"Bareness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... out. It's here," she rushed on, pressing her hands hysterically against her softly rounded bosom. "The dream is past. All dreams are past. I'm awake now—to this," she indicated the room about her, simple almost to bareness in its furnishing, with a gesture of indescribable feeling. "It's all I've got to waken to. All I've got to look forward to. I've tried to tell myself there's a good time coming, when I can peer into the great light world, and snatch something of the joy of it all. I've tried, I've tried. But ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... looking at him, nothing but the blue wind between him and them, was like being naked to the very soul. Doubtless there would be creatures about, to share the night with him, and protect him from its awful bareness; but they would be few for the size of the room, and he might see none of them! It was the sense of emptiness, the lack of present life that dismayed him. He had never seen any creatures to shrink ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... fantastic mountains, which just opened their rocky gates wide enough to let us through, and then closed again. Pinnacles and needles of bare, flushed rock rose out of luxuriant vegetation—Quiraing without its bareness, the Rhine without its ruins, and more beautiful than both. There were mountains connected by ridges no broader than a horse's back, others with great gray buttresses, deep chasms cleft by streams, temples with pagoda roofs on heights, sunny villages ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... and she went up the staircase and along the corridor to Mrs. Winstanley's room. Oh, how dear and familiar the old house looked, how full of richness and colour after the bareness and decay of Les Tourelles; brocaded curtains hanging in heavy folds against the carved oaken framework of a deep-set window; gleams of evening light stealing through old stained glass; everywhere a rich variety of form and ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... a large house in a long wide street of houses, all exactly alike. When she arrived with Miss Bey, they were shown into a deliciously cool shady drawing-room, charmingly furnished, and the effect upon Beth, after the graceless bareness of ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... that, during the Dark Ages, hangings woven and embroidered continued to be the custom throughout Europe. Our own Anglo-Saxon records prove that such furnishings were employed to mitigate the cold bareness of our northern homes from the earliest times. Sir G. Dasent informs me that in Icelandic Sagas, as early as the eleventh century, there are frequent notices of hangings both in churches and in the halls of houses; such, for instance, as the Saga of Charlemagne, i.e. scenes ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... Rome, St. Paul's in London is the largest church, in the world. The first impression a person gets is one of great vastness and bareness, for, unlike Westminster Abbey, here one does not encounter at every step famous statues, memorials, and graves. The nave is tremendous in width and in length. Chapels open from both sides, but they seem far off and shadowy. Way in the distance is the choir, the altar, and ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... A hearthrug made by Miss Abbot's mother lay before the fireplace, in which a mere handful of fire was burning. An arm-chair with cheerful red cushions stood beside the fire. It was quite comfortable, but Jean felt a bareness. There were no pots on the fire—nothing seemed ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... It was something the shape of a gourd, with a long end that curved out of sight below, a very girdle of blue velvet binding the waists of the brown hills. At their left the shores of the wider part of the lake, the bulb of the gourd, were, in unexpected contrast to the bareness of the uplands, heavily wooded with great cottonwood trees and spruce. A grassy islet ringed with willows seemed to be moored here like the barge of some woodland princess. Away beyond, elevated on a grassy terrace at the head of the lake, and overlooking its whole expanse, stood a tiny ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... year? She thought of her room at home, the great sunny room that she shared with her sister Jean. That had four windows, which were generally flung wide open; it was bare, because she and Jean liked to have plenty of space for gymnastics and wrestling; but that was a homelike, accustomed bareness, and they loved it. The great old four-post bed, with the round balls on which they loved to stand and perform circus tricks; the hammock slung across one end; the birds' nests and hawks' wings that adorned the walls in lieu of pictures; the antlers on which they hung their hats,—all these, ...
— Peggy • Laura E. Richards
... weary and disheartened: fire and pillage had laid the countryside bare with that horrible bareness that only lies in the wake ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... personality, his impressive oratory and the modern note in his preaching; proud that its ushers must each Sabbath morning turn away many late-comers. Indeed, the whole parish had been born to a new spiritual life since that day when the worship at St. Antipas had been kept simple to bareness by a stubborn and perverse reactionary. In this happier day St. Antipas was known for its advanced ritual, for a service so beautifully enriched that a new spiritual warmth pervaded the entire parish. The doctrine of the Real Presence was not ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... wretched den no longer affected her painfully. She moved about there as if in her own rooms, opening the round attic window to admit the fresh air, and pushing the table into a corner if it came in her way. The garret's bareness, its whitewashed walls and rickety furniture, realized to her mind an existence whose simplicity she had sometimes dreamt of in her girlhood. But what especially charmed her was the kindly emotion she experienced there. Playing the part of sick ...
— A Love Episode • Emile Zola
... the same wise, these unable [useless] priests have been, and yet are, and shall be, the chief cause of pestilence of men, and murrain of beasts, and of bareness of the earth, and of all other mischiefs, to the time that Lords and Commons able them through grace for to know and to keep the Commandments of GOD, enforcing them then faithfully and charitably by one assent, for to redress and make one, this foresaid priesthood to the wilful poor, ...
