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More "Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... let me go, won't you?" Di pleaded, using her pet name for Father, which he likes because it sounds young and unparental. Then catching a bleak gleam in my eyes, she hastily added: "And afterward Peggy, if Captain March ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... than she had seen him, was waiting in the early dawn which struck out bleak lights from the dangling prisms of the big French chandeliers—the ugly chandeliers of which Lella Mabrouka was proud. He asked no questions; and somehow that seemed worse than the ordeal for which Sanda had braced herself. The Agha's ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... Cumshaw rather fancied he didn't. He was so sure of it that he decided that he would gain nothing by divulging the connection between himself and the late Mr. Bradby. So the mouth which was opening to speak shut up again like a steel trap, and the dark eyes turned bleak and cold. He looked Bryce steadily and calmly in ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... courage when she entered Mrs. Lovejoy's house, and saw that lady sitting very erect on a sofa, with a bleak face, which looked somehow as if a north-east wind had blown over it, and ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if Nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... that part of the earth from which it removes, in order to temper it, than that it approaches to favour it with its beams. Its kind, beneficent aspect fertilises all it shines upon. This change produces that of the seasons, whose variety is so agreeable. The spring silences bleak frosty winds, brings forth blossoms and flowers, and promises fruits. The summer yields rich harvests. The autumn bestows the fruits promised by the spring. The winter, which is a kind of night wherein man ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... he led the exiles to a dismal, swampy stretch of ground about a mile from the village; and told them for the present to rest their bones in an old unfinished farmhouse {June 8th, 1722.}. The spot itself was dreary and bleak, but the neighbouring woods of pines and beeches relieved the bareness of the scene. It was part of Zinzendorf's estate, and lay at the top of a gentle slope, up which a long avenue now leads. It was a piece of common pasture ground, and was therefore known as the Hutberg,73 or Watch-Hill. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... buttons, so that Thackeray himself should hardly recognise him. And then of a sudden there came to me memories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, and had spent long nights walking and talking with, upon a very desolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth of an extraordinary moral simplicity—almost vacancy; plastic to any influence, the creature of his admirations: and putting such a youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to a considerable extent in its aspect, is yet universally shagged with forests, or deformed by marshes: moister on the side of Gaul, more bleak on the side of Norieum and Pannonia. [32] It is productive of grain, but unkindly to fruit-trees. [33] It abounds in flocks and herds, but in general of a small breed. Even the beeve kind are destitute of their usual stateliness and dignity ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... is pleasant to think, just under the snow, That stretches so bleak and blank and cold, Are beauty and warmth that we cannot know, Green fields and leaves ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... nation's seed! Frail shallop, quick with unborn states! Autumn was mellow in the fatherland when they set sail, And winter deepened as they neared the West. Out of the desert sea they came at last, And their hearts warmed to see that frozen land. O, first gray dawn that filtered through the dark! Bleak, glorious birth-hour of our northern states! They stood upon the shore like new created men; On barren solitudes of sand they stood, The conquered sea behind, the unconquered wilderness before. Some died that year beneath the cruel cold, And some for heartsick longing and the pang ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... sink at the thought of her going away. She was the only amusing person I had met at Glenarm, and the idea of losing her gave a darker note to the bleak landscape. ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... skirted the Great Salt Lake with its bleak and desolate islands of rock rising in silhouette against the cold grey skies, Hattie compared the scene to the feeling of utter desolation ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... took to studying the landscape, which had become a succession of sharp ridges and narrow coulees, water-worn and bleak, with a purplish line of mountains off to the left. After ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... hand on his horse's neck, and as she watched him at last ride down the village green and disappear round behind the church, half her sorrow at losing him was swallowed up in the practical certainty that they would meet again before Christmas in their old home, and not in a stranger's house in the bleak North country. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... millinery way of life. And it wasn't enough that the tired genii had to gouge out the streets of Harvey; to fill in the gulleys and ravines; to dab in scores of new houses; to toil and moil over the new hotel, witching up four bleak stories upon the prairie. It wasn't enough that they had to cast a spell on people all over the earth, dragging strangers to Harvey by trainloads; it wasn't enough that the overworked genii should have to bring big George Brotherton to town with ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the main streets of Sydney the other night—grotesque bundles of rags lying under the verandas of the old Fruit Markets and York Street shops, with their heads to the wall and their feet to the gutter. It was raining and cold that night, and the unemployed had been driven in from Hyde Park and the bleak Domain—from dripping trees, damp seats, and drenched grass—from the rain, and cold, and the wind. Some had sheets of old newspapers to cover them-and some hadn't. Two were mates, and they divided a Herald between ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... relief!) from the bleak coast that hears The German Ocean roar, deep-blooming, strong, And yellow hair'd, the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... been her first blow, for she had long located her publishing house on that beautiful stretch of Michigan Avenue which overlooked the lake. But the real insult was that this publishing house, instead of having a building, or at least a floor, all to itself, simply had a place penned off in a bleak, dirty building such as one who had done work in sociological research instinctively associated with a box factory. And the thing which fairly trailed her visions in the dust was that the partition penning them off did not extend to the ceiling, and ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... added Bernard, "that I should think it little short of murderous to take that unlucky child from the one woman who understands her up into the bleak north at this ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... earnest little girl held her vagrant big brother by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful durance. It was a drab picture—the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy, miry stones below, the frowsy mothers ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Heard Island - 80% ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak); McDonald Islands ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... John Bleak—Jan. 26, 1899. Killed by Mexicans, near Hackberry, Mohave County. The body was found with many knife thrusts, with indications of a desperate ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... ago the day was cold and bleak. It drizzled through the dreary hours, freezing as it fell. But to many loving hearts, its sleet and rain were not its gloom. On this day was laid to rest in Mother Earth the loved remains of one numbered in the health-seeking trio ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... friends Sir William Napier (who first found a resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly as Leonard Boythom in "Bleak House". But his most constant companion was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life, right to ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... greatly delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we are ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the country, but because no indication is given of the light in our newest Admiralty charts. Captain Runciman, however, had more confidence in the correctness of his own chart, and could hardly believe his eyes when he saw that the light really had no existence on the bare bleak headland. His faith was terribly shaken, and I hope he will not omit to call Messrs. Imray's attention to the matter on his return home; for the mistake is most serious, and one which might lead to the destruction of many a ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... disorder which was not fully known until after his departure from France. Then people saw, at last, where all the golden schemes that had flooded upon popular credulity had borne us;—not to the smiling and fertile shores of Prosperity and Confidence, as may be imagined; but to the bleak rocks and dangerous sands of Ruin and Mistrust, where dull clouds obscure the sky, and where there is ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... kneeling, far up toward the altar, his head in his hands. In all the big church, which was bleak and bare in the cold afternoon light, there was no one else. The red altar light flickered in its hanging glass cup; a dozen lighted candles, in a great frame that held sockets for five times as many, guttered and flared at ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... English troops pent up on a bleak promontory, sick and disheartened, with uncooked provisions, in the middle of winter. Of course they melted away even in the hospitals to which they were sent on the Levant. In those hospitals there was a terrible mortality. At Scutari alone nine thousand perished before ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... public bar of the Wagtail, in Wapping, four men and a woman were drinking beer and discussing diseases. It was not a pretty subject, and the company was certainly not a handsome one. It was a dark November evening, and the dingy lighting of the bar seemed but to emphasize the bleak exterior. Drifts of fog and damp from without mingled with the smoke of shag. The sanded floor was kicked into a muddy morass not unlike the surface of the pavement. An old lady down the street had died from pneumonia the previous evening, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... faculties were given us to put to use; to be passively obedient is really to evade probation—so with almost excessive emphasis Browning set forth a cardinal article of his creed; but Elizabeth Barrett was not, like him, "ever a fighter," and, after all, London in 1845 was not bleak and grey as it had been a year previously—"for reasons," to adopt a reiterated word of the correspondence, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... may be revived, especially if the British peasantry be re-created. A hundred years ago the great agricultural authority, Arthur Young, wrote: "The magic of property turns sand into gold. Give a man a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden. Give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert." Since the time when these words were written most European countries have created ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... hot, dry grass. And through the branches of the trees on the lower terrace one could get frequent glimpses of the James River, thickly studded with black rocks and tiny green islands." No wonder that the girl from the bleak North found it in her heart to thrill at the beauty of such a gem from Nature's jewel-casket as was that garden ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... raw the north wind doth blow, Bleak in the morning early; All the hills are covered with snow, And ...
— The Real Mother Goose • (Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright)
... stone walls through which the gaping gateway led, three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that even the yellow sunlight could not light them into brightness, looked down, with row upon row of windows, upon three sides of the bleak, stone courtyard. Back of and above them clustered a jumble of other buildings, tower and turret, one high-peaked ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... was detailed to a big prairie stretch of country where there was little to do but wait. On the first day of August he was at Hymers when the Limited plunged down the embankment into Blind Indian River. The first word of it came over the wire from Bleak House Station a little before midnight, while he and the agent were playing cribbage. Pink-cheeked little Gunn, agent, operator, and one-third of the total population of Hymers, had lifted a peg to make a count when his hand stopped in mid-air, and ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... between the rows for that purpose, while others were hauling the grain to their barns to store it away for the winter's use. The broad corn leaves rustling in the wind seemed to whisper, "Winter is coming with his cold, bleak storms to rob the earth of her summer splendor; but he will bring his beautiful coverlet of snow to protect her fields and to prepare them for ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... "The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver; But not the dark arch, Or the black flowing river: Mad from life's history, Glad to death's mystery Swift to be hurled— Anywhere, anywhere Out ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... have been transformed. The "white line" was gone. So, too, was the ocean. Before them, as far as the eye could reach, lay a mass of yellow lights and purple shadows, ice-fields that had buried the sea. Only one object stood out, black, bleak and bare before them—the hull of the ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... more words and Glenister, accompanied by these two, slipped out into the whirling storm, and a half-hour later the rest followed. One by one the Vigilantes left, the blackness blotting them up an arm's-length from the door, till at last the big, bleak warehouse echoed hollowly to the voice of ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... or two afterwards, and we are surprised to find that the farmer is safely housed, and that he has not been robbed upon a bleak moor on a dark stage. But we soon feel a sensation of awe, when we learn that before us is the interior of the very farm-house that is going to be murdered. The farmer and his wife go through the long-standing dialogue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... show that a pawnbroker's business was carried on within. It was not the first visit she had made to this establishment, for the poor little household ornaments, the loss of which had left her home so bleak and bare, were now in the safekeeping of the proprietor; but still she shrank back as she approached a dim side entrance in a narrow street, and drawing her bonnet closer over her face, pushed open a baize door, and entered ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... o' her carles teuch an' auld, Her carlines grim that flyte an' scauld, Her wabsters blithe, an' souters bauld, Her flocks an' herds sae fair to see. Sing o' her mountains bleak an high; Her fords, whare neigh'rin' kelpies ply; Her glens, the haunts o' rural joy; Her lasses lilting ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... autumn time. The neighbourhood of the Beacon was our favourite resort. Many a pleasant day we have spent at the top of it. The hill was covered with heather and gorse bushes. In winter it was as wild, bleak, and cold a place as any you could ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... so we could not get to Clark's "good camp," for with ten hours of utmost effort only about half a day's distance could be covered, when at last, finding the struggle useless, we were forced to halt for the night in a bleak bottom on the north bank of the river. But no one could sleep, for the wind swept over us with unobstructed fury, and the only fuel to be had was a few green bushes. As night fell a decided change of temperature added much to our misery, the mercury, which had risen when the "Norther" ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... literature. I do not think that at this time I cared much for novel reading. Scott seemed to me on a par with Burke's speeches; that is to say, too impersonal for my very personal taste. Dickens I knew by heart, and "Bleak House" I thought his greatest achievement. Thackeray left no deep impression on my mind; in no way did he hold my thoughts. He was not picturesque like Dickens, and I was at that time curiously eager ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... been alive doubtless her lips would have remained sealed. But he was not there, and she knew not what had become of him. Then there was little Marcel, and she knew that when she left that bed it would be only for a cold grave on this bleak plateau of Unaga. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... where you will find a broken shrine, erected hundreds of years ago to the Blessed Virgin. The shrine is on the left side of the road as you travel west, one hundred paces back, on the top of a low hill surrounded by a bleak moor. The shrine has gone to decay, but it holds a sacred relic ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... bleak days and vernal, Lie I and lies she, This never-known lady, eternal Companion ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... landed by mischance in St. Antoine. Indeed, Le Petit Nord and Labrador are so much alike in climate, people, and conditions that this part of the island is often designated locally as Labrador (never has it been my lot to see a more desolate, bleak, and barren spot). The traveller who described Newfoundland as a country composed chiefly of ponds with a little land to divide them from the sea, at least cannot be impeached for unveracity. In this northern part even that little is rendered almost ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... the Anglo-Saxon poems is adapted to men of this stamp. Their souls delight in the bleak boreal climes, the north wind, frost, hail, ice, howling tempest and raging seas, recur as often in this literature as blue waves and sunlit blossoms in the writings of men to whom these exquisite marvels are familiar. Their descriptions are all short, save when ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... been long ago discarded. The creature did not look as if it had been ridden in any recent decade. It looked as if it had almost abandoned the hope of ever being ridden again. It was but hoping against hope now, as it stood rocking there in the bleak twilight. Bright warm nurseries were for younger, happier horses. Still it went on rocking, to show ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Dore imagined. His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a buzzard's beak. His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless. His presence was a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together for protection against the unguessed threat of him. Watching his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock several pounds in weigh close to his hand if need for action ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... Plymouth Company - also sent out an, expedition, and tried to found a colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River. But it was a failure. Some of the adventurers were so discouraged with the cold and bleak appearance of the land that they sailed home again in the ship which had brought them out. Only about forty-five or so stayed on. The winter was long and cold, and they were so weary of it, so homesick and miserable, ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... were taken. Every corner is a gem; and Sir Lionel told us that the old rectangular part of the town was planned more or less at one time. Of course, the people who did the planning had plenty of time to think it all over, before moving down from Old Sarum, which was so high and bleak they couldn't hear the priest saying mass in the cathedral, because of the wind. Fancy! Salisbury used to be called the "Venice of England"; but I must say, if one can judge ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... of trees sweep the sky clean; Sweep the house fronts, And leave them bleak in sleep. High up the empty ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... walked forward, hoping she wouldn't make him push around her. But apparently she read the determination in his face and stood aside, her expression bleak now. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... Alpine peak, Stands, when the sunrise lifts the East, And gilds the crown and lights the cheek Of largest monarch down to least, Of all the summits cold and bleak, ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... once before saved the squire's life. But he was alive. It would not take much to kill him; a little pressure on his wounded throat would be enough. Even to leave him there, uncared for, till morning in the bleak wind, lying upon the cold ground, would be almost certain to put an end to his life. But to the honour of Charles James Juxon be it said that such thoughts never crossed his mind. He pulled off his heavy ulster greatcoat, wrapped it about the felon's insensible body, then, kneeling, raised ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... better fitted for telling stories around a blazing fire than for playing ball, but orders were orders, and I obeyed them. I soon found that it was to test my qualities as a batsman that I had been ordered to report. A bleak March wind blew across the enclosure, and as I doffed my coat and took my stand at the plate I shivered as though suffering from the ague. This was partially from the effects of the cold and partially ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... lost the trail of the pneus, but as the country changed we picked it up again. We were among trees now, and the mountain sides were green with oak and poplar, though as we dropped the landscape darkened into desolation. The bleak corner of the world towards which we were speeding had that formless, featureless look which one sees on common faces, as if it had been shaken together carelessly by the great Creator ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Night on bleak downs; a high grass-grown trench runs athwart the slope. The earthwork is manned by warriors clad in hides. Two warriors, BRYS and ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... Don Jorge placed the body in one of the vacant vaults and filled the entrance with some loose bricks. Then they stood back expectantly. It was now the priest's turn. He had a part to perform, out there on the bleak hilltop in the ghostly light. But Jose remained motionless and silent, his head sunk upon ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... face confronted her. "No, it ain't much of a fire yet, but our hired girl she joined a movin'-picture outfit, so us two he-things are doin' the best we can chasin' a breakfast." And the tramp, Overland Red, ragged, unkempt, jocular, rose from his knees beside a tiny blaze. He pulled a bleak flop of felt from his tangled hair in an over-accentuated ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the silent fields The natural heart is touched, and public way And crowded street resound with ballad strains, Inspired by one whose very name bespeaks Favor divine, exalting, human love; Whom, since her birth on bleak Northumbrian coast, Known unto few, but prized as far as known, A single act endears to high and low Through the whole land—to manhood, moved in spite Of the world's freezing cares; to generous youth; To infancy, that lisps her praise; to age, Whose eye reflects it, glistening ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, and the right side of one's body and the right arm were ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... out, ah God! to roam Like some whipped dog among my kind. I have no friends, I have no home, Save these bleak walls I leave behind. How can I face the world of men, My comrades in the days of yore? Oh! hide me in my cell again, And, warden, ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... him. He went as often as he thought he could without attracting the attention of Mr. Shrank or eliciting ponderous jocosities from the other workers. After several visits, however, he did begin to question himself. What drew him to that bleak refuge again and again? He was not aware of bladder irritation. He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make sense by itself? ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... go to prepare a place for you." Just as when a little child is born into the world it comes to a place made ready for it by the thousand little tendernesses of a mother's love, so does death lead us, not into the bleak, inhospitable night, but into the "Father's house," to a place which love has made ready for our coming. "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." Into Thy hands—thither Jesus passed from the Cross and the cruel hands of men; thither have ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... of autumn in the air At the bleak end of night; he shivered there In a dank, musty dug-out where he lay, Legs wrapped in sand-bags,—lumps of chalk and clay Spattering his face. Dry-mouthed, he thought, "To-day We start the damned attack; and, Lord knows ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... rather in the direction of speaking, preaching, and writing, and resolved to establish himself in some quiet country retreat. One summer I visited several houses in Hertfordshire with him, but they proved unsuitable. One of these possessed an extraordinary attraction for him. It was in a bleak remote village, and it was a fine old house which had fallen from its high estate. It stood on the road and was used as a grocer's shop. It was much dilapidated, and there was little ground about it, but inside there were old frescoes and pictures, strange plaster ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... assistant were readily accepted. Lauzun gave his hand to Mary; Saint Victor wrapped up in his warm cloak the ill fated heir of so many Kings. The party stole down the back stairs, and embarked in an open skiff. It was a miserable voyage. The night was bleak: the rain fell: the wind roared: the waves were rough: at length the boat reached Lambeth; and the fugitives landed near an inn, where a coach and horses were in waiting. Some time elapsed before the horses could be harnessed. Mary, afraid that her face might be known, would not enter the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The bleak and almost barren lives of these isolated folk became illumined with a reminiscent glow as the tinkling notes of the guitar hushed to faint echoes of fairy bells hung on the silver boughs of starlit trees. "Adios, linda Rosa," ran the song. Then ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... "I should think a little of that stuff would do neither of us any harm; the night is rather bleak." ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... person was a lad a couple of years my senior, called always "Young Sam," apparently one of those unhappy waifs cast on the bleak world without relations or friends to care for him. He was a fine young fellow, with a blue laughing eye, dauntless and active, and promised to become a good seaman. In spite of the rough treatment he often received from his shipmates, he kept up his spirits, and as our ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... step banks, beautifully wooded, and in spring one mass of primroses, are crowned here and there with ruined Border towers—like Elibank, the houses of Muckle Mou'ed Meg; or with fair baronial houses like Fernilea. Meg made a bad exchange when she left Elibank with the salmon pool at its foot for bleak Harden, frowning over the narrow "den" where Harden kept the plundered cattle. There is no fishing in the tiny Harden burn, that joins ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... sun was low when he rode down the crest of the range. The mountains were devoid of vegetation, bleak and bare and black. The lava rock seemed to absorb the heat of the sun and throw it in the rider's face. But Rathburn didn't appear ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... streams! How burnt with hopeless, aimless fire, To mark thy giant strength aspire In patriot themes! and tun'd the while Thy "Bonny Doon," or "Balloch Mile." Spirit of BURNS! accept the tear That rapture gives thy mem'ry here On the bleak mountain top. Here thou Thyself had rais'd the gallant brow Of conscious intellect, to twine Th'imperishable verse of thine, That charm'st the world. Or can it be, That scenes like these were nought to ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... old town, with its red roofs, its quaint architecture, its crowded, narrow, picturesque streets. But this time they seemed almost deserted, and the whole effect of the place was bleak and dreary. The leaves had dropped from the trees, the flowers had faded, the vines that covered the cottage walls were brown and bare. He was pleasantly conscious of the warmth of a sable-lined coat he had brought from Russia two years ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... as Minnesota, he went down the Mississippi to a different kind of civilization in the quaint old cities. It was none the less heart-sickening. He found traces of the war, that we had almost forgotten, fresh at every step; still it seemed as if the hand of Nature was much more bounteous than at the bleak North. Yet Bishop Heber's old missionary hymn rang continually through his mind. Even amid the Florida orange-groves, and the great cotton-fields, some cause brought about baleful results, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... with a wet sheet and a flowing sail (as we say at sea when we are not sick), that I write. It is simply to say what follows, which I hope may save you some mental uneasiness. For I was stricken ill when I was doing "Bleak House," and I shall not easily forget what I suffered under the fear of not being able to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... opportunity of the first glimpse of sunshine to make a short excursion along the coast; I started early in the morning, and after a long stroll along the bold headlands of Kilkee, was returning late in the evening to my lodgings. My path lay across a wild, bleak moor, dotted with low clumps of furze, and not presenting on any side the least trace of habitation. In wading through the tangled bushes, my dog "Mouche" started a hare; and after a run "sharp, short, and ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... Willard had been in the habit of walking on Trunion Pike. He had been in the midst of the great open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only the moon looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when bleak winds blew and on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the April morning he wanted to go there again, to walk again in the silence. He did walk to where the road dipped down by a little ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... a fresh start. So Mrs. Alcott wrote to her brother in Boston for help, sold all the furniture they could spare, and went to Still River, the nearest village to Fruitlands, and engaged four rooms. "Then on a bleak December day the Alcott family emerged from the snowbank in which Fruitlands, now re-christened Apple Stump by Mrs. Alcott, lay hidden. Their worldly goods were piled on an ox-sled, the four girls on the top, while father and mother ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... extensive slope of cultivated country, about ten miles short of Milledgeville, and was deploying his troops for camp when I got up. There was a high, raw wind blowing, and I asked him why he had chosen so cold and bleak a position. He explained that he had accomplished his full distance for the day, and had there an abundance of wood and water. He explained further that his advance-guard was a mile or so ahead; so I rode on, asking him to let his ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... grand thing if it cud be straightened out. Th' laws ought to be th' same ivrywhere. In anny part iv this fair land iv ours it shud be th' right iv anny man to get a divoorce, with alimony, simply be goin' befure a Justice iv th' Peace an' makin' an affydavit that th' lady's face had grown too bleak f'r his taste. Be Hivens, I'd go farther. Rather than have people endure this sarvichood I'd let anny man escape be jumpin' th' conthract. All he'd have to do if I was r-runnin' this Governmint wud be to put some clothes in th' grip, write a note to his ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... (one of the ordinary winds of New England), from all points of the compass. The fine snow becomes rain; it becomes large snow; it melts as it falls; it freezes as it falls. At last a storm sets in, and night shuts down upon the bleak scene. ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... never in reality the strong man he looked. At any rate, his fight for his life when it came was a singularly weak one. The second winter after Louise's death was bitterly cold; he was overworked, and often without sleep. One bleak east-wind day struck home. He took to his bed with a chill, which turned to peritonitis; the system showed no power of resistance, and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... early in the crisis and eventually brokered a $42 billion bailout package; but Jakarta jeopardized the program by resisting strict IMF reforms, partly in response to the rupiah's collapse, which lost as much as 80% of its value at one point. Economic prospects look bleak for 1998: the economy probably will shrink between 4% to 10%, unemployment top historic highs-in excess of 15%-and inflation ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... beneath his feet. At God's bidding the avalanche fell. No precaution could save the traveler who was in its path. He was instantly borne to destruction, and buried where no voice but the archangel's trump could ever reach his ear. Terrific storms of wind and snow often swept through those bleak altitudes, blinding and smothering the traveler. Hundreds of bodies, like pillars of ice, embalmed in snow, are now sepulchred in those drifts, there to sleep till the fires of the last conflagration shall have consumed their winding ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... respecting his origin, his meaning, his Maker, and his destiny. That perpetual half-night of his planet-mind—that shadowed side of his orbit-life—forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity, but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleak side what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as of the earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, what strange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra! Sacred, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... "Mysterious Man of Meteighan," a wild and untoward storm swept down the North Atlantic and over the seaboard far and near. In the Bay of Fundy that night the elements met in their grandest extremes. Tide-rips and mountain waves opposed each other with titanic force. All along the bleak and rock-ribbed coast the boiling waters lay churned into foam. Over the breakwaters the giant combers crashed and soared far up into the troubled sky; while out under the black clouds of the night the whirlpools and the tempests met. Was ever a night like ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... the ground rising gently but steadily, until we stopped at last on a high plateau, and gazed around us at the scene. A more bleak and desolate country it would be impossible to imagine. One vast and semi-desert plain, the eye relieved only by patches of algarrobo bushes, or little lakes of water. Far ahead of us the cone of a solitary mountain rose on the horizon, and towards this the sun was slowly ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... prothalamia chaunting enraptured things,— O sumptuous fables, why so prodigal Of masque and music, of dreams like foam-white swans On lakes of hyacinthus? Must Love seek Great allies, Beauty sound her arriere-bans That all her splendours betray us to this bleak Simplicity whereto blind satyrs run?"— The irony seems old, old ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... because she enjoyed and benefited by the exercise, she was much away from home every day. Sometimes, attended only by a groom, she rode long distances north or south along the coast; or up over the ridge behind the castle and far inland along the shaded roads through the woods; or over bleak wind-swept stretches of moorland. Sometimes she would walk, all alone, far down to the sea-road, and would sit for hours on the shore or high up on some little rocky headland where she could enjoy the ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... large bosky hedges, pretty damp deep lanes, and roads with broad grass margins running along them. Such is the general nature of the county; but just up in its northern extremity this nature alters. There it is bleak and ugly, with low artificial hedges and without wood; not uncultivated, as it is all portioned out into new-looking large fields, bearing turnips, and wheat, and mangel, all in due course of agricultural ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... flowers has spangled all the ground, Or winter bleak the flickering hearth around Draws close the circling seat; The child still sheds a never-failing light; We call; Mamma with mingled joy and fright ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... a house on fire at any hour draws a crowd. At sea, in the bleak cold wastes of the water desert, even one other shipload of sympathizers is too often wished for vainly. Wind, cold, and breakdowns of machinery the sailor accepts with dull indifference; shipwrecks, strandings, and disease he looks forward to as part of an inevitable fate; but ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... cliffs, stretched the Causses, vast, arid and barren plateaux, flat and featureless save for an occasional low, rounded mound, a menhir or a dolmen, and (if such may be termed features) great pits that opened in the earth like cold craters, which the countryfolk termed avens. A strange, bleak land, inhospitable, wind-harried, haunted, the home of seven ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... of 'Little Dorrit.' The elder Dickens had unquestionably some of the traits ascribed to the unpractical friend of Copperfield's youth, and something of the cruel self-indulgence and pompous deportment of the dancing-master in 'Bleak House.' And it was during his father's imprisonment for debt when the son was but a youth, that Dickens got his intimate knowledge of the Marshalsea, and of the heart-breaking existence of its inmates. Some years before 'Copperfield' was written, he ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... all pulled down to shut out the summer light and air. It was indeed a tribute to Society to find a room set apart for her behests out there on so apparently neighborless and remote an island. Afternoon visits and evening festivals must be few in such a bleak situation at certain seasons of the year, but Mrs. Blackett was of those who do not live to themselves, and who have long since passed the line that divides mere self-concern from a valued share in whatever Society can give and take. There were those of her neighbors who never ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... stood in the midst of a bleak moor, in the North Country, a certain village. All its inhabitants were poor, for their fields were barren, and they had little trade; but the poorest of them all were two brothers called Scrub and Spare, who followed the cobbler's craft. Their hut ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... for an effect of opulent gorgeousness by every device of material, color and decoration, the heads of the Vedian family had expressed, in their atrium, their cult of primitive simplicity. Compared with others of the houses of senators their atrium appeared bare and bleak. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... doubt; and the rich verdure, and the thorough finish added by human art, are perhaps as attractive to an American eye as any stronger feature could be. Our journey, however, between Manchester and Sheffield was not through a rich tract of country, but along a valley walled in by bleak, ridgy hills extending straight as a rampart, and across black moorlands with here and there a plantation of trees. Sometimes there were long and gradual ascents, bleak, windy, and desolate, conveying the very impression which the reader gets from many passages of Miss Bronte's novels, and still ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... without reason that we dreaded passing across this bleak region. The name of Paramo is given to those inhospitable desert-regions high up among the mountains, of which there are so many in the Andes. No human being can exist in them without keeping in incessant and violent motion. Artificial means are incapable ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... northward cast his curious eyes On other cliffs of more exalted size. Where Maine's bleak breakers line the dangerous coast, And isles and shoals their latent horrors boast, High lantern'd in his heaven the cloudless White Heaves the glad sailor an eternal light; Who far thro troubled ocean greets the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... the house, no flower-beds in the nooks and corners, no sweet shrubs peeping in at the square windows. Gardens there are, but they are away, half a mile off; and the great hall door opens out upon a flat, bleak park, with hardly a scrap around it which ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... second visit will reveal to me the blindness, the distortions, and the wrong-headedness of my first. But even as a Chinaman I did notice subtle differences between New York and Chicago. As one who was brought up in a bleak and uncanny climate, where soft coal is in universal use, I at once felt more at home in Chicago than I could ever do in New York. The old instinct to wash the hands and change the collar every couple of hours instantly returned to me in Chicago, together with the old comforting ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... cab into a street even more bleak and bedraggled than the one they had just traversed. He stopped and got out. Pauline followed him. A blear-eyed man, slouching on a stoop, looked up in faint curiosity ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... of the aurora, which went racing swiftly back and forth along the northern horizon. Even when the sun rose, huge and fiery, in a haze of frozen moisture at the south, it did not seem to infuse any warmth or life into the bleak wintry landscape. It only drowned, in a dull red glare, the blue, tremulous streamers of the aurora and the white radiance of the moon and stars, tinged the snow with a faint colour like a stormy sunset, and lighted up a splendid mirage ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... pleasure I heard this piece of news, and eagerly pressed forward, preferring the warm shelter and hospitable board the major was certain of possessing, to the cold blast and dripping grass of a bivouac. Night, however, fell fast; darkness, without an intervening twilight, set in, and we lost our way. A bleak table-land with here and there a stunted, leafless tree was all that we could discern by the pale light of a new moon. An apparently interminable heath uncrossed by path or foot-track was before us, and our jaded cattle seemed to feel ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... once woo'd a budding Rose, (Sing hey down ho, the bleak winds blow.) With fond delight his bosom glows, (How softly fall the flakes of snow.) Love watch'd the flower whose ruby tips Peep'd coyly forth, like pouting lips, Then nearer to the Rose he trips; (The stately oak ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and River St. Lawrence and Canada, and W. by James' Bay and Hudson's Bay. Its area is estimated at 420,000 sq. miles. The vast interior, inhabited by a few wandering Nascopie Indians, is little known; the coast, mainly but sparsely peopled by Eskimoes, is rugged, bleak and desolate. Seals abound, and the sea is well stocked with cod and other fish. The wild animals include deer (caribou), bears, wolves, foxes, martens, and otters. The Eskimo dogs are trained to draw sledges, ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... doubt that Charles James Fox ..." Mr. Burley began; but here Mrs. Stretton told him that she knew his sister well; had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but bleak in winter. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Waverley out by a passage different from that through which he had entered the apartment. At a distance he heard the hall of the Chief still resounding with the clang of bagpipes and the high applause of his guests. Having gained the open air by a postern door, they walked a little way up the wild, bleak, and narrow valley in which the house was situated, following the course of the stream that winded through it. In a spot, about a quarter of a mile from the castle, two brooks, which formed the little river, had their junction. The larger of the two came down the long bare valley, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... deferential attention while Betty tried to tell him how lovely the snowy meadows and the bleak, ice-bound river looked on a bright June day, and carefully followed her lead as she turned the conversation from river scenery to skating and canoeing; so that they reached home without a second ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... these often occupied the mind of Mr. Grim. Such were his thoughts as he sat in his luxurious parlor, one bleak December evening, surrounded by every external comfort his heart could desire, when a child not over seven or eight years of age was brought into the room by a servant, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... trapper and fur-trader. The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life; the voyageur and courier de bois, clad in skins, paddling up ice-rimmed streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often to dusky squaws, became assimilated to the savage life about them and reverted to the lower hunter ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... religion! But if it's thy blessed and holy will to let me do so, then it is my duty to submit! Give me strength, then, to bow to thy will, and to receive with faith and thanksgivin' whatever you choose to bestow upon me! And above all things O Lord, grant me a repentant heart, and that my bleak and lonely death-bad may have the light of glory upon it! Grant me this, O God, and I will die happy even here; for where your blessed presence is there ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... lightened the 'Dudley Docker' by placing some cases on an outer rock, where they were retrieved subsequently. Then he beached his boat, and with many hands at work we soon had our belongings ashore and our three craft above high-water mark. The spit was by no means an ideal camping-ground; it was rough, bleak, and inhospitable—just an acre or two of rock and shingle, with the sea foaming around it except where the snow-slope, running up to a glacier, formed the landward boundary. But some of the larger rocks provided a measure of shelter from the wind, and as we clustered round the blubber-stove, ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... She gave him a bleak little smile. "My dear boy, if I had left all the hard things to my manager to do, Storm to-day would be just where ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... their route, struck them as "one of the most appalling objects" which they had seen, being a bleak rock twelve hundred feet high above the level of the lake, with a perpendicular face of its full height. The Indians say, that any one who can scale it, and "turn three times on the brink of its fearful wall, will live for ever." We ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... of Meldorf—once the capital of an ancient commonwealth—his earliest associations were connected. A kind of rude equality still reigned in the manners of the rustic population, which was not likely to be disturbed by the influx of the world into a bleak and gloomy district remote from the great roads. Here young Niebuhr grew up a studious and solitary boy; instructed by his father in French, the rudiments of Latin, and above all, in geography and history, which the old traveller taught him to illustrate by maps and plans, and by digging regular ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... three assembled in the bleak drawing-room of the hotel. Frohman ordered a little supper of ham sandwiches and sarsaparilla, after which he rehearsed the love scene, which simply consisted of a tender little parting in a doorway. It served to bring out the wistful and appealing tenderness ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... pitch their tents on the banks of a river, or, at least, in the neighborhood of a running stream. But in the winter, they return to the South, and shelter their camp, behind some convenient eminence, against the winds, which are chilled in their passage over the bleak and icy regions of Siberia. These manners are admirably adapted to diffuse, among the wandering tribes, the spirit of emigration and conquest. The connection between the people and their territory is of so frail a texture, that it may be broken ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the sober dignity of dress, acquired from years of acute observation in the service of the nobility, were to be seen as, at the hour of five, in the twilight of this bleak autumn afternoon, Bude moved majestically into the lounge-hall of Harkings and leisurely pounded ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... side of the bar, where, amid the shelter of the coarse, tufted grass the delicate, graceful creatures will sit three months hence on their fragile white and purple-splashed eggs. The boobies are but visitors, for their breeding-places are on the bleak, savage islands far to the south, amid the snows and storms of black Antarctic seas. But here they dwell together, in unison with the gulls, and were the wind not westerly you could hear their shrill cries and ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... cheered my recollection as I trod that sour moorland. I tried to remember her song, and hummed it assiduously till I got some kind of version, which I shouted in my tuneless voice. For I was only a young lad, and my life had been bleak and barren. Small wonder that the call of youth set every fibre of ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... than it now is, and that it gradually attained its present size. Where food was abundant and nutritious and the climate mild and healthful, the early horses developed large frames and heavy limbs and muscles; on the other hand, where food was scarce and the climate cold and bleak, the animals remained as dwarfed as the ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... his brain a seething whirl of hate in which all thought of caution was gone as he tensed his muscles to hurl himself upon that grim monstrosity from the bleak ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... but men: no gods are we To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak, Each separate, on his painful peak, Thin-cloaked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... in a temper with which the weather harmonised. It was gusty, bleak, and wet. Great pools of water lay on the rough roads in the poor quarter of the town through which lay his route. In order to reach the works, he had to cross the river by means of a ferry-boat. When he reached the landing-stage on this particular morning, he could see the ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... operating expenses and public investment. In 2000-01, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $105 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak financial situation. The IMF approved a $73 million poverty reduction and growth facility for Niger in 2000 and announced $115 million in debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Further ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... about to suffer in the same cause—the cause of impartial and adequate representation—the cause of the Constitution. Pray to the best of Beings for Muir, Palmer, Skirving, Margarott and Gerald, who are now, or will shortly be crossing, like you, the bleak Ocean, to a barbarous land!—Pray that they may be animated with the same spirit, which in the days of their fathers, triumphed at the stake, and shone in the midst of flames. Melancholy indeed, it is that the mildest and most humane of all Religions should have been so perverted as ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... first time since yesterday we have an unobstructed view. I dismount and look round. Backward stretches an endless expanse of bleak and stormy-swept billowy mountains; before us looms, in serried phalanx, the western Cordillera, dazzling white, all save one black-throated colossus, who vomits skyward thick clouds of ashes and smoke, and down whose ragged flanks course streams of ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... some people whom already we have met, and to others whom thus far we have not met, were transacted in a lofty and rather bleak looking room at Scotland Yard between the hours of nine and ten A. M.; that is, later in the morning of the fateful day whose advent we have heard acclaimed from the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... unknown country, carried any freight but that of books. Book-makers were there in less proportion than on board the solitary vessel that, in 1620, took a more northerly course, and cast anchor at last off the bleak and sullen shore of Massachusetts; but for both alike the stress of those early years left small energy or time for any composition beyond the reports that, at stated intervals, went back to the mother country. The work of the pioneer is for muscles first, brain having small ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... observer might have seen their striking dissimilarity, both in dress and manners. Truth was clad in garments of the plainest material and finish, while Error was decked in costly robes and jewels. The step of the former was firm and slow, while that of the latter was rapid and nervous. The bleak winds penetrated their forms as they turned a sharp angle in the road, when there was revealed to them, on an eminence, a costly and ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... rather to compose it in type at the case, for that was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places. It was all very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I went on I began to find myself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... once what many had been at pains to mention to me before—that my father was not a temperate man. Nor did our cellar seem wholly bleak. He pressed wine upon me, and soon had finished a bottle himself, only to gesture Brutus to uncork a second. And all the while he regaled me with anecdotes of the gaming table and the vices of a dozen seaports. With hardly ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... divinest part Ruled triumphant in the heart, And, with shrinking, sudden start, The bleak old world ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter. White men, with their dull scent, might never have divined them; the fragrance of the wood fire would have concealed from them these almost electrical hints of moss and bark and hardening ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... fowling- piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been a bleak July day, and as night came on a bitter westerly howled through the trees. Cold! was n't it cold! The pigs in the sty, hungry and half-fed (we wanted for ourselves the few pumpkins that had survived the drought) fought savagely with each other for shelter, and squealed all ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... yards of Jan were groups of solid frame houses, with warm kitchens in them, and abundant food. But the tent, standing by itself, came first; and, though he could not know it, the tent was, on the whole, the very best of all the habitations in that bleak little town—for Jan. For this tent was the temporary home of an American named Willis—James Gurney Willis; as knowledgeable a man as Jean himself and, in addition, one known wherever he went into the northland as ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... been wet and stormy, and his shoes and stockings were covered with mud. The college gates, when he reached them, were still closed, an unusual thing at that hour; and he walked up and down under the walls in the bleak grey morning, till the clock struck seven, "much disquieted, his head full of forecasting cares," but resolved, like a brave man, that come what would, he would accuse no one, and declare nothing but what he saw was already known. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... exclamation is as true now as it was when he sang the labours of Italian country-folk some nineteen centuries ago. To a traveller from the north there is a pathos even in the contrast between the country in which these children of a happier climate toil, and those bleak, winter-beaten fields where our own peasants pass their lives. The cold nights and warm days of Tuscan springtime are like a Swiss summer. They make rich pasture and a hardy race of men. Tracts of corn and oats and rye alternate with patches of flax in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... ten minutes was the landscape the same. From olive plantations we rushed into a bleak country of savage hills, where windmills planted upon rocks beckoned with slowly moving arms; so down into flowery valleys with a thread of silver river tangled in the grasses near a long white road. And always the horizon was broken with tumbled mountains, purple, gold, and rose, swimming ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... bitter year, by that couch of suffering in the heart of multitudinous Paris and London; hundreds of sympathizing friends, in both hemispheres, listened and prayed and hoped through a dreary twelvemonth. With the ripe autumn closed the quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. By a singular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable'—is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner—or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom—or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room—waiting to be discovered! Little Miss Still-Waters, deeper than ten thousand seas! Little Miss Gunpowder, milder than the dusk before the moon ignites it! ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... dry desolation that yet somehow smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of the whole impression—the impression that culminated at last, before the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad forms of piety, forces of labour, beautiful fruits of genius. However, one gaped above all things for the impression, and what one ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Boz," took so little interest in his great Book. It always seemed to me that he did not care for praise of it, or wish much that it should be alluded to. But he at once became interested, when you spoke of some of his artful plots, in Bleak House, or Little Dorrit—then his eye kindled. He may have fancied, as his friend Forster also did, that Pickwick was a rather jejune juvenile thing, inartistically planned, and thrown off, or rather rattled off. His penchant, as was the case ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... liberality towards those of other people, which had always been a part of her character, ever since Owen Sandbrook had read sermons with her on self-denial. If Miss Wells had a fire in her bedroom forced upon her, Miss Charlecote had none, and hurried down in the bleak winter morning in shawl and gloves to Humfrey's great Bible, and then to his account books and her business letters. She was fresh with cold when she met the children for their early reading. And then—but it was not soon that she learnt to ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... off the floor and went to the window and back. I don't know why I felt moved—a sudden sense of the cosiness came over me. The world looked wet and bleak outside. ...
— Red Hair • Elinor Glyn
... reason to doubt that Charles James Fox ..." Mr. Burley began; but here Mrs. Stretton told him that she knew his sister well; had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but bleak in winter. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... on, another hill reared its bleak and barren head on the opposite side of the rivulet. Once fairly in the gorge, there was no exit save at the upper end of the ravine. Here, then, I must intercept my game, which I was able to do by taking a nearer cut over the ridge, that ...
— Thrilling Adventures by Land and Sea • James O. Brayman
... cold February, and it was a very bleak walk over the mountain; but Winthrop took it many a time. His mother now and then said when she saw him come in or go out, "Don't overtry yourself, my son! —" but he answered her always with his usual composure, ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... out on the verandah, or along the path of the little terrace garden which General Ashburnham has surrounded with a defensive wall, and from thence I should point out to you the harbour, bright as a flower-bed with the flags of many nations, the jutting promontory of Kowloon, and the barrier of bleak and jagged hills that bounds the prospect. A little later, when the sun began to sink, and the long shadows to fall from the mountain's side, we should set forth for a walk along a level pathway of about a quarter of a mile long, which is cut in its flank, and connects with ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... still ringing by gaslight in the unfinished shop; while Brown and Jones were still busy with the goods, and Mrs. Jones was measuring out to the shop-girls yards of Magenta ribbon, short by an inch, Robinson again walked down to the bridge. "The bleak wind of March makes me tremble and shiver," said he to himself;—"but, 'Not the dark arch or the ...
— The Struggles of Brown, Jones, and Robinson - By One of the Firm • Anthony Trollope
... stream haunted by shrieking spectres, and finds himself whirled round in chaos like a stone shot in a sling. Having at length passed safely through the initiation of Fire, Water and Air, he is welcomed into a valley of "unearthly sadness," with a bleak, dreary lake lit by a "ghostly glimmer of sunshine." He gazes with awe on the image of the god Osiris, who presides over the silent kingdom of the dead. Watching within the temple of Isis, he suddenly sees before him the ...
— The Tale of Terror • Edith Birkhead
... off on her crack-brained expedition, the very next morning, on the six-thirty train. I happened to be looking out sleepily and saw her trudging wearily past our house in the bleak gray of our mountain dawn, the inadequate little, yellow flame of her old fashioned lantern like a glowworm at her side. It seemed somehow symbolical of something, I did not ...
— Hillsboro People • Dorothy Canfield
... of this sudden change in their relations, there is but little doubt that a legal separation between this ill-assorted couple was pending, when one bleak autumn morning she was discovered dead in her bed under circumstances peculiarly open ...
— The Golden Slipper • Anna Katharine Green
... were going to remain behind, for the winters which we dreaded so much had no terrors for them. Sometimes when we were preening our feathers under the radiant skies near the Southern gulf, I thought of our old neighbors the jays, and fancied them in their bleak Northern home flitting about in the tops of the leafless trees, swayed by the icy winds from the upper lakes, and with perhaps but little to eat. I would not have exchanged places with them for the world. But my older comrades assured me the jays were not in need ...
— Dickey Downy - The Autobiography of a Bird • Virginia Sharpe Patterson
... of Finland as a sub-arctic country of bleak and forbidding aspect maybe surprised to hear that several railroads have already made a large part of the region accessible. A new line, 160 miles long, has just been opened to the heart of the country ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... be helped preoccupied him as if he had been twenty, thirty, fifty years older; and the world seemed to him a shocking place, a gray, bleak, melancholy hell where there was nothing but sadness, ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... their inn by this path, and, feeling that they knew it, had hitherto neglected it in favor of untrodden ways. But at last the list of these was exhausted, and Rowland proposed the walk to Engelberg as a novelty. The place is half bleak and half pastoral; a huge white monastery rises abruptly from the green floor of the valley and complicates its picturesqueness with an element rare in Swiss scenery. Hard by is a group of chalets and inns, with the usual appurtenances of a prosperous Swiss resort—lean brown guides in ...
— Roderick Hudson • Henry James
... rise twenty feet before we need give it a thought," said Hester. She had been reared along the river and had no fear of it. She loved it in any form it could assume—tranquil and quiet—frozen and white—rolling and bleak and sullen. In every form, she recognized only the beautiful and knew ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... Derbys, the Shaftesburys, or the Warwicks, nor the vulgar vanity of the untravelled Cockney. It simply defies accurate delineation. Dickens has attempted to paint the portrait of such a character in "Bleak House"; but Sir Leicester Dedlock, even in the hands of this great artist, is not a success,—merely because, in the case of the Baronet, selfishness and self-importance are only a superficial crust, while with your true Chesterton these attributes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... corner of Utah is soon traversed, and leaves no particular impressions on the mind. By an early hour on Wednesday morning we stopped to breakfast at Toano, a little station on a bleak, high- lying plateau in Nevada. The man who kept the station eating-house was a Scot, and learning that I was the same, he grew very friendly, and gave me some advice on the country I was now entering. "You see," said he, "I tell you this, because I ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... seemed for me to do was to start for America immediately, and, after taking paid advice—one gets very good advice by paying for it—Roy, McGreggor, my lawyer, and I left England one cold and bleak March morning. ...
— The Reflections of Ambrosine - A Novel • Elinor Glyn
... on the barren island two years he went to the mainland one day, and brought back with him a bride. It was a bleak place for a bridal home, but the young wife had the qualities of the husband. "While you raise your trees," she said, "I will raise our children." And within a score of years the young bride sent thirteen happy-faced, well-brought-up children over that island, and there ...
— The Americanization of Edward Bok - The Autobiography of a Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward William Bok (1863-1930)
... and Preston lies over bare, stony heights, an inhospitable country in the short, bleak days and long nights of November. Charles shared every hardship with his soldiers. He had a carriage but he never used it, and it was chiefly occupied by Lord Pitsligo. With his target on his shoulder he marched alongside of the soldiers, keeping ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... territory in which Anathoth lay was Benjamin's. Even where not actually desert the bleak and stony soil accords with the character given to the tribe and its few historical personages. Benjamin shall ravin as a wolf.(100) Of Benjamin were the mad King Saul, the cursing Shimei, Jeremiah's persecutors in Anathoth, and the other Saul who breathed ...
— Jeremiah • George Adam Smith
... home for Venice. He had married a Venetian wife, who, among the bleak mountains of the Katunska, was pining for the sun and warmth of her native city. But before leaving he laid down the lines for a powerful regime. A Prince-Bishop, or Vladika, was placed at the head of affairs, but, to help ...
— The Land of the Black Mountain - The Adventures of Two Englishmen in Montenegro • Reginald Wyon
... track, which existed in 1878, ran for the most part along its rocky bed. In the winter months the depth of the water nowhere exceeded three feet, except after heavy rain, and although the stream was rather swift, it could usually be forded with very little risk. The valley itself had a bleak and deserted appearance, save in the immediate vicinity of the few and widely-scattered villages, around which were clustered fruit trees ...
— Forty-one years in India - From Subaltern To Commander-In-Chief • Frederick Sleigh Roberts
... the strain before spring came in. She was pale in the morning and fever-flushed in the afternoon and her hands were uncertain. March was long and bleak, that year, but April came in as sweetly as a silver bugle call. The first week in April the ice went out of the lake with a crash and boom and mighty upheaval, leaving a pellucid calm of blue waters that brought a new light to Lydia's face. She heard the first robin call on her way home from college, ...
