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More "Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... contradict Himself. To this it may be answered that apart from any question of miracles, there are already flaws in this chain of causation, or rather, powers from without that can shake it, as, for instance, the outbreak of a war rendering a country, which should have been fertile, barren and wasted. Holy Scripture is not responsible for the phrase, "suspension of the laws of nature." Theologians do not dogmatise about the nature of miracles, and it would be well if science were less zealous for the inviolability of laws, the outside limits of which ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... off. The road wound through the valley, across the low hills that encircled it, sometimes spanning or running parallel to the bright stream that had been the delight of Eric's innocent childhood. There was something enjoyable at first to the poor boy's eyes, so long accustomed to the barren sea, in resting once more on the soft undulating green of the summer fields, which were intertissued with white and yellow flowers, like a broidery of pearls and gold. The whole scene was bathed in the exquisite light, and rich with the delicate perfumes of a glorious evening, which filled ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... Where are your children?" I demanded. They pointed to the high and barren hills looming against the ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... too much and acts too little," he said to the Duke of Chevreuse; "his most solid occupations are confined to vague applications of his mind and barren resolutions; he must see society, study it, mix in it, without becoming a slave to it, learn to express himself forcibly, and acquire a gentle authority. If he do not feel the need of possessing firmness and nerve, he will not make any real progress; it is time for him to be a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... yes) the warrior muttered, and went his way. He had climbed the top of his favorite barren hill to survey the surrounding prairies, when he spied my chase after the coyote. His keen eyes recognized the pony and driver. At once uneasy for my safety, he had come running to my mother's cabin to give her warning. I did not appreciate ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... been followed with great success by many men of enterprise in those regions; and there is no doubt, we think, that if such dams were multiplied, Artesian wells sunk, and railways run into the karroos, those fine, though comparatively barren regions of South Africa, would soon begin to blossom ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... covered with those low vines which, trampled upon by the coronation army, bloomed again into leaves and fruit, says the legend, and by St. Martin's Day yielded a late but rich vintage.[142] I have lingered in barren Picardy, along the Bay of the Somme so sad and bare beneath the flight of its birds of passage. I have wandered through the fat meadows of Normandy to Rouen with its steeples and towers, its ancient charnel houses, its damp streets, its last remaining timbered houses with ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... U. S. Grant. So, up to the coming of Grant, their record, in the main, was a series of bloody disasters, and their few victories, like Antietam and Gettysburg, were not properly and energetically followed up as they should have been, and hence were largely barren of adequate results. Considering these things, I have always somehow "felt it in my bones" that if Mr. Lincoln had not sent the brief telegram above mentioned, I would now be sleeping in some (probably) unmarked and unknown grave away ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... sufficient to raise my spirits, and I had left Bois le Duc a good way in arrears before I was thoroughly convinced of my existence; when I looked through the blinds of the carriage, and saw nothing but barren plains and mournful willows, banks clad with rushes, and heifers so black and dismal that Proserpine herself would have given them up to Hecate. I was near believing myself in the neighbourhood of a ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... the country where the Celts had once lived, and whence their civilised descendants had been driven by the English, had become a barren moorland. Scarce a tree grew on the heights, but a wild common, with valley and hill alternating, much as on Dartmoor at the present day, stretched before the travellers, and was traversed by the old Roman trackway. Dreary indeed it looked in the darkening twilight; here ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... all stages of preparation for rafting down the Moratsha. This was succeeded by a forest entirely of firs, also splendid trees, and then we came into a region which was beyond all my experience or imagination,—a wide and barren waste of rock, gray, glistening in the now burning sun, and without a trace of vegetation that could be recognized by the casual vision. There was no soil, and apparently never had been any, and the silvery-gray of the lichenous ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... one accuse the critic of irreverence, who doubts the wisdom of universities, and of pedantic scholars who burrow like moles in the mouldering remnants of antiquity, but see nothing of the glorious sky overhead. While I have no reverence for barren or wasted intellect, I have the profoundest respect for the fruitful intellect which produces valuable results—for the vast energy of the lower class of intellectual powers, which have developed our immense ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... their property must both be produced together—not one to the loss of the other. Property must not be created in lands desolate by exile of their people, nor multiplied and depraved humanity, in lands barren of bread. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... expended seven millions in experiments, leaving his wife to die of neglect. From 1820 to 1825* he was a tax-collector in Brittany—duties performed by his elder daughter who had secured the position for him in order to divert him from his barren labors. During this time she rehabilitated the family fortunes. Balthazar died, almost insane, crying "Eureka!" [The ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... children. But when they reached a land where the Rogi dwelt of old, a people who had joined the Gothic host and gone to Italy, they settled in that place. But since they were pressed by famine, because they were in a barren land, they removed from there not long afterward, and came to a place close to the country of the Gepaedes.[190] And at first the Gepaedes permitted them to dwell there and be neighbours to them, since they came as suppliants. But afterwards for no good ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... pass grew vegetation, while here and there, along the side, some tree managed to obtain a precarious foothold, and sprouted forth toward the sun. The floor of the canon was of a varied nature—rocks, boulders, grass, streams of water, gravel, sand, and barren soil, alternating with each other and preventing anything like an accurate description of any particular section. A survey of this curious specimen of nature's highway suggested the idea that the solid mountain had been rent for many leagues by an earthquake, ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... fed, so as to make strong and prosperous stocks; whereas if the bees are wanting, every thing else will be in vain: just as a land where there are many stout hands and courageous hearts, although comparatively barren, will in due time, be made to "bud and blossom as the rose," while a second Eden, if inhabited by a scanty and discouraged population, must speedily be overgrown ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... have merely come to make your fortune; that is to say, I offer you a superb opportunity of making your entry into the artistic world. Art, you know, is a barren route, of which glory is ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... but the greater part of this third subscription the Jesuits had spent upon their schools, so the fate of St. Joseph's seemed to be to remain, as someone had said, an unfinished ruin. Their resources were exhausted, and they surveyed the barren aisles, dreaming of the painting and mosaics they would put up when the promises of Father Gordon were realised. For it was understood that their fortunes should be retrieved by his musical abilities, and his competence ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... you shall not sow your seed in barren ground, for I hope to return you an increase answerable to your hopes; but however, you shal find me obedient, and thankful, and serviceable to ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... stallions I can pay, Do I not own their strength and speed? A proper man I dash away, As their two dozen legs were mine indeed. Up then, from idle pondering free, And forth into the world with me! I tell you what;—your speculative churl Is like a beast which some ill spirit leads, On barren wilderness, in ceaseless whirl, While all around ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... probable that we shall finish our work in a much shorter period than was anticipated; very likely in ten or twelve months. The country up here is beautiful; everything green and pleasant; and if you saw it now, you would not believe that in two months' time it could have such a parched and barren appearance as it will then assume. I hope to be able, either from the Darling or from Cooper's Creek, to send you some details of our proceedings. Please to remember me ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it—a noble wreck on a barren, social shore. For the Signal House was once a family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as a quaint and interesting demesne. Finally its price fell with a crash, and an elderly lady of weak intellect was ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... her mind, in spite of her, would go back to happier days. It was not often that Martha allowed herself to indulge in self-pity; but to-night, as she looked squarely into the future and saw it stretching away before her, barren and gray, it seemed hard to keep back the tears. It was not like Martha to give way to her emotions; perhaps it was the Christmas feel in the air that gripped ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky was a colorless vault, cool, high and barren of the threat of rain. It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Long ago this mysterious colony quitted Spain, and settled on the tongue of land on which it is to this day. Whence it came no one knew, and it spoke an unknown tongue. One of its chiefs, who understood Provencal, begged the commune of Marseilles to give them this bare and barren promontory, where, like the sailors of old, they had run their boats ashore. The request was granted; and three months afterwards, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which had brought these gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up. This village, constructed in ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... genius, or beauty. We may be told that it has always been so in every country, and that the fine society of all lands is as profuse and flashy as our own. We deny it, flatly. Neither English, nor French, nor Italian, nor German society, is so unspeakably barren as that which is technically called "society" here. In London, and Paris, and Vienna, and Rome, all the really eminent men and women help make up the mass of society. A party is not a mere ball, but it is a congress ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... lava flow had stopped and the lower valley began, came vegetation. Sparse at first, then springing to luxuriant growth, it contrasted strongly with the barren wall beside it and the equally barren waste of high ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... with it, then it becomes great and worthy at once, for it is part of the giver's very self. It is not what a man gives, but how he gives it, that matters. Gold and silver coming from a full purse and a cold heart, is a barren gift compared to the widow's mite, ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... they had got into one of those deep, hollow lanes, from which it is impossible to catch a glimpse of the surrounding country: those lanes so still, and so beautiful, with their broken sandy banks, covered with tufts of feathering grass, with peeping primroses and violets, and barren strawberries between; the beech and ash of the copses casting their slender branches across, and checkering the way with innumerable broken lights! While, may be, as was here the case, a long pebbly stream runs sparkling and shining ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... which I cannot resist, which I glory in not resisting; for you have been my guide, my morning star, which has awakened me to new life. If I have a noble purpose upon earth, if I have roused myself from that conceited dream of self-culture which now looks to me so cold, and barren, and tawdry, into the hope of becoming useful, beneficent—to whom do I owe it but to you, Marie? No; there is no gulf, Marie! You are my wife, and you alone!" And he held her so firmly, and gazed down upon her with such strong manhood, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... aspect of its tombs. The king of birds never hovers over the deserted waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said that appearances are deceitful; for all that space, and much more, is a cemetery, and what a cemetery! "It is difficult," again says Loftus, "to convey anything ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... and measured voice, "I have to thank you for one very happy minute; the sight of a heart so fresh in the limpid purity of goodness is a luxury you cannot comprehend till you have come to my age; journeyed, like me, from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Heed me: if you had been half-a-dozen years older, and this child for whom you plead had been a fair young woman, perhaps just as innocent, just as charming,—more in peril,—my benevolence would have lain as dormant as a stone. A young man's foolish ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... It was a queer moment, though not an unprecedented one in the stormy history of their relations together. A queer, strange, comforting, healing moment, the fleeting shadow of a great rock in a barren land; a strayed fragment of something which should have been between them always but was ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... incident is that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. Years after he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... not proposed to enter into the Rationalism of the last century, therefore; or to inquire into the causes of the barren lifeless shape into which Theology then, for the most part, threw itself. I have never made that department of Ecclesiastical History my study: and who does not turn away from what is joyless and ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... apothegms, as keen as sharpened swords. And Halfdan, too, from off of royal seat Arose, with pleading words and pleading looks,— But it was all in vain; each prayer was wasted,— Like sunshine lavished on a barren rock, No growth alluring from his stony heart. King Helge's sullen countenance was like His heart,—a pale-faced "No" to human prayers. "A peasant's son," said he, contemptuously, "Could Ing'borg gain, but who profanes the temple Ill-suited ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... own much longer in face of the ever increasing demand for their pelts and the more systematic invasion of their range. The opening up of the country in the north will mean the extinction of the great migrating herd of barren-ground caribou, unless protection is enforced. The coast birds are going fast. Some very old men can still remember the great auk, which is now as extinct as the dodo. Elderly men have eaten the Labrador duck, ...
— Draft of a Plan for Beginning Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... House, never beautiful, and barren in its immediate surroundings, was entirely deserted. The Hive was my home; and when the warm sun, looking through the barren grape vine into the dining room window, melted the light snow of early spring, and awoke ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... wonders of the extent, power, riches, and splendour of the kingdom of Bisnagar, bent his course towards the Indian coast; and after three months' travelling, joining himself to different caravans, sometimes over deserts and barren mountains, and sometimes through populous and fertile countries, arrived at Bisnagar, the capital of the kingdom of that name, and the residence of its maharajah. He lodged at a khan appointed for foreign merchants; and having learnt that there ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Golden cross, and rings, and jewels, Fitting ornaments to beauty. Now she leaves her many treasures, Leaves the store-house on the mountain, Filled with gold and silver trinkets, Wanders over field and meadow, Over stone-fields waste and barren, Wanders on through fen and forest, Through the forest vast and cheerless, Wanders hither, wanders thither, Singing careless as she wanders, This her mournful song and echo: "Woe is me, my life hard-fated! Woe to Aino, broken-hearted! ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... Quito, which the Spaniards call the Arcabucos, being thickly covered with brushwood, but over which the road is tolerably easy and only moderately steep, being almost under the equator. In this march his men suffered extremely from hunger and thirst, as the country through which they went was very barren, and had neither springs nor rivulets. The only relief they could procure was from certain large canes as thick as a mans leg, in each of the joints of which they usually found rather more than a quart of excellent water. They were so much distressed by famine on this march as to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the canyon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse, utterly silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of the multitude of our fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants. Centuries ago it was inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw America, built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones, some of them several stories ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... clear, an ideal one for a ride, and mile after mile was passed, between the now almost barren fields, and through long groves of leafless trees. The horses from Riverlawn had always been boasted of as being the best in that section of the country, and now they were proving ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... evidence that the disease had originated. It was plain enough that it used to be known in many localities where it has long ceased to be feared. Still it was and is remarkable to see what a clean bill of health in this particular respect our barren soil inherited with its sterility. There are some malarious spots on the edge of Lake Champlain, and there have been some temporary centres of malaria, within the memory of man, on one or more of our Massachusetts rivers, but these are harmless enough, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of Burke's journey had to be made through rugged and barren regions, destitute of water, and with nothing that could serve as food for man or beast. Driven to extremities by hunger, the pioneers devoured the venomous reptiles they killed, and on one occasion Burke came near ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... the ground is covered with low stunted shrubs, which serve as landmarks for the caravans, and furnish the camels with a scanty forage. In other parts the disconsolate wanderer, wherever he turns, sees nothing around him but a vast interminable expanse of sand and sky—a gloomy and barren void, where the eye finds no particular object to rest upon, and the mind is filled with painful apprehensions of perishing ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... Glazier soon found himself again on the barren desert. A side track of the railroad, named White Plains, gave him rest for the night. The spot is surrounded by a white alkali desert, covered in places with salt and alkali deposits. Hot Springs is another ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise." (Galatians 4:22-28) Isaac pictures the entire Christ, head and body—Jesus ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... was a very old man when we first met him. He died before we left that part of the country. His last illness was preceded by a drunken spree, during which some rougish boys painted a barren fig-tree on his bald head. He died soon afterward. Notwithstanding the efforts of those who prepared the body for burial, his head went to its last resting-place still marked by some of the paint that portrayed him as a ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... of artist must rise to that vision of a loftier reality—a more true because a more beautiful world—which only imagination can reveal. A truer world, —for the world of facts is not and cannot be true. It is barren, incoherent, misleading. But behind every fact there is a truth: and these truths are enlightening, unifying, creative. Fasten your hold upon them, and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm of detail ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... journeyed was barren; the plants were dried up by the frost and were all faded. Snow lay on the summits of Lebanon, which the travellers now saw from afar, away in their native land, and pale gleams fell on to the lowlands of Judaea through the cloudy atmosphere, so that stones and grass were white. When ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... a barren union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... light ferruginous dust that is distributed over the county of Cumberland, and which annoys the traveller by its extreme minuteness, to the eastward of the Blue Mountains, is as different from the coarse gravelly soil on the secondary ranges to the westward of them, as the barren scrubs and thickly-wooded tracts of the former district are to the grassy and ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... as distinguished from the sky—the earth with its continents, its seas, its alternation of barren deserts and fertile lands—was represented as a man: Phtah at Memphis, Amon at Thebes, Minu at Coptos and at Panopolis. Amon seems rather to have symbolized the productive soil, while Minu reigned over the desert. But ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... began to arise. If the Many were not, if all things were names of the One, and nothing could be predicated of any other thing, how could truth be distinguished from falsehood? The Eleatic philosopher would have replied that Being is alone true. But mankind had got beyond his barren abstractions: they were beginning to analyze, to classify, to define, to ask what is the nature of knowledge, opinion, sensation. Still less could they be content with the description which Achilles gives in Homer of the man whom ...
