and people in the days of Romanist error. Is the cause of pure and undefiled religion stronger in the land because Melrose and Crossraguel and Pluscarden are desolate; St. Andrews a roofless ruin; Iona as yet open to the Atlantic winds? Is the voice of praise and prayer sweeter in the North because Mortlach is effaced and Fortrose shattered, and the bells are silent which men on the mainland ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... offered, Queen Elizabeth herself, moved by hope of treasure, coming to his help with a hundred and eighty-ton craft, the "Ayde," to which two smaller vessels were added. These being provisioned and manned, the bold navigator, with "a merrie wind" in his sails, set out again for the desolate north. ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of Tyre were already light, but empty: as though they had got up early to meet some one who had not arrived. I sped through them like a seagull that has the harbour to itself, and was not long in reaching the theatre. How desolate the playbills looked that had been so companionable but two or three hours before. And there was her photograph! Surely it was an omen. Ah, my angel! See, I am bringing you my heart in a song 'All my heart ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... did! Why didn't father know the two young men who sat last night at the next table in the dining room? Even those two would have done just now. Clearly they had been mad to know her too, for they were likewise feeling desolate. Perhaps mother can get father to scrape up an acquaintance with them. But alas, before this plan can be set in motion, the two young men have formed their own conclusions as to what Palm Beach is like when you do not ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... talkers had said—but of this he had been already aware, for the chief Nondwana and his son were both well known to him. That would give him a little over six weeks. Escape? Nothing short of a miracle could effect that, he told himself, remembering the immense tract of desolate country surrounding the fastnesses of the Ba-gcatya, and the ferocious cannibal hordes which lay beyond these, and who indeed would wreak a vengeance of the most barbarous kind upon their old enemy and scourge, the slaver-chief, did they find him alone, and to that extent no longer formidable, ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford
... I want to burst out upon her and say, 'You silly, tiresome woman! you have had your dream of love and your husband; you have still four dear children; you have a home, plenty of money, hosts of friends, besides youth and good looks; while I am—oh, how desolate!'" ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... by: but, however excited and fierce a ewe may be, she never offers any resistance to mankind, being perfectly and meekly passive to them. The weather grew fine and warm, and the dead lamb soon decayed, which the body of a dead lamb does particularly soon: but still this affectionate and desolate creature kept hanging over the poor remains with an attachment that seemed to be nourished by hopelessness. It often drew the tears from my eyes to see her hanging with such fondness over a few bones, mixed with a ...
— Stories about the Instinct of Animals, Their Characters, and Habits • Thomas Bingley
... to anchor and refitted; and on the 19th of August we sailed from this uninhabited extremity of the world, where the inhospitable climate affords neither food nor shelter, and not a tree or shrub of any kind grows amongst its barren rocks; but all is one desolate and expanded waste of ice, which even the constant beams of the sun for six months in the year cannot penetrate or dissolve. The sun now being on the decline the days shortened as we sailed to the southward; and, on the 28th, in latitude 73, it was dark by ten ...
— The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African - Written By Himself • Olaudah Equiano
... faithful old servant Katoda came out, and bowing himself to the ground before his master, poured out the long tale of wrong, telling him all that had happened, and how it was that he found his daughter in such a wild and desolate spot with only two old servants to take care ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki
... between them and us. Not one shot broke the stillness of the night. As dawn broke I beheld the flat, gray waters of the Sound stretching away to the eastward, and there was the boat at the desolate wharf beside the warehouse, her steam rising white ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... our iniquities is justice far from us: we wait for light, but behold obscurity; for brightness, but we walk in darkness. We grope for the wall like the blind; we stumble at noon day as in the night: we are in desolate ...
— Pascal's Pensees • Blaise Pascal
... mother away at last; and then for a moment Lilias' strength and courage forsook her. The cry of her desolate heart ...
— The Orphans of Glen Elder • Margaret Murray Robertson
... main agent in the conversion of St. Augustine. Hilarion (a remarkable personage, whose history will be told hereafter) carried their report and their example likewise into Palestine; and from that time Judaea, desolate and seemingly accursed by the sin of the Jewish people, became once more the Holy Land; the place of pilgrimage; whose ruins, whose very soil, were kept sacred by hermits, the guardians of ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... passing through the canal, the search-light of the 'Fulvia' sweeping the path ahead of it and glorifying everything it touched. Mud barges were fairy palaces; Arab punts beautiful gondolas; the ragged Egyptians on the banks became picturesque; and the desolate country behind them had a wide vestibule of splendour. I stood for half an hour watching this scene, then I went below to Roscoe's cabin and relieved the bookmaker. The sick man was sleeping from ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... its winter-day journey, did it shine into any cabin in an Irish bog more desolate than these Cherry Street "homes"? An army of thousands, whose one bright and wholesome memory, only tradition of home, is that poverty-stricken cabin in the desolate bog, are herded in such barracks to-day in New York. Potatoes they have; yes, ...
— Children of the Tenements • Jacob A. Riis
... evil spirit. The crashing of a falling tree in the forest is the struggle of mighty giants. The rumbling of thunder, the flash of lightning, the tempest's blast, and all the other phenomena of nature are the operations of unseen agencies. The darkness is peopled with hosts of spirits. On the desolate rocks, in the untrodden jungle, on the dark mountain tops, in gloomy caves, by mad torrents, in deep pools, dwell invisible powers whose enmity he must avoid or whose good will he must court, or whose anger ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... solitary contadini,—wherever the influence and sentiment of the Roman Campagna is felt. The moment we get into Tuscany, on the one side, or over into Naples, on the other, it begins to be lost. It was only the other day, at nightfall, that I was sauntering out on the desolate Campagna towards Civita Vecchia. The shadows were deepening and the mists beginning to creep whitely along the deep hollows. Everything was dreary and melancholy enough. As I paused to listen to the solitude, I ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... proud, cold, selfish man, whose will had seldom been crossed, and who found himself in a tight place from which he could not wholly extricate himself. He was sorry for Eudora, for he guessed how desolate she would be when he was gone, and there was nothing left but that home in the clearing, with old granny and Mandy Ann. He had not seen Jake, of whom Eudora now spoke, saying, "Our house never seemed so poor to me till I seen you in it. It will be better when Jake comes, ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... as many of one of my brother's children. I found no provision had been made for me, they concluding I had been long since dead; so that I was but in a very slender station. Indeed the Captain did me a great kindness, by his report to the owners, how I had delivered their ship on the Desolate Island, upon which they made me a present of 200L. sterling. I next went to Lisbon, taking my man Friday with me, and there arriving in April, I met the Portuguese Captain who had taken me on board on the African coast; but, being ancient, he had left off the sea, and resigned all his ...
— The Life and Most Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of - York, Mariner (1801) • Daniel Defoe
... next day I will tell you nothing, for the best of all reasons, that I remember no more than that we continued through desolate and desert scenes, fiery hot and deadly weary. But some time after I had fallen asleep that night, I was awakened by one of my companions. It was in vain that I resisted. A fire of enthusiasm and whisky burned in his eyes; and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... closing in upon a stormy March day; rain and sleet falling fast while a blustering northeast wind sent them sweeping across the desolate-looking fields and gardens, and over the wet road where a hack was lumbering along, drawn by two weary-looking steeds; its solitary passenger sighing and groaning with impatience over its slow progress and her ...
— Elsie at Home • Martha Finley
... puzzled. I have read Phillips' War Speech, marked the tenor and spirit of the Liberator, seen the stars and stripes paraded in the Standard, perused James Freeman Clarke's sermon, and I feel more desolate and solitary than ever. Mrs. Stanton, too, is for War for the Union, and I say to myself: "How will Susan Anthony and Parker Pillsbury and all the other old comrades be affected by these signs of ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... bad Indians go to an island in the Bitter Waters, an island naked and barren and desolate, covered only with brine-spattered stone, swept with cold winds and the biting sea-spray. Here they live always, breaking stone upon one another, with no food but the broken stones and no drink but the salt ...
— Myths and Legends of California and the Old Southwest • Katharine Berry Judson
... widely distributed. Although the natives have doubtless long been subject to the disease caused by this parasite, the recent influx of whites to these regions and the consequent movements of the natives have caused a great spread of the disease so that whole regions are now made desolate, the inhabitants dying or fleeing to ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... ill-treat children. It is only women, who adore them, that kill them and ill-use them accordingly. She will be my little benefactress, God bless her! I may love her more than I ought, being yours, for my home is desolate without her; but that is the only fault you shall ever find with me. There is my hand ...