— Fifteenth Century Prose and Verse • Various
... from the soldiers who had penetrated to her Highness's praying-room, which, owing to its bareness and small size, had received at first but a cursory ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... look at the bowls and vases of roses placed about it, now and then to look out of the windows, and finally at the last window she stopped to watch Augustine advancing over the lawn towards the house. It was a grey stone house, low and solid, its bareness unalleviated by any grace of ornament or structure, and its two long rows of windows gazed out resignedly at a tame prospect. The stretch of lawn sloped to a sunken stone wall; beyond the wall a stream ran sluggishly in a ditch-like channel; on the left ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... home. His wife had once or twice before had to take charge of young ladies, French or English, who were confided to the embassy, and she had a guest chamber for them, a small room, but with an oriel window overhanging the Thames and letting in the southern sun, so as almost to compensate for the bareness of the rest, where there was nothing but a square box-bed, a chest, and a few toilette essentials, to break upon the dulness of the dark wainscoted walls. Madame herself came to sleep with her guest, for lonely nights were regarded with dread in those times, and indeed she seemed ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Communion. There may be minor outward differences as to the manner of its celebration: you shall find in one parish a tradition of Puritan bareness, in another a full and rich ceremonial symbolism, with lights and vestments. A man may have his personal preferences, but it is a mistake to attach undue importance either to the presence or to the absence of the external adjuncts of worship. What matters is the ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... clouds or by the lofty mountains surrounding it, the peak at last stands forth distinctly, the incline becomes less steep, and those vast plains of intensely melancholy appearance, called Canadas by the Spanish, on account of their bareness, are crossed. A halt is made for lunch at the Pine grotto before climbing the huge blocks of basalt ranged in a circle about the crater, now filled in with ashes from the peak, and forming its enceinte. The peak itself is next attached, the ascent of which is broken one-third of the way up by ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... yet no audience, and had not begun to exercise his creative imagination. Moreover, to a nature like Hugh's, naturally temperate and ardent, and with no gross or sensuous fibre of any kind, there was a real craving for the bareness and cleanness of self-discipline and asceticism. There is a high and noble pleasure in some natures towards the reduction and disregard of all material claims and limitations, by which a freedom and expansiveness of the spirit can be won. Such self-denial ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... points of sand; on our return of a gloomy red. The sun gone down. The crescent moon, Jupiter and Venus. The sound of the sea distinctly heard on the tops of the hills, which we could never hear in summer. We attribute this partly to the bareness of the trees, but chiefly to the absence of the singing birds, the hum of insects, that noiseless noise which lives in the summer air. The villages marked out by beautiful beds of smoke. The turf fading into ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state within; for entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and vast. There was an earthy savor in the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too much ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... to say that I forgot I was a minister; I think I recalled that very thing, and it gave more power to my arm, for I knew the poverty amid which Geordie's poor wife strove to keep their home together; and the pitiful bareness of wee Jessie's death-chamber flashed before me. This well-nourished vampire had sucked the life-blood from them all, and remembering this, I rushed into the unequal conflict and smote the vampire between ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... planting, utilizing the water for reflection. There was a twisted cypress that he placed alone against the colonnade with a skill that showed the insight and the feeling of an, artist. On, the water side, the Marina, he used the trees to break the bareness of the long esplanade. And here and there on the grounds, for pure decoration, he reached some of his finest effects with the eucalyptus, for which he evidently had a particular regard. As no California Exposition ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... sinking into the ground for lack of foundations, the scrubby evergreens which had not yet had time to grow, all the provisional slop kind of mourning that one saw there, imparted to that vast field of repose a look of poverty and cold, clean, dismal bareness like that of a barracks or a hospital. There was not a corner to be found recalling the graveyard nooks sung of in the ballads of the romantic period, not one leafy turn quivering with mystery, not a single large tomb speaking of pride and eternity. You were ...
— His Masterpiece • Emile Zola
... waving his arm; "we banish thee from our presence! This is our palace!—and our guards are at hand!" pointing to the still and skeleton trees that grouped round in ghastly bareness. "Begone!" ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VIII • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... room always cheered K. Its warmth and light appealed to his aesthetic sense; after the bareness of his bedroom, it spelled luxury. And perhaps, to be entirely frank, there was more than physical comfort and satisfaction in the evenings he spent in Christine's firelit parlor. He was entirely masculine, and her evident pleasure in his society gratified him. He had fallen into a ...
— K • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... many minds. It is an erroneous notion that ivy injures buildings against the walls of which it is planted; it never injures a good wall, nor a sound house, but on the contrary, hides and softens the stony bareness of the one and adds beauty and freshness ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... a flash Glenister stripped back the blankets and seized the "pokes," leaping into the back room. In another instant he returned with them and faced desperately the candid bareness of the little room that they lived and slept in. Nothing could be hidden; it was folly to think of it. There was a loft overhead, he remembered, hopefully, then realized that the pursuers would search there ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... time she had ever been in room—with its poverty, its bareness. She must have cast about it a look of delicate inquiry—as a woman is apt to do in a singleman's abode; for when she came again, in addition to pieces of soft old linen for bandages brought fresh cool fragrant sheets—the work of her own looms; a better pillow with ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... desirable, with four little boxes of sleeping-rooms, yellow painted floors, and bunks curtained with hand-embroidered dimity, stiff as a frozen crust of snow; a studio, with a few charming bits of old painted Dutch furniture to redeem it from bareness, and a kitchen which roused all ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... withdrawn, while he lived, from all human ken, yet written down—in thirty or forty volumes!—for his own discipline and remembrance, can now be read, thanks to his biographers, in the pages of the Life, They are extraordinarily frank and simple; startling, often, in their bareness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of a mystic, moving in a Divine presence. An old and intimate friend of the Master's once said to me that he believed "Jowett's inner mind, especially toward the end ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... heroically as watch-springs. The sixteenth century produced a race of artists peculiar in their feeling for material beauty, but normal, coming as they do at the foot of the hills, in their technical proficiency and aesthetic indigence. Craft holds the candle that betrays the bareness of the cupboard. The aesthetic significance of form is feebly and impurely felt, the power of creating it is lost almost; but finer descriptions have rarely been painted. They knew how to paint in the ...
— Art • Clive Bell
... In the very bareness of his use of them there lurks an occasional irony as in the following—a passage of prose broken by a single line of verse.(74) The Deity ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... however, what can be called a complete, definite monument, belonging to a class. It is neither a Roman nor a Gothic church. The edifice is not a typical one. It has not, like the abbey at Tournus, the sober massive breadth, the round expansive arch, the icy bareness, the majestic simplicity of those buildings based on the semicircular arch. It is not, like the cathedral at Bourges, the magnificent, airy, multiform, bushy, sturdy, efflorescent product of the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... up to the rooms which had been Evadne's. They were kept very much as she was accustomed to have them, but there was that something of bareness about them, and a kind of spick-and-spanness conveying a sense of emptiness and desertion which strikes cold to the heart when it comes of the absence of someone dear. And Mr. Frayling felt the discomfort of it. The afternoon sunlight slanted across the ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... one on first entering a Japanese dwelling is the extreme cleanliness, the white and chilling bareness ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... winter hath my absence been From Thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December's bareness everywhere! ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... tedious forms, the trickeries, the mistakes, the false claims and falser assertions, the empty architecture that reveals the infidelity of its builders, the gross materialism, and the crass superstition of the Roman Church, one turns with relief of heart and eyes to the poverty and bareness of the dark and narrow catacombs, and to the simple piety of the words found upon their graves. In them is at once the exhibition and the promise of a purer Christianity. In them, indeed, one may see only too plainly the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... lack of scenery in my narrative, that I thought it well to group in a few pages the African pictures I have given in the last chapter. My story had too much of the bareness of the Greek stage, and I was conscious that landscape, as well as action, was required to mellow the subject and relieve it from tedium. After our dash through the wilderness, let us return to the slow toil ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... the most naked of men, his whole workaday costume consisting of one rag about equal in amplitude to half a good pocket-handkerchief, his wife is the most dressy of women. She is always well-dressed even on common days. The bareness of her limbs may perhaps shock our notions of propriety at first, for, being a mud-wader of necessity, like the stork and the heron, she girds her garments about her very tightly indeed; but this only sets off her wonderfully erect and athletic figure, while her well-set head looks all the ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... His easy, high-bred air, his graceful, flexible form and handsome face formed a singular contrast to the dark and mouldy apartment, at whose single unglazed window he was sitting. The sight of this splendid man gave an impression of strangeness, in the general bareness, much as if some marvellous jewel had been unaccountably found lying on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... the king broke the silence. "How unusually early," he remarked, "the leaves fall this year!" To those who heard him, the bareness which he remarked seemed an omen of the fate which awaited himself, about to be stripped of his royal dignity; perhaps even, like some superfluous crowder of the grove, to fall beneath the axe. The Assembly had already been deliberating whether it should invite him to take refuge with them when ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... burden of his responsibility weighed upon him like old age. Here in this scant cabin things so serious as birth and death showed in a pathetic bareness, stripped of all ceremonial trappings, as mere events in the orderly working out of natural laws—events as seasonable as the springing up and the cutting down of the corn. In these simple lives, so closely lived to the ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... the keen light raked her room, laying its bareness still more bare. It was furnished, Laura's room, with an extreme austerity. There was a little square of blue drugget under the deal table that stood against the wall, and one green serge curtain ...