— Sophist • Plato
... twelve days Beth was on that barren, sandy island entirely alone. The natives were, at this time of the year, off fishing up one of the rivers of the mainland. She did not have as much as a match to light a fire. She had no sort of notion as to how or when her brother would return. The fact of the matter was that had not her brother ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... the great wild cock, and that upon an oath that he return it to him again." Whereupon Solomon asked, "And what does the wild cock do with the Shameer?" To which the demon replied, "He takes it to a barren rocky mountain, and by means of it he cleaves the mountain asunder, into the cleft of which, formed into a valley, he drops the seeds of various plants and trees, and thus the place becomes clothed with verdure and fit for habitation." ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... drowsy soul, it shocks the pious soul, it frightens the timid soul, but it lifts them all, as it were, by main force, out of themselves, and makes healthful breezes blow, and refreshing showers fall upon what was formerly a barren waste. This is Bjoernson's mission; this is, during the second period of his career, his greatness ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... I was very careful not to ask questions that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction that this astonishing substance was ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... task for engineers; it essentially depends upon the discovery and the application of natural laws, including the laws of human nature. It is, therefore, not a task for old fashioned philosophical speculation nor for barren metaphysical reasoning in vacuo; it is a scientific task and involves the coordination and cooperation of all the sciences. This is why it is an ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... for all after times. The epochs in which unbelief, in whatever form it may be, prevails, even when for the moment they put on the semblance of glory and success, inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity, which will not waste its thoughts on things barren and unfruitful.' ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... down-dale course the battalions of royal troops marched and counter-marched to the call of bugles that have gone silent these hundred years and more. It is a road of varied fortunes, like many of those who have passed over it; it is sometimes rich in all manner of priceless possessions, and again it is barren, poverty-stricken, and desolate. It climbs long hills, sometimes in a roundabout, hesitating, half-hearted way, and sometimes with an abrupt and breathless ascent; at the summit it seems to pause a moment as if to invite the traveller ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... sheaves, Smiling at tint and shape, thy smile of peace, But whispering of the next sweet year's increase,— O tender Love, thy loving hope but grieves My heart! I rue my harvest, if it leaves Thee vainly waiting after harvests cease, Like one who has been mocked by title lease To barren fields. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... four principal castles in Norfolk. It is built of brick, and is one of the earliest edifices in England constructed of that material after its rediscovery as suitable for building purposes. It stands with its strong defences not far from the sea on the barren coast. It was built by Sir John Fastolfe, who fought with great distinction in the French wars of Henry V and Henry VI, and was the hero of the Battle of the Herrings in 1428, when he defeated the French ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... old footing, without comprehensive plan, developing only the same spasmodic encounters, barren of strategic result, that had marked the course of the earlier ten years' rebellion as well as the present insurrection from its start. No alternative save physical exhaustion of either combatant, and therewithal the practical ruin of the island, lay in sight, but how ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the help offered was even more deserving of praise. The French are not an adventurous nation: they are not fond of travelling. Hugo says Paris is the world, and to the average Frenchman it embodies the world it comprises: it is the world. Expatriated, he would rather dwell, like the poet, on a barren island within sight of the shores of France than seek or find new worlds to conquer. It must therefore be conceded that the sentiment which brought us our allies in 1780 was a hearty one, nor had they encouragement from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... gushes, then stopped, then disappeared under the earth. Christophe had paid no heed to it: what did it matter to him? His grief and his budding passion had absorbed his mind.—But after the storm had passed, when once more he, turned to the fountain to drink, he could find no trace of it. All was barren. Not a trickle of water. His soul was dried up. In vain did he try to dig down into the sand, and force the water up from the subterranean wells, and create at all costs: the machine of his mind refused to obey. He could not invoke the aid of habit, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... of these adverse opinions Sir Felix managed to get his dinner-table close to theirs and to tell them at dinner something of his future prospects. He was going to travel and see the world. He had, according to his own account, completely run through London life and found that it was all barren. ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... about ten miles north-west. Box-tree flats, of more or less extent, were intercepted by abrupt barren craggy hills composed of sandstone, which seemed to rest on layers of argillaceous rock. The latter was generally observed at the foot of the hills and in the bed of the river; it had in most places been worn by ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... the attitude of both farmer and tramp, that the misguided vagrant who wandered that way was the object of distinct, if not distinguished, curiosity. In the country roads he was stared at with a malevolence that chilled his appetite, no matter how long he had been cultivating it on barren soil. In the streets of Tinkletown, and even at the county seat, he was an object of such amazing concern that he slunk away in pure distress. It was indeed an unsophisticated tramp who thought to thrive ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the trip in the heart of the Creek Nation, commenced to make a fortune. He found on a small creek of beautiful water a little bay land, and made his little field for corn and pumpkins upon that spot: all around was poor, barren pine woods, but he said it was a good range for stock; but he had not an ox or cow on the face of the earth. The truth is, it looked like Emanuel County. The turpentine smell, the moan of the winds through the pine-trees, and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... well-manured soil. Karna overstrained herself and died and left me.... And we went so well in harness together. Her thousand kroner went into it, too ... and now I'm a poor wreck. All that was put into the barren, rocky soil, so that it became good and generous soil. And then the farmer buys it, and now he wants to live there—we poor lice have prepared the way for him! What else were we there for? Fools we are to excite ourselves so over such ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... adequate idea of the intense, the appalling loneliness of the spot. It really seemed to me as if our voices and laughter, so far from breaking the deep eternal silence, only brought it out into stronger relief. On either hand rose up, shear from the waters edge, a great, barren, shingly mountain; before us loomed a dark pine forest, whose black shadows crept up until they merged in the deep crevasses and fissures of the Snowy Range. Behind us stretched the winding gullies by which we had climbed to ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... redundancy than the Greek. The simplicity of the Attic writers would make Latin composition bold and tame. To be perspicuous, the Latin must be full. Thus Arnold thinks that what Tacitus gained in energy he lost in elegance and perspicuity. But Cicero, dealing with a barren and unphilosophical language, enriched it with circumlocutions and metaphors, while he formed it of harsh and uncouth expressions, and thus became the greatest master of composition the world has seen. He was a great artist, making use of his scanty materials ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... not much news from the field to dispel the gloom in the South. The great battle of Chickamauga had been won not long before, but it was a barren victory. There were no more Fredericksburgs nor Chancellorsvilles to rejoice over. Gettysburg had come; the genius of Lee himself had failed; Jackson was dead and no one had arisen ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the days that followed, he thought of what she had said about the anemones and applied it to herself. She, too, had grown up among the rocks spiritually. He could see the effect of the barren soil in her suspicious and unfriendly attitude toward life. There was in her manner a resentment at fate, a bitterness that no girl of her years should have felt. In her wary eyes he read distrust ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... wagons were so nearly gone that, by spring, they were living partly on roots, dug from the ground. All their lives now depended on the crops of grain and vegetables which they could raise in the valley. They made the barren land fertile by spreading water from the little streams over it,—what we call "irrigating"; and they planted enough corn and grain and vegetables for all the people. Every one helped, and every one watched for the sprouting, with hopes, and ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... was the real White Hope. He advised Kirk to direct William's education on the lines which would insure his being, when the time was ripe, undisputed heavy-weight champion of the world. To Steve life outside the ring was a poor affair, practically barren of prizes ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... It tore the barren atmosphere of the office to rags; it made the place august and awful. Rufin bent to her and took her clasped hands in one of his to ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... rightful owner. The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and motionless beneath the dark ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... exercised by De Foe, whose Robinson Crusoe, he maintains, completely alters the mental physiognomy of his model. Robinson is not a man in a state of entire isolation, but is, in fact, a European developing the resources of his industry, while contending with a barren soil and ferocious enemies. Without comparing the present work with the immortal production of De Foe, which regards the history in another point of view, we must allow it the merit of a rich poetical fancy, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... with unfailing regularity. The abuse he heaped on Satan must have added largely to the burden of sorrows under which we are assured the fallen angel carries out his appointed work. He had been profuse in his prayers and curses when we entered the barren pathway of the Little Hills behind the plains of Hillreeli, and there were times when I had felt quite sorry for Satan. Oblation offered to the house spirits, the Maalem asked for his money, the half due at the journey's end, sober enough, despite the kief, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... A barren and sterile country was soon spread before them, the sun was oppressively hot, and not a sign of water was to be observed in any direction. At last they arrived at a muddy pool, in which elephants ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... friendly, almost paternal, but it held an insidious challenge, too, and for one betraying moment all the native antagonism that was really there flashed in the Colonel's eyes. Few enemies of his had been permitted to see it so clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren one. "Be very sure." ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... arrangement in the midst of which we exist, to a certain degree a soothing and agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... along. Button-Bright gave a deep sigh and said he was hungry. Indeed, all were hungry, and thirsty, too; for they had eaten nothing but the apples since breakfast; so their steps lagged and they grew silent and weary. At last they slowly passed over the crest of a barren hill and saw before them a line of green trees with a strip of grass at their feet. An agreeable fragrance ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... camels, because they are sustained with little meat, and bear great burdens. They must purvey victuals for a month to cross it only, for to go through it lengthways would require a year's time. They go through the sands and barren mountains, and daily find water; yet at times it is so little that it will hardly suffice fifty or a hundred men with their beasts; and in three or four places the water is salt and bitter. The rest of the road, for eight-and-twenty days, is very good. In it there are not either beasts or ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... such white sand before. One had to misquote: "Come unto these SILVER sands." It glittered white in a great horse-shoe round the bay, and the bed of the Salt Lake (which is really an overflow from the sea) was a barren patch of this silver-sand, with here and there a dead mule or a sniper's body lying out, a little black blot, ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... of the merchant prince who owned our ships, played cock-o'-the-walk, took rank next to M. Radisson, and called himself deputy-governor. Foret, whose father had a stretch of barren shingle on The Labrador, and who had himself received letters patent from His Most Christian Majesty for a marquisate, swore he would be cursed if he gave the pas to La Chesnaye, or any other commoner. And M. de Radisson was as great ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... New England, on whose barren musical soil we have already descanted, and who has not hitherto disputed to the Old World her privilege of pouring out on our untutored continent the accumulated wealth of years of musical study and training, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... no means barren. The soil is fertile, the rains plentiful, and a considerable proportion of ground is occupied by cultivation, and amply supplies ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... Changchau. Along this route in many parts, more especially in that part lying between Tang-oa and Changchau, very large camphor-trees are met with. I have frequently travelled over this road. The road from Fuchau to Chinchew, which also takes five days to travel over, is bleak and barren, lying chiefly along the sea-coast, and in winter a most uncomfortable journey. But few trees are met with; a banyan here and there, but no camphor-trees along this route; but there is one extremely interesting feature on it that would strike the most ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... moor is inexhaustible—why let others grow rich in your stead, sir? On through darkness to light; that's my device. I will strive and fight to the last breath; it is not my own interest which is at stake. It seems to me to be a question for the welfare of humanity. The aim is to win this barren soil for cultivation, to give new life-blood to this whole district, to change the poverty of this country into prosperity—to be a benefactor to ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... there: I see them flourish as I see them fall! But he, who once was growing with the grass, And blooming with the flowers, my little son, Fell, withered—dead, nor has revived again! Perfect and lovely, needful to my sight, Why comes he not to ornament my days? The barren fields forget their barrenness, The soulless earth mates with these soulless things, Why should I not obtain my recompense? The budding spring should bring, or summer's prime, At least a vision of the vanished child, And let his heart commune with mine ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... tie the ewe's clits together to make her a handier load, I looked round me at the cold bare trees, asleep till the spring would waken them with sap. The hills were bleak and barren, the rocks harsh and cold with no warm crotal on them, and just the reek from the houses rising into ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... street. The roof, looking as if it were only the dirty eaves hanging from its more aspiring neighbour on the right, supports itself against the cabin on the left, about three feet above the ground. Can that be the habitation of any of the human race? Few but such as those whose lot has fallen on such barren places would venture in; but for a moment let us see what ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... inseparable companions) ceased for many years, and my aunt began her new life with a bitter bankruptcy of love and friendship, happiness and hope, that would have dried the sap of every sweet affection, and made even goodness barren, in many a ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... confused beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read can glimpse scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that the very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intrigued with the logical abstraction of words and were led away into a wilderness of barren deduction—their one inspired vision of a stable premiss ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... malice had done its worst, invisible goodness had lent its aid. In the poor fallen one, suddenly raised up, by the side of the repulsive, it had placed the attractive; on the barren shoal it had set the loadstone; it had caused a soul to fly with swift wings towards the deserted one; it had sent the dove to console the creature whom the thunderbolt had overwhelmed, and had made beauty adore deformity. For this to be possible it was necessary that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... from this city. She came of her own accord, and was most welcome, and we came here together a little more than a week ago, June declaring that she meant to stay all summer, and I nothing loth.' She stopped and smiled. 'This is all very barren,' she said. 'I think thee will ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... slaves debate. But did not chance, at length, her errour mend? Did no subverted empire mark his end? Did rival monarchs give the fatal wound? Or hostile millions press him to the ground? His fall was destin'd to a barren strand, A petty fortress, and a dubious hand; He left the name, at which the world grew pale, To point a moral, or adorn a tale. [y]All times their scenes of pompous woes afford, From Persia's tyrant to Bavaria's lord. In gay hostility and barb'rous ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... were unfavourable to the schemes of Humayun. All his plans miscarried, and, in the spring of 1542, he and his young wife had to flee for safety to the barren deserts of Marwar. In August they reached Jaisalmer, but, repulsed by its Raja, they had to cross the great desert, suffering terribly during the journey from want of water. Struggling bravely, however, ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... the sooner we get away from this barren spot the better," observed Harry. "If the fine weather continues, as I hope it may, we can expect to reach the Auckland Islands in three or ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working- men's quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached, irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather. The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... last drawn breath Leaves such long silence; but let not thy faith Fail for a moment in God's boundless grace. But know, oh know, He has prepared a place Fairer for our dear dead than worlds beneath, Yet not beneath; for those entrancing spheres Surround our earth as seas a barren isle. Ours is the region of eternal fears; Theirs is the region where God's radiant smile Shines outward from the centre, and gives hope Even to those who in the shadows grope. They are not far from us. At first though long And lone may seem the paths that intervene, If ever ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Davis went to Vera Cruz for a newspaper syndicate, and after the first sharp engagement in the Mexican seaport there was nothing for the correspondent to do but kill time on that barren, low lying strip of Gulf coast, hemmed in on all sides by Mexicans and the sea, and time is hard to kill there. Yet there was a story to be got, but it required ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... range of enclosures, yet no two soils can be more different; for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, carrying a good turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to be large timber; while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, barren waste. The former being all in the parish of Binsted, is about two miles in extent from north to south, and near as much from east to west, and contains within it many woodlands and lawns, and the great lodge where the grantees reside, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... summits form themselves into a wild, dreary region, sown with sterile mountain-tops, and torn to pieces by wind and storm; the only glimpse of peace is derived from the view on either side of the sea, which sometimes shows itself on the horizon, a misty line, half silver, half ether. This barren wilderness again softens into gracefully-swelling hills turned towards Florence. The fair olive tree and the dark cypress mingle their foliage with the luxuriant chestnut boughs, and the frequent marble villa flashes a white gleam from amid ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... in a rosier temper, listened with great satisfaction to my Jeremiads, and ironically concurred. He instanced, as a cognate matter, the action of the tides, "which," said he, "was altogether designed for the confusion of canoeists, except in so far as it was calculated to minister to a barren vanity on the part ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... aqueducts. Mr. Dinwiddie made us remark the pavement of the road leading up to the Kelt, the old road to Jerusalem, the road by which Jesus went when the blind men called him, and over which, somewhere on its way, stretched the sycamore tree into which Zaccheus climbed. Ah how barren and empty the way looked now! - with Him no longer here. For a moment, so looked my own path before me, - the dusty, hot road; the desolate pass; the barren mountain top. It was only a freak of fancy; I do not know what ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... have a pale and unlovely hue. An English view would have been incomparably richer in its never-fading green; and in my own country, the wooded hills would have been more delightful than these peaks and ridges of dreary and barren sunshine; and there would have been the bright eyes of half a dozen little lakes, looking heavenward, within an extent like that of the ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of Hudson's Straits, which he traversed a distance of sixty miles. He succeeded at length in retracing his course, and anchored on the southern shore of Frobisher's Bay, in the Countess of Warwick's Sound. But the desire for gold, the bleak winds, barren shores, and drifting icebergs, all combined to dispel the hopes of making a successful settlement, and the adventurers turned their faces homeward, carrying once more a cargo of ore, which proved, like the first, to be ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... What, was to be done? for a knife was an article of indispensable necessity: it belonged to Spencer, and it would have been madness in the owner of such an article to part with it. He resolved to accompany Holiday part of the way on his journey, and went as far as Big Barren River. When about to turn back, Spencer's heart relented: he broke the blade of his knife in two, gave half to his friend, and with a light heart returned to his hollow tree. Not long after his gallant rescue of Mrs. Bledsoe, he was killed by a party ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... been told by some persons from the islands that I must not expect to find every where a green and tropical verdure; for much of the country was barren, unfruitful lava. I was up on deck bright and early, to see this far-off part of the world. There was "Diamond Head" before me, an extinct volcanic mountain, of a sort of reddish dust-color, with its top fallen in, and without a tree or spear of ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... opening gates were of iron, and were adorned with sharp spikes on the top, so as to make climbing over impossible; a sentry, too, stood at the entrance. The gates opened on to a spacious courtyard surrounded by buildings. Not a green thing was to be seen, and the gravelled yard was as naked and barren as the buildings themselves, whose blank windows suggested deserted rooms. Only a few were graced with white curtains, which gave promise of habitation. Even the young chestnut-trees that had been planted round the borders of the courtyard throve but poorly; now and then a yellow leaf ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... her trees and gardens, which attract a visitor, especially one from the more barren north, Oxford must yield the palm of natural beauty to many English towns, not to mention those ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... Dementia Praecox out of a total of five cases treated; curing six cases of Locomotor Ataxia out of six cases treated; curing two cases of Paralysis Agitans out of two cases treated; restoring normal conditions in one hundred cases of Psychopathia Sexualis; bringing about the parenthood of barren women and impotent men not yet past middle-age; restoring the function of menstruation or regular periodicity to women who have passed through the change of life; and, in a word, making good in the cure of so-called incurables, and doing something that was never done before, to our knowledge, ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... over the walls before me in a vague hope of reproducing, in my mind, the ideas which must have passed through his before he rose and thrust those papers into their place of concealment. Alas! those walls were barren of all suggestion, and my eyes went wandering through the window before me in a vague appeal, when a sudden remembrance of his last moments struck me sharply and I bounded up with a new thought, a new idea, which sent me in haste to my room and brought me down again in hat and jacket. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... on Elbow Barren's took," Allen told him suddenly—"the one just off the road. I saw smoke in the chimney ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Herchenberg, an extinct volcano. As we climb its sides we see traces of the former devastation. Loose ashes cover the ground, bits of mica glittering in the sun, and on the summit we find enormous masses of stone which were melted and then baked together. In the center lies the old crater, a quiet, barren place bearing very little vegetation, but from its wall an excellent view of the surrounding country can be obtained. Not far from this mountain lies the mighty Bausenberg, with its immense, well preserved crater, only one side of which has been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... There he was, tearing over the grass towards the lake. Then she turned to Mr. Gifford and resumed the discussion of Morte, with a warning of the terrible responsibility he incurred by maintaining that nest of vice and fever; but as it was barren of results it need not ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... and other sorts in less abundance. These are scattered over the country more or less thickly, but, never so as to deserve the name of a forest. Coarse and scanty grasses grow beneath them on the more barren hills, and a luxuriant herbage in the moister localities. In the islands between Timor and Java there is often a more thickly wooded country abounding in thorny and prickly trees. These seldom reach any great height, and during the force of the dry season they almost ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... see we were getting along very well, steadily collecting those things which were necessary as well for our comfort as our safety. If the island on which we had been cast away was barren and inhospitable, it was none the less capable, like almost every other land, in whatever region of the earth, of ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... utterly discouraged. In his soul he was asking bitterly what good had come of all his prayerful labours among the people of this pinched, narrow world, as rugged and unbeautiful in form and life as the barren hills ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, and the International Boundary and Water Commission, United States and Mexico. A number of these projects are multiple-purpose projects, providing not only for reclamation and irrigation of barren land and flood control, but also for the production of power needed for industrial development of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... idea of the desolate and love-lorn Ariadne writing a letter from the barren isle of Naxos is in itself ridiculous, nor can all the pathos of her grief redeem the irony. Helen wishes she had had more practice in correspondence, so that she might perhaps touch her lover's chilly heart. Ovid using the language of mythology, reminds us of those heroes ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the modern Pict's ignoble boast,[dy][122] To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared:[6.B.] Cold as the crags upon his native coast, His mind as barren and his heart as hard, Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared. Aught to displace Athenae's poor remains: Her Sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard, Yet felt some portion of their Mother's pains,[7.B.