— Lydia of the Pines • Honore Willsie Morrow
... placed between the rows for that purpose, while others were hauling the grain to their barns to store it away for the winter's use. The broad corn leaves rustling in the wind seemed to whisper, "Winter is coming with his cold, bleak storms to rob the earth of her summer splendor; but he will bring his beautiful coverlet of snow to protect her fields and to prepare them for the ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... land of chivalry and song,' exclaimed Eleanor, 'where they have courts of love and poetry, and tilts and tourneys and minstrelsy, and the sun shines as it never does in this cold bleak north; and above all there is Margaret, dear tender Margaret, almost a queen, as a queen she will be one day. Oh! I ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge
... over the bleak hills; the rain fell in a despondent drizzle, and twilight began to fall. But the calm man gazed as tranquilly into the fog as if he beheld a radiant bow of promise spanning the gray sky. The cheery woman tried to cover every one but herself with the big umbrella. The brown boy pillowed his head ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... however, hear the exquisite notes of this little brown wood-sprite, for after the nesting season is over he finds little to call them forth during the bleak, snowy winter months, when in the Middle and Southern States he may properly be called a neighbor. Sharp hunger, rather than natural boldness, drives him near the homes of men, where he appears just as the house wren departs for ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... rain the snow was all gone. The ground was bleak and bare, but the six little Bunkers did not mind that, for they were eager for ice ...
— Six Little Bunkers at Grandpa Ford's • Laura Lee Hope
... She forgot the nippy ride out through the bare, bleak suburbs, and the weltering waste of the raw gray lake just below, and the cold glare from the dozens of disused table-tops, and the cool stares of people who wondered why she was here. Let them but wait a little, and they might ...
— Under the Skylights • Henry Blake Fuller
... it turned; a lion and his mate were rearing themselves one after the other against the walls, half turning from the middle to fall almost backward in that peculiar movement which reminds one forcibly of great succeeding waves stopped and thrown back upon themselves by some bleak rock. ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... anew my onbearer, I traversed the downland Whereon the bleak hill-graves of Chieftains Bulge barren ...
— Wessex Poems and Other Verses • Thomas Hardy
... cold, rainy Fall night that the dream came. A bleak east wind blowing along the lake-shore, probed every recess of the 'Pontchartrain,' the tiny open-work cottage I used. The place was flushed like a sieve with wind and rain. It leaked copiously and audibly, and there was ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... there were no children playing in the garden. It was a rainy afternoon. A gray cloud of fog and soot hung from the whole sky. About a score of yellow leaves yet quivered on the trees, and the statue of Queen Anne stood bleak and disconsolate among the bare branches. I am afraid I am getting long-winded, but somehow that afternoon seems burned into me in enamel. I gazed drearily without interest. I brooded over the past; I never, at this time, ...
— The Vicar's Daughter • George MacDonald
... the 22nd October and turned as cold as the coldest days in Western Australia, involving bleak conditions in the trenches at night. On the 27th there was a very unpleasant wind and dust storm which ...
— The 28th: A Record of War Service in the Australian Imperial Force, 1915-19, Vol. I • Herbert Brayley Collett
... his oven whistling soft and shrill, his long legs striding between the shafts, until, reaching a certain bleak corner, he halted again, though to be sure there were few people hereabouts and no children. But upon the opposite corner was a saloon, with a large annex and many outbuildings behind, backing upon the river, and Ravenslee, lounging on the handles of his barrow, ...
— The Definite Object - A Romance of New York • Jeffery Farnol
... on, down out of the bleak, bright sunshine into cool twilight depths of clinging vapours; and the good green earth lifted its warm ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... in the face, and recognized it for a very tolerable embodiment of what he had heretofore supposed he thought about the Irish. For an instant, the sight of it made him shiver, as if the sunny May had of a sudden lapsed back into bleak December. Then he smiled, and the bad vision went off into space. He saw instead Father Forbes, in the white and purple vestments, standing by poor MacEvoy's bedside, with his pale, chiselled, luminous, uplifted face, and he heard only the proud, ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... may I follow When friendships decay, And from love's shining circle The gems drop away. When true hearts lie withered And fond ones are flown, Oh! who would inhabit This bleak world alone? ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... past the bleak pulpit of saint Mark's, under the railway bridge, past the Queen's theatre: in silence. Hoardings: Eugene Stratton, Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Could I go to see LEAH tonight, I wonder. I said I. Or the Lily of Killarney? Elster Grimes Opera Company. Big powerful change. Wet bright ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... lands and the castle of the Duke, its ruler, lay beside a lake that was bluer than the deepest indigo. A long time ago the Knight Wendelin and his squire George chanced upon this lake, but they found nothing save waste fields and bleak rocks around it, yet the shores must formerly have borne a different aspect, for there were shattered columns and broken-nosed statues lying on the ground. Against the hillside there were remains of ancient ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... go. I sail for the bleak North, for the peace of the frozen shore. Your laughter is untimely, my friends. You turn my farewell tunes into the welcome song of the Newcomer, And all things draw me back again into the ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... the prospect looked bleak for woman suffrage. In Congress, there was not the slightest hope of the introduction of or action on a Sixteenth Amendment. In the states, interest was kept alive by woman suffrage bills before the legislatures, and year by year, with more people recognizing the inherent justice of the demand, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... till the afternoon that they left the railroad, and then they had a two hours' drive through a country which Marian found very unlike her own: the bleak, bare downs of Wiltshire, low green hills rising endlessly one after the other, the white road visible far away before them, the chalk pits white and cold, a few whitey brown ponds now and then, and at long intervals a farm house, looking as if it ...
— The Two Guardians • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... the muffler around his neck, puts on his bearskin gloves and unties his rig. You watch him drive off, the wheels yelling on the hard snow, and wonder if it isn't more cheerful out in the frozen country with the corn shocks for company. It's the terrible half hour of bleak, fading light before the electricity is turned on and the cozy dark comes down—the loneliest hour of the ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... vigorous, the animation the most lively. An activity has been here that has swept away all difficulties before it and clothed the very rocks with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask the cause; the enjoyment of property must have done it. Give a man the sure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden." The italics are my own. When will Arthur Young have his tablet in Westminster ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Butch Brewster's followers had trailed dejectedly from Bannister Field to the Gym, where Head Coach Corridan was flaying them with a tongue as keen as the two-edged sword that drove Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. A cold, bleak November afternoon, a leaden sky lowered overhead, and a chill wind swept athwart the field; in the concrete stands, the loyal "rooters" of the Gold and Green, or of the Gold and Blue, shivered, stamped, and swung their arms, waiting for the excitement of the scrimmage again to warm them. ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... lower in her chair, burying her face in the cushions. But Vere abruptly stood erect, his fine dark face lifted and set. Just so some ancestors of his might have risen in a bleak New England meeting-house when moved powerfully to wrestle with evil in prayer. But it is doubtful if any Maine deacon ever addressed his Deity as Vere ...
— The Thing from the Lake • Eleanor M. Ingram
... molest or make afraid, always excepting the black demons from the spiritual world. One dwells in a cave in the bowels of the earth; one lies on the sand beneath a blazing sun; one has shut himself forever from the sight of man in a miserable hut among the bleak rocks of yonder projecting peak; one rests with joy in the marshes, breathing with ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... the merry north winds had robbed the trees of the last of their foliage and they stood out grim and gaunt against the bleak November sky; when the last purple asters and the hardiest bright goldenrod had faded, Black Bruin felt the old winter drowsiness slowly ...
— Black Bruin - The Biography of a Bear • Clarence Hawkes
... Ionian cities to beg them attack Lydia in the rear, and time to come down himself in force to his far western province. Croesus was brought to battle in the first days of the autumn. The engagement was indecisive, but the Lydians, having no mind to stay out the winter on the bleak Cappadocian highlands and little suspicion that the enemy would think of further warfare before spring, went back at their leisure to the Hermus valley, only to hear at Sardes itself that the Persian was hot in pursuit. A final battle was fought under the very ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... was enough to show me what she thought. But granting that our employer led a double and dubious life, who could she be, this mysterious woman who kept him company in the old tower? I knew from my own inspection how bleak and bare a room it was. She certainly did not live there. But in that case where did she come from? It could not be anyone of the household. They were all under the vigilant eyes of Mrs. Stevens. The visitor must come ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the end of her long journey, and the migratory instinct has ceased to act, what an agony of remorse the bird would feel, if, from being endowed with great mental activity, she could not prevent the image constantly passing through her mind, of her young ones perishing in the bleak north from cold ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... Cold and bitter and bleak howled the November blast, and ruthlessly drove the fleet against the shivering panes, exposed without, though shielded within by Venetian folding shutters, on that gray morning, when a passing whisper from most unlovely and altogether unfaithful lips nerved me ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... feat from Sestos to Abydos Hemans, Mrs., her 'Restoration' Character of her poetry Henley, Orator Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, his life much interested Lord Byron Hero and Leander Hill, Aaron 'Hills of Annesley, bleak and barren.' 'HINTS FROM HORACE,' written at Athens first produced to Mr. Dallas singular preference given by the author to them See also Hippopotamus at Exeter Change Historians, list of, perused by Lord Byron at nineteen Hoare, Mr., Lord ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... the road winds through a bleak valley called Smithem Bottom, till recently the favourite resort of the cockney gunners for rabbit-shooting; but whether from the noise of their harmless double-barrel Nocks, or the more dreadful carnage of the Croydon poachers, ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... the seven dark firs which had given to the place its name. The tall firs and the hilltop hid from the house the sunshine of the early morning, but they stood a welcome shelter between it and the bleak east wind which came from the sea when the dreary time of ...
— Allison Bain - By a Way she knew not • Margaret Murray Robertson
... with which the Teutonic invaders accepted it, whether presented to them in the form of Catholicism or of Arianism.[317] The great marvel in their history, and their chief claim to the dominion of the world, was, that they had preserved so long, in the bleak regions in which the growth of civilisation was in every way retarded, the virtues together with the ignorance ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... frostwork in the morning ray The fancied fabric melts away; Each Gothic arch, memorial-stone, And long, dim, lofty aisle, are gone; And lingering last, deception dear, The choir's high sounds die on my ear. Now slow return the lonely down, The silent pastures bleak and brown, The farm begirt with copsewood wild, The gambols of each frolic child, Mixing their shrill cries with the tone Of Tweed's dark waters ...
— Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field • Walter Scott
... before him, the sense of personal love and aid towards the Lord and Master whom he served grew upon him. Neither the gazelle-eyed Ayesha nor the prosperous village life presented any great temptation. He would have given them all for one bleak day of mist on a Border moss; it was the appalling contrast with the hold of a Moorish galley that at times startled him, together with the only too great probability that he should be utterly incapable of saving poor little Ulysse from ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge
... of his oar by Jones who steered our boat. About noon having run three miles, a landing was made on a broad gravelly island, to enable Andy to concoct a dinner. A heavy gale was tearing fiercely across the bleak spot. The sand flew in stinging clouds, but we got a fire started and then it burned like a furnace. Andy made another sample of his biscuits, this time liberally incorporated with sand, and he fried some bacon. ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... entirely engrossed by two clamant demands of nature—food and heat. They had only a small quantity of coal on board, and nothing except a few extra spars that could be used as a substitute, while the bleak shores afforded neither shrub nor tree of any kind. Meanwhile they had a sufficiency of everything they required for at least two or three months to come, and for the rest as Grim said, they had ...
— The World of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... Through the open window a keen draught of air blew in with dust and a scrap of shaving from the Lung' Arno down below; it circled round his workshop, fluttering the sketches and rags pinned to the walls. He looked out on a bleak landscape—San Miniato in heavy shade, and the white houses by the river staring like dead faces. A strong breeze was abroad; it whipped the brown water and raised little curling billows, ragged and white at the edges, and tossed about snaps of surf. It was cold. Sandro shivered ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... soul's own son, dear image of my mind, I would not without blessing send thee forth Into the bleak wide world, whose voice unkind Perchance will mock at thee as nothing worth; For the cold critic's jealous eye may find In all thy purposed good little but ill, May taunt thy simple garb as quaintly wrought, And praise thee for no more than the small skill Of ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... said they, "beyond the green Isle of Erin, is our father's hall. Seven days' journey northward, on the bleak Norwegian shore, is our father's hall. ...
— Hero Tales • James Baldwin
... wrote a few days later, "and my horizon looks bleak and lonely. I want to be alone where I can collect my thoughts, but, even when Katie is out, I cannot think, but sit by the window staring at the old women hanging up the clothes which everlastingly flap on the lines tied between the poor old gnarled willow trees. Poor ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... had fallen upon that bleak, gloomy prison, whose very shadow, as it lay across the dusty road, streamed out like a pall. Human crime brings human misery, and that, crowded together and stifled under the heel of the law, is a terrible, most ...
— The Old Countess; or, The Two Proposals • Ann S. Stephens
... again. But presently a wider and more pronounced break appeared which did not vanish; on the contrary, it widened, until presently a fitful gleam of wan and watery sunshine pierced through it and lighted up the bleak, desolate expanse of raging ocean for a few seconds. And almost simultaneously with the welcome appearance of this transient but welcome gleam of pallid sunshine, we became aware of a slight but unmistakable diminution in the fury of the gale; a change productive ...
— A Pirate of the Caribbees • Harry Collingwood
... fair, my lovely girls and boys; I will forget them; I will pass these joys, Ask nought so heavenward; so too too high; Only I pray, as fairest boon, to die; To be delivered from this cumbrous flesh, >From this gross, detestable, filthy mesh, And merely given to the cold, bleak air. Have mercy, goddess! ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... to live in the midst of abundance, isolated from neighbors and nature, confined by blighted cities and bleak suburbs, stunted by a poverty of learning and ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... Bleak, black, deep, and cold is Utrovand, a long pocket of glacial water, a crack in the globe, a wrinkle in the high Norwegian mountains, blocked with another mountain, and flooded with a frigid flood, three thousand feet above its Mother Sea, and yet no ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... on October seventh, but the wind had so far abated that we were able to resume our journey. It was a bleak and dismal day. Save for now and then a small grove of spruce trees in some sheltered nook, and these at long intervals, the country was destitute and barren of growth. Below our camp, upon entering ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... yon hoary rock's impending brow, And on its windy summit take your stand— Lo! Wilsill's lovely vale extends below, And long, long heathy moors on either hand Stretch dark and misty—a bleak tract of land, Whereon but seldom human footsteps come; Save when with dog, obedient at command, And gun, the sportsman quits his city home, And brushing through the ling in ...
— The Mirror Of Literature, Amusement, And Instruction, No. 391 - Vol. 14, No. 391, Saturday, September 26, 1829 • Various
... the river, and disappeared after her. This was followed by another cry of horror and despair, for somehow, the idea of desolation which marks, at all times, a deep, over-swollen torrent, heightened by the bleak mountain scenery around them, and the dark, angry voracity of the river where they had sunk, might have impressed the spectators with utter hopelessness as to the fate of those now engulfed in its vortex. This, however, I leave ...
— The Ned M'Keown Stories - Traits And Stories Of The Irish Peasantry, The Works of - William Carleton, Volume Three • William Carleton
... neighborhood of a running stream. But in the winter, they return to the South, and shelter their camp, behind some convenient eminence, against the winds, which are chilled in their passage over the bleak and icy regions of Siberia. These manners are admirably adapted to diffuse, among the wandering tribes, the spirit of emigration and conquest. The connection between the people and their territory is of so frail a texture, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... stayed at Mrs. Alexander Whyte's. In the course of these three days He addressed the Theosophical Society, the Esperanto Society, and many of the students, including representatives of almost all parts of the East. He also spoke to two or three other large meetings in the bleak but receptive 'northern Athens.' It is pleasant to add that here, as elsewhere, many seekers came and had private interviews with Him. It was a fruitful season, and ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... incontestably its advance signs. No longer, as the mouse-coloured cayuse bore him over the range, was there the mellow crunch of snow underfoot. Instead the sound was crisp and sharp: the crackling of ice where the snow had melted and frozen again. Distinct upon the record of the bleak prairie page appeared another sign infallible. Here and there, singly and en masse, wherever the herds had grazed, appeared oblong brown blots the size of an animal's body. The cattle were becoming weak under the influence of prolonged winter, and lay down frequently ...
— Where the Trail Divides • Will Lillibridge
... had expected her travellers, and towards the east, where already the snow was taking on a faint bluish tint, a reflection of the sky deepening nightwards in that half-circle of the horizon. Distant and a little bleak and cheerless ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Your devotion shall lose you nothing, believe me. Come, Julia, let us go and array us for the journey. The nights are cold now, in December, and the passes of the Algidus are bleak and gusty." ...
— The Roman Traitor (Vol. 2 of 2) • Henry William Herbert
... hard winter drew slowly past, and spring brightened the land and our hearts, and set new life in both, my mind turned again to thoughts of escape. While that bleak country lay in the grip of ice and snow it had seemed certain death to quit the hard hospitality of the prison. It was better to be alive inside than dead outside. But now the stirrings of life without stirred the life within towards freedom, and I ...
— Carette of Sark • John Oxenham
... power here." On 11th November O'Hara reported that, in the absence of engineer officers, the forts had been injudiciously constructed; that their garrisons began to suffer from exposure to the bleak weather; that the broken and wooded country greatly favoured the advance of the enemy, and hampered all efforts to dislodge him; that the Spaniards and Sardinians had no artillery, tools, or camp equipments; and that the only means of securing Toulon ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... joy died out of Lucrezia's life. Spring might come again, and summer sunshine make others glad, but for her it would be ever cold, bleak winter. For never more should her heart grow warm in the sunshine of Filippo's smile—that sunshine which had made every one love him, in spite of his faults, ever since he ran about the streets, a little ragged boy, in the old city ...
— Knights of Art - Stories of the Italian Painters • Amy Steedman
... than the first evening amongst the Ionian Islands. To port, backed by the bold heights of the Grecian sea-range, lay the hoary mount, and the red cliffs, 780 feet high, of Sappho's Leap, a never-forgotten memory. Starboard rose bleak Ithaca, fronting the black mountain of Cephalonia, now bald and bare, but clothed with dark forests till these were burnt down by some mischievous malignant. Whatever of sterility deformed the scene lay robed under a glory of colour painted with perfect beauty by the last ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... looked out over the dreary moor, Over the hill so bleak and hoar— 'A bird from the land I revisit no more Has come to visit me, Dear Innisfail from thy fragrant shore— Land of my own I shall see no ...
— The Sunny Side of Ireland - How to see it by the Great Southern and Western Railway • John O'Mahony and R. Lloyd Praeger
... came slowly and reluctantly at seven; the village lay bleak and closed under a sky of unbroken gray. Here and there smoke streamed upward from a chimney, or a window-pane showed an oblong of pale light. The dirty snow, frozen in thick lumps about the yard, was trodden by a furtive black cat, that mounted a ...
— Harriet and the Piper - (Norris Volume XI) • Kathleen Norris
... got into the car without speaking. Esther could not see why her companion appeared to be so much annoyed. She stole a glance at him, and saw that his mouth had taken on a grim line that made him more than ever like his father, while his eyes were bleak and steely. An Englishman might have said that this was the ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... with very little reference to the real facts of anybody's soul or salary—into this weak and lukewarm torrent has melted down much of that mountainous ice which sparkled in the seventeenth century, bleak indeed, but blazing. The hardest thing of the seventeenth century bids fair to be the softest ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... ten degrees of more indulgent skies, Nor at the coarseness of our heaven repine, Though o'er our heads the frozen Pleiads shine: 'Tis liberty that crowns Britannia's isle, And makes her barren rocks and her bleak mountains smile. 140 Others with towering piles may please the sight, And in their proud aspiring domes delight; A nicer touch to the stretched canvas give, Or teach their animated rocks to live: 'Tis Britain's care to watch o'er Europe's fate, And hold in balance each contending state, To threaten ...
— The Poetical Works of Addison; Gay's Fables; and Somerville's Chase • Joseph Addison, John Gay, William Sommerville
... were then almost the only roads. In seaside towns it could be a mark for for sailors at sea; such was the Truro meeting-house. Then, too, our Puritan ancestors dearly loved a "sightly location," and were willing to climb uphill cheerfully, even through bleak New England winters, for the sake of having a meeting-house which showed off well, and was a proper source of envy to the neighboring villages and the country around. The studiously remote and painfully inaccessible locations chosen for the site of many fine, roomy churches must astonish any ...
— Sabbath in Puritan New England • Alice Morse Earle
... to the bleak world, dog! You have repaid my generosity with the blackest ingratitude. You have forged my name on a five thousand dollar check—have repeatedly robbed my money drawer—have perpetrated a long series of high-handed villanies, and now to-night, because, forsooth, I'll not give ...
— The Complete Works of Artemus Ward, Part 3 • Charles Farrar Browne
... no conception. Dale keeps them at bay. He also baffles the curiosity of my sisters, and by his diplomacy has sent Eleanor Faversham on a huffy trip to Sicily. She cannot understand why I bury myself in bleak solitude, instead of making cheerful holiday among the oranges ...
— Simon the Jester • William J. Locke
... nature bound never to pardon the success of another, condemned to chronic discontent because he was never content with himself. Lucien began to understand the sour look which seemed to add to the bleak expression of envy on Vernou's face; the acerbity of the epigrams with which his conversation was sown, the journalist's pungent phrases, keen and elaborately wrought as a stiletto, ...
— A Distinguished Provincial at Paris • Honore de Balzac
... day. Sometimes, attended only by a groom, she rode long distances north or south along the coast; or up over the ridge behind the castle and far inland along the shaded roads through the woods; or over bleak wind-swept stretches of moorland. Sometimes she would walk, all alone, far down to the sea-road, and would sit for hours on the shore or high up on some little rocky headland where she could enjoy the ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... garden, now bleak with winter waste. Helen drew a red cloak about her shoulders, which Prescott thought singularly becoming. The snow was falling gently and the frosty air deepened the scarlet in her cheeks. The Harley house was only on the other side of the garden and there was a path between ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... street lamps smouldered on. No one was visible for the moment, though smoke was rising from many of the chimneys to greet its sister mist. At the house of the detective across the way the blinds were still down and the shutters up. Yet the familiar, prosaic aspect of the street calmed her. The bleak air set her coughing; she slammed the door to, and returned to the kitchen to make fresh tea for Constant, who could only be in a deep sleep. But the canister trembled in her grasp. She did not know whether she dropped it or threw it down, but there was nothing ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... the most isolated and desolate spot imaginable during this weather. The frigid monotony of winter has settled down upon that region, and now it is haunted only by sea fowl. The bleak, barren promontory whereon stands the light is swept clean of its summer dust by the violent raking of cold hurricanes across it, and coated with ice from the wind-dashed spume of the great breakers hurled against the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... uneasily as I waited why she had not embraced them. I strayed about the room. A coal fire burned in the grate, the red-shaded lamps gave a subdued but cheerful light; some impulse led me to cross over to the windows and draw aside the heavy hangings. Dusk was gathering over that garden, bleak and frozen now, where we had romped together as children. How queer the place seemed! How shrivelled! Once it had had the wide range of a park. There, still weathering the elements, was the old-fashioned latticed summer-house, but the fruit-trees that I recalled as clouds of pink and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... it lost to his matter-of-fact soul. Baptiste the Red, still gazing across, recognized the familiar postures, and remembered the girl who had shared his star-roofed couch in the hills and forests, and the woman-child who lay somewhere by bleak Hudson's Bay. ...
— The God of His Fathers • Jack London
... in the end of October I started from Guachochic bound for the upper part of the great Barranca de San Carlos and the country southward as far as there were Tarahumares. Everything seemed bleak and dreary. The corn was harvested, the grass looked grey, and there was a wintry feeling in the air. The sere and withered leaves rustled like paper, and as I made camp near an Indian ranch I saw loose stubble and dead leaves ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... imagined. His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a buzzard's beak. His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless. His presence was a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together for protection against the unguessed threat of him. Watching his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... the bleak sea-beach, A fisherman stood aghast, To see the form of a maiden fair, Lashed close to a ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf (Vol 2 of 17) - Folk-Lore, Fables, And Fairy Tales • Various
... flared to a point of brilliance in the murky gloom. It showed, on the floor where they stood, a litter of dried vegetation—food, doubtless placed there as an offering. It was dry now, and dusty, and through it there shone the bleak whiteness of bones. Beyond was the floor, and beyond that.... The whiteness that had been but a blur ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... United States, and were originally published in Scribner's Magazine. . . "It should be said that, after his long spell of weakness at Bournemouth, Stevenson had gone West in search of health among the bleak hill summits—'on the Canadian border of New York State, very unsettled and primitive and cold.' He had made the voyage in an ocean tramp, the Ludgate Hill, the sort of craft which any person not a born child of the sea would shun in ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... after one had taken in all the details of fruit and flower and foliage that earned the composition its name, one noted the landscape that showed through a broad casement in the left-hand corner. It was a landscape clutched in the grip of winter, naked, bleak, black-frozen; a winter in which things died and knew no rewakening. If the picture typified harvest, it was a harvest of ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... the drenched bare boughs of half-fledged trees, clouds hung purple-gray over the bleak moors; the river had overflowed the meadows, and the horses floundered flank-deep over the paved ford. Few travelers were abroad. Those who saw the black and white livery of the Temple, and the old man in the long dark cloak who ...
— Masters of the Guild • L. Lamprey
... during the winter it lay deep and heavy on the ground, making the roads almost impassable and their isolation more complete. Both husband and wife began to feel an almost uncontrollable depression amid these bleak surroundings, aggravated as they were by many deaths among the patients. As spring ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... on the Mississippi is longer than the cold, bleak monotone of a dry gale out of the north. There is an undertone to the voices which depresses the soul as the rank wind shrivels the body. On whistling wings great flocks of wild fowl come driving down before the wintry gales, or they turn back from the prospect of an ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... girl was still unextinguished on either side. He would have been less than mortal, she thought, if he had not felt, with all the bitterness of a conscious fool, that he had missed his true destiny. Sara possessed the warmth and wealth of heart which were the complements his own bleak nature required. Agnes Carillon, with her accurate, invariable beauty, had a prim disposition, wholesome enough for a man of strange, dark humours like David Rennes, but perilous always in its effect on any frigid or calculating mind. And Reckage was known to be ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... business," he went on, "that northern industrial country. There's a grandeur about it—the bare valleys, the steep bleak fields, the dead or dying trees, the huge factories. Those great furnaces, with tall iron cylinders and galleries, and spidery contrivances, and black pipes, and engines swinging vast burdens about, and moving wheels, are fearfully interesting and magnificent. They stand for ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... he should have a son by me, foredoomed The murderer of his father: True, indeed, A son was born; but, to prevent that crime, The wretched infant of a guilty fate, Bored through his untried feet, and bound with cords, On a bleak mountain naked was exposed: The king himself lived many, many years, And found a different fate; by robbers murdered, Where three ways met: Yet these are oracles, And this ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Vol. 6 (of 18) - Limberham; Oedipus; Troilus and Cressida; The Spanish Friar • John Dryden
... camp where the boats were built. Men worked frantically, early and late, at the height of their endurance, caulking, nailing, and pitching in a frenzy of haste for which adequate explanation was not far to seek. Each day the snow-line crept farther down the bleak, rock-shouldered peaks, and gale followed gale, with sleet and slush and snow, and in the eddies and quiet places young ice formed and thickened through the fleeting hours. And each morn, toil- stiffened men turned wan faces across the ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... are but men: no gods are we To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak, Each separate, on his painful peak, Thin-cloaked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... a bleak and empty region. There were no growing things there, not even trees with berries. There were no birds, there were no animals. As Odin, the Father of the Gods, and Loki, the doer of good and the doer of evil, went through this region hunger came upon them. But in all the land around they ...
— The Children of Odin - The Book of Northern Myths • Padraic Colum
... little island where he dwelt, Or rather a lone rock, barren and bleak, Short scanty herbage spotting with dark spots Its gray stone surface. Never mariner Approach'd that rude and uninviting coast, Nor ever fisherman his lonely bark Anchored beside its shore. It was a place Befitting well a rigid anchoret, Dead ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... McDonald Islands Heard Island - 80% ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak); McDonald ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... because when gloom goes too far it becomes ridiculous; and I did think the convent gardens as I saw them from the chapter-house window were beautiful, and the hills around majestic and serious, with no intention of falling upon my prostrate spirit. Yes, and after a lifelong abhorrence of that bleak king who founded the Escorial, I will own that I am, through pity, beginning to feel an affection for Philip II.; perhaps I was finally wrought upon by hearing him so endearingly called Philly ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... old one left to fall back upon. And Madison Avenue, after dark, shows little to reassure a new playwright who carries in his pocket a note ending with the words, "before deciding to put on another play I have been considering." It was Bleak Street, that night, for young Stewart Canby, and a bleak, bleak walk he ...
— Harlequin and Columbine • Booth Tarkington
... the 17th century; and towards the period of the Revolution, the last proprietor of Ravenswood Castle saw himself compelled to part with the ancient family seat, and to remove himself to a lonely and sea-beaten tower, which, situated on the bleak shores between St. Abb's Head and the village of Eyemouth, looked out on the lonely and boisterous German Ocean. A black domain of wild pasture-land surrounded their new residence, and formed the remains of ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... lovely! And I do admire the Scandinavian farmers down there so: their big red barns and silos and milking-machines and everything. Do you all know that lonely Lutheran church, with the tin-covered spire, that stands out alone on a hill? It's so bleak; somehow it seems so brave. I do think the Scandinavians are the ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... her fire, her Cottage-home; Yet o'er the moorland will she roam In weather rough and bleak; And when against the wind she strains, Oh! might I kiss the mountain rains That sparkle on ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... past Spitzbergen has been greatly resorted to on account of the profitable whale-fishery of the surrounding seas, and several shipwrecks, as well as incidents similar to the preceding, have occurred there, and in the vicinity.—Spitzbergen is a bleak and barren country, and received its name from the lofty pointed mountains by which it is covered; perpetual snow prevails, few plants spring from the soil, and it is destitute of wood. But to compensate in some measure for the scanty productions ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous
... who fails to establish some sort of genuine relation with the people who surround him. We are all more or less familiar with the results of isolation in rural districts; the Bronte sisters have portrayed the hideous immorality and savagery of the remote dwellers on the bleak moorlands of northern England; Miss Wilkins has written of the overdeveloped will of the solitary New Englander; but tales still wait to be told of the isolated city dweller. In addition to the ...
— Twenty Years At Hull House • Jane Addams
... me, but obey me! Do not elect this man." Truth is so terrible, even in fetters, that for a moment Syme's slender and insane victory swayed like a reed. But you could not have guessed it from Syme's bleak blue eyes. ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... fair-haired men, whether all Teutons, or, as Mr. Latham thinks, Sclavonians with Teuton leaders, still intimately connected with our own English race both by their language and their laws, struggling for existence on the bleak brown bogs and moors, sowing a little barley and flax, feeding a few rough cattle, breeding a few great black horses; generation after generation fighting their way southward, as they exhausted the barren northern soils, or became too numerous ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... escort, pauses, if perchance he spy Vestige of somewhat strange and rare: so paus'd The sev'nfold band, arriving at the verge Of a dun umbrage hoar, such as is seen, Beneath green leaves and gloomy branches, oft To overbrow a bleak and alpine cliff. And, where they stood, before them, as it seem'd, Tigris and Euphrates both beheld, Forth from one fountain issue; and, like friends, Linger at parting. "O enlight'ning beam! O glory of our kind! beseech thee say What water ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... as they impeded her work, and babbled questions about this or that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... intelligent generosity. It was with grim Sarah then—Sarah grim for all her grace—that Waymarsh had begun at ten o'clock in the morning to save him. Well—if he COULD, poor dear man, with his big bleak kindness! The upshot of which crowded perception was that Strether, on his own side, still showed no more than he absolutely had to. He showed the least possible by saying to Mrs. Pocock after an interval much briefer than our glance at ...
— The Ambassadors • Henry James
... when I was fighting my way to school against the wind, I could n't see anything but the road in front of me; but in the late afternoon, when I was coming home, the town looked bleak and desolate to me. The pale, cold light of the winter sunset did not beautify—it was like the light of truth itself. When the smoky clouds hung low in the west and the red sun went down behind them, leaving a pink flush on the snowy roofs ...
— My Antonia • Willa Sibert Cather
... the 6th of December, and the cold winds of approaching winter began to sweep over the water, which seemed almost to surround them. Imagination can hardly conceive a more bleak and dreary spot than the extremity of Cape Cod. It was manifest to all that it was no place for the establishment of a colony, and that, late as it was in the year, they must, at all hazards, continue their search for a more inviting location. Previous ...
— King Philip - Makers of History • John S. C. (John Stevens Cabot) Abbott
... little surprised to find Kennedya speciosa, (his original name for Clianthus Oxleyi), a plant discovered in July 1817, on sterile bleak open flats, near Regent's Lake, on the River Lachlan, in lat. 33 degrees 13 minutes S. and long. 146 degrees 40 minutes E. It is not common, I could see only three plants, of which one was in flower. This ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... was soon eaten and cleared away, the fire carefully covered up on the hearth, and the whole little family quietly in bed. Then the storm, which had been making ready all day, came down upon them in earnest. The bleak wind howled around the corners, the white flakes by millions and millions came with it, and hurled themselves upon that house. In fact, that poor little cabin alone on the wide prairie seemed to be the object of their sport. ...
— The Children's Book of Christmas Stories • Various
... Pictures of Italy, and American Notes. *Nicholas Nickleby. Old Curiosity Shop, and Reprinted Pieces. Barnaby Rudge, and Hard Times. *Martin Chuzzlewit. Dombey and Son. *David Copperfield. Christmas Books, Uncommercial Traveller, and Additional Christmas Stories. Bleak House. Little Dorrit. Tale of Two Cities, and Great Expectations. Our Mutual Friend. Edwin Drood, Sketches, Master Humphrey's ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... stood on Sarum's treeless plain, The waste that careless Nature owns; Lone tenants of her bleak domain, Loomed huge and gray ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... again) remembered, and the beadle gratified, and the sexton (who was accidentally on the doorsteps, looking with great interest at the weather) not forgotten, they got into the carriage again, and drove home in the same bleak fellowship. ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... suddenly, as storms have a way of doing, and a low, squat ranch-house stood dimly revealed against the bleak expanse of wind-tortured prairie. Rowdy gave an exultant little whoop and made for the gate, leaned and swung it open and rode through, dragging Chub after him by main strength, as usual. When he turned to close the gate after Miss ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... land, though varied to a considerable extent in its aspect, is yet universally shagged with forests, or deformed by marshes: moister on the side of Gaul, more bleak on the side of Norieum and Pannonia. [32] It is productive of grain, but unkindly to fruit-trees. [33] It abounds in flocks and herds, but in general of a small breed. Even the beeve kind are destitute of their usual stateliness and dignity of head: [34] they are, however, numerous, and form the ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... that Eirek the Red sailed to the bleak shores of Greenland down to the brilliant exploit of Admiral Dewey in the Philippine Islands, how true it is, in view of each and every one of the events immortalized in this unequalled series of paintings, that, in ...
— Thirteen Chapters of American History - represented by the Edward Moran series of Thirteen - Historical Marine Paintings • Theodore Sutro
... cold and bleak, but full of stars. He had already mastered the local topography, and he knew now exactly where all the bombs that had been showered upon the place had fallen. Here was the corner of blackened walls and roasted beams ...
— Mr. Britling Sees It Through • H. G. Wells
... those vanished day-dreams? Ah! God in heaven pity her! they lay in ruins around her, and heart-wrecked, heart-broken, she was facing the cold, bleak ...
— Pretty Madcap Dorothy - How She Won a Lover • Laura Jean Libbey
... from the very heaven of memory. But a pretended letter of friendship—how easily detected! how transparent its falsity! The loadstone of love touches it, and finds it mere brass. Its influence is icy and bleak, like the rays of the moon, from which all the lenses on earth cannot ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... with regret. Readers of Dickens remember the prolonged degradation of the young hero of 'Bleak house,' through hope deferred and the delays of a Chancery suit. Similar causes contributed to the final wreck of Charles. The thought of a Restoration was his Chancery suit. A letter of November 1753, written by the Prince ...
— Pickle the Spy • Andrew Lang
... which he has been accustomed, but asks for that in continually more ardent or more virulent concentration; and the ultimate power of fiction to entertain him is by varying to his fancy the modes, and defining for his dullness the horrors, of Death. In the single novel of "Bleak House" there are nine deaths (or left for death's, in the drop scene) carefully wrought out or led up to, either by way of pleasing surprise, as the baby's at the brick-maker's, or finished in their threatenings ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... in Lesser Armenia, Pompey almost annihilated the army of Mithridates. The king fled from the field, and, after seeking in vain for a refuge in Asia Minor, sought an asylum beyond the Caucasus Mountains, whose bleak barriers interposed their friendly shield between him and his pursuers. Desisting from the pursuit, Pompey turned south and conquered Syria, Phoenicia, and Coele-Syria, which countries he erected into a Roman province. Still ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... the slow progress to the cemetery. It was a dull, cold day. Alvina shivered as she stood on the bleak hillside, by the open grave. Her coat did not seem warm enough, her old black seal-skin furs were not much protection. The minister stood on the plank by the grave, and she stood near, watching the white flowers blowing ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... rose, you and I, All in the summer weather; Sweet its perfume and rare its bloom, Enjoyed by us together. The rose is dead, the summer fled, And bleak winds are complaining; We dwell apart, but in each heart We find the ...
— The Kingdom of Love - and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... and sick. His head swam. There was a series of stabbing pains in his lacerated face. But he was of the sea, of that breed which survives by dint of fortitude, endurance, stoutness of arm and quickness of wit. He clawed to his feet. Almost before him lifted the bleak southern face of Squitty Island. Point Old jutted out like a barrier. MacRae swung on the tiller. But the wind had the mainsail in its teeth. Without control of that boom his rudder ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... full share of silly women—more's the pity—but there is not one who can hold a candle to the girl who trots about in the cold, bleak days of winter clad in summery undergarments fit only for the warm atmosphere of a baker's oven in August. So long as these exhibitions of utter absurdity continue we cannot consistently harp upon woman's recently acquired good sense in dress. It seems more and more the fad for ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans
... A scurry of rain: Bleak day from bleaker night Creeps pinched and fain; The old gloom thins and dies, And in the wretched skies A new gloom, sick to rise, Sprawls, like ...
— Hawthorn and Lavender - with Other Verses • William Ernest Henley
... atmosphere, and also, as regards the landscape, in a completely different country, which latter fact we only fully appreciated with the morning light, as we drew near to Pretoria. The stranger landing at Delagoa Bay, and travelling through those bleak and barren mountains, might well ask himself the reason of the late prolonged and costly war; but as he approaches the Rand, and suddenly sees the rows and rows of mining shafts and chimneys, which are the visible signs of the hidden ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... pleasant, or brightening the gloom of his infancy with any deceptive gleams of January sunshine. A bitter north wind made a dreary howling among the leafless trees, and swept across the broad bare fields with merciless force—a bleak cruel new-year's-day, on which to go out a-pleasuring; but it was more in harmony with Ellen Carley's thoughts than brighter weather could have been; and she went to and fro about her morning's work, up and down cold windy passages, and in ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... boyhood a shepherd, he has dwelt among the mountains of his native Wales, and his imagination has heard the voices that are in rocks and trees, in the silence of lonely places, in the desolation of the bleak hills, and in the cold light of distant stars. He is now a preacher, infatuated with his mission, inspired in his eloquence, invincible in his tremendous sincerity. He sees Vashti and he loves her. It is the first thrill of mortal passion that ever has mingled with his devotion to his ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... driven from Norway because they refused to submit to a king called Harold Fairhair, and when he pursued them to the Orkney and Faroe Islands they took refuge on the coasts of Iceland. There they settled, built themselves wooden houses, planted such crops as would grow in that bleak land, and founded a commonwealth. Little by little they left the old Viking life, and it lived only in their songs ...
— The Story of Sigurd the Volsung • William Morris
... on the scene of his exploit, rose early, rode fast, and by noon was plainly in the selvage of the great woods. The country was split into bleak ravines, a pell-mell of rocks and boulders, and a sturdy crop of black pines between them. An overgrowth of brambles and briony ran riot over all. Prosper rode up a dry river-bed, keeping steadily west, so far as it would serve him; found himself quagged ere a dozen ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... It was a bleak night in January, and intensely cold, when Mrs. Singleton wrapped a shawl about her head, and ran along the dark corridor to the cell, where Beryl was walking up and down to keep herself warm. Only the moonlight illumined it, as the rays fell on the bare floor, making a broad band of silver ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the true channel, until one of the boys, who had made a couple of trading trips up to the city, took it upon his own responsibility to read the buoys and landmarks as far as he knew them. Keeping the lead constantly going, we quietly jogged up the river with a stiff breeze; the country bleak and bare, a region of half-redeemed swamp and lagoon: being in smooth water, our party all turned out; stores were rummaged, and a good breakfast provided upon the deck of the boat so recently swept by the green seas: the past was forgotten, the sun shone out, and again ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... early on a cold morning the family set foot, scarcely clothed, not only in the city of which the young boy was to be one day the leading citizen, but on the very spot, it is said, where he was afterwards to base one pier of his great bridge. On that bleak morning, however, none of them foresaw a bright future, or indeed anything but a distressful present. Some ladies of the old French families of the town were very kind to the forlorn women; and once on her feet Mrs. Eads set about supporting herself and her children. In those days, ...
— James B. Eads • Louis How
... ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak); McDonald Islands ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Shalouf—and immediately prepared for the attack on the central positions. The chief of these was the place to which Samson carried the gates of Gaza: Ali Muntar—how familiar we were destined to be with that name!—a great, bleak rock, whose terraced slopes rose far above the rest and commanded a wide field of fire over the plains of Gaza. It was defended in its several tiers by machine-guns cunningly placed, concealed rifle pits, trenches protected by rows of cactus and prickly pear, the broad leaves of which ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett
... afforded but slight shelter, and after gazing fixedly at them for two or three minutes, he became convinced that the man was no longer there. As soon as he came to this conclusion he stood up and looked over the surrounding country. It was bleak and bare, and entirely destitute of hedges ...
— Through Russian Snows - A Story of Napoleon's Retreat from Moscow • G. A Henty
... 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 that the children heard with open eyes, and mouths only not open ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... place of remarkably wide streets and a number of well-built churches, not all of the Establishment, however. The solid old houses, consisting entirely of the local stone, are not uninteresting and are in keeping with the dour and bleak scenery of the island. The mistake of importing alien red bricks of a most aggressive hue has not been made here. Those that flame from the hill slope above Portland station only succeed in emphasizing the general bleakness ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... a troop For escort, pauses, if perchance he spy Vestige of somewhat strange and rare: so paus'd The sev'nfold band, arriving at the verge Of a dun umbrage hoar, such as is seen, Beneath green leaves and gloomy branches, oft To overbrow a bleak and alpine cliff. And, where they stood, before them, as it seem'd, Tigris and Euphrates both beheld, Forth from one fountain issue; and, like friends, Linger at parting. "O enlight'ning beam! O glory of our kind! beseech thee ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... an instant a tide of bitterness, of passionate regret, swept over him. He saw the Hatburns' house, a rectangular bleak structure crowning a gray prominence, with the tender green of young pole beans on one hand and a disorderly barn on the other, and a blue plume of smoke rising from an unsteady stone chimney against an end of the dwelling. No one ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... the end of October I started from Guachochic bound for the upper part of the great Barranca de San Carlos and the country southward as far as there were Tarahumares. Everything seemed bleak and dreary. The corn was harvested, the grass looked grey, and there was a wintry feeling in the air. The sere and withered leaves rustled like paper, and as I made camp near an Indian ranch I saw loose stubble and dead leaves carried up in a whirlwind, two or three ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... might know of that wild ride? Only the bleak Hill— The red Hill, vigilant, Like a blood-shot eye In the black mask of night— Dared watch them as they raced By each blind-folded street Godiva might have ridden down... But when they stopped beside the Place, I know he turned his face Wistfully ...
— The Ghetto and Other Poems • Lola Ridge
... whose souls nobody cares. They are utterly destitute of moral and religious teachings. No efforts have ever been made by Protestants for their salvation. If you fellows are looking, in earnest, for a hard job, there is one ready for you to tackle on those bleak prairies." ...
— Among the Sioux - A Story of the Twin Cities and the Two Dakotas • R. J. Creswell
... to crush him. He went as often as he thought he could without attracting the attention of Mr. Shrank or eliciting ponderous jocosities from the other workers. After several visits, however, he did begin to question himself. What drew him to that bleak refuge again and again? He was not aware of bladder irritation. He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make sense by itself? Or was there one reason hiding behind ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... this enrage thee not, How changed art thou from what thou wast on earth! On Russia's plains, so bleak and desolate, They died, the sons of Italy; Ah, well deserving of a better fate! In cruel war with men, with beasts, The elements! In heaps they strewed the ground; Half-clad, emaciated, stained with blood, A bed of ice for their sick frames they found. ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... gelid hands distil 160 In pearly mowers the parsimonious rill; And, as aloft the curling vapours rise Through the cleft roof, ambitious for the skies, In vaulted hills condense the tepid steams, And pour to HEALTH the medicated streams. 165 —So in green vales amid her mountains bleak BUXTONIA smiles, the Goddess-Nymyh of Peak; Deep in warm waves, and pebbly baths she dwells, And calls HYGEIA to her ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... had become darker, the storm more threatening. The wind blew in furious gusts over the dismal country, and an occasional rumbling of distant thunder filled the weary lads with dread. The road they had chosen was absolutely deserted. It lay through a bleak, scarcely habitable prairie, a landscape common enough in that part of Russia; and stones and brambles did much to retard their progress. There was not a place of shelter in sight. The outlook was sufficiently unpromising ...
— Rabbi and Priest - A Story • Milton Goldsmith
... of San Francisco Bay, where ships to and from the Orient were continually plying, there should rise an Oriental city. The idea had a special appeal in providing a reason for extensive color effects. The bay, in spite of the California sunshine, somewhat bleak, needed to be helped out with color. The use of color by the Orientals had abundantly justified itself as an integral part of architecture. The Greeks and the Romans had accepted it and applied it even in their statuary. It was, moreover, associated with those Spanish ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... near daybreak; the moon shone faintly in the dull, grey heaven; a small, vaporous rain was sinking from the shapeless clouds; the waning night showed bleak and cheerless to the earth, but cast no mournful or reproving influence over the Pagan's mind. He looked round on his solitary lurking place, and beheld no human figure in its lonely recesses. He ...
— Antonina • Wilkie Collins
... and propriety suggested such personal compliment as calling the Boyne a Tiber, and Halifax an improvement upon Virgil; while his heart was in the closing emphasis, also proper to the occasion, which dwelt on the liberty that gives their smile to the barren rocks and bleak mountains of Britannia's isle, while for Italy, rich in the unexhausted stores of nature, proud Oppression in her valleys reigns, and tyranny usurps her happy plains. Addison's were formal raptures, and he knew them to ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... where at least minorities of people had hoped for some nobler vision of the world's needs, and for some healing remedy for the evils which had massacred its youth. The League of Nations, which had seemed to promise so well, was hedged round by limitations which made it look bleak and barren. Still it was peace, and the rivers of blood had ceased to flow, and the men were coming home again... ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... with two or three gasps, she came to herself. Lake had been railing on all this time, and his voice, which, in ill-temper, was singularly bleak and terrible, was again in her ears the ...
— Wylder's Hand • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... questions about this or that. Beside the fire, in the chair that had once belonged to the master of the house, sat Micah Ward. He looked very old now and infirm. The months in a prison hulk in Belfast Lough and the long weariness of his confinement in bleak Fort George had set their mark upon him. On his knees lay a Greek lexicon, but he was pursuing no word through its pages. It was open at the fly-leaf inside the cover. He was reading lovingly for the hundredth time an ...
— The Northern Iron - 1907 • George A. Birmingham
... princesses of his own kith, whose brown cheeks blush with the blood of ancient Pharaohs and who exult with Babbulkund in her surpassing beauty, and who know nought of the desert or the jungle or the bleak hills to the north. Quite unadorned and clad in simple garments go all the kith of Nehemoth, for they know well that he grows weary of pomp. Unadorned all save one, the Princess Linderith, who weareth Ong Zwarba and the three lesser gems of the sea. Such a stone is Ong Zwarba that there are none ...
— Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsay • Lord Dunsany
... and a few frogs and buttons, so that Thackeray himself should hardly recognise him. And then of a sudden there came to me memories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, and had spent long nights walking and talking with, upon a very desolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth of an extraordinary moral simplicity—almost vacancy; plastic to any influence, the creature of his admirations: and putting such a youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to me that he would serve ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to Farmer Sinclair's; they had often remarked him, but could give me no other information. I then proceeded towards the coast; there was a small public house belonging to Sir Lionel close by the sea shore; never had I seen a more bleak and dreary prospect than that which stretched for miles around this miserable cabaret. How an innkeeper could live there is a mystery to me at this day—I should have imagined it a spot upon which anything but a sea-gull or a ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... was in the mind of Mr. Alexander when he turned from his library, and, drawing on his overcoat, passed forth to the street. It was a bleak winter morning, and the muffled pedestrians hurried ...
— Lessons in Life, For All Who Will Read Them • T. S. Arthur
... way to a dim shop, where three golden balls hung to an iron bracket at the door, to show that a pawnbroker's business was carried on within. It was not the first visit she had made to this establishment, for the poor little household ornaments, the loss of which had left her home so bleak and bare, were now in the safekeeping of the proprietor; but still she shrank back as she approached a dim side entrance in a narrow street, and drawing her bonnet closer over her face, pushed open a ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... to-night. She thought he had been detained over-time at the harbor, but she was not anxious. He would come straight home to her as soon as his business was completed—of that she felt sure. Her thoughts went out along the bleak harbor road to meet him. She could see him plainly, coming with his free stride through the sandy hollows and over the windy hills, in the harsh, cold light of that forbidding sunset, strong and handsome in his comely youth, with her own deeply cleft chin and his father's dark gray, ...
— Further Chronicles of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... before we need give it a thought," said Hester. She had been reared along the river and had no fear of it. She loved it in any form it could assume—tranquil and quiet—frozen and white—rolling and bleak and sullen. In every form, she recognized only the beautiful and ...
— Hester's Counterpart - A Story of Boarding School Life • Jean K. Baird
... prospects (so no graveyard be in the background), and also after Sweden-borganism, and the Spirit Rapping philosophy, with other new views, alike in things natural and unnatural; and immortally hopeful, is forever making new flower-beds even on the north side of the house where the bleak mountain wind would scarce allow the wiry weed called hard-hack to gain a thorough footing; and on the road-side sets out mere pipe-stems of young elms; though there is no hope of any shade from them, except over the ruins of her great granddaughter's gravestones; and won't ...
— I and My Chimney • Herman Melville
... brief visit. His companions were the frost, the fluttering snowflake, the stinging hail. For music, instead of the soft notes of a shepherd's pipe under blue Italian or Grecian skies, he listened to the north wind whistling among the bare branches, or to the roar of an angry northern sea upon the bleak coast. ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck
... the air, in the glint of his eyes, in the leaping of her heart. And she knew what she would say to him, and what they would say to the world a few hours hence. The mountains seemed to have lost their splendid frown; they were beaming down upon her, tenderly caressing instead of bleak and foreboding as they ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon
... while yonder, like a jewel on the cusp of a horn, Porto Venere shines; and farther still, Lerici in the shadow of the hills washed by the sea, stained by the blood of the sunset, its great castle seeming like some splendid ship in the midst of the waters. From the bleak height of La Foce, whence all the woods seem to have run down to the shore, slowly one by one the lights of the city appear like great golden night flowers; soon they are answered from the bay, where the ships lie solemnly, sleepily at anchor, and at last the ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... mountain range (the Sierra Guadarrama) and a river (the Ebro) as the natural boundary line of the two territories. The Moor was a child of the sun. If the stubborn Goth chose to sulk, up among the chilly heights and on the bleak plains of the north, he might do so, and it was little matter if one Alfonso called himself "King of the Asturians," in that mountain-defended and sea-girt province. The fertile plains of Andalusia, and the banks of the Tagus and Guadalquivir, were ...
— A Short History of Spain • Mary Platt Parmele
... her rights, and change her name to "penalty for transgression." The law is no enemy, but the friend of liberty. The world and the planets move by law. Disregarding the law by which they move, they would become wanderers in the bleak darkness forever. ...
— The Story of Cole Younger, by Himself • Cole Younger
... her pity was so vast that she sickened under its weight. She had come prepared to see him die, as all men do when they have lived out their time, but she had not counted on seeing him die like this, with suffering in his bleak old eyes and a smile of derision ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... traveling; I was but lightly clothed, and of this I felt the inconvenience the more I advanced northeast. What must not a poor old man have suffered in that severe weather and climate, whom I saw on a bleak common in Poland, lying on the road, helpless, shivering, and hardly having wherewithal to cover his nakedness? I pitied the poor soul; though I felt the severity of the air myself, I threw my mantle over him, and immediately ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... such a time. One bright day in early winter Honora, returning from her walk across the bleak plains in the hope of letters, found newspapers and periodicals instead, addressed in an unknown hand. It matters not whose hand: Honora never sought to know. She had long regarded as inevitable this acutest phase of her martyrdom, and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the true reply to his question and burst spontaneously from her lips. Her first swift suspicion when she had seen the bulk of him framed against the bleak night had been quite natural. But now that she had marked the man's carriage and had seen his face and looked for one instant deep into his clear eyes, she set her conjecture aside as an absurdity. It was not so much that her reason had risen to demand ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... sweltering patches of sand and gravelly soil, and sparse, harsh brush. She turned and looked back toward the sweep of Desert Valley; there she saw green fields, trees, grazing stock. It was like the Promised Land compared with this bleak desolate spot her father had chosen. She turned to him, words of expostulation forming. But his eyes were bright, his look triumphant. He had already dismounted and was poking about here and there, ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... changed. He had taken on, merely in his physical aspect, a new quality: he seemed taller than formerly, and older. Amid all his tasks he moved with a sort of feline restlessness. He took to prowling at night, round and round the bleak garden. The robed figure paced the paths with an effect of stealing carefully toward an enemy. In the light from a window his fine profile appeared for an instant like a presentment of vengeance—with something sensual in its look ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... of the 17th century; and towards the period of the Revolution, the last proprietor of Ravenswood Castle saw himself compelled to part with the ancient family seat, and to remove himself to a lonely and sea-beaten tower, which, situated on the bleak shores between St. Abb's Head and the village of Eyemouth, looked out on the lonely and boisterous German Ocean. A black domain of wild pasture-land surrounded their new residence, and formed the ...
— Bride of Lammermoor • Sir Walter Scott
... never at the perilous behest Of noble knighthood,—but the love of life, Compassion, and soul-sickness of the strife. "If any be that loved him!" Oh, to die Far from green-swarded Camelot, and lie Among these bleak and barren hills alone, His end unwept for and his grave unknown,— Never again to see the glad sunrise That brightened all his ...
— Gawayne And The Green Knight - A Fairy Tale • Charlton Miner Lewis
... gently for two days; and a white sheet of it, at least three inches deep, covered the ground on the morning of the 5th. The weather had changed during the night, and now the air was sharp and cold. Dark, bleak clouds hung along the horizon in the northeast, the distant hills stood out sharp and cold, and a chilling wind whispered and sighed through the leafless trees. Then the wind grew stronger and stronger, the snow fell thicker and ...
— The Von Toodleburgs - Or, The History of a Very Distinguished Family • F. Colburn Adams
... Hindostan; but make a low grunting noise, scarcely audible, and that but seldom, when under some impression of uneasiness. These cattle are pastured in the coldest part of Tibet, upon short herbage, peculiar to the tops of mountains and bleak plains. That chain of lofty mountains situated between lat. 27 deg. and 28 deg., which divides Tibet from Bootan, and whose summits are most commonly covered with snow, is their favourite haunt. In this vicinity the Southern glens afford them food and shelter ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... vigils, her fastings, the wearying abnegations of her stern, hard life had left her little strength for struggling against the disease when it laid hold of her at last, and so she too died in her cell one cold, bleak March morning, with a hushed sisterhood gathered round her death- bed, and gazing on it, as on that of a departing saint. Little beloved, but much revered, Therese Linders also had got that she had laboured for, and was now gone to prove the worth of it; that which ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... of us see it from the deck, and it did look good. I once saw the flat, bleak Atlantic coast of Patagonia after ten days at sea, and the high iron wintry coast of Newfoundland after another period at sea, and I clearly recall that even they both looked like fine countries. And the coast of France was neither bleak nor icy, so you may guess that it was a pleasing sight ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... going to have a regular old-fashioned snowstorm," said Captain Nutter, one bleak December morning, casting a peculiarly ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... pounded through the Cattegat, swung southward through the Skagerrack and the bleak North Sea. But the storm pursued her. The big waves snarled and bit at her, and the captain and the chief officer consulted with each other. They decided to run into the Thames, and the harried steamer nosed her way in ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... robe, less Oppressive than an emperor's jewelled purple. But, here! the despots of the north appear To imitate the ice-wind of their clime, 720 Searching the shivering vassal through his rags, To wring his soul—as the bleak elements His form. And 'tis to be amongst these sovereigns My husband pants! and such his pride of birth— That twenty years of usage, such as no Father born in a humble state could nerve His soul to persecute a son withal, Hath changed no atom ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... events intervening between this moment and that when death called to us out of the night, I have the haziest recollections. An excellent dinner was served in the bleak and gloomy dining-room by the mulatto, and the crippled author was carried to the head of the table by this same Herculean attendant, as lightly as though he had but ...
— The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... over the Wey runs between double ribands of water; on one side lies the sunny, slow canal, edged with iris and forget-me-nots, and banked up higher than the road; on the other, a shady stream, dun and bleak-haunted. Before the road turns into Addlestone there is a field-path, breaking off at right angles, which leads to a wooden bridge crossing the clear, brown little Bourne, and beyond the bridge lies Chertsey Mead, one huge hayfield, ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... agreeably to his instructions from the American Secretary at War, with the view of depriving the British army of comfortable winter quarters. He was indeed ordered to lay waste the country as he retreated, if retreat became necessary. It was on the 10th of December, a bleak, cold winter day, that McClure fulfilled his instructions. One hundred and fifty houses, composing the flourishing village of Newark, were reduced to ashes, and four hundred women and children were left to wander in the snow or seek the temporary ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger
... singer of the highlands is the horned lark. One morning in June a lively carriage party passing along the mountain side, on a road so bare and bleak that it seemed nothing could live there, was startled by a small gray bird, who suddenly dashed out of the sand beside the wheels, ran across the path, and flew to a fence on the other side. Undisturbed, perhaps even stimulated, by the clatter of two horses and a rattling mountain ...
— A Bird-Lover in the West • Olive Thorne Miller
... any place on earth where a man is justified in being mean, it is in Butte. It is a mining camp. It rests upon bleak, barren hills; the sulphuric fumes, arising from roasting ores, have long since killed out all vegetation. It has not even a sprig of grass. This smoke, also laden with arsenic, sometimes hovers over Butte like a London fog. More wealth is every year dug out of the earth in Butte, and more ...
— Tales of the Road • Charles N. Crewdson
... full hour and a half before his friend would return to business. What should he do? The Verein where he had once been entertained was deserted even by its waiters; the garden, with its ostentatious out-of-door tables, looked bleak and bare. Mr. Clinch was not artistic in his tastes; but even he was quick to detect the affront put upon Nature by this continental, theatrical gardening, and turned disgustedly away. Born near a "lake" larger than the German Ocean, ...
— The Twins of Table Mountain and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... believe the latter, in consequence of some quarrel between me and my brother, in the first week in October, I ran away from fear of being whipped, and passed the whole night, a night of rain and storm, on the bleak side of a hill on the Otter, and was there found at daybreak, without the power of using my limbs, about six yards from the naked bank ...
— The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - 1838 • James Gillman
... utter disillusion for her. The great house on the Avenue proved to be but four bleak walls; and when the villa on Long Island was built, she tried to be as enthusiastic as Morgan wanted her to be. He lavished gifts upon her. He brought out gay house-parties for weekends. Lucia did her best to keep her part of a bad bargain. She made herself lovely, and ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... black and clear and vitreous on the forest pools. The clods on the ploughed field, the broken hillocks in the pasture, the ruts of the winding backwoods road, were hard as iron and rang under the travelling hoof. The silent, naked woods, moved only by the bleak wind drawing through them from the north, seemed as if life had ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... their striking dissimilarity, both in dress and manners. Truth was clad in garments of the plainest material and finish, while Error was decked in costly robes and jewels. The step of the former was firm and slow, while that of the latter was rapid and nervous. The bleak winds penetrated their forms as they turned a sharp angle in the road, when there was revealed to them, on an eminence, ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... the thirteenth century Genghis Khan, the great Mongol, born in the bleak Hsing-an Mountains, gathered together all the restless bands of Mongolia, and sweeping down on Peking drove out the Kins and established the purely Mongol dynasty of the Yuan. Up till then Peking had consisted of what is to-day the Chinese city, or the older outer city. Kublai Khan, Genghis's ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... Augustine had taken his mackintosh. He was very forgetful about such things. She went out to look into the bleak, stone hall hung with old hunting prints that were dimmed and spotted with age and damp. Yes, it was gone from its place, and his ulster, too. It had been a considered, not a hasty departure. A tweed cloak that he often wore on their walks hung there still and, vaguely, as though she sought ...
— Amabel Channice • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... up and beyond Barley. He saw the dark outline of the bleak, wet goal posts, saw the tense faces of the Canton team ... then his ...
— Over the Line • Harold M. Sherman
... background, and not without solicitude for the future of his favorite humanistic studies—a solicitude, some will think, only too well justified. "Cambridge at all times is full of ghosts," said Emerson. But no ghost from the past, flitting along the Old Road from Elmwood to the Yard, and haunting the bleak lecture-rooms where it had recited as a careless boy and taught wearily as a man, could wear a more quizzical and friendly aspect than Lowell's. He commonly spoke of his life as a professor with whimsical disparagement, as Henry Adams wrote of his own teaching with a somewhat cynical disparagement. ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... over the sky, That the faint coming breeze would be fair for our flight, And shall steal us away, ere the falling of night. Dear Douglas! thou knowest, with thee by my side, With thy friendship to soothe me, thy courage to guide, There is not a bleak isle in those summerless seas, Where the day comes in darkness, or shines but to freeze, Not a tract of the line, not a barbarous shore, That I could not with patience, with pleasure explore! Oh think then how gladly I follow thee now, When Hope smooths the billowy path of our ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Switzerland. I could not LIVE in Switzerland. It does me good to go there, to be iced and baked and washed clean with pure air. But the terrible mountains, so cold and unchanged, with their immemorial patience, their frozen tranquillity; the high hamlets, perched on their lonely shelves; the bleak pine-trees, with their indomitable strength—all these depress me. Of course there is much homely beauty among the lower slopes; the thickets, the falling streams, the flowers. But the grim black peaks ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to which yet clung a number of brown leaves. Truelove sat down, drawing her cloak about her, for, though the sun shone, the air was keen. MacLean took off his coat, and kneeling put it beneath her feet. He laughed at her protest. "Why, these winds are not bleak!" he said. "This land knows no true and honest cold. In my country, night after night have I lain in snow with only my plaid for cover, and heard the spirits call in the icy wind, the kelpie shriek beneath the frozen ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... two afterwards, and we are surprised to find that the farmer is safely housed, and that he has not been robbed upon a bleak moor on a dark stage. But we soon feel a sensation of awe, when we learn that before us is the interior of the very farm-house that is going to be murdered. The farmer and his wife go through the long-standing dialogue of stage-stereotype, about love and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... soft light and looked across to the dark mass of the chapel opposite and saw that a dim light was still burning from the window by the organ loft. And as I stood and looked, the empty place that I had felt in the very center of my heart grew colder and more bleak until suddenly across the garden on perfumed waves of sound came the Tristan love song and filled my emptiness with a pain that was both hot and cold. I stood and let the flood dash over me as long as I could and then with ...
— The Heart's Kingdom • Maria Thompson Daviess
... know the rapture of his kiss, the exquisite security of his enfolding arm. The To-come was before her—bleak, grey and bereft; the roseate hues of love's delight lay all in the Gone-by. Her love was of no avail. It had fluttered back to her, ...
— East of the Shadows • Mrs. Hubert Barclay
... was slow, difficult, and intensely painful to the Irish, for Connaught was bleak, sterile, and desolate, and the weather was inclement. The natural protectors of many families had been killed or banished, and the women and children clung with frantic fondness to their old homes. But for the feelings ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin
... behind a bank of grey clouds, the northeast wind came whistling insistently through the trees:—even that feeling of spring in the air had vanished. It was just a bleak grey winter's day now. Crystal felt herself shivering with cold. She drew her shawl more closely round her shoulders, then with eyes still wet with tears, but small head held well erect, she rose to her feet and walked rapidly ...
— The Bronze Eagle - A Story of the Hundred Days • Emmuska Orczy, Baroness Orczy
... sweep the sky clean; Sweep the house fronts, And leave them bleak in sleep. High up the empty moon Spills ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... and sleeping mist gradually awakens; the sighing and howling of the bleak winds are heard above; the vapor palpitates in the first rays of the coming sun, and a drifting ice-floe of curdling clouds drives wildly o'er this quickening sea of fog ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... can be relied upon. And, what is very unpleasant, is the conduct of the Spaniards, who are striving for power here." On 11th November O'Hara reported that, in the absence of engineer officers, the forts had been injudiciously constructed; that their garrisons began to suffer from exposure to the bleak weather; that the broken and wooded country greatly favoured the advance of the enemy, and hampered all efforts to dislodge him; that the Spaniards and Sardinians had no artillery, tools, or camp equipments; and that the only means of securing Toulon was to have an army ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... old when the change came in my life. I remember the day was cold and bleak, an early spring day. My father had had an accident a few days before. In one of his unconscious fits he had fallen forward—I had left the room but for a moment—and struck his head sharply against one of the fire-irons. ...
— Rosin the Beau • Laura Elizabeth Howe Richards
... field with a solitary divine reading his breviary. The drive turned and turned again in great sloping curves; more divines were passed, and then there came a terrace with a balustrade and a view of the open country. The high red walls of the college faced bleak terraces: a square tower squatted in the middle of the building, and out of it rose the octagon of the bell-tower, and in the tower wall was the great oak door studded with ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... snow—the small bitter sifting snow that, encountered on the hill, stings like the ant and drifts in monstrous and impassable wreaths. Round about us yawned the glens, to me nameless, mysterious, choked to the throat with snow-mist that flapped and shook like grey rags. The fields were bleak and empty; the few houses that lay in the melancholy plain were on no particularly friendly terms with this convocation of Erse-men and wild kerns: they shut their doors steadfastly on our doings, and gave us not even ...
— John Splendid - The Tale of a Poor Gentleman, and the Little Wars of Lorn • Neil Munro
... tender recollection. After wandering for several hours in the thickest mist upon this Novembry heath, and what by moorish ground—what by the dripping atmosphere being thoroughly soaked, and stiffening with cold, the author and Mr. Vanley discovered on a declivity of the bleak Mount Patrick a solitary hovel. It stood apart from all houses or dwellings; and even the shepherd on this particular night had stolen away (probably on a love-tryst): however, if the shepherd was gone, his sheep were not: and we ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... prismatic hues, and fear the pure white light, even if it is in me, but I am going to try; so it will be no small comfort to have your company just now, seeing that when you have your men and women aforesaid, you are busied with them, whereas it seems bleak, melancholy work, this talking to the wind (for I have begun)—yet I don't think I shall let you hear, after all, the savage things about Popes and imaginative religions that I ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... scaled the peak and found no shelter in fame's bleak and barren height. Lead me, my Guide, before the light fades, into the valley of quiet where life's ...
— Stray Birds • Rabindranath Tagore
... over an unknown road; He himself has trodden it before. He hath drunk of every "brook by the way;" He himself hath "suffered being tempted;" He is "able to succour them that are tempted." He seems to say, "Fear not; I cannot lead you wrong; follow me in the bleak waste, the blackened wilderness, as well as by the green pastures and the still waters. Do you ask why I have left the sunny side of the valley—carpeted with flowers, and bathed in sunshine—leading you to some high mountain apart, some cheerless spot of sorrow? Trust me, I will lead ...
— The Words of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... in at the open gate, hitched his horse in a warm corner by the kitchen door, and then stopped for a moment to enjoy the view. The situation of the little house, half a mile from any other, was beautiful in summer, but it was bleak enough in winter. In the small front dooryard stood three lofty, wind-blown poplars, all heading away from the sea, and between them you could look down the bay or across the salt-marshes, while in the opposite direction were to be seen the roofs and the glittering ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 6 • Various
... how cheerless looked the earth when first I came above it, so dull and black, save where a few snowflakes had been drifted by the wintry winds; all else was bleak and bare. There was not a gleam of sunshine athwart the leaden sky to cheer us, nor a bird to meet us with a friendly greeting, for even the robins kept so near the houses for warmth and shelter, they came not to the spot where we grew, alone ...
— Parables from Flowers • Gertrude P. Dyer
... fishing-village in Picardy, to the town of St. Valery-sur-Somme. It was in the month of February, and one of those luckless days on which cold, wind and rain all seem banded in league against the comfort of mankind: the sky, dull and lowering, presented to the eye nothing but a bleak, cheerless desert of gray, relieved only by troops of dark, inky clouds, which would at moments, as though flying the fury of a raging storm, roll pell-mell through the air like an army in rout, pouring down at the same time through the thick, black fog that covered ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 90, June, 1875 • Various
... children, they decided not to remain there. They then bade farewell to all that was near and dear to them in the old country and started across the ocean to America—the new land. After a voyage of two months, they reached the bleak, rocky coast of Massachusetts, and they knew that if they could come ashore safely, they could here worship God just as they ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... to quit the scenes of their short lived felicity, they bade a hasty adieu to the now fading beauties of Windermere; and, full of hope and expectation, eagerly turned towards the bleak hills of Scotland. They stopped for a short time at Edinburgh, to provide themselves with a carriage, and some other necessaries. There, too, she fortunately met with an English Abigail and footman, who, for double wages, were prevailed upon to ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the hotel, but the hillsides are for the most part bare and green. Piora in fact is a fine breezy open upland valley of singular beauty, and with a sweet atmosphere of cow about it; it is rich in rhododendrons and all manner of Alpine flowers, just a trifle bleak, but as ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... sleep severed his thoughts into fragments of horrible dreams. The next day he felt differently; Waymark's advice seemed more practical. In the afternoon he should have visited Harriet in the ward, but an insuperable repulsion kept him away, and for the first time. It was a bleak, cheerless day; the air was cold with the breath of the nearing winter; At night he found it impossible to sit in his own room, and dreaded to talk with any one. His thoughts were fixed upon one place; a great longing drew him forth, ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... Then the "Bertha Millner" caught the wind again and lay over quietly and contentedly to her work. The next tack brought the schooner close under Alcatraz. The sea became heavier, the breeze grew stiff and smelled of the outside ocean. Out beyond them to westward opened the Golden Gate, a bleak vista of gray-green ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... to decide. Yes, you can detain me. If I go to that bleak and barren desert, it will merely be to court exile from that quarter of the globe in which you and I would have to live together and not separate. That I cannot stand. In Kamtchatka—Well, there is no knowing what ...
— Mr. Scarborough's Family • Anthony Trollope
... me go. I sail for the bleak North, for the peace of the frozen shore. Your laughter is untimely, my friends. You turn my farewell tunes into the welcome song of the Newcomer, And all things draw me back again into the ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore
... sunbeams may be taught to dance. If not in written form exprest, 'Twas known at least to every guest, That, tho' not bidden to parade Their scenic powers in masquerade, (A pastime little found to thrive In the bleak fog of England's skies, Where wit's the thing we best contrive, As masqueraders, to disguise,) It yet was hoped-and well that hope Was answered by the young and gay— That in the toilet's task to-day Fancy should take her wildest scope;— That the rapt milliner should ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... an afternoon of bleak, early spring, Evelyn wandered alone on the shore where she had bidden Jim Willowby farewell. It was raining, and the sea was grey and desolate. The tide was coming in with a fierce roaring that seemed to fill the ...
— The Swindler and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... the color flushed through his tan. "Why, you are like nothing in the world but a certain Alaska violet I once stumbled on. It was out of season, on a bleak mountainside, where, at the close of a miserable day, I was forced to make camp. A little thing stimulates a man sometimes, and the sight of that flower blooming there when violet time was gone, lifting its head next to a snow-field, nodding ...
— The Rim of the Desert • Ada Woodruff Anderson
... the heavy snows of a recent winter, a child harper trudged wearily down the Fifth avenue, on his way to the Five Points, where he was to pass the night. It was intensely cold, and the little fellow's strength was so exhausted by fatigue and the bleak night wind that he staggered under the weight of his harp. At length he sat down on the steps of a splendid mansion to rest himself. The house was brilliantly lighted, and he looked around timidly as he seated himself, expecting the usual command to move off. No one noticed him, however, ...
— Lights and Shadows of New York Life - or, the Sights and Sensations of the Great City • James D. McCabe
... high up against its white and ghastly crest, howling and shrieking forever. Just opposite the promontory upon whose apex we were placed, and at 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... misery. What that meant I could not tell. Were we not away from such things as mouldering flesh and broken bones? It seemed not; and I climbed madly away from them. Quite suddenly I came to the top, a bleak platform of rock, where I fell prostrate on my ...
— The Child of the Dawn • Arthur Christopher Benson
... times when the weather was bad, and the whole settlement would sink into melancholia. These people were on the bleak hillside, facing the sea. Back of them, hedging them close, was the forest, dim, dark and mysterious. In this wood were bears, wolves, panthers, which in Winter, lured by the smell of food, would occasionally enter the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... and his sister Sue were now going farther down into the sunny South. They had left far behind the bleak and cold of the North where there was ice and snow when they had come away. In Georgia they had found soft winds and balmy skies, but now, as they were headed into Florida, they were to find it ...
— Bunny Brown and His Sister Sue in the Sunny South • Laura Lee Hope
... backs of horses; but the horses perished from famine and from excessive labour. The men were too few, too weak, too destitute of the helpful ways of English sailors, to assist in providing for themselves. Thus penned up on the bleak promontory, cholera-stricken, mocked rather than sustained during their benumbing toil with rations of uncooked meat and green coffee-berries, the British soldiery wasted away. Their effective force ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... is of the kind that remains in the memory for a long time and is of a quality as moving in its sadness as anything MacDowell ever composed. Its suggested scene seems to be the bleak and icy winter ...
— Edward MacDowell • John F. Porte
... value of its own, and answers to some special requirement in its proper season under glass or in the open ground. In the darkest winter days we prize the glow of Tulips and Hyacinths for brightening our homes. And bleak days are not all past when Aconites and Snowdrops sparkle in beds and borders. The Anemones follow in March, and during the lengthening days of spring there are sumptuous beds of Hyacinths, Narcissi, and Tulips. When high summer begins to decline we have stately groups of Gladioli and many ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... It was bleak and drear. A raw, angry wind came out of the north and went raging through the woods, tearing the pretty clothing of the trees to pieces and rudely hurling the dust of the street in one's face. The sun got behind the clouds and in grief and dismay hid his ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington
... in a bleak house on the edge of a wild, lonely moor," began Migwan. "All winter long the storms howl around the house like angry spirits of the air. To amuse themselves in these long winter evenings this girl and her sisters make up stories about the ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... streamers of the aurora, which went racing swiftly back and forth along the northern horizon. Even when the sun rose, huge and fiery, in a haze of frozen moisture at the south, it did not seem to infuse any warmth or life into the bleak wintry landscape. It only drowned, in a dull red glare, the blue, tremulous streamers of the aurora and the white radiance of the moon and stars, tinged the snow with a faint colour like a stormy sunset, and lighted up a splendid mirage ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... he has discerned, I noted not whither I had strayed until a sudden chill wind striking my face revived in me a sense of my surroundings. I observed with astonishment that everything seemed unfamiliar. On every side of me stretched a bleak and desolate expanse of plain, covered with a tall overgrowth of sere grass, which rustled and whistled in the autumn wind with heaven knows what mysterious and disquieting suggestion. Protruded at long intervals above it, stood strangely shaped and somber-colored rocks, ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... in Jerusalem, Greeting to Caius, his best friend in Rome! Salve! these presents will he borne to you By Lucius, who is wearied with this place, Sated with travel, looks upon the East As simply hateful—blazing, barren, bleak, And longs again to find himself in Rome, After the tumult of its streets, its trains Of slaves and clients, and its villas cool With marble porticoes beside the sea, And friends and banquets—more than all, its games— This life seems blank and flat. ...
— A Roman Lawyer in Jerusalem - First Century • W. W. Story
... was not fully known until after his departure from France. Then people saw, at last, where all the golden schemes that had flooded upon popular credulity had borne us;—not to the smiling and fertile shores of Prosperity and Confidence, as may be imagined; but to the bleak rocks and dangerous sands of Ruin and Mistrust, where dull clouds obscure the sky, and where there is no ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... the scene. The Sandhills lying to the north of Deal are before us, and the shadows of night are beginning to deepen over the bleak expanse of downs. A fortnight has ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... Three bleak, pinched days later the army again took the road to Romney. Four miles from Unger's they began to climb Sleepy Creek Mountain, mounting the great, sparsely wooded slope like a long line of warrior ants. To either hand the view was very fine, North Mountain to the left, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... seen the bleak moon-like landscape through the viewports. They were eager to get out there and plant the flag of Earth and determine what the new world was like. There were only eight of them in the first landing party: others would follow once the ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... close to the churchyard when she spoke. The church, a dreary building of grey stone, was situated in a little valley, so as to be sheltered from the bleak winds blowing over the moorland all round it. The burial-ground advanced, from the side of the church, a little way up the slope of the hill. It was surrounded by a rough, low stone wall, and was bare and open to the sky, except at one extremity, ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... of the Ghetto was still upon her, blent with a passion of martyrdom that made her yearn for a lower social depth than was really necessary. But the more human aspects of the situation were paramount in the gray chillness of a bleak May dawn. Her resolution to cross the Atlantic forthwith seemed a little hasty, and though she did not flinch from it, she was not sorry to remember that she had not money enough for the journey. She must perforce stay in London till she had earned it; meantime she ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... when all without was bleak and stormy and all within were blithe and gay,—when song and story made the circuit of the festive board, filling up the chasms of ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... weariness and discomfort for her guests in wide, unlimited prospects of sun-scorched earth. She marked the gray valley and the black mountains and the wide, red gateway of the desert, and the dim, shadowy peaks, blue as the sky they pierced. She was sorry when the bleak, gnarled cedar-trees shut ...
— The Light of Western Stars • Zane Grey
... Sir Walter Raleigh had the materials, at the Tower, to write a history; Lafayette, at Olmutz, lived in perpetual expectancy of release; Moore and Byron, children, flowers, birds, and the Muses cheered Leigh Hunt's year of durance: but in this bleak fortress, innocent and magnanimous men beheld the seasons come and go, night succeed day, and year follow year, with no cognizance of kindred or the world's doings,—no works of bard or sage,—no element of life,—but a grim, cold, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various
... caught his arm in a stony grip. Hours seemed to pass—the pain was past enduring; then the kindly cleft yawned once more, allowing him to jump into the garden below. Simultaneously he heard a crash as the inner rooms of the house fell; then climbed aloft, and for four days wandered among the bleak, wet hills. Thousands were ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... and the sunset, like a dome Against the glory of a world on fire, Now burned a sudden hill, Bleak, round, and high, by flame-lit height made higher, With nothing on it for the flame to kill Save one who moved and was alone up there To loom before the chaos and the glare As if he were the last god going home Unto his last desire. Dark, marvelous, ...
— The Man Against the Sky • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... been here that has swept away all difficulties before it and clothed the very rocks with verdure. It would be a disgrace to common sense to ask the cause; the enjoyment of property must have done it. Give a man the sure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden." The italics are my own. When will Arthur Young have his tablet in Westminster ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... Nicholas Nickleby. Martin Chuzzlewit. The Old Curiosity Shop. Barnaby Rudge. Dombey and Son. Christmas Books. Sketches by Boz. David Copperfield. American Notes and Pictures from Italy. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Bleak House. ...
— The Pirate and The Three Cutters • Frederick Marryat
... uninhabited. I could fancy that all this was newly-sprung vegetation. This asteroid had whirled in from the cold of the interplanetary space far outside our Solar System. A few years ago—as time might be measured astronomically, it was no more than yesterday—this fair landscape was congealed white and bleak, with a sweep of glacial ice. But the seeds of life miraculously were here. The miracle of life! Under the warming, germinating sunlight, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... the flickering mirage the familiar forms of the Tihmah range, a ridge now broken into half a dozen blocks. I had ordered the caravan to march upon the Tuwayl el-Sk; but, after one hour and fifteen minutes, we found the tents pitched some three miles short of it, on a bleak and ugly wave of the Wghir. The Shaykhs swore, by all holy things, that this was the veritable Tuwayl; and a Bedawi, who declared that he knew where water lay in the neighbourhood, refused ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 2 • Richard Burton
... gulf, but there was a drawbridge in one place and this the Royal Gardener let down until the outcasts had passed over it. Then he drew it up again and returned with his Roses to the greenhouse, leaving the four queerly assorted comrades to wander into the bleak and unknown country ...
— Tik-Tok of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... of Indian summer and then a drenching rain from the east, which stopped chopping. A black frost today, dark and bleak. Had a letter from Gordon yesterday, who is happy in learning so much that is new to him. He was at Bambray's for dinner last Sabbath and spent an evening at Dunlop's. He will make friends wherever ...
— The Narrative of Gordon Sellar Who Emigrated to Canada in 1825 • Gordon Sellar
... day, instead of not at all, I'd forgive you everything, but such a supplication. Kiss me again, Puss. There! Prospective and retrospective - a clear score between us. Pile up the fire here! Would you freeze the people on this bleak December night! Let us be light, and warm, and merry, or I'll not ...
— The Battle of Life • Charles Dickens
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