— The Creators - A Comedy • May Sinclair
... claim wide culture. As to her sophistication—well, Galusha gave little thought to that, in most worldly matters he himself was unsophisticated. However, he was sure that he liked Miss Phipps and that he loathed Mrs. Buckley. And he liked East Wellmouth, bareness and bleakness and lonesomeness and all. He rather wished he were going to stay there for a long time—weeks perhaps, months it might be; that is, of course, provided he could occupy his present quarters and eat at the Phipps' table. If he could do that ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... smile from the sun, which could be seen and felt as well here, in the blue and gentle flood in which it washed the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded carpet of ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... door on the second floor was answered by a clumsy Russian maid-servant, who smiled a broad, good-natured recognition when she saw him, and, turning without a word, led the way along a narrow passage. The smell of tobacco smoke and a certain bareness of wall and floor suggested a bachelor's home. The maid opened the door of a room and stood aside for ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... the bee-spangled Imperial curtains still hang over the doors, and festoons of the same drapery decorate the gallery above. The brocaded panels of the Salle du Trone were objects of much remark among the ladies, as were the tapestries of the Salle des Gobelins; but the bareness and total absence of furniture were commented on freely on all sides. Not a chair or a window blind, or even a door-plate or handle, is to be seen in any of the rooms, except in those used for the concerts, and the question ...
— The Insurrection in Paris • An Englishman: Davy
... office of the Prouty House, redolent of the juniper and spruce boughs which took the bareness from the walls, the guests hungrily watched the hands of the clock creep towards the fashionable hour ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... exotic industry that tried to run along beside the greater and more artistic. It never has tried to be much higher than a man's feet, has been content for the most part to soften and brighten floors that before its coming were left in the cold bareness of tile or parquet. It crept up to the backs and seats of chairs, and into panelled screens a little later on, but never has it had much vogue on ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... her into a little cleanly, raftered chamber. He knelt by the bedside and spoke gently to the girl who lay upon the white pillows, her deathly face more white than the clean, coarse linen. 'Twas true she did not see him, but lay staring at the wall's bareness, her lips moving as she muttered the name she had shrieked and wailed at intervals throughout the hours. "John—Oh, John Oxon!" he could barely hear, "God laughs at us—why should not ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... accidental. Our fathers' communities were a slender chain of frontier settlements, separated from an ancient civilization by an unknown and dangerous sea on the one hand, menaced by all the perils of a virgin wilderness upon the other. All their life was simple to the point of bareness; austere, reduced to the most elemental necessities. Inevitably the order of their worship corresponded to the order of their society. It is certain, I think, that the white meeting-house with its naked dignity, the old service with its heroic simplicity, conveyed to the primitive society ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... sorry, Mademoiselle," I said, suddenly conscious of the stiff bareness of my ancestral home, "that things are not brighter. I have done ...
— Dross • Henry Seton Merriman
... Mark so long as she made it good that she wasn't underhand about anybody else. She had denied everything and every one, she reflected as she went away—and that was a relief; but it also made rather a clean sweep of the future. The prospect put on a bareness that already gave her something in common with the ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2 • Henry James
... made their way, and where they were joined by various other members of the good lady's circle. Indeed, it completed Miss Birdseye herself, if anything could be said to render that office to this essentially formless old woman, who had no more outline than a bundle of hay. But the bareness of her long, loose, empty parlour (it was shaped exactly like Miss Chancellor's) told that she had never had any needs but moral needs, and that all her history had been that of her sympathies. The place was lighted by a small hot glare of gas, which made it look white and featureless. It struck ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... surprised when his cousin made his appearance. There was something in the hearty clasp and full, rich voice that went to his lonely heart. Once he recalled that he had met the quiet Quaker in his farm attire in this very house, and the bareness of his uncle's home, at his call, had rather displeased ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... year is colder, And mark that as memory grows older, The brighter it pulses and gleams. And if I should try to render The tissues of fugitive splendour That fled down the wind of living, Will they read it some day in the future, And be conscious of an awareness In our old lives, and the bareness Of theirs, with the newest passions In the ...
— Lundy's Lane and Other Poems • Duncan Campbell Scott
... entirely of wood, and had consequently escaped injury. This dining-room was a very lofty hall, paved with marble and entirely surrounded by arches open to the air. It had previously reminded me of the interiors seen in Italian pictures of sacred subjects, with its bareness, spacious whiteness, its columns and arches. Here the Governor, Lady Swettenham and her sister were living, in little encampments formed by screens. Two splendid chandeliers of Spanish bronze, originally looted from Havannah in the eighteenth century, had been dismantled ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... when not long after the rude hands of catholics themselves, at their wits' end for the maintenance of the "religious war," spoiled it of the accumulated treasure of centuries, leaving Notre-Dame de Chartres in the bareness with which we see it to-day, he had no keen ...
— Gaston de Latour: an unfinished romance • Walter Horatio Pater
... his old green damask dressing-gown and the bareness of the room in which he sat, where the floor was covered with a shabby tapestry in place of carpet, and the walls were hung with tavern-paper presenting the profiles of Louis XVI. and members of his family, traced among the branches of a weeping willow with other sentimentalities invented ...
— An Old Maid • Honore de Balzac
... thoughts!—for verily the thoughts are the garments of the poet's soul,—and the common thief of things petty and material is no whit more contemptible than he who robs an author of ideas wherein to deck the bareness of his own poor wit! Come, place thyself at ease upon this cushioned couch, and give me thy attention, ... I feel the fervor rising within me, ... I will summon Zabastes, ... " Here he pulled a small silken cord ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... relations at Kennard to whom she could return. Far different, indeed. At the thought of the homesickness that at times Ruth must know, of the lonesomeness of mountain and mesa from which she must suffer, of the deprivations, the hard bareness of the life, the moments of despair, he had a sensation of the bitter unfairness of things and a desire to snatch her safe away from the harsh pass in which she stood. It would be only right, it would ...
— The Iron Furrow • George C. Shedd
... an illy-cooked meal, and later sitting smoking in the desolate silence. She saw him go forth to his daily toil with all the lightness gone from his step, to return at nightfall, with a heaviness born of more than mere physical fatigue, to the same bleak bareness. ...
— The Land of Promise • D. Torbett
... comprehended all. The bareness of the country, the absence of the leaves on the lower bushes, the millions of small hoof-tracks, all were now explained. A migration of the springbok antelope, a "trek-boken," had swept over the spot. That it ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... this study of the old harper's wistful mood. But whatever his subject, his treatment of it is the same. His lines are always strongly drawn; his handling is always simple; and his subject always romantic. But though romantic, it is simple almost to bareness,—one of the great causes both of his popularity, and of that deficiency in his poetry of which so many of his admirers become conscious when they compare him with other and richer poets. Scott used to say that in poetry Byron "bet" him; and no doubt that in which chiefly as a poet ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... in that country is like the village pump—the hull country gets about it. Take things to eat an' things to wear an' things to make the shack look pretty an' interestin' and comfortable. They don't take much room and they take the bareness off. That's what kills the women folk in the West, the bareness inside and outside. Nothin' but chairs, table an' stove inside; nothin' but grass an' sand outside. That's what makes ...
— The Major • Ralph Connor
... and Ida were together at Hastings, Mrs. Enderby called one evening at Miss Bygrave's house—the house of Maud's childhood, still distinguished by the same coldness, bareness and gloom, the same silence echoing to a strange footfall. Theresa Bygrave had not greatly altered; tall, upright, clad in the plainest black garment, she walked into the room with silent dignity, and listened to a suggestion ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... sitting by a warm fire in a big, glowing room, it was quite delightful to hear how cold it could be in an attic. It must be admitted that the attic was rather delighted in, and that its coldness and bareness quite sank into insignificance when Melchisedec was remembered, and one heard about the sparrows and things one could see if one climbed on the table and stuck one's head and shoulders out ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... in worse and worse. Our nightshirts were wet through, so we got into our other shirts and knickerbockers, but preserved bareness in our feet. And the floor kept on being half an inch deep in water, however much we ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... Thyrsis, to be the judge and the jury and the executioner of the stern will of this "economic screw". There was, for instance, the episode of the "turkey-red table-cover", which became a classic in their later lives. Corydon was always chafing at the bareness of their little home; and going into the shops in the town, and discovering things which might have made it lovely. One evil day she went alone; and when she came back, Thyrsis, as usual, pounced upon his mail, and came upon a letter from a magazine-editor whom ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... a grove of trees. The house would be in there. Pasture, orchard, cornfield, ragged and uncut, a grove of low trees with thick foliage, barns and corrals he noted with appreciative enthusiasm. The place did not have the bareness characteristic ...
— Valley of Wild Horses • Zane Grey
... to her, every print on the walls, every ornament on the brackets, seemed to speak to her eye and to her soul both at once, and the sense of comfort and beauty and home, after the bareness of school, seemed to charm her above all. "I always did want to know what was inside people's ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was a delusion. When John Osgood's small boat swept up the sands on the white crest of a league-long roller, how different was the scene! He saw a group of dilapidated huts, a tavern called The Angel's Rest, a blackfellow's hut, and the bareness of three Government offices, all built on piles, that the white ants should not humble them suddenly to the dust; a fever-making mangrove swamp, black at the base as the filthiest moat, and tenanted by reptiles; feeble palms, and a sickly breath creeping from the jungle to mingle with the heavy ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... it were too painful for him to continue, looked around the room, noting its bareness, and asked, with a break in his voice: "Where do ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... park, half-way, suddenly, Laura stopped, with a pain—a moral pang—that almost took away her breath; she looked at the misty glades and the dear old beeches (so familiar they were now and loved as much as if she owned them); they seemed in their unlighted December bareness conscious of all the trouble, and they made her conscious of all the change. A year ago she knew nothing, and now she knew almost everything; and the worst of her knowledge (or at least the worst of the fears she had raised upon it) had come to her in that beautiful place, ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... pitiable. For the past twelve months I had not earned a cent, and of my small capital there now remained but two pounds to ward the hound of starvation from my door. In the moonlight I could perceive all the bareness of the apartment. Would to God Fancy would ride to me on this moonbeam and give me inspiration! 'Twas indeed weird—this silver ethereal path connecting the moon with the earth, and the more I gazed along it, the more I wished to leave my body and escape to the star-lighted ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendour in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved indeed, to the uttermost, by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its bareness, impressive in its conciseness; the true language of history, instinct with the spirit of nations and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the schools; one and uniform in its air ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... unventilated wings and back of the stage. The wild beast smell of the lion, although his cage had been hurriedly wheeled out through the scenery door, still persisted and caught the throat, and in the dim white-washed bareness, a few figures, stagehands in shirt-sleeves, and vague pale men in hard felt hats tiptoed about like perspiring ghosts. One of the latter approached Andrew. Monsieur Patou need have no fear, he whispered. Everything was arranged—the beautiful ballroom interior—the men who were ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... along noisily over the rough road, and, a good deal inspired by it, Mrs. Sprague began to take something like interest in the melancholy country that flew past the window, as if seeking a place to hide its bareness in the blue line of uplands that ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... sanctuary in the Norman style which still flourished in Aquitaine in the twelfth century. Restored some twenty years ago, it had received the addition of a bell-tower which had not been contemplated in the original plan. At any rate, poverty had safeguarded its pure bareness. I tried to join in the prayers of the celebrant as much as my thoughts would permit, and then I returned with him to the presbytery. Here we breakfasted on a little bread and milk, after which we went to M. ...
— Balthasar - And Other Works - 1909 • Anatole France
... Bareness and spareness were the rule, and when the tall, bony, woman manager stood near the yellow-brown partition, it took keen eyes to tell just where her face left off and the plaster began. She did not ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay
... bareness of the land before him without any effort to palliate unpleasantness. If he chose to stalk about and look glum, she could sit still and call his attention to revolting truths which he could not deny. She could point out to him that he had no money, and that tenants would not stay in houses ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... layer, which then has to be rubbed down, polished, and finished. Thus in a short time, since the bulk of that superficially dyed wool or fur on the top of every hat is but small, and has been much reduced by polishing and rubbing, you soon hear of an appearance of bareness—I was going to say threadbareness—making itself manifest. This is simply because the colour or dye only penetrates a very little way down into the substance of the felt, until, in fact, it meets the proofing, which, being as it ought ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... and sunshine gets into them. Some of the best and most costly are along the Prado. A Cuban house interior generally impresses an American as lacking in home-like quality. Some of the best are richly adorned, but there is a certain bareness and an absence of color. As is usual with customs unlike our own, and which we are therefore prone to regard as inferior to ours, there are excellent reasons for Cuban interior decoration, or rather ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... never seemed to mind it. Fumbling in his vest pocket, he found a match. This he struck and lighted a tallow dip which was stuck into a rude candle-stick upon a bare wooden table. One glance at the room revealed by the dim light showed its desolate bareness. Besides the table there were two small benches and a wash-stand, containing a granite-iron basin. A small broken-down stove stood at one end of the room, by the side of which was a couch. Not a scrap of mat or rug adorned the floor. There were no blinds or curtains to the cheerless, windows, ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... not for a moment reply. He had closed the door behind him carefully, and was looking around the room now with evident interest. Its bareness of furniture and decoration were noteworthy, but on the top of the ugly chest of drawers was a great bowl of roses, a queer little ivory figure set in an arched frame of copper—a figure almost sacerdotal, with its face turned towards the east—and ...
— The Pawns Count • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... The bareness of Minnie Davis' yard was relieved by a single rosebush, and her small house might best be described as a "tumble-down shack." An unsteady wooden box served as a step to the fragment of ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States From Interviews with Former Slaves: Volume IV, Georgia Narratives, Part 1 • Works Projects Administration
... will like it here?" she asked suddenly, looking about the humble room which for the Lynch's, served as parlor, dining-room and kitchen. Now its bareness lay wrapped in a kindly shadow through which glinted diamond sparks from much-scrubbed tin. "It's nice—" Beryl meditated. She loved this hour, she loved the singing tea-kettle and the smell of strong soap and her mother's face in the lamplight, with all the loud ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... no threat of rain, but a gray sky making the calmest background for the charms of a mild winter scene—the grassy borders of the lanes, the hedgerows sprinkled with red berries and haunted with low twitterings, the purple bareness of the elms, the rich brown of the furrows. The horses' hoofs made a musical chime, accompanying their young voices. She was laughing at his equipment, for he was the reverse of a dandy, and he was enjoying her laughter; the freshness of the morning mingled with the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... lath-like crosses which are seen elsewhere. Its tower is a monstrosity, with an egg-shaped protuberance which is neither shapely nor impressive, while the southern range of the nave and aisle, when viewed laterally, shows a bareness and poverty of design unusual and painful. The ensemble, from this point, is one of a certain impressiveness. It could hardly be otherwise, with the situation which it commands, even were it the grossest thing that ever took shape in architecture. Its irregularities and inconsistencies, and ...
— The Cathedrals of Northern France • Francis Miltoun
... basement heater had apparently been extinguished, but a snapping wood-fire blazed upon the English pattern hearth, and, for the light was fading outside, it flung an uncertain, flickering radiance about the room. Weston, sitting down, contrasted its luxury with the grim bareness of his match-boarded cubicle in the boarding-house, and with the log shanties of the railroad and logging camps. He frowned as he did so, for all that his eyes rested on made unpleasantly plain the distinction between himself and the girl whose ...
— The Gold Trail • Harold Bindloss
... as neglected and overgrown had become orderly. The little beds cut in the turf were neat in their Winter bareness, despite a few dead leaves which had fluttered on to them. Her eyes fell on a pair of gardening gloves and a trowel lying on the grass by one of the beds. From the open mouth of a brown paper bag a bulb had partly rolled before ...
— Love of Brothers • Katharine Tynan
... top of the granite ridge which is visible from Newport, and made them observe the peculiarity of the rock lines, and the contrast between their bareness and the fertility of the little intervening glades, for which they serve as a natural conservatory. Then they dipped down into the thickets of the farther side, finding all manner of ferns and wild-flowers and shy growing things, and so to the ...
— A Little Country Girl • Susan Coolidge
... it seemed willing to make no more commotion that day. The sun was far on his way to the horizon, and many a broad hill-side slope was in shadow; the snow had blown or melted from off the stones and rocks, leaving all their roughness and bareness unveiled; and the white crust of snow that lay between them looked a cheerless waste in the shade of the wood and the hill. But there were other spots where the sunbeams struck, and bright streams of light ran between the ...
— Queechy, Volume I • Elizabeth Wetherell
... appeared through the skylight. It was a very long time before she slept. The early sunshine, however, woke her in the small hours of the morning. There was no blind to the window, and the room faced east. Diana sat up in bed. Her eyes fell on the pictureless walls. Perhaps the very fact of their bareness made her look at them more particularly. She did not admire the pattern of the paper. In places it had been badly fitted together, especially in that corner. Why, the magenta roses actually overlapped! They did it in a sort of curve, ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... Benbo (the hill of cattle), sacred now to rabbits and hares and any other small game that can shelter on its bald sides. Up hill and down hill, between hills and around hills, mountains of every shape and degree of bareness and baldness looking down at us over one another's shoulders as we drove along. An ambitious little peasant clung on behind with his hands, his little bare feet thudding on the smooth road and over the loose layer of sharp stones that lay edge upwards in ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... style. His mastery in the art of fictitious narrative has never been excelled; but his living pictures of familiar life, as well as the whimsical caricatures of Smollett and the humorous fantasies of Sterne, are disfigured by faults of which the very smallest are coarseness of language and bareness of licentious description, in which they outdid Richardson. Not only is their standard of morality low, but they display indifference to the essential distinctions of right and wrong, in regard to some of the ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... chief was telling the truth. He saw the hardships and bareness of the wilderness but the life there appealed to him and satisfied the stronger wants of his nature; he seemed to be the reincarnation of some old forest dweller, belonging to a time thousands of years ago, yet the voice of duty, which was in this case also the voice ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... depressing—the absence of the great carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us. Nothing of the old luxury and richness was there. It was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness. At the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, wonderful expanse ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Then, sudden as a flame, the black-robed priest, The clotted earth piled roughly up about The hacked red oblong of the new-made thing, Short words in swordlike Latin — and a rout Of dreams most impotent, unwearying. Then, like a blind door shut on a carouse, The terrible bareness ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... contains a telescope. It would not be worth mentioning, save that our prophetic vision sees it coming into use by and by. Not to analyze too closely, everything in this room speaks of life, health, and movement. In spite of smallness, bareness, and angularity, it is fit for a May morning to enter, ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... tendency is to plant much too closely. Observe well- developed trees, and see how wide a space they require. There is naturally an eager wish for shade as soon as possible, and a desire to banish from surroundings an aspect of bareness. These purposes can, it is true, often be accomplished by setting out more trees at first than could mature, and by taking out one and another from time to time when they begin to interfere with each other's growth. One symmetrical, noble tree, ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... the swinging lamps, and the well-spread table comfortably arranged for tea, with the cups and saucers placed between "fiddles" to prevent them from slipping adrift when the vessel pitched or rolled, it afforded a strong contrast to the barren bareness and gloomy discomfort of the deck, especially on such a cold night, with suspicions of hail, and sleet, and snow at intervals. But, still, here also everything was not quite so rose-coloured as might have at first appeared; for stormy weather at sea discounts what might be called ...
— The Wreck of the Nancy Bell - Cast Away on Kerguelen Land • J. C. Hutcheson
... the constant autumnal downpours, were covered with a thick carpet of fallen leaves which extended beneath the shivering bareness of the almost leafless poplars. She went as far as the shrubbery. It was as sad as the chamber of a dying person. A green hedge which separated the little winding walks was bare of leaves. Little birds flew from place to place with a little ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... been in Winn's room before, and as she sat down to wait for him her eyes took in its neat impressive bareness. It was a narrow hotel room, a bed in one corner, a chest of drawers, washstand, and wardrobe opposite. By the balcony window were a small table and an armchair. A cane chair stood at ...
— The Dark Tower • Phyllis Bottome
... for the absolute bareness of the cone became apparent the instant that I stepped out of the shadow of the pines, for I immediately plunged ankle-deep in a loose deposit of ashes and pumice-stone that yielded to my tread and slid away under me to such an extent as to ...
— Overdue - The Story of a Missing Ship • Harry Collingwood
... eleventh century, and the last few lines are still later. The material is, however, older: the poem is an outline, in allusions often obscure to us, of traditions and beliefs familiar to its first hearers. The very bareness of the outline is sufficient proof that the material is not new. The framework is apparently imitated from that of the poem known as Baldr's Dreams, some lines from which are inserted in Voeluspa. This ...
— The Edda, Vol. 1 - The Divine Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 12 • Winifred Faraday
... he sped along the country road, which no longer was so green, so warm with sunshine, as before. Markland looked already cold in its bareness against the distant sky, all flushed with flying clouds, the young saplings about, bending before the wind, as if they supplicated for shelter and a little warmth, and the old tottering cedar behind the house, ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... glass-house squalor and Roxana's magnificence de mauvais lieu, but not much: the gold-dust and deserts of Singleton are a necessary part of the "business," but nothing more. Moll Flanders—in some respects the greatest of all his books—has the bareness of an Elizabethan stage in scenery and properties—it is much if Greenfield spares us a table or a ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... valleys of France and the plains of Italy all gilded with corn and fragrant with deep grass, where the violets and buttercups wave and toss in the summer wind, travelers often forget that the beauty of the plains was bought, at a great price, by the bareness of the mountains. For these mountains are in reality vast compost heaps, nature's stores of powerful stimulants. Daily the heat swells the flakes of granite; daily the frost splits them; daily the rains dissolve the crushed stone into an impalpable dust; daily the floods sweep the rich mineral ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... makes up for her historical poverty. Dr. Johnson was the first great man of letters to visit the town. He stayed in West Street with the Thrales, rode on the Downs and, after his wont, abused their bareness, making a joke about our dearth of trees similar to one on the same topic in Scotland. The Doctor also bathed. Mrs. Piozzi relates that one of the bathing men, seeing him swim, remarked, "Why, sir, you must have been a stout-hearted ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... plenty of green shadow by and by. No shadow was needed at present, for the sun was too gentle; its warmth was welcome, and beneficent, and kindly. The old cherry tree in the corner was beginning to open its wealth of white blossoms; everywhere else the bareness and brownness of winter was still reigning, only excepting the patches of green turf around the boles and under the spreading boughs of the trees here and there. The garden was no garden, only a spread of soft, up-turned brown loam. It looked a desolate place ...
— Nobody • Susan Warner
... hideous names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were luckier in this respect than "the best race in the world"; by the Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And "our unrivalled happiness"; —what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,—how dismal those who have seen them will remember;—the gloom, the smoke, the cold, the strangled illegitimate child! "I ask you whether, the world ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold
... and crowded, and the mist of leaves grew brighter and brighter. No birds sang, for they had all flown away for the winter, and there were no flowers. But the drifting leaves hid the bareness, ...
— The Little House in the Fairy Wood • Ethel Cook Eliot
... happened, Rodney not only took the responsibility of stripping his own station to the verge of bareness in favor of the general interest, but in so doing he came very near traversing, unwittingly, the plans of the general government by his local action, laudable and proper as that certainly was. He was, however, professionally ...
— Types of Naval Officers - Drawn from the History of the British Navy • A. T. Mahan
... ground about a mile from the village; and told them for the present to rest their bones in an old unfinished farmhouse {June 8th, 1722.}. The spot itself was dreary and bleak, but the neighbouring woods of pines and beeches relieved the bareness of the scene. It was part of Zinzendorf's estate, and lay at the top of a gentle slope, up which a long avenue now leads. It was a piece of common pasture ground, and was therefore known as the Hutberg,73 or Watch-Hill. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... extend, while with us it has only a chance to tower, on the short up-town block which is the extreme dimension of our proudest edifice, public or private. Another reason is in the London atmosphere, which deepens and heightens all the effects, while the lunar bareness of our perspectives mercilessly reveals the facts. After you leave the last cliff behind on lower Broadway the only incident of the long, straight avenue which distracts you from the varied commonplace of the commercial structures on either ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... crowd with loveliness from which clouds of perfume would float up to him on days when the sun warmed and the soft airs stirred the flowers, shaking the fragrance from their full incense-cups. But the white fog shut out to- day even their winter bareness. There were light and warmth inside, and every added charm of rich harmony of deep color and comfort made beautiful. There were books and papers waiting to be looked over, but they lay untouched on the writing-table, and Strangeways was sitting close ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... go onward, and came presently to a part where the grey plain did stretch out a bareness into the Night Land to my front; so that my way ended, unless I did make a long passing ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... a great, cold bareness and bleakness about the interior; for there are very few monuments, and those seem chiefly to be of ecclesiastical people. I saw no armed knights, asleep on the tops of their tombs; but there was a curious ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... as well. The mountain Nicon-chau naturally brings forth beautiful trees. Even when the trunks are cut down, young shoots will constantly rise up. If cattle are allowed to feed there, the mountain looks bare. Shall we say, then, that bareness is natural to the mountain? So the lower passions are let loose to eat down the nobler growths of reverence and love in the heart of man; shall we, therefore, say that there are no such feelings in his heart at all? Under the quiet peaceful airs of morning and ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... Duchess herself. The walls are pale gray, with a gilded border running round the room, or rather two rooms, which are divided, but not separated, by crimson curtains. The furniture is crimson, and everything is so comfortable—such a contrast to German bareness and stiffness generally. A splendid grand piano (he receives a new one every year,) stands in one window. The other window is always open and looks out on the park. There is a dovecote just opposite the window, and doves promenade ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... piece sewed on as she suggested." The neck was au fait, Guy said, laughing as Maddy for blushing so, and saying when he saw how really distressed she seemed that he would provide her with something to relieve the bareness of which she complained. "Oh, I know, I saw, I peeked in the box," Jessie began, but Guy put his hand over the little tattler's mouth, bidding her keep the result of her ...
— Aikenside • Mary J. Holmes
... fails me to follow out his interesting arguments. I can only mention that he is inclined to trace back hairlessness, the development of the beard in man, and the characteristic colour of the different human races to sexual selection. Since bareness of the skin could be no advantage, but rather a disadvantage, this character cannot have been brought about by natural selection. Darwin also rejected a direct influence of climate as a cause of the origin of the skin-colour. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... fault, it was an actual sin, in the eyes of these prudent, simple-living folk, and you may have heard before the story of the ingenious housewife, who, tired of the blank bareness of her yellow-painted floors, conceived the bold idea of manufacturing a carpet for ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... stripped naked to the revolting bareness of his unclean soul, and she drew back with a shudder ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... the most unfortunate of all, because the household depended wholly upon him, and he saw no gleam of hope anywhere. He bore this condition of things, because, in his simplicity, he believed in a superior will, and thought that his misery was inevitable. The resignation of this man, the terrible bareness of his obscure existence, oppressed me. If I could bear the sight of it, it was only because I hoped; I thought that we should soon find the road which makes life happier, more agreeable to every one. How, where, in what manner? What a mystery! But the ...
— Contemporary Russian Novelists • Serge Persky
... "correct" and beautiful, but one has the feeling that the decorator made chalk-marks indicating the exact spot on which each piece of furniture is to stand. Other houses are filled with things of little intrinsic value, often with much that is shabby, or they are perhaps empty to the point of bareness, and yet they have that "inviting" atmosphere, and air of unmistakable quality which is an unfailing indication of ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... of climbing, I neared the summit, it was already beginning to be light. The bareness and desert grey of the distance I had crossed stood revealed in a colourless dawn, only the Mont' Amiata, now somewhat to the northward, was more gentle, and softened the scene with distant woods. Between it and this height ...
— The Path to Rome • Hilaire Belloc
... with her hand in Jack's, Adela talking incessantly the whole way while they two sat in silence. It was a bare building in the heart of the town, but its bareness did not convey any chill to her. She was already too ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... from early youth. She had longed for its sunny clime, amid the storms and winds of bleak New England; for its historic associations, amid the poverty of a land without a past; for its architectural splendors, amid the bareness and baldness of the New World cities; for the grandeur of its ancient art, amid the poverty of the America of that day; for its impassioned music, in a land almost devoid of musical culture; and she had longed for the beautiful, sensuous, idle life of its people, ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... showed the few chairs, the bureau, the carpetless floor, and the one table—no, not the one table; there was a second table, in a corner, with a large Bible and a few other books upon it. It was this new strange bareness that Tom felt first, before he thought of looking again at the face which was also lit up by the fire, and which stole a half-shy, questioning glance at him as the entirely ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... familiar with Japanese life, my mother-in-law's house in itself reveals a refined nature—complete bareness, two or three screens placed here and there, a teapot, a vase full of lotus-flowers, and nothing more. Woodwork devoid of paint or varnish, but carved in most elaborate and capricious openwork, the whiteness of the pinewood being preserved by constant scrubbing with ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... length, raised from four to eight feet from the earth, and accessible by a broad stair. Along the back of this, and coming to about half its width, runs the open front of the house, like a covered gallery: the interior sometimes neat and almost elegant in its bareness, the sleeping space divided off by an endlong coaming, some bright raiment perhaps hanging from a nail, and a lamp and one of White's sewing-machines, the only marks of civilisation. On the outside, at one end ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... again at the great, tumbled stretches of granite, the long spaces of green-black pines, showing in the distance like so many upright fronds of some strange, mossy fern; at the blank spaces, where cold stone and shifting shale had made jagged marks of bareness in the masses of evergreen, then on to the last gnarled bulwarks of foliage, struggling bravely, almost desperately, to hold on to life where life was impossible, the dividing line, as sharp as a knife-thrust, ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... summer on To hideous winter, and confounds him there; Sap check'd with frost and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o'ersnow'd, and bareness everywhere; Then, were not summer's distillation left, A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft, Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was; But flowers distill'd, though they with winter meet, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... blanket, now, for hers, and she took it and sang on a bit unsteadily in the echoing bareness of the dismantled room. ...
— The Happy Venture • Edith Ballinger Price
... dining-room also, for the orthodox dining-room had been transformed into a studio and sitting-room; they stood opposite to each other. A little further along the corridor came the two best bedrooms, which, at first sight, gave to a Parisian girl a sensation of bareness and emptiness, corrected later by habit. Everything necessary was to be found there,—large brass bedsteads with snowy coverings, all the modern contrivances for the toilet, chests of drawers, each surmounted by a bright looking-glass; even a number of tiny ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... church wedding, and indeed any wedding, be retained. The country church lends itself more aptly to those private weddings where the bridal party, whether small or large, are the only spectators, than does the large city church. The sense of exclusiveness is preserved without the great sense of bareness ...
— The Etiquette of To-day • Edith B. Ordway
... about the room with more interest, and as she noticed the simplicity and the bareness, Swot's remark concerning the doctor's poverty came back to her. Only many books and innumerable glass bottles, a microscope, and other still more mysterious instruments, seemed to save it from the tenement-house, if ...
— Wanted—A Match Maker • Paul Leicester Ford
... objects, pictures, drawings, lay figures, frames without paintings, and paintings without frames gave to this irregular apartment that studio physiognomy which is distinguished for its singular jumble of ornament and bareness, poverty and riches, care and neglect. The vast receptacle of an "atelier," where all seems small, even man, has something of the air of an Opera "coulisse"; here lie ancient garments, gilded armor, fragments of stuffs, machinery. And yet there is something mysteriously grand, ...
— Vendetta • Honore de Balzac
... chair, feeling bewildered and awkward. This was a nice predicament! How could she tell that other Ida that the cake didn't belong to her? The poor thing was so delighted. And, oh, what a bare, lonely little room! The big, luxurious cake seemed to emphasize the bareness and loneliness. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1905 to 1906 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... think of Burns and Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think of Leopardi and Musset and Emily Bronte and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned by his spareness and bareness and bleakness—all this in reference to the voices that have most proved their command of the ear of time, and with the various examples added of those claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter attention; and their office thus mainly affects us as that of showing ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... could prompt to such sacrifices. Many, perhaps, might have preferred that he should have chosen a less decided course. But if his judgment really led to these results, I see no way in which it was possible for him to have avoided it. It was with an emotion of reverence that I contrasted the bareness, plainness, and poverty of the little chapel with that evident air of elegance and cultivation which appeared in all that he said and did. The sermon was on the text, "Now abideth faith, hope, and charity, these three." Naturally enough, the subject divided itself ...
— Sunny Memories Of Foreign Lands, Volume 1 (of 2) • Harriet Elizabeth (Beecher) Stowe
... changed—perhaps a little more bareness and leanness of aspect, an older and more faded look to the clothing of the people whom he passed, but the same fine courage shone in their eyes. If Richmond, after nearly four years of fighting, ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... you if I don't find my real self out here, if I don't see my own soul in all its bareness and weakness then I will never see it. At home hedged in by conventionality, custom, and the hundred little interests of our daily life, we have small chance to see ourselves as we really are, but in a foreign land stripped bare of everything ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... would be on the look-out for squalls, to use his own expression. To this end he took up his quarters in one of the attics which he had reserved by the terms of the lease, wilfully shutting his eyes to the bareness and want that made his son's home desolate. If they owed him rent, they could well afford to keep him. He ate his food from a tinned iron plate, and made no marvel at it. "I began in the same way," he told his daughter-in-law, when she apologized for the ...
— Eve and David • Honore de Balzac
... stamps. Bear in mind, too, that the guardians of the spoil are the sans-culottes who have made a conquest of it; that they are poor; that such a profusion of useful or precious objects makes them feel the bareness of their homes all the more; that their wives would like to lay in a stock of furniture; moreover, has it not held out to them from the beginning of the Revolution, that "forty-thousand mansions, palaces and chateaux, two-thirds of the ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... present you the thing in all its bareness. You may take this as a specimen of an Eastern house. People are apt to fancy that those long, latticed houses on the Bosphorus conceal unheard-of luxuries, and that the people live like Sybarites. It is quite untrue. They either try to imitate the French style, and do it horribly, or else they live ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... Antonia thought she saw a nun?? Little garden, with box hedges and lemon-trees. The inner windows (cells) open on this garden, are large, ordinary, and without bars. There was even one long ground floor window with a little balcony and steps with a cat on them. But never a soul! Great bareness, fair neatness, and order. ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... the Ultimate genuine Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have known it! These thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were a regiment whom he had enlisted, man by man; to make war on a very genuine enemy: Bareness of back, and disobedient Cotton-fibre, which will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here is a most genuine enemy; over whom all creatures will wish him victory. He enlisted his thousand men; said to them, "Come, brothers, let us have a dash at Cotton!" They follow ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... S., C., and I drove out to call upon Kossuth. We found him in an obscure lodging on the outskirts of London. I would that some of the editors in America, who have thrown out insinuations about his living in luxury, could have seen the utter bareness and plainness of the reception room, which had nothing in it beyond the simplest necessaries. Here dwells the man whose greatest fault is an undying love of his country. We all know that if Kossuth would have taken wealth and a secure retreat, with a life of ease ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... to attract in a place so colorless, and he thought, as was his habit with all interiors, how different he would want it to be if he ever became a member. His fresh young nature revolted at the dinginess and bareness of the surroundings. He couldn't understand why the men came here and what could be the fascination of sitting round these cold tables talking by the hour when there was so much happiness outside—so much of light and air and sunshine ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... painted white and the walls were a grayish blue color with several pretty pictures scattered about them to break the bareness. ...
— Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall - or, Leading a Needed Rebellion • Janet D. Wheeler
... those classic souls which by some anomaly, passing by the older lineages and cultures of the East, find birthplace in a bleak untutored village of the West. To this bareness some succumb, and the divine afflatus dies. Still others roam restlessly up and down, searching until they find their milieu and then for the first time their ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... looks as if he'd be back any minute. He wouldn't like giving the enemy a chance to find his lair and step into it before him." It was dark in the room, and I struck another wax match just inside the threshold. But I had hardly time to get an impression of bareness and meanness of furnishing before a draught of air from an open window blew out the struggling flame and at the same instant banged the ...
— The Powers and Maxine • Charles Norris Williamson
... imagination," returned Donal, "that requires age or any mere accessory to rouse it. The very absence of everything external, the bareness of the mere humanity involved, may in itself be an excitement greater than any accompaniment of the antique or the picturesque. But in this old-fashioned garden, in the midst of these old-fashioned flowers, with all the gentlenesses ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... in the seeing mind and their expectation of light beyond the blank, narrow night justified. Nay, our conception of immortality is shaken. Faith, the motive-power of human life, flickers out. Before such vacancy and bareness the shocks of wrecked worlds were indeed welcome. In truth, dreams bring us the thought independently of us and in spite ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... pleasant, spacious, and comfortably furnished. There was no suggestion of bareness or anything left unfinished. Much of the furniture was old, having belonged to David's mother, and was in a state of fine preservation, a possession of which to ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... limited person, who could come as close as Teddy, whispering love in the darkness. She had a ridiculous feeling that God really struggled like Mr. Britling, and that with only some indefinable inferiority of outlook Mr. Britling loved like God. She loved him for his maps and his dreams and the bareness of his talk to her. It was strange how the straining thought of the dead Teddy had passed now out of her mind. She was possessed by a sense of ending and beginning, as though a page had turned over in her life and everything was new. She ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... therefore lovelier—undulating with fields and groves, where many a pleasant dwelling is embowered, into lines of hills that gradually soften away into another land. On the other side, sloping back, or overhanging, mounts beautiful in their bareness, for they are green as emerald; others, scarcely more beautiful, studded with fair trees—some altogether woods. They soon form into mountains—and the mountains become more and more majestical, yet beauty never deserts them, and her spirit continues to tame that of the frowning ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... what you couldn't afford, what wouldn't do you a particle of good, nor me either, in the long run. I'm going to make you set out trees enough to double the value of your place and take all the bleakness and bareness from this hillside. To-day is only the beginning. I did get some new notions in the city which made me discontented with my home, but they were not the notions you were worrying about. In the suburbs I saw that the most ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... dignity and impressiveness. Note the figure of our Lord and censing angels on W. front, as at Chewton. On exterior of church observe (1) debased S. porch; (2) crucifix on E. gable of nave. The interior is disappointing. The clerestory is spacious, and the roof fair, but a general sense of bareness pervades the whole building. The shabbiness of the chancel in particular is enhanced by a casement which does duty for an E. window. Note (1) Dec. windows to aisle; (2) rood-loft stair; (3) curious quatrefoil piscina in sanctuary; (4) some fragments of old glass in E. window of S. aisle. ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade |