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... which wind through it by a serpentine course, and dotted with innumerable little forts and villages, he will have before him one of the meadows of Cabul." To complete the picture the reader must conceive the grey barren hills, which, contrasting strongly with the fertility of the plains they encompass, are themselves overlooked by the eternal snows of the Indian Caucasus. To the English exile these valleys have another attraction, ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... a proposal to sell to the firm for the sum of one million dinars a barren rock in the Indian Sea, which was not even theirs, and on which indeed not one of them had ever set eyes. Their claim to advance so original a proposal was that to their certain knowledge two thousand of the wealthiest citizens of ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... early days of his reign he had indulged himself in visions of empire, and of repeating the old glories of the Plantagenet kings. But in the peace which was concluded after the defeat of Pavia, he showed that he had resigned himself to a wiser policy,[417] and the surrender of a barren designation would cost him little. In his quarrel with the pope, also, he had professed an extreme reluctance to impair the unity of the church; and the sacrifices which he had made, and the years ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... letter we see the first germ of an idea afterwards developed in the letter to Barren Field of August 31, 1817, and again, more fully, in the Elia essay ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... fertile, but much of it has become exhausted by reason of improper tillage. The forests which were once a vast extent of stately pines, and from which great quantities of turpentine and tar were for a century and a half exported, are now little better than barren fields. Pine lumber and staves have long been a large article of export, which with corn and cotton make up nearly all the articles sent abroad. But the pines are now nearly exhausted, the trade in naval ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... the other to disturb nothing, so that careful examination might, if necessary, be made when daylight returned. The path elbowed to right and left sharply, ever ascending, and it was not too steep to prevent steady progress. It ended at last on the summit of the cliffs, where, after a barren space of fifty yards, a low wall ran separating ploughed lands from the precipices. But no sight of any human being awaited them and, on the close sward of the summit, footsteps would ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... impart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out in tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The acclivity is barren and stony,—a true desert foreground, like those of Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the immense bulk before us, with its delicate ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... could not help himself, he thought bitterly. And yet how dreary the prospect seemed. He had given up the first young love of his life, and now the barren splendors of Belgrave House seemed to oppress him—the walls closed round him like the walls ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... waves dashing against the iron-bound line of northern cliffs. Inland, the country was more cultivated, but hilly and broken up with masses of lichen-covered rock, and little clumps of thin fir trees. He knew the scenery so well. The rugged, barren country, with its great stretches of moorland and little patches of cultivated land, with its silent tarns, its desolation, and the ever-varying music of the sea, they all meant home to him, and he loved them. It had always been so, and yet ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be real so long as leagues of barren, unbroken wilderness separated the maritime from the central provinces. Free intercourse, ties of trade, knowledge which would sweep away prejudice, could not come until a railway had spanned this wilderness. In the fifties plans had been made for a main trunk line to run from ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... has been disputed, and his works have been declared to be an ingenious compilation, drawn from the productions of a multitude of singers. It is not my intention here to enter into the endless and barren controversy which has raged round this question. It will be more to the purpose to try and form some general idea of the characteristics of the Greek Epic; and to do this it is necessary to give a brief review of the political and ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... from the well with its loud-rattling chain and clumsy, water-sodden bucket, but no one called. At the door of the house he whistled, stamped, pounded, and at last flung it open with all the noise he could make. Still his hungry ears fed on nothing but sinister echoes, the barren husks of his own clamour. There was no curt voice of a man, no quick, questioning tread of a woman. There were dead white ashes on the hearth, and the silence was grimly kept by ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." A heart and mind full of sympathy and fellow-feeling is the secret of a loving life; and an idle mind and an empty heart, to which no thrill of sympathy with others is ever admitted, is the barren and desolate region from which loveless looks and cruel words and selfish ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... individual. The natural pride, however, of his parents, did not blind them to the uncertainty that belongs to all premature efforts of the mind; and they so carefully avoided everything like a boastful display of blossoms which, in many cases, have withered away in barren luxuriance, that the circumstance of these compositions was hardly ever mentioned ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... a good crop from English wheat.[770] In these cases varieties have been carried from a warmer to a cooler climate; in the reverse case, as "when wheat was imported directly from France into the West Indian Islands, it produced either wholly barren spikes or furnished with only two or three miserable seeds, while West Indian seed by its side yielded an enormous harvest."[771] Here is another case of close adaptation to a slightly cooler climate; a kind of wheat which in England ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... gun had gone re-echoing through the Highlands of the Hudson. The great garrison flag was still slowly fluttering earthward, veiled partially from the view of the throng of spectators by the snowy cloud of sulphur smoke drifting lazily away upon the wing of the breeze. Afar over beyond the barren level of the cavalry plain the gilded hands of the tower-clock on "the old Academic" were blended into one in proclaiming to all whom it might concern that it was five minutes past the half-hour 'twixt seven and eight, and there were girls in every group, and ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... battle-furnitures, pour over in two columns; the Cavalry, at the due point of time, riding by a ford short way to the right. And at four, in the gray of the August morning (Saturday, 11th August, 1759), all persons and things find themselves correctly across; ranked there, in those barren, much-indented "Pasture-grounds of Goritz" or of OEtscher; intending towards Kunersdorf; ready for unfolding into order of battle there. They leave their heavy baggage at Goritz, Wunsch to guard the Bridges and it; and, in succinct condition, are all under way. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... blank; and yet we can scarcely hope to discover the central breeding-place of man in what is, geographically, little more than a blind alley. In the next place, Physical Anthropology, not only in respect to human palaeontology, but in general, is as barren of explanations as it is fertile in detailed observations. The systematic study of heredity as it bears on the history of the human organism has hardly begun. Hence, it would not befit one who is no expert in relation to such matters to anticipate the verdict of a science that needs only ...
— Progress and History • Various
... barren garden that we found, This was an empty house we came to meet, We, who for all our longing, hear no sound ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison
... his bread out of the sweat of his own brow or not at all. The history of the abolition of slavery in America could not be written with Massachusetts left out; the history of Massachusetts herself, since the Revolution, would be but a dreary, barren waste without the chapter of ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... of various singers and actors and painters and writers of his acquaintance, of studios and greenrooms, customs in European countries, famous friendships between royalty and artists; and she had her first glimpse of a world that made her own seem as barren and desolate as ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... conquest of knowledge, be totally arrested? Rome herself is nowadays a terrible example of such a disastrous experiment—Rome with her congealed soil, her dead sap, killed by centuries of papal government, Rome which has become so barren that not a man, not a work has sprung from her midst even after five and twenty years of awakening and liberty! And who would accept such a state of things, not among people of revolutionary mind, but among those of religious mind that might possess any culture ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... have all been canny enough to have means enough to balance all that barren moorland. You are a richer man ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought they had left behind. Napoleon, contrary to custom, dressed early and went upon deck: he went forward to the gangway to view the island. He beheld a kind of village surrounded by numerous barren hills towering to the clouds. Every platform, every aperture, the brow of every hill was planted with cannon. The Emperor viewed the prospect through his glass. His countenance underwent no change. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... accord, and was most welcome, and we came here together a little more than a week ago, June declaring that she meant to stay all summer, and I nothing loth.' She stopped and smiled. 'This is all very barren,' she said. 'I think thee ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home—took hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... weakness, shame, and wrong Mutely the frozen features tell. Noiseless falls on it, the tears of dew, Over it softly the breezes blow; Wavelets, kissing the tangled hair, Murmur a requiem sad and low. Out to the barren, bleak hillside Rough hands bear it with scorn and jest. Cradled once in a mother's arms— Once by a mother's fond lips pressed— Under the clods of a new-made grave; A rough-hewn board at the foot and head, Where never ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... "Alas; ah, me: Why should I live where none can see?" But He who made both field and flood, Hath formed that flower and called it good, And in His wisdom placed it there To make the desert seem more fair: And if He then hath need of flowers To deck this barren world of ours, He hath a use ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... all round; not a bush, not a blade, not a clinging moss such as elsewhere nature has lightly flung on the rocky surface of the heights, as if a breath of her creative life had softly touched the barren stone. Nothing but smooth granite, and above it a sky as bare of cloud as the rocks are of shrubs ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... your father and this Ralph Darrell, who was a banker in one of the New England cities—Boston, I believe. They christened it the 'Copper Princess,' invested nearly a million dollars in a complete mining-plant, and sank a shaft into barren rock. Not one cent did the mine ever yield, and the deeper they went the poorer became their prospects. Finally, Darrell, completely ruined financially, became crazed by his troubles and disappeared; nor has he ever been heard from since. Your father, having put half of his fortune ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... flower beds, with groves, with trim parterres, with the finest turf, to improve fruit trees, to seek out and perfect edible roots and herbs at once for man and cattle. We owe to the Dutch that scurvy and leprosy have been banished from England, that continuous crops have taken the place of barren fallows, that the true rotation of crops has been discovered and perfected, that the population of these islands has been increased and that the cattle and sheep in England are ten times what they were in numbers and three times ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... girl. "However, there is little chance of our encountering such a party. The soldiers are all coming up from the south and are bound to force Black Hawk's warriors to the other bank of the Rock. There will be nothing but barren country east of here. What do you say, ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... to do—for it was caused by home-sickness. He pined for his rude home in Siberia—for the ice-fields, the marshy meadows, and the barren steppes of his fatherland—he saw no beauty in the summer plains of the South, no charm in the cultivated fields, nor found pleasure in the society into which he was thrown. His sadness increased every day—he lost his flesh, and at length became ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... after the woman was gone. Mrs. C. wore also a white bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck, with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves. She had on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that barren waste of neck and shoulders. Her hair was frizzled into a tangled chaparral, forward of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly bound and plaited into a stump like a pony's tail, and furthermore was canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... has been read largely even here; and no man, how prejudiced soever, can compare with the standing at a deer-path all day long waiting till a great timid beast is driven up within ten yards of your muzzle, with that extraordinary sport on bald and barren mountains, where nothing but vast and muscular exertion, the eye of the eagle, and the cunning of the serpent, can bring you within range of the wild ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... when you have reached my years, and can look upon fields on which you have lavished your warmest hopes, your noblest aspirations, your tenderest affections, and see the soil all profitless and barren. 'Set not your heart on the things of earth,' saith ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... fortnight's time!" But the sneer in Lindley's voice was for Ashley, who had asked the impertinent question, not for Farquhart, whose honor he, apparently, doubted. "Lord Farquhart's not to blame, as you know well enough. The mess is of Lord Gordon's making, for Lord Gordon holds in trust even the barren lands that came to Percy with ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... peculiarities of this tree is its power of flourishing in almost any soil. It grows equally well on the mountain-side, in the rich valleys beside the streams, and on the barren sea-beach of the coral reefs, where its only soil is sand, and where its roots are watered by the waves of every rising tide. Another peculiarity is, that fruit in every stage may be seen on the same tree at one time—from the first formation, after the falling ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... put in the spelling-books, Monsieur. Ah, bah! a far different path did Cesar Prevost pursue! He studied these phenomena, not to explain them,—being too wise to dream of living par amours with such barren virgins as are Whence and Why (your Bacon was very shrewd, Monsieur). What cared I about causes? Let Descartes, and Polignac, and Reid, and Cudworth, et id omne genus, famish themselves in this desert; but ask it not of Cesar ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... sitting in his litter as far as the entrance-hall, instead of dismounting at the usual place and proceeding on foot through several gates and courtyards. Nor were the privileges of the temple confined to barren honours, for it was endowed with lands of the value of five ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... brightest day a cloud, And after summer evermore succeeds Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold; So cares and joys abound, as seasons ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... which Clive had been appointed, was, at this time, perhaps, the first in importance of the Company's settlements. In the preceding century Fort St. George had arisen on a barren spot beaten by a raging surf; and in the neighbourhood a town, inhabited by many thousands of natives, had sprung up, as towns spring up in the East, with the rapidity of the prophet's gourd. There were already in the suburbs many white villas, each surrounded by its garden, whither ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that the country through which we passed to-day, was as fertile and much more picturesque than the Said. The reason for the latter part of this assertion is, that in the Said the view is limited by the ridges of barren and calcined mountains that bound it on both sides, whereas here the view ranges over plains bounded only by the horizon, and interspersed here and there with isolated mountains of most singular forms. Some of them might be mistaken for pyramids, they are so regular and ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... "),whereof he boasts in one of his inscriptions, was no doubt, as he states, "a blessing to the Babylonians"—it "changed desert plains into well-watered fields; it spread around fertility an abundance"—it brought a whole district, previously barren, into cultivation, and it set an example, which the best of the later monarchs followed, of a mode whereby the productiveness of the country might be increased ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... generally those who, from the standpoint of economic stability or solid moral quality, are the most variable. We staid and sober citizens are inclined to throw an aura of picturesqueness about such creatures as the Stuarts, the dissipated Virginian cavaliers, the happy-go-lucky barren artists of the Latin Quarter, the fiery touchiness of that so-called chivalry which was one of the least important features of Southern life, and so on. We staid and sober citizens generally object strenuously to living in actual contact with the unpunctuality, unreliability, unreasonableness, ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... the whites, they point to the barren hillside, as evincing the truth of the story, affirming that one day the forest trees stood thick upon it, but was stripped of them by the great serpent as he rolled down its declivity. The round stones found there in great abundance, resembling in size and ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... after leaving Val Cassione the wind shifted again and the weather improved as if by magic. The clouds gradually melted away, and the blue of the sky palpitated through the grey; the sun shone warm upon the barren, featureless coast, adding colour to the dispiriting grey of the limestone spotted with the dark green of shrubs, a characteristic of most of the Dalmatian islands, and the Velebit Mountains became clear, in some places to the summits, though the greater part of the chain was still ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... five weeks at sea when we dropped anchor in Porto Praya roads, the appearance of the land was by no means inviting to the eyes. A high and extremely barren hill, or large heap of dry earth, with a good many stones about it, seemed to compose the Island. Close to us was the town, a collection of white houses that looked very dazzling in the summer sun. Beside, and running ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... among the Hurons began in earnest. Missionary stations multiplied rapidly. The Christianized villages of St. Joseph, St. Louis, St. Ignatius, and St. John smiled in the desert like green spots amidst the barren sands. At the central station of St. Mary's alone, three thousand Indians received hospitality in the course of one year. Undeterred by the certainty of privation and suffering, new missioners continued to swell the ranks and aid the work. With indefatigable ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... is the barren and desolate country to the east of Lake Dambeling, doubtless a continuation of the same sterile country seen by Mr. Roe, the surveyor-General, east of York many years previously; and probably from Mr. Eyre's observation, extending quite ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... "in all this immense space between this large island and the American coast, there is only one solitary barren little island crossed ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... and of power; her pride of person and accomplishments; her desire for admiration; her violent passions, had made her a torment to others and to herself. She knew that no one loved her for anything good that she possessed, and knew that her own heart was barren of love for others. She felt that a little child who would call her "mother," clinging to her hand, or nestling in her bosom, could redeem her to her better self; and how could she help thinking of the true men who, with their hearts in their ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... Maria's name to her master, dated it ahead, and from Windsor, Canada West, and sent it enclosed in a letter to a friend at that place, with directions to mail it to the master at the date I had given. Maria informed her master Champlin that Canada was not the cold barren country he had always told her it was, for they raised great fields of corn, and potatoes, peas and beans, and everything she saw in Kentucky; and that she had found the best of friends ever since she left home, and signed ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... long, high ridge. On its crest Norton halted. Hollis likewise drew in his pony. From here they could see a great stretch of country, sweeping away into the basin beneath it, toward a mountain range whose peaks rose barren and smooth in ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... days writers conjured without a very precise consideration of its true significance. By Bacon's method we are to construct in time the 'noble science of politics,' which is equally removed from the barren theories of Utilitarian sophists and the petty craft of intriguing jobbers. The Utilitarians are schoolmen, while the Whigs are the true followers of Bacon and scientific induction. J. S. Mill admitted within certain limits the relevancy of this criticism, and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... account of Count D'Estaing's abortive expeditions to America; the barren results of the first two years' alliance between Congress and the King of France, by Dr. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... her resolution, Nattie sobbed herself to sleep. Not so easy is it to renounce love, and look forward to a life barren of its best ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... sought her employer in the studio. Daniel Burton spent all his waking hours in the studio now. The woods and fields were nothing but a barren desert of loneliness to Daniel Burton— ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... Lucille's happiness was at an end; her fairy palace was shattered in the dust; the magician's wand was broken up; the Ariel was given to the winds; and the bright enchantment no longer distinguished the land she lived in from the rest of the barren world. It is true that St. Amand's words were kind; it is true that he remembered with the deepest gratitude all she had done in his behalf; it is true that he forced himself again and again to say, "She is ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... world to-day is much concerned over the question of prostitution and its effect upon the coming race, through the transmission of syphilitic taint to an innocent wife, who is thereafter barren, or who bears syphilitic children. The folly of the double standard, purity insisted on for the wife, unchasity condoned in the husband; all these subjects are sure to be brought up, and the nurse who goes prepared on these and kindred topics can do an immense amount ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... beautiful. While she deprecates harshness, she insists on a rigorous discipline. She would stimulate industry and the cultivation of moderate abilities, as more likely to win in the long race of life,—even as a barren soil and ungenial climate have generally produced the most thrifty people. She would banish frivolous books which give only superficial knowledge, and even those abridgments and compendiums which form too considerable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... vale of infinite radius, methought, and shortly, I saw by a few bluish lights, like the flickering flame of a candle, countless, ah! countless shades of men, some afoot and some on horseback, rushing back and fro like the wind, in awful silence and solemnity; the land was barren, bleak and blasted, without either grass or hay, trees or animals, save deadly beasts and poisonous vermin of every kind—serpents, snakes, lice, frogs, worms, locusts, gids and all such that exist on man's corruption. Through a myriad shades and reptiles, graves, churchyards ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... look-out for an unsuspecting green one, or a wealthy pigeon, who, if once netted, seldom succeeds in quitting the trap without being plucked of a few of his feathers. The greatest improvement to a place barren of foliage and the agreeable retirement of overshadowed walks, is the Royal Gardens, on the level at the extremity of the town, in a line with the Steyne enclosures as you enter from the London ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Mundi A Christmas Carol By the Waters of Babylon Paradise "I will lift up mine Eyes unto the Hills" Saints and Angels "When my Heart is Vexed, I will Complain" After Communion A Rose Plant in Jericho Who shall Deliver Me? Despised and Rejected Long Barren If Only Dost thou not Care? Weary in Well-Doing Martyrs' Song After this the Judgment ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... length the progress of investigation led to the discarding of these monstrosities, and Miller's restorations were returned to, as, after all, the true ones. "The Old Red Sandstone" formed an era in the history of fossil geology. That formation had hitherto been regarded as well nigh barren of organic remains; but Mr. Miller demonstrated that it contains at least three successive stages, each characterized by a suite of uncouth and hitherto unknown fishes. A few years later he published his "Footprints of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... element of mystery each fact evolved. First, Captain Wegg must have been a rich man in order to build this house, maintain two servants and live for years in comfort without any income from his barren farm lands. What became of his money after his death? Why was his only son obliged to fly to the cities in order to obtain a livelihood? Secondly, the Captain, a surly and silent man, had brought hither—perhaps by force—a young woman as his wife who was so unhappy that she pined away and died. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... another striking illustration of the wonderful growth of American towns. Less than a year ago, a barren waste marked the spot where now was growing a thriving city. The railroad, as in other localities, had played an important part in awakening this uninhabited region to life and activity. The trackless, boundless prairie had been reclaimed, and was now a flourishing city, full ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... "If Albinus be criminal," exclaimed the orator, "the senate and myself are all guilty of the same crime. If we are innocent, Albinus is equally entitled to the protection of the laws." These laws might not have punished the simple and barren wish of an unattainable blessing; but they would have shown less indulgence to the rash confession of Boethius, that, had he known of a conspiracy, the tyrant never should. [94] The advocate of Albinus was soon involved in the danger and perhaps the guilt of his client; their signature ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... to the title of harbor pilot. And if certain perquisites went with an otherwise barren office, that was to be expected. Who worked for nothing, or for the empty honor ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... but it did seem to me that, had the commander of the army been able to be present on the field, he could have taken advantage of Bragg's final repulse, and there would have remained in our hands more than the barren field. But no attempt was made to do anything more till next morning, and then we secured little except the enemy's killed and ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... country have not looked forward" (his eyes twinkled almost wickedly) "with that pleasure you might expect in exiles, to the influx of people brought up here by the great Gold Discovery. We knew what that sort of craze leads to. We knew that in a barren land like this, more and more denuded of wild game every year, more and more the prey of epidemic disease—we knew that into this sorely tried and hungry world would come a horde of men, all of them ignorant of the conditions ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... difficulties and complications arose; for the new Earl of Murray, with his character, was not a man to content himself with a barren title, while the estates which were crown property since the extinction of the male branch of the old earls, had been gradually encroached upon by powerful neighbours, among whom was the famous Earl of Huntly, whom we have already ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... stimulus given to railway construction by the establishment of the gold industry Mr. Worsfold speaks with authority. He says, "To-day, Johannesburg—built on land which in 1886 was part of an absolutely barren waste—is approached by three distinct lines, which connect it directly with the four chief ports of South Africa—Delagoa Bay, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town. Of these lines the earliest, which traverses the Free State from end to end, and links the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote for circulars of every stock company that was started, and tried to induce every one to invest who would listen to him? We looked around at those dull faces, the truthful indices of mean and barren minds, and decided that we would leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacobus's biscuit, light as Aurora's cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the perfume of the late azaleas with which she decked her ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... is visible a prehistoric habitation of the Picts and a cavern in which gypsy mothers are even now brought secretly to give birth to their offspring. On the other side are visible the slopes of a barren hill, inhabited till lately by a witch who gathered herbs by night under the influence of certain planets, and of whose powers even the doctor at Golspie went in half-acknowledged terror. At dinner two pipers played on a landing outside ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... dates, and, as far as possible, to associate them with each other, and thus assist the memory in their permanent retention; experience having proved the committing of many dates to be the most barren and profitless of ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... The bright eyes, sweet, loving face, and happy voice of little Rachel, that was heard all day long, lightened the mother's toil, refreshed her spirits, and often made her forget the loneliness and seclusion in which they lived. She was like a cool spring in the desert, a bright flower in a barren waste, a ray of sunshine from ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... colonel at the head of the regiment was much surprised at the commander in chief's order to throw out skirmishers. He had felt perfectly sure that there were other troops in front of him and that the enemy must be at least six miles away. There was really nothing to be seen in front except a barren descent hidden by dense mist. Having given orders in the commander in chief's name to rectify this omission, Prince Andrew galloped back. Kutuzov still in the same place, his stout body resting heavily in the saddle ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... watershed of a tortuous, low chain of mountains running, roughly, east and west. Their northern slope, which is occupied by the three Guianas first named, is saturated and river-torn; but their southern one, Brazilian Guiana, is in general thirsty and semi-barren, and the driest region of the Amazon valley. It is an area which has been left almost in the undisturbed possession of nomadic Indian tribes, whose scanty numbers find it difficult to solve the food problem. From the divortium aquarum between French Guiana and Brazil, known as the Tumuc-humac ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ring. He was the real White Hope. He advised Kirk to direct William's education on the lines which would insure his being, when the time was ripe, undisputed heavy-weight champion of the world. To Steve life outside the ring was a poor affair, practically barren of prizes for ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not, outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges, and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who, without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God, while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... no part of the world or state of society does it hold good. But our theorist, by laying down this double ratio as a law of nature, gains this advantage, that at all times it seems as if, whether in new or old-peopled countries, in fertile or barren soils, the population was pressing hard on the means of subsistence; and again, it seems as if the evil increased with the progress of improvement and civilization; for if you cast your eye at the scale which is supposed to be calculated upon true and infallible data, you find that when ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... correspondence for the rest of the year are singularly barren of interest. A troublesome attack of sciatica in the end of July led to Reeve's being advised to try Harrogate, whither he accordingly went in the beginning of August. He found the place—possibly also the water—disagreeable, and after a week's stay he went on to Bolton Abbey, to Minto, and to ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... the true cause of the despondency so prevalent in the latter poetry of "the melancholy Cowley." And hence the indiscretion of the muse, in a single flight, condemned her to a painful, rather than a voluntary solitude; and made the poet complain of "barren praise" ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... each new survey of the scene convinced him. "Here," he muttered, "everything has been steeping so long in the attenuated resolutions that drove us to come; everything is still conscientiously soaked—saturated—in the barren memory ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I've forgotten her," he replied; "she's the one bright spot I see in this barren hole. By the way, why do you think ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... rest was plainly under cultivation. There were large green areas, such as argued grain fields; elsewhere were what looked like orchards and vineyards, some of which were in full bloom—refuting the notion that the season was a late one. Nowhere was there a spot of land which might be called barren. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... quarter of a mile wide and fronting the beach was barren of commercial timber. As grazing-land, Hector McKaye was enabled to file on a full section of this, and, with its acquisition, he owned the key to the outlet. While "proving up" his claim, he operated a general store for trading with the Indians and trappers, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... resembled a mammoth, concave palette upon which nature had mixed her colors—yellow and gold and brown, with here and there a blotch of red and purple, a dash of green,—lingering over the season—and great, wide stretches of gray. The barren spots seemed to grow more barren—mocked by the scarlet blossoms of the cactus that seemed to be everlasting, and the fringing, yellow soap weed, hardy, defying the advancing winter. Razor-Back ridge was a desolate place. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Thames; Throughout her shores commodious ports abound, Clear flow the waters of the varying ground; Cold nipping winds a lengthen'd winter bring, Late rise the products of the tardy spring. The broken soil a labouring race requires; Each barren hill its generous crops admires, Where nature meanly did her gifts impart, Yet, smiling, owns how much she owes ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. Years after ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... with either pure parent. The experiment was tried by M. Corbie "avec une espece d'obstination;" and likewise by M. Manduyt, and by M. Vieillot. Temminck also found the hybrids from these two species quite barren. Therefore, when Bechstein ('Naturgesch. Vogel. Deutschlands,' B. 4, s. 101) asserts that the hybrids from these two turtle-doves propagate inter se equally well with pure species, and when a writer in the 'Field' newspaper (in a letter dated Nov. 10th, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... and shone broad and full over the barren moorland; but it was several hours after sunrise before the man who took care of the ruins came ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... his eyes toward a huge bluish bulk extending out into the sea and looking to the casual spectator like a great barren island. It was the promontory crowned by the Mongo, the great Ferrarian promontory of the ancient geographers, the furthest-reaching point of the peninsula in the lower Mediterranean that closes the Gulf ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... very low. "I feel as though I were looking into a beautiful garden from the top of an ugly, barren, cold mountain. I shall like to come down and go in among ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... masses of shade, the separating line between the land and water, or to distinguish the fading objects that seemed sinking into chaos. Now did the busy fancy supply the feebleness of vision, producing with industrious craft a fairy creation of her own. Under her plastic wand the barren rocks frowned upon the watery waste, in the semblance of lofty towers, and high embattled castles; trees assumed the direful forms of mighty giants, and the inaccessible summits of the mountains seemed peopled with ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... him. Certainly if fortune had again become favorable to him, as in the past, the King of Saxony would have found himself master of one of the most extensive kingdoms of Europe; but fortune was hereafter to be always adverse, and even our victories brought us only a barren glory. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... this was Liskane—wonderful, marvellous, magical Liskane! To the bored and cynical adult Liskane may easily appear to be one of the ugliest, most deserted stations in the whole of Europe, having nothing on either side of it save barren grey fields that never grow grass but only stones and bottles, with its single decoration—a heavy iron bridge that crosses the rails and leads up to the higher road and the town of Liskane. Ugly enough, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... and wife did not last long, the acte went on. Lacoste ardently desired a son and heir, and his wife appeared to be barren. He confided his grief to an old friend, one Lespere. Lespere pointed out that Euphemie was not only Lacoste's wife, but his kinswoman as well. To this Lacoste replied that the fact did not content him. "I tell you on the quiet,'' he said to his friend, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... towards the horizon, where golden clouds and air and sea appeared to mingle harmoniously, "I wonder that you, with good ships and many stout men and plenty of means, should choose to remain in this barren spot, instead of searching out the famous Vinland and making a ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the Touaricks, a people inhabiting the Desert of Sahara, a considerable degree of civilization. We are informed that in the Sahara, which, by the way, is far less a barren waste than we have been taught to suppose it, "the Touaricks have towns, cities, and an excellent condition of agriculture"; that with them fruit is cultivated with great success and skill. Their method of political organization is democratic and ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... coming of Grant, their record, in the main, was a series of bloody disasters, and their few victories, like Antietam and Gettysburg, were not properly and energetically followed up as they should have been, and hence were largely barren of adequate results. Considering these things, I have always somehow "felt it in my bones" that if Mr. Lincoln had not sent the brief telegram above mentioned, I would now be sleeping in some (probably) unmarked and unknown grave away ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... Barren Keep Pure Solid Certain Liberal Rare Sorry Cold Light (adjective) Rich Spread Cool Light (noun) Right Straight Deep Long Rude Still Dry Low Short Sure Easy Mean Simple Thick Foul Narrow Slow Thin Full New Small Tender Gentle Obscure Smooth True Grand Odd Sober ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... more insignificant. The contemptuous eye of the world scarcely deigned to notice it. Yet the famous vessel that bore Caesar and his fortunes, carried but an ignoble freight compared with that of the Mayflower. Though landed by a treacherous pilot upon a barren and inhospitable coast, they sought neither richer fields nor a more congenial climate, but liberty ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information; but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to lack of matter. Speech is often barren, but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and, when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... to think it very silly of me to burden myself with extra food upon the march, though she was quite glad to eat it with me, if the way chanced to be barren of sustenance." ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... can he well imagined more uninteresting. On leaving Lower Bengal, even the luxuriant tropical vegetation which distinguishes that part of India disappears,—and the rest of the journey is performed through a country perfectly flat, and apparently barren; for notwithstanding occasional groups of trees, and good crops here and there, the wide-spreading dusty plains give but faint indications of the fertility which cultivation and irrigation can no doubt evolve ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... things: "It strikes me as almost incredible that the plan here advanced by Dr. Nansen should receive encouragement or support. It seems to me to be based on fallacious ideas as to physical conditions within the polar regions, and to foreshadow, if attempted, barren results, apart from the suffering and death among its members. Dr. Nansen, so far as I know, has had no Arctic service; his crossing of Greenland, however difficult, is no more polar work than the scaling of Mount St. Elias. It is doubtful if any hydrographer ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... and history of the town and port of Suakin might afford a useful instance to a cynical politician. Most of the houses stand on a small barren island which is connected with the mainland by a narrow causeway. At a distance the tall buildings of white coral, often five storeys high, present an imposing appearance, and the prominent chimneys of the condensing ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... lonely as now, for Christie had a social heart, and, having known the joy of a cordial friendship even for a little while, life seemed very barren to her when she lost it. No new friend took Rachel's place, for none came to her, and a feeling of loyalty kept her from seeking one. But she suffered for the want of genial society, for all the tenderness ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... the tract of ordinary intention, give evidence of their truth; and I now called up a tradition, which I owed to my friend the maniac, respecting the manner in which the Mackenzies of Fairburn and the Chisholms of Strathglass had divided this barren tract between them. It had lain, from the first settlement of the country, an unappropriated waste, and neither proprietor could tell where his own lands terminated, or those of his neighbour began; but finding that the want of a proper line ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... intellect is enlightened, their influences become circumscribed, and must gradually almost entirely disappear. In the primitive state of the race, climate, soil, food, and scenery, are all-powerful; but among an enlightened people, the effects of heat and cold, of barren or exceedingly productive soils, etc., are entirely modified. This omission has given his enemies an excellent opportunity for a display of their refutory powers, of which they have not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... leaf, or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer—the power is ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever there, and will satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful; the means we possess to gratify it are limited—we are always trying to find the statue in the rude block. Out of the vast block ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... him?" It would take the wind out of my sails, when I came to preach about Redemption, because I should be tempted to believe that, after all, human beings were only in the world on sufferance, and that the aching, frozen, barren earth, so inimical to life, was in even more urgent need of redemption. Day by day, among the heights, I grew to feel that I wanted some explanation of why the strange panorama of splintered crag and ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... clutch and pushed down the accelerator—and the car would leap into space, three or four hundred feet over a mountain torrent. From this point the via dolorosa stretched away precariously, at first a winding path of ice and then a track across the snowdrifts of the barren uplands. The Serbian Government had offered to construct this very necessary road to Andrievica; the engineer, one Smodlaka, undertook to build it in three months, but Nikita's Minister replied that the Austrian prisoners, whom it was proposed to use, were mostly in the grip of ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted "trimmer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with "that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from the top of a mast into ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the sea with their blood. There might be inserted here a battle-piece worthy of the Drakes and Morgans of old, if the facts only bore us out. Instead of that, however, we are forced to say that the pirates proved sheer caitiffs when matched against honest men, and the battle was a barren farce. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... wood, and then saw what a delightful country this part of Scotland might be made by planting forest trees. The ground all over heaves and swells like a sea; but for miles there are neither trees nor hedgerows, only 'mound' fences and tracts; or slips of corn, potatoes, clover—with hay between, and barren land; but near the cottages many hills and hillocks covered with wood. We passed some fine trees, and paused under the shade of one close by an old mansion that seemed from its neglected state to be inhabited by farmers. ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating "into the seeds" of character, and ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... on the sills of first floor windows. War's toll was being exacted daily, but the country had yet to pay the full price. It was going through that process of degeneration toward the stripped and barren but it still held much ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... to know how many women Romano loved in the twenty or more years since he grew to man's estate, and how many he seduced. It agitates and pains me to think of it, but all my questions are barren of results. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... idea, came a delightful flow of happy converse. Though possessing so imperfectly the accomplishments ordinarily taught to young women, and which may be cultured to the utmost, and yet leave the thoughts so barren, and the talk so vapid, she had that accomplishment which most pleases the taste, and commands the love, of the man of talent; especially if his talent be not so actively employed as to make him desire only relaxation where he seeks companionship,—the accomplishment of facility in ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her silver through that barren flower Of silver frost, until it filled and whitened A room where two small children waited, frightened At the pale ghost of light that hour by hour Stared at them till though fear slept not they slept. And when that white ghost from the window crept, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... which begins the organization of that unwritten and only half spoken public opinion recognized by Mr. Cobden as a great underlying force even in England. It needs a little republican pollen-dust to cause the evolution of its else barren germs. The fruit of Mr. Beecher's visit will ripen in due time, not only in direct results, but in opening the way to future moral embassies, going forth unheralded, unsanctioned by State documents, in the simple strength of Christian manhood, on their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... used gravidus,—a word we now apply only to animals, especially dogs and ants,—and enceinte, borrowed from French, and referring to the ancient custom of girding a woman who was with child. Similarly barren of direct reference to the child are accouchement, which we have borrowed from ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... first wife, or by the old men, and is divided equally among his wives and children, with perhaps a little extra added to the share of the first mate. The belongings of a free-born woman go to her children, or, in case she is barren, are given to her relatives. In cases where both the parents are dead, the children pass into the care of ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... Scotland, who are very numerous, were content to reside in their castles and houses, in that bleak and barren climate; and although some of them made frequent journeys to London, yet I do not remember any of their greatest families, till very lately, to have made England their constant habitation, before ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... I went from that room like a man condemned to die. Fort Ungava in Labrador,—a thousand miles away, over a barren, savage country, and in winter too; for it would be winter there immediately! It was an exile to Siberia, and far worse than Siberia; for there are many there to share the fellowship of misery, and I was likely to be the only white man at Fort ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... requiring an oriental squat at which I am not adept. I compromised by stretching out along a hard couch raised some six inches above the floor. There were no gadgets to tinker with, the place was to me barren of necessary appurtenances ... strange ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... most unpromising; and fitter for geese than men. A vast sedgy swamp with water in the middle, thin fringes of great fern-trees, and here and there a disconsolate tree like a weeping-willow, and at the end of this lake and swamp, which all together formed a triangle, was a barren hill without a blade of vegetation on it, and a sort of jagged summit Hazel did not at all like the look ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... we awoke. We all felt ravenously hungry, and were burning with thirst. Our thirst we slightly quenched with another orange apiece; but as we gazed around the barren sand-bank, we had no hopes of satisfying our hunger. Unless we could quickly reach the land, we felt we must perish. Standing up, we looked eagerly towards the east; a mist, however, which the sun had not yet dispelled, hung over that part of the horizon. The sand-bank, ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... make them accept present knowledge, and present things, as all that can be attained to. This is all— there is nothing more—is the iterated preaching of house-life. Remain; becontent; go round and round in one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables, old age and death. Of all the inventions of casuistry with man for ages has in various ways which manacled himself, and stayed his ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... streets with the friend and monitor of his childhood, confiding the simple tale of his earlier trials,—when, amidst the wreck of fortune and in despair of fame, the Child-angel smiled by his side, like Hope,—all renown seemed to him so barren, all the future so dark! His voice trembled, and his countenance became so sad, that his benignant listener, divining that around the image of Helen there clung some passionate grief that overshadowed all worldly success, drew Leonard gently and gently on, till the young man, ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... of the ceiling—Guido's Aurora, (copy); Hero and Leander; Diana and Endymion; Hercules and Omphale, &c,—the whole by the pencil of Bernini, an Italian artist. From this terrace the view is enchanting; the distant hills of barren Hambleton subsiding into the fruitful vale; and nearer, fertile fields intersected with wood and mossy rocks; and immediately beneath the eye, the pale and ivied ruin, mouldering over the dust of heroes who fought ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, - Vol. 12, Issue 328, August 23, 1828 • Various
... could have conquered so many of their warriors. To the west in a long fringe of green loomed the cottonwoods of Moroni, where the hard-working Mormons had turned the Salagua from its course and irrigated the fertile plain, and there on their barren reservation dwelt the remnant of those warlike Pimas, the unrequited friends of the white men, now held by them ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... stone for sale. There also were to be seen sellers of cloths, and these were without number as that is a thing so many want, they being of cotton. There were also to be seen grass and straw in infinite abundance. I do not know who could describe it so as to be believed, so barren a country is this Rachol and so sandy. It is a mystery how there should be an abundance of everything therein. Any one can imagine what grass and straw would be required each day for the consumption ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell
... court is over, cannot you look at us, even should you return to the manor? The two girls followed you to the stagehouse, saw you seated and drive off. Frederick's tooth prevented his attendance. My heart is full of affection, my head too barren to express it. I am impatient for evening; for the receipt of your dear letter; for those delightful sensations which your expressions of tenderness alone can excite. Dejected, distracted with out them; elated, giddy even to folly with them; my mind, never at medium, ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... us—I say, we were so robbed, and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a dreadful thing to bring a child into the world, and that what we should most pray for, was, that our women might be barren and our miserable race ...
— A Tale of Two Cities - A Story of the French Revolution • Charles Dickens
... deprived of the grand fountain of good, (a deep conviction of inborn sin, and firm belief in the efficacy of Christ's death for the salvation of those who trust in him, and really wish to serve him,) would soon dry up, and leave us barren ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... Oh! might I but become an eagle, who soars in the skies! Oh! might I fly above the azure waves of the barren sea!(2) ...
— The Birds • Aristophanes
... condition of public opinion in Issoudun, the arrival of the Parisians was known all over the town in ten minutes. Madame Hochon came out upon her doorstep to welcome her godchild, and kissed her as though she were really a daughter. After seventy-two years of a barren and monotonous existence, exhibiting in their retrospect the graves of her three children, all unhappy in their lives, and all dead, she had come to feel a sort of fictitious motherhood for the young girl whom she had, as she expressed it, carried in her pouch for sixteen years. ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... would try to send her box up to Woodview to-morrow.... That was the way to Woodview, right up the lane. She could not miss it. She would find the lodge gate behind that clump of trees. And thinking how she could get her box to Woodview that evening, she looked at the barren strip of country lying between the downs and the shingle beach. The little town clamped about its deserted harbour seemed more than ever like falling to pieces like a derelict vessel, and when Esther passed over the level crossing she noticed that the line of little villas had not increased; ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... announced on the last local train they traveled in, Nan Sherwood certainly was tired of riding by rail. The station was in Marquette County, near the Schoolcraft line. Pine Camp was twenty miles deeper in the Wilderness. It seemed to Nan that she had been traveling through forests, or the barren stumpage where ...
— Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp - or, The Old Lumberman's Secret • Annie Roe Carr
... old man when we first met him. He died before we left that part of the country. His last illness was preceded by a drunken spree, during which some rougish boys painted a barren fig-tree on his bald head. He died soon afterward. Notwithstanding the efforts of those who prepared the body for burial, his head went to its last resting-place still marked by some of the paint that portrayed ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... her. Even Mrs. Neugass and her apartment had suddenly become abhorrent; Broadway as barren as any granite gully and somehow terrifying. She strolled a block toward the station, yet it is doubtful whether in the back of her head Lilly did not know the impulse of home to be ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... declared that the gates of hell should not prevail against her? Was not the unfoldment of truth a matter, not of years, but of ages? And were the minds of men to-day prepared for higher verities than those she offered? Did not the Church plant the seed as rapidly as the barren soil of the human mind was tilled and made fallow? True, her sons, whom he had so obstinately opposed, were blindly zealous. But were they wholly without wisdom? Had not his own zeal been as unreasoningly directed to the forcing of events? And still, through it all, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... old rooks congregate, to keep a sharp look-out for an unsuspecting green one, or a wealthy pigeon, who, if once netted, seldom succeeds in quitting the trap without being plucked of a few of his feathers. The greatest improvement to a place barren of foliage and the agreeable retirement of overshadowed walks, is the Royal Gardens, on the level at the extremity of the town, in a line with the Steyne enclosures as you enter from the London road. The taste, variety, and accommodation displayed ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the pyramids is familiar the world over, but an actual view of these monuments of hoary age ever inspires awe and reverence. As we ascended the plateau (twelve hundred by sixteen hundred yards), and rode within the shadow of the pyramids, our feeling was deepened by the view of the barren waste stretched before us,—yellowish sand and piles of debris accentuating the solitude of the place, while the inscrutable Sphinx and other monuments ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck
... of your ugly shape has blacked the Western plains; It brought relief to border towns all soaked with tropic rains; The sight of you, at column's head, made redskins turn and flee,— O'er barren land you've led the van that fights for Liberty. The Filipino knows you; his protection you have meant, And the wily Pancho Villa never dared to try and dent The contour of your homely crown or chip your wobbly brim,— You, old chapeau, spelt ...
— The Stars & Stripes, Vol 1, No 1, February 8, 1918, - The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919 • American Expeditionary Forces
... The shooter grew, the broad-leaved sycamore, The barren plantain, and the walnut sound, The myrrh, that her foul sin doth still deplore, The alder owner of all waterish ground, Sweet juniper, whose shadow hurteth sore, Proud cedar, oak, the king of forests crowned; Thus fell the ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... certain lands the forests have been cut down, the wild creatures driven away, and the soil so carelessly cultivated that it has become poor. In other lands Nature's gifts have been carefully used; even the barren deserts have been turned into green fields and blooming gardens for hundreds ...
— Conservation Reader • Harold W. Fairbanks
... which she seldom long withheld. "The cottages must be quite covered with roses, whenever they are not too near the sea; and the trees at their best, full of leaves and blossoms, by the side of the brook that feeds them. All the rest of the coast is so hard and barren, and covered with chalk instead of grass, and the shore so straight and staring. But I have never been there at this time of year. How much you must enjoy it! Surely we ought to be able to see it, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... flashes of uncertain light Cleave the thick darkness, driving far athwart The up-piled glooms, as lightnings plough their bright Fire-furrows through the barren cloud They sow with thunders. Thought on burning thought Shatters the doubts and terrors which have bowed Weak hearts on weaker leaning in a crowd Self-crushing and self-fettering; gleams are caught From some far centre ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... when he liked. He was master of all the little attentions women love, and in his manner towards Gladys managed to infuse a certain deference, not untouched by tenderness, which she found quite gratifying. She had so long lived a meagre, barren existence that she seemed almost greedy of the lovely and pleasant things of life. She enjoyed wearing her beautiful gowns, living in luxurious rooms, eating dainty food at a well-appointed table. In all that there was nothing ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... county constabulary had proved quite as mysterious and quite as barren of result as Mr. Taggett's had been. They had worn his mantle of secrecy, and ...
— The Stillwater Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... ingeniously corrupted by fruiterers into mandarins) the seeds have almost been cultivated out; in the best pine-apples, and in the small grapes known in the dried state as currants, they have quite disappeared; while in some varieties of pears they survive only in the form of shrivelled, barren, and useless pips. But the banana, more than any other plant we know of, has managed for many centuries to do without seeds altogether. The cultivated sort, especially in America, is quite seedless, and the plants ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... would seem that the Mother of God did not take a vow of virginity. For it is written (Deut. 7:14): "No one shall be barren among you of either sex." But sterility is a consequence of virginity. Therefore the keeping of virginity was contrary to the commandment of the Old Law. But before Christ was born the old law was still in force. Therefore at that ...
— Summa Theologica, Part III (Tertia Pars) - From the Complete American Edition • Thomas Aquinas
... dost thou drive me from myself, to search For foreign aids?—to hunt my memory, And range all o'er a waste and barren place, To find a friend? The wretched have no friends. Yet I had one, the bravest youth of Rome, Whom Caesar loves beyond the love of women: He could resolve his mind, as fire does wax, From that hard rugged image melt him down, ...
— All for Love • John Dryden
... one of them I counted 260 grains of corn. By this fruitfulness, the sun seems in some measure to compensate for the trouble and distress produced by its excessive heat. Their drink is either water, or the juice which drops from cut branches of the palmito, a barren palm or date tree; to collect which they hang great gourds to the cut branches every evening, or set them on the ground under the trees, to receive the juice which issues during the night. Our people said ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... not caring to confine himself to barren speculations or to reports of pure matter of fact, without deriving therefrom something of advantage to his countrymen, takes the liberty of proposing that upon the demise of the trunkmaker, or upon his losing "the spring of his arm" by sickness, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... sacrifice, encountered the Spanish fleet off Cuba in an action, which, though less decisive on the English side than might have been hoped, left at least no ground of triumph to the enemy. Meantime the court was by no means barren of incident; and we are fortunate in possessing a minute and authentic journal of its transactions in a series of letters addressed to sir Robert Sidney governor of Flushing by several of his friends, but chiefly by Rowland Whyte, a gentleman to whom, during his ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... and Love,' "Regina mundi, greater, because so far the less; and man is her head, but only as he serves his queen." Set this sober aphorism against the school girl love-making which kisses a man's feet and gaily refuses him the barren honour ...
— The Roadmender • Michael Fairless
... shedding bitter tears, when my hope streamed away dissolved in sorrow, and I stood alone beside the barren hill, that concealed in narrow gloomy space the form of my existence—alone, as never solitary yet hath been, urged by an agony beyond expression, powerless, no more than a mere thought of sorrow; as I ...
— Peter Schlemihl etc. • Chamisso et. al.
... It is the country of the wolf and the isard, of the brown bear and the mountain-goat, a land of bare rock and of rushing water. Yet here it was that the will of a great prince had now assembled a gallant army; so that from the Adour to the passes of Navarre the barren valleys and wind-swept wastes were populous with soldiers and loud with the shouting of orders and the neighing of horses. For the banners of war had been flung to the wind once more, and over those glistening peaks was ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the widowed's dream of her new mate? Seen has she virulent days of heat in flood; The sly Persuader snaky in his blood; With her the barren Huntress alternate; His rough refractory off on kicking heels To rear; the man dragged rearward, shamed, amazed; And as a torrent stream where cattle grazed, His tumbled world. What, then, the faith she feels? May not his aspect, like her own so fair Reflexively, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... enter into the Rationalism of the last century, therefore; or to inquire into the causes of the barren lifeless shape into which Theology then, for the most part, threw itself. I have never made that department of Ecclesiastical History my study: and who does not turn away from what is joyless and dreary, to greener meadows, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... territory lying between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean the rivers are fast being harnessed for a work that will one day make the most barren spots fertile. Irrigation is claiming every year more of the flow of Western rivers. Even the tricksy old Missouri is contributing somewhat to irrigation, but in the ...
— Southern Stories - Retold from St. Nicholas • Various
... left explains the name "iron cap" or "gossan" so often applied to the upper part of the oxide zone. Not infrequently, and especially in copper ores, the upper part of the oxide zone is nearly or entirely barren of values and is called ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... Mo. 24th. The great parting is over: the love and mercy of our heavenly Father sustained my dearest father and mother beyond expectation. On this occasion, when I have been helped back from a sad, lone wandering on barren mountains, I may learn, more deeply than ever before, the safety, the sweetness, of dwelling in the valley of humiliation. Oh, let me dwell there long and low enough. I ask not high enjoyments nor rapturous delights; but I ask, I pray, when I can pray at all, for quiet, watchful, trustful dependence ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... himself, and obeyed the summons. Beyond the French window lay a little alcove, about which a barren but full-leaved vine was trailed. The sky was still filled with a diffuse light, and the May moon, pale as yet, was rising like a silver canoe above the edge of a hill a ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... no merit in Tom Jones, in Gulliver's Travels, or in Tristram Shandy. To Thomson's Castle of Indolence he vouchsafed only a line of cold commendation, of commendation much colder than what he has bestowed on the Creation of that portentous bore, Sir Richard Blackmore. Gray was, in his dialect, a barren rascal. Churchill was a blockhead. The contempt which he felt for the trash of Macpherson was indeed just; but it was, we suspect, just by chance. He despised the Fingal for the very reason which led many men of genius to admire it. He despised it, not because it was essentially ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... made a grand fight against a vastly superior force of the enemy in a country absolutely unfavourable to the movement of mounted troops. They never had more than 1200 rifles holding a far-flung barren and bleak line, and the fine qualities of vigorous and swift attack, unfaltering discipline and heroic stubbornness in defence under all conditions, get their proof in the 499 casualties incurred by the Division ...
— How Jerusalem Was Won - Being the Record of Allenby's Campaign in Palestine • W.T. Massey
... think I've forgotten her," he replied; "she's the one bright spot I see in this barren hole. By the way, why do you ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... for. These victims of money-hunger made Rhodes personally responsible for the disappointments which their greed and unhealthy appetites encountered when at last they were forced to the conclusion that Rhodesia was a land barren of gold. In time, perhaps, and at enormous expense, it might be developed for the purpose of cattle breeding, but gold and diamonds either did not exist or could only be found in such small quantities that it was not ...
— Cecil Rhodes - Man and Empire-Maker • Princess Catherine Radziwill
... blesseth God for his retirement," so the book begins, "and kisses the gentle hand which led him into it; for though it should prove barren to the world, it can never do so to him. He has now had some time he can call his own; a property he was never so much master of before; in which he has taken a view of himself and the world, and observed wherein he hath hit and missed the mark. And he verily thinks, were ...
— William Penn • George Hodges
... Pirot in Serbia on November 27, having refused King Milan's request for an armistice, and was marching on Nish, when Austria intervened, and threatened to send troops into Serbia unless fighting ceased. Bulgaria had to obey, and on March 3, 1886, a barren treaty of peace was imposed on the belligerents at Bucarest. Prince Alexander's position did not improve after this, indeed it would have needed a much more skilful navigator to steer through the many currents which eddied round him. A strong Russophile ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... he be amusing attention with incidents, or enchaining it in suspense, let but a quibble spring up before him, and he leaves his work unfinished. A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight, that he was content to purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth. A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... from the wagon and was soon hurrying across a barren bit of pasture land that led down to a brook which was all but dried up. The cottage stood upon the bank of the brook, and walking up to it, the young ...
— Young Auctioneers - The Polishing of a Rolling Stone • Edward Stratemeyer
... Sophocles, and in Italy poets like Virgil and Horace, has not produced a philosopher or a first-class poet, with all the leisure he enjoyed while the Negro has been engaged in enforced labor for him. In the highest field of thought as in philosophy and the works of imagination the South presents a barren field. In the sphere of authorship usually entered by white men the Negro has already worked his way. He has already produced meritorious books on mathematics, sociology, theology, history, poetry, travels, sermons, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... to-day the grief beginneth yet the bitterness is done. Though my body wendeth barren 'neath the beams of the quickening sun, Yet remembrance still abideth, and long after the days of my life Shall I live in the tale of the morning, when they tell of the ending of strife; And the deeds of this little hand, and the ...
— The House of the Wolfings - A Tale of the House of the Wolfings and All the Kindreds of the Mark Written in Prose and in Verse • William Morris
... welcome thee, for thy beauty will add lustre to his court, and we shall be married with all speed. I warrant the Countess of Salisbury will be a person of importance at the English court, and thou shalt have a retinue such as in this barren country ye little dream of. Thou shalt have both lords and knights to ride in thy train, and twenty little page boys to serve thee on bended knee; and hawks, and hounds, and horses galore, so thou wouldst join in the chase. Think of it, lady, and ...
— Tales From Scottish Ballads • Elizabeth W. Grierson
... in the centre by the Bayas, called Bepasa in the Sangskrita, but its territory extends to the Satadru of the sacred language, which, in the dialect of men, is called Satarudra. Kullu is extensive, but cold, mountainous, and barren, producing, however, many sheep. The grains which grow there are mostly phaphar, chuya, and uya. The chuya, from the description given, would seem to be the Holcus sorghum, although the coldness of ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton
... sitting alone in a bare little room, which communicated by a glazed door with a surgery. Hideous coloured diagrams of the ravages of hideous diseases decorated the barren buff-coloured walls. A book-case filled with dingy medical works, and ornamented at the top with a skull, in place of the customary bust; a large deal table copiously splashed with ink; wooden chairs of the sort that are seen in kitchens ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... denied to her these joyous, endless wanderings. "I love it" he told her presently. "I can't help it. It appeals to something in me, just like drink appeals to a drunkard. I'm never so happy as when gophering around in a barren prospect hole or coyoting on some rocky hillside. But it's only another form of the gambling fever, and I realize that whether my present plans mature or not I've got to give it up. It was all right a few ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... desperate and looked it. They stood in a fair way of losing several pounds that morning. A good rider always smiles at the sight of a poor one, when a little retrospection should make him rather pitying. Hillard went on. The park was not lovely; the trees were barren, the grass yellow and sodden, and here and there were ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... It is her modest little head that has bent over the boxes of earth, which constitute her landed property; her pretty little fingers which have trained the stems and watered the roots and cherished the flowers until the barren house-top has been made to blossom like the rose. And love, as usual, has done it all—love to that very ugly old woman, chimney-pot Liz, who sits on the rustic chair in the midst of the garden enjoying ...
— The Garret and the Garden • R.M. Ballantyne
... river lay yesterday, at sunset, lost in purple gloom; they receded into airy distances of dreams and faery; they sank softly into night, the peaks of the delectable mountains. But I knew, as I gazed enchanted, that the hills, so purple-soft of seeming, were hard, and gray, and barren in the wintry twilight; and that in the distance was the ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... knoll, if there was anything tall, it would spoil the Fairacres' view. So Jacob built this 'Spite House.' He made it as ugly as he could, and he did everything outrageous to make great-grandfather disgusted. He named this rocky barren 'Bareacre,' and that little gully yonder he called 'Glenpolly,' because his enemy had named the beautiful ravine we know as 'Glenellen.' Polly and Ellen were the wives' names, and I've heard they grieved ...
— Reels and Spindles - A Story of Mill Life • Evelyn Raymond
... gale had not driven the mass of ice in a north-westerly direction. Two days afterward, exhausted and nearly dead with hunger, these survivors of the catastrophe were cast upon the southern coast of Greenland—a barren and deserted region—but where they nevertheless managed to keep themselves alive through the mercy ...
— Ticket No. "9672" • Jules Verne
... grip on Saghalien, and thereafter exercised with Japan joint sovereignty over that island. The natural result followed. In 1875 Russia found means to eject her partner, the Japanese receiving as compensation undisputed claim to the barren Kuriles, which they ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... hopes and loves Come whispering at the door, Come creeping through the weeping mist That drapes the barren moor; But we within have turned the key 'Gainst Hope and Love and Care, Where Wit keeps tryst with Folly, at The Tavern ...
— Dreams and Dust • Don Marquis
... to those advisers of his who from time to time had urged him to put her away by divorce, and marry a Protestant who might bear him children. Even my Lord Bishop of Salisbury, Dr. Burnet, had, thirteen or fourteen years ago given as his opinion that a barren wife might be divorced, and even that polygamy was not contrary to the New Testament! This, however, Charles had flatly refused to countenance; and, when he thought of it, now and again, shewed her a sort of ...
— Oddsfish! • Robert Hugh Benson
... to symbol the course of a Poet's mind from a state wherein thought is disordered, barren and uncultivated, to that which is ordered and swayed by the true Spirit of Poetry, ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... and his Diggers set to work with spade and shovel on the barren soil of St. George's Hill, in Surrey, in the spring of 1649, was the attention of the Council of State called to the strange proceedings. The matter was left to the local magistrates and landowners, and the Diggers were suppressed. A similar attempt ...
— The Rise of the Democracy • Joseph Clayton
... which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it will be an idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt
... in the garden. The Hindus believe that this tree, when barren, may be induced to put forth flowers by the contact of the foot of a handsome woman. The tree in question does not blossom, and being the favourite of Dharini, she has proposed to try the effect of her own foot. Unluckily however, the Vidhushaka, whilst setting her swing in ...
— Tales from the Hindu Dramatists • R. N. Dutta
... approach too near the forbidden regions of bliss. Many of the genii delight in mischief; they surprise and mislead travelers, raise whirlwinds, and dry up springs in the desert. The Ghoul lives on the flesh of men and women, whom he decoys to his haunts in wild and barren places, in order to kill and devour them, and when he cannot thus obtain food, he enters the graveyards and feeds upon ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... very varied; but, nevertheless, I know of no part of the world where the soil responds more quickly or more kindly to the work of the tiller than it does in the Silver West. And this is all the more wonderful when we consider that a great part of the land hereabouts is by nature barren in the extreme. ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... to set things in the right way, for even I, who had no sisters, was not left out of that answer. So we both said that he was right, and she knew well what we meant, and was content. Moreover, by naming our titles once again, though they were barren enough here in all truth, he told her that it was on our honour ...
— A Sea Queen's Sailing • Charles Whistler
... soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh also longeth after thee: in a barren and dry land where ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... nearly the entire political capacity, information and common sense of France was to be found. Outside of their heads the other twenty-six millions of brains contained but little else than dangerous and barren formulas; as they alone had commanded, negotiated, deliberated and governed, they were the only ones who understood men and things tolerably well, and, consequently, the only ones who were not completely disqualified for their management. In the provincial ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 4 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 3 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... Jerome panted: he, that he might be more free to translate the Scriptures and write his commentaries, and to commune with God; she, to minister to his wants, stimulate his labors, enjoy the beatific visions, and set a proud example of the happiness to be enjoyed amid barren rocks or scorching sands. At Rome, Jerome was interrupted, diverted, disgusted. What was a Vanity Fair, a Babel of jargons, a school for scandals, a mart of lies, an arena of passions, an atmosphere of poisons, such as that city was, in spite of wonders of art and trophies of victory and contributions ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... years; the lava stream descends the mountain-side like a black and burning glacier, and destruction too plainly marks its path; a storm bursts upon the hills, and for long miles the valleys are choked with barren mud, the bridges scattered in ruin through the stream, the cheerful husbandry of men laid hopelessly waste. But we cannot watch the slow upheaval of a long line of coast, where the fisherman hardly knows at the end ...
— Beside the Still Waters - A Sermon • Charles Beard
... the shore than they had at first ventured to take gave the explorers a good notion of the fertility and resources of the country. After passing a belt of fertile land, about two miles wide, they came to a range of barren hills. These being crossed, they descended into a wide plain, watered by a river issuing from a fertile valley, which was nearly a hundred yards wide, and at a considerable distance ...
— Captain Cook - His Life, Voyages, and Discoveries • W.H.G. Kingston
... his memoir: "De l'influence du climat sur les habitudes morales," vague, and wholly barren of illustrations excepting one citation ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... is but a little land, barren and rocky, and looks toward the bleak north-east. Do you see that ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... assembly by Duryodhana of sinful soul and how also we bore it with patience. That Duryodhana, O Madhava, will behave with justice towards the Pandavas is what I cannot believe. Wise counsels will be lost on him like seed sown in a barren soil. Therefore, do without delay what thou, O thou of Vrishni race, thinkest to be proper and beneficial for the Pandavas, or what, ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... o'clock express from Euston to Scotland was tearing along on its daily journey. It was that barren hour in the afternoon when luncheon is over and forgotten, and tea is yet far distant, and most of the passengers were either asleep or listlessly trying ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... strained in a boisterous sea, and ultimately flung the voyagers ashore, three hundred miles, in a direct line, from Perth. Never were men given a harder tramp than across those miles, so parched and barren that they hardly echoed the koo-ee of a native. Yet there was no succour, no hostel, unless they could ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... minutes—or 12 hours, and once again we would view the fairest continent planted by God in the seas. Mind you, the first sight of Australia (going that way) is not very attractive. Rottenest Island, outside Fremantle, is sandy and barren and really not much to boast about, yet had you spread before us a scene from the Garden of Eden it had not charmed us half so much. For this was part of Australia, the land that we all called home. Back of that, for three thousand miles, stretched the country that held our ain folk and love and ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... comedians in the greenroom. Who, more than they, is skilled in that research at the bottom of things, in that groping, profound and impious? See how they speak of everything; always in terms the most barren, the most crude and abject; such words appear true to them; all the rest is only parade, convention, prejudice. Let them tell a story, let them recount some experience, they will always use the same dirty and material expression, always the letter, always death! They ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... self-seeking, is essentially barren and unproductive, both in regard to the lives of others and our own lives. Only so far as we are, in some real sense, laying down our lives for others, denying (not that which belongs to us, but) ourselves, for their sake, can ...
— Gloria Crucis - addresses delivered in Lichfield Cathedral Holy Week and Good Friday, 1907 • J. H. Beibitz
... to them about learning anything under heaven? Did He say one word about intellectual liberty? Did he say one word about reason or about justice? Did He make the slightest effort to improve them? All that He did in the world was to give them one poor little miserable, barren command, "Thou shalt not eat of a certain fruit." That's all that amounted to anything; and, when they sinned, did this great God take them in the arms of His love and endeavor to reform them? No; He simply put upon them a curse. When ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... leaned back in his chair with a little smile. It was an odd little smile, which fell over his features like a mask and completely hid his thoughts. It was apparent that Claude de Chauxville's tricks of speech and manner fell here on barren ground. The Frenchman's epigrams, his method of conveying his meaning in a non-committing and impersonal generality, failed to impress this hearer. The difference between a Frenchman and a Russian is that the former is amenable to every outward ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... by means of the Holy Scriptures, that God ardently desires that we should be saved,[1] and that none should perish. His will is our sanctification, that is to say, He wishes us to be holy. Moreover, to prove that His desire is neither barren nor unhelpful, He gives us in His holy Church all the graces necessary for our salvation, so that if we are lost it will only be because of ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... grain is sown upon the undisturbed deposit, and simply trampled in by flocks of sheep and goats driven over it. In a few weeks the entire land, so recently a flooded plain, is overspread with a sea of verdure, which forms a striking contrast to the desert sands and barren hills that rim ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... was barren of result, and when Abe went out to lunch that day he had little appetite for his food. Accordingly he sought an enameled-brick dairy restaurant, and he was midway in the consumption of a bowl of milk toast when Leon Sammet, senior partner ...
— Potash & Perlmutter - Their Copartnership Ventures and Adventures • Montague Glass
... moderately high, rocky, and barren, yet thickly covered with the eucalyptus and casuarina. From the highest rock on the south-east side, I took bearings of the objects in ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders
... Grampius. The field presented a dreadful spectacle of carnage and destruction; for ten thousand of the tribesmen fell in the engagement. The Roman army elated by its success passed the night in exultation. The victory was barren of results, for, after three years of persevering warfare, the Romans were forced to relinquish the object of the expedition. In the year 183 the Highlanders broke through the northern Roman wall. In 207 the irrepressible ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... went to the front porch to view the prospect. And what did I see there? Banks of dirty, half-melted snow, bones, and scraps of offal, patches of bare earth, for a small space, say about fifty feet round, and then the whole region shut in by barren, inaccessible rocks, which cut off all ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... what purpose soever of planting wood. Rather therefore we should take notice how many great wits and ingenious persons, who have leisure and faculty, are in pain for improvements of their heaths and barren Hills, cold and starving places, which causes them to be neglected and despair'd of; whilst they flatter their hopes and vain expectations with fructifying liquors, chymical menstruums, and such vast ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... toil when the bleeding hand Of the pioneer grew numb, When the untilled tracts of the barren land Where the weary ones had come Could offer nought from a fruitful soil To stay the strength ...
— The Complete Works • James Whitcomb Riley
... situated in the northwest part of Italy. It is notorious for its gambling saloon. This city of nearly four thousand inhabitants is located in Monaco, the smallest independent country in the world. Monaco is about eight miles square, and lies on a "barren, rocky ridge between the sea and lofty, almost inaccessible rocks." The soil is barren, except in small tracts which are used for fruit-gardens. For centuries the inhabitants, the Monagasques, lived by marauding expeditions, both by sea and land, and by slight commerce with Genoa, Marseilles, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... of Christian service, Mrs. Ahok was especially eager to share the joy of her new-found faith with the women of her own class, the wealthy aristocratic ladies whose secluded lives were so barren and empty, and to whom it was so difficult for a missionary to obtain access. She threw herself with whole-hearted eagerness into the work of the Church of England Zenana Society, whose mission is to these very women, and ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton
... are, in Park Lane, and the park neighborhood of Piccadilly, and the larger and lesser streets of Mayfair, and the different squares and gardens and places; and certain of them may be visited at certain times on application by the tourist. But that is a barren pleasure which one easily denies oneself in behalf of the simpler and more real satisfactions of London. The charm of the vast friendly old place is not in such great houses, as its grandeur is not in its monuments. Now and then such a house gave evidence of high social preparation during ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... under world? No, of course you don't. They look like hawks and eagles whose backs one seldom sees, for they soar up above. I lived in a hovel provided by the state, with seven brothers and sisters and a pig; out on a barren stretch where nothing grew, not even a tree, but from the window I could see the Count's park walls with apple trees rising above them. That was the garden of paradise; and there stood many angry angels with flaming swords protecting it; but for all that I and other boys found ...
— Plays: The Father; Countess Julie; The Outlaw; The Stronger • August Strindberg
... with them many changes. The snow was gone, and the warm, balmy airs of springtime had brought the buds upon the trees almost to leaf. It seemed indeed a new land, and one now full of charm and delight—the desolate, straggling hamlet, once so barren, frozen and hopeless looking, was now a quaint, alluring little village nestling picturesquely in its hollow, framed in green fields and majestic woods. Quiet, restful, peaceful it was—like a dream place, untroubled. Upon the farms about men plowed their furrows, calling ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... make; and she was already worn by the leagues already traversed. Although this was nothing new that she did now, yet as time flew on and she flew with it, ceaselessly, through the dim, solitary, barren moonlit land, her brain now and then grew giddy, her heart now and then stood still with a sudden numbing faintness. She shook the weakness off her with the resolute scorn for it of her nature, and succeeded in its banishment. They had put in her hand, as she had passed ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... never be real so long as leagues of barren, unbroken wilderness separated the maritime from the central provinces. Free intercourse, ties of trade, knowledge which would sweep away prejudice, could not come until a railway had spanned this wilderness. In the fifties plans had been made ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... his acquaintance with the family of Dallison. For one day, after telling his chauffeur to meet him at the Albert Gate, he had set out to stroll down Rotten Row, as he often did on the way home, designing to nod to anybody that he knew. It had turned out a somewhat barren expedition. No one of any consequence had met his eye; and it was with a certain almost fretful longing for distraction that in Kensington Gardens he came on an old man feeding birds out of a paper bag. The birds having flown away on seeing him, ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... contrary winds from the 27th of November to the 3d December. On the evening of that day, we heard one of the officers, who was at the mast head, cry "Land! Land!" Nevertheless, the night coming on, and the barren rocks which we had before us being little elevated above the ocean, ...
— Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America in the years 1811, 1812, 1813, and 1814 or the First American Settlement on the Pacific • Gabriel Franchere
... He began life in a showy and brilliant enough fashion, by the light of a petty personal chivalry. He was not without some tincture of patriotism; but it was resolvable into two parts: a preference for life among his fellow-countrymen, and a barren point of honour. In England, he could comfort himself by the reflection that "he had been taken while loyally doing his devoir," without any misgiving as to his conduct in the previous years, when he had prepared the ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... These negotiations, lamentably barren of good results, were stretched through half the year. But it is necessary to leave them for the time, that we may return and see if the Emperor had better success in the management of the domestic problem referred to ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... men. The glamour which at first disguises the inherent barrenness of savage life has had time to pass away, and I see it in all its nakedness as a life not much raised above the necessities of animal existence, timid, monotonous, barren of good, dark, dull, "without hope, and without God in the world;" though at its lowest and worst considerably higher and better than that of many other aboriginal races, and— must I say it?—considerably higher and better than that of thousands of the lapsed masses of our own great ...
— Unbeaten Tracks in Japan • Isabella L. Bird
... full of woes, All remedies refusing; A plant that most with cutting grows, Most barren with best using. Why so? More we enjoy it, more it dies, If not ...
— Tudor and Stuart Love Songs • Various
... style bears a remarkable analogy to his mode of thinking, and indeed exercises great influence on his mode of thinking. His rhetoric, though often good of its kind, darkens and perplexes the logic which it should illustrate. Half his acuteness and diligence, with a barren imagination and a scanty vocabulary, would have saved him from almost all his mistakes. He has one gift most dangerous to a speculator, a vast command of a kind of language, grave and majestic, but of vague and uncertain import; of a kind of language which affects us much in the same way in which ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... a crazy toboggan. It moved slowly, but with increasing speed, sailed out of the office through the window and began gaining altitude. They went soaring over the city at about thirty miles an hour, heading toward what seemed to be barren land beyond. "Sometimes they fail now," she told him. "But so far, only if the words ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... said, just now, in deprecation of set courses of reading, was designed for private students only, who so often find a stereotyped sequence of books barren or uninteresting. It was not intended to discourage the pursuit of a special course of study in the school, or the society, or the reading class. This is, in fact, one of the best means of intellectual progress. Here, there ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... signatory powers, solemnly declared such to be our intention; and nothing is gained by reiterating our adherence to the principle, while refusing to provide any means of making our intention effectual. In the amended form the treaties contain nothing except such expression of barren intention, and indeed, as compared with what has already been provided in The Hague arbitration treaty, they probably represent not a step forward but a slight step backward, as regards the question of international arbitration. As such I do not think they should ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom
... in hunting, and whose main interests lay in making war upon their neighbours. Some tribes were strong, and others weak, so that by degrees the powerful folk drove away the less warlike people from the rich hunting-grounds and wooded country into the barren rocks. Now, if these hunted tribes were to exist at all, it was clear they must find some means of protecting themselves; thus it may have happened that scrambling up the cliffs one day to avoid their foes, some fugitive ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... the Tippecanoe, is a great convenience. It is immediately in the center of the back line of that fine country which he wishes to prevent us from settling, and above all, he has immediately in his rear a country that has been but little explored, consisting principally of barren thickets, interspersed with swamps and lakes, into which our cavalry could not penetrate, and our infantry only by slow and ...
— The Land of the Miamis • Elmore Barce
... the road up the mountain must be very beautiful. For two-thirds of the height they are covered with splendid forest trees. When, at this season, the leaves are changing in places to a deep crimson, the effect is very fine. The upper part of these mountains seems to consist of barren rocks. We returned and dined at the Alpine House. Both papa and I were seriously frightened in our walks, especially at the Glen House, by encountering three savage-looking bears. Luckily before we had shouted for help, we discovered they were chained, ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... above Mayne's Harbor was pretty, though somewhat barren. Beyond the narrow belt of woods bordering the shore, the walking was over soggy hummocks, with little growth upon them except moss, lichens, and coarse marsh grass. These were succeeded by ridges of crumbling rock, between which were numerous small lakes. The land seemed very barren ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... hereditary bondage; they will send the felon and the captive to foreign barracoons; and they will sentence to domestic servitude the orphans of culprits, disorderly children, gamblers, witches, vagrants, cripples, insolvents, the deaf, the mute, the barren, and the faithless. Five-sixths of ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... might as well be said of Virgil, or any great author, whose general character will infallibly raise many casual additions to their reputation."—Pope's Pref. to Homer. "Either James or John, one of them, will come."—Smith's New Gram., p. 37. "Even a rugged rock or barren heath, though in themselves disagreeable, contribute by contrast to the beauty of the whole."—Kames, El. of Crit., i, 185. "That neither Count Rechteren nor Monsieur Mesnager had behaved themselves right in this affair."—Spect., No. 481. "If an ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... can conceive the beauty, sublimity and inspiration of that scene, especially to one who had for weary months been traversing dusty, treeless and barren plains. The contrast was overwhelming. Tears filled my eyes as I gazed upon the fairy scene. I recall the entrancing picture to-day, in all its splendid detail, so vividly was it photographed ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... routed out, and all saw the rugged outline of the great island—a continent itself, as large as the United States and much the same shape—stretching away to the southward and slowly dwindling into low, sandy, barren shores as it went. ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... fleet would on the morrow be in the neighbourhood of the Madeira Isles. Accordingly, soon after day-break the following morning, she made the signal for seeing land, and at noon we were abreast of the Deserters—certain high barren rocks so named, to the SSE of the Island of Madeira, and distant ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 1 • David Collins
... to find our Eden a barren desert, Meg, no sign of either Freddy or you in it. It was horrible. I started off to Cairo in hopes of learning from the Iretons where you had gone to, to discover what you had heard of Millicent." His pressure of Meg's hands explained the full meaning ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer
... in time; and the converse. The periodic or compensating errors of the planets is another instance. The influences of climate and soil in political history is another. The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil does not breed fevers, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... railroad, about sixteen miles from Augusta." To Timrod, that "crazy wooden shanty," set in immemorial pines and made radiant by the presence of his poet friend, was finer than a palace. On that "windy, frowzy, barren hill," as Maurice Thompson called it, the two old friends spent together the spring days of '67—such days as lingered in golden beauty in the memory of one of them and have come down ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... careless tourist might have said,—a sleepy shop in Sleepy Hollow. To me it seemed not so. Peaceful, remote, sequestered,—these and all similar epithets suited well with Longnook; but for myself, in all my loitering there I was never otherwise than wide awake. The close-lying, barren, mountainous-looking hills did not oppress the mind, but rather lifted and dilated it, and although I could not hear the surf, I felt all the while the neighborhood of the sea; not the harbor, but the ocean, with nothing between me and Spain except that stretch of water. Blessed forever be Dyer's ...
— The Foot-path Way • Bradford Torrey
... been expanded by coral dredging; North Island (Akau) and East Island (Hikina) are manmade islands formed from coral dredging; the egg-shaped reef is 34 km in circumference; closed to the public Kingman Reef: barren coral atoll with deep interior lagoon; closed to the public Midway Islands: a coral atoll managed as a national wildlife refuge and open to the public for wildlife-related recreation in the form of wildlife observation and photography Palmyra Atoll: ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... by a Brazilian family. The walls are four feet in thickness. The long dark corridors and gloomy cloisters struck me as very inappropriate in the midst of this young and radiant nature. They would be better if placed on some barren moor in Northern Europe than here in the midst of perpetual summer. The next turn in the river below Burujuba brought the city of Para into view. The wind was now against us, and we were obliged to tack about. Towards evening, ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... receive benefits worth having. The history of human delusions is a very sad one, as sad almost as the history of human wickedness; and all those poor enthusiasts had a sad awakening, for they found that the barren fights of placemen would still go on, that the people would continue to be shorn, and that the condition of the poor was uncommonly likely to be worse than ever. The hour of hopefulness passed away, and there succeeded bitter ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... was always expecting them to become evergreens of glory. In dealing with them he had a patience a little like the patience of God, never reproaching them or threatening them with the time limits of salvation in this world; no man ever had a sublimer skill in dealing with the barren fig-tree ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris
... plants indoors in the window possesses many of the attractions of outdoor flower-gardening, and is a means of beautifying the room at very small expense. Especially do window-gardens give delight during the barren winter time. They are a source of culture and pleasure to thousands who cannot afford extended ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... Cawsand heaves up, down beyond down, a vast sheet of purple heath and golden whin, while on the right the lofty serrated ridge of Yestor starts boldly up, black against the western sky, throwing a long shadow over the wild waste of barren stone at his feet. ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley
... asked, "Pray why is this land left waste?" "It is, sir, altogether unproductive." "Why is this? It seems to me to be just as good as the rest around, which produces such fine crops." "It is called khubtee—slimy, and is said to be altogether barren." "I assure you, sir," said Rajah Bukhtawar Sing, "that it is good land, and capable of yielding good crops, under good tillage, or it would not produce the fine grass you see upon it. You must not ask men like this about the kinds and qualities of soils for they really know nothing ...
— A Journey through the Kingdom of Oude, Volumes I & II • William Sleeman
... went to its top and secured specimens from the columns. The famous "natural images" of men, are, to my eye, not nearly so good as the descriptions lead one to expect. The history of the place could hardly be guessed from its present barren, desolate, poverty-stricken appearance; but the remains of quite a fort on Barrier Point show some signs of former and now departed glory. It seems that it has been under the dominion of England, France and the United States, all of whom took ...
— Bowdoin Boys in Labrador • Jonathan Prince (Jr.) Cilley
... all been canny enough to have means enough to balance all that barren moorland. You are a richer man ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... noon hour approached, the doctor noted how the hills off to the west seemed to be growing higher, and that there were broader vistas of wide ranges of barren slopes ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... scarcely any covering; feeding on unripe potatoes and yellow weed, and feigning sickness, in order to get into hospitals. He continued:—"This is the condition of a country blest by nature with fertility, but barren from the want of cultivation, and whose inhabitants stalk through the land enduring the extremity of misery and want. Did we govern ourselves? Who did this? You, Englishmen!—I say, you did it? It is the result of your policy and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... epilogue to a tragedy, that the tide of pity and of love, whilst it overwhelms, fertilizes the soul. That it may deposit the seeds of future fertilization, I believe; but some time must elapse before they germinate: on the first retiring of the tide, the prospect is barren and desolate. I was absolutely inert, and almost imbecile for a considerable time, after the extraordinary stimulus, by which I had been actuated, was withdrawn. I was in this state of apathy when the rebellion broke out in Ireland; nor was I roused ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... on the 5th July, steering N.W. and passed the island of Ascension, in lat. 8 deg. S. on the 13th. No ships touch at this island, for it is altogether barren and without water; only that it abounds with fish all around in deep water, where there is ill riding for ships. Holding our course still N.W. with the wind at E. and S.E. till the 19th of that month, we then passed the ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. VIII. • Robert Kerr
... scarped cliffs of Stone Mountain; beside him Plutina. His arm was about her waist, and their hands were clasped, as they crept with cautious, feeling steps amid the perils of the path. For over the lofty, barren summit, the mist had shut down in impenetrable veils. Yet, through that murk of vapor, the two, though they moved so carefully, went in pulsing gladness, their hearts singing the old, old, new, new mating song. A mist ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... on three sides by beech woods. Behind an occasional wisp of smoke showed that a train was making its way between Achiet and Miraumont, whose supply depots were frequently visited by our bombarding squadrons. A mile to the south the hamlet of Serre, twice fruitlessly attacked next year, topped a barren and shell-blown ridge. About this point, notorious for frequent visits from the earth-shelling aerial torpedo, began the lines of the 4th Division, once again our neighbours. They were our sister division in the 7th Corps, which was completed by the arrival at the end of August of the ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... general, as distinguished from the sky—the earth with its continents, its seas, its alternation of barren deserts and fertile lands—was represented as a man: Phtah at Memphis, Amon at Thebes, Minu at Coptos and at Panopolis. Amon seems rather to have symbolized the productive soil, while Minu reigned over the desert. But these were fine distinctions, not invariably insisted upon, and his worshippers ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... children no one could call her that. Both herself and her husband had seen something of the larger world—he during the time of his service; while she had spent a year or so in Paris with a Breton family; but had been too home-sick to remain longer away from the hilly and green country, set in a barren circle of rocks and sands, where she had been born. She thought that one of the boys ought perhaps to be a priest, but said nothing to her husband, who was a republican, and hated the "crows," as he called the ministers of religion. The christening was a ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... period, so rich in genius of every other type, seems to have been almost wholly barren of liturgical power. Men had not ceased to write prayers, as a stout volume in the Parker Society's Library abundantly evidences; but they had ceased to write them with the terseness and melody that give to the style of ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington
... bravelie fyghte, and live till deathe of date. Thinke of brave AElfridus, yclept the grete, 135 From porte to porte the red-haird Dane he chasd, The Danes, with whomme not lyoncels coud mate, Who made of peopled reaulms a barren waste; Thinke how at once by you Norwegia bled Whilste dethe and victorie ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... awoke, scarce expecting to find either earth or heaven, when lo! they looked on what had yesterday been tilled land or barren moor, and there was a great sheet of blue. Was it sky? Had a sheet of the "blue field of heaven" fallen down? Was it the ocean? They came near it, tasted it. It was fresh and sweet as a fountain-rill. They looked at it from the hill-tops, ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... fall! But he, who once was growing with the grass, And blooming with the flowers, my little son, Fell, withered—dead, nor has revived again! Perfect and lovely, needful to my sight, Why comes he not to ornament my days? The barren fields forget their barrenness, The soulless earth mates with these soulless things, Why should I not obtain my recompense? The budding spring should bring, or summer's prime, At least a vision of the vanished child, ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... They call th' Etrurian augurs: amongst whom The gravest, Arruns, dwelt in forsaken Leuca[640] Well-skill'd in pyromancy; one that knew The hearts of beasts, and flight of wandering fowls. First he commands such monsters Nature hatch'd Against her kind, the barren mule's loath'd issue, To be cut forth[641] and cast in dismal fires; 590 Then, that the trembling citizens should walk About the city; then, the sacred priests That with divine lustration purg'd the walls, And went the round, in and without the town; Next, an inferior troop, in ...
— The Works of Christopher Marlowe, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Christopher Marlowe
... than the Greek. The simplicity of the Attic writers would make Latin composition bald and tame. To be perspicuous, the Latin must be full. Thus Arnold thinks that what Tacitus gained in energy he lost in elegance and perspicuity. But Cicero, dealing with a barren and unphilosophical language, enriched it with circumlocutions and metaphors, while he freed it of harsh and uncouth expressions, and thus became the greatest master of composition the world has seen. He was a great ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... without touching? What idea can they have of the world? They are like comedians in the greenroom. Who, more than they, is skilled in that research at the bottom of things, in that groping, profound and impious? See how they speak of everything; always in terms the most barren, the most crude and abject; such words appear true to them; all the rest is only parade, convention, prejudice. Let them tell a story, let them recount some experience, they will always use the same dirty and material ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset
... it must bring them to misery and distress in the end, and perhaps to the gallows. They all appeared very penitent, and begged hard for their lives. As for that, he told them they were not his prisoners, but the commander's of the island; that they thought they had set him on shore in a barren, uninhabited island; but it had pleased God so to direct them that it was inhabited, and that the governor was an Englishman; that he might hang them all there, if he pleased; but as he had given them all quarter, he supposed he would send them to England, to be ...
— Robinson Crusoe • Daniel Defoe
... little boys munching their roast crabs—"over there, above Stuben, where Danube and Rhine meet and part." The pass of Arlberg is even still so bleak and bitter that few care to climb there: the mountains around are drear and barren, and snow lies till midsummer, and even longer sometimes. "But in the early ages," said the priest—and this is quite a true tale, which the children heard with open eyes, and mouths only not open because they were full of crabs and chestnuts,—"in the early ages," said ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... the last of the Deadly Arts, he bowed his head in grateful prayer. What ecstasy to be once more in the arms of Mother Church! There, dipped in her lustral waters, and there alone would he find solace for his barren heart, pardon for his insane pride of intellect, and protection from the demons that waylaid his sluggish soul. The ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... the noblest rivers which spread fertility over continents, and bear richly laden fleets to the sea, are to be sought in wild and barren mountain tracts, incorrectly laid down in maps, and rarely explored by travellers. To such a tract the history of our country during the thirteenth century may not unaptly be compared. Sterile and obscure as is that ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 1 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... and began preparing fresh pieces of betel-nut to chew; but Murray's rest was short, and jumping up again, he took a geological hammer from his belt, and began to crack and chip the stones and masses of rock which peered from the barren-looking ground, the two boys, one of whom carried the gun, ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... mathematics are sufficiently evidenced by the numerous mathematical treatises of the highest order which he published, a list of which is appended to this biography. But a very important feature of his investigations was the thoroughness of them. He was never satisfied with leaving a result as a barren mathematical expression. He would reduce it, if possible, to a practical and numerical form, at any cost of labour: and would use any approximations which would conduce to this result, rather than leave the ...
— Autobiography of Sir George Biddell Airy • George Biddell Airy
... heavy sea which had sprung up the previous afternoon had been moderating all morning, so that it was now possible to lower the boats for an afternoon's hunt. The hunting promised to be profitable. We had sailed since daylight across a sea barren of seals, and were now running ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... a union based on a common faith, in the happiness of struggling and suffering together in accomplishment. But she had only believed in that endeavor, that faith, while they were gilded by the sun of love: and as the sun died down she saw them as barren, gloomy mountains standing out against the empty sky: and her strength failed her, so that she could go no farther on the road: what was the good of reaching the summit? What was there on the other side? It was a gigantic phantom ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... instinctively to feel her way to required knowledge, caring for herself in the desert as a fledgling bird tossed by some storm from the home nest. He remembered there were wild burros in the Sonora hills, but that she should have already located one on this most barren of mountains was but another unbelievable touch to the trail of enchantment, and after a century of lost lives and treasure in the search for the Indian mine, to think that this Indian stray, picked up on a desolate trail, should have been the one to know that secret and ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer's green all girded up in sheaves, Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard, Then of thy beauty do I question make, That thou among the wastes ...
— Shakespeare's Sonnets • William Shakespeare
... miles north-west. Box-tree flats, of more or less extent, were intercepted by abrupt barren craggy hills composed of sandstone, which seemed to rest on layers of argillaceous rock. The latter was generally observed at the foot of the hills and in the bed of the river; it had in most places ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... to the trouble which Milton's words cost him, was his care in preserving them. His few Latin letters to his foreign friends are remarkably barren either of fact or sentiment. But Milton liked them well enough to have kept copies of them, and now allowed a publisher, Brabazon Aylmer, to issue them in print, adding to them, with a view to make out a volume, his college exercises, ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... fall of the man beside me created a hasty rumor that I was killed, so that it was on the whole an alarming experience for them. They kept together very tolerably, however, while our assailants, dividing, rode along on each side through the open pine-barren, firing into our ranks, but mostly over the heads of the men. My soldiers in turn fired rapidly,—too rapidly, being yet beginners,—and it was evident, that, dim as it was, both sides had opportunity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... abstractions in our remote island, as would have sufficed for the great dogmatic battles of the Continent. It would be difficult to exaggerate the pity that fills the heart at such a reflection; at the thought of how this neck of barren hills between two inclement seaways has echoed for three centuries with the uproar of sectarian battle; of how the east wind has carried out the sound of our shrill disputations into the desolate Atlantic, and the west wind has borne it over the German Ocean, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the barren rocks Or for sand to send forth water, Than that I should cease to love The ...
— Apu Ollantay - A Drama of the Time of the Incas • Sir Clements R. Markham
... and a half miles across the valley is an abrupt rocky mountain range of most irregular and picturesque formation, covered with scanty brushwood here and there, or rising into barren pinnacles and plateaux of rock. In outline and appearance this portion of the landscape was wonderfully like the Trosachs. A patch of blue sea was caught in between the overhanging cliffs of Balaklava as they closed in ...
— Ten Englishmen of the Nineteenth Century • James Richard Joy
... shore—and then we'll have to do some nice work and lay the Ertak parallel to the edge of the water. The beach is narrow, but apparently the only barren portion. Will ...
— Vampires of Space • Sewell Peaslee Wright
... the place where the Sabbath is kept; which is accounted for by the circumstance of its being trodden by so many of those whose feet are constitutionally hot, and therefore being burnt up and consequently very barren—that two devils of note preside on the occasion, the great negro, who is called Master Leonard, and a little devil, whom Master Leonard sometimes substitutes in his place as temporary vice-president; his name is Master John Mullin. (De Lancre, p. 126.) ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... route to the sea the road is lined with gardens. Nothing could be more unpromising in appearance than this soil before it is ploughed and pulverized by the cultivator. It looks like a barren waste. We passed a tract that was offered three years ago for twelve dollars an acre. Some of it now is rented to Chinamen at thirty dollars an acre; and I saw one field of two acres off which a Chinaman has sold in one season $750 ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... there is a self-sustaining strength by which it lives, deprived of everything, as there are plants that live upon our barren ruins burned by the sun, and parched and shelterless, yet ever lifting green leaves to ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida
... than they had imagined possible, so close that, from the highest lookout on the Ark, they were able with their telescopes to see very clearly where the water washed the barren mountainsides at what seemed to be ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... Holmes was too absorbed for conversation, I had tossed aside the barren paper, and leaning back in my chair, I fell into a brown study. Suddenly my companion's voice broke in upon ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... strangely inclined to retrospection. Thoughtfully fingering the key which locked up the record of his wealth, he walked to the window and looked out. It was a dreary prospect of brown moor and gray sea, but Crawford loved it. The bare land and the barren mountains was the country of the Crawfords. He had a fixed idea that it always had been theirs, and whenever he told himself—as he did this night—that so many acres of old Scotland were actually his own, ...
— Scottish sketches • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... to enter into the Rationalism of the last century, therefore; or to inquire into the causes of the barren lifeless shape into which Theology then, for the most part, threw itself. I have never made that department of Ecclesiastical History my study: and who does not turn away from what is joyless and dreary, ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... fifty cocoa-nuts, which were distributed to the men at the surgeon's discretion. We had seen some turtle as we were coming into the bay, and hoping that some of them might repair to the island in the night, especially as it was sandy, barren, and uninhabited, like the places these animals most frequent, I sent a few men on shore to watch for them, but they returned in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... are the kingdoms of Tunis and Constantina, which latter is at this day subject to Tunis, and also the regions of Bugia, Tripoli, and Ezzah. This part of Africa is very barren, by reason of the great deserts of Numidia and Barca. The principal ports of the kingdom of Tunis are, Goletta, Bizerta, Potofarnia, Bona, and Stora. Tunis and Constantina are the chief cities, with several ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VII • Robert Kerr
... for which Becker had intrigued so long and so often, for which he had overthrown the municipality, for which he had abrogated and refused and invented successive schemes of neutral territory, was now no more to the Germans than a very unattractive, barren peninsula and a very much disputed land-claim of Mr. Weber's. It will scarcely be believed that the tale of the Scanlon outrages was not yet finished. Leary had gained his point, but Scanlon had lost his compensation. And it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... advice was kindly received; if it did not thrive, was it because you sowed it on barren ground? ...
— The Eureka Stockade • Carboni Raffaello
... fulfilment. Here in this desert of men's huts he had gained what all the towering mountains had not been able to bestow. Here was his bride, made manifest, his mate, the Dragon Maid, found at last through centuries of barren searching! Surely, if he should spring now to his feet, catch her to him and call upon his mountain gods for aid, they would be hurled together to some paradise of love where only he and she and love ...
— The Dragon Painter • Mary McNeil Fenollosa
... trail leading to the foot-hills where the barren ridges overlooked the sparkling sea—a vast cerulian expanse without a single fleck of a white sail. The trail led through the great fields of buffalo-grass, out of which gigantic solitary trees shot up a hundred feet into the air. ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... than I can say,' answered Lady Maulevrier, gaily. 'That horried climate—a sky like molten copper—an atmosphere that tastes of red-hot sand—that flat barren coast never suited him. His term of office would expire in little more than a year, but I hardly think he could have lived out the year. However, I am happy to say the mail that came in to-day—I suppose ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... remarkably pleasant in her manners, and perfectly free from the shy awkward gait of country girls in general. And you will be surprised when I inform you, that there is excellent accommodation to be met with at the Longstone lighthouse, although it stands alone, upon a barren rock, five miles from the mainland. The tower is very ingeniously constructed, and contains a well-furnished sitting room, in which is a capital collection of popular works, and three or four comfortable bedrooms. These, with an abundance of good, wholesome, homely fare, together with the very ...
— Grace Darling - Heroine of the Farne Islands • Eva Hope
... his harness in the icy caves, And barren chasms, and all to left and right, The bare black cliff clanged round him, as he based His feet on juts of slippery crag that rang, Sharp-smitten with the dint of armed heels— And on a sudden, lo! the level lake, And the long ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... miles the pine trees and undergrowth covered the mountain, then came a stretch of utter barren-ness and isolation. Miles above yet seemingly close enough to touch rose tongues of flame and crimson smoke. Above was the majestic serenity of the summer night, below the peaceful valley, with the twinkling lights of far away villages. It was a queer sensation ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... the man who knows how to mould them. They clench their fists, and inflate their lungs, and quote Napoleon's proud boast,—"Circumstances! I make circumstances!" Vain babblers! Whither did this Napoleonic Idea lead? To a barren rock in a waste of waters. Do we need St. Helena and Sir Hudson Lowe to refute it? Control circumstances! I should like to know if the most important circumstance that can happen to a man isn't to be born? and if that is under his control, or in any way affected by his whims ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... not much of interest to observe in the somewhat barren-looking country through which the railroad ran; and voting France (Paris excepted) a very slow place indeed, Will buried himself for the rest of the afternoon in a boy's book of travels. Nevertheless, the journey proved a very tedious one, and after stopping for dinner at six, ...
— Harper's Young People, March 9, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... timbered, but not with pine-trees. The place of the latter was here supplied by oaks and other of the harder woods; and around their roots clustered a dense and bushy under-growth, leaving, however, barren spaces between the trees, thick strewn with withered leaves. Whenever the rustling of the branches or the creaking of the trunks made a sound, as if the forest were waking from slumber, Reuben instinctively raised the musket that rested on his arm, and cast a quick, sharp glance on every side; ...
— Mosses from an Old Manse and Other Stories • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thus? Is our life forever to be without profit—without possession? Shall the strength of its generations be as barren as death; or cast away their labor, as the wild fig-tree casts her untimely figs? Is it all a dream then—the desire of the eyes and the pride of life—or, if it be, might we not live in nobler dream than this? ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... three hundred feet long, a score of paces across at its widest, with black barren cliffs guarding it and the faint pink dawn slowly growing a deeper rose over it, such was the port of adventure into which nosed the row boat bringing Jim Kendric and Twisty Barlow treasure seeking. In the stern crouched Nigger Ben, come ashore in order to row the boat ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... These uninhabited, barren, sub-Antarctic islands were transferred from the UK to Australia in 1947. Populated by large numbers of seal and bird species, the islands have been designated ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... th' industrious windmill vainly yearns To pause, and scratch its swallow-haunted head, Yet at the wind's relentless urging turns Its flying arms in wild appeal outspread; So am I vex'd by vain desire, that burns These barren places whence the hair hath fled, To wander far amid the woodland ferns, Where dewdrops shine along the gossamer thread; Where its own sunlight on the reddening leaf Sleeps, when soft mists ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101. October 3rd, 1891 • Various
... preventing their corrupting the good, he benefited society, without depriving the criminals of life; at the same time that he punished them severely for their crimes, by obliging them to live by their labors, and derive a precarious sustenance from quails, or whatever they could catch, in that barren region. Commutation of punishment was the foundation of this part of the convict system of Egypt, and Rhinocolura was their Norfolk Island, where a sea of sand separated the worst felons from those guilty ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... mountain top which had never been touched by anything less pure than the rain from the cloud or the mists from the valley below. Nature itself was making a silent protest against the invasion of her solitude. The trees which had borne abundant fruit before were barren now. ...
— Bohemian Society • Lydia Leavitt
... another fact, or another aspect of the same fact. Evil exhibits itself everywhere as something negative, barren, weakening, destructive, a principle of death. It isolates, disunites, and tends to annihilate not only its opposite but itself. That which keeps the evil man[14] prosperous, makes him succeed, even permits him to exist, is the good in him (I do not mean only the obviously 'moral' good). When ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... now for some distance leaves the shore and ascends a range of barren hills containing slate, limestone and granite. Hardy trees become more abundant than the chestnut, and the mountains higher and more imposing, as we approach ...
— Itinerary through Corsica - by its Rail, Carriage & Forest Roads • Charles Bertram Black
... reader has already concluded, there was little room in his sordid heart for so pure a sentiment as that of friendship. He, however, lost no time in ascertaining the amount of property left by Elder, which consisted of two small houses in the city, and a barren tract of about sixty acres of land, somewhere in Pennsylvania, which had been taken for a debt of five hundred dollars. In view of his death, Elder had wound up his business some months before, paid off what he owed, and ...
— True Riches - Or, Wealth Without Wings • T.S. Arthur
... truthful and brave in England, must yet be moulded to a higher quality amid this varying climate and on these low shores. The regions of the world most garlanded with glory and romance, Attica, Provence, Scotland, were originally more barren than Massachusetts; and there is yet possible for us such an harmonious mingling of refinement and vigor, that we may more than fulfil the world's expectation, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 41, March, 1861 • Various
... on the ice partly on the cape, by night in the neighbourhood of the tents. Sweepings and offal from the proceeds of the chase had there produced a vegetation, which, though concealed by snow, yielded to the hares in winter a more abundant supply of food than the barren tundra. It was remarkable that the hares were allowed to live between the tents and in their neighbourhood without being disturbed by the score of lean and hungry dogs belonging to the village. When farther into the winter for the sake of facilitating the ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... open, and its whole breadth was in joyful animation, from the cool sand on the beach to the little sails on the horizon, drifting away like autumn-tinted leaves that had drifted from the trees. Changeless and barren, looking ignorantly at all the seasons with its fixed, pinched face of poverty and care, the prison had not a touch of any of these beauties on it. Blossom what would, its bricks and bars bore uniformly the same dead crop. Yet Clennam, listening to the voice as it read to him, ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... fearfully down through the ashes of the far slope to the lake. All day long they had lain on their faces in the grass just beyond the highest line of the fire. The fire had gone on past them leaving them safe. But behind them rose tier upon tier of barren rocks, and behind those lay a hundred miles nearly of unknown country. They could not go that way. They were not, in fact, fit for travel in any direction. For all the day before they had run, dodging like hunted rats, between a line of fire—of their own ...
— The Shepherd of the North • Richard Aumerle Maher
... was just going down, a hissing globe of fire and torment. Already the lower limb was in contact with the jagged backbone of the mountain chain that rimmed the desert with purple and gold. Out on the barren, hard-baked flat in front of the corral, just where it had been unhitched when the paymaster and his safe were dumped soon after dawn, a weather-beaten ambulance was throwing unbroken a mile-long shadow towards the distant ...
— Foes in Ambush • Charles King
... a section of Middleton dominated by a high hill, with a country pond at its foot, that possessed an air of distinction, of being apart from the flat village and the small barren farms. High stone-walls ribbed its green surfaces, meeting in a heap at the top, where also a few wind-blown apple-trees maintained their stunted growth. A little below the crown of the hill there was a thick cluster of nut-trees. From this height ...
— The Man Who Wins • Robert Herrick
... two hundred slaves, who received the usual treatment of starvation, nakedness, and the cowhide. They had one lively negro woman who bore no children. For this neglect, her mistress had her back made naked and a severe whipping inflicted. But as she continued barren, she was ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Reverence is barren. The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship), were he president of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole Mecanique Celeste and Hegel's Philosophy, and the epitome of all laboratories and observatories with their results, in his single head, is ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... thinned, and they saw before them the dusty strip, pallid and lonely beneath the storm clouds, her heart leaped within her; then grew sick for fear that he had gone by. When they stood, ankle-deep in the dust, she looked first toward the north, and then to the south. Nothing moved; all was barren, hushed, ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, and fill his physical life with barren toil and battle. He attains a certain degree of physical comfort, and develops a more or less workable theory of life, in such favourable situations as the plains of Mesopotamia or of Egypt, and then, for thousands and thousands of years, struggles, with varying fortunes, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... vanquishing by his death. Uninspired by ambition, assailed by every earthly motive, God alone could have directed, and God only could have upheld him. The Emperor of Austria had sworn to depose him, the Italians promised to assist his antagonist. With scarce a footing in Germany or Italy, cooped up on a barren peak, he wrestled with the haughty conqueror of England, humbled the pride of Nicephorus Botoniates who had usurped from Michael Paripinasses the empire of the East, and deposed Guibert the guilty Bishop of Ravenna. Yet amid these cares, such as human shoulders seldom knew before ...
— The Truce of God - A Tale of the Eleventh Century • George Henry Miles
... amiable and affectionate monkeys, with all manner of winning ways and kind intentions,—more frequently selfish and malicious monkeys; but, whatever their disposition, squabbling continually about nuts, and the best places on the barren sticks of trees; and that all this monkeys' den was filled, by mischance, with precious pictures, and the witty and wilful beasts were always wrapping themselves up and going to sleep in pictures, or tearing holes in them to grin through; or ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... threat to snatch my prize away, Due to the deeds of many a dreadful day? A prize as small, O tyrant! match'd with thine, As thy own actions if compared to mine. Thine in each conquest is the wealthy prey, Though mine the sweat and danger of the day. Some trivial present to my ships I bear: Or barren praises pay the wounds of war. But know, proud monarch, I'm thy slave no more; My fleet shall waft me to Thessalia's shore: Left by Achilles on the Trojan plain, What spoils, what conquests, ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... by the members of the overland expedition in their great journey through an almost uninhabited region, a barren waste of ice and snow, facing death itself every day for nearly four months, over a route never before traveled by white men, with no refuge but at the end of the journey, carrying relief and cheer to ...
— Messages and Papers of William McKinley V.2. • William McKinley
... to pay court to Venus, and pray her to teach them how they might serve and please their dames, or to provide with ladies those whose hearts were yet vacant. Before Venus knelt a thousand sad petitioners, entreating her to punish "the false untrue," that had broken their vows, "barren of ruth, untrue of what they said, now that their lust and pleasure is allay'd." But the ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... are stripped of cover And revel lustfully; The barren rock, a star! The body is a flame! Rubies here and things of gold, Priceless pearls and things of silver, Scatter, O divinely naked Land, Scatter, ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... to pacifie his wife. And therefore thinks it best himself to take th'advice of Doctor, and most especially with that French Doctor, who is so renowned for his skill of making many men and women that before were barren and unfruitfull to conceive children: Insomuch that they do now every year precisely bear a young son, or a daughter, yea somtimes two at a time. It is thereby also very necessary that the good woman her self ...
— The Ten Pleasures of Marriage and The Confession of the New-married Couple (1682) • A. Marsh
... another school, avoided all barren speculations concerning the universe, and confined himself to human actions and interests. He looked even upon geometry in a very practical way, valuing it only so far as it could be made serviceable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... This barren place yields somewhat to relieve, For I have found sufficient to content me, And more true bliss than ever ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... an auspicious prelude, in the eyes of the friends of absolutism, to the negotiations which were opened in the month of May, at Cologne. Before sketching, as rapidly as possible, those celebrated but barren conferences, it is necessary, for the sake of unity in the narrative, to cast a glance at certain synchronical events in different parts of ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... anywhere, but they are assuredly thicker along the more frequented routes. The safest plan of all would probably be to bear south, and strike the Egyptian coast well to the east of the mouth of the Nile. Thence, till you get to Palestine, the country is utterly barren and uninhabited, while, running up the coast to Palestine, there are, save at Jaffa, no ports to speak of until you arrive at Acre; and besides, the inhabitants there, even if pirates, would not venture to disregard the pasha's safe conduct. ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty
... German, I am told it is a fine language - and I can easily believe that any tongue (not excepting our old barbarous Saxon, which, a bit of an antiquary as I am, I abhor,) is more harmonious than French. It was curious absurdity, therefore, to pitch on the most unpoetic language in Europe, the most barren, and the most clogged with difficulties. I have heard Russian and Polish sung, and both sounded musical; but, to abandon one's own tongue, and not adopt Italian, that is even sweeter, and softer, ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole
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