|
|
|
More "Dreary" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I wish to avoid her? If she amuses me, diverts my mind, beguiles my pain, or more dreary apathy, why not let her exert her power to the utmost and make herself useful? Yes, but she will try to do more than amuse. Well, suppose she does; one can coolly foil such efforts. Not so sure of that. If I were dealing with a man I could, but one must be worse than a clod to hear her ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... Prince Albert in 1851, and the Advance with Kane, in 1853, were kept prisoners by the ice for several weeks. The odd form of the Devil's Thumb, the dreary deserts in its vicinity, the vast circus of icebergs—some of them more than three hundred feet high—the cracking of the ice, reproduced by the echo in so sinister a manner, rendered the position of the Forward horribly dreary. Shandon understood the necessity of getting out of it and going ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... made me very happy," Mr. Carrollton said to Madam Conway, as, at a late hour, he bade her good-night—"happier than I can well express; for without Margaret life to me would be dreary indeed." ...
— Maggie Miller • Mary J. Holmes
... the trees can be studied at any time, even in winter, when the world outside is bare and dreary, and the evenings are long, and afford fine opportunity for such amusement. And what is more important still, the sheets prepared as we have shown can be sent through the mail to distant parts of the ...
— Harper's Young People, June 1, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... "It was a dreary night, dark and still and terribly cold; the white flakes were falling slowly to the earth, and covering the mother's footsteps ...
— Harper's Young People, December 2, 1879 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... was in Chicago when Frohman bought the play, and he cabled her that she was to do the title part. She afterward declared that this news changed the dull, dreary, soggy day into one that was brilliant and dazzling. "To play Chantecler," she said, "is an honor international in ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... we sipped a dreary, faded reminiscence of former joys and sparkling brilliancy long dead, in cups of Congress-water, brought by unattractive Ganymedes and sold in the train,—draughts flat, flabby, and utterly bubbleless, lukewarm heel-taps with a flavor of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... bodies, or hatchets lop their members, bit by bit; drinking the bitterest poisons, their fate yet holds them back from death. Thus those who found their joy in evil deeds, he saw receiving now their direst sorrow; a momentary taste of pleasure here, a dreary length of suffering there. A laugh or joke because of others' pain, a crying out and weeping now at punishment received. Surely if living creatures saw the consequence of all their evil deeds, self-visited, with hatred would they turn and leave them, fearing the ruin following—the blood ...
— Sacred Books of the East • Various
... Adam the dreams which were very naturally the repetition of her waking thoughts. Petrarch invokes the beauty of Laura. Eloisa, separated from Abelard, is again happy in his company, even amid the "dreary wastes" and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... Zephyr read the whole dreary life at a glance. A fleeting thought came to Zephyr. How would it have been with Madame had she years ago chosen him instead of Pierre? A smile, half pitying, half contemptuous, was suggested by an ...
— Blue Goose • Frank Lewis Nason
... ungyved prance With which his freezing feet he warms, And drag my lady's-chains and dance The galley-slave of dreary forms. ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... that night, and when he awoke in the morning it was with a dreary feeling that a great deal was gone. He was the only child now, and as he stood by the little open grave where Mildred's tiny coffin had been lowered, and as he felt the soft, tight clasp of his mother's hand in his, Arthur felt he would ...
— Left at Home - or, The Heart's Resting Place • Mary L. Code
... the goose hunt seems to elate the Indian more than in anything else. Why, I could never find out. It may be because it is the first spring hunting after the long, dreary winter, and there is the natural gladness that the pleasant springtime has come again. Whatever it may be, I noticed for years more noisy mirth and earnest congratulations on success in the goose ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... just such another dreary day, in just such another December, and not so many years gone by, that the light had gone ...
— Bob, Son of Battle • Alfred Ollivant
... intellect laid bare to him in all its abject incoherency the thing that was untrue, which thenceforth became for him a thing that was not tenable, that it was perilous and scandalous to attempt maintaining. Twenty years in the dreary, weltering lake of parliamentary confusion, with its disappointments and bewilderments, had not quenched this tendency, in which, as we say, he persevered as by a law of nature itself, for the essence of his mind was clearness, healthy purity, incompatibility ...
— On the Choice of Books • Thomas Carlyle
... going on as it had gone on for ten years, with the omnipresent threat of the Death Bath whipping flagged, tired brains to dreary energy. The work kept going on till they dropped worn out at last in their tired seats. Only in Keston's brain, and in mine, flamed the new hope of release. Tomorrow the work would be done, forever. Tomorrow, we would be released, to take our places in the pleasure palaces. To loll at ease, breathing ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... up and up forever, through the spider's web of glens, till he could see the narrow gulfs spread below him, north and south, and east and west; black cracks half-choked with mists, and above all a dreary down. ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... winter slow, Travelling once a forest through Cold and hungry, tired and wet, Began in words like these to fret: "Oh, what a sharp inclement day! And what a dismal, dreary way! No friendly cot, no cheering fields, No food this howling forest yields; I've nought in store or expectation! There's ...
— Aesop, in Rhyme - Old Friends in a New Dress • Marmaduke Park
... desolation of the place. The palette and a few worn brushes were scattered on the floor, where the artist had laid them down for ever. There was one living creature in the room, a young girl, not more than sixteen, sitting on a stool by the open window, looking out listlessly on the stretch of dreary fenland, shrouded in the cold and heavy mist. It was a day on which the scenery of the fen country looked desolate, cheerless, and chill. These green meadows and flat stretches have need of the sunshine to warm them ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... much afflicted at seeing her ill, and I often exclaimed: "Life is so dreary!" "Life is not dreary"—she would immediately say; "on the contrary, it is most gay. Now if you said: 'Exile is dreary,' I could understand. It is a mistake to call 'life' that which must have an end. Such a word should be only used of the joys of Heaven—joys that are unfading—and in this true ...
— The Story of a Soul (L'Histoire d'une Ame): The Autobiography of St. Therese of Lisieux • Therese Martin (of Lisieux)
... altogether selfish, Sherbrooke—and you have no cause to say I am so—if, as you know too well, there is deep, and permanent, and pure and true affection for you at the bottom of my heart, judge what the after-hours of life will be, judge what a long dreary lapse lies before me, between the present ...
— The King's Highway • G. P. R. James
... the dreary weather, I am told that thousands of London people were assembled in the streets to catch a last glimpse of the popular Princess Royal. They could hardly recognize her pleasant, rosy, child- like face—it was so sad, so swollen with weeping. ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... that inhospitable island, and kept six years a close prisoner, and that Sir Hudson Lowe was his executioner. He concluded with these words: "You will end like the proud republic of Venice; and I, dying upon this dreary rock, away from those I hold dear, and deprived of everything, bequeath the opprobrium and horror of my death to the reigning ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... might be. Sears had pondered a good deal concerning it and tried to guess in what possible way the boy could be "in the same boat" with Egbert. There was little use in guessing, however, and he had given up trying. And another week passed, another fruitless, dreary, hopeless week. ...
— Fair Harbor • Joseph Crosby Lincoln
... labyrinth of sluggish and narrow channels of the morass. It was a gloomy journey. The leafless trees frequently met overhead; the long rushes in the wetter parts of the swamp rustled as the cold breezes swept across them, and a slight coating of snow which had fallen the previous night added to the dreary aspect of the scene. At last they ...
— The Dragon and the Raven - or, The Days of King Alfred • G. A. Henty
... miles around, myriads of troops, cavalry, artillery, everything, all camped in the open—no concealment. Mud? Why, everyone is mud, up to the eyes, and so are the horses. This big movement has quite dislocated the ordinary trench warfare, and now all over the dreary uplands are trenches hurriedly dug by the Hun and then abandoned. Trenches that often barely shelter you above the knees. Chaos, chaos. Rifles lying to rust in the mud, duds everywhere, men sitting in dug-outs, not knowing what they are expected to do next. Others in mere scratched-out ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... become very oppressive, and at half-past seven we stopped to breakfast and to water the horses. Half-past eight found us in the saddle again, and we commenced to traverse a dreary plain of yellowish white pumice-stone, interspersed with huge blocks of obsidian, thrown from the mouth of the volcano. At first the monotony of the scene was relieved by large bushes of yellow broom in full flower, and still larger bushes of the beautiful Retama blanca, quite covered ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... should be regarded as the unlimited future, for which no man can be responsible. But such philosophy will too frequently be insufficient for the stoutest hearts. Mountjoy's heart would occasionally almost give way, and then his thoughts would be dreary enough. Hunger, absolute hunger, without the assured expectation of food, had never yet come upon him; but in order to put a stop to its cravings, if he should find it troublesome to bear, he had already provided ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... a girl's stomach should plague her. A single woman; that's it. When she has a man to plague, it will have something besides itself to prey upon. Knowest thou not moreover, that man is the woman's sun; woman is the man's earth?—How dreary, how desolate, the earth, that the suns shines ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... New England, a stranger will be struck with the variety, in taste and feeling, respecting burial-places. Here and there may be seen a solitary grave, in a desolate and dreary pasture lot, and anon under the shade of some lone tree, the simple stone reared by affection to the memory of one known and loved by the humble fireside only. There, on that gentle elevation, sloping green ...
— Masterpieces Of American Wit And Humor • Thomas L. Masson (Editor)
... live with young Freshleigh, with whom you are already chums, and whose apartment has the morning sun; but the first room is a foundation stone in your house of memories. Your trunk is brought in by the Student Transfer man (first lesson in self-help) and put down near the dreary-looking beds with their mattresses doubled on the foot-rail. Then, sitting down by the bare, shining table where, later on, theses are to be written and punches brewed, you stake out claims for the decorative material in your trunk. Certainly decorations ...
— Stanford Stories - Tales of a Young University • Charles K. Field
... goodness, wickedness. A god or a genius could have risen above his fearful isolation. Xerxes was neither. The iron ceremonial of the Persian court left him of genuine pleasures almost none. Something novel, a rare sensation, an opportunity to vary the dreary monotony of splendour by an astounding act of generosity or an act of frightful cruelty,—it mattered little which,—was snatched at by the king with childlike eagerness. And this night Xerxes was in an unwontedly gracious mood. ...
— A Victor of Salamis • William Stearns Davis
... little grating in the door through which Prince Arthur called. A hollow, dreary, murmuring voice replied. It was the voice of the Red Cross Knight, which, when the champion heard, "with furious force and indignation fell" he rent that iron ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... me in its wrath and broke all records sprinting. At noontide I sat down to rest, and rose depressed and dizzy; I'd sat upon a hornet's nest, and all the birds got busy. My whiskers now are full of hay, my legs are lame and weary; it's been a-raining every day, and all the world is dreary. The road will do for those who like a pathway rough and gritty; I've had enough—just watch me hike back to the ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... gone, Louise came down, and found Maxwell in a dreary muse over his manuscript. He looked up at her with a lack-lustre eye, and said, "Godolphin is jealous of Salome now. What he really wants is a five-act monologue that will keep him on the stage all the time. He thinks that as it is, ...
— The Story of a Play - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... many weeks his letters were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand was out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long, long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri—a most inadequate person, in whose vacuity the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... belonged to the deceased Keraunus now dwelt an Egyptian without wife or children—a stern and prudent man who had done good service as house-steward to the prefect Titianus, and the living-room of the evicted family now looked dreary and uninhabited. The mosaic pavement which had indirectly caused the death of Keraunus, was now on its way to Rome, and the new steward had not thought it worth while to fill up the empty, dusty, broken-up place which had been left in the floor ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... proceeded from the cloisters or the universities, even the metaphysical disquisitions of the Nominalists and Realists, and the boundless subtleties of the contending schools of the "Divine Doctors," Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, fall under this description. Dull, dreary, unintelligible, and interminable as they are, they are still in reality works of fancy. They are the offspring, almost exclusively, of the imaginative faculty. It ought not to create surprise, to find that this faculty predominated in the minds and characters ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... sameness of desolation exhibited by these gigantic mountains, offer a striking contrast to the glowing and lively tints of the surrounding country. On their lofty summits the clouds appear to have fixed their abode; and in their inhospitable regions no living thing can dwell.—Still barren and dreary they remain, in the very bosom of luxuriance and cheerfulness; throughout the vicissitudes of climate and season they ...
— Gomez Arias - The Moors of the Alpujarras, A Spanish Historical Romance. • Joaquin Telesforo de Trueba y Cosio
... more obviously to the purpose; but Ariosto gives the ponderousness and dreary triumph of the monster. The comparison of the fly and the mastiff is in the same higher and more epic taste. The classical reader need not be told that the whole ensuing passage, as far as the combat is concerned, ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Vol. 2 • Leigh Hunt
... times nine the serpent folds embrace The marble walls about—which he must tread Before his anxious foot may touch the base: Long in the dreary path, and must be sped! But Love, that holds the mastery of dread, Braces his spirit, and with constant toil He wins his way, and now, with arms outspread, Impatient plunges from the last long coil; So may all ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... to Hartwell in the afternoon. We had previously taken a walk in the environs of the town, and had met the Duchesse d'Angouleme on horseback, accompanied by a Madame Choisi. At five o'clock we set out to Hartwell. The house is large, but in a dreary, disagreeable situation. The King had completely altered the interior, having subdivided almost all the apartments in order to lodge a greater number of people. There were numerous outhouses, in some of which small shops had been ...
— The Greville Memoirs - A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV, Vol. II • Charles C. F. Greville
... a branch of the great Aryan family, whose original settlements are supposed to have been on the high table-lands of Central Asia east of the Caspian Sea, probably in Bactria. They emigrated from that dreary and inhospitable country after Zoroaster had proclaimed his doctrines, after the sacred hymns called the Gathas were sung, perhaps even after the Zend-Avesta or sacred writings of the Zoroastrian priests had been begun,—conquering or driving away Turanian tribes, and migrating to the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... and dreary law of gravitation made it fall, but the glorious law of life, known only to God, drew it up out of the earth and hung it in all its inexplicable wonder high in ...
— Great Testimony - against scientific cruelty • Stephen Coleridge
... stories began to affect me in spite of myself. There were times when I felt very dreary. Perhaps Aunt Philippa was right. Perhaps men possessed neither truth nor constancy. Certainly Mark had forgotten me. I was ashamed of myself because this hurt me so much, but I could not help it. I grew pale and listless. Aunt Philippa ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... and we saw the drops fall into plashes, and the plashes were wrinkling under their blows. It was a damp, gray day—a very dreary day. The snow still lay on the roofs, while on the ground, here and there, were dark spots of mud. And the snow on the roofs, too, was covered with a brownish, muddy coating. The rain trickled slowly, producing a mournful sound. ...
— Twenty-six and One and Other Stories • Maksim Gorky
... afloat, Captain Lascelles carried him off, as well as his own two midshipmen, with, of course, Queerface and the two parrots. The Ranger went away to the southward, where she cruised without much success. Those only who have been long on the coast know what dreary work it often is, how homesick many poor fellows become, how easily, when the coast fever gets hold of them, the destroyer gains the victory. They had been some two or three weeks at sea, when a man-of-war ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... hopeless. Heartsick and discouraged, he rallied from each disappointment, only to face defeat again. He had spent weeks in fruitless journeying, following up every clue that presented itself, waited days at hospitals for chiefs of staff, and made the dreary round of newspaper offices, where knowledge of every conceivable subject is supposedly upon file ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... that I am somewhat of your opinion, Paolo. My father brought me up a Protestant like yourself, and when I was quite young I had a very dreary time of it while he was away, living as I did in the house of a Huguenot pastor. After that I attended the Protestant services in the barracks, for all the officers and almost all the men are Protestants, and, of course, were allowed to have their own services; but the minister, who was a Scotchman, ...
— Won by the Sword - A Story of the Thirty Years' War • G.A. Henty
... I had married her that I realized what a delightful thing it was to be alive. My former existence, looked back on from that time, seemed but a blank expanse through which I had stagnated as a chrysalis lingers on, half alive, through the dreary months ...
— The Uttermost Farthing - A Savant's Vendetta • R. Austin Freeman
... a gale of wind from the southward all night, and next morning such a surf was breaking upon the beach that to have attempted to move would have been madness. Here we were therefore once more kept prisoners upon this dreary coast; the country was exactly similar to that lying immediately to the north of it, with these two exceptions, that the range of sandhills was less elevated, and that we could not here find fresh water. The morning was passed in searching for it; in the middle of the day I read a few appropriate ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... surge through his whole body. "Bud, I want him here. I want to be always around to help him when he gets bumping into potholes. It's that weakness that sets me crazy when I think. He ain't made for the dreary grind of the life we live. That's why he cut it out when I came here. Well there's no grind for him now, and I want to have him come along and share in with me. That's why I'm talking now. From this moment on we're a great proposition in the ranching world, ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum
... made her stop a moment with her back to him. "Think better of that. You are too young, too beautiful, too much made to be happy and to make others happy. If you are afraid of losing your freedom, I can assure you that this freedom here, this life you now lead, is a dreary bondage to what I will offer you. You shall do things that I don't think you have ever thought of. I will take you anywhere in the wide world that you propose. Are you unhappy? You give me a feeling that you are unhappy. You have no right to be, or to ...
— The American • Henry James
... Very little happened. The Vicar and his wife dined there occasionally, and still more occasionally Father Mahon. Now and then there were vague entertainments to be patronized in the village schoolroom, in an atmosphere of ink and hair-oil, and a mild amount of rather dreary and stately gaiety connected with the big houses round. Mrs. Baxter occasionally put in appearances, a dignified and aristocratic old figure with her gentle eyes and black lace veil; ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... Every single soul in this dreary building. Considering he never left the flat, it's wonderful - wonderful; but he knew all the children, and they all knew him. And if you know the children you know the fathers ...
— Winding Paths • Gertrude Page
... night and several degrees of frost by day were what Thrums began to accept as a revised order of nature. Vainly the Thrums doctor, whose practice extends into the glens, made repeated attempts to reach his distant patients, twice driving so far into the dreary waste that he could neither go on nor turn back. A ploughman who contrived to gallop ten miles for him did not get home for a week. Between the town, which is nowadays an agricultural centre of some importance, and the outlying farms communication was cut ...
— Auld Licht Idyls • J.M. Barrie
... can write what I please. I see no reason why I should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most natural thing in the world; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was that wrote so many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... know how your health goes on: we are better than we had reason to expect. When we look back upon this Spring, it seems like a dreary dream to us. But I trust in God that we shall yet 'bear up ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... by his experience. It was a dreary story. He would bring home three pounds on Saturday, and on Monday all the clothes would be in pawn. Sick of the useless struggle, he gave up a paying contract, and contented himself with small and ill-paid jobs. "A bad job was as good as ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... Nymphs sat down seven days and waited trembling, till the Nymph came up again; and her face was pale, and her eyes dazzled with the light for she had been long in the dreary darkness; but in her hand was ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... up to my room. The drizzle and the monotony of a dreary, eventless Southern town had made me tired and listless. I remember that just before I went to bed I mentally disposed of the mysterious dollar bill (which might have formed the clew to a tremendously fine detective story ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... but in the spring and summer of 1915 it was a beautiful place, where one might fancy that the many British dead rested more easily beneath oaks and among familiar flowers than in most of the cemeteries of this dreary land. The wood was about 1-1/2 miles long, with a maximum depth of 1,400 yards, and its undergrowth, where not cut away, was densely intertwined with alder, hazel, ash, and blackthorn, with water standing ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... to some romantic lay, My flageolet—and as I pensive play, The sweet notes echo o'er the mountain scene: The traveller late journeying o'er the moors, Hears them aghast,—(while still the dull owl pours Her hollow screams each dreary ...
— The Poetical Works of Henry Kirke White - With a Memoir by Sir Harris Nicolas • Henry Kirke White
... whom Brighton is recommended for change of air and of scene get sadly taken in, for here the air—like that of a barrel-organ—never changes, as the wind is always high. In sunshine, Brighton always looks hot; in moonshine, eternally dreary; the men are yawning all day long, and the women sitting smirking in bay-windows, or walking with puppy-dogs and parasols, which last they are continually opening and shutting. In short, when a man is sick of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... After this, Ambrose's dreary imprisonment took on a new color. True, the hours next day threatened to drag more slowly than ever, but with the hope that it might be the last day he could ...
— The Fur Bringers - A Story of the Canadian Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... the trees and the roofs of the cottages. Here I could for the first time see the whole extent of the calamity. Many houses had been completely torn down, and the crops, and even the loose alluvial earth swept away; as we glided by each dreary scene of devastation, another yet more dismal ...
— Visit to Iceland - and the Scandinavian North • Ida Pfeiffer
... I never rested until I too was en route to Siberia! I wanted to take Irene in my arms and to console her as her dead mother would have done. O—— was a fearful place, just a colony of dreary huts by the sea. Behind were the wolf-infested forests; in the midst of it, the frowning fortress prison! When I showed my ukase, and demanded to see my relations, they simply showed me two graves. Irene and Alex rested side by side, ...
— Fifty-Two Stories For Girls • Various
... weather by the moon's quarters, but none of the other fooleries which we find in those that circulate in England among the less educated classes. It is curious to notice how the taste for putting sonnets and other dreary poems at the beginnings and ends of books has survived in these Spanish countries. What used to be known in England as "a copy of verses" is still appreciated here, and almanacks, newspapers, religious books, even programmes of plays ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... round him hung As of a dweller out of doors; In his whole figure and his mien A savage character was seen Of mountains and of dreary moors. 295 ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... The way led through a trackless forest, the route merely indicated by blazed trees. Bears, wolves, and wild-cats were numerous. The distance was impossible to be traversed in a single day; these young girls must spend the night in that dreary wilderness. Worse than danger from wild animals, was that to be apprehended from Indians, who might kill them, or capture and bear them away to some distant tribe. But undauntedly they set out on their perilous journey, carrying twenty pounds of powder. They reached Machias in safety, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... approaching the arctic circle, and already near the place where wise men think it is best to turn homeward; for it is close to the Land of the Polar Bear and the Northern Lights—the region of perpetual snow. But dreary as this would seem to us, nest building is going on there this June ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... of the fleece is usually monotonous and dreary in the extreme; and those located here were a fair sample of the general herd. There was a shepherd and a hut-keeper. The duty of the former was to lead out the flocks daily at dawn, to follow and tend them while depasturing, and protect them from the depredations ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro
... Day heard him with a fainting spirit, dreary-eyed. What did she care for paying out Coman, down the street! Her heart was full ...
— Mrs. Day's Daughters • Mary E. Mann
... a dreary scene that met my gaze at break of day. Already the Quharity had risen six feet, and in many parts of the glen it was two hundred yards wide. Waster Lunny's corn-field looked like a bog grown over with rushes, ...
— The Little Minister • J.M. Barrie
... and many things about the University which interested me. I sent my card to Professor Fries, and he entirely devoted himself to me: but imagine our conversation—he spoke in Latin and I in French: however we understood each other very well. It is on the whole a dreary country except where enlivened by lakes: some parts are pine forests and birch forests, but others are featureless ground with boulder stones, like the worst part of ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... day! Father is home again! Jupheena will now be happy. The time of thy absence seemed long and dreary; but thou art back again in our ...
— The Young Captives - A Story of Judah and Babylon • Erasmus W. Jones
... animating rod Taught Jacob's sons their wonder-working God, Who led thro dreary wastes the murmuring band, And reach'd the confines of their promised land, Opprest with years, from Pisgah's towering height, On fruitful Canaan feasted long his sight; The bliss of unborn nations warm'd his breast, Repaid his toils and sooth'd his soul to rest; Thus o'er thy subject ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... ashamed to proclaim his pleasure in four hours of uninterrupted, musically inflected speech over a substratum of shifting harmonies, each with its individual tang and instrumental color; but neither should anybody be afraid to say that nine-tenths of the music is a dreary monotony because of the absence of what to him stands for musical thought. Let him admit or deny, as he sees fit, that the principle of symphonic development is a proper concomitant of the musical drama, but let him also say whether or not what to some appears a flocculent, hazy ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... she would have found that State dinner as dreary as it was pompous. The Rajah was occupied with discussing the laws of British sport with Colonel Bradlaw who regarded himself as an authority on such matters, and expressed his opinions ...
— The Keeper of the Door • Ethel M. Dell
... had been brought to him, and, as usual, he had made an unsuccessful effort to induce his sullen jailer to inform him why he was confined, and when he should be released. Gloomy and disconsolate, he seated himself on the ground, and leaned his back against the end wall of his dreary dungeon. The light from the window above his head fell upon the opposite door, and illuminated the spot where he had scratched, with the shank of a button, a line for each day of his imprisonment. ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... what that means. They will know nothing of life till they do,—and natures like his can realise it. When I was brought down from my prison to the Court of Bankruptcy, between two policemen,—waited in the long dreary corridor that, before the whole crowd, whom an action so sweet and simple hushed into silence, he might gravely raise his hat to me, as, handcuffed and with bowed head, I passed him by. Men have gone to heaven ...
— Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde - with a Preface by Robert Ross • Oscar Wilde
... can tether time or tide; The hour approaches Tam maun ride: That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane, That dreary hour he mounts his beast in: And sic a night he tak's the road in, As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in. The wind blew as 'twad blawn its last; The rattlin' showers rose on the blast; The speedy gleams ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... founded this the first regular college in 1284. Of the original buildings of the little hostel nothing remains, and the quadrangle was not commenced until 1424, but the tragedy which befell the college took place in the second half of the eighteenth century, when James Essex, who built the dreary west front of Emmanuel, was turned loose in the court. His hand was fortunately stayed before he had touched the garden side of the southern wing, and the picturesque range of fifteenth-century buildings, including the hall and combination ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... problem more easy of statement than of solution, in face of Dominic's pride, inexperience, and the singular isolation of his position! There followed dreary months wherein his evenings were spent in studying and answerings advertisements; and his days, till late afternoon, in walking the town from end to end for the interviewing of possible employers and the keeping of fruitless ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet
... through beautiful valleys and pretty hillsides. To the east of Sebsevar you come out into desert country, which, however passes into fertile country with many villages.[2] Then there comes a boundless dreary steppe to the south. At the village Seng-i-kal-i-deh you enter an undulating country with immense flocks of sheep. 'The first stretch of the road between Shurab and Nishapur led us through perfect desert..; but the landscape soon changed its aspect; the desert passed by degrees ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... many of the virtuous people. What was called virtue and piety had something stifling and choking about it, I used to think. I had a tutor at school who was a parson, and he was a good sort of man, too, in a way. But I used to feel suddenly dreary with him, as if there were a whole lot of real things and interesting things which he was afraid of. I couldn't say what I thought to him—only what I felt he wanted me to think. That's a bad answer," I went on, "but I ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... aim, it were all, in sooth, That any soul needs, to climb to heaven, And we would not cumber the way of truth With dreary dogmas, or rites ...
— Yesterdays • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... I hate you, I hate you! Because I am a woman, I hate you! Because I would live in a house, and not in this endless dreary waste of a dead world, I hate you! Because your very emptiness and solitude are worse than a prison, because the calls of the living things that creep and fly over your endless bosom are more mournful than death ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... hotel he hailed a passing taxi and was soon speeding through Piccadilly westward. He turned by Hyde Park Corner, skirted the grounds of Buckingham Palace and plunged into the maze of Pimlico. He pulled up before a dreary-looking house in a blank and dreary street, and telling the cabman to wait, mounted the ...
— The Green Rust • Edgar Wallace
... Bargeton's past life, a dreary chronicle which must be given if Lucien's position with regard to the lady is to be comprehensible. Lucien's introduction came about oddly enough. In the previous winter a newcomer had brought some interest into Mme. de Bargeton's ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... of "Child and Woman in Universal Freemasonry" was hailed with acclamation in the columns of the Revue Mensuelle; it reviewed it by dreary instalments, and when reviewing was no longer possible, had recourse to tremendous citations; as a last effort, it supplied an exhaustive index to the whole work—a charitable and necessary action, for the twelve months' toil of the author had expired without the accomplishment ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite
... deserted-looking building, surrounded by an immense number of the monuments which the natives call Permessur; while, stretched out at our feet, and forming, as it were, the bottom of a large basin among the mountains, was a dreary desert of glaring, burning sand. The place altogether looked like a city of the dead: not a soul appeared in sight, except one solitary old woman, who was slowly traversing the weary waste of sands, ...
— Diary of a Pedestrian in Cashmere and Thibet • by William Henry Knight
... up, the thorn that scratches them, the snow that makes their flesh tingle, is an object of their resentment in just the same kind and degree as are the men and women who thwart or injure them. But of duty—that dreary device to secure future reward by present suffering; of conscientiousness—that fear of present good for the sake of future punishment; of remorse—that disavowal of past pleasure for fear of the sting in its tail; of ambition—that begrudging of all honorable results that are not ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... thoughts as she went about the house, hasping windows and bolting doors, with a dreary sense of the futility ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... intellectual type of mind. We cannot tell precisely the reach of his soul, but it was certainly "above buttons." The chopping of the firewood, the providing of food, the state of the weather, the prospects of the advancing spring, and the retrospect of the long dreary winter that was just vanishing from the scene, were not sufficient to appease his intellectual appetite. They sufficed, indeed, for his square, solid, easy-going, matter-of-fact interpreter, Donald Mowat; and ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... four o'clock when they reached the farm-house, and they found the weary, dreary mother of the family cleaning fish at the kitchen sink, one baby pulling at her skirts, another sprawling on ...
— Tillie: A Mennonite Maid - A Story of the Pennsylvania Dutch • Helen Reimensnyder Martin
... halts at imaginary clubs, where—imaginary steps being leisurely ascended—imaginary papers were glanced at, imaginary scandal was discussed with elderly shakings of the head, and—regrettable to say—imaginary glasses were lifted lipwards. Heaven only knows how the germ of this dreary pastime first found way into his small-boyish being. It was his own invention, and he was proportionately proud of it. Meanwhile, Charlotte and I, crouched in the window-seat, watched, spell-stricken, ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... the time we got the coffee, rain was falling in sheets, and the evening bade fair to be a most dismal one; but songs and choruses set up by some of my staff—the two young women playing accompaniments on a battered piano—relieved the situation and enlivened us a little. However, the dreary night brought me one great comfort; for General Grant, who that day had moved out to Gravelly Run, sent me instructions to abandon all idea of the contemplated raid, and directed me to act in concert with the infantry under his immediate ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... himself delighted, and shook hands with Babington with a fervour which seemed to imply that until he had met him life had been a dreary blank, but that now he could begin to enjoy himself again. 'I should like to join you, if you don't mind including a friend of mine in the party,' said Richards. 'He was to meet me here. By the way, he's the author of that new ...
— Tales of St. Austin's • P. G. Wodehouse
... Doris sat huddled in a corner of the little waiting-room counting the dreary minutes as she waited for her train. No one beside ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... victor, and he assigned to his brothers and cousins the administration of the provinces of southern Russia. Still the ancient annals give us nothing but a dreary record of war. A very energetic prince arose, by the name of Mstislaf, who, for years, strode over subjugated provinces, desolating them with fire and sword. Another horrible famine commenced its ...
— The Empire of Russia • John S. C. Abbott
... that my curate and I had set to work steadily at our Greek authors, to show the Bishop we could do something, I put aside my Homer with regret, and faced the frost of November. The concert was held in the old store down by the creek; and I shivered at the thought of two hours in that dreary room, with the windows open and a sea draught sweeping through. To my intense surprise, I gave up my ticket to a well-dressed young man with a basket of flowers in his button-hole; and I passed into a hall where the light blinded me, and I was dazed at the multitude ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan
... their innings to-night; played a pretty stiff game till, at twelve o'clock, stumps drawn. All about what used to be called the Compensation Bill. Got a new name now; Compensation Clauses dropped; but JOKIM finds it dreary ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, August 9, 1890. • Various
... such a gain to have the sea quiet! It roars and beats here enough in the best of times. I am sure I hope there will not a storm come while we are here; for I should think it must be dreadfully dreary. It's all sea here, ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... far-away mountains was made up of many parallel ranges of rocky hills; which ranges were separated by broad, shallow valleys, where cactus and sage-brush covered the dry ground thickly; and the only trees that broke this dreary monotony were pita-palms, the most dismal thing in all created nature to which the name of a tree ever has been given by man. There was no trail, and travelling through this tangle of briers was very difficult. All of Rayburn's skill, which long practice had developed to ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... present, unless he regards it as being the vestibule of the future, and that this present life is unintelligible and insignificant unless beyond it, and led up to by it, and shaped through it, there lies the eternal life beyond. The low flat plain is dreary and desolate, featureless and melancholy, when the sky above it is filled with clouds. But sweep away the cloud-rack, and let the blue arch itself above the brown moorland, and all glows into lustre, and every undulation is brought out, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... were as idyllic as by day. The queen and her ladies, relieved of the dreary presence of the king who still remained at Paris, revelled in an unwonted freedom. Concerts, suppers and dances were the rule and moonlight cavalcades to the heart of the forest, or promenades on foot the length of the terrace, and by some romantically disposed couples far beyond, gave ...
— Royal Palaces and Parks of France • Milburg Francisco Mansfield
... long dreary weeks that followed I was glad that I had had that dinner at sunset and moonrise with him down in the cove at the spring that was away from all the world. All during the days that never seemed to end, as I went upon my round ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... learned scribe," he added, "and fill every jar and skin that you can gather with sweet water, lest to-morrow you and your company should go thirsty," and he laughed a very dreary laugh. ...
— Moon of Israel • H. Rider Haggard
... to be closed whenever it was cold or stormy, making the house as dark as night, and had then been placed in a house lighted by glass windows, we would scarcely have found words to express our thankfulness. It would have been like taking a man out of a dreary prison and setting him in the bright world of God's blessed sunshine. After a time men made small windows of stones that were partly transparent; and then they used skins prepared something like parchment, and finally ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... back to Judge Markham," she said to the girl, and then resumed her bouquet-making, wondering if every bride-elect were as wretched as herself, or if to any other maiden of twenty the world had ever looked so desolate and dreary, as it did ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... annoyed while all alert to find A plausible likeness of my own dark thought, I cast me down beneath yon oak's wide boughs, And, shielding with both hands my throbbing brows, Watched lazily the shadows of my brain. The feeble tide of peevishness went down, And left a flat dull waste of dreary pain, Which seemed to clog the blood in every vein; The world, of course, put on its darkest frown— In all its realms I saw no mortal crown Which did not wound or crush some restless head; And hope, and will, and motive, all ...
— Poems of Henry Timrod • Henry Timrod
... sorrow to her heart, and feeds her passion by recounting it, and watches away the leaden hours, crying aloud to all who will listen: "He is not dead—he is not dead! he will come back to me! He promised it—he will come back to me! This long, dreary waiting is only a test of my loyalty and love! I will be patient, for he will come back to me! He will come ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... Six dreary, anxious months followed. Then the baron, the only person in the whole world who seemed to care whether she lived or died, came to find her. He took her to Paris. There he decided to pass her off as his daughter, declaring he had very grave reasons ...
— A Nest of Spies • Pierre Souvestre
... your own fault," replied Edna, in the same dreary hopeless voice. "There is no trouble so hard to bear as that. To think that I might have been so happy, and that my own temper has spoiled it all. Let me tell you all about it, Bessie; it will be a relief, even though you cannot help me, for to-night ...
— Our Bessie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... first and most natural root of a great city is the labor and populousness of the adjacent country, which supplies the materials of subsistence, of manufactures, and of foreign trade. But the greater part of the Campagna of Rome is reduced to a dreary and desolate wilderness: the overgrown estates of the princes and the clergy are cultivated by the lazy hands of indigent and hopeless vassals; and the scanty harvests are confined or exported for the benefit of a monopoly. A second and more artificial cause of the growth of a metropolis is the residence ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... was the same cold stillness and the same moon, but even brighter than before. The light was so strong and the snow sparkled with so many stars that one did not wish to look up at the sky and the real stars were unnoticed. The sky was black and dreary, while the earth ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... the cold blue glimmer from here and there a storm window or a skylight. As the conviction of failure grew on him, the ghostly feeling of the place began to invade him. All was vague, forsaken, and hopeless, as a dreary dream, with the superadded miserable sense of lonely sleepwalking. I suspect that the feeling we call ghostly is but the sense of abandonment in the lack of companion life; but be this as it may, Malcolm was glad enough to catch sight of ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald
... there was no animosity; there was nothing at all but a sense of gratefulness. In the dreary picture of his life there was now an illumined corner. He had ceased to blame her; she was doing for her country what he, did necessity so will, would do for his. And after all, he could not war against a woman—a ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... down. He was horribly afraid of rats, so he did not try to sleep, but sat looking distrustfully at the dark, still terrified lest he might have awakened his father. In such reactions, after one of the experiences which made days and nights out of the dreary blanks of the calendar, when his senses were deadened, Paul's head was always singularly clear. Suppose his father had heard him getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose his father ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... to the power of Russia there, and Raglan has been all for the Crimea and the road to Sevastopol. And no man has known what to believe amongst the divided councils of the Allies. The men amongst the vineyards are plucking and sucking the grapes. The sun grows hotter and hotter, and there is so dreary a silence in these waiting hours that the angry neigh of a horse is heard for a mile along the line. Five o'clock when we began to move, and here is high noon, and impatience all on edge, and nothing done. The staff comes cantering back, and another hour goes by in silence; ...
— VC — A Chronicle of Castle Barfield and of the Crimea • David Christie Murray
... is not a bit nice and comfortable," she said with an anxious frown: "fancy your spending your days in this dreary room." ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... knowledge acquired as a means of subsistence, it is a comforting reflection that we can thus earn a livelihood in such a satisfactory and congenial manner, especially when bearing in mind that the majority of young women, who toil in this great metropolis, are constrained to pass long and dreary hours at work which is far less lucrative and much more debilitating and unhealthy. Again, the study of stenography requires constant and critical attention, thereby strengthening the mind and doing away with idle day-dreaming. Mental ...
— Silver Links • Various
... stillness all around—a stillness widely different from that peaceful composure which characterizes a calm day in an inhabited land. It was the death-like stillness of that most peculiar and dreary desolation which results from the total absence of animal existence. The silence was so oppressive that it was with a feeling of relief he listened to the low, distant voices of the men as they paused ever and anon in their busy ...
— The World of Ice • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... with it a slight disillusionment. The dining-room in Shamrock House is in the basement; chill and dreary of aspect, its windows always dirty and unopenable, because at the slightest excuse of an open window the small boys of the neighbourhood will make it their target for all kinds of filth. Rotting vegetables, apple-cores, scrapings ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... breakfast dishes in a dreary, listless sort of way. She looked tired and broken-spirited. Ted's enthusiasm seemed to grate on ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1896 to 1901 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... parts of a cracked bell, if I might judge from the tinkling of it. On another side, it was protected from the bitter blast by the poor-house, thus judiciously placed for the benefit of the invalided paupers. It was a dreary evening in February, and everything was looking chilly and black, except, by the bye, an early primrose peering out from the side of a crumbling tomb in the very darkest corner of the whole—that looked fresh and ...
— Confessions of an Etonian • I. E. M.
... 'Attack continues. Enemy reinforced from the south.' Then 'Attack renewed. Very hard pressed.' There the messages ended for the day, leaving the Empire black with apprehension. The darkest forecasts and most dreary anticipations were indulged by the most temperate and best-informed London papers. For the first time the very suggestion that the campaign might be above our strength was made to the public. And then at last there came the official news of the repulse of the assault. Far away ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... wide sea of neighborhood gossip and parish opinions, and at last some one happened to speak again of Thanksgiving, which at once turned the tide of conversation, and it seemed to ebb suddenly, while the gray, dreary look once more ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett
... some one kept watch at a sick bed. Sometimes the road ran between high trees, whose skeleton outlines stood grimly up between him and the stars, stiff and motionless. At other times, it coursed along dreary wastes; then again, it was buried in dense shadow; now ascending, now descending. At times he caught a glimpse of the distant gray river, gleaming in the darkness, with here and there the light on board some vessel at anchor, glittering like a star. In some places, where ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... know the song that the Bluebird is singing Out in the apple tree, where he is swinging. Brave little fellow! the skies may be dreary, Nothing cares he while his heart is so cheery. Hark! how the music leaps out from his throat, Hark! was there ever so merry ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph [March 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... weeks slipped by very pleasantly at Thornleigh, and the end of those bright midsummer holidays came only too soon. It seemed a bitter thing to say 'good-bye' to Milly Darrell, and to go back alone to a place which must needs be doubly dull and dreary to me without her. She had been my only friend at Albury Lodge; loving her as I did, I had never cared to ...
— Milly Darrell and Other Tales • M. E. Braddon
... desire nought but silence; therefore, hold thy peace." "I will, Lord, while I can." And the maiden went on with the horses before her, and she pursued her way straight onwards. And from the copse-wood already mentioned, they journeyed over a vast and dreary open plain. And at a great distance from them they beheld a wood, and they could see neither end nor boundary to the wood, except on that side that was nearest to them, and they went towards it. Then there came from out the wood five horsemen, eager, and bold, and mighty, ...
— The Mabinogion • Lady Charlotte Guest
... before us will certainly be exposed, with this class of readers. Even in the judgment of a fitter audience, however, it must, we fear, be admitted, that, besides the riot and extravagance of his fancy, the scope and substance of Mr. K.'s poetry is rather too dreary and abstracted to excite the strongest interest, or to sustain the attention through a work of any great compass or extent. He deals too much with shadowy and incomprehensible beings, and is too constantly ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... foes in Paris, by urging the people of Geneva to shake off irrational prejudices and straightway to set up a playhouse. Rousseau had long been brooding over certain private grievances of his own against Diderot; the dreary story has been told by me before, and happily need not be repeated.[146] He took the occasion of D'Alembert's mischievous suggestion to his native Geneva, not merely to denounce the drama with all the force and eloquence at his command, but formally to declare the breach between ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... regions of air on his hippogriff, or conversing on the mount of terrestial Paradise with the beloved Apostle John. But which of us even in fancy can ride with the Red-Cross warrior, penetrate with Guyon into the cave of Mammon, or realise the dreary pageant that issued from the House ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... to get back to the fancee shop," sad Smith one morning. "So do I, for I'm sick of this dreary work. Why, I'd rather have another of ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... window and looked out on a rather dreary prospect. The inevitable afternoon trades had been blowing hard since three, strong and brisk from the ocean, driving hard through the Golden Gate and filling the city with a taint of salt. Now the fog was coming in; Vandover could ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris
... advice, he decided against turning aside to consult his uncle at Ulm, and returned home in a mood that rejoiced Heinz and Hatto with hopes of the old days, while it filled his mother with dreary dismay and apprehension. ...
— The Dove in the Eagle's Nest • Charlotte M. Yonge
... godlike ravishment, drew forth a breath So deep, so strong, so fervid, thick with love— Blissful, yet laden as with twenty prayers, That Juno yearned with no diviner soul, To the first burthen of the lips of Jove. Th' exceeding mystery of the loveliness Sadden'd delight; and with his mournful look Dreary and gaunt, hanging his pallid face 'Twixt his dark flowing locks, he almost seemed Too feeble, or, to melancholy eyes, One that has parted with his soul for pride, And in the ...
— The Violin - Its Famous Makers and Their Imitators • George Hart
... and orl; Ther rusted niles fell from the knorts That 'eld the pear to the garden-worll. Ther broken sheds looked sed and stringe; Unlifted was the clinking latch; Weeded and worn their ancient thatch Er-pon ther lownely moated gringe, She only said 'Me life is dreary, ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... was drawing in, the last autumn days were short and often grey and dreary; the wind had swept the leaves from the trees and scattered them over park lands and lanes, where they lay a mellow-hued, rustling carpet, shifting with each chill breeze that blew. The berried briony garlands clung to the bared hedges, and here and there flared scarlet, still holding ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... by and by, not heavily, but a slow, dull, seeping fall that was inexpressibly dreary, and the thick, clammy darkness, shot with mists and vapors from the lake, rolled up to the very edge of the fires. Robert might have joined the sleepers, as he was detached from immediate duty, but his brain was still too much heated to admit it. Despite his experience and his knowledge that ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... isolated, shy, retiring as he was, had not altogether escaped notice: certain established men are aware of his existence; and, if stretching-out no helpful hand, have at least their eyes on him. He appears, though in dreary enough humour, to be addressing himself to the Profession of Law;—whereof, indeed, the world has since seen him a public graduate. But omitting these broken, unsatisfactory thrums of Economical relation, let us present rather ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... 21st, the canoe on which I was a passenger, was sent to the mouth of French river, to observe the motions of the enemy. The route lay between a range of low islands, and a shelvy beach, very monotonous and dreary. We remained at the entrance of the aforesaid river till the 25th, when the fleet of loaded canoes, forty-seven in number, arrived there. The value of the furs which they carried could not be estimated at less than ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... in the earth," he had asked himself what it mattered to him though all the world were peopled, now that she, who had been all the world to him, was dead. God had left him as a lonely pilgrim in a dreary desert. Only one glimpse of human affection had he known as a man, and here it was taken from ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... a little dried-up mummy of a man, the ugliness of whose countenance was, as it were, emphasized by a disagreeable leer which would ever and anon deepen into a broad grin; this man, with his dreary jokes and vapid small-talk, was equally repulsive ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... have a witness in case of any emergency. Supported by his son and the servant-lad, he waddled at last into the drawing-room. It may be assumed that he felt considerable curiosity. The drawing-room in which Mitya was awaiting him was a vast, dreary room that laid a weight of depression on the heart. It had a double row of windows, a gallery, marbled walls, and three immense chandeliers with glass ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... along the line of the great chain of American lakes, even to the head waters of the Father of Rivers, and over the rich and fertile plains stretching southward from the lake shores? Let the teeming populations—let the hundreds of millions of annual products that have succeeded to the but recent dreary and unproductive haunts of the red man—answer that question. That very preponderance of free States which the Senator from New York contemplates with such satisfaction, and which has moved him exultingly to exclaim that there is at last a North side of this Chamber, has been hastened ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the shelf, helped Joan to put on her frock and tie her shawl round her again; then they opened the door, stole down the steps, and there they paused in dismay. The caravan had come to a standstill, and been drawn up on the edge of a stretch of dreary common; the horses were unyoked, and grazing near by. Along the further boundary of the common wound a broad, level highway, bordered by a wide footpath; and in the distance, from the valley front, rose the towers, spires, and smoking chimneys of a large-sized town. But Firgrove, Hill ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... wet clothing freezing to him, he rode all night, a distance of about forty miles. In the morning he left his faithful horse tied to a fence, quite broken down. He then commenced his dreary journey on foot—cold and hungry—in a strange place, where it was quite unsafe to make known his condition and wants. Thus for a day or two, without food or shelter, he traveled until his feet were literally worn out, and in this condition he arrived ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... to like dreary things, even days, and it's most awfully silly to be dreary yourself. Not fair, you know, when every body's doing their best ...
— Phyllis - A Twin • Dorothy Whitehill
... of her new home. The rooms were just ordinary hotel rooms, furnished with the dingy, wholesale pretentiousness of hotels of the second rate. But they were the essence of luxury compared to her one room at the Duchess's with its view of dreary back yards. These rooms thrilled her. They were her first material evidence that she was now actually launched upon ...
— Children of the Whirlwind • Leroy Scott
... "Darke, dolefull, dreary, like a greedy grave, That still for carrion carcasses doth crave; On top whereof ay dwelt the ghastly owl, Shrieking his balefull note, which ever drave Far from that haunt all other cheerful fowl, And all about it wandring ghosts ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville
... seeing half of them. Besides, it was in the charge of a typical Spanish family: a lean, leathery, sallow father, a fat, immovable mother, and a tall, silent daughter. The girl showed us darkly about the dreary place, with its fountains and orange trees and palms, its damp, Moresque, moldy walls, its damp, moldy, beautiful wooden ceilings, and its damp, moldy staircase leading to the family rooms overhead, ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... whip. Man after man on the hillside took up the irresistible rhythm in an undertone, and "Cracked" with the singer. In front of me was being created a folk-song. The bitterness and glory of their life were being told to them, and they were hearing the singer gladly. Their leader was lifting the dreary trench night and death itself into a ...
— Golden Lads • Arthur Gleason and Helen Hayes Gleason
... told you that I went back to Hamburg on Thursday (Sept. 27th.) to take leave of my friend, who travels southward, and returned hither on the Monday following. From Empfelde, a village half way from Ratzeburg, I walked to Hamburg through deep sandy roads and a dreary flat: the soil everywhere white, hungry, and excessively pulverised; but the approach to the city is pleasing. Light cool country houses, which you can look through and see the gardens behind them, with arbours and trellis work, and thick vegetable walls, and trees in cloisters and piazzas, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... happened. The Vicar and his wife dined there occasionally, and still more occasionally Father Mahon. Now and then there were vague entertainments to be patronized in the village schoolroom, in an atmosphere of ink and hair-oil, and a mild amount of rather dreary and stately gaiety connected with the big houses round. Mrs. Baxter occasionally put in appearances, a dignified and aristocratic old figure with her gentle eyes and black lace veil; and Maggie ...
— The Necromancers • Robert Hugh Benson
... boy with the golden curls had become lord of Dangerfield Hall. The long corridor had been but partially destroyed. It was repaired and refurnished by successive generations; but guests and servants alike refused to sleep again in that dreary wing after the first trial. Every night, so surely as the clock tolled out the hour of twelve, a rush of feet was heard along the passage—a window looking into the court was thrown open—a piercing scream from a woman's voice ...
— Kate Coventry - An Autobiography • G. J. Whyte-Melville
... houses of the older type. Here and there gleamed out a scrap of a white marble door-step, but most of the houses were approached by steps of dull stone or of painted wood. There was a dejected and dreary air about the place. The street was swarming with children in various ...
— The Girl from Montana • Grace Livingston Hill
... which we obtain it; and while he acknowledges our ascendancy, he still believes in his superiority. War and hunting are the only pursuits which appear to him worthy to be the occupations of a man. *m The Indian, in the dreary solitude of his woods, cherishes the same ideas, the same opinions as the noble of the Middle ages in his castle, and he only requires to become a conqueror to complete the resemblance; thus, however strange it ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville
... promised to be wild and spectacular, had somehow miscarried in the night, and instead of pelting showers and tossing branches he saw a pale grey wall of mist against his windows. All excitement had gone from the atmosphere, leaving the dreary certainty that the mist would presently clear only to condense into a slow, persistent, autumn rain. It is conceivable that he would not have exchanged his waking dreams so quickly for more definite thoughts and speculations had his eyes rested ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... figs that had retained their freshness for sixty-six years were carried to Babylonia by an eagle, who had told Baruch that he had been sent to serve him as a messenger. The eagle set out on his journey. His first halting-place was a dreary waste spot to which he knew Jeremiah and the people would come it was the burial-place of the Jews which Nebuchadnezzar had given the prophet at his solicitation. When the eagle saw Jeremiah and the people ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... moved on,—freighted with its weight of sorrow,—up the red, muddy, turbid current, through the abrupt tortuous windings of the Red river; and sad eyes gazed wearily on the steep red-clay banks, as they glided by in dreary sameness. At last the boat stopped at a small town, and ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is deep digging a grave in the mould.... O Life,—so o'erflowing with sorrows untold, My life, so homeless and lonely and weary, Life, as an Autumn night silent and dreary— Bitter in truth is thy fate 'neath the sky, And as a fire of the field wilt thou die! Die then—no sad falling tear will recall thee, Fast will the roof of thy pine coffin wall thee, Heavy the earth falls ...
— Russian Lyrics • Translated by Martha Gilbert Dickinson Bianchi
... Already are the railroads displacing the companionable cheer of crackling walnut with the dogged self-complacency and sullen virtue of anthracite. Even where wood survives, he is too often shut in the dreary madhouse cell of an airtight, round which one can no more fancy a social mug of flip circling than round a coffin. Let us be thankful that we can sit in Mr. Whittier's chimney-corner and believe that the blaze he has kindled for us ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... One dreary stretch of swamp that kept us on the corduroy road behind the jolting wagon I remember well; this was near Crawfordsville, Indiana. It is now gone, the corduroy and the timber as well. In their places great barns and comfortable houses dot the ...
— Ox-Team Days on the Oregon Trail • Ezra Meeker
... ruling motive of the founding of Georgia was charity, and that is the greatest of these three. The spirit which dominated in the measures taken for the beginning of the enterprise was embodied in one of the most interesting personages of the dreary eighteenth century—General James Oglethorpe. His eventful life covered the greater part of the eighteenth century, but in some of the leading traits of his character and incidents of his career he was rather a man of the nineteenth. At the age of twenty-one he was already ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... the encampment had been finally abandoned, and the thought that a little spot once tenanted by civilized man was about to be yielded to that dreary solitude from which for a while he had rescued it, made the pilgrimage a melancholy one. The scene itself was in strict keeping with such thoughts—the rugged and lofty cliffs which frown down upon the valley—the flitting shadows ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... myself in its pages, and feeling painfully affected by the noisy hilarity of some gay young students in a neighbouring box, I drank off my sober beverage, and walked home to my solitary chambers. Oh, how dreary they appeared that night!—how desolate seemed the uncomfortable, dirty, cold staircase, and that remarkable want of all sorts of conveniences, for which the Temple has acquired so great a notoriety! In fine, I was fairly hipped; and being convinced ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... The first pleasure of hearing from his own lips that I had deserved the strongest proof he could give of his confidence in me was soon dashed by the pain which mixes itself with all pleasure—at least, with all that I have ever known. Never has my past life seemed so dreary to look back on as it seems now, when I feel how entirely it has unfitted me to take the place of all others that I should have liked to occupy in my friend's service. I mustered courage to tell him that I had none of the business knowledge and business experience which his ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... It was a dreary day. Great Customs House buildings blotted out any possible view, reminding her very much of the ugliness of Tilbury. The rain drizzled down, warm rain that covered the walls of the cabins in streams of moisture; ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... their frames. Now and then, in a momentary lull of the wind, a brief cessation of the city noises, Hollister could hear far off the beat of the Gulf seas bursting on the beach at English Bay, snoring in the mouth of False Creek. A dreary, threatening night that fitted ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... one of the most finished things in Egypt, essentially a thing to inspire within one the "perfect calm that is Greek." The blighting touch of the Nile, which has changed the beautiful pale yellow of the stone of the lower part of the building to a hideous and dreary grey—which made me think of a steel knife on which liquid has been spilt and allowed to run—has destroyed the uniformity, the balance, the faultless melody lifted up by form and color. And so it is with the temple. It ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... needing the stoutest heart. Through long dreary months they faced the sub-arctic cold and fearful blizzards that swept the wilderness, following silent trails over wide white wastes or through the depths of dark forests, and falling upon many a wild adventure that tried their mettle a hundred times. It was a man's job, but they both ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... the English sky seemed to her, and dreary as was the aspect of London in October, this girl was glad to return to her native land. She had felt herself very lonely in the French school, forgotten and deserted by her own kindred, a creature to be pitied; and ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... abandon the idea of leaving our sons and daughters a little property, since modern science renders it useless, for we should become trafficers in men if we were to lend it on interest. Alas! the world which these persons would open before us as an imaginary good, is still more dreary and desolate than that which they condemn, for hope, at any rate, is not banished from the latter." Thus in all respects, and in every point of view, the question is a serious one. Let us hasten to arrive at ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... to grow long above his forehead, where it was combed up to form a single curl, which ran straight across the top of his head, from brow to crown. The peculiar nature of this curl had beguiled the time of dreary sermons for many a youthful sinner; for, like Melchisedek, it appeared to have its beginning and ending in nothing, and there was a certain fascination in tracing its placid course ...
— In Blue Creek Canon • Anna Chapin Ray
... outlook inspiring?" Captain Stewart laughed as he looked out upon the dreary landscape, for the afternoon was lowery, and certainly, the cheerless flat landscape between Washington and the Junction was far ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... "although some of it had got a little damp; and we furbished up the old pistol, with which Peterkin is a crack shot now. But to continue. We did not find any other vestige of you on the reef, and finally gave up all hope of ever seeing you again. After this the island became a dreary place to us, and we began to long for a ship to heave in sight and take us off. But now that you're back again, my dear fellow, it looks as bright and cheerful as it used to do, and I love it as ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... plight can to some extent be imagined. Moreover, there were about six inches of water all round me, so that I could not attempt to sleep. The cold was intense, and I can safely say that I never spent such a long, disagreeable, and dreary night in all my previous experience, and I hope never to be compelled to do so again. There are bears in this district also, but I am thankful to say that I was not molested ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... of different looks and talents, moods and tempers, but young with the youth of all times and places—the story is alive with them at once. The Rostov household resounds with them—the Rostovs are of the easy, light-spirited, quick-tongued sort. Then there is the dreary old Bolkonsky mansion, with Andrew, generous and sceptical, and with poor plain Marya, ardent and repressed. And for quite another kind of youth, there is Peter Besukhov, master of millions, fat and good-natured and indolent, ...
— The Craft of Fiction • Percy Lubbock
... at the mines there had been a certain piquancy in her sense of the contrast between herself and her circumstances, but that had long passed into a dreary recognition of the fact that she had no real part in ...
— In Exile and Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... to brightness—the black fold fell from its face—Angel eyes looked at me—Angel lips smiled!—and then—I found myself suddenly alone on the shore of a little bay, blue as a sapphire in the reflection of the blue sky above it. The black stretch of water which had seemed so dreary and impassable had disappeared, and to my astonishment I recognised the very shore near the rock garden which was immediately under my turret room. I looked everywhere for the woman who had been in the boat with me—for the boat itself and its guide—but there ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... dreary November day, a lonesome little fellow stood at the door of a cheap eating house, in Boston, and offered a solitary copy of a morning paper for sale to ...
— Tiger and Tom and Other Stories for Boys • Various
... doubt very agreeable to their members,—did not offer a mode of life which was easily compatible with the demands of general society. Social enjoyments, therefore, were pursued under difficulties; and the city, although improving, was dreary enough. ...
— Daniel Webster • Henry Cabot Lodge
... Strikes a solitary sound. Vainly glitters hill and plain, And the air is calm in vain; Vainly Morning spreads the lure Of a sky serene and pure; Creature none can she decoy Into open sign of joy: 90 Is it that they have a fear Of the dreary season near? Or that other pleasures be ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... himself thoroughly before he had to ride off to leave them—two miles further altogether; for besides the bag for the Grange, and all the letters for the Rectory, and for the farmers, there was a young gentlemen's school at a great old lonely house, called Ragglesford, at the end of a very long dreary lane; and many a day Alfred would have given something if those boys' relations would only have been so good as, with one consent, to ...
— Friarswood Post-Office • Charlotte M. Yonge
... would permit him, he would give me a brief sketch of his history; and, particularly, of the transaction, which, almost in childhood, had given a disastrous coloring to the whole period of his youth, and, in the result, had brought him to be an occupant of his present dreary abode.' ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... to realize the character and pursuit of his travelling companions; but the details and tone of the dialogue were not of an interest sufficiently engrossing to keep him awake. He dozed afresh, and in the unconsciousness of a fitful sleep he passed a good many miles of his dreary ...
— The Shadow of a Crime - A Cumbrian Romance • Hall Caine
... recalled, with a guilty blush, the time when she and I won the village championship in doubles in an all day siege of croquet, so what could I say in my own defence? Therefore I went with Phyllis to the tennis-court and sat for two long and inexpressibly dreary hours watching the senseless and stupid proceedings. It was pleasant to reflect that I was with Sylvia's daughter, and I tried to imagine that the keen interest of youth still remained, but I was sadly out of place. I am satisfied that this game of tennis ...
— The Romance of an Old Fool • Roswell Field
... out. Mr. Chandler and Monsieur de Letz are, no doubt, your friends, Marchese, who have come with you to pay us a friendly visit. We shall be delighted to entertain them on board as well as we can during the dreary ...
— The Castle Of The Shadows • Alice Muriel Williamson
... silent for a long time. I looked about me at the crumbling buildings, the monotone, unchanging sky, and the dreary, empty street. Here, then, was the fruit of the Conquest, here was the elimination of work, the end of hunger and of cold, the cessation of the hard struggle, the downfall of change and death—nay, the very millennium of happiness. And yet, somehow, there seemed something ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... can, give us a paper with some variety, and not wholly composed of dreary Indian appeals, the hearing of which always reminded me of the toil of Pharaoh's charioteers, when they drave heavily their wheelless chariots in the deep ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... were, turned the first leaf. The other was connected with the name on the despatch-box. Why did it haunt her? It had produced a kind of indistinguishable echo in the brain, to which she could put no words—which was none the less dreary; like a voice of wailing from ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... cave with his feet toward the entrance. Having deposited the food near the dead man's head, the women sat down on a stone inside, while the men stood up near the mouth of the cave, all faces turned toward the grave. The father-in-law seated himself on a stone near the feet of the dead. It was a dreary winter evening in the Sierra and the scene was singularly impressive. The old man was a strong personality, powerfully built, and a shaman of great reputation, who in his entire bearing showed his determination to keep ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... he had to be placed again upon the sledge, although he besought them to leave him behind to die in peace; then they resumed their dreary and difficult march. ...
— The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... palliation can we find? Mr. Swinburne calls the book "a worthless little volume of stolen and mutilated poetry, patched up and padded out with dirty and dreary doggrel, under the senseless and preposterous title of The Passionate Pilgrim." On the other hand, Mr. Humphreys maintains that "Jaggard, at any rate, had very good taste. This is partly seen in the choice of a title. Few books have so charming a name as The Passionate Pilgrim. It is ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... years so well? Who knew so well their pleasant tales, And all those livelier freaks could tell Whose oft-told story never fails? In vain we turn our aching eyes,— In vain we stretch our eager hands,— Cold in his wintry shroud he lies Beneath the dreary drifting sands! ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... so painful to her to ask the Captain for money that she preferred the novel pain of self-denial to that humiliation. And then there was the cheerless prospect of the future always staring her in the face, that dreary time after Violet's majority, when it would be a question whether she and her husband could afford to go on living ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... less surely than in stricken Belgium has there been a deportation here. Factories and cities have swallowed up a whole population, indeed, along the Beartown road. It is easy to say that they went willingly, that they preferred the life of cities; that the dreary tenement under factory grime, with a "movie" theatre around the corner, is an acceptable substitute to them for the ample fireplaces, the fanlight door, the rolling fields and roadside brook. We hear much discussion in New England to-day of "how to keep the young ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... 'I-Lizzati wa Mufarriku 'l-Jama'at," by "Terminator of Delights and Separator of Companies" instead of Destroyer of delights and Severer of societies. And lastly he pads the end of his article (pp. 196-199) with five dreary extracts from Lane (i. 372-73) who can be dull even when translating the ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... all. When I asked her that, her face turned harder than ever. She answered me on her slate in these dismal words: 'I have not got a friend in the world. I dare not live alone.' There was her reason! Dreary and dreadful, ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... order to re-cross the river. It was a stormy and dreary night, and so, of course, favorable to our purpose. The maneuver was executed in silence, and with commendable expedition. The rebels appeared to have no suspicion of General Burnside's intentions. The measured beat of our double quick was drowned by the fury of the storm, and with minds relieved, ...
— Frank's Campaign - or the Farm and the Camp • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... and the urgent whinney which called one to the other and told of loneliness when separated is no longer heard. It is pathetic to think that these good creatures have been robbed of the one thing which gave color to their lives and lifted them above the dreary treadmill of duty for duty's sake. The kindly friendship of each for his yoke-fellow is not the old sympathetic companionship, which will come again only when the cooling breezes, running brooks, and knee-deep pastures of the good ...
— The Fat of the Land - The Story of an American Farm • John Williams Streeter
... taken to make the library a pleasant room to live in; it should have everything arranged and adapted for use and comfort, and not be stiff and dreary with any set arrangement. The panels of the cupboard doors may be filled in with Japanese lacquer-work or painted decoration, and here and there, in the recesses, nests of shelves may be fitted with projecting brackets, ...
— The Private Library - What We Do Know, What We Don't Know, What We Ought to Know - About Our Books • Arthur L. Humphreys
... broke, it revealed the ship hove-to under close-reefed fore and main topsails, and fore-topmast staysail, the central object in the midst of a grey and desolate picture, the dreary character of which it would be difficult to surpass. It was now blowing a whole gale from the South-West, the wind having backed during the night; the sky was an unbroken expanse of dark, slate-coloured cloud athwart the face of which tattered shreds of dirty grey vapour rapidly swept; the ...
— A Middy of the King - A Romance of the Old British Navy • Harry Collingwood
... portion of this community allow their exile to be much more dull and dreary than it need be, by neglecting to cultivate their gardens, and leaving them entirely to the taste and industry of the malee. I never feel half so much inclined to envy the great men of this now crowded city the possession of vast but gardenless mansions, (partly ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... old Peter shuffled off to water the stock, Miss Prescott fell to continuing her fancy work which the good lady had brought with her from the Fast. An odd picture she made, sitting there in that dreary grove in the desert, with her New England suggestion of primness and house-wifely qualities showing in striking contrast to the strange setting of ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... place of Wolfgang's former indifference. He was more attentive during the last lessons; the empty bare room with the few pictures on the plain walls did not seem so bare to him any longer. Was it only because he had grown accustomed to it? A softer light fell through the dreary windows and glided over the monotonous rows of benches, ...
— The Son of His Mother • Clara Viebig
... their darling buried in a little grave in a cemetery miles away from their own home, and then they returned, desolate and bereaved, to the deserted city, which seemed empty indeed to them. The house had never looked so very dark and dreary before. Yet from time to time old Oliver forgot that Dolly was gone altogether, and could never come back; for he would call her in his eager, quavering tones, or search for her in some of the hiding-places, where she had often played at hide-and-seek with him. When mealtimes came round ...
— Alone In London • Hesba Stretton
... command and betook himself to Winchester, a general without an army, but still able to check by his presence the existing panic, and ready to enter upon the trying, dreary, and fruitless work that lay before him. In April, 1757, he wrote: "I have been posted then, for more than twenty months past, upon our cold and barren frontiers, to perform, I think I may say, impossibilities; ...
— George Washington, Vol. I • Henry Cabot Lodge
... have witnessed carnivals. Here are all our harlequins and columbines of the spoken and written drama. They flash to and fro, they thrill us with expectancy. Then, presto! What a dreary lot they are when the revellers ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... said, calling him by his baptismal name for the first time. She spoke with a felicitous mixture of submissiveness and boldness that touched and at the same time enchanted him. "What should I have done? They come and talk to you, and spin their nets about you; and at home it is so dreary and lonely, and your heart is so empty and Father is so mean, you haven't got anybody else in the world to talk to." Such was her defence, effective even if more voluble ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... the most hopeless and uncultivated was always this good man's object. The Falkland Isles were dreary enough, but they were a paradise compared to the desolate fag-end of the American world,—a cluster of barren rocks, intersected by arms of the sea, which divide them into numerous islets, the larger ones bearing stunted forests of ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Dreary indeed was the life in my prison cell, sitting on the three-legged stool picking fibre, or walking up and down the twelve-foot floor. I used frequently to stand under the window for long intervals, resting my hand on the sloping sill. ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... the care of Robert and two female servants, he went in search of the mistress of the silent and dreary house. ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... concealment; if a man is frightened, he hides in the grass; in case of hostilities, the high grass is a fortress to the negro. It became evident that we were to remain surrounded by this dense herbage, which not only obstructed the view, but rendered the station damp and dreary. ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... attractiveness—more particularly after meals. Life he felt had no further happiness to offer him. He hated Miriam, and there was no getting away from her whatever might betide. And for the rest there was toil and struggle, toil and struggle with a failing heart and dwindling courage, to sustain that dreary duologue. "Life's insured," said Mr. Polly; "place is insured. I don't see it does any harm to her ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... traveled on after breakfast, though it was dreary riding. They plodded on for mile after mile in silence. All at once Jack, who ...
— Jack Ranger's Western Trip - From Boarding School to Ranch and Range • Clarence Young
... which sweep fierce winds, where the golden broom and the purple heather—flowers of the barren heights—are all that will flourish. There are, indeed, secluded valleys filled with muskmallows and bracken, but these are often visited by wild tempests, and sudden floods may make the whole region dreary and dangerous. ...
— Lafayette • Martha Foote Crow
... back from Gaza yesterday, after a ten days' sojourn there, returning through Askelon, where there are very fine ruins, enormous columns, marbles, &c, lying in all directions: it is a wonderful place. Like all the coast, it is most dreary, yet one sees that all the country was once thickly populated. Sand from the shore is creeping in steadily, and makes it mournful. Napoleon I., Alexander the Great, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, and a host of great men passed by this route. Titus came up by Gaza to Jerusalem. ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... It was in the dreary month of fog, misanthropy, and suicide—the month during which Heaven receives a scantier tribute of gratitude from discontented man—during which the sun rises, but shines not—gives forth an unwilling light, but glads us not with his cheerful rays—during which ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... arrival there was a heavy rain-storm which drove into the unglazed windows, and here and there came through the roof and walls of our daub-and-wattle house. The heat was intense and there was much moisture in this valley. During the downpour I looked out at the dreary little houses, showing through the driving rain, while the sheets of muddy water slid past their door- sills; and I felt a sincere respect for the lieutenant and his soldiers who were holding this desolate outpost of civilization. ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... morn Ralph awoke and saw Ursula sleeping peacefully as he deemed, and he looked about on the dreary desert and its dead men and saw no end to it, though they lay on the top of one of those stony bents; and he said softly to himself: "Will it end at all then? Surely all this people of the days gone by were Seekers of the Well as we be; ...
— The Well at the World's End • William Morris
... faith and guilt and woe; Loftiest aims by earth defiled, Gleams of wisdom sin-beguiled, Sated power's tyrannic mood, Counsels shared with men of blood, Sad success, parental tears, And a dreary gift ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... nearly all the landed proprietors were Roman Catholics, where there was a Catholic Bishop, a monastery and two convents, while one half-ruined Protestant church sufficed to accommodate the few worshippers who sat under a dreary, inoffensive vicar on a very small salary. All reasonable folk, moreover, know that Killarney is the town to which, more than any other in Ireland, it is important to ...
— The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent • S.M. Hussey
... of SCROOGE and MARLEY. A dark, dreary office, indicated by brown curtains at sides, with entrances R. and L. and brown curtains at rear. Note: These rear curtains must be arranged to be parted, showing the tableau stage back of the real stage. The tableau stage is elevated a few feet above the real stage (this makes a better ...
— The White Christmas and other Merry Christmas Plays • Walter Ben Hare
... forward to Smith's side, and was about to pass him in the narrow doorway. The hulk moved beneath our feet like a living thing groaning, creaking—and the water lapped about the rotten woodwork with a sound infinitely dreary. ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... vacant, spiritless days of portent that wait hushed and numb before a coming storm. Not a crow, nor a jay, nor a chickadee had heart enough to cheep. But little Hyla, the tree-frog, was nothing daunted. Since the last week in February, throughout the spring and the noisy summer on till this dreary time, he had been cheerfully, continuously piping. ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... wearily on across the bridge and reached the castle. The courtyard was quite empty and looked very dreary, for it was all overgrown with weeds and thistles. At the door of the half-ruined castle stood ...
— Stories of King Arthur's Knights - Told to the Children by Mary MacGregor • Mary MacGregor
... end of Long Island, toward the west and south, extends a dreary monotony of sandbeach along the whole Atlantic coast, to the extreme southern cape of Florida, thence along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico to the Rio Grande, broken only by occasional inlets. The picturesque coast scenery is mostly north and east of Cape Cod. Following ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 5, May, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... make him," muttered the captain. "But never mind; you must both come and dine with us another time, when we are all Englishmen present. This is a dreary business; but we must make the best ...
— In Honour's Cause - A Tale of the Days of George the First • George Manville Fenn
... dawned. O how heavily the moments have passed, yet with what various emotion have they been marked, as I sometimes thought I heard footsteps, and fancied you were approaching, and then again—perceived only a dead and dreary silence! But, when you opened the door of the pavilion, and the darkness prevented my distinguishing with certainty, whether it was my love—my heart beat so strongly with hopes and fears, that I ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. "'Tis some visiter," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... yet out of love his dusky grace still was: you could see it by the shamed looks of the Queen and court (though they pretended not to care), by the way darling ladies brought forward for his approval burst into tears as they were told to pass on, and by his own most dreary face. ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... fact that the other clerks disliked them equally, because they belonged to a class a little higher than their own, was a bond of union. When Philip thought that he must spend over four years more with that dreary set of fellows his heart sank. He had expected wonderful things from London and it had given him nothing. He hated it now. He did not know a soul, and he had no idea how he was to get to know anyone. He was ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... for some occult reason held early rising in high esteem. Why burning fire and candle light in the morning, when everything was cold and dreary, should look so much more virtuous and heroic than sitting up awhile at night when the house was warm and everything pleasant, is one of the mysteries to be solved only by the firm belief that the easy, ...
— A Little Girl in Old Boston • Amanda Millie Douglas
... resumed their march over the dreary plain in silence. Indeed, conversation in the circumstances was out of the question. The brief remarks that had been made when they paused to recover breath were howled at each other while ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... modern scholars agree with his most daring opinion, that the epistle of James was written by "some Jew who had heard of the Christians but not joined them." After Luther the voluminous works of the commentators are a dreary desert of arid dogmatism and fantastic pedantry. Carlstadt was perhaps the second best of the higher critics of the time; Zwingli was conservative; Calvin's exegesis slumbers in fifty ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... their coats-of-arms were broken off, and their effigies cast down, and the victors triumphed over them with the flourishes of trumpets and the waving of banners. But while I looked, the vision was changed, and I then beheld a wide and a dreary waste, and afar off the steeples of a great city, and a tower in the midst, like the tower of Babel, and on it I could discern, written in characters of fire, "Public Opinion." While I was pondering at the same, I heard a great shout, and presently the conquerors made their appearance, ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... ages, through the heart of a barren, rocky country. The precipices on each side were often two and three hundred feet high, sometimes perpendicular, and sometimes overhanging, so that it was impossible, excepting in one or two places, to get down to the margin of the stream. This dreary strait was rendered the more dangerous by frequent rapids, and occasionally perpendicular falls from ten to forty feet in height; so that it seemed almost hopeless to attempt to pass the canoes down it. The party, however, who had explored the south side of the river, had found a place, about ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... Elliston, who, with Uncle Dan, were entertaining a young woman relative from Savannah. He did not know how the others accepted his greeting; he only saw Agnes, and she smiled quite placidly at him, which was far worse than if she had tilted her head. Through two dreary, interminable acts he sat looking at the stage, trying to talk small talk with the Starletts and remaining absolutely miserable; but shortly before the beginning of the last act he was able to take a quite new and gleeful interest ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... of you, and sisters, and a quiet home; you cannot tell (it is not likely) what a lonely nature is. How it leaps in mirth sometimes, with only heaven touching it; and how it falls away desponding, when the dreary weight creeps on. ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... possible, more solitary than the night. The noise of the wild turkey, the croaking of the raven, or the woodpecker tapping the hollow beech tree, did not much enliven the dreary scene. The various tribes of singing birds are not inhabitants of the desert. They are not carnivorous and therefore must be fed from the labors of man. At any rate they did not exist in this country at ...
— Daniel Boone - The Pioneer of Kentucky • John S. C. Abbott
... hoodwink her own indestructible lucidity. Looking back on her life, after the joyous romances of her youth, the years had passed like so many funeral processions, each bearing some pleasant scandal to its burial. Then there had come the dreary funeral feast, and then the days of mournful rehabilitation. Oh, that rehabilitation! There had been three years of it. Three years of exhausting struggle for a position in society, three years of crawling, ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... that another element was now involved. Her longing to be an actress remained the same. Her distaste for the idea of life at the parsonage in Enderby had been increased almost to horror by the glimpses she had had through her friend's letters of what seemed to her its dreary and complacent domesticity. Nevertheless, at this moment she felt that she would give up the former and accept the latter without a murmur if she could thereby measure up to Cousin Julia's standard, and yet, in the process, hurt neither her nor ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... across eighteen centuries and all the chapters of the dreary story to the middle of the century we have just left behind, and look upon this picture of the New World's metropolis as it was drawn in public reports at a time when a legislative committee came to New York to see how crime and drunkenness came to be the natural crop of a population ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis
... derived, has been long esteemed in Germany for its many valuable qualities; and instead of being left to its natural growth, is cultivated in plantations of forest-like extent. In this way, many parts of a vast, dreary, sandy surface are turned to good account, for the tree grows rapidly on a light soil, imparting to it solidity and consistency, and affords shelter to the oak, which, under such favourable circumstances, acquires such vigour of development as to outgrow its protector. About the fortieth year of ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 458 - Volume 18, New Series, October 9, 1852 • Various
... and 32 guns each, and 700 men, to complete his discovery and take possession of this new continent. But he soon ascertained, what indeed he might and ought to have ascertained in his first voyage, that what he deemed and represented to be the Terra Australis was only a dreary and inhospitable island, of small size, so very barren and useless, that it produces no tree or even shrub of any kind, and very little grass. On such an island, in such a part of the globe, no inhabitants ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... a Versailles minuet, and now the spritely steps of a Parisian jig, would be either ludicrous or pathetic—one hardly knows which—were it not so certainly neither the one nor the other, but simply dreary with an unutterable dreariness, from which the eyes of men avert themselves in shuddering dismay. Frederick himself felt that there was something wrong—something, but not really very much. All that was wanted was a little expert advice; and obviously ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... the cottage were all that was left of the building; and these, blackened by smoke, and stripped of their piazzas and ornaments, were but dreary memorials of the content and security that had so lately reigned within. The roof, together with the rest of the woodwork, had tumbled into the cellars, and a pale and flitting light, ascending from their embers, shone faintly through the windows. The early flight of the Skinners left the ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper
... extremely strong as it did to-night, the tree leant over before the blast, and thus opened the crack. The fox, listening at the crack, heard the voice lamenting the long years that had passed, the darkness and the dreary time, and imploring every species of vengeance upon the head of the ...
— Wood Magic - A Fable • Richard Jefferies
... from place to place, spends a great deal of time seated in railway stations or on the banks of the Nile, waiting for his train or his boat to arrive; and he has, therefore, a great deal of time for thinking. I often try to fill in these dreary periods by jotting down a few notes on some matter which has recently been discussed, or registering and elaborating arguments which have chanced lately to come into the thoughts. These notes are shaped and "written up" when next there is a spare hour, ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... boyhood, he drew his career out before the wondering eyes of the old man down to the day when the culmination of carnal ambition, false thought, perverted concepts of filial devotion and sacredness of oath, of family honor and pride of race, had washed him up against the dreary shores of Simiti. With no thought of concealment, he exposed his ambition in regard to Carmen—even the love for her that he knew must die of inanition—and ended by throwing himself without reserve upon Rosendo's judgment. When the tense ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... insignificant, and I have never thought of them since. Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me, even in scenes which we are accustomed to call wild and dreary, and also that the nearest of blood to me and humanest was not a person nor a villager, that I thought no place could ever ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... they trace the dreary way, Through the black horrors of the ensanguined plain, Through dust, through blood, o'er ...
— The Story of Troy • Michael Clarke
... praised in those days; and the Murillo,—not from Marshal Soup's collection; and the portrait of Annibale Caracci by himself, which cost the Athenaeum a hundred dollars; and Cole's allegorical pictures, and his immense and dreary canvas, in which the prostrate shepherds and the angel in Joseph's coat of many colors look as if they must have been thrown in for nothing; and West's brawny Lear tearing his clothes to pieces. But why go on with the catalogue, when most of these pictures can be seen ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... have drawn near to hearken. There in Elahiy[)i] you are at rest, O White Woman. No one is ever lonely when with you. You are most beautiful. Instantly and at once you have rendered me a white man. No one is ever lonely when with me. Now you have made the path white for me. It shall never be dreary. Now you have put me into it. It shall never become blue. You have brought down to me from above the white road. There in mid-earth (mid-surface) you have placed me. I shall stand erect upon the earth. No one is ever lonely ...
— Seventh Annual Report • Various
... the borealis race, That flit ere you can point their place; Or like the rainbow's lovely form, Evanishing amid the storm. Nae man can tether time or tide; The hour approaches, Tam maun ride; That hour, o' night's black arch the keystane, That dreary hour he mounts his beast in; And sic a night he taks the road in As never poor sinner was ...
— Playful Poems • Henry Morley
... should like to keep him here as much as you would, but in every way it is better that he should go out and take his place in the world. To you and me, after our long imprisonment, this place is life, freedom, and happiness, and we are together; but for him it is a dreary little country chateau, and he would soon long for ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... American military authorities fell into much the same series of errors as their predecessors, the British, untaught by the dreary and mortifying experience of the latter in fighting these forest foes. The War Department at Washington, and the Federal generals who first came to the Northwest, did not seem able to realize the formidable character of the Indian armies, and were certainly unable to teach ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Three - The Founding of the Trans-Alleghany Commonwealths, 1784-1790 • Theodore Roosevelt
... deserted, solitary lad in Scotland. With that I turned my back upon the sea and faced the sandhills. There was no light or sound of man; the sun shone on the wet sand and the dry, the wind blew in the bents, the gulls made a dreary piping. As I passed higher up the beach, the sand-lice were hopping nimbly about the stranded tangles. The devil any other sight or sound in that unchancy place. And yet I knew there were folk there, observing me, upon some ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 11 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
Copyright © 2025 e-Free Translation.com
|
|
|