— A Perilous Secret • Charles Reade
... replaced by snow. In truth, the climate of the Alps was colder at that period than now, and snow lay on the higher passes all through the year. The soldiers were disheartened by cold and fatigue. The scene around them was desolate and dreary. New perils awaited their onward course. But no such feeling entered Hannibal's courageous soul. Fired by hope and ambition, he sought to plant new courage in the ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... comes: Again—and yet again! on every gale, America! from thy great battle field! Our hearts are hushed, and desolate our homes— Our lids are heavy, and our cheeks are pale— While thus we yield Our loved ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... spires that rose as high as 200 feet; farther off, a succession of steeply cut cliffs sporting a grayish tint, huge mirrors that reflected the sparse rays of a sun half drowned in mist. Beyond, a stark silence reigned in this desolate natural setting, a silence barely broken by the flapping wings of petrels or puffins. By this point everything ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... be so," said the girl, with tremulous anxiety, "what universal ruin! What is there on earth that could fill its place? If the empire falls into the power of the barbarians, Rome will be made desolate, and all the provinces laid waste which thrive under ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... by river or sea-shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn? And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return. ...
— A Day with Keats • May (Clarissa Gillington) Byron
... birthplace of the painter Millet. It is at the tip of Cape La Hague, which juts abruptly from the French coast into the English channel. The cape is a steep headland bristling with granite rocks and needles, and very desolate seen from the sea. Inland it is pleasant and fruitful, with apple orchards ...
— Jean Francois Millet • Estelle M. Hurll
... away one by one. One hour, two hours, I remain alone. I pace the room in one direction and another, then I look, and shiver. My aunt is no more. There is only left of her something indistinct, struck down, of subterranean color, and her place is desolate. Now, close to her, I am alone! Alone—magnified by my affliction, master of my future, disturbed and numbed by the newness of the things now beginning. At last the window grows pale, the ceiling turns gray, and the candle-flames wink in the ...
— Light • Henri Barbusse
... for she was staring with wide eyes out at the desolate welter of water and cloud, and thinking of home: the home that was, that used to be till such a little while ago, the home that now seemed to have been so amazingly, so unbelievably beautiful and blest, with its daily life of love and laughter and of easy confidence that to-morrow was ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... Valois liked Suzanne immensely, but did not allow himself to be caught in this trap. Suzanne went to Paris and speedily became a fashionable courtesan. Shortly thereafter she reappeared at Alencon for a visit to attend Athanase Granson's funeral. She mourned with the desolate mother, saying to her on leaving: "I loved him!" At the same time she ridiculed the marriage of Mlle. Cormon with M. du Bousquier, thus avenging the deceased and Chevalier de Valois. [Jealousies of a Country Town.] Under the name of Mme. du Val-Noble ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... sacrifice for the darling she has brought into the world. She shines, a star in the midnight sky, giving comfort to the sorrowing heart; she, who has languished in grief, pours balm into the wounded souls of the desolate and bereaved, and gives health and refreshment to the suffering. When nature pines in winter cold or in summer drought and lacks power to revive, when the sun is darkened, when lies and evil instincts alienate the soul from its pure first cause, then ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... resistance which that island made to English rule. By the use of military power, backed up by an Act of Parliament, his generals forced the people to leave their houses and emigrate to the province of Connaught on the west coast. Part of that district was so barren and desolate that it was said, "it had not water enough to drown a man, trees enough to hang him, or earth enough to bury him." Thousands were compelled to go into this dreary exile, and hundreds of families who refused were shipped to the West Indies and sold to the planters as slaves for a term of years,—a ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... him no more; she defied him; and yet he did not kill her. She lay weeping, moaning, at intervals, repeating that desolate phrase, "What's the ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... large majestic birds. One is the courlan, called "crazy widow" from its mourning plumage and long melancholy screams, which on still evenings may be heard a league away. Another is the graceful variegated ypicaha, fond of social gatherings, where the birds perform a dance and make the desolate marshes resound with their insane humanlike voices. A smaller kind, Porphyriops melanops, has a night-cry like a burst of shrill hysterical laughter, which has won for it the name of "witch;" while another, Rallus rythyrhynchus, is called "little donkey" from its ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... side of the clearing to the other, were on their way toward the headquarters of the gang. And Dick, leading them, though his head was reeling, felt as if his own reason was slipping from him. Had he only dreamed all this? Was it possible that the headquarters of the Invisible Emperor existed on this desolate prairie? If it was true, why had they suddenly become silent, inert? Why had they not long ago wiped out these few Marines? And the gale—was it now sweeping northward on its ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, October, 1930 • Various
... looked in as he usually did, since Mr. Audley, sleeping out of the house, never came in till after early church. The nurse, who still slept in the room, was gone to dress; there was only a flickering night-light, and the room looked very desolate and forlorn, still more so the voice that called out to him, 'Felix! ...
— The Pillars of the House, V1 • Charlotte M. Yonge
... which when Deucalion beheld to be empty, and how the desolate Earth kept a profound silence, he thus addressed Pyrrha, with tears bursting forth:—"O sister, O wife, O thou, the only woman surviving, whom a common origin,[63] and a kindred descent, and afterwards the marriage tie has united to me, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... It was a desolate part, with nothing but the poorest huts for shelter, dirty and verminous, so that the discomforts of the land were almost equal to the perils of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 14th, 1920 • Various
... of the sky strange gigantic enemies, armed with mysterious weapons, and began to slay and burn and make desolate. Our forefathers could not withstand them. They seemed like demons, who had been sent from the abodes of ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... was empty, and no man dwelling therein, save a few priests only, and their wives, and their children, who are drawn to and fro in little carriages dragged by women. But the priest told me that during half the year the city was desolate, for that there came somewhat called "The Long," or "The Vac," and drave out the young priests. And he said that these did no other thing but row boats, and throw balls from one to the other, and this they were made to do, he said, that the young priests might learn to be humble, for they are the ...
— Letters to Dead Authors • Andrew Lang
... one another—all at last dying a miserable death. Not only did the customary enemies of the voles arrive on the scene: Nature called to her great task a number of unexpected destroyers—sea-gulls from the distant coast, a kite from a wooded island on a desolate, far-off mere, and a buzzard from a rocky fastness, rarely visited save by keepers and shepherds, near the up-country lakes. Food had gradually become scarce even for the few hundred voles that yet remained. No longer were they to be seen at play together, ...
— Creatures of the Night - A Book of Wild Life in Western Britain • Alfred W. Rees
... early workmen trooping to their destinations, added to his troubles as day brightened. People stared at him in surprise as he went by with scared look and soaked hat and muddy clothes. For a long while he sought refuge against palings and among scaffoldings, his desolate brain haunted by the single remaining thought ...
— Nana, The Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille • Emile Zola
... Death, no appeal to thy frozen sympathies? Canst thou suffer thy better nature to resume its deep and trance-like sleep again, and rob that poor widowed mother of her only hope on earth, that bright, glad creature, who carries sunshine to her otherwise desolate home, but to pinion her free and fetterless spirit beneath the iron rule and despotic sway ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 3 September 1848 • Various
... not only social and professional disgrace, but financial ruin which confronted the broken officer as he bade good-bye to his regiment at its desolate quarters in California, after fifteen years of service to the army. He was absolutely without money and, at the age of thirty-two, it was by no means easy for him to begin life all over again and earn his own living at a new calling. His fellow ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... into his grandmother's parlour, shutting the door behind him. He followed, not doubting that the man must have a right to go there, but questioning very much his right to shut him out. When he reached the door, however, he found it bolted; and outside he had to stay all alone, in the desolate remainder of the house, till Betty ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... charm Stiffens the sinews of the Nation's arm. What nerves its hands to strike a deadlier blow And hurl its legions on the rebel foe? Lo! for each town new rising o'er our State See the foe's hamlet waste and desolate, While each new factory lifts its chimney tall, Like a fresh mortar trained ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... in the morning, and to being forced to mingle with the commonest Irish girls. She was in every respect a lady, and had been accustomed to have a servant at her command, even in the midst of the typhus-fever in the desolate districts of Silesia; while here she was not even treated with humanity. This soon grew unbearable; and she returned to us on the 16th of October, after having been only ten days in the institution. So eager ...
— A Practical Illustration of Woman's Right to Labor - A Letter from Marie E. Zakrzewska, M.D. Late of Berlin, Prussia • Marie E. Zakrzewska
... to the preservation and order of its own system, just at those precise periods of time when their effects, whether salutary or hurtful to many, may serve as instruments for the government of the moral world: for example, that a foreign enemy, amidst our intestine broils, should desolate all the flourishing works of rural industry,—that warring elements, in the suited order of natural government, should depopulate and tear in pieces a highly-viced city, just in those very moments when moral government required a warning and example to be held out to a careless ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... beautiful, but almost entirely desolate. All was ghastly in the raw, hard gleams of moonlight coming fitfully through the masses of flying cloud. The wind was rising, and the air was damp and cold. I looked round the room instinctively, and noticed that the fire was laid ready for lighting, and that there were small-cut logs of ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker
... scintillating gray, and seemed ground to powder beneath our feet. At our right, along a long and irregular course, roared a tumultuous torrent. And we staggered along under this heat, in this light, in this burning, arid, desolate valley cut by this torrent of turbulent water which seemed to be ever hurrying onward, without fertilizing the rocks, lost in this furnace which greedily drank it up without being saturated or refreshed ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... believing that it might be postponed till her marriage would make all things easy. Her future mode of living had often been discussed between her and her lover, and she had been candid enough in explaining to him that she could not leave her father desolate. He had always replied that his wife's father should want for nothing, and she had been delighted to think that she could with joy accept that from her husband which nothing would induce her to accept from her lover. This thought had sufficed to comfort her, as the evil ...
— Nina Balatka • Anthony Trollope
... to our misfortunes, it was rumoured that the various Royalist armies, having united, were marching to attack us; so for days together we were kept on the alert, riding for hours over the desolate country and ...
— At the Point of the Sword • Herbert Hayens
... that one dark evening in the month of June I was belated in the Bernese Oberland. Dusk overtook me toiling along the great Chamounix Road, and in the heart of a most desolate gorge, whose towering snow-flung walls seemed—as the day sucked inwards to a point secret as a leech's mouth—to close about me like a monstrous amphitheatre of ghosts. The rutted road, dipping and climbing toilfully against ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... the couch with out-stretched arms, where she stood, such a slender and beautiful mother, looking down; and her silken veils filled the air with a gentle whispering as she moved to his head—such a desolate mother,—looking down at the little crimson mark which showed like a rose above ...
— The Hawk of Egypt • Joan Conquest
... stops?" she asked, almost breathlessly. "When the stamps pound no more, and the power is withdrawn? It is empty and desolate—and frightening?" ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... his heart; he presses her closely to his breast. Leaning on each other, they grope cautiously along through the dark, desolate chamber to the divan at the upper end, and there, both locked in a happy embrace, they ...
— Henry VIII And His Court • Louise Muhlbach
... in the strike. When Daylight, with his heavy outfit of flour, arrived at the mouth of the Klondike, he found the big flat as desolate and tenantless as ever. Down close by the river, Chief Isaac and his Indians were camped beside the frames on which they were drying salmon. Several old-timers were also in camp there. Having finished their summer work on Ten Mile Creek, they had come down the ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... not see his face, and that troubled her. She bore him no ill-will. She was not discontented with him, but with herself. Robert went straight on, without turning his head, far, and still farther, until he was only a black point in the desolate wood. She thought that perhaps she had been capricious and harsh in leaving him without a word of farewell, without even a letter. He was her lover and her only friend. She never had had another. "I do not wish him to be unfortunate because ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... whose feeling for him was more one of simple disgust than disdain—oppressed him ... and parting with David could not have caused him much regret. I, of course, was utterly crushed by the separation; I was utterly desolate at first and lost all support in life and all ...
— Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... What a desolate place would be a world without a flower! It would be a face without a smile—a feast without a welcome Are not flowers the stars of the earth? and are not the stars we see at night ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... quiet; there was no sound of any surf; the moon shone clear, and I thought in my heart I had never seen a place so desert and desolate. But it was dry land; and when at last it grew so shallow that I could leave the yard and wade ashore upon my feet, I cannot tell if I was more tired or more grateful. Both at least, I was; tired as I never was before that night; ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 6 • Charles H. Sylvester
... - I am sitting on the top of the cars with a mill party from Missouri going west for his health. Desolate flat prairie upon all hands. Here and there a herd of cattle, a yellow butterfly or two; a patch of wild sunflowers; a wooden house or two; then a wooden church alone in miles of waste; then a windmill to ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... wandering, such of the survivors as had courage enough returned to the desolate scene of their former prosperity; but the progress of resettlement was slow and painful. Fortifications were built, old and young trained for soldiers, watch and ward kept night and day, scouts ranged the surrounding forests, and all were constantly on the alert. All hunting or fishing, ...
— The New England Magazine Volume 1, No. 3, March, 1886 - Bay State Monthly Volume 4, No. 3, March, 1886 • Various
... end of July they have managed to press on out of the track of all the whaling vessels, and make for Lancaster Sound, westward. The desolate coast of North Devon is skirted, and subsequently Beachey Island is reached. From hence they move northward again, and to Wellington Channel, only to be turned back ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... a whitish, desolate sky, stretched the white, empty leagues of snow, unbroken by rock or tree or hill, to the straight, menacing horizon. Green-black, and splotched with snow that clung here and there upon their branches, along the southward limits ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
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