"Bareness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... dream. She seemed to see her lover sitting as he always sat, in a round-backed chair, in the dark hall—sitting low, with the receiver at his ear, talking in a gentle, slow voice, that he reserved for the telephone—and saving the world and her, in the black darkness. She moved her hand over the bareness of the base of her throat, to have the warmth of flesh upon it and upon ...
— The Good Soldier • Ford Madox Ford
... sweetness,—from what paradise he never stopped his studies to inquire. He was like a great, rugged elm, with all its lacings and archings of boughs and twigs, which has stood cold and frozen against the metallic blue of winter sky, forgetful of leaves, and patient in its bareness, calmly content in its naked strength and crystalline definiteness of outline. But in April there is a rising and stirring within the grand old monster,—a whispering of knotted buds, a mounting of sap coursing ethereally from bough to bough with ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... of this ultimate chamber— Or innermost, rather? If I see it clearly It is the last, and cunningest, resort Of one who has found this world of dust and flesh,— This world of lamentations, death, injustice, Sickness, humiliation, slow defeat, Bareness, and ugliness, and iteration,— Too meaningless; or, if it has a meaning, Too tiresomely insistent ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... noisily over the rough road, and, a good deal inspired by it, Mrs. Sprague began to take something like interest in the melancholy country that flew past the window, as if seeking a place to hide its bareness in the blue line of uplands that ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... so you serve us, Till we serve you: but when you have our roses, You barely leave our thorns to prick ourselves, And mock us with our bareness. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851 • Various
... doubt that, during the Dark Ages, hangings woven and embroidered continued to be the custom throughout Europe. Our own Anglo-Saxon records prove that such furnishings were employed to mitigate the cold bareness of our northern homes from the earliest times. Sir G. Dasent informs me that in Icelandic Sagas, as early as the eleventh century, there are frequent notices of hangings both in churches and in the halls of houses; such, for instance, ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... testimony is needful also in cross-examination. Not only children and slow-witted folk, but also bright persons often answer only "yes'' and "no,''[1] and these bare answers demand a patience most necessary with just this bareness, if the answers are to be pursued for some time and consecutively. The danger of impatience is the more obvious inasmuch as everyone recognizes more or less clearly that he is likely to set the reserved witness suggestive questions and so to learn things that the witness ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... one on first entering a Japanese dwelling is the extreme cleanliness, the white and chilling bareness of the rooms. ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... hill of cattle), sacred now to rabbits and hares and any other small game that can shelter on its bald sides. Up hill and down hill, between hills and around hills, mountains of every shape and degree of bareness and baldness looking down at us over one another's shoulders as we drove along. An ambitious little peasant clung on behind with his hands, his little bare feet thudding on the smooth road and over the loose layer of sharp stones that lay edge upwards ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... lived, from all human ken, yet written down—in thirty or forty volumes!—for his own discipline and remembrance, can now be read, thanks to his biographers, in the pages of the Life, They are extraordinarily frank and simple; startling, often, in their bareness and truth. But they are, above all, the thoughts of a mystic, moving in a Divine presence. An old and intimate friend of the Master's once said to me that he believed "Jowett's inner mind, especially toward the end of his life, was always in an attitude ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... went on and the great sea opened before my eyes, I quite forgot my fears in the pleasure of such wide horizons, such magnificent scenery. The ocean was here in all its grandeur, yet there was no bleakness or bareness in these rock-bound shores, softly veiled in the haze of the October afternoon. The voices of the breakers greeted me as something vaguely familiar: I seemed to have been listening for them all my life. In such joys as I felt that day eyes and ears do but ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 22, August, 1878 • Various
... sophistication—well, Galusha gave little thought to that, in most worldly matters he himself was unsophisticated. However, he was sure that he liked Miss Phipps and that he loathed Mrs. Buckley. And he liked East Wellmouth, bareness and bleakness and lonesomeness and all. He rather wished he were going to stay there for a long time—weeks perhaps, months it might be; that is, of course, provided he could occupy his present ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... vegetation round about it, heightens this appearance of sadness and desolation. But at that moment the only thing that struck Orso in this particular landscape was one point—an important one, it is true, in his present circumstances. The bareness of the ground rendered any kind of ambush impossible, and the man who has reason to fear that at any moment he may see a gun-barrel thrust out of a thicket straight at his own chest, looks on a ...
— Columba • Prosper Merimee
... her into a little cleanly, raftered chamber. He knelt by the bedside and spoke gently to the girl who lay upon the white pillows, her deathly face more white than the clean, coarse linen. 'Twas true she did not see him, but lay staring at the wall's bareness, her lips moving as she muttered the name she had shrieked and wailed at intervals throughout the hours. "John—Oh, John Oxon!" he could barely hear, "God laughs at us—why ...
— His Grace of Osmonde • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... him, still empty, scarcely even held romance now. Rain dripped from it sadly. Its cheerless bareness seemed worse than the most sinister shadows ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... go onward, and came presently to a part where the grey plain did stretch out a bareness into the Night Land to my front; so that my way ended, unless I did make a ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... was best and most characteristic in Canadian civilisation, and it was for this that they wrought and prayed. But, though to people and minister, Convener and Superintendent, the little manse meant so much, the bareness, the unloveliness, and, more than all, the utter loneliness of it smote Shock with a sense of depression. At first he could not explain to himself this feeling. It was only after he had consciously recognised the picture which had risen ...
— The Prospector - A Tale of the Crow's Nest Pass • Ralph Connor
... shout went up from the soldiers who had penetrated to her Highness's praying-room, which, owing to its bareness and small size, had received at first but a cursory glance ...
— A German Pompadour - Being the Extraordinary History of Wilhelmine van Graevenitz, - Landhofmeisterin of Wirtemberg • Marie Hay
... the very bareness and desolation of the scene sickened Beatrice to the soul. No guests were here now—they were not likely to be. A polite manager was saying something to the bride, but she did not ...
— The Slave of Silence • Fred M. White
... a house looming out of the bareness of the slope. It dominated that long white incline. Grim, lonely, forbidding, how strangely it harmonized with the surroundings! The structure was octagon-shaped, built of uncut stone, and resembled a fort. There was no door on the sides exposed to Shefford's gaze, but small apertures two-thirds ...
— The Rainbow Trail • Zane Grey
... autumn. The tiles are patched with thatch. Of course they are, I should say so! It affords the occasion to have on one's roof a colony of pink dragon flowers and wild marsh-mallow. A fine green grass carpets the foot of this decrepit wall, the ivy climbs joyously up it and cloaks its bareness—its wounds and its leprosy mayhap; moss covers with green velvet the stone seat at the door. All nature takes pity upon this degraded and charming thing that you call a hovel, and welcomes it. 0 hovel! honest and peaceful old dwelling, ...
— The Memoirs of Victor Hugo • Victor Hugo
... delicate wineglasses, and the little dishes of coloured glass piled with wet green olives, stood among their images on a gleaming table. The food was all either very hot or very cold. She had two helps of everything, but at the same time she was being appalled by the bareness of the room. Her intuition informed that if a violent soul became terrified lest its own violence should provoke disorder it would probably make a violent effort towards order by throwing nearly everything out of the window, and that its habitation ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... bareness and bleakness about the interior; for there are very few monuments, and those seem chiefly to be of ecclesiastical people. I saw no armed knights, asleep on the tops of their tombs; but there was a curious representation of a skeleton, at full length, under the table-slab of one of the monuments. ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... rose, a ray of yellow gold stole across the sky, and the sky was iridescent. Philip could not get out of his eyes the dead girl lying on the bed, wan and white, and the boy who stood at the end of it like a stricken beast. The bareness of the squalid room made the pain of it more poignant. It was cruel that a stupid chance should have cut off her life when she was just entering upon it; but in the very moment of saying this to himself, Philip thought of the life which had been in store for her, ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... very much afflicted her. She dreamt that she heard a Dog bark in her Belly; and inquiring (at what Oracle is not said) the Meaning of her Dream, she was told, That that Child should bark out the Gospel (excuse the Bareness of the Expression, it may run better in Spanish; tho', if I remember right, Erasmus gives it in Latin much the same Turn) which should thence shine out like that lighted Torch. And this is the Reason, that wherever you see the Image of that Saint, a Dog and a ...
— Military Memoirs of Capt. George Carleton • Daniel Defoe
... proportion to skull as three is to five. The muzzle is covered with hair of a little darker shade than the topknot, and of the same texture as the feather of the fore-legs. The top of the muzzle is generally bare for about an inch from the black part of the nose, the bareness coming to a point towards the eye, and being about one inch broad at the nose. The nose and inside of mouth black or dark coloured. The teeth very strong, especially the canine, which are of extraordinary size for such a small dog. The canines ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... helplessness. She had always measured everything by the strict line of duty, of usefulness. There was a virtue in enduring hardness as a good soldier, and the harder it was the more virtue it held in it. Her room was plain, almost to bareness. There had been a faded patchwork top quilt at first, until Mother Taft insisted upon having something nicer. But it had to be folded up carefully at sundown, when the likelihood of calls was over. And she did put one of the new rugs ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... place itself—the bareness—and the glitter and the salt smells, and the wind blowing the sand! The Men run after me and I run.... I know what's coming too. ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... of tawny hair, all in a frizzle, had peered in on them. The vision was clothed in garments so torn the wonder was that they stayed on at all, and there was a general look of abject poverty about her to which Sallie Calkins, with all the bareness of her lot, was a stranger. She stood for just a moment, as if transfixed by astonishment at the unwonted sight in the room, then turned and sped away as swiftly and silently as ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... returned Donal, "that requires age or any mere accessory to rouse it. The very absence of everything external, the bareness of the mere humanity involved, may in itself be an excitement greater than any accompaniment of the antique or the picturesque. But in this old-fashioned garden, in the midst of these old-fashioned flowers, with all the gentlenesses of old-fashioned life suggested by ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... enough to be in their glen, with all its bareness and discomfort, when they heard that a troop of horse had visited Elmwood, and made a requisition there for hay and straw. They had used no violence, but the farmers were compelled to take it into the camp in their own waggons, getting nothing in payment ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he had never thought of. To lie down with the stars looking at him, nothing but the blue wind between him and them, was like being naked to the very soul. Doubtless there would be creatures about, to share the night with him, and protect him from its awful bareness; but they would be few for the size of the room, and he might see none of them! It was the sense of emptiness, the lack of present life that dismayed him. He had never seen any creatures to shrink from. He disliked no one of the things ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... was lodging in a mechanics' cheap boarding-house in Duane Street, and we may imagine the bareness of his room, the feeble poverty ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... for treating language. Greek poetry is statuesque in the sense that it depends greatly on its organic structure; it is not in the least so in the sense of being cold or colourless or stiff. But Greek poetry on the whole has a bareness and severity which disappoints a modern reader, accustomed as he is to lavish ornament and exaggeration at every turn. It has the same simplicity and straightforwardness as Greek sculpture. The poet has something to say and he says it as well and truly as he can in the suitable style, and ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the door on the second floor was answered by a clumsy Russian maid-servant, who smiled a broad, good-natured recognition when she saw him, and, turning without a word, led the way along a narrow passage. The smell of tobacco smoke and a certain bareness of wall and floor suggested a bachelor's home. The maid opened the door of a room and stood aside for ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... small quarters after the airy bareness of the Curley home, and they were additionally reduced in effect by the peculiar taste their first occupant had shown in furnishing. The walls were crowded with heavily framed pictures, coloured photographs of ...
— Martie the Unconquered • Kathleen Norris
... hide what is coming. But the cheerless nakedness of that wall being unbearable to us, we paint it over with landscapes of our own devising. And that is what the unthinking mind calls the future. Any one can paint these pictures on the wall, and to complain of its bareness is to acknowledge the poverty of one's own imagination wishing for something,—never mind what. The higher, the more unattainable, the better. Only desire earnestly, and you will feel yourself alive again. Your misfortune, my friend, is that you ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... in the center of the room. The electric light was turned on, revealing the bareness and absence of all ornament of the apartment; a fire was laid in the grate but not lit, and Priscilla's ugly square trunk, its canvas covering removed, stood in a prominent position, half on the hearthrug, half on the square of carpet which covered ...
— A Sweet Girl Graduate • Mrs. L.T. Meade
... this is a partial explanation of the bareness of American politics. The two big parties have had to preserve a superficial homogeneity; and a platitude is more potent than an issue. The minor parties—Populist, Prohibition, Independence League and Socialist—have shown a much greater willingness to face new problems. Their view of national ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... sun, which could be seen and felt as well here, in the blue and gentle flood in which it washed the masonry, as on the pavement of the Square or the straw of the market-place; and even on our first Sundays, when we came down before Easter, it would console me for the blackness and bareness of the earth outside by making burst into blossom, as in some springtime in old history among the heirs of Saint Louis, this dazzling and gilded carpet ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... So far as long and short sentences are concerned some general rules have already been hinted at in dealing with other kinds. The advantages of the short sentence are mainly those of clearness, directness, emphasis. Its dangers are monotony, bareness, over-compactness. The advantages of the long—that is, quite long—sentence, are rather difficult to comprehend. A wordy sentence is likely to defeat its own purpose. Instead of guiding it will lose its hearer. Somewhat long sentences—as already ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... remorse of this man? Wait, then, until you lie alone, as he had done, through days as slow, revealing as ages, face to face with God and death. Wait until you go down so close to eternity that the life you have lived stands out before you in the dreadful bareness in which God sees it,—as you shall see it some day from heaven or hell: money, and hate, and love will stand in their true light then. Yet, coming back to life again, he held whatever resolve he had reached down there with his old iron will: all the pain he bore in looking back ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... any farm in Maine or Massachusetts, and fond recollection sniffs the same odor of sputtering doughnuts through the kitchen-door, whether it carries one back to the Green hills or the White. Recollections are alike, but impressions differ, one class of minds retaining the sense of bareness and gloom which is so continually insisted upon in some New England books, and others, as in the book before us, dwelling lovingly upon the wholesome flavor, pungent yet mellow, which gives New England country life a distinctive charm unlike anything ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... smelting-pot. Its alchemy transmutes possessions into lives, redeemed, sweetened, Jesus-touched, Christ-renewed lives, made like Himself. And the sweet music of their new lives comes up into His gladdened ears, and a few of the strains come to cheer you. One may have at first a strange feeling of bareness, for things that we've always clung to as essential have gone out from us to others. But with the outgoing of things has come an incoming of Himself, in greater abundance than we dreamed possible. He, within, completely overbalances what He ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon
... assistant climbed into the organ loft, while I seated myself in the chancel to listen. The instrument was small but sweet, and Berkeley really played very well. The interior of the little church was plain to bareness; but the sun, which had fallen low, threw red lights on the upper part of the undecorated walls, and rich shadows darkened the lower half. Through the white, pointed windows I saw the trembling branches of the firs. I had been hurrying for a fortnight ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... and trick out herself and her children. For though the Koli is the most naked of men, his whole workaday costume consisting of one rag about equal in amplitude to half a good pocket-handkerchief, his wife is the most dressy of women. She is always well-dressed even on common days. The bareness of her limbs may perhaps shock our notions of propriety at first, for, being a mud-wader of necessity, like the stork and the heron, she girds her garments about her very tightly indeed; but this only sets off her wonderfully ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... of young ladies, French or English, who were confided to the embassy, and she had a guest chamber for them, a small room, but with an oriel window overhanging the Thames and letting in the southern sun, so as almost to compensate for the bareness of the rest, where there was nothing but a square box-bed, a chest, and a few toilette essentials, to break upon the dulness of the dark wainscoted walls. Madame herself came to sleep with her guest, ...
— Unknown to History - A Story of the Captivity of Mary of Scotland • Charlotte M. Yonge
... mimosa. The whole scene reminds me very much of Egypt; and you might easily believe that you were sitting on the banks of the Nile somewhere between the first and second cataract. There are the same white, sandy banks, the same narrow fringe of verdure on each side, the same bareness and treelessness of the surrounding landscape, the same sun-scorched, stony hillocks; in fact, the whole look of the place is almost identical. The river, slow and muddy, is a smaller Nile; there only wants the long snout and heavy, slug-like form of an old crocodile on the spit of ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... for her old friend, who, in spite of all his work and his sufferings and his celebrity, was unable to shake free of material anxiety. And at the same time she was amused at the absolute indifference revealed by the bareness of the room that had no carpets, no pictures, no bric-a-brac, no armchair; no other furniture than a table, three hard chairs, and a piano: and papers, papers everywhere, mixed up with books, on the table, under the table, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... beauty was a delusion. When John Osgood's small boat swept up the sands on the white crest of a league-long roller, how different was the scene! He saw a group of dilapidated huts, a tavern called The Angel's Rest, a blackfellow's hut, and the bareness of three Government offices, all built on piles, that the white ants should not humble them suddenly to the dust; a fever-making mangrove swamp, black at the base as the filthiest moat, and tenanted by reptiles; ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... all. The bareness of the country, the absence of the leaves on the lower bushes, the millions of small hoof-tracks, all were now explained. A migration of the springbok antelope, a "trek-boken," had swept over the spot. That it was that had caused such a mighty change. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... yellow-green leaf is cast aside the fringe of the blood-red robe soon to overspread has appeared. The white cedar (MELIA CONFERTA) permits its leaves to become yellow and to fall lingeringly, but its bareness is merely for a week or so. So also does the foliage of the moo-jee (TERMINALIA MELANOCARPA) turn to deepest red and is discarded, but so orderly is the disrobing and the never varying fashion of foliage that the tree averts the ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... born to enjoy all delicacies and all luxuries. She was distressed at the poverty of her dwelling, at the bareness of the walls, at the shabby chairs, the ugliness of the curtains. All those things, of which another woman of her rank would never even have been conscious, tortured her and made her angry. The sight of the little Breton peasant who did her humble housework ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the abode of strange uncanny beasts instead of decent ewes and fat wethers, and that the mists would be hiding the revels of the folk a man does not care to be speaking of. The trees would be dreary and sad—the sea always grey and gurly and ochone, the very roads had the look of bareness and emptiness, as though all a man's friends had marched over ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... the change occurred, for Warwick gazed from its windows in the morning to find the ground rimed with hoar-frost, that looked like streaks of crusted salt. The sun was scarcely three hours in the ascendant before the frost disappeared, like the withdrawal of a silvery veil, disclosing the bareness it had beautified so briefly. Even the most casual observer could now see that autumn had made a long forward march in the last three days ...
— The Mayor of Warwick • Herbert M. Hopkins
... roughly up about The hacked red oblong of the new-made thing, Short words in swordlike Latin — and a rout Of dreams most impotent, unwearying. Then, like a blind door shut on a carouse, The terrible bareness of ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... age when everything seems pretty well discovered, when one cannot preserve even a shred of mystery to cloak the bareness of one's life, when the very surface of the globe is all mapped out, and the mysterious griffins of untraversed deserts are vanishing from the map, it is an amazing relief to know that an unsolved, nay more, that an insoluble, mystery ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... Wessex were weary and disheartened: fire and pillage had laid the countryside bare with that horrible bareness that only lies in the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... walls are pale gray, with a gilded border running round the room, or rather two rooms, which are divided, but not separated, by crimson curtains. The furniture is crimson, and everything is so comfortable—such a contrast to German bareness and stiffness generally. A splendid grand piano (he receives a new one every year,) stands in one window. The other window is always open and looks out on the park. There is a dovecote just opposite the window, and doves promenade up and down upon the roof of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... humanized and refined so that the new dwellings of the nobility, if less imposing in appearance, were much more comfortable as places of residence. A gentle race had built their houses rather for peace than for war. He who compares the savage bareness of Pevensey or Guildford with the piled grandeur of Bodmin or Windsor cannot fail to understand the change in manners which ...
— Sir Nigel • Arthur Conan Doyle
... her childhood, which she was never to see again, Jeanne, in company with Durand Lassois, passed down her native valley in its winter bareness. As she went by the house of the husbandman Gerard Guillemette of Greux, whose children and Jacques d'Arc's were great friends, she cried: "Good-bye! I am ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... in his vest pocket, he found a match. This he struck and lighted a tallow dip which was stuck into a rude candle-stick upon a bare wooden table. One glance at the room revealed by the dim light showed its desolate bareness. Besides the table there were two small benches and a wash-stand, containing a granite-iron basin. A small broken-down stove stood at one end of the room, by the side of which was a couch. Not a scrap of mat or rug adorned the floor. There were no blinds or ...
— Under Sealed Orders • H. A. Cody
... say that I forgot I was a minister; I think I recalled that very thing, and it gave more power to my arm, for I knew the poverty amid which Geordie's poor wife strove to keep their home together; and the pitiful bareness of wee Jessie's death-chamber flashed before me. This well-nourished vampire had sucked the life-blood from them all, and remembering this, I rushed into the unequal conflict and smote the vampire between his greedy eyes with such fervour that he fell ...
— St. Cuthbert's • Robert E. Knowles
... variation. From the point of view of the social life we may note also that sex adds greatly to its variety, enriching it with numerous fruitful variations which undoubtedly further social evolution. The bareness and monotony of a social life without sex can ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... its sunniest vineyards, its most wildly romantic heights, and its most picturesque ruins. This part of its course may be said to end at the Siebengebirge, or 'Seven Mountains,' where the river again widens and the banks become more bare and uninteresting. Passing Bonn and Cologne, the bareness of the landscape is remarkable after the variety of that from which we have just emerged, and henceforward the river takes on what may be called a 'Dutch' appearance. After entering Holland it divides ...
— Hero Tales and Legends of the Rhine • Lewis Spence
... other necessary things, it is very inadvisable to increase those expenses in other ways. And considering the future—for there might happen to be persons in those bishoprics who do not think of or profess the poverty and bareness now maintained by those who are there—that would be a great burden on the Indian natives, and of ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVIII, 1617-1620 • Various
... holy band, Rest here, beneath the foot-fall hushing sod, Wrapt in the peace of God, While summer burns above thee; while the land Disrobes; till pitying snow Cover her bareness; till fresh Spring-winds blow, And the sun-circle rounds itself again:— Whilst England cries in vain For thy wise temperance, Lucius!—But thine ear The violent-impotent fever-restless cry, The faction-yells of triumph, will not hear: —Only the thrush on high ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... white and the walls were a grayish blue color with several pretty pictures scattered about them to break the bareness. ...
— Billie Bradley at Three Towers Hall - or, Leading a Needed Rebellion • Janet D. Wheeler
... coming in worse and worse. Our nightshirts were wet through, so we got into our other shirts and knickerbockers, but preserved bareness in our feet. And the floor kept on being half an inch deep in water, however much ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... though we vowed one another not to attempt anything so mad. In the meanwhile, before it should be time for lunch, we could walk up to a small church near the station and see the people at prayer in an interior which did not differ in bareness and tawdriness from most other country churches of the Latin south, though it had a facade so satisfyingly Spanish, because I suppose it was so perfectly Portuguese, that heart could ask no more. Not all the people were at prayer ...
— Roman Holidays and Others • W. D. Howells
... that a strong prejudice exists against ivy in many minds. It is an erroneous notion that ivy injures buildings against the walls of which it is planted; it never injures a good wall, nor a sound house, but on the contrary, hides and softens the stony bareness of the one and adds beauty and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 433, April 19, 1884 • Various
... floor, long and low, with a vaulted ceiling, whitewashed, and a pavement of worn red tiles, was a clean, bare room, that (pervaded by a curious, dry, not unpleasant odour) seemed actually to smell of bareness, as well as of cleanliness. There was a table, there was a dresser, there were a few unpainted deal chairs, rush-bottomed (exactly like the chairs in the church, in all Italian churches), and there was absolutely nothing else, save a great black ...
— My Friend Prospero • Henry Harland
... he sped along the country road, which no longer was so green, so warm with sunshine, as before. Markland looked already cold in its bareness against the distant sky, all flushed with flying clouds, the young saplings about, bending before the wind, as if they supplicated for shelter and a little warmth, and the old tottering cedar behind the house, looking as if the next blast would bring it down with ...
— A Country Gentleman and his Family • Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant
... time. But he had as yet no audience, and had not begun to exercise his creative imagination. Moreover, to a nature like Hugh's, naturally temperate and ardent, and with no gross or sensuous fibre of any kind, there was a real craving for the bareness and cleanness of self-discipline and asceticism. There is a high and noble pleasure in some natures towards the reduction and disregard of all material claims and limitations, by which a freedom and expansiveness of the spirit can ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... to be rubbed down, polished, and finished. Thus in a short time, since the bulk of that superficially dyed wool or fur on the top of every hat is but small, and has been much reduced by polishing and rubbing, you soon hear of an appearance of bareness—I was going to say threadbareness—making itself manifest. This is simply because the colour or dye only penetrates a very little way down into the substance of the felt, until, in fact, it meets the proofing, which, being as it ought to be, a waterproofing, cannot be dyed. ...
— The Chemistry of Hat Manufacturing - Lectures Delivered Before the Hat Manufacturers' Association • Watson Smith
... streets, more air and sunshine gets into them. Some of the best and most costly are along the Prado. A Cuban house interior generally impresses an American as lacking in home-like quality. Some of the best are richly adorned, but there is a certain bareness and an absence of color. As is usual with customs unlike our own, and which we are therefore prone to regard as inferior to ours, there are excellent reasons for Cuban interior decoration, or rather the lack of it. A little experience, ...
— Cuba, Old and New • Albert Gardner Robinson
... stood there the burden of his responsibility weighed upon him like old age. Here in this scant cabin things so serious as birth and death showed in a pathetic bareness, stripped of all ceremonial trappings, as mere events in the orderly working out of natural laws—events as seasonable as the springing up and the cutting down of the corn. In these simple lives, so closely lived to the ground, grave things were sweetened by an unconscious humour ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow
... gloom, its bareness, and the few hundreds of shaking pallid mortals which make up its present-day population, the marsh city of Aigues-Mortes is a lively memory to all who have ...
— The Automobilist Abroad • M. F. (Milburg Francisco) Mansfield
... nun?? Little garden, with box hedges and lemon-trees. The inner windows (cells) open on this garden, are large, ordinary, and without bars. There was even one long ground floor window with a little balcony and steps with a cat on them. But never a soul! Great bareness, fair neatness, ...
— The Spirit of Rome • Vernon Lee
... his office in the Lunacy Commission, he was quite at home. He at once characteristically assumed the air of command, introducing himself with grave dignity to the authorities, by-and-bye pointing out matters which might be amended, among others the bareness of the walls, which were without pictures. In the grounds he received all the confidences of the unhappy patients and their complaints (one young fellow bitterly appealing to him on the hardship of not being ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... present you the thing in all its bareness. You may take this as a specimen of an Eastern house. People are apt to fancy that those long, latticed houses on the Bosphorus conceal unheard-of luxuries, and that the people live like Sybarites. It is quite untrue. They either ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... literature makes up for her historical poverty. Dr. Johnson was the first great man of letters to visit the town. He stayed in West Street with the Thrales, rode on the Downs and, after his wont, abused their bareness, making a joke about our dearth of trees similar to one on the same topic in Scotland. The Doctor also bathed. Mrs. Piozzi relates that one of the bathing men, seeing him swim, remarked, "Why, sir, you ...
— Highways & Byways in Sussex • E.V. Lucas
... that if he could have seen Agassiz again before he died he could have persuaded him that evolution was the solution of the problem of creation, though knowing that Agassiz could never have accepted the doctrine of natural selection in its bareness, absolutely convinced as he was of the agency of Conscious Mind in creation. And I had the further declaration of Owen himself in his expressed conviction that the process of evolution was directed by the Divine Intelligence. One statement he made struck me forcibly in this connection, viz.: that ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... Everything shone that could be made to shine. A hearthrug made by Miss Abbot's mother lay before the fireplace, in which a mere handful of fire was burning. An arm-chair with cheerful red cushions stood beside the fire. It was quite comfortable, but Jean felt a bareness. There were no pots on the fire—nothing seemed to ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... passages which err upon the side of bareness. Cape Cod itself certainly errs that way, and so often does our author; and when they are combined, the result of desiccation is sometimes astounding. But so much the truer the picture. If Vedder's "Lair of the Sea-Serpent" had the rank ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... there was dead silence again. She crouched before the easel with bowed head and her face veiled upon her arms, making no stir or sound. But at length she rose again, numbly and stiffly. She stood up and glanced slowly about her—at the bareness, at the moonlight, at the narrow, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 3 • Various
... great rooms running the whole length of the house: the first was a lumber-room, the second her own especial cell. Cell-like it was, in its monastic or conventual bareness. It was vague with bareness: a huge, square room, gaunt as a barn, the walls and ceiling whitewashed, the floor plain boards. Yonder, near the one small window, stood a table and tall-backed oaken chair, afar off, as it were, ...
— Amaryllis at the Fair • Richard Jefferies
... left there was a high board fence and an entrance with a small grille open on a somber reach of garden. A maid in a stiff white cap answered the fall of the knocker; she took Linda's bag; and, in a hall that impressed her by its bareness, Linda was greeted by the Miss Lowrie she ...
— Linda Condon • Joseph Hergesheimer
... before she slept. The early sunshine, however, woke her in the small hours of the morning. There was no blind to the window, and the room faced east. Diana sat up in bed. Her eyes fell on the pictureless walls. Perhaps the very fact of their bareness made her look at them more particularly. She did not admire the pattern of the paper. In places it had been badly fitted together, especially in that corner. Why, the magenta roses actually overlapped! They did it in a sort of curve, ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... kind and respectful hospitality with which he had been received in every part of Scotland. It was, of course, not to be expected that an Oxonian Tory should praise the Presbyterian polity and ritual, or that an eye accustomed to the hedgerows and parks of England should not be struck by the bareness of Berwickshire and East Lothian. But even in censure Johnson's tone is not unfriendly. The most enlightened Scotchmen, with Lord Mansfield at their head, were well pleased. But some foolish and ignorant Scotchmen were ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... little boxes of sleeping-rooms, yellow painted floors, and bunks curtained with hand-embroidered dimity, stiff as a frozen crust of snow; a studio, with a few charming bits of old painted Dutch furniture to redeem it from bareness, and a kitchen which roused all Phil's ...
— The Chauffeur and the Chaperon • C. N. Williamson
... of fictitious narrative has never been excelled; but his living pictures of familiar life, as well as the whimsical caricatures of Smollett and the humorous fantasies of Sterne, are disfigured by faults of which the very smallest are coarseness of language and bareness of licentious description, in which they outdid Richardson. Not only is their standard of morality low, but they display indifference to the essential distinctions of right and wrong, in regard to some of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... through water, and presently the glare of the headlamps bored through breast-high mist. There was a smell of wet soil and rotting leaves. It was very different from the tangled pine bush of Ontario and the stark bareness of the plains, but it was somehow familiar and Foster felt that he was ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... about the scenes, the places, the incidents represented. Just here, perhaps, we are met by some who grant all that we say on the subject of decoration by works of art, and who yet impatiently exclaim, "But I have no money to spare for any thing of this sort. I am condemned to an absolute bareness, and beauty in my case is ...
— The American Woman's Home • Catherine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe
... darker. It had been almost brilliant during a part of the afternoon because the bareness of the branches let in the wintry sun. There were no leaves to keep it out and there had been a rare, chill blue sky. All seemed cold blue sky where it was not brown or sodden yellow fern and moss. The trunks of ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... carved bed and other furnishings, which had been so much a part of the picture, was felt by all of us. Nothing of the old luxury and richness was there. It was a summer-furnished place, handsome but with the customary bareness. At the end of this first session he dressed in his snowy flannels, which he had adopted in the place of linen for summer wear, and we descended to the veranda and looked out over that wide, ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... material darkness; we think of Burns and Chatterton, and Keats and Shelley and Coleridge, we think of Leopardi and Musset and Emily Bronte and Walt Whitman, as it is open to us surely to think even of Wordsworth, so harshly conditioned by his spareness and bareness and bleakness—all this in reference to the voices that have most proved their command of the ear of time, and with the various examples added of those claiming, or at best enjoying, but the slighter attention; and their office thus mainly affects ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... tendency is to plant much too closely. Observe well- developed trees, and see how wide a space they require. There is naturally an eager wish for shade as soon as possible, and a desire to banish from surroundings an aspect of bareness. These purposes can, it is true, often be accomplished by setting out more trees at first than could mature, and by taking out one and another from time to time when they begin to interfere with each other's growth. One symmetrical, noble tree, however, is certainly worth more ...
— The Home Acre • E. P. Roe
... present. A box-stove, such as we use in our pioneer shacks in Canada, was throwing out a glow of cheeriness. Candles had been lighted. Little knicknacks of feminine taste had been hung here and there to disguise the bareness of the walls. A bed, in one corner, was carefully disguised as a couch. Save for the fact that there was no glass in the window—glass being unobtainable in France at present—one might easily have persuaded himself that he was back ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... been secured, Flora Grant welcomed the new arrivals graciously, and after a while they sat down to supper with the hired men in a big room. It was plainly furnished, but there was everything that comfort demanded, for the happy mean between bareness and superfluity had been cleverly hit, and George thought Miss Grant was responsible for this. He sat beside her at the foot of the long table and noticed the hired hands' attitude toward her. It was respectful, but not diffident. ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... quarters, like their beds, are in no respect different from those of the pistoles or private cells. The name pistole originated, no doubt, in the fact that the prisoners formerly paid a pistole (about ten francs) a week for this accommodation, its bareness resembling that of the empty garrets in which great men in poverty begin their ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... half a mile farther on in the narrowing ravine, and on the way we passed a desolate dwelling, squalid, set in the marsh, its battered verandas and open doors disclosing a wretched mingling of native bareness with poverty-stricken European fittings. On the tottering veranda sat a ragged Frenchman, bearded and shaggy-haired, and beside him three girls as blonde as German Maedchens. Their white delicate faces and blue ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... a winter hath my absence been From Thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year! What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen, What old December's bareness everywhere! ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various |
