"Wilderness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... little corner of a garden that might have been a spread table in the wilderness. It was only a small triangle of lawn, with a summer-house at its apex, and a spruce-fir and a house at its base, and privet-hedges marking off the rest. But it had a "bird-table," and a swept-clean circle on the grass, and there was sopped bread ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... myself, and how you fill my being. That probably explains why it is that I appear cold to all except you, even to mother; if God should impose on me the terrible affliction of losing you, I feel, so far as my feelings can at this moment grasp and realize such a wilderness of desolation, that I would then cling so to your parents that mother would have to complain of being persecuted with love. But away with all imaginary misery; there is enough in reality. Let us now earnestly thank the Lord that we are all together, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... yet all ripened and many of the leaves are as red and bright as flowers. The edges of most of the leaves have began to crumple: they are victims of a creeping sickness that eats into them and dirties them, and makes bramble and fern together an inextricable wilderness of refuse. ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... into the tall jungle grass, are apt to bewilder and mislead the traveller. During the dry season these jungles are the resort of great herds of cattle and tame buffaloes, which trample down the dry stalks, and force their way into the innermost recesses of the wilderness of grass, which grows ten to twelve feet high. If you once lose your path you may wander for miles, until your weary horse is almost unable to stumble on. In such a case, the best way is to take it coolly, and halloo ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... steps, discharged its load, and parted with its horses to the huge stone stable under the house. The mingling languages of an English and French society sounded all around her. The girl felt bewildered, as if she had crossed ocean and forest to find, instead of savage wilderness, an enchanted English county full of French country estates. Names and dignitaries ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... all the uses of this world. For what are its inhabitants? Its great men and its little, its fat ones and its lean ... pitiful automatons, despicable Yahoos, yea, they are altogether an insufferable thing. "O for a lodge in some vast wilderness, some boundless contiguity of shade, where the scowl of the purse-proud nabob, the sneer and strut of the coxcomb, the bray of the ninny and the clodpole might never ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... of a goat, which answers this description. This was the opinion of the Ancient Christians concerning the apparitions of the ancient panites, fauns, and satyrs; and of this form we read of one that appeared to Anthony in the wilderness. The same is also confirmed from exposition of Holy Scripture. For whereas it is said, 'Thou shalt not offer unto devils,' the original word is Seghuirim, i.e., 'rough and hairy goats,' because in that shape the Devil most often appeared, as is expounded by the rabbis, as ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... these are the pomegranates with which the word of the gospel is baited, that sinners may be taken and saved thereby. The argument of old was 'milk and honey'; that was, I say, the alluring bait, with which Moses drew six hundred thousand out of Egypt, into the wilderness of old (Exo 3:8). But behold we have pomegranates, two rows of pomegranates; grace and a kingdom, as the bait of the holy gospel; no wonder, then, if, when men of skill did cast this net into the sea, such numbers of fish have been catched, even by one sermon (Acts 2). They baited ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... given Himself to save us, so we ought to reach out the hand of love, and endeavour to snatch others from lives of misery and want. If we cannot open our own doors to the lost and wayward; ought we not to help in finding out those who can, that the lost and wandering lambs outside in the wilderness might be gathered beneath a sheltering wing inside ...
— God's Answers - A Record Of Miss Annie Macpherson's Work at the - Home of Industry, Spitalfields, London, and in Canada • Clara M. S. Lowe
... the moment all her maiden defenses had been wiped out and he had ridden roughshod over her reserves. But somewhere in her a bell of warning was ringing. The poignant sting of sex appeal had come home to her for the first time. Wherefore in this frank child of the wilderness had been born a shy shame, a vague trembling for herself that marked a change. At sunrise she had been still treading gayly the primrose path of childhood; at sunset she had entered upon her heritage ...
— Brand Blotters • William MacLeod Raine
... troop is naturally famished. A luncheon, has, however, been prepared by the thoughtfulness of the agha. Riding up to a tent which appears as by magic in the wilderness, the provisions for a sumptuous repast are discovered. Two fires are burning in the open air, and are surrounded by a host of servants or followers. The Roumi and their host adjourn from the neighborhood ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... the diary for 1881 says: "The year closes down on a wilderness of work, a swamp of letters and papers almost hopeless." She attacked it, however, with that sublime courage which was ever her strongest characteristic, and at the end of the first week of the new year the heaviest part of the burden ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... habit which, during subsequent years, he has so constantly and successfully pursued, namely, of enlisting in his service all the rare talent which he found lying common and unappropriated in the great wilderness of the world, no matter if the object to which it would apply might not immediately be in sight. The conjuncture would arrive when it would be wanted. Thus he generally had ready the right person for the occasion; and, whatever might ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli
... much of the forest as the beech. On the verge of woods the oaks are far apart, the ashes thin; the verge is like a wilderness and scrubby, so that the forest does not seem to begin till you have penetrated some distance. Under the beeches the forest begins at once. They stand at the edge of the slope, huge round boles rising from the mossy ground, wide fans of branches—a shadow ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... forth by earth and sky. There was exhilaration in the very thought of the long climb, and at an early hour I was fast leaving the village behind me. The road skirted the base of the mountain, and struck at once into the heart of the wilderness, which the clustering peaks have preserved from any but the most fleeting associations with the peopled world around. A barrier of ancient silence and solitude soon separated me even in thought from the familiar scenes ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... seems much ado about nothing," she said presently, filliping over the leaves. "Really, I can't see that there is any wilderness in the world, or devils to fight in or out of pits. At ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... crownless, in her voiceless woe; An empty urn within her wither'd hands, Whose holy dust was scatter'd long ago: The Scipios' tomb contains no ashes now; The very sepulchres lie tenantless Of their heroic dwellers; dost thou flow, Old Tiber! through a marble wilderness? Rise, with thy yellow waves, and mantle ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux
... turned and went slowly up the stair, and came out on to the open face of that Isle, and he saw that it was waste indeed, and dreadful: a wilderness of black sand and stones and ice-borne rocks, with here and there a little grass growing in the hollows, and here and there a dreary mire where the white-tufted rushes shook in the wind, and here and there stretches of moss blended with red-blossomed ...
— The Story of the Glittering Plain - or the Land of Living Men • William Morris
... initial cause of his resolve, is now mere matter of conjecture; probably the former. The three friends, Gallatin, Badollet, and Serre seem to have amused their leisure in planning an ideal existence in some wilderness. America offered a boundless field for the realization of such dreams, and the spice of adventure could be had for the seeking. Here was the forest primeval in its original grandeur. Here the Indian roamed undisputed master; ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... we have made but some ten miles advance among the hills, and we have lost already eight hundred hoplites, and I know not how many light armed troops. At this rate our force will melt away to nothing before we have half cleared this wilderness of rock and forest. Hitherto in their revolts the gladiators have met our troops in pitched battle, but their strength and skill have not availed against Roman discipline. But in such fighting as this discipline ...
— Beric the Briton - A Story of the Roman Invasion • G. A. Henty
... Barnabas gives neither an incident nor a single sentence from the Gospel, that he is unacquainted with the conception of the Logos, that expressions like 'water and blood,' or the Old Testament types of Christ, and especially the serpent reared in the wilderness as an object of faith, are employed by him independently—for all this the deeper order of conceptions in the Epistle coincides in the gross or in detail so repeatedly with the Gospel that science must either assume a connection between ...
— The Gospels in the Second Century - An Examination of the Critical Part of a Work - Entitled 'Supernatural Religion' • William Sanday
... happy days of yore passed like fairy dreams before her she heaved an involuntary sigh as she passionately exclaimed: "Oh drink, thou hast been our curse; turning our happiness into misery; our Eden of bliss into a waste, weary wilderness of ...
— From Wealth to Poverty • Austin Potter
... common phrase, whether they did any harm would be to beg the question in their own manner; to ask whether they produced any effect would lead us too far. They certainly expressed a prevalent tendency. Most fortunately Mr Arnold was allowed another ten years and more wherein to escape from the wilderness which yielded these Dead Sea fruits, and to till his proper garden once more. Yet we have not quite done ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... result of this little passage of words, some twenty minutes later two dangerous-looking seafaring ruffians entered a waiting cab, accompanied by Inspector Weymouth, and were driven off into the wilderness of London's night. In this theatrical business there was, to my mind, something ridiculous—almost childish—and I could have laughed heartily had it not been that grim tragedy lurked so ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... dishcloths and brooms, and begin scouring their knockers, and scrubbing their rooms.' Perhaps the most sensible thing on the subject came from one of the New England senators. He thought the seat of government ought to be 'in some wilderness, where there would be no social attractions, where members could go and attend strictly to business.' Upon my word, sir, the opinions are endless in number and variety; but, in truth, Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Morris are arranging the matter. This ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... old sadnesses to heighten my own sense of luxurious tranquillity and security. Not so will I err again. I will rather believe that a mighty price is being paid for a mightier joy, that we are not astray in the wilderness out of the way, but that we are rather a great and loving company, guided onward to some far-off city of God, with infinite tenderness, and a love so great that we cannot even comprehend ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... house to house, inciting the peasantry to rebel. Among others he sought out some of his father's tenants, in the hope that they at least would hear him. But he found them all sunk in lethargy, cowering under the sword of Christiern. His voice was truly the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The golden hope of lifting his country out of her misery seemed shattered at a blow. Instead of being received with open arms as a deliverer, he was jeered at in every town, and finally so bitter grew the public sentiment against him that he was forced to flee. Hardly daring ...
— The Swedish Revolution Under Gustavus Vasa • Paul Barron Watson
... purpose of improving their condition. Their first duty to themselves is to open and cultivate farms, to construct roads, to establish schools, to erect places of religious worship, and to devote their energies generally to reclaim the wilderness and to lay the foundations of a flourishing and prosperous commonwealth. If in this incipient condition, with a population of a few thousand, they should prematurely enter the Union, they are oppressed by the burden of ...
— State of the Union Addresses of James Buchanan • James Buchanan
... with this wonderful extension of steel ways through our wilderness there is loss as well as gain. Nearly all railroads are bordered by belts of desolation. The finest wilderness perishes as if stricken with pestilence. Bird and beast people, if not the dryads, are frightened from the groves. Too often the ...
— The Grand Canon of the Colorado • John Muir
... this magnificent dwelling-place. Armies were employed, in the intervals of their warlike labors, to level hills, or pile them up; to turn rivers, and to build aqueducts, and transplant woods, and construct smooth terraces, and long canals. A vast garden grew up in a wilderness, and a stupendous palace in the garden, and a stately city round the palace: the city was peopled with parasites, who daily came to do worship before the creator of these wonders—the Great King. "Dieu seul ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... on up the wall, which when you are on it is not so perpendicular as it looks from below, my desire being to see what sort of country there was on the top of it, between it and the final peak. Sasu had reported to Herr Liebert that it was a wilderness of rock, in which it would be impossible to fix a tent, and spoke vaguely of caves. Here and there on the way up I come to holes, similar to the one my men had been down for water. I suppose these holes ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... this; but then Keats was the first. Now this book, admitting its merit in a certain way, is but the imitation of a school, and, in my mind, a bad school. One such poem as that on the bust of Dante is worth a whole wilderness of these new writers, the very best of them. Certainly nothing better than those two pages ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... parliament was like the rock in the wilderness, which flowed with the welcome stream when touched by the rod of Moses. The present supply which the commons granted for the subsistence of the Hanoverian army, was, in pursuance of a message from his majesty, communicated to the house by Mr. Secretary ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... can live luxuriously and wear fine clothes, without being obliged to work; for idleness is natural to man — Great numbers of these, being disappointed in their expectation, become thieves and sharpers; and London being an immense wilderness, in which there is neither watch nor ward of any signification, nor any order or police, affords them lurking-places ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... off 87 per cent. in recent years, with a decrease in its death-rate of over one-third. Besides all this, and independent of any such investigation, the 'intuitions' of our most earnest women were leading them out of the wilderness. As is their custom, they determined to put this matter to the test of that 'experience which one experiences when he experiences his own experience,' and a whole body of divinity upon the advantages of non-alcoholic treatment could be furnished from their evidence. I was not ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... down, ye lightning-bolts! Burst open, clouds! Pour out, ye drenching streams Of heaven, and drown the land! Annihilate I' the very germ the unborn brood of men! Ye furious elements, assert your lordship! Ye bears, ye ancient wolves o' the wilderness, Come back again! The land belongs to you. Who cares to live in it bereft ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas
... field was discovered almost in sight of a depot formed by Sturt, at a spot where he was imprisoned at a water hole for six months without moving his camp. He described the whole region as a desert, and he seems to have been haunted by the notion that he had got into and was surrounded by a wilderness the like of which no human being had ever seen or heard of before. His whole narrative is a tale of suffering and woe, and he says on his map, being at the furthest point he attained in the interior, about forty-five miles from where he had encamped on the watercourse he called ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles
... hints of their moral degradation which Scripture gives;—the helplessness, the hopelessness, the cowardice, the sensuality, which cried, 'Let us alone, that we may serve the Egyptians. Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou brought us forth to die in the wilderness?' 'Whose highest wish on earth was to sit by the fleshpots of Egypt, where they did eat bread to the full.' What had transformed that race into a lion, ...
— Discipline and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... professed that he received benefit from that of the meanest person. He cultivated and pruned a little garden on his desert mountain, that he might have herbs always at hand to present a refreshment to those who, on coming to see him, were always weary by travelling over a vast wilderness and inhospitable mountain, as St. Athanasius mentions. This tillage was not the only manual labor in which St. Antony employed himself. The same venerable author speaks of his making mats as an ordinary occupation. We are told ...
— The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs, and Principal Saints - January, February, March • Alban Butler
... stretched away in unbroken miles of wilderness. The wood was used for the settlers' homes, their fuel, and their scanty furniture, but they needed so little that it grew much faster than it could be used. The man who cut down a tree was a public benefactor. The trees, though so necessary ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... had been reading about the lost sheep, and the joy there is in heaven over the sinner that repenteth. Surely the eternal love she believed in through all the sadness of her lot, would not leave her child to wander farther and farther into the wilderness till here was no turning—the child so lovely, so pitiful to others, so good, till she was goaded into sin by woman's bitterest sorrows! Mrs. Raynor had her faith and her spiritual comforts, though she was not in the least ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... the prospect, and suppressed her sighs at the dislocation of her life-long habits, and the loss of intercourse with the acquaintance whom separation raised to the rank of intimate friends, even her misgivings as to butchers, bakers, and grocers in the wilderness, and still worse, as to ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... sylvan wilderness, mid-leg deep in ferns, whose tall fronds brushed their horses' sides in their furious gallop and concealed the flapping of the captive's loosened cords. The peaceful vista, more suggestive of the offerings of nymph and shepherd than of human sacrifice, was in a strange contrast to this ...
— Stories in Light and Shadow • Bret Harte
... these subjects of Prester John. They were no other than the infidels, the sons of Ghuz, or Kofar-al-Turak, the wild flat-nosed Mongol hordes from the Tartary Steppes, who, in Benjamin's quaint language, "worship the wind and live in the wilderness, who eat no bread and drink no wine, but feed on uncooked meat. They have no noses—in lieu thereof they have two small holes through which ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... I will," exclaimed Elizabeth; "would that I could not only oblige, but retain you for our comfort, for this world to my mother will be a wilderness indeed." ...
— The Boarding School • Unknown
... the righteousness and sprinkled with the blood of Christ. Here the appropriation of the merits of Christ, through an orthodox and vivifying faith, is the real cause as well as the experimental assurance of salvation. This is free to all. As the brazen serpent was hoisted in the wilderness, and the scorpion bitten Israelites invited to look on it and be healed, so the crucified God is lifted up, and all men, everywhere, are urged to kneel before him, accept his atonement, and thus enable his righteousness to be imputed to them, and their souls to be saved. The vital condition ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... and surgical supplies had to be inventoried, and missing or required supplies ordered up. New supplies coming in had to be checked, tested, and stored in the ship's limited hold space. It was like preparing for an extended pack trip into wilderness country; once the Lancet left its home base on Hospital Earth it was a world to itself, equipped to support its physician-crew and provide the necessary equipment and data they would need to deal with the problems they would face. ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse
... glance told the story. With the round stone for a hammer the mad hunter had pounded his golden bullets into shape upon the flat stone! There was no longer a doubt in their minds; they were in the madman's camp. That morning they had left this strange creature of the wilderness fifty miles away. But how far away was he now? The fire slumbering under its covering of ash and earth proved that he meant to return—and soon. Would he travel by night as well as by day? Was it possible that he was already ...
— The Gold Hunters - A Story of Life and Adventure in the Hudson Bay Wilds • James Oliver Curwood
... change in the economic laws of the country. Duplicating the scheme by which the Huntingtons and Oakes Ameses robbed the people they submitted their prospectus for endorsement, and, lo, this whole coast grovels in the dust to these new Moseses, who are to show them the way out of the wilderness into which their original, Huntington, has ...
— Confiscation, An Outline • William Greenwood
... with the meekness of an ostentatious scape-goat, unjustly bearing the sins of her tribe, and went upstairs into the wilderness of ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... god celestial I swear it you, and eke on each goddess, On ev'ry nymph, and deity infernal, On Satyrs and on Faunes more or less, That *halfe goddes* be of wilderness; *demigods And Atropos my thread of life to-brest,* *break utterly If I be false! now trow* me if ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... Antony of Thebes was the founder of monachism. He is said to have been born at Koma, Egypt, near Heraklea, A. D. 251, and to have died A. D. 356. In early life he retired to the wilderness, and lived in seclusion until 305, when he founded the monastery of Fayum, near Memphis and Arsinoe. He is the patron of hospitallers, and his day is celebrated on January 17. His life was written by St. Athanasius, ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 40 of 55 • Francisco Colin
... flood river whirled at rocky banks, An army issues out of wilderness, With battle plucking round its ragged flanks; Obstruction in the van; insane excess Oft at the heart; yet hard the onward stress Unto more spacious, where move ordered ranks, And rise hushed temples built of shapely stone, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Pond, looking along its reedy margin, under purple tamaracks, for deer. There was a great silence, here in the deep of the woods, and Tip Taylor's axe, while he peeled the bark for our camp, seemed to fill the wilderness with echoes. It was after dark when the shanty was covered and we lay on its fragrant mow of balsam and hemlock. The great logs that we had rolled in front of our shanty were set afire ...
— Eben Holden - A Tale of the North Country • Irving Bacheller
... unusual number of toy-shops. Finally we took a cab, and drove to the Hall, about four miles distant, nearly the whole of the way lying through the wooded Park. There are many sorts of trees, making up a wilderness, which looked not unlike the woods of our own Concord, only less wild. The English oak is not a handsome tree, being short and sturdy, with a round, thick mass of foliage, lying all within its own bounds. It was a showery day. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... avoid one conclusion: the peril which had impelled the young German's horse to such a burst of speed must have been in the form dreaded above all others—that of the wild Indians who at that day roamed through the vast wilderness of the West and hovered along the frontier, eager to use the torch, the rifle, or the tomahawk, whenever and ...
— The Lost Trail - I • Edward S. Ellis
... distance, while they were within reach of the moist air of the oasis, these sand-mountains produced vegetation of various sorts. Presently, however, we passed out into the wilderness proper, and for a while climbed up and down the steep, shifting slopes, till from the crest of one of them the chief pointed out what in South Africa is called a pan, or vlei, covered with green reeds, and explained by signs that in these ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... inflicted, and that death must have inevitably followed, then the death of Christ is proved. The Resurrection becomes supernatural; the Ascension forthwith ceases to be marvellous; the Miraculous Conception, the Temptation in the Wilderness, all the other miracles of Christ and his Apostles, become believable at once upon so signal a failure of human experience; human experience ceases to be a guide at all, inasmuch as it is found to ...
— The Fair Haven • Samuel Butler
... place at a time when the belief in diabolic agency had been hardly called in question, much less shaken. The early adventurers brought it with them to a country in every way fitted, not only to keep it alive, but to feed it into greater vigor. The solitude of the wilderness (and solitude alone, by dis-furnishing the brain of its commonplace associations, makes it an apt theatre for the delusions of imagination), the nightly forest noises, the glimpse, perhaps, through the leaves, of a painted savage face, uncertain whether of redman ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... Teutonic mythology. He desires to avenge his father on Halfdan that slew him. To this end he must have a weapon of might against Halfdan's club. The Moon-god tells him of the blade Thiasse has forged. It has been stolen by Mimer, who has gone out into the cold wilderness on the rim of the world. Swipdag achieves the sword, and defeats and slays Halfdan. He now buys a wife, Menglad, of her kinsmen the gods by the gift of the sword, which thus passes into ...
— The Danish History, Books I-IX • Saxo Grammaticus ("Saxo the Learned")
... the ordinary is this "Spirit of the Border." The main thread of the story has to do with the work of the Moravian missionaries in the Ohio Valley. Incidentally the reader is given details of the frontier life of those hardy pioneers who broke the wilderness for the planting of this great nation. Chief among these, as a matter of course, is Lewis Wetzel, one of the most peculiar, and at the same time the most admirable of all the brave men who spent their lives battling with the savage foe, that ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... just the finest kind of a place for a camp," said the enthusiastic Jess. "It's just like a wilderness." ...
— The Girls of Central High in Camp - The Old Professor's Secret • Gertrude W. Morrison
... amid which she had lived till now—a monotonous blue sea, mountains scorched and crumbled by the sun, dry palms in hot gardens, roads choked with dust and tormented with a plague of motor-cars, white villas crowded among high walls, a wilderness of hotels, and ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Chip's, Wickens's, Pinney's, and so on), and the playground, or "green" as it was called, although the only thing green about the place was the broken glass on the walls that separate Slaughter House from Wilderness Row and Goswell Street—(many a time have I seen Mr. Pickwick look out of his window in that street, though we did not know him then)—the playground, or green, was common to all. But if any stray boy from Potky's was found, for instance, in, or entering into, Chip's ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... were forewarned, and that they were constitutionally obedient. A few minutes later, and they were all swept up high on the beach in a wilderness of foam. The return of that wilderness was like the rushing of a millrace. Sand, stones, sticks, and seaweed went back with it in dire confusion. Prone on their knees, with fingers and toes fixed, and heads down, the brothers and sister met the rush. It was almost too much for them. A moment ...
— The Island Queen • R.M. Ballantyne
... European peoples." Obviously erroneous as are these words, there was an element of truth in them. If we would understand this element of truth, we must study the transforming influence of the American wilderness, remote from Europe, and by its resources and its free opportunities affording the conditions under which a new people, with new social and political types and ideals, could arise to play its own part in the world, and to ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... we had set up our shack in a wilderness. Now there were shacks everywhere and frantic activity. The plains had come to life. Over them, where there had been bleak emptiness, loomed tents, white against the green background, where the settlers could sleep until they were able to build houses. ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... long pilgrimage. Norwich had also a court in miniature. In the heart of the city stood an old palace of the Dukes of Norfolk, said to be the largest town house in the kingdom out of London. In this mansion, to which were annexed a tennis court, a bowling green, and a wilderness stretching along the banks of the Wansum, the noble family of Howard frequently resided, and kept a state resembling that of petty sovereigns. Drink was served to guests in goblets of pure gold. The very tongs and shovels were of silver. Pictures by Italian masters ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... the order to extinguish all lights on the moor had been obeyed. Only a panting sound as if from a wilderness of frightened animals betrayed the presence of thousands. As long as the sun shone there had been a babel of sound; at the disappearance of our parent planet, a hushed awe had fallen with the night. Gone the rude joking and wrangling, the crying of children, and the ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... Society" was founded in 1818. It consisted at first of nine women. In those early days the country was a wilderness. Other members were added later. It has had in all, over nine hundred members. Mrs. Elizabeth Pettit was its presiding officer from 1840 until 1881—forty-one years. The daughters and the granddaughters are all made members by right of inheritance, and in several instances four generations ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... before reaching Jerusalem, the road by which we travelled was stoney and deserted. Not a blade of grass or a tree was visible. "Most fervently do I pray," Sir Moses remarked, "that the wilderness of Zion may again be like Eden, and her desert like ...
— Diaries of Sir Moses and Lady Montefiore, Volume I • Sir Moses Montefiore
... the world for me might show Its sordid faith and selfish gloom, Yet 'mid life's wilderness to know For me that sweet flower shed its bloom, Was joy, was solace:—thou art gone— And hope forsook me, when the stone Sank ...
— The Life of Mansie Wauch - Tailor in Dalkeith, written by himself • David Macbeth Moir
... can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach. I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,—cut off his skirts, Sir! cut ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... you I'm in shivers! My heart that is shaking like an ivy leaf! My bones that are loosened and slackened in the similitude of a rope of tow! I'd sooner meet with a lion of the wilderness or the wickedest wind of the hills! I thought it never would come to pass. I'd sooner go into the pettiest house, the wildest home and the worst! Look at here now. Let me stop along with yourself. I never let out so much ...
— New Irish Comedies • Lady Augusta Gregory
... Chaplain Norman Fox, and Mr. Henry M. Myers. I am also indebted to the friends of Samuel S. Craig for the use of his diary, extending from the early history of the Army of the Potomac, to the death of the talented young soldier in the Wilderness. ...
— Three Years in the Sixth Corps • George T. Stevens
... blurred and indistinct, resolving to a dim, vast mass, rugged with high-shouldered office buildings and bulging, balloon-like domes, confused and mysterious under the cloak of the fog. In the nearer foreground, along the lines of the wharves and docks, a wilderness of masts and spars of a tone just darker than the gray of the mist stood away from the blur of the background with the distinctness and ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... of which the Saxons slew three thousand of the Normans at York, for which the infuriated William punished Northumbria with a horrible slaughter. "From York to Durham not an inhabited village remained; fire, slaughter, and desolation, made a vast wilderness there. . . . . From Durham right on to Hexham, from the banks of the winding Wear to those of the Tyne, Jarrow, Monkchester, with all the dwellings, homesteads, and happy places, were deluged with the people's blood; even the monasteries and religious houses shared ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... helmet and lance. Beyond the narrow defile at the base of the castle, the road at that day opened into a broad patch of verdure, circled on all sides, save that open to the sea, by wood, interspersed with myrtle and orange, and a wilderness of odorous shrubs. In this space, and sheltered by the broad-spreading and classic fagus (so improperly translated into the English "beech"), a gay pavilion was prepared, which commanded the view of the sparkling sea;—shaded from the sun, but open to the gentle breeze. This was poor Adeline's ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... my fellow men. I would fain have them believe that I have been, in some measure, the slave of circumstances beyond human control. I would wish them to seek out for me, in the details I am about to give, some little oasis of fatality amid a wilderness of error. I would have them allow—what they cannot refrain from allowing—that, although temptation may have erewhile existed as great, man was never thus, at least, tempted before—certainly, never thus fell. And is it therefore that he has never thus suffered? ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... freighters of the far North. For more than two centuries and a quarter they have sweated the wilderness freight across these same portages. And they are sober men—when civilization is ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... deceitful halo around their path and beckoned them onwards through seas of blood to the subversion of an unoffending dynasty. They were content with the slow but steady progress of their social polity. They patiently endured the privations of the wilderness, watering the tree of liberty with their tears and with the sweat of their brow, till it took deep root in the land and sent up its branches high towards the heavens; while the communities of the neighboring continent, shooting up into the sudden splendors of a tropical vegetation, ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... the great Forsyte army advancing to the civilization of this wilderness, felt his spirit daunted by the loneliness, by the invisible singing, and the hot, sweet air. He had begun to retrace his steps when he at ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Alvin Drake's son. Alvin, I knew, had died about a year before I had started on this journey. But what was his son doing in this wilderness? ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... fast-flowing stream whose course runs parallel with the meridian like all the others of that interesting group of rivers between Assam and eastern Szechuan, the Irrawaddy, the Salween, the Mekong, the Yangtse, the Yalung. The Anning, the smallest of these, lies enclosed in a wilderness of tangled ranges, and its valley forms the shortest trade route between Szechuan and the Indo-Chinese peninsula. For about eight marches, north and south, it runs through a district known as Chien-ch'ang, celebrated throughout China for its fertility ...
— A Wayfarer in China - Impressions of a trip across West China and Mongolia • Elizabeth Kendall
... were sitting in the corner of one of the villa's terraced walks, amid a scented wilderness of flowers. Above them was a canopy of purple and yellow—rose and wistaria; while through the arches of the pergola which ran along the walk gleamed all those various blues which make the spell of Como—the blue ...
— Lady Rose's Daughter • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... save me from her, thou illustrious sage! For every vein and pulse throughout my frame She hath made tremble." He, soon as he saw That I was weeping, answer'd, "Thou must needs Another way pursue, if thou wouldst 'scape From out that savage wilderness. This beast, At whom thou criest, her way will suffer none To pass, and no less hindrance makes than death: So bad and so accursed in her kind, That never sated is her ravenous will, Still after food more craving than before. To many an ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... 1867, the men of light and leading at Ottawa lost no time in looking westward to secure the vast western domain for the new Confederation. Despite the difficulty of travel, settlers had already begun to percolate from Eastern Canada through the States or the wilderness spaces west of the Great Lakes, into the Red River country made famous by the Selkirk Colony. And it had been becoming more and more apparent to the Hudson's Bay Company itself as well as to others that the great fur-trading and mercantile organization ...
— Policing the Plains - Being the Real-Life Record of the Famous North-West Mounted Police • R.G. MacBeth
... of danger shot through him. His fears returned a hundredfold. Sharply he scanned the way about them, but nothing was in sight. The whistle was not repeated; he could have imagined that he dreamed it. An utter stillness possessed the wilderness. ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... arrived of the discovery of several rich gold mines in the southern part of the island. They were found by a soldier named Miguel Diaz, who having fled to the wilderness to escape punishment for wounding a comrade, had established conjugal relations with an Indian woman near the present site of Santo Domingo City. Noticing that her consort was tiring of her, the lady tried to retain him by revealing the existence of gold deposits in the region; and Diaz ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich
... may be larger or smaller, its difficulties more or less pronounced, the contending armies more or less great, the necessary movements more or less easy, but these are simply differences of scale, of degree, not of kind. As a wilderness gives place to civilization, as means of communication multiply, as roads are opened, rivers bridged, food-resources increased, the operations of war become easier, more rapid, more extensive; but the principles to which they must be conformed remain the same. When ...
— The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783 • A. T. Mahan
... very little hope of this, and only went back there because it seemed to her a little less dauntingly strange than every other spot in the howling wilderness about her; for all at once the Fair, which had seemed so lively and cheerful and gay before, seemed now a horrible, frightening, noisy place, full of hurried strangers who came and went their own ways, with not a glance out of their hard eyes ...
— Understood Betsy • Dorothy Canfield
... than 5000, from a nation moving by moral forces, and ploughing up for ever new soils of moral promise, betray itself, by folly or by guilt, into the meshes of a frightful calamity, and the earth listens for the details from the tropics to the arctic circle. Not Moscow and Smolensko, through all the wilderness of their afflictions, ever challenged the gaze of Christendom so earnestly as the Coord Cabool. And why? The pomp, the procession of the misery, lasted through six weeks in the Napoleon case, through six days in the English case. Of the French host there had been originally ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... Woolli is bounded by Walli on the west, by the Gambia on the south, by the small river Walli on the north-west, by Bondou on the north-east, and on the east by the Simbani wilderness. ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... life-hope was so dead within her, that for the time she looked upon all things in the universe through a veil of unreality. What did it matter, one thing or the other? what did it signify any longer which way she took through the wilderness of this world? Diana's senses were benumbed; she no longer recognised the forms of things, nor their possible hard edges, nor the perspectives of time. Life seemed unending, long, it is true, to look forward ...
— Diana • Susan Warner
... innocent. He is there— In the desert vast, in the wilderness, On the bellowing sea, in the lion's lair, In the midst of battle, and everywhere. In his hand he holds with a father's care The tender hearts of the motherless; The maid and the mother in sore distress He shields with his love and his tenderness; He comforts the widowed—the comfortless, ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... Victrix. He could not combat her any more. He was out in the wilderness, alone with her. Having occasion to go to London, he marvelled, as he returned, thinking of naked, lurking savages on an island, how these had built up and created the great mass of Oxford Street ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... No one knew what was happening. There were no newspapers, no letters, no despatches. Every community was as completely isolated as though ten thousand miles of primeval wilderness stretched between it and the rest of the world. For that matter, the world had ceased to exist. And for a week this state of ...
— The Iron Heel • Jack London
... writing a novel, not history. In "The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border" (1802-3) Sir Walter gave this account of the persecutions. "Had the system of coercion been continued until our day, Blair and Robertson would have preached in the wilderness, and only discovered their powers of eloquence and composition by rolling along a deeper torrent of gloomy fanaticism. . . . The genius of the persecuted became stubborn, obstinate, and ferocious." He did not, in his romance, draw a complete picture of ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... the house had become deserted, Matravers stood there, his hands resting upon the edge of the box, and his dark face turned steadfastly to that far-away corner, where it seemed to him that he could see a solitary, human figure, sitting with bowed head amongst the wilderness ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... our course, and, an hour later, stood upon its very verge. Our venerable companion now looked up at the precipitous slope above us, where only some stray, projecting rocks were left to guide us through the wilderness of snow. "Boys," said he, despondently, "I cannot reach the top; I have not rested during the night, and I am now falling asleep on my feet; besides, I am very much fatigued." This came almost like a sob from a breaking heart. Although the old gentleman was opposed to the ascent in the ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... and Foremost. "When we get through with Oz it will be a desert wilderness. Ozma shall be ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... orthodoxy in his disgust at their rebukes. Towards the close of the Revolution, getting poor in fact by getting rich in Continental money, he endeavored to save himself by investing in Virginia land-warrants, went to Kentucky as a surveyor, and became possessed of sixteen hundred acres of that wilderness. On a second expedition down the Ohio, early in 1782, he fell into the hands of the savages, in the most melodramatic style, was led captive through the vast forests and swamps to Detroit, had a very characteristic and remarkable prison-experience ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... high peak on the crest of the range where all was desolation, and nothing grew. The peak was a vast pile of broken rocks and stones partly covered with snow. To the North Long's Peak stood out above everything else. To the East one had a grand view over a wilderness of mountain ranges and peaks to the great plains in the dim distance. To the South, beyond a range of other snow-capped peaks, towered Mount Gray. Within a mile of us in full view, were seven mountain lakes from ten to a hundred acres in size, and one of them, which was screened from the sun's rays ...
— A Gold Hunter's Experience • Chalkley J. Hambleton
... passed, painted and feather-crested, armed with a bow of hickory, a stone tomahawk, and flint-headed arrows. But the ripple had hardly vanished from the water, when a white flag caught the breeze, over a castle in the wilderness, with frowning ramparts and a hundred cannon.... A war party of French and Indians were issuing from the gate to lay waste some village of New England. Near the fortress there was a group of dancers. The merry soldiers footing it with the swart savage maids; deeper in the wood, some red ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... critical examination. The founder of a new faith has usually begun by the earnest and authoritative declaration of a few simple truths and positive doctrines, for which his disciples provide, in course of time, the necessary philosophical basis. Bentham's voice had been crying ineffectually in the wilderness; and he now set about laying with his own hands the foundations of his beliefs upon primary scientific principles, always with unswerving aim and application to concrete facts. He was a thorough-going iconoclast, wielding, like Mohammed, a single ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... the skirts Of the blind vapour, opened to my view Glory beyond all glory ever seen By waking sense or by the dreaming soul! The appearance, instantaneously disclosed, Was of a mighty city—boldly say A wilderness of building, sinking far And self-withdrawn into a boundless depth, Far sinking into splendour—without end! Fabric it seemed of diamond and of gold, With alabaster domes, and silver spires, And blazing terrace upon terrace, high Uplifted; here, serene pavilions bright, In avenues ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... do—wait. So he went to his hiding-place of the day before and watched the sea with staring eyes. An hour passed and his still aching vision saw no sign of sail; two hours—and the sun was falling in a blinding glare over the Wisconsin wilderness. At last he sprang to his feet with a hopeless cry and stood for a few moments undecided. Should he wait until night with the hope of attracting the attention of Neil and joining him in his canoe or should he hasten in the direction of St. James? In the darkness he might miss Neil, unless ...
— The Courage of Captain Plum • James Oliver Curwood
... two brothers named Drew, having some work to look into for them. These Drews were the sons of a clergymen in England, and they had lately come to New Zealand with a little money and no experience, taken a small tract of land in this swampy wilderness, and settled down to farm it. The buildings consisted of a wretched mud hut, some twelve feet square, a small yard, and a few pigsties. What a habitation it was, and what filth and absence of management was apparent all over it! Failure was stamped on these ...
— Five Years in New Zealand - 1859 to 1864 • Robert B. Booth
... the trade, and that "they should be obliged to eat oats out of English hands."[29] From the north the French descended in great numbers, eager to share in the gains of this traffic, and often encroached upon the domains of other nations. The solitudes of the wilderness thus resounded every where to the tread of the adventurous white man, who, lured on by the hope of gain, thought not of the dangers that beset his path. It doubtless afforded the Indian no little satisfaction to welcome ...
— Wampum - A Paper Presented to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society - of Philadelphia • Ashbel Woodward
... was a wonderful fulfillment of prophecy. The Jews had cherished the hope of the promised Messiah for thousands of years. Through all their national vicissitudes, enslavement in Egypt, wanderings in, the wilderness, establishment and growth in the promised land, internal division and external captivity in Babylon, restoration, and final subjection to the Romans, this hope burned on the horizon of their future as ...
— A Wonderful Night; An Interpretation Of Christmas • James H. Snowden
... three rooms, all very nicely appointed for a place as far out in the wilderness as this. When Elshawe got his equipment stowed away, Porter invited him to come out and take a look at his ...
— By Proxy • Gordon Randall Garrett
... and I believed I could beat it to Oak Cliff. I felt certain I could reach the little hamlet of Pine Top, and from there on it would be easy to get to shelter. Between us and Pine Top was practically an unbroken wilderness, a part of the country reserved as a source of water supply for the great city far to the ...
— John Henry Smith - A Humorous Romance of Outdoor Life • Frederick Upham Adams
... be difficult to stir Otto Schmidt, at any stage of his career, into antagonism against the Jewish race, when he remembers the patience and loving kindness with which Maxie Fishandler labored with him and guided his first steps through the wilderness ...
— New Faces • Myra Kelly
... own importance—at least underrates that of the animal kingdom below him—and is too apt to deem everything in nature wasted that cannot be directly or indirectly connected with himself! Is all that glows in beauty in the wilderness doomed to "blush unseen"? Is all the sweetness expended on the desert ...
— The Rover of the Andes - A Tale of Adventure on South America • R.M. Ballantyne
... The river expanded into a lake before them, and in their lap some cottages, and half-way up the hillside, among the stunted pines, a much-galleried hotel, proclaimed a resort of fashion in the heart of what seemed otherwise a wilderness. Indian huts sheathed in birch-bark nestled at the foot of the rocks, which were rich in orange and scarlet stains; out of the tops of the huts curled the blue smoke, and at the door of one stood a squaw in a flame-red ...
— A Chance Acquaintance • W. D. Howells
... however, where a plain question appeared to him to be permissible, the Doctor was unsparing in his endeavours to cultivate the wilderness of his ignorance and uncertainty and so ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... a friend with whom I lived peacefully in the wilderness. I swung like a cloud full of rain, I murmured like a rivulet, I shook like a thunder-bolt, I overturned every thing like an earthquake, I flashed as lightning, I consumed like the sun. Yellow ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff
... be considering. "Well, I think perhaps you've hit it. However, there are some extenuating circumstances. Give a man a dozen years or so of the mental starvation of a New England wilderness, and then all at once fill him chock full of new ideas, and he gets a pain within him, just as painful a pain as if it were in his tummy, not his mind. In time, it leads to chronic indigestion. That's what ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... Huntersville at 9 o'clock in the evening of the last mentioned day. According to the official report the entire distance marched on the expedition, going and coming, was 190 miles, and we didn't see an armed Confederate on the whole trip. Our return route was through the wilderness, most of it primeval forest, and we didn't pass through a single town. But now there is a railroad that runs practically over all the course we followed during the last three days we were on this march. I haven't been in that region since ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... to the settlement of the wilderness parts of Nova Scotia by the proclamations issued by Governor Lawrence in 1758 and 1759 offering free grants of lands to those who would become settlers. In consequence of these proclamations attention was directed to the St. John river. The fertile lands along its borders greatly pleased the ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... remembers—see how he lights memorial lamps about them," for the sun, reflected from the polished floor, threw a sheen upon the ancient canvases, and burned bright in the bosses of the frames. "Give me these," he wound up, "a book or two, and a jug of the parroco's 'included wine'—my wilderness is ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... soldiers—who acted as auxiliaries to Irish clans engaged on the queen's instigation in mutual massacre. After three years of this sort of thing, the whole southern portion of the island was reduced, to use Mr. Froude's words, "to a smoking wilderness," men, women, and children having been remorselessly slaughtered; but no attempt whatever was then made to establish either courts or police, or any civil rule of any kind. Society was left in a worse condition than before. Why was this? Because, says Mr. Froude, ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... vulture watches from the high overhanging points of rock the lower woods and pastures; the melancholy owl hoots through the night around the hamlets; and by the side of the lowly mountain tarn stands silent and solitary the pelican of the wilderness. Only the wild turkey in the pinetree's top is a mark for the rifle; or the pheasant, darting up out of the path into the overhanging branches, tempts occasionally the sharpshooter; while, on the contrary, woodcock and snipe bore for worms in every marsh and mud-bank, ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... adventure. They left that place and continued their journey, and when twilight began to fall they once more agreed to seek a halting-place near some piece of water. But they were much terrified to find themselves quite lost in a lonely wilderness. At last, however, they came upon a tiny lake, where they decided to spend the night. They kindled a fire, unpacked cooking utensils and food, and took their evening meal. After that they disposed themselves to sleep. Then said the second brother, "Do ...
— Tales of Wonder Every Child Should Know • Various
... district, I built with reeds and stalks my first oratory in the name of the Holy Trinity. And there concealed, with but one comrade, a certain cleric, I was able to sing over and over again to the Lord: "Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness" ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... chains, and scarred by the whip. One of the most telling testimonies against the pretended kindness of slaveholders, is the fact that uncounted numbers of fugitives are now inhabiting the Dismal Swamp, preferring{344} the untamed wilderness to their cultivated homes—choosing rather to encounter hunger and thirst, and to roam with the wild beasts of the forest, running the hazard of being hunted and shot down, than to submit to the authority ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... the cloud, and beneath it, and through them, is seen a vision of wild, melancholy, boundless light, the sweep of the desert, and the figure of Christ is seen therein alone, with his arms lifted as in supplication or ecstacy, borne of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of ...
— Modern Painters Volume II (of V) • John Ruskin
... geography was like a first talk with a long-lost friend. It had, indeed, been my old friend. Behind its broad back I had eaten forbidden apples, I had aimed and discharged the blow-gun, I had reveled in blood-and-thunder tales that made the drowsy schoolroom fade before the vast wilderness, the scene of breathless struggles between Indian and settler, or open into the high seas where pirate, or worse-than-pirate Britisher, struck flag to American privateer ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips |
