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More "Desolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... trace huge forests, and unharboured heaths, Infamous hills, and sandy perilous wilds; Where, through the sacred rays of chastity, No savage fierce, bandite, or mountaineer, Will dare to soil her virgin purity. Yea, there where very desolation dwells, By grots and caverns shagged with horrid shades, She may pass on with unblenched majesty, 430 Be it not done in pride, or in presumption. Some say no evil thing that walks by night, In fog or ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton
... and the two brothers looked out of Gluck's little window in the morning. The Treasure Valley was one mass of ruin and desolation. The inundation had swept away trees, crops, and cattle, and left, in their stead, a waste of red sand and gray mud. The two brothers crept, shivering and horror-struck, into the kitchen. The water had gutted the whole first floor: corn, money, almost every movable thing had been ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... of those evenings at Hale Castle, when George Fairfax had abandoned her to pay duty to his betrothed, and of the desolation of spirit that had come upon her in the ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... ever been active in the great business of reform; some traces of which activity were manifest in the statute-book. But the reforms which Burke had ever advocated were founded in justice; those which the French regenerators had adopted were subversive of all order, and tended only to anarchy and desolation. ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... river that had carried his mother away brought him a little comfort in his desolation, for down by the water's edge, cast up on the sand by a circling eddy, he found a dead sucker. He ate it with relish, and felt better in spite of himself. It made a very large meal for a lynx of his size, and by the time he had finished it he began to be drowsy, so he picked out the driest ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... only her husband's prostration with grief and desolation that drew her off, to do her best with her pretty childish caresses and soothings; and when the two had been sent to their own home, Mrs. Evelyn was so calm that her friend felt she might be left with her daughter for the night, and returned, bringing her tender ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "The abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet," observed Henderson, who had caught a fragment of the conversation. "I'm in his form, ...
— St. Winifred's - The World of School • Frederic W. Farrar
... effeminacy, it is certain that the people of Asia have, in general, been the unresisting prey of every invader. At this time several fierce and barbarous nations had broken in upon its territory, and, after covering its fertile plains with carnage and desolation, were contending with ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... the charm of its colour, the fascination of the prospects of its hillside High Street, no town in Surrey, and perhaps only Oxford in England, is comparable with it. But between the railway station and the High Street it is desolation and blank walls. A few pretty old cottages jut out over a narrow pavement; beyond a huddled roof or two rises the tower of St. Nicholas' Church, umber and solid; nearly all else is tumbled down ugliness, broken brickwork, mud and shaggy grass. A clear space, a level green, a bed of flowers—what ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... clasped in each other's arms they admitted the extent of their desolation. Life had been robbed of a magic,—a mystery. The solid friendship of years of mutual trust and understanding was the background of so much lovely folly, so many unrealized possibilities, so many nebulous desires and dreams that the sudden dissolution of their circle was ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... belongs to Nelly Fane, with her long black curls, biscuit-coloured legs and arms, and large, melting dark eyes. At the time the thought of being separated from this imperious little beauty meant for me an abomination of desolation too dreadful to be contemplated. But, looking back upon the circumstances of my suit, I think it likely my heart had never been captivated but for jealousy, and my trick of seeing myself as the first ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson
... trade. They forced the natives to buy dear and to sell cheap. They insulted with impunity the tribunals, the police, and the fiscal authorities of the country. They covered with their protection a set of native dependants who ranged through the provinces, spreading desolation and terror wherever they appeared. Every servant of a British factor was armed with all the power of his master; and his master was armed with all the power of the Company. Enormous fortunes were thus rapidly accumulated ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the two stood together near the binnacle, watching the boat rising and falling like a cork over the long hummocks of swell as she swept rapidly down toward the wreck, "what think you of that for a sight? Is it not a very perfect picture of ruin and desolation? A few days ago—it can scarcely be more—that craft floated buoyantly and all ataunto, 'walking the waters like a thing of life,' her decks presenting an animated picture of busy activity, as her crew went hither and thither about ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... encroaching upon the level of the lake, have, in course of time, given birth to ample promontories of sweeping outline, that contrast boldly with the longitudinal base of the steeps on the opposite shore; while their flat or gently-sloping surfaces never fail to introduce, into the midst of desolation and barrenness, the elements of fertility, even where the habitations of men may not have ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... The desolation of his outlook was appalling. And during his weary hours of solitude the hopelessness of it stirred him to a bitterness that at moments became almost insanely profane. Shadows, too, crept into his mind. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... situation to obtain some alteration in their feelings. Thaddeus was too miserable awake not to view with eagerness the bed on which he trusted that, for a few hours at least, he might lose the consciousness of his desolation, with its ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... the ill-fated city. There the unfortunate inhabitants were found just where they were overtaken by death. Some were discovered in lofty attics and some in deep cellars, whither they had fled before the approaching desolation. Others were found in the streets, through which they were fleeing in wild despair when the tide of volcanic gases and the storm of falling ashes overwhelmed them. But the Roman sentinel was standing at his post, his skeleton-hand still grasping the hilt of his sword, his attitude ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... Scripture, with much strength and manliness of expression, although so as not to escape the charge of fanaticism. The nineteenth chapter of Jeremiah was the portion of Scripture which he selected; in which, under the type of breaking a potter's vessel, the prophet presages the desolation of the Jews. The lecturer was not naturally eloquent; but a strong, deep, and sincere conviction of the truth of what he said supplied him with language of energy and fire, as he drew parallel between the abominations ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... little wagons, drawn by plodding old horses, guided by plodding men. Beyond, the salt river gleamed with a keen brightness like steel. The sky above it was dull and brooding. The wind was going down. The whole landscape was desolate, and with a strange, ragged, ignominious desolation. The earth looked despoiled, insulted, dissected, as if her sacred inner parts were laid bare by these poor pygmies, the tools of a few capitalists grubbing at her vitals for the clay which ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... has many errors, is still a-gropin' after the light! Do you counsel me to set aside the sacred and time honored rules of our church, and allow the Sabbath to go by unregarded, have the sanctuary desecrated, the cause of religion languish—I cannot believe it. Think of the widespread desolation it would cause if, as the ...
— Samantha Among the Brethren, Complete • Josiah Allen's Wife (Marietta Holley)
... into the calamities of a civil war? He has read history to little account who has not learned that such a warfare is, in its nature, not only cruel, but protracted. It is like letting loose the hurricane. Passion and poverty, carnage and crime, desolation and death, become the condition of a hitherto happy people. For thirty years Germany was ravaged, and millions slain by a contest occasioned by a difference in religious opinions. For more than ...
— A Report of the Debates and Proceedings in the Secret Sessions of the Conference Convention • Lucius Eugene Chittenden
... toward each other, the men devoted to their women and the women repaying them with interest, till out of the perfectly cloudless sky one day a bolt descended, without a whisper of warning, and brought ruin and desolation ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... the laughable part of dupes, unless that mask of youth concealed a most polluted soul, if there had been any unhappy episode in her life, if she had endured the horrors of violation, and gone through all the horrors of desolation, fear and shame, would not something visible, something disgusting, attacks of low spirits, and of gloom, and disgust with everything have remained, which would have shown the progress of some mysterious malady, ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume II (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... was born at Florence. A city of flowers and gay festivities, the home of a cultured pleasure-loving people, it was the frequent scene of feuds and factions handed down from sire to son. The hatred they engendered and the desolation they caused may be understood from the reading of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy whose scene is laid in Verona in the year 1303 and to the families concerned in which Dante makes allusion in the sixth canto of his Purgatorio. But Verona and Florence ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... may have done the same thing, and our country may be left, like a stranded vessel, to rot upon the beach! Her furnaces extinguished, her manufactories deserted, her cities decayed, the hum of her busy population silenced, she may present a spectacle of desolation like that of so many other famous nations which have risen, culminated, and set ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... cette incarnation, faudra-t-il encore que je fasse pour vous, et de quelle part vient la terreur, qui vous trouble ainsi? A ces mots du grand Vishnou: "C'est le demon Ravana, reprirent les Dieux; c'est lui, Vishnou, cette desolation des mondes, qui nous inspire un tel effroi. Enveloppe-toi d'un corps, humain, et qu'il te plaise arracher du monde cette blessante epine; car nul autre que toi parmi les habitants du ciel n'est capable d'immoler ce pecheur. Sache que longtemps ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... this old monastic establishment, would seem to reside the very genius of that spirit of desolation which had touched me unpleasantly in the hour of my arrival in Crossleys. I determined to ascertain by inquiries amongst the local tradespeople, none of whom I had hitherto met, by what means the fact that no one resided at Friar's Park was concealed from those whose ordinary business ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... treachery of Hole-in-the-Day. For a moment the utmost consternation prevailed among the Indians, but revenge was the second thought, and rapidly were their preparations made to seek the scene of the murder. The distance was accomplished in a short time, and the desolation ...
— Dahcotah - Life and Legends of the Sioux Around Fort Snelling • Mary Eastman
... out-buildings and the large barns and stables told that it had once been the seat of wealth, and the wild waste of sassafras that covered the broad fields gave it an air of desolation that greatly excited my interest. Entirely oblivious of my proximity, the negro went on calling "Whoo-oop, heah!" until along the path, walking very slowly and with great dignity, appeared a noble-looking ...
— Short Stories for English Courses • Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.)
... needless to say, we marked with interest the lines of their forts, so terribly near our little town. We noted the farmhouse lately the headquarters of General Snyman, standing naked and alone. Formerly surrounded by a flourishing orchard and a carefully tended garden, it was now the picture of desolation. The ground was trampled by many feet of men and horses; straw, forage, packing-cases, and rubbish of all kinds, were strewn about, and absolutely hid the soil from view. Away on the hill beyond I spied the tiny house and hospital where I had spent six weary nights and days; and between these ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... frost before the usual time (in a country, too, where the commencement of its two seasons is in general scarcely less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons between the tropics) which caused, and the desolation which accompanied, the flight from Moscow." One can make no other comment upon this than that if it really be wisdom which statesmen would do well to lay to heart, the late Dr. Cumming must have been the most profound instructor in statesmanship that the world has ever seen. A prime minister ...
— English Men of Letters: Coleridge • H. D. Traill
... left there came upon them, in that cozy, little, two-room apartment, a feeling of desolation and vastness, and a terrible loneliness such as they had never dreamed of in the great twelve-room house in Winnebago. They kept close to each other. They toiled up the winding stairs together and stood a moment on the balcony, feigning ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... universal harmony. Can that ever be achieved by a disunited Christendom? The nations are rivals. Their rivalry persisted at the Peace Conference, disappointing all the hopes of idealists. Must it not always persist, must not horrible carnage, awful desolation, ruinous destruction, and, at any rate, dangerous and provocative rivalries, always dog the steps of humanity ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... The music that lieth hid in lamentation, The song that is heard in the deep hearts of the dead, That the Lord of dead men 'mid his dancing singeth, And never joy-cry, never joy it bringeth; Woe for the house of Kings in desolation, Woe for the light of the ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... yet, perhaps, for many a cycle of years, to spread misery and desolation around me; and yet I love you with a feeling which has in it more of gratefulness and unselfishness than ever yet found a home within my breast. I would fain have you, although you cannot save me; there may yet be a chance, ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... more than sixty miles, totally uncultivated and unproductive, remains bare to the present day." This is believed to have been written about 1135, and would give us grounds for believing that the desolation continued for over sixty years. A vivid light is thrown on the destruction wrought at Pickering by the record in the Domesday Book, ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... odious name of heretics were unworthy the protection of the laws; and that, though good and loyal citizens, they ought to be punished by the civil magistrate. This doctrine, so alien to the spirit of the New Testament, has often spread desolation and terror throughout whole provinces; and has led to the deliberate murder of a hundredfold more Christians than were destroyed by pagan Rome. Even the fathers of the Reformation did not escape from the influence of an intolerant training; but that Bible ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... form is not more observable than the indications of a philosophy which has chilled the spiritual faculties. The supernatural is gone. Nature is a vast machine which moves by fixed laws impressed upon it by a Creator. The soul feels chilled with the desolation of a universe wherein it cannot reach forth by prayer to a loving Father. Scripture is displaced by science. Doubt has passed into unbelief. The universe is viewed by the cold materialism which arraigns spiritual ...
— History of Free Thought in Reference to The Christian Religion • Adam Storey Farrar
... the day came for the presentation of Piccinni's opera, "Roland," and the family broke into tears when he went to the theatre. He alone was calm in the midst of this desolation, reassured his wife, and departed with his friends. He returned home in a triumph, which was perhaps greater than the work deserved, but certainly not greater than so ...
— The Love Affairs of Great Musicians, Volume 1 • Rupert Hughes
... and this man apart was removed. There was nothing to prevent them marrying. George was conscious of a vast depression. The last strand of the rope had parted, and he was drifting alone out into the ocean of desolation. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Elector Palatine saw from the towers of his castle at Manheim two cities and twenty-five villages at the same time in flames. This awful destruction was perpetrated upon the defenseless inhabitants, that the armies of the emperor, encountering entire desolation, might be deprived of subsistence. It was nothing to Turenne that thousands of women and children should be cast houseless into ...
— Louis XIV., Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott
... the same sort of damn liar you always were, Tode," answered Jim—but without conviction. There was something terrific about that desolation. Nothing within a thousand miles of ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... god has assign'd to me this tribulation— Loss of a son without peer? But yourselves shall partake my affliction; Easier far will it be for the pitiless sword of the Argives, Now he is dead, to make havoc of you. For myself, ere I witness Ilion storm'd in their wrath, and the fulness of her desolation, Oh, may the Destiny yield me to enter the dwelling ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... only a fleeting call; Nature has placed grave obstacles in the way of Boscastle's ever becoming a fashionable watering-place. Its charm is unique and undeniable; but it appeals to the artist, the sturdy pedestrian and climber, the lover of solitude that at times is absolute desolation, rather than to the parent of a family. But the desolation, if that is not too stern a word to use, only applies to the coast; the Valency Valley is verdant and beautiful. It runs among furze and bracken by the riverside, ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... belong to a southern continent; but, in fact, it is an island, and that of no great extent. If our commander had not been unwilling to deprive M. Kerguelen of the honour of its bearing his name, he would have been disposed, from its sterility, to call it the Island of Desolation. ...
— Narrative of the Voyages Round The World, • A. Kippis
... property, there seems no doubt that the area of cultivation will spread and something of the ancient prosperity return. The land is immensely fertile: it is only Ottoman misrule, which here, as everywhere else, has left desolation in the place of prosperity and death in place of life. The rainfall is adequate, the climate suitable to those who will naturally spread there: it needs only freedom from the murderous tyranny that has bled it for centuries past, to guarantee its ...
— Crescent and Iron Cross • E. F. Benson
... This air of desolation had infected Lady Vernon, too. Her temper, never of the mildest disposition, now became exceedingly irritable, and finding little consolation forthcoming from Sir Benedict, she vented her spleen with all those with whom she came into contact, and finally shut herself up ...
— Heiress of Haddon • William E. Doubleday
... that had been kindled in the room was very low, and the lady received but a momentary impression of a man's figure bowed over a white table. She chose a chair at once with her back towards him, and resting her brow on her forefinger, disposed herself for desolation. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... soothe and console her; she remained perfectly still, her face hid in her arms, and replied not to her anxious questionings. A long silence ensued, and Mary wept. A feeling of desolation began to creep over her; a second time she was to be thrown on the wide, cold world. She thought of her uncle's generosity and unvaried kindness during the many years she had dwelt under his roof, and scarcely felt that it was not her own. And then there stole up the image of her lost ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... did not want truth such as this; she would have preferred that he should utter the poor, common falsehoods. Hungry for passionate love, she heard with a sense of desolation all this calm reasoning. That Jasper was of cold temperament she had often feared; yet there was always the consoling thought that she did not see with perfect clearness into his nature. Now and then had come a flash, a hint of possibilities. She had looked forward ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... weirdness and desolation of the spot struck him. He wished, yet dreaded, to advance. Something in the grief of the mourner whose sobs he had heard had seized upon his heart-strings, and yet, as he hesitated, the sounds came again, and forgetting that his intrusion might not prove altogether welcome, he pressed ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... the desolation which reigned between the Strand and the City in that fatal summer, now drawing to its melancholy close. More than once in her brief pilgrimage Angela drew back, shuddering, from the embrasure of a door, or the inlet to some narrow alley, at sight of death lying on the threshold, ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... longest, most gloomy night Jack North ever knew. He saw nor heard nothing of the steamer during the long hours of darkness and desolation. ...
— Jack North's Treasure Hunt - Daring Adventures in South America • Roy Rockwood
... sat alone in her desolation and shame, the thought of self-destruction had surged up in the lava of other tumultuous thoughts occasioned by the artist's scorn, and at first she had shrunk from it with natural and instinctive dread. But the awful thought began to fascinate ...
— A Face Illumined • E. P. Roe
... that fate should have let that ceremony go on to the end which would spread ruin and desolation before it! ...
— Jolly Sally Pendleton - The Wife Who Was Not a Wife • Laura Jean Libbey
... tent stood at a little distance from the rest of the camp, for the reason that solitude at times has its charms. When the lamp outside the tent door was extinguished, and all was enveloped in darkness and fog to an overwhelming degree, a feeling of loneliness and desolation stole over me, though it soon left me when I thought of the glories of the coming day, when all the ...
— Through Central Borneo: - An Account of Two Years' Travel in the Land of Head-Hunters - Between the Years 1913 and 1917 • Carl Lumholtz
... Desolation, Fireless hearths, and lifeless homes; Over orphans' heartsick sorrows, Patriot ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... bells; places inaccessible to the present, a border-land of the past, and which, as Alfieri says, thinking of those many times when he must have reined in his horse, and vaguely and wistfully looked out on to the green desolation islanded with ruins and traversed by the vast procession of the aqueducts, invited one to meditate, and cry, and be a poet. And sometimes—we know it from the sonnets to his horse Fido, who had, Alfieri tells us, carried the beloved burden of his lady—Alfieri did not ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... in his mutilated state, having undergone an amputation of the leg and thigh on the field of battle, who can wonder at the desolation of Madame Victor when he resolved to sustain the risk of such an offer? Presently, what was my emotion at the sudden and abrupt entrance into the room of an officer of the king's garde du corps! in the self-same uniform as that from which I had parted with ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 3 • Madame D'Arblay
... All her forlorn, unprotected youth, the more forlorn that in her father's lifetime it was under a certain hollow sham of protection; the total desolation afterward, exposed to every insult of the bitter world, or at least that bitter portion of it which is always ready to trample down a woman if she is helpless, and to hunt her down if she is strong enough to help herself—all this ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... silently in the petition of her heart. I saw in profile a girl's troubled face charged with mystery, a slim, tall, weary figure all in white against the flame, a cheek's pure oval, the tense curve of a proud neck, a mass of severely snodded russet hair. So I recalled her afterward, picture of desolation seeking comfort, but at the moment when I blundered on her my presence seemed profanity and no time was found for appraisement. Abashed I came to a halt, and was for tiptoeing back to the door; but hearing me ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... seemed sliding away aching desolation overwhelmed her. Brian's face with its passion and pain rose before her dry, burning eyes. Then darkness came, blotting out the sunshine; the little stream trickling into its stony basin seemed to grow into a roaring cataract, the waters to rush into her ears ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... his left hand,—said very little that all the world might not have heard. But he did say one such word. "It has been so dreary to me, the last month!" Emily of course had no answer to make to this. She could not tell him that her desolation had been infinitely worse than his, and that she had sometimes felt as though her very heart would break. "I wonder whether it must always be like this with me," he said,—and then he went back to the theatres, ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... Spezzia—grows ever grander. The castle is a ruin, still capable of partial habitation, and now undergoing repair—the state in which a ruin looks most sordid and forlorn. How strange it is, too, that, to enforce this sense of desolation, sad dishevelled weeds cling ever to such antique masonry! Here are the henbane, the sow-thistle, the wild cucumber. At Avignon, at Orvieto, at Dolce Acqua, at Les Baux, we never missed them. And they have the dusty courtyards, the massive portals, where portcullises still threaten, ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... our rear and to our left ran range upon range of low, even-topped hills of unimaginable barrenness, the approach to which lay over a vast plain, broken by innumerable smaller hills, grand in its utter desolation; and in front of us stretched a level, shimmering expanse of sand as far as the silvery ribbon of the Gulf of Suez, beyond which, and dominating the whole scene, the gaunt, black mass of Gebel Atakah (Mountain of Deliverance) thrust its mighty ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... illiberality in these remarks; they are put forward to advocate the rights of our own destitute countrymen—to claim for them a share of the lavish commiseration bestowed on others—to call attention to the desolation of their hearths—the wreck of their comforts—the awful condition of their starving and dependent families—and to give the really charitable an opportunity of reserving some of their kindnesses for home consumption. Let ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various
... saw Louvain in the ashes of her desolation. We were just back then from the German trenches before Antwerp; and the hollow sounds of the big guns which were fired there at spaced intervals came to our ears as we rode over the road leading out from Brussels, like the boomings of ...
— Paths of Glory - Impressions of War Written At and Near the Front • Irvin S. Cobb
... for my employer, he addressed himself to the Marquis de Bonac, who had been ambassador to the Porte, and knew all about the Holy Sepulchre. I don't know what passed at their interview, but the archimandrite disappeared and I was detained. In my desolation I told the marquis the history of my life, and by him was sent to Paris, with plenty of money in my pocket, to enter the service of a young friend of his in the army. My first sight of the city was a disappointment which I have never got over, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... arms upon the high chairback and laid his face down upon them, like a woman who is hurt to the point of tears and yet will not weep. His booted feet were thrust toward the dying coals, his whole attitude spoke of utter desolation—of a loneliness ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... change ringing a little colour was thrown in, and we had Pat Tom Joyce Red and Pat Tom Joyce Black, Red Pat Tom Joyce and Black Tom Joyce Pat. This is called Joyce's country, before Balfour's time depopulating to desolation, now thriving and filling up, re-Joyceing in fact. Nearly seventeen hundred men are at work here and at the other end, and in 1894 the great civiliser will steam from Galway to Clifden, inaugurating (let us hope) ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... varmints, to be sure; or what-all the abomination o' desolation has left of 'em. We ain't more than a cat's jump from the edge o' the big rock where we first sot eyes on ...
— The Master of Appleby • Francis Lynde
... it. What misfortune can equal death? Change can convert every other into a blessing, or heal its sting—death alone has no cure. It shakes the foundations of the earth on which we tread; it destroys its beauty; it casts down our shelter; it exposes us bare to desolation. When those we love have passed into eternity, 'life is the desert and the solitude' in which we are forced to linger—but never find ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... which from their size and isolation are more beautiful than young ones and are little likely to be injurious to health, and ends them by raising mounds and sticking into them dense belts of quick-growing trees like poplars to hide as speedily as possible the desolation of bricks and mortar he has created. It is this senseless outdoor work of the builder and his nurseryman which stands most in need of revision from time to time in suburban residences, but which rarely receives ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... born in Pennsylvania; after graduating in medicine, joined the Kane expedition in search of Franklin in 1853, and subsequently made two other voyages to the Arctic regions, accounts of which are given in his "An Arctic Boat-journey," "The Land of Desolation," &c.; subsequently he served as a surgeon during the Civil War, and sat in the New ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... stand in the center of Hiroshima and get a view of the most of the city; the hills prevented a similar overall view in Nagasaki. Hiroshima impressed itself on one's mind as a vast expanse of desolation; but nothing as vivid was left in one's memory ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... distracted body that he well might be. For a twelvemonth ago he had lost his wife and both his elder children in one week, and his pair of two-year-old twins were now all that stood between himself and world-wide desolation. At the front door his frantic rush was met and baffled by a choking puff, which sent him fleeing round in hopes that entrance might be more possible through the back; and on the way he came face to face with the wrathful visages of his son ...
— Strangers at Lisconnel • Barlow Jane
... which belongs to death, we find in the sensation of loneliness which attaches to it. Have we ever seen a ship preparing to sail with its load of pauper emigrants to a distant colony? If we have we know what that desolation is which comes from feeling unfriended on a new and untried excursion. All beyond the seas, to the ignorant poor man, is a strange land. They are going away from the helps and the friendships and the companionships of life, scarcely knowing what is before them. And it is in such a moment, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... recrossed it, for two centuries, farther south. In British America Mackenzie had already penetrated to the Pacific, while Hearne had made a far more noteworthy and difficult trip than Mackenzie, when he wandered over the terrible desolation of the Barren Grounds, which lie under the Arctic circle. But no man had ever crossed or explored that part of the continent which the United States had just acquired; a part far better fitted to be the home of our stock than the regions to the north or south. It was the explorations of Lewis ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Four - Louisiana and the Northwest, 1791-1807 • Theodore Roosevelt
... the river. It became the capital of the colony. Before long Isabella, on the north coast, was entirely abandoned. Trees soon grew upon the streets and through the roofs of the houses. It presented a scene of wild desolation, and ghosts were believed to wander in crowds through the abandoned city. Ruins of the house of Columbus, of the church, and the fort can still be traced out by those who penetrate into the dense jungle which now covers that ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 8 - The Later Renaissance: From Gutenberg To The Reformation • Editor-in-Chief: Rossiter Johnson
... his hands, by assault, and was leveled with the ground, and the temple was destroyed. Zedekiah, in attempting to escape, was taken, had his eyes put out, and was carried captive to Babylon, together with the whole nation, and the country was reduced to utter desolation. It was not, however, repeopled by heathen settlers, as was Samaria. The small remnant that remained, under the guidance of Jeremiah, recovered some civil rights, and supported themselves by the cultivation of the land, and in their bitter misery learned those lessons which ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... wretched mortal from the dust; Beyond man's home condition they! with eyes Intent, and voice desponding, and unheard By Aroar, though he tarried at his side. "They know me not," cried Gebir, "O my sires, Ye know me not! they answer not, nor hear. How distant are they still! what sad extent Of desolation must we overcome! Aroar, what wretch that nearest us? what wretch Is that with eyebrows white, and slanting brow? Listen! him yonder who bound down supine, Shrinks yelling from that sword there engine-hung; ...
— Gebir • Walter Savage Landor
... beasts of burden, and many months' provision.. moreover, 'tis a foolish, fancy crossed my mind at best,—for what should I, the Laureate of Al-Kyris, do in other lands? Besides, my departure would indeed be the desolation of the city,—well may Al-Kyris fall when Sah-luma no longer abides within it! Seawards the way lies open,—maybe, in days to come, we twain may take ship and sail hence for a brief sojourn to those distant western shores, whence thou, ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... India was not a thin nonentity, void of all content. The Rishis of India asserted emphatically, "To know him in this life is to be true; not to know him in this life is the desolation of death." [Footnote: Iha chet avedit atha satyamasti, nachet iha avedit mahati vinashtih.] How to know him then? "By realising him in each and all." [Footnote: Bhuteshu bhuteshu vichintva.] Not only in nature but in ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... picture, I can see the black wavering lines of the walls in the fields sinking into the drifts! the snow billowed over the graves by the church where I preached! the banks of snow around the houses! the white desolation everywhere! I ask myself at times if the people are still there. Yes, I feel as blessedly remote from that terrible winter as if I had died away from it, and were ...
— Indian Summer • William D. Howells
... seemed eloquent with voices of the dead. The rest of the House had gone for a run. He was all alone. His head fell forward on his hands. The captaincy he had tried so hard to gain had ended in pitiable failure. It was the desolation, the utter desolation!... ...
— The Loom of Youth • Alec Waugh
... the prophet Jeremiah weeping over Jerusalem, for I sat down on a rock, and viewing the desolation around me, wept also. Then I dried my wet cheeks, and there and then set about clearing the ruin. But it was a great task, and would take several days before I could clear the debris and recover such goods and chattels as were not totally destroyed. I ...
— Jethou - or Crusoe Life in the Channel Isles • E. R. Suffling
... before the grass grew over it. Alfred, he says, "restauravit et habitabilem fecit." "To make a town habitable" implies that it was uninhabited; "to restore it" implies that at some previous period it had been what the great king then made it once more. How long this condition of desolation prevailed within the Roman wall we have no information. Unfortunately no successful attempt has been made to discriminate between the Roman masonry, that of Alfred, and that of the successive mediaeval repairs, in the recent examinations of what is ...
— Memorials of Old London - Volume I • Various
... time, such as Falkland, or the Spencers (Sunderland), or the Comptons (Northampton), who felt and owned their paramount duty to lie in public self-dedication, and died therefore, and oftentimes left their inheritances a desolation. 'Thus far'—oh heavens! with what bitterness I said this, knowing it a thing undeniable by W. W. or by Sir George—you, the peerages that pretend to try conclusions with the English, you—French, German, Walloon, Spanish, Scottish—are able to do so simply because you are faineans, ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Sunday) Colonel Napier and his Unknown set out on horseback on an excursion to the ruins of Italica. As they sat on a ruined wall of the Convent of San Isidoro, contemplating the scene of ruin and desolation around, "the 'Unknown' began to feel the vein of poetry creeping through his inward soul, and gave vent to it by reciting with great emphasis and effect" some lines that the scene called up ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... of the "music of the wind." For to us, in our gloomy moods, it breathes but of desolation, sorrow, and suffering; while, as the blast rises higher, its sentimental mournfulness is mingled with painful thoughts, which press on our spirit, of the peril in which it places so many of our fellow-creatures; and, "God help the poor souls at sea!" rises ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... of the Farnese palace to the distant vista of trees beyond the river. With its infrequent traffic the street, even in the daytime, was like some sepulchral corridor where the past was crumbling into dust, and when night fell its desolation quite appalled Pierre. You did not meet a soul, you did not see a light in any window, and the glimmering gas lamps, few and far between, seemed powerless to pierce the gloom. On either hand the doors were barred and bolted, and not a sound, not a breath ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... fill me with care, allure and entangle me, that I cannot have free access to Thee, nor enjoy that sweet intercourse which is always near at hand to the blessed spirits. Let my deep sighing come before Thee, and my manifold desolation on ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... the foam, like a wisp of snow, and brought the murmur more clearly to the ear of the listener, shutting out for the time, the faint hollow roar that was wafted from the region of pines and cedars. It was a picture of lonely grandeur and desolation, made all the more impressive by the tiny bits of life, showing in the few ...
— A Waif of the Mountains • Edward S. Ellis
... floe had given way at last, and broken into many floating islets of varied size, had become a scene of life and animation, in striking contrast to its late icy desolation. In every direction geese, singly and in flocks, fed along the edges of the still immovable inner ice-fields; swam placidly among the narrow leads, or in huge bodies blackened the open pools or the projecting points of ice. Among them, too, wheeled many flocks of ...
— Adrift in the Ice-Fields • Charles W. Hall
... desire to rid themselves of the strange feeling of desolation that brooded over the familiar rooms that sent the girls to the attic as soon as Agnes left. Mam Daphne had brought the mail, as she often did in rainy weather, and gone again. The sight of the letter addressed to Agnes had given rise to Wilma's usual supposition, and then silence followed ...
— Cicely and Other Stories • Annie Fellows Johnston
... down immediately, and in the Gold Parlour she found the Lady Lucy Raincy—Lady Lucy in tears, Lady Lucy in a pleasant fluffy desolation of woe. She flung her arms about the girl's neck and wept freely on ...
— Patsy • S. R. Crockett
... streamed in line, square, and triangle, with flashes of flying gold and the lurid stain of blood. And then ourselves—three modern Englishmen in a modern English boat—seeming to jar upon and look out of tone with that measureless desolation; and in front of us the noble buck limned out upon a background ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... as well as they liked to hear hers. She made a point of visiting every fresh batch of children, after they had been duly fumigated and disinfected, and she seemed to take a horrible and unnatural delight in the ghastly details of desolation and death which were revealed in the artless narratives ...
— The Sign Of The Red Cross • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Verteneglio, and in 1686, as there were not enough citizens to constitute a council, they had to add strangers to make a quorum. Angelo Morosini, podesta of Capodistria in 1646, described it as "Goddess of desolation and refuge of solitude itself." Parenzo was so severely smitten that only thirty persons remained. At Pola in 1631 there were but 300 persons left, including the garrison of foreigners, and of the citizens but three families. This was the ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... The sun was just setting in a radiance of glory behind the dark spruce forest that hid the great unknown, unexplored Labrador wilderness which stretched away a thousand miles to the rocky shores of Hudson's Bay and the bleak desolation of Ungava. With their back to the forest and the setting sun, drawn up in martial line stood the eight or ten whitewashed log buildings of the Hudson's Bay Company Post, just as they had stood for a hundred years, and just as they stand to-day, looking out upon the wide waters of Eskimo Bay, which ...
— Ungava Bob - A Winter's Tale • Dillon Wallace
... silent now; the very bareness and desolation of the scene sickened Beatrice to the soul. No guests were here now—they were not likely to be. A polite manager was saying something to the bride, but she did not ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... its way than this sailorman's brief and fragmentary description of his life in the wilderness. He had heard from steam whaler skippers a little about the tundra that fringes the Polar Sea, the vast desolation frozen hard in summer a few inches below the surface, on which nothing beyond the mosses ever grew. It was easy to understand the brain-crushing sameness and monotony of an existence chequered only by times of dire scarcity ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... had spent its fury, when the pall of night came over the stricken city. Human wolves crept from their hiding places and began their work of prowling amid the ruins and robbing the dead. All night long they held high carnival amid the scenes of terror and desolation. ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... engendered in a free, urban, industrial society. The passion of the war touched everything. The churches were strongholds of the national cause. The Sanitary and Christian Commissions kept camp and home in close touch. But under all this stir was the tragedy of wide-spread desolation and bereavement. The multitudinous slaughter of campaigns like the Wilderness had an awful background ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... impalpable, unlovely, soul-crushing suggestions of space illimitable; dancing and shimmering in the heat waves, it seems struggling to escape. When the wind blows, the dust-devils play tag among the low sage and greasewood; the Joshua trees, rising in the midst of this desolation, stretch forth their fantastically twisted and withered arms, seeming to invoke a curse on nature herself while warning the traveler that the heritage of this land is death. There is a bearing down of one's spirit in the midst of all this loneliness and desolation ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... contrary forces, which give their rhythm to all creation, has not yet been perfected by man in his civilisation, and the Creator in him is baffled over and over again. He comes back to his work, however, and makes himself busy, building his world in the midst of desolation and ruins. His history is the history of his aspiration interrupted and renewed. And one truth of which he must be reminded, therefore, is that the power which accomplishes the miracle of creation, by bringing conflicting ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore
... French: "are they not very villainous people?" "Yes," answered our unhappy countrymen. "Well," continued she, "these robbers carried me off, notwithstanding the efforts of my unhappy father, who defended me with courage; they then carried desolation into our village, which a moment before enjoyed tranquillity and happiness; on this sad day we saw whole families carried off, and we were all conducted to that horrible market at St. Louis, where the whites carry on the execrable trade of dealers in men; chance favored me, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to Senegal in 1816 • J. B. Henry Savigny and Alexander Correard
... Boer would have succeeded in finding the way back, but I soon lost my way altogether. I lost the traces of the horse's hoofs, and the dongas looked to me so different that in one place where a donga branched off I did not know which to follow. An intense feeling of desolation took possession of me. Lost in a wilderness without food or water! I thought of the twelve or thirteen men who got lost in this wood on a hunting expedition, and of whom only one was saved. A great fear came upon me. ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... neither written to nor heard from, and she dared not hope to meet him. She fancied a wish to have tidings of his marriage: it would be peace; if in desolation. Now that she had confessed and given her pledge to Emma, she had so far broken with him as to render the holding him chained a cruelty, and his reserve whispered of a rational acceptance of the end between them. She thanked him for it; an act whereby ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Aloft in air the granite took upon itself the most fantastic shapes, and assumed those misty tints that give to high mountains a dim resemblance to clouds in the sky. The bare, bleak cliffs, with the fearful rents in their sides, pictures of wild and barren desolation, contrasted strongly with the pretty view of the valley; and so strange were the shapes they assumed, that one of the cliffs had been called "The Capuchin," because it was so like a monk. Sometimes these sharp-pointed peaks, these mighty masses of rock, and ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... chin, Not in slow-oozing drops of clotted gore, But in a pelting shower of crimson hue. Such is the wreck, not of a single life, But of a husband's and a wife's in one. The grandeur of this house in happier hours Was grandeur worthy of the name. To-day Sorrow and desolation, death and shame, All evils for which man has names ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... both had torches, so that there was ample light as we passed through the passage and entered the Chamber where the sarcophagus had stood. The first thing noticeable was the emptiness of the place. Despite all its magnificent adornment, the tomb was made a desolation by the absence of the great sarcophagus, to hold which it was hewn in the rock; of the chest with the alabaster jars; of the tables which had held the implements and food for the use of the dead, and ...
— The Jewel of Seven Stars • Bram Stoker
... vigorous man, despite his age. He looked frank and intelligent, but one guessed that there was a hidden bitterness and desolation in him. He wore a black cassock with red ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... the end we came upon a wilderness of open ground, with half-finished villas dotted about, and a hideous litter of boards, wheelbarrows, and building materials of all sorts scattered in every direction. At one corner of this scene of desolation, stood a great overgrown dismal house, plastered with drab-colored stucco, and surrounded by a naked, unfinished garden, without a shrub or a flower in it, frightful to behold. On the open iron gate that led into this inclosure ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... the wretched dog continued to howl. What possessed the poor little creature? In the stillness of the early morning the long-drawn, disconsolate sounds rose and tell with a dirge-like hint of desolation. He must be silenced somehow; ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... him but desolation, said Taterleg, a country so rough that it tried a horse to travel it. Ranchhouses were farther apart as a man proceeded, and beyond that, mountains. It looked to Taterleg as if he'd ...
— The Duke Of Chimney Butte • G. W. Ogden
... his sack, proceeded upon his journey, and travelling for many days he at last reached a country so barren and rocky that not a single living thing grew upon it—everywhere reigned grim desolation. And in the midst of this dead region he ...
— The Orange Fairy Book • Various
... desolation, through which Mannering's road had lain on the preceding evening, was excluded from the view by some rising ground, and the landscape showed a pleasing alternation of hill and dale, intersected by a river, which was ...
— Guy Mannering • Sir Walter Scott
... in it He had been writing letters, evidently, for an unfinished one lay on the table. She stood a moment quite still in the silent room. Manske had gone to find the coachman, and she could hear his steps on the stones beneath the open windows. The desolation of the deserted room, the terrible sense of misfortune worse than death that brooded over it, struck her like a blow that for ever destroyed her cheerful youth. She never forgot the look and the feeling of that room. She went to the writing-table, dropped on her knees, and laid her cheek, ...
— The Benefactress • Elizabeth Beauchamp
... walking, he shivered. There was something hostile in the air which made him hesitate, and he felt that invisible forces barred his way. Unseen hands seemed to draw him back. No one would go near now to gather the cocoa-nuts, and they lay rotting on the ground. Everywhere was desolation. The bush was encroaching, and it looked as though very soon the primeval forest would regain possession of that strip of land which had been snatched from it at the cost of so much labour. He had the sensation that here was the abode of ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... be rebuilt, indeed. But I think that, whether or no, a golden fence should be built around it, and it should forever and for all time be preserved as a monument to the wanton wickedness of the Hun. It should serve and stand, in its stark desolation, as a tribute, dedicated to the Kultur of Germany. No painter could depict the frightfulness of that city of the dead. No camera could make you see as it is. Only your eyes can do that for you. And even then you cannot realize it all at once. ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... of silk and velvet. Two discouraged servants remained with her, out of a staff of twelve. Once there had been ten gardeners; now there was none; and the one hope left for this lost palace of sleep was in a new ownership. The whole place smelt of decay and desolation, yet to Hannaford it was more attractive than such a beautiful and prosperous domain as Schuyler's Stellamare. The sad loveliness of the old house and the old garden made a special appeal to him. He wanted to save the Chateau Lontana from ruin, and felt superstitiously that the ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... many reasons—because it is real, intimate, confidential; because it narrates a tragic experience that is all too common in actual life; because its tragedy is enhanced by dramatic contrasts, the splendour of the bright, breezy, sunlit garden contrasting with the road of ashen spiritual desolation the soul must take; the splendour of the gorgeous stiff brocade and the futility of the blank, soft, imprisoned flesh; the obstreperous heart, beating in joyous harmony with the rhythm of the swaying flowers, changed by one written word into a ...
— The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century • William Lyon Phelps
... 'I have no desire for literary distinction,' said he; 'no ambition. My original wish was to pass my life in easy, quiet obscurity—with her whom I loved. I was disappointed in my wish; she was removed, who constituted my only felicity in this life: desolation came to my heart, and misery to my head. To escape from the latter I had recourse to Chinese. By degrees the misery left my head, but the ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... termination of the last and the commencement of the present century, the world was roused into an interest and enthusiasm, which now we can scarcely appreciate or account for; the sympathies of England were awakened by the terrible revolutions of France, and the desolation of Poland; as a principle, we hated Napoleon, though he had neither act nor part in the doings of the democrats; and the sea-songs of Dibdin, which our youth now would call uncouth and ungraceful rhymes, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... that human existence has no purpose, and human virtue no unfailing friend; that this brief life is everything to us, and death is total, everlasting extinction; once let them thoroughly abandon religion, and who can conceive or describe the extent of the desolation ...
— McGuffey's Fifth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... the river, over there, was a semblance of civilization. That is to say, men wore white linen, avoided murder, and frequently paid their gambling debts. But on this west side stood wilderness, not the kind one reads about as being eventually conquered by white men; no, the real grim desolation, where the ax cuts but leaves no blaze, where the pioneer disappears and few or none follow. The pioneer has always been a successful pugilist, but in this part of Burma fate, out of pure admiration for the pygmy's gameness, decided to call the battle a draw. ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... the deep!" But when that dark day burst upon them, and nature with one angry sweep transformed that splendid palace into a floating death-chamber; when ocean lifted up this triumph of man's skill, and shook it like a toy; the interest which hung over that awful desolation—the interest to which your hearts flow out with painful sympathy to-night—was in nothing that man had achieved, but in humanity itself. All the workmanship, all the material splendor, all the skill, were nothing compared with one heart beating amidst that tempest; compared with ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... to the north-west, the horses being a little fresher than for some days past. Halted at four o'clock, having gone ten miles through a country which, for barrenness and desolation, can I think have no equal; it was a continued scrub, and where there was timber it chiefly consisted of small cypress: we saw no water as usual, but stopped on some burnt grass near the base of a low range of stony hills west of Peel's range, from which we are distant eight or ten miles. These ...
— Journals of Two Expeditions into the Interior of New South Wales • John Oxley
... lived to rejoice when the day of triumph came; but the name of this woman was found upon no heroic roll, nor is it on the page of any history that men have since written, although she made heroes of cowards, and helped to stay the wave of desolation which, in the dark days of '76, threatened ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... to the young girl on one of those dreary autumn nights when all the desolation of the dying summer, and none of the exhilaration of the approaching winter, is in the air. She had been labouring all day under a cloud of depression which hovered over her heart and brain and threatened to wholly envelop her; and the letter from ...
— An Ambitious Man • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... in which I saw little of the calculating spirit of a mere fisherman. Though he looked on the coming tide, his eyes seemed to dwell particularly on the black and decayed hulls of two vessels, which, half immersed in the quicksand, still addressed to every heart a tale of shipwreck and desolation. The tide wheeled and foamed around them, and, creeping inch by inch up the side, at last fairly threw its waters over the top, and a long and hollow eddy showed the resistance which the ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... the Lutherans, and the Romanists. In the two latter were generally found the richest people of the community, though they were the least numerous. They, therefore, would have suffered the most, had a battle been fought in the city. Nothing could have been more horrible than such an event—desolation and destruction would have been brought into every house. Yet, strange as it may seem, all parties were willing and eager to fight. Fresh articles were drawn up, and approved by those who represented the Lutheran and Romanist parties. The Prince resolved early in the morning to ...
— The Golden Grasshopper - A story of the days of Sir Thomas Gresham • W.H.G. Kingston
... cattle-trucks, which can hardly be said to have changed their use! Trains in which is heaped up the desolation of these people torn from their homes, and how quickly become as beasts! Misery has stripped them of all their human attributes. We take them food and drink, and that is how they become exposed: the man drinks without remembering his ...
— Letters of a Soldier - 1914-1915 • Anonymous
... and battlements arise, Turrets and arches nodding to their fall, Unpeopled monasteries delude our eyes, And mimic desolation covers all. ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... seemed to think that he had any duty towards her, beyond the obvious one of civility in public. All thought of Piers Ingham had been resolutely crushed down, except when it came—as it sometimes did—in the form of a dream of bliss from which she awoke to desolation. A miserable day was sure to follow one of those dreams. The only other moment when she allowed herself to think of him was in her ...
— A Forgotten Hero - Not for Him • Emily Sarah Holt
... call Christ! Christ! shall at the last day be found less near to him than such as knew him not. What shall the kings of Islam say to your Christian kings, when they see the book of judgment opened, and hear all that is set down in it to their dishonour? In that book shall be read the desolation which Albert will inflict on Bohemia:[26]—in that book, the woes inflicted on Paris by that adulterator of his kingdom's money, who shall die by the hog's teeth:—in that book, the ambition which makes such ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... topmost platform the Aztec warriors were drawn up to dispute his passage. From their elevated position they showered down heavy stones, beams, and burning rafters, which thundering along the stairway overturned the ascending Spaniards and carried desolation through their ranks. The more fortunate, eluding or springing over these obstacles, succeeded in gaining the first terrace, where they fell upon their enemies and compelled them to give way, and then, aided by a brisk fire from the musketeers below, they pressed on, forcing their ...
— The True Story Book • Andrew Lang
... with the majesty of the great mountains, nor the solemnity of the great plains, but with that nearer, more intimate relationship which is the peculiar property of the foothill country. Here was neither the flatness that, with a change of mood, could become in a moment desolation, nor the aloofness of eternal rocks towering into cold space, but the friendship of hills that could be climbed, and trees that lisped in the light wind, and water that babbled playfully over gravel ridges gleaming in the August sunshine. The girl drew a great breath of the pure air and was ...
— The Cow Puncher • Robert J. C. Stead
... drive the people through flame and smoke and desolation. They had fire in front of them, fire behind them, and fire to left and right of them, and saw only destruction ahead of them. Yet, after taking them through all these horrors, he finally led them to a green spot in the forest, where it was peaceful and cool and safe. In the centre of a flowery ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... to think of Myra Beckwith; his mind felt blood-stained, no fit place for the thought of her. There, where the thought of her had shone for months, a steady, heart-warming flame, was only a dull desolation which he dared ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller
... magnificent Madeley Court, Salop[1] (now, alas! in the last stage of desolation and decay, surrounded by coal-fields and undermined by pits), is honeycombed with places for concealment and escape. A ruinous apartment at the top of the house, known as "the chapel" (only a few years ...
— Secret Chambers and Hiding Places • Allan Fea
... prevent it from becoming a means of dissemination of crime, of filth, of disease. They stand by the new-fledged proselyte to work, to encourage perseverance. They follow him to the country colony, the abomination of desolation to one who has walked the London pavements and found his heaven in the gin-palace and the music-hall, to stimulate effort. They accompany him to the colony to remind him that true freedom is not licence, that the conditions of success are a change of mind ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... and turn them into pastures, evicting all the tenants, is essential to the rights of property. This has been said in connection with the great absentee proprietors. According to this theory of proprietorship, the only one recognised by law, Lord Lansdowne may legally spread desolation over a large part of Kerry; Lord Fitzwilliam may send the ploughshare of ruin through the hearths of half the county Wicklow; Lord Digby, in the King's County, may restore to the bog of Allen vast tracts reclaimed during many generations ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... build an empire on the ruins of the Ten Commandments, are as blind to discern the laws of human nature as they are awkward to raise the horoscope of events. This Western Continent, under God, may it please the despots, is not going to barbarism and desolation. That good missionary of freedom as well as religion, whom New England sent to California in the person of Thomas Starr King, writes us that Mount Shasta is ascertained to be higher than Mont Blanc. Some other elevations than of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 74, December, 1863 • Various
... distressed nations and to rescue from the fangs of tyranny the powerful states of Britain, Spain, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands? Shall she, like another Phaethon, madly ascend the chariot of Empire, and spread desolation and horror over the world? Shall she attempt to restrain the career of a nation, which my honorable colleague represents to have been irresistible, and which he declares has appalled the British lion and ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... but general time is also expressed in chapter viii.; where, after giving an account of the taking the city of Ai, it is said, ver. 28th, "And Joshua burned Ai, and made it an heap for ever, a desolation unto this day;" and again, ver. 29, where speaking of the king of Ai, whom Joshua had hanged, and buried at the entering of the gate, it is said, "And he raised thereon a great heap of stones, which remaineth unto this day," that is, unto the day or time in which ...
— The Writings Of Thomas Paine, Complete - With Index to Volumes I - IV • Thomas Paine
... Granite Pillar.' No appearance of human life or labour exists around; the whole is a desert, over which these columnar formations—resembling a city of the Titans, crumbling slowly into dust—hold an empire of solitude and death. The imagination is oppressed with a sense of utter desolation that withers every ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 461 - Volume 18, New Series, October 30, 1852 • Various
... face you behold the confidence and pride of those who, accustomed to conquest, are about to extend their dominion over new territories, and to whom war is a game of pleasure rather than a dark hazard, that may end in utter desolation and ruin. Intrenched within these massy walls, the people of this gay capital cannot realise war. Its sounds have ever been afar off, beyond the wide sweep of the deserts; and will be now, so they judge—and they are scarcely turned for a moment, ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... indeed, dressed in khaki, with a breastplate composed of newspapers containing reports of speeches which he had been charged to deliver to soldiers at the front. He was passing in a winged tank along those scenes of desolation of which he had so often read in his daily papers, and which his swollen fancy now coloured even more vividly than had those striking phrases of the past, when presently the tank turned a somersault, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... to that bliss aspire, Must win their way through blood and fire. The writhings of a wounded heart Are fiercer than a foeman's dart. Oft in Life's stillest shade reclining, In Desolation unrepining, Without a hope on earth to find A mirror in an answering mind, Meek souls there are, who little dream Their daily strife an Angel's theme, Or that the rod they take so calm Shall prove in Heaven ...
— The Christian Year • Rev. John Keble
... He painted the desolation of the church, during the late period of her distresses, in the most affecting colours. He described her, like Hagar watching the waning life of her infant amid the fountainless desert; like Judah, under her palm-tree, mourning for the devastation of her temple; ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... Eustacia was melting to nothing, and the fair woman herself was standing on Rainbarrow, her soul in an abyss of desolation seldom plumbed by one so young, Yeobright sat lonely at Blooms-End. He had fulfilled his word to Thomasin by sending off Fairway with the letter to his wife, and now waited with increased impatience for some sound or signal of her return. Were Eustacia still at Mistover the very ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... pointed out to you your duty—a duty which you were forced to perform afterwards by necessity. Then be it so; let me perish on these black rocks, as I shall, and my bones be whitened by the chilly blasts which howl over their desolation. But mark me, cruel and vindictive man! I shall not be the only one whose bones will bleach there. I prophesy that many others will share my fate, and even you, Admiral, may be of the number,—if I mistake not, we ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... beloved mistresses their lost sheep, their outcast, miserable boy. She did not reason the matter out, but she felt it, and felt that in making her in some degree His instrument God had been very good to her in the midst of her desolation. ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... thought the grave was closed, the old wound healed by time and silence; and now a little child had torn it open, and it was bleeding and throbbing again with a pang such as she had never felt before, while there crept over her such a feeling of desolation and loneliness, a want of something unpossessed, as few ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... is true of individuals. It may seem now winter and desolation with you. Your hearts have been ploughed and harrowed and are now frozen up. There is not a flower left, not a blade of grass, not a bird to sing,—and it is hard to believe that any brighter flowers, any greener herbage, shall spring up, than those which have been torn away: ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... malaria and solitude. The very existence of Paestum was unknown, except to wandering herdsmen and fishers coasting near its ruined colonnades, until the end of the last century. Yet, strange to relate, after all these revolutions, and in the midst of this total desolation, the only relics of the antique city are three Greek temples, those very temples where the Hellenes, barbarised by their Lucanian neighbours, met to mourn for their lost liberty. It is almost impossible to trace more than the mere circuit of the walls of Poseidonia. Its port, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... its head against his shoulder, the beautiful creature uttering its peculiar purring sound as Rob threw an arm round its neck and began to caress it, ready as he was out there to cling to anything in his weariness and desolation. ...
— Rob Harlow's Adventures - A Story of the Grand Chaco • George Manville Fenn
... tranquillity; occasions for gladness, uplifting, and love; reasons for wonder and gratitude—seeing that the vast bulk of mankind, in whose name we would fain lift our voice, have not even the time or assurance to drain to the dregs the misery and desolation of life. Not to them is it given to linger over the inward rejoicing, the profound consolation, that the satisfied thinker has slowly and painfully acquired, that he knows how to prize. Thus has it often been urged against moralists, among them Epictetus, ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... ideas on the subject. Either their ghosts would wander eternally in the land of shadows, or else they would pass into a succession of other bodies, of animals or men. From the nakedness and desolation of unclothed spirit, and the possibility which this notion held out of some close contact with a holy and just judge, the soul shrank back to the hope of the metempsychosis, and hoped rather to dwell in the body of a brute, than be utterly ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... but at last she looked out of window, and I told her I only wanted to know what could be done for her child, and would send a doctor. Then she told me how to open the door. Poor thing! I found her the picture of desolation, in the midst of the dreary kitchen, with the child gasping on her lap; all the pretence of widowhood gone, and her hair hanging loose about her face, which was quite white with hunger, and her great eyes looked wild, like the glare of a wild beast's in a den. I spoke to ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... world—such, at least, as they saw it then—was doomed, Scripture and their own reason taught them. They did not merely believe, but see, in the misery and confusion, the desolation and degradation around them, that all that was in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, was not of the Father, but of the world; that the world was passing away, and ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... news had reached him on landing. There were troubles on every side. On the 11th of October he wrote the "Epistle to a Friend" ("Oh, banish care," &c.) and the lines "To Thyrza," which, with other elegies, were appended to the second edition of Childe Harold (April 17, 1812). It was this cry of desolation, this open profession of melancholy, which at first excited the interest of contemporaries, and has since been decried as morbid and unreal. No one who has read his letters can doubt the sincerity of his grief, but it is no less true that he measured and appraised its literary significance. He could ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... ramparts from the roofs of the houses in close proximity to the walls. If, however, they could gain admittance by none of these means, and time was of no consideration, they would resign themselves to a lengthy siege, and the blockade would commence by a systematic desolation of the surrounding country, in which the villages scattered over the plain would be burnt, the vines torn up, and ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... much that I intend to return to it; but I must confess that its fascinations depend rather upon what it has not than upon what it has, and Ito says that it would kill him to spend even two days there. It looks like the end of all things, as if loneliness and desolation could go no farther. A sandy stretch on three sides, a river arrested in its progress to the sea, and compelled to wander tediously in search of an outlet by the height and mass of the beach thrown up by the Pacific, a ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... are born and mighty planets die And hissing comets scorch the brow of space, The Universe keeps its eternal calm. Through patient preparation, year on year, The earth endures the travail of the Spring And Winter's desolation. So our souls In grand submission to a higher law Should move serene through all the ills of ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... folly. All this, however, quadrates with the character of a good republican; as he hates England, why not murder English?" In April, 1803, Dennie denounced Democratic Government, and prophesied that of it would come "civil war, desolation and anarchy." His pranks had now become too broad to bear with, and on the Fourth of July this latest publication of his was condemned as "an inflammatory and seditious libel," and a bill of indictment was found. The case was tried in November, 1805, Ingersoll and Hopkinson appearing for the defence. ...
— The Philadelphia Magazines and their Contributors 1741-1850 • Albert Smyth
... season be beaten out of their thick husks and stored away for winter nights by the blazing hearth, and in their veins, too, was the wine and the fragrance of that brief carnival that comes before the desolation of winter. ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... London an hour before sunrise, on a summer's morning, is most striking even to the few whose unfortunate pursuits of pleasure, or scarcely less unfortunate pursuits of business, cause them to be well acquainted with the scene. There is an air of cold, solitary desolation about the noiseless streets which we are accustomed to see thronged at other times by a busy, eager crowd, and over the quiet, closely-shut buildings, which throughout the day are swarming with life and bustle, that is ...
— Sketches by Boz - illustrative of everyday life and every-day people • Charles Dickens
... the night of his memorable quarrel with Dr. Percy, no doubt regretting the violence and boisterous rudeness with which he had attacked an amiable and gifted man. From Bolt Court he walked to service at St. Clement's Church on the day he rejoiced in comparing the animation of Fleet Street with the desolation of the Hebrides. It was from Bolt Court Boswell drove Johnson to dine with General Paoli, a drive memorable for the fact that on that occasion Johnson uttered his first and only ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... the distant fires and lights which give to the vicinity of certain manufactories so preternatural an appearance, streaming red and wild over the waste. So abandoned by man appeared the spot, that you found it difficult to imagine that it was only from human fires that its bleak and barren desolation was illumined. For miles along the moor you detected no vestige of any habitation; but as you approached the verge nearest to the town, you could just perceive at a little distance from the main road, ...
— Ernest Maltravers, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... his eyes and glanced from city to city, to Albert, Bapaume, and Arras, his gaze moved over a plain with its harvest of desolation lying forlorn and ungathered, lit by the flashing clouds and the moon and peering rockets. He turned ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... fell into an uncontrollable fit of weeping at the sense of her own desolation and helplessness, and Mrs. Curtis came to comfort her, and tell her affectionately of having gone through the like feelings, and of the repeated but most comfortable words of promise to the fatherless and the widow—words that had ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... prison. Restraint, sickness, age, extreme poverty, misery, which I have no power to remove or alleviate,—these are the ideas, the feelings, which the sight of those walls excites; yet, perhaps, if not certainly, they contain less of that extreme desolation than the morbid fancy is apt to paint. There will be found order, cleanliness, food, clothing, warmth, refuge for the homeless, medicine and attendance for the sick, rest and sufficiency for old age, and sympathy, the ...
— Our Village • Mary Russell Mitford
... away aching desolation overwhelmed her. Brian's face with its passion and pain rose before her dry, burning eyes. Then darkness came, blotting out the sunshine; the little stream trickling into its stony basin seemed to grow into a roaring cataract, the waters to rush into ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... have done anything towards improving the church is a fact that speaks as plainly as possible of its being already in good condition. Had there been anything like the desolation that some accounts pretend, Ernulf would have spared no exertions in his endeavours to put things right. He came from Canterbury, where he was Prior, and where he had already distinguished himself as a zealous builder; but all that is recorded as due to him at Burgh is the completion ...
— The Cathedral Church of Peterborough - A Description Of Its Fabric And A Brief History Of The Episcopal See • W.D. Sweeting
... object to the cruel tyranny and oppression with which we have been governed, and demand our freedom. Your march through the country has been marked by violence and outrage of every conceivable description, and you have left in your track nothing but death and desolation. The measure of your iniquity is full, and Cuba will endure no more. Your General Weyler has declared a war of extermination against Cubans, and you who execute his murderous mandate must pay the penalty. Yet, since ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... of it, namely this, which I have been urging upon you throughout these letters, that all redemption must begin in subjection and in the recovery of the sense of Fatherhood and authority, as all ruin and desolation begin in the loss of that sense. The lost son began by claiming his rights. He is found when he resigns them. He is lost by flying from his father, when his father's authority was only paternal. He is found by returning to his father, and desiring that his authority ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin
... on the humble plan used in the building of Scotch cottages about a century ago, the greater part of them had been long deserted; and their fallen roofs, blackened gables, and ruinous walls, showed Desolation's triumph over Poverty. On some huts the rafters, varnished with soot, were still standing, in whole or in part, like skeletons, and a few, wholly or partially covered with thatch, seemed still inhabited, ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott
... returns, and the familiar song of the birds shall sweeten the renewing woods afresh for a million springs. Apollo weeping over the beauteous and darling boy, his slain and drooped Hyacinthus, is the sun shorn of his fierce beams and mourning over the annual wintry desolation: it is also Nature bewailing the remediless loss of man, her favorite companion. It was these general analogies and suggestions, striking the imagination, affecting the heart, enlisting the reason, wrought ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... every stay, From Hope exil'd, with Woe I keep My vigils, each sad sorrowing day, And wake, each dreary night, to weep!— By Penury chill'd poetic powers, No voice to soothe, no hand to save, And snatch a victim from the grave,— Around me Desolation lours, And glaring, midst the deep'ning gloom, Despair and Famine urge ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... of many fair cities of antiquity, whose nameless ruins encumber the plains of Europe and Asia, and awaken the fruitless inquiry of the traveler? They have sunk into dust and silence—they have perished from remembrance for want of a historian! The philanthropist may weep over their desolation—the poet may wander among their mouldering arches and broken columns, and indulge the visionary flights of his fancy—but alas! alas! the modern historian, whose pen, like my own, is doomed to confine itself to dull ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... them in the eyes of the inhabitants so suspicious an appearance, that no one would harbour them; and while her husband ran from inn to inn vainly imploring admittance, the afflicted duchess was compelled to betake herself to the shelter of a church porch; and there, in that misery and desolation and want of every thing, was delivered of a child, to whom, in memory of the circumstance, she gave the name of Peregrine. Bertie meantime, addressing himself in Latin to two young scholars whom he overheard speaking together in that language, obtained a direction to a ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... swaying carriage brought the travellers nearer, Victoria could see deep red and brown stripes, separated by narrow bands of white. For background, there was a knot of trees; for they had come south of El Aghouat to the strange region of dayas, where the stony desolation is broken by little emerald hollows, running with water, like big round bowls stuck full ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... immediately after my return from France to London, when I could not but be struck, as here described, with the vanity and parade of our own country, especially in great towns and cities, as contrasted with the quiet, and I may say the desolation, that the Revolution had produced in France. This must be borne in mind, or else the reader may think that in this and the succeeding Sonnets I have exaggerated the mischief engendered and fostered among us by undisturbed wealth. It would not be easy to conceive ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... popular on their coronation day. Kobad was certainly no exception to the general rule. His subjects rejoiced at the termination of a war which had always been a serious drain on the population, and which latterly had brought ruin and desolation upon the hearths and homes of thousands. The general emptying of the prisons was an act that cannot be called statesman-like; but it had a specious appearance of liberality, and was probably viewed with favor by the mass of the people. A ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 7. (of 7): The Sassanian or New Persian Empire • George Rawlinson
... mark whom I was asked to join. It was about one o'clock in the morning. The shutters were up. For some reason or other the electric light was not switched on, and the big room was lit up only by a few tall candles, just enough for us to see each other's faces by. I saw in those faces the awful desolation of men whose country, torn in three, found itself engaged in the contest with no will of its own, and not even the power to assert itself at the cost of life. All the past was gone, and there was no future, whatever happened; no road ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... for a little while from that blackened waste across the sea, which had been trodden into desolation under the heel of a ruthless aggressor and was still shrieking as with the screams of hell. He had gone there willingly, eagerly, enthusiastically, doing the work and sharing the risk of every other soldier of the King, and he would go back, ...
— The Drama Of Three Hundred & Sixty-Five Days - Scenes In The Great War - 1915 • Hall Caine
... been one or two seasons in my life during which I have felt as if the darkness of sorrow and desolation that crushed my inmost heart could never pass away until death should make me cease to feel. The present ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... are deeply sown within their breasts, and that, if they saw any probability that her Majesty's troops would be subdued, they would at once go over to the rebels; and after asking what has brought this state of things about—what led to the war on the frontier—the desolation of some of the finest districts—desecration of their homesteads, and the spilling of the best blood of the colonists—attributes it to the want of ...
— Kathay: A Cruise in the China Seas • W. Hastings Macaulay
... earnestness, that if he were that moment convinced—a conviction, the possibility of which, indeed, he could not realize to himself—that the New Testament was a forgery from beginning to end—wide as the desolation in his moral feelings would be, he should not abate one jot of his faith in God's power and mercy through some manifestation of his being towards man, either in time past or future, or in the hidden ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... furniture were used to feed bonfires. Doors were torn from their hinges, windows dashed in, costly mirrors broken with hammers. Destruction swept the island, all its improvements being ruthlessly destroyed. For months the mansion stood, an eyesore of desolation, until some hand, moved by the last impulse of savagery, set it on fire, and it was ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 1 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... of Chiven, God of destruction and desolation, who has, however, for his emblem the symbol of generation. He is the most wicked of the three, and he has the most followers. These men, proud of his character, express in their devotions to him their contempt for the other gods,* his ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... south, and there form a colony of free men.' His wife wept as she listened to him, and I myself wept as I looked at her. Oh! how much the outpourings of confidence console and fortify minds that are in desolation. I drew a rapid sketch of the resources and hopes of Liberty in the south. A serene expression of joy spread over Roland's brow: he squeezed my hand, and we traced on a map of France the limits of this empire of Liberty, ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... hours! If he had said a couple of years, the words could have brought, it seemed, no deeper sense of desolation. Hardly had he gone, however, when the door-bell rang, and word was brought to Lois, who with Dosia had gone up-stairs, that it was Mr. Harker from the typometer office. The visitor, a tall, colorless, darkly sack-coated man, with a jaded necktie, had entered the little drawing-room with a decorously ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol 31, No 2, June 1908 • Various
... the purpose of setting fire to the little towns, villages, and hamlets which lay in the route, and the rich crops with which the land was then covered. The whole country was in a blaze. Those who were ordered to preside at this work of destruction seemed eager to spread desolation on every side, as if they could thereby avenge themselves for their reverses, and find in such dreadful havoc an alleviation of their sufferings. We were constantly surrounded by plunderers, incendiaries, and the dying, who, stretched ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... more than his own life or all that a thousand lives might hold for him, he loved the violet-eyed girl who had come into his life from the desolation and unhappiness of ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood
... weeds and grass. But as they neared the mining district the soil was bleak and barren. The mountain rivers were dry, and their beds made yawning gaps as though the earth had violently shuddered at her own desolation. ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... itself into one round of boyish homesickness and desolation; then gradually, as the marvellous healing properties of youth began to stir, a new feeling awakened in his mind—a sense of curiosity concerning the strange old man whom fate, by a twist of the wheel, had made the arbiter of his life. Even to one ...
— The Mystics - A Novel • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... broods Profoundly o'er these solitudes; Nought but the lapsing of the floods Breaks the deep stillness of the woods; A sense of desolation reigns O'er these unpeopled forest plains. Where sounds of life ne'er wake a tone Of cheerful praise round Nature's throne, Man finds himself ...
— Roughing it in the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... we burn and slaughter, Spread desolation wide, If still, by land and water, Thou fightest ...
— The New York Times Current History of the European War, Vol. 1, January 9, 1915 - What Americans Say to Europe • Various
... them to go away with his daughter. It is said that several, in their despair, hung themselves, fearing to be taken from their parents. Sons were separated from fathers, daughters from mothers, and all departed with deep groans and maledictions, and in Paris there reigned a desolation like that of Egypt. Not a few, of superior birth, being forced to go away, even made wills whereby they left their possessions to the churches, and demanded that, so soon as the young girl should have entered Spain, their wills ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 6 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality. French. • Charles Morris
... grasped the arms of her chair convulsively. She looked at her aunt with desolation in her dark-ringed eyes. The last thing she had ever intended was to mention the mysterious and disastrous fate that had befallen her; yet she ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... locked up and sequestered from vulgar use, except on occasions of memorable affliction, where everything is purposely in disorder—broken—shattered—mutilated: to typify, by symbols appalling to the eye, that desolation which has so long trampled on Jerusalem, and the ravages of the boar within the vineyards of Judea. My mother, as a Hebrew princess, maintained all traditional customs. Even in this wretched suburb she had her 'chamber of desolation.' There it was that I and my ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... Cook's tourists' interpreter, while our quartermasters reaped a harvest of small change from personally conducted parties. But when the move was made—that move which carried us some mile and a half down the stream to be tied up to an altogether muddier and shabbier quay—then indeed the desolation of solitude became our lot. It was a complete and soundless stagnation; for as we had the ship ready for sea to the smallest detail, as the frost was hard and the days short, we were absolutely idle—idle to the point of blushing with shame when the thought struck ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... greeted her with a deplorable copiousness of tact. Most tactfully they avoided any reference to Constance's loss; but by their tone, their glances, at Constance and at each other, and their heroically restrained sighs, they spread desolation as though they had been spreading ashes instead of butter on bread. The assistants, too, had a special demeanour for the poor lone widow which was excessively trying to her. She wished to be natural, and she would have succeeded, had they not all of them apparently conspired together to ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... done that hand could do, She rested, and her desolation came Upon her, and she wept ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... sui generis—quite unlike anything else in the world. The vast undulating plain called the Campagna is divided among very few proprietors in comparison to its extent, who hold immense estates, which are more profitable than the appearance of the country, smitten to all seeming with a curse of desolation, would lead a stranger to suppose. These huge properties are held mainly by the great Roman papal families and by monastic corporations whose monasteries are within the city. In either case the property is practically inalienable, and has been passed from father to son for generations, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... widowed man had seemed in the big, empty house during those chill, sorrow-stricken, February days! No wonder he had sought escape from his desolation in another marriage—his loneliness without the lovely little mother must have been unbearable. What was the new wife like, he wondered? Was she like the lady of the manor he remembered? Could there be another such gentle, tender, flower-like ...
— The Dreamer - A Romantic Rendering of the Life-Story of Edgar Allan Poe • Mary Newton Stanard
... village, loveliest of the lawn, 35 Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, And desolation saddens all thy green: One only master grasps the whole domain, And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain: 40 No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, But chok'd with sedges, works its weedy way. Along thy glades, a ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... rapid succession, and the density of the population was in agreeable contrast to the desolation of many parts of the lower Amoor. It was a panorama of houses, temples, groves, and fields, with a surrounding of rich meadows and gentle hills. There was a range of low mountains in the background, but on the Russian shore the flat ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... to the trenches north of the Sainte Lesse salient. A north wind, according to season, brought snow or rain or fog upon British, French, Belgian and Boche alike. Winds of the south carried distant exhalations from orchards and green fields into the pitted waste of ashes where that monstrous desolation stretched away beneath a thundering iron rain which beat all day, all night upon the ...
— Barbarians • Robert W. Chambers
... by this first intimation that her father's house was no longer her home. A more real sense of desolation came upon her. Under its cold influence she began to collect herself, and to feel her pride rising like a barrier between her and ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... wagon with his eye, marvelling greatly as to the nature of its concealed contents, until it had also gained the summit of the eminence, and in its turn disappeared behind the swell of the land. Then he turned to gaze at the desolation of the scene around him. The absence of human forms would have scarce created a sensation in the bosom of one so long accustomed to solitude, had not the site of the deserted camp furnished such strong memorials ...
— The Prairie • J. Fenimore Cooper
... I returned. The host himself brought my breakfast into the parlour. I requested him to shut the door and sit down: I had some questions to ask him. But when he complied, I scarcely knew how to begin; such horror had I of the possible answers. And yet the spectacle of desolation I had just left prepared me in a measure for a tale of misery. The host was a ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... God. A Persian was used to punish our recreant fathers, and he carried them into captivity; another Persian was selected to restore their children to the Holy Land; greater than either of them, however, was the Macedonian through whom the desolation of Judea and the Temple was avenged. The special distinction of the men was that they were chosen by the Lord, each for a divine purpose; and that they were Gentiles does not lessen their glory. Do not lose sight of ...
— Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ • Lew Wallace
... miserable appearance baffles all description. I have not seen six cabins out of six hundred, where the windows have been whole. Old hats, old clothes, old boards, old fragments of blanket and paper, are stuffed into the broken glass; and their air is misery and desolation. It pains the eye to see the stumps of great trees thickly strewn in every field of wheat; and never to lose the eternal swamp and dull morass, with hundreds of rotten trunks, of elm and pine and sycamore and logwood, steeped in its unwholesome water; where the frogs ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... his knees, accompanied by all his domestic servants, he held it upwards to the flames, and invoked Father Francis to his assistance. At the same instant the fire was extinguished of itself; and the town in this manner preserved from desolation, when it was ready to ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI. (of 18) - The Life of St. Francis Xavier • John Dryden
... and rather overwhelming, had hung about the forbidding place which allied to the abomination of desolation had disconcerted him, and made him turn to the guide ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... had looked forward, then, even to that bitter time—far off, she prayed God!—when she would be alone—a woman no longer young, without parents, husband, or child, or smiling home. She doubted not that her father had written this letter to counsel and comfort her at such a season of desolation, years after he was ...
— Olive - A Novel • Dinah Maria Craik, (AKA Dinah Maria Mulock)
... kingdoms of Death, with all their innumerable silent nations and generations, stood before him; the inexorable word, NEVER! now first showed its meaning. My Mother wept, and her sorrow got vent; but in my heart there lay a whole lake of tears, pent up in silent desolation. Nevertheless the unworn Spirit is strong; Life is so healthful that it even finds nourishment in Death: these stern experiences, planted down by Memory in my Imagination, rose there to a whole cypress-forest, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... looking from Peter to the mound, then at the wide sweep of the ranges about. The whole world was spread before him in utter silence; range beyond range, desert beyond desert into a violet distance so great that the fancy staggered in contemplating it. For the first time a feeling of utter desolation swept over Roger. ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... she left Steel's Corner, Leam turned up into the wood, making for the old hiding-place where she and Alick had so often sat in the first days of her desolation and when he had been her sole comforter. She was very sorrowful, and oppressed with doubts and self-reproaches. As she climbed the steep wood-path, her eyes fixed on the ground, her empty basket in her hand, and her ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, April, 1876. • Various
... nearing Ritzen. Across the mysterious desolation she discerned its many lights. It was a city in a plain, and the far hills mounted guard around it, but she saw them only dimly in the ...
— The Top of the World • Ethel M. Dell
... (no witch was ever burned in New England), hundreds of innocent men and women were imprisoned, or fled into exile or hiding places, their homes were broken up, their estates were ruined, and their families and friends were left in sorrow, anxiety, and desolation; and all this terrorism was wrought at the instance of the chief men in the communities, ...
— The Witchcraft Delusion In Colonial Connecticut (1647-1697) • John M. Taylor
... glooming to purple, the gelid water writhed nakedly. Spectral islands elbowed each other, to peer at us as we flitted past. Still more wraithlike the mainland, fringed to the sea foam with saturnine pine, faded away into fastnesses of impregnable desolation. There was a sense of deathlike passivity in the land, of overwhelming vastitude, of unconquerable loneliness. It was as if I had felt for the first time the Spirit of the Wild; the Wild where God broods amid His silence; the Wild, His infinite ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... weary months it was our portion to live amid the scenes of destruction, desolation, poverty, want and woe; sometimes in tents, sometimes without; and so much rain and mud, and such a lack of the commonest comforts for a time, until we could build houses to shelter ourselves and those around us. Without a safe and with a dry-goods box for a desk, we conducted ...
— A Story of the Red Cross - Glimpses of Field Work • Clara Barton
... set out, and, with few interruptions, arrived at a place half-way up the mountain called The Hermitage. Here they rested, and leaving their horses behind, walked on over a barren region to the foot of the cone. All around was the abomination of desolation. Craggy rocks, huge, disjointed masses of shattered lava-blocks, cooled off into the most grotesque shapes, mixed with ashes, scoriae, and pumice-stones. The cone towered frowningly above their heads. Looking up, the aspect was not ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... his way into the still smouldering hut, and began to busy himself with preparations, whilst Stane looked round again. The darkness, and the figures lying in the snow gave the scene an indescribable air of desolation, and for a moment he stood without moving; then, as something occurred to him, he began to walk towards the place where he had been struck down. Three figures lay there huddled grotesquely in the snow, and to one of them he owed his life. Which of them was it? Two of ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... action or of policy in the influences which brought on the present war, but also because it was manifestly our duty to prevent, if it were possible, the indefinite extension of the fires of hate and desolation kindled by that terrible conflict and seek to serve mankind by reserving our strength and our resources for the anxious and difficult days of restoration and healing which must follow, when peace will have to ...
— From Isolation to Leadership, Revised - A Review of American Foreign Policy • John Holladay Latane
... shall be smitten with hail; the locusts shall eat up every green thing in the land; and at last all the first-born of Egypt shall die in one night, and the land be filled with mourning, horror, and desolation, before the anger of this terrible God, who will destroy and destroy ...
— The Gospel of the Pentateuch • Charles Kingsley
... there was an awe-inspiring menace in its dry, bleaching, monotonous levels. He felt more keenly than ever his own helplessness in such a situation and congratulated himself on having fallen in with his two guides. He wondered that the plain had not impressed him more deeply with its desolation and barrenness when he came out to the ranch. But he had no doubt of the ability and good faith of his two companions and he drew his horse a little nearer to ...
— With Hoops of Steel • Florence Finch Kelly
... its value is nil. Artsybashev and Andreyev were very second-rate writers; they had no knowledge of their art and their taste was deplorably bad and crude, but at least they were in a way, sincere, and gave expression to the genuine vacuum and desolation of their hearts. But around them sprung up a literature which sold as well and better than they did, but was openly meretricious and, fortunately, ephemeral. If it has done nothing else the great Revolution of 1917 has at least done ...
— Tales of the Wilderness • Boris Pilniak
... could stand in the center of Hiroshima and get a view of the most of the city; the hills prevented a similar overall view in Nagasaki. Hiroshima impressed itself on one's mind as a vast expanse of desolation; but nothing as vivid was left ...
— The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki • United States
... defiant in her desolation, some subtle thread of association, guided, perhaps, by the invisible fingers of her guardian angel, led her mind to a favorite couplet ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... were covered deep with fallen leaves, and the naked branches spoke of the desolation of ...
— The Black Douglas • S. R. Crockett
... done so only a few minutes before I left Kachi at 21,000 feet. The cold was intense. The stars were extraordinarily brilliant and the moon shone bright for a while over the panorama around me, and though it was a view of utter desolation, it had nevertheless a curious indescribable fascination. Below me, to the south, were mountainous masses buried in snow, and to the South-West and North-East were peaks even higher than the one on which I stood. To the north stretched the immense, dreary Tibetan plateau with undulations and ...
— In the Forbidden Land • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... on the little place; A beehive round it was, without a trace Of occupant or owner; standing dim Among the gloomy trees it seemed to Him A final desolation, the last word Wherewith the lips of silence had been stirred. Chaste and remote, so tiny and so shy, So new withal, so lost to any eye, So pac't of memories all innocent Of days and nights that in it had been spent In blithe communion, Adam, Eve, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1911-12 • Various
... support; Alette's father has been now dead two years: Alette removed to some near relatives, in order after a certain time, to give her hand to a man whom she has long loved; and I sought in travel to dissipate the feeling of desolation which had seized on my heart. It was at this moment that business, or rather Providence, conducted me to you. Admiration, and an interest whose power I cannot describe, drew me towards you; perhaps, unknown to me, darkly operated in me the delightful ...
— Strife and Peace • Fredrika Bremer
... King Leopold's regime meant the death of twelve million natives, "but what we who were behind the scenes felt most keenly was the fact that the real catastrophe in the Congo was desolation and murder in the larger sense. The invasion of family life, the ruthless destruction of every social barrier, the shattering of every tribal law, the introduction of criminal practices which struck the chiefs of the people dumb with horror—in a word, a veritable avalanche of filth ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... ever when freemen shall stand, Between their loved homes and the war's desolation; Blessed with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just, And this be our motto, "In God is our trust." And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave, O'er the land ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth
... all the general aspect of the country on this side of the valley of Mexico, suffice it to say, that there is a universal air of dreariness, vastiness, and desolation. The country is flat, but always enlivened by the surrounding mountains, like an uninteresting painting in a diamond frame; and yet it is not wholly uninteresting. It has a character peculiar to itself, great plains of maguey, ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... raised in them an ambition to share in the powers of government. The struggles which ensued, first between the Fujiwara and Taira, and then between the Taira and Minamoto, continued to keep the country embroiled for more than a century. The suffering and desolation resulting from these weary internecine wars can only be paralleled by such conflicts as that between the White and Red Roses in England, or the Thirty Years' War in Germany. Of these struggles it will be possible to give only ...
— Japan • David Murray
... passed through valleys, on first descending from the mountains, where the yellow oat-grass (or Anthisteria) resembled a ripe crop of grain. But this resemblance to the emblem of plenty made the desolation of these hopeless solitudes only the more apparent, abandoned as they then were alike by man, beast, and bird. No living thing remained in these valleys, for water, that element so essential to life, was a want too obvious in the dismal silence (for not an ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... with a sigh, as he took in the unkempt desolation of it all, "this is sanguinary. This is unusually sanguinary. Sort o' mad country. Like a grate when the fire's put out by the sun." He shaded his eyes against the moonlight. "An' there's a loony dancin' ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... remain on the other. For you have heaped up crime upon crime. I find none of you thirsty, but you are all the worse for drinking. The cup is full, and the present generation shall know it. When desolation comes over the land, then let him who is in the valley flee to the mountain, and let him who is in the field not return into the city, and let him who is on the roof not come down, in order to fetch his coat from the house. Fire and sword will ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... in the London house that he had taken and join in social life, or go away to some quiet retreat, and be seen no more." It was in a modified form the story of the "fervid youth grown man," in his own "Daniel Bartoli," who in his desolation, after ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... Examining it more carefully he saw that the pressure was threatening to open up a wide crack in the gate; and, child as he was, he knew that if it were not stopped that little stream would soon become a cascade, a great sheet of water, a torrent, and then a terrible inundation which would end in desolation and death. So the little fellow did not hesitate. He determined to try and prevent the mischief. Reaching up to the hole he placed his finger in it, but soon he found that the wood was rotten, and that ...
— Little Folks (November 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... yet before these people when they would begin to realise that they called in vain on their God, that they had no monopoly of the Almighty, that the God of their fathers fights no longer on the side of the Boers, but on that of the big battalions. This will be the desolation of downfall. ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... for him.[484] But it was too late, for the wrath of the Lord, coming everywhere upon them, pursued them even unto destruction.[485] How, in a few days, is their memorial perished with resounding noise;[486] how are they brought into desolation, they are consumed in a moment, they are punished for their iniquity.[487] A great miracle to-day is the extinction of that generation, so quickly wrought, especially for those who knew their pride and power.[488] And many other signs truly[489] were there by which God glorified His name and ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... to marry. He is a general favorite, but turned to me as to a friend and teacher. He is poor, and it was possible for me to guarantee him a good education. I began to help him from the longings of a lonely life. I wanted a son and a friend in my inward desolation. I craved the companionship of this pure and happy nature. I felt such a reverence for him that I hoped to find the sensuous element in me purged away by his purity. I am, indeed, utterly incapable ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... of my life. I must turn to the work of peace now. I have no fireplace over which to hang the trusty blade. It is better to bury it here in the mountains in the midst of desolation, and forever to forget ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... piano was open, the bacchanal from 'Orphee aux Enfers' on the music-shelf, and the gaudy hangings surrounding that scene of desolation, the chairs overturned, as if in fear, reminded one of the saloon of a wrecked packet-boat, of one of those ghostly nights of watching when one is suddenly informed, in the midst of a fete at sea, that the ship has sprung a leak, that she is taking ...
— Fromont and Risler, Complete • Alphonse Daudet
... feminine malice and spite she could not readily forgive another of her own sex for being beautiful, refined and attractive. She said emphatically, that "it was well that, in this world, pride could sometimes be humbled;" but for all that, the memory of that day so long ago, passed alone in her desolation and sorrowful widowhood, lent a pitying sadness to her voice that placed her infinitely above these other soulless ones of her sex, with their cold eyes ...
— Clemence - The Schoolmistress of Waveland • Retta Babcock
... for his wife, so Mary gave her her seat on the cart, and walked with Lucy three miles beyond, where we heard that Lilly and the children had arrived in a cart, early in the day. All the talk by the roadside was of burning homes, houses knocked to pieces by balls, famine, murder, desolation; so I comforted myself singing, "Better days are coming" and "I hope to die shouting, the Lord will provide"; while Lucy toiled through the sun and dust, and answered with a chorus of "I'm a-runnin', ...
— A Confederate Girl's Diary • Sarah Morgan Dawson
... unjust to deny that when in "The Sea Lions" Cooper abandons his metaphysics and turns to his real business, that he creates a powerful story. One may almost be said at times to feel the cold, the desolation, the darkness, and the gloom of an Antarctic winter confronting and overshadowing the spirit. But there can be little that is more tedious than the dry chaff of theological discussion which is here threshed for us over and over again. Believers in the Trinity had as little reason as believers ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... DEAR NEPHEW AND NIECE,—I am most grievously and fearfully concerned to hear of your sad condition in consequence of the terrible and needless war that is now spreading misery, desolation, and perhaps famine all over the Empire, just to gratify the unbounded ambition of one man. We wish you and your three children could fly over to us and be in safety. Really, if you get at all alarmed, ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... is it then to me, if impious War— Array'd in flames, like to the Prince of Fiends— Do, with his smirch'd complexion, all fell feats Enlink'd to waste and desolation?" ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... of Edgar Allan Poe's poetry—Weird Melancholy. A poem like "L'Allegro" could never be written by an Australian. It is too airy, too sweet, too freshly happy. The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in their shade. In other lands the dying year is mourned, the falling leaves drop lightly ...
— Poems • Adam Lindsay Gordon
... the sight of these bright mountains; something life-like, that prevented us from feeling the extreme and real desolation by which we were surrounded. At times we could not help fancying that we were in a thickly-populated country—a country of vast wealth and civilisation, as appeared from its architectural grandeur. Yet in reality we were journeying through the wildest of earth's dominions, where ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... son without peer? But yourselves shall partake my affliction; Easier far will it be for the pitiless sword of the Argives, Now he is dead, to make havoc of you. For myself, ere I witness Ilion storm'd in their wrath, and the fulness of her desolation, Oh, may the Destiny yield me to enter ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... dead white moon above. I sat down upon the edge of the sink, and with my eyes upon that ghastly pile of silvery light and ominous shadows began to turn over my plans. In the morning I would gather some provisions in the dingey, and after setting fire to the pyre before me, push out into the desolation of the high sea once more. I felt that for Montgomery there was no help; that he was, in truth, half akin to these Beast ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... hound upon one of the principal natives, and the Indian was torn to pieces, whereupon the chief, indignant at his friend's death, caused a boatload of Spaniards to be killed, thus giving Ovando a welcome excuse for the invasion. Four hundred Spaniards dealt death and desolation throughout the region, pursuing the Indians into the mountains and forests and sparing neither women nor children. When at last they captured and hung an aged Indian woman revered as a prophetess, the terrified aborigines ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... the destruction of Troy. Conteining the Founders and foundation of the sayde Citie, with the causes and manner of the first and second spoyles and sacking thereof by Hercules and his followers: and the third and last vtter desolation and ruine, effected by Menelaus, and all the notable Worthies of Greece. Here also are mentioned the rising and flourishing of sundry Kings with their Realmes, as also the decay and ouerthrow of diuers ...
— Catalogue of the Books Presented by Edward Capell to the Library of Trinity College in Cambridge • W. W. Greg
... past few weeks while leading the expedition in the retreat to the southward. When they had decided upon the track of the morrow's advance they sat down for a moment upon the crest of a hummock to breathe themselves, their elbows on their knees, looking off to the south over the desolation of ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... "The Germans drew their gods by their own character, who loved nothing so much themselves as to display their strength and power in battle, and to signalize their vengeance upon their enemies by slaughter and desolation." There remain to this day some traces of the worship paid to Odin in the name given by almost all the people of the north to the fourth day of the week, which was formerly consecrated to him. It is called ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... of a mere fisherman. Though he looked on the coming tide, his eyes seemed to dwell particularly on the black and decayed hulls of two vessels, which, half immersed in the quicksand, still addressed to every heart a tale of shipwreck and desolation. The tide wheeled and foamed around them, and, creeping inch by inch up the side, at last fairly threw its waters over the top, and a long and hollow eddy showed the resistance which the liquid ...
— Folk-Lore and Legends - Scotland • Anonymous
... more crowned by the inhabitants. His brother Pedro, attempting to assassinate him, fell by his hand, and all the consequences of the English expedition were undone—all, save the wasting disease that preyed on England's heir, and the desolation at the orphaned hearth ...
— The Lances of Lynwood • Charlotte M. Yonge
... companion and leader and instructor; prophet of good hope, teacher of good cheer. His figure mingles with my household life, and with the life of my country. I can hardly imagine either without him. He has pictured for us the infinite desolation of the man without a country. But when his time shall come, what will be the desolation of the country without ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar
... Beauty in desolation was her pride, Her crowned array a glory that had been; She faltered tow'rds us like a swan that died, But although ruined she ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... whole world looked gray and cheerless. Again, as on the night before, he heard the rattle of a train in the distance. High up through the drenched murky air, a bird sped across the river, and somehow its disappearance among the hills left Tom with a sinking feeling of utter desolation. In Temple Camp, on a day like this, they would be in ...
— Tom Slade with the Boys Over There • Percy K. Fitzhugh
... itself! There lay the blackened remnants of the wheels and Roman candles, and a large hole was burned in the side of the room. The overalls of the boys, which hung just above, were burned, some one leg, some both; and the room looked like desolation. ...
— Aunt Fanny's Story-Book for Little Boys and Girls • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... the richest in Greece, was plundered of its treasures and consigned to the flames. Corinth was specially distinguished for its perfection in the arts of painting and sculpture, and the poet ANTIP'ATER, of Sidon, thus describes the desolation of the city after its destruction by ...
— Mosaics of Grecian History • Marcius Willson and Robert Pierpont Willson
... thought, without kindling the passions to fierce excitement. The storm which burst with all its fury on the Continent, wrapping nations in the flames of civil war, prostrating, withering, and overwhelming civil institutions, and marking its path with desolation did but exert a salutary influence in England. The lightning was seen flashing in the distant horizon, the rolling thunder could be heard afar off, but the fury of the storm fell at a distance; the atmosphere was purified ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... as a lusty event; for neither could I live to see Athens revive, nor have I much faith in two such bloody-minded vultures, cock and hen, as Catherine and Joseph, conquering for the benefit of humanity; nor does my Christianity admire the propagation of the Gospel by the mouth of cannon. What desolation of peasants and their families by the episodes of forage and quarters! Oh! I wish Catherine and Joseph were brought to Westminster-hall and worried by Sheridan! I hope, too, that the poor Begums are alive to hear of his speech; it will be some comfort, though I ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
... to me, Philemon! I have done what I threatened. I have made the sacrifice. Our child is no longer ours, and now, perhaps, he may live. But oh, my breaking heart! my empty arms! Help me to bear my desolation, for it is for life. We will ...
— Agatha Webb • Anna Katharine Green
... wheel, which was broken by it, for when, after two hours' delay, we tried to start and had gone a little way, there was another crash and the paddle-wheel fell down. You may be sure we did little sleeping that night. It was an inexpressible desolation to think that we might never again see those we loved. No one knows how much one thinks, and ...
— The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe • Charles Edward Stowe
... the figures of the Jewish martyrs of old Ukraina, Gogol can only discern "miserable, terror-stricken creatures." Thus one of the principal founders of Russian fiction set up in its very center the repelling scarecrow of a Jew, an abomination of desolation, which poured the poison of hatred into the hearts of the Russian readers and determined to a certain extent the literary types ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... At long intervals were tables and chairs of jet-black oak, in all sorts and states of decay. On one or two remained the fragments of some crimson velvet,—on the back of one, remnants of a coat of arms! And here, entirely in keeping with the scene of desolation, were the first signs of human life—an old man with a grey beard, leaning upon a stick, who walked slowly back and forth, ...
— The Box with Broken Seals • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... easy to conquer. No man or woman can conquer it alone. Historians tell us that when the first passenger rocket started out for Mars, Space Fear took men by surprise in the same way your fear gripped you. The loneliness, the utter desolation of space, was too much for a human mind ...
— The Man from Time • Frank Belknap Long
... time laboured upward and onward through the snow—which was now above their knees in the track, and of unknown depth elsewhere—and they were still labouring upward and onward through the most frightful part of that tremendous desolation, when snow begin to fall. At first, but a few flakes descended slowly and steadily. After a little while the fall grew much denser, and suddenly it began without apparent cause to whirl itself into spiral shapes. Instantly ensuing ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... the commandant of the fortress had terrible tales to tell of Ulugh Ali's raid on the island, and the horrors that the Turks had perpetrated in the villages, which now presented a scene of ruin and desolation. Gil d'Andrada rejoined the fleet there. He had not seen the Turkish armament, but he had obtained news of it from coasters and fishermen. He estimated from these reports that it was inferior in numbers to the Christian fleet, and he had learned that, as if conscious of its weakness, ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... the river. It is wide and in fine condition so we dash along to where, on the up trip, the first glimpse is gained of the Crystal Range, its two chief peaks, Pyramid and Agassiz, dominating the landscape from this side as they do from Desolation Valley on the ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... its plains the powder "spoke," and the burning douars lighted the roads that their owners had plundered so often. Neither old nor young were spared, and great basketsful of human heads were sent to Red Marrakesh, to be spiked upon the wall by the J'maa Effina. When the desolation was complete from end to end of the province, the Shareefian troops were withdrawn, the few remaining folk of R'hamna were sent north and south to other provinces, the n'zalas were established in ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... than I might seem to need it. Good night!" and even then she gave me a rose, with the same coquetry, I doubt not, that had once made Colonel Jere Lansdale quick to think of his pistols when another evoked it. Only now it masked her weariness, her sense of desperate desolation. I took the rose and kissed her hand. I left her wilting in the big chair, staring hard into the fireplace that Clem had rilled ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... M. Darpent gave his word for us, and obtained for us a pass. And, oh! it was a sad sight to see the great courts and long galleries left all dreary and empty. It made me think of Whitehall and of Windsor, though we little knew that at that very time there was worse there than even desolation. ...
— Stray Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... questions in her mind about the use of money and the duties of rich people. So much work a little money here had done! It was not like the same place. It was a humble place doubtless, and would always be that; but there was cozy warmth instead of desolation; and comfortable tidiness and neatness instead of the wretched condition of things which had made Matilda's heart sick once; and the poor woman herself was decently dressed, and her face had brightened up wonderfully. Matilda read to her, and ...
— The House in Town • Susan Warner
... with rocks, and made away with, after any fashion that might come most readily to the hands of brutes devoid of light, of mercy, of conscience, and apparently of fear. It must have been a terrible sight to see, for those who had first broken in upon the scene of desolation. In the course of the next morning it had become known to the police, and it was soon rumoured throughout England and Ireland that there had been ten murderers engaged in the bloody fray. It must have been ...
— The Landleaguers • Anthony Trollope
... sane being must, from these,—not death itself, tried his spirit so bitterly as his own uselessness. All the pleasant, kindly activities of common intercourse were over. He was removed alike from good deeds and from bad. He had ceased to have part or lot in the affairs of living men. The desolation ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries, to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun, with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a ...
— Key-Notes of American Liberty • Various
... Wild Goose, the Curlew, the Stork, the Bittern, the Sandpiper, etc., awaken quite a different train of emotions from those awakened by the land birds. They all have clinging to them some reminiscence and suggestion of the sea. Their cries echo its wildness and desolation; their wings are the shape ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... arrangement, by Paul Delaroche), the Virgin, kneeling at some distance, and a little above, contemplates her dead Son. The expression and attitude are those of intense anguish, and only anguish. It is the bereaved Mother; it is a craving desolation, which is in the highest degree human and tragic; but it is not the ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... there on the verge of mysteries, beyond our comprehension; but this we know—that it was our sin and the world's, made His by His willing identifying of Himself with us, which built up that black wall of separation. That hour of utter desolation, forsaken by God, deserted by men, was the hour of the world's redemption. And Jesus Christ was forsaken by God and deserted by men, that you and I might never be either the one or the other, but might find in His sweet and constant companionship ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... in the mountains; how Hugh set the trap for the young grizzly, and more wonderful, how he tamed him and made him his friend and servant; how Father Montfort saved the three men who were snowed up in Desolation Gulch, and brought them out one by one on his shoulders, just as their last biscuit was gone and they had sat down to die,—on and on went the tale, for it was a story without an end. On and on went the girls, too, unconscious of their going, forgetting to think they were tired, ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... him his pistol, the only defence he could have retained against hostile attack, and lying on the bare ground, resigned to his fate, urgently requested them to leave him. Imagination, with all the aid of poetical fancy, can conceive no position to exceed this in utter desolation. It has been said, and many may think, they ought not to have separated. No consideration, or argument, should have induced his two companions to abandon him. It was indeed a trying alternative, but falling in with the blacks appeared to ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... have equally inspired the respect of both. He has equally secured the confidence of every class of citizens in a wise civil administration of affairs. He has carried the territory from a state of war and desolation, which it presented at the close of 1815, when the whole population was less than three thousand souls, to a state of sound prosperity, which, in a few years, will develop resources that must class us one of the first ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... my spring. Was there another spring? I knew their noisy desolation well, Drinking it up as a ...
— Poems New and Old • John Freeman
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