"Desolate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... even the poorest emigrant to encounter these causes of distress, unless seduced by the misrepresentations of some interested landholder, or by the fantasies of his own brain, to an unhealthy and desolate situation, where he can neither help himself, nor ...
— A New Guide for Emigrants to the West • J. M. Peck
... conduct was not only natural but almost worthy of praise. She had brought harm to no one thereby, only providing herself and another with sensual enjoyment. Without such enjoyment there would be no youth, and life itself would be barren and desolate as a leafless tree ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... private life of any individual. Her boundless influences enveloped kings in their palaces, and relieved the beggar at the monastery gate. In all Europe there was not a man too obscure, too insignificant, or too desolate for her. Surrounded by her solemnities, every one received his name at her altar; her bells chimed at his marriage, her knell tolled at his funeral. She extorted from him the secrets of his life at her confessionals, ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... their hot haste—men whose homes have been made desolate, their kindred carried into captivity. Each has his own painful reflections. In that hour, at that very moment, his beloved wife, his delicate daughter, his fair sister, or sweetheart, may be struggling in the embrace of a brawny savage. No wonder ...
— The Lone Ranche • Captain Mayne Reid
... to smile appreciatively. He felt rather dubious about the scheme. But he liked to see the other's quiet eyes flash with an unexpected fire. Perhaps his genius might indeed reclaim this desolate region. Inward from the beach lay the waste of sand-hills known as Golden Gate Park. There was talk among the real estate visionaries of making it a ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... uprise and overwhelm both ends of the Nan-Shan in snowy rushes of foam, expanding wide, beyond both rails, into the night. And on this dazzling sheet, spread under the blackness of the clouds and emitting a bluish glow, Captain MacWhirr could catch a desolate glimpse of a few tiny specks black as ebony, the tops of the hatches, the battened companions, the heads of the covered winches, the foot of a mast. This was all he could see of his ship. Her middle structure, covered by the bridge which bore him, his mate, the closed wheelhouse ...
— Typhoon • Joseph Conrad
... landscapes—no blending of tones, no softening of colors, no graduation of shadows, every line glaring in white or black by reason of the total absence of refracted light. And yet the wonderfully peculiar character of this desolate world imparted to it a weird attraction ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... to us simply a baby; a live, laughing baby, sent by his Master to the desolate places of the earth with the old message of Divine love and universal brotherhood to his children; and I like to believe, too, that as he lay in the arms of his savage foster-mothers, taking life from their life, Christ ...
— Stories of Childhood • Various
... Albany and Poughkeepsie. It was raining furiously, and my horse, already weary with long travel, gave unmistakable signs of discouragement. I was, therefore, greatly relieved when, in the most desolate part of the road, I espied rising before me the dim outlines of a house, and was correspondingly disappointed when, upon riding forward, I perceived that it was but a deserted ruin I was approaching, whose fallen chimneys and broken windows betrayed a dilapidation so great ...
— The Forsaken Inn - A Novel • Anna Katharine Green
... wide arc of the sea; and as I have already said, it was part of the disciplines of these Samurai of mine that yearly they should go apart for at least a week of solitary wandering and meditation in lonely and desolate places. Music again is a frequent means of release from the narrow life as it closes about us. One man I know makes an anthology into which he copies to re-read any passage that stirs and revives in him the sense of broad issues. ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... the columns that upbore The leafy palace, green for aye: The shivered branches whirr and sigh, Yawn the huge trunks with mighty groan, The roots, upriven, creak and moan! In fearful and entangled fall, One crashing ruin whelms them all, While through the desolate abyss, Sweeping the wreck-strewn precipice, The raging storm-blasts howl and hiss! Aloft strange voices dost thou hear? Distant now and now more near? Hark! the mountain ridge along, Streameth a ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... in, choked by luxuriant greenery; but the blank sides mounted to meet the walled path reaching out to its top from the abrupt hill against which it had been placed. Before it foundations could still be traced; and above, a rectangle of windowless stone walls survived, roofless and desolate. An abandoned road turned up the hill, and they followed it to where they could gaze into the upper ruin and the Furnace top below. Everywhere nature had marked or twisted aside cut stone and wood with its living greenery. Farther down a pathlike level followed the ...
— The Three Black Pennys - A Novel • Joseph Hergesheimer
... he wandered through the enormous white fields. It was true they were no more melancholy-looking at this time of the year than when full of turnips and ripe corn; but their uniform whiteness seemed to give them a larger and more desolate appearance. Even the hares, as they nibbled away at the few stalks that were left, and the birds of prey, [Pg 69] as they lazily flapped their wings in the direction of the Przykop, did not enliven their desolation; for the sluggish inertness of their movements, which enabled ...
— Absolution • Clara Viebig
... good Beltran,' said he, 'you have actually hunted this bird, whose height is gigantic, whose cry at a distance resembles the lion's, and which is to be found in parched and desolate tracts, deserted even by ...
— The Boy Crusaders - A Story of the Days of Louis IX. • John G. Edgar
... disturbance. And thus came to be selected the site of the little cantonment, which since has sent forth generations of steel-bred warriors to keep bright the ancient flame; a small oasis, rescued by rough but kindly hands from the dry and desolate desert, and which the leisure of sixty years has served to turn into the beautiful and cherished home of ...
— The Story of the Guides • G. J. Younghusband
... And gradually, without knowing it herself, she clung to him, in her lost, childish, desolate moments, when it was good to creep up to something big and warm, and bury her little self in his big, unlimited being. Instinctively he was careful of her, careful to recognize her and to give himself ...
— The Rainbow • D. H. (David Herbert) Lawrence
... sounds of advancing civilisation first broke the stillness of this desolate region, the chief of the trading-post was seated at breakfast with his clerk. He was a tall, good-looking, young Englishman, named Reginald Redding. The clerk, Bob Smart, was a sturdy youth, who first saw the light among the mountains of Scotland. Doubtless he had been named Robert ...
— Wrecked but not Ruined • R.M. Ballantyne
... of hard facts. An army in which the men had meat for breakfast, and ate more every day than the French soldiers at the front got in a week! Their moving kitchens and supply trains were the wonder of France. Down below Arles, where her husband's sister had married, on the desolate plain of the Crau, their tinned provisions were piled like mountain ranges, under sheds and canvas. Nobody had ever seen so much food before; coffee, milk, sugar, bacon, hams; everything the world was famished ...
— One of Ours • Willa Cather
... drenching, with a sudden drum-like sound, the passing umbrellas, whose varied tints of pink, blue, and orange, like the draggled finery of feathers and flounces beneath them, only made the scene more glaringly desolate. Then came the rush and splatter of cabriolets, scattering terror and defilement. The well-mounted English dandy shows his sense by hoisting his parapluie; the French dragoon curls his mustachio at such effeminacy, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 273, September 15, 1827 • Various
... the cliffs were beaten with hail, every stone of which, as far as I could see, was regular in form, six-sided pyramids with rounded base, rich and sumptuous-looking, and fashioned with loving care, yet seemingly thrown away on those desolate crags down which they went rolling, falling, sliding in a network of ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... of evening fell upon the desolate ruins, but nought had occurred to alleviate the calamity: all seemed to have perished unaided in the suddenness of their destruction—a thing improbable—unheard of—yet ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... a rare thing happened—our train was punctual, and we arrived in Nish at four o'clock. It was cold and misty. The station was desolate and the town asleep. Around us in the courtyard ragged soldiers were lying with their heads pillowed on brightly striped bags. A nice old woman who had asked Jo how old she was, what relation Jan was to her, whether they had children, and where she had learnt Serbian, ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... will mark his coming and grow brighter." If that beacon still burns for him, he can continue his voyage. If it has gone out, if anything has happened to it, his way is dark; nothing but the abiding hand of the Great Father can steady his helm and hold him to his desolate course. ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... before Mavis rejoined her lover. When she had looked at the spot where she had enjoyed a day of unalloyed rapture, it appeared strangely desolate in the gathering gloom ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... desolate and strange To me must seem the autumn's change, When housed in attic or in chest, A lonely and unwilling guest, I lie through nights of bleak December, And think in ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... for your winnings, As wise folk ye knowen all th' estate Of regnes*; ye be fathers of tidings, *kingdoms And tales, both of peace and of debate*: *contention, war I were right now of tales desolate*, *barren, empty. But that a merchant, gone in many a year, Me taught a tale, which ye shall ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... of the house, as had been said, was an orchard, at the other was a large garden. If the desolate appearance of the house was likely to raise oppressive feelings in a stranger's mind, how much more this garden! It was a large oblong piece of ground, the walls of which enclosed the western end of the house completely. One of them ran parallel with the ...
— Fated to Be Free • Jean Ingelow
... produces the arguments one sometimes sees in defence of Christianity against Positivism, drawn from a consideration of the services which Christianity has rendered to the race, and of the gloomy and desolate condition in which its disappearance would leave the world. Tyndall and Huxley do not, however, occupy the position of religious prophets or fathers. They preside over no church or other organization. They have no power or authority to draft any creed or articles ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... slaughtered bodies, together with those wounded by bullets and axes. The last agonies and the moans and lamentations were dreadful to hear.... The houses were converted into heaps of stones, so that I might say with Micah, "We are made desolate;" and with Jeremiah, "A piteous wail may go forth in his distress." With Paul I say, "Brothers, pray for us." I have every evening, during a whole month, offered up prayers with the congregation, on the four points of our fort, under the blue sky.... Many ...
— Continental Monthly - Volume 1 - Issue 3 • Various
... her, cold he got crossing rivers in the night-time to get to Ballylee." This is perhaps the man the other remembered, for tradition gives the one thing many shapes. There is an old woman who remembers her, at Derrybrien among the Echtge hills, a vast desolate place, which has changed little since the old poem said, "the stag upon the cold summit of Echtge hears the cry of the wolves," but still mindful of many poems and of the dignity of ancient speech. She says, "The sun and the moon never shone on ...
— The Celtic Twilight • W. B. Yeats
... stood between them and us. Not one shot broke the stillness of the night. As dawn broke I beheld the flat, gray waters of the Sound stretching away to the eastward, and there was the boat at the desolate wharf beside the warehouse, her steam rising white in the chill ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... head held erect; Eve, mechanically watchful of all his movements, followed a step or two behind. With weary monotony one flight of stairs succeeded another; each, to her unaccustomed eyes, seeming more colorless, more solitary, more desolate than the preceding one. ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... Duncombe in the front seat, the other three behind. The car gathered speed rapidly. In less than an hour they were half-way to Norwich. Then suddenly the driver took a sharp corner and turned down a long desolate lane. ...
— A Maker of History • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... might the Muse affords And the balm of thoughtful words; Bring music to the desolate; Hang ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... guinea-fowl got up out of the prickly pear bushes right at the kraal gate. I remember that I hesitated a little before going in, there was such an air of desolation about the spot. Nature never looks desolate when man has not yet laid his hand upon her breast; she is only lonely. But when man has been, and has passed away, ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... sea baths, jerking a rowing machine or playing on a health lift till his eyes hang out on his cheeks, and he need not do any walking whatever. In that way the coming man will be over-developed above the legs, and his lower limbs will look like the desolate stems of a frozen geranium. Eccentricities of limb will be handed over like baldness from father to son among the dwellers in the cities, where every advantage in the way of rapid transit is to be had, until a metropolitan will be instantly picked out by his able digestion ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... and looked at the streets and blocks of houses, I found myself almost doubting that that was the spot where we had camped forty-nine years ago. When memory called back to my mind what a barren, desolate country it was at that time, it almost seemed incredible that such a large city could be built and such a vast change be made in less than fifty years, and not only in this particular spot but for miles and miles ...
— Chief of Scouts • W.F. Drannan
... Went, once an important Roman station, and for a long time after the departure of the Romans a celebrated British city, now a poor desolate place consisting of a few old-fashioned houses and a strange-looking dilapidated church. No Welsh is spoken at Caer Went, nor to the east of it, nor indeed for two or three miles before you ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... between the clashing rocks! Better were it to have overleapt the will of Zeus and perished in venturing some mighty deed. But now what should we do, held back by the winds to stay here, if ever so short a time? How desolate looms before us the edge ...
— The Argonautica • Apollonius Rhodius
... there the previous winter, after a march of over seven hundred miles from Massachusetts, the hillside, which now bloomed, was desolate and bleak. But few buildings had been erected, and about the only provisions obtainable were corn meal and water. All that had been changed as by magic, and many of the poor fellows had not known such comfort since leaving their homes in England, while most of the Hessians were faring better ...
— Rodney, the Ranger - With Daniel Morgan on Trail and Battlefield • John V. Lane
... his life! He married at nineteen, and, because Sir Joshua and others had said that marriage spoilt an artist, almost immediately left his wife in the North, and scarce saw her till the end of his life: when, old, nearly mad, and quite desolate, he went back to her, and she received him, and nursed him till he died. This quiet act of hers is worth all Romney's pictures; even as a matter of Art, ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... Mr. Bolton's failure, of course the work stopped. The men were discharged, the tools were housed, the hopeful noise of pickman and driver ceased, and the mining camp had that desolate and mournful aspect which always hovers ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 6. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... (wild turnips) and berries for many days. They were almost famished for meat. The old man was too feeble to hunt successfully. One day in this desolate camp a young Cree maiden—for such they were—declared that she could no longer sit still and see her people suffer. She took down her dead father's second bow and quiver full of arrows, and begged her old grandmother to accompany ...
— Indian Boyhood • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... the desolate, fever-stricken coasts of Latium and Campania to-day, one comes upon many traces of former splendour, and one is reminded that the pleasure which the old Romans took in the sea-side was spoilt for those who came after them by the ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... tangle at my feet. Something at the same moment rang sharply, like a falling coin. I stooped, and there, sure enough, crusted with the red rust, there lay an iron shoe-buckle. The sight of this poor human relic thrilled me to the heart, but not with hope nor fear, only with a desolate melancholy. I held it in my hand, and the thought of its owner appeared before me like the presence of an actual man. His weather-beaten face, his sailor's hands, his sea-voice hoarse with singing at the capstan, the very foot that had once ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume XXI • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the greatest satisfaction your amendments of the Opera ["Fidelio" which was about to be again performed]. It has decided me once more to rebuild the desolate ruins ...
— Beethoven's Letters 1790-1826, Volume 1 of 2 • Lady Wallace
... note: landlocked; the western and central low-lying, desolate portions of the country make up the great Garagum (Kara-Kum) desert, which occupies over 80% of the country; eastern ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... cell at Bethlehem. What is now to be seen," cried he, "but conflagration, slaughter, ruin,—the universal shipwreck of society?" The same words of despair came from Saint Augustine at Hippo. Both had seen the city in the height of its material grandeur, and now it was laid low and desolate. The end of all things seemed to be at hand; and the only consolation of the great churchmen of the age was the belief in the ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... prospectus? The shareholders incur no liability beyond the extent of their shares; there shall be no call upon them to come to Palestine—let them remain in their snug nests; the Jewish Company, Limited, seeks a home only for the desolate dove that finds no rest for the sole of ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... from Daisy that she would wait for him till he had made a Name in literature, or proved his ability in some definite manner. There was no indication that any one else was in the way; everything pointed to a contrary probability. But there is nothing so desolate as the heart of a lover whose fair one is just beyond ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... his wife in Bruce county, and he wrote saying he was perfectly happy in his new life. He awoke one morning and found himself in the "Best" Hotel, Ashcroft, British Columbia, Dominion of Canada, and the first thing he saw was the sand-hill. He thought Ashcroft was the most desolate looking spot he had ever seen. It looked like a town that had been located in a hurry and had been planted by mistake on ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... more complex person than the dying lover of love who became the instructor of Paracelsus. When the scene shifts from Constantinople to Basil, and the illustrious Professor holds converse with Festus by the blazing logs deep into the night, and at length morning arises "clouded, wintry, desolate and cold," we listen with unflagging attention and entire imaginative conviction; and, when silence ensues, a wonder comes upon us as to where a young man of three-and-twenty acquired this knowledge of the various bitter tastes of life which belong ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... courage leads to destruction, and when your very fortifications are a stumbling-block. Conjugal love, which, according to authors, is a peculiar phase of love, has, more than anything else, its French Campaign, its fatal 1814. The devil especially loves to dangle his tail in the affairs of poor desolate women, and ...
— Analytical Studies • Honore de Balzac
... countries should not live peaceably together, each going about its own business. I have heard it said, before now, that it would be a good thing for both countries if the border districts on both sides were stripped altogether of their people, and allowed to lie desolate. ...
— Both Sides the Border - A Tale of Hotspur and Glendower • G. A. Henty
... is ridiculous to maintain seriously that Byron's love of the desolate and inhuman in nature was the mark of vital scepticism and depression. When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older earth, we may deduce with ...
— Varied Types • G. K. Chesterton
... set: there are no clouds in the clear, frosty sky to reflect its slant beams, but the air itself is tinged with a slight roseate colour which is again reflected on the snow that covers the ground. I live in a lone cottage on a solitary, wide heath: no voice of life reaches me. I see the desolate plain covered with white, save a few black patches that the noonday sun has made at the top of those sharp pointed hillocks from which the snow, sliding as it fell, lay thinner than on the plain ground: a few birds are pecking at the hard ice that covers the ...
— Mathilda • Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
... rainfall not by inches, but by yards. Sometimes, not often, a pale orb struggles through the clouds and glimmers faintly upon the grimy town—some poor relation of the sun, maybe, but not the godlike creature himself. For six months, in this cold desolate spot, among a people strangely unlike the English of Devon, though they are of kindred race, I laboured for six months in the Torpedo Factory. I lived meanly in one room, for my Austrian pay and allowance had stopped when War cut the channels of communication. ...
— The Lost Naval Papers • Bennet Copplestone
... sigh seemed to be floating above the overturned skiff—the endless, labouring sigh of the earth, injured and exhausted by the eternal changes from the bright and warm summer to the cold misty and damp autumn. The wind blew continually over the desolate shore and the foaming river—blew ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... us clearly of a period of turmoil and disorder, and great designs withal,—when Time had struck his tent, and was hurrying on in confused march, with bag and baggage, knight, standard, and the sutler's wagon all jumbled together.—Let us, on our return, pass through that group of desolate Corinthians; and, looking in at the Capitol, bid farewell to the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCLXXVI. February, 1847. Vol. LXI. • Various
... granite was of scintillating gray, and under our feet it seemed rasped, pounded; we were walking over shining powder. At our right, along a long and irregular course, a tumultuous torrent ran with a continuous roar. And we staggered along under this heat, in this light, in this burning, arid, desolate valley cut by this ravine of turbulent water which seemed to be ever hurrying onward, without being able to fertilize these rocks, lost in this furnace which greedily drank it up without being penetrated ...
— A Comedy of Marriage & Other Tales • Guy De Maupassant
... and the course that they pursued led them westward through the Zegzeb and Nyti countries, then north-westward along the valley of the Niger, and then westward across the desert to the desolate sandy shores of the Western Sahara, which they crossed at sunrise on the Sunday morning, in the latitude of the island which was to form their rendezvous ...
— The Angel of the Revolution - A Tale of the Coming Terror • George Griffith
... and weary days passed over us on this desolate key, where our mode of life brought to my recollection many a similar hour spent by me in company with Don Rafael and his companions. Vessel after vessel passed the reef, but none took notice of our signal. At last, on the tenth day of our imprisonment, a ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... rooms are accustomed to present, when their occupants are about to depart. The books were all stowed away in boxes—the pictures taken down—the bed unmade—the sofa littered with papers, and the violin, and flute—the general air of the desolate room, that of a man who has parted with his last hope and wishes to ...
— The Youth of Jefferson - A Chronicle of College Scrapes at Williamsburg, in Virginia, A.D. 1764 • Anonymous
... phoebe-bird, builds an exquisite nest of moss on the side of some shelving cliff or overhanging rock. The other day, passing by a ledge near the top of a mountain in a singularly desolate locality, my eye rested upon one of these structures, looking precisely as if it grew there, so in keeping was it with the mossy character of the rock, and I have had a growing affection for the bird ever since. ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... dire suspicion rack'd. Come, cruel one! Come and behold the' oppression of the nobles, And mark their injuries: and thou mayst see. What safety Santafiore can supply. Come and behold thy Rome, who calls on thee, Desolate widow! day and night with moans: "My Caesar, why dost thou desert my side?" Come and behold what love among thy people: And if no pity touches thee for us, Come and blush for thine own report. For me, If it be lawful, O Almighty Power, Who wast in earth for our sakes ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... fringe of a desolate tract of downs, high above the coast. Over the hedge to the right appeared a long narrow strip of sea. On the three remaining sides nothing was visible but undulating stretches of brown turf, except where, to northward, the summits of two ...
— I Saw Three Ships and Other Winter Tales • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... house-boat was in sight now, moored close to a tiny island. Arnold pulled up alongside and paused to reconnoiter. To all appearance, it was a derelict. There were no awnings, no carpets, no baskets of flowers. The outside was grievously in need of paint. It had an entirely uninhabited and desolate appearance. Arnold beached his boat upon the little island and swung himself up onto the deck. There was still no sign of any human occupancy. He descended into the saloon. The furniture there was mildewed and musty. ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... a prolonged fear. They were treacherous because they had never been taught the greater strength of candour. George Sand tried to point out the advantage of plain dealing, and the natural goodness of mankind when uncorrupted by a false education. She loved the wayward and the desolate: pretentiousness in any disguise was the one thing she suspected and could not tolerate. It may be questioned whether she ever deceived herself; but it must be said, that on the whole she flattered weakness—and excused, ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... was impossible to take the citadel by their own efforts, compelled by necessity, implored the aid of Hanno. He endeavoured to bring the Crotonians to surrender, under an agreement that they should allow a colony of Bruttians to settle there; so that their city, desolate and depopulated by wars, might recover its former populousness: but not a man besides Aristomachus did he move; they affirmed, that "they would die sooner than, mixing with Bruttians, be turned to the rites, manners, and laws, and soon the language ...
— The History of Rome; Books Nine to Twenty-Six • Titus Livius
... his two children, the most beautiful creatures in the island. Now the whole existence of this man, who was once so happy and so much envied, is changed. The smiling cottage, that hung over the gulf like a swan over a transparent lake, is sad and desolate; the little enclosure, with its hedges of lilac and hawthorn, where joyous groups used to come and sit at the close of day, is silent and deserted. No human sound dares to trouble the mourning of this saddened solitude. ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... happiness to her pining lover. But, again, the man of correct habits triumphed over the sons of the king, and despatched Abner to tear his wife from her true husband's arms. Poor Phaltiel followed her weeping, until ordered to go back—and back he went, forever desolate. ...
— The Entailed Hat - Or, Patty Cannon's Times • George Alfred Townsend
... Louis was already a widower, having been married at the age of thirteen to Margaret of Scotland, who led a mournful existence at the French court, where she felt herself a desolate alien. Her death at the age of twenty was possibly due to slander. "Fie upon life," she said on her deathbed, when urged to rouse herself to resist the languor into which she was sinking. "Talk to me no more ...
— Charles the Bold - Last Duke Of Burgundy, 1433-1477 • Ruth Putnam
... desolate one of the best granaries of the South, preventing them from raising another crop this year, and taking away from them some ...
— The Battle of Atlanta - and Other Campaigns, Addresses, Etc. • Grenville M. Dodge
... spring of 1099 about twenty thousand warriors finally moved upon Jerusalem. They found the city well walled and in the midst of a desolate region where neither food nor water, nor the materials to construct the apparatus necessary for the capture of the town, were to be found, The opportune arrival at Jaffa of galleys from Genoa furnished the besiegers with ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... both mind and sense for true art, were nevertheless interrupted and damped by one of the most melancholy sights,—by the destroyed and desolate condition of so many of the streets of Dresden through which I took my way. The Mohrenstrasse in ruins, and the Church (/Kreuzkirche/) of the Cross, with its shattered tower, impressed themselves deeply upon me, and still stand like a gloomy ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... proceeded again to the shore just before daybreak. The distant moaning of the sea, the harsh screams of the cormorants with the desolate nature of the spot, chilled my spirits. I had passed a sleepless night, and the storm rose again, and raged till near daybreak with increased fury, but the wind was now greatly hushed. The sea, however, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 375, June 13, 1829 • Various
... ruins of those "labyrinths" of stone, where the old tyrants had their pleasures. For it is a mistake to suppose that that wistful sense of eeriness in ruined buildings, to which most of us are susceptible, is an exclusively modern feeling. The name Cyclopean, attached to those desolate remains of buildings which were older than Greek history itself, attests their romantic influence over the fancy of the people who thus attributed them to a superhuman strength and skill. And the Cyclopes, like all the ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... echoed the Princess's wish. I was in favour of abandoning the yacht and trusting to the chances of the island. As the sun rose higher we got glimpses of this through the windows, and the verdure looked inviting after so many weary weeks of desolate water. The tops of the hills seemed barren, but I had no doubt that there was more fertility in the valleys, which were not swept by the bluff winds of the wild sea. But the Prince was obstinate, and, relying upon his luck, was dragging down with him the lives of the two women ...
— Hurricane Island • H. B. Marriott Watson
... The most desolate pang was struck into the girl's heart. Here she was, twenty-two—soon twenty-three—and not a creature loved her; none but Otto; and would even he forgive? If she began weeping in these woods alone, it would mean death or madness. Hastily she trod the thoughts out ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 7 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... followed her sister to the little room which they always shared when Janetta was at home. It might have looked very bare and desolate to ordinary eyes, but the girl felt the thrill of pleasure that all young creatures feel to anything that bears the name of home, and became aware of a satisfaction such as she had not experienced in her luxurious bedroom at Helmsley Court. Nora helped her to take off her hat and ...
— A True Friend - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... stole into the hitherto colorless cheeks, and at last the large, brown eyes unclosed and looked into hers with an expression so mournful, so beseeching, that a thrill of yearning tenderness for the desolate young creature shot through her heart, and bending down she said, ...
— Bad Hugh • Mary Jane Holmes
... sharp peaks, lean spires that rose as high as 200 feet; farther off, a succession of steeply cut cliffs sporting a grayish tint, huge mirrors that reflected the sparse rays of a sun half drowned in mist. Beyond, a stark silence reigned in this desolate natural setting, a silence barely broken by the flapping wings of petrels or puffins. By this point everything ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... yet a hush profound! They turned with saddened hearts to go; Then from afar there came a sound Of silver bells;—the priest said low, "O Mother, Mother, deign to hear, The worship-hour has rung; we wait In meek humility and fear. Must we return home desolate? Oh come, as late thou cam'st unsought, Or was it but an idle dream? Give us some sign if it was not, A word, a breath, ...
— Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan • Toru Dutt
... perhaps it was? for anxiety for the future darkened not the prospects of earthly bliss, her trust in the character of St. Eval was too confiding; it was only her fond heart which for a time would be so desolate. Her ear would linger in vain for the voice it loved; her eye seek in sorrow for the graceful form, the beauteous features on which it had so loved to gaze. New ties would supply to Caroline the place of all that she had left; deep ...
— The Mother's Recompense, Volume II. - A Sequel to Home Influence in Two Volumes • Grace Aguilar
... Don't you think it is desolate and cold-hearted, this great sea of people who none of them care ...
— Phoebe, Junior • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... hot iron, that the class may see through it; and finally burning it upon the funeral pyre, in order to throw light upon the subject. After these exercises, the procession returned, with music, to the State-House, where they disbanded, and returned to their desolate habitations. The affair surpassed anything of the kind that has ever taken place here, and nothing was wanting to render it a complete performance. It testifies to the spirit and character of the class of '53."—Literary World, Nov. 23, 1850, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... of his letters from Verona, "are tenacious to a degree of the truth of Juliet's story, insisting on the fact, giving the date 1303, and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden—once a cemetery, now ruined, to the very graves! The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love." He might have added, that when Verona itself, with its amphitheatre and its Paladian structures, ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson
... and desolate part of the planet, concealed in the depths of the towering jungle growth, a mammoth space-cruiser was receiving her complement of passengers. Airboats, flying at their terrific velocity through the heavy, steaming fog as ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith
... country?" Next year, after a visit to his birthplace, he exclaimed: "What a spectacle does our lower country present! Deserted and dismantled country-houses once the seats of cheerfulness and plenty, and the temples of the Most High ruinous and desolate, 'frowning in portentous silence upon the land,'" And in 1819 he wrote from Richmond: "You have no conception of the gloom and distress that pervade this place. There has been nothing like it since 1785 when from the same causes ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... its utmost bounds. A multitude of carriages, three cannon, several thousand men and women, and some children, were abandoned on the hostile bank. They were seen wandering in desolate troops on the borders of the river. Some threw themselves into it in order to swim across; others ventured themselves on the pieces of ice which were floating along: some there were also who threw ...
— History of the Expedition to Russia - Undertaken by the Emperor Napoleon in the Year 1812 • Count Philip de Segur
... and the happy sunshine. Eugenia, rising at daybreak for a gallop across country, would feel the dew in her face and the autumn in her blood. As she dashed over fences and ditches to the unploughed pasture, the morning was as desolate as midnight—not a soul showed in the surrounding fields and the long road lay as pallid as a streak of frost. The loneliness and the hour set her eyes to dancing and the glad blood to bounding in her veins. When a startled rabbit shied from the brushwood she would slacken her speed to watch it, ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... strength and appetite, which he speaks of in the eighteenth chapter of "Lavengro," after the Gypsies had gone away. He was almost given over by the physicians, he tells us, but cured by an "ancient female, a kind of doctress," with a decoction of "a bitter root which grows on commons and desolate places." An attack of "the dark feeling of mysterious dread" ...
— George Borrow - The Man and His Books • Edward Thomas
... still thought it better to remain some time in this desolate region, to procure fresh victuals for his crew. He found safe anchorage in Christmas Sound, where as usual, he made ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... desolate appearance of the ordinarily buzzing spaceport and it troubled him more than he would show. He knew that unless the defect in the force fields was corrected soon, the outer-space colony would have to be abandoned to ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... Leaving the desolate spot, D'Oppede next presented himself, on the nineteenth of April, before the town of Cabrieres. Behind some weak entrenchments a small body of brave men had posted themselves, determined to defend the lives and ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... Lord reliance; My soul, with courage wait; His truth be thine affiance, When faint and desolate; His might thine heart shall strengthen; His love thy joy increase; Mercy thy days shall lengthen; The Lord will ...
— Hymns for Christian Devotion - Especially Adapted to the Universalist Denomination • J.G. Adams
... from Rethel, and the 1st went no farther than Attigny. Between Contreuve and the valley of the Aisne the country became level again and was more bare than ever; as they drew near to Vouziers the road wound among desolate hills and naked gray fields, without a tree, without a house, as gloomy and forbidding as a desert, and the day's march, short as it was, was accomplished with such fatigue and distress that it seemed interminably long. Soon after midday, however, the 1st and 3d divisions had passed through ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of disaster. For why should Lady Fenimore have sent for me to see Sir Anthony, when he, strong and hearty, could have sent for me himself, or, for the matter of that, could have visited me at my own home? The house looked stark and desolate. And when we drew up at the front door and Pardoe, the elderly butler, appeared, his face ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... immense grey skull. At the base of this mountain, and facing the shore of Nakashima, rises a pyramidal mass of rock, covered with scraggy undergrowth, and several hundred feet in height—Mongakuzan. On its desolate ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... great pleasure to express to the officers and students of Straight University our thanks for the interesting reception we have received at their hands. We have come from a long way off, for sight-seeing, and the study of the country, but here we find something more than the wild mountains, and desolate plains, and border towns, that are to make up so much of the interest of our journey. Through institutions like this, a problem suggested to me in one of your streets will find solution. I visited the Republican State ...
— The American Missionary, Volume XLII. No. 7. July 1888 • Various
... word! More precious than silver and gold, Or all that this earth can afford But the sound of the church-going bell These valleys and rocks never heard, Ne'er sighed at the sound of a knell, Or smiled when a sabbath appeared Ye winds, that have made me your sport Convey to this desolate shore Some cordial endearing report Of a land I must visit no more My friends, do they now and then send A wish or a thought after me? O tell me I yet have a friend, Though a friend I am never ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... no man's land with a patrol; and Kerr, of A Company, Telfer, and I went out on a wiring party just behind him. We went up Durham Trench by ourselves first; the party followed on after. Machine-gun bullets whizzed past the desolate area; it was not exactly pleasant. We went on along New Garden Street, and waited for the parties. Then they drew wire and pickets which had been dumped by a carrying party under Giffin. The Brigade-Major and Colonel Best-Dunkley went past ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd
... our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen; Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea, And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green: And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea, Foursquare from base unto point like the building of Gods that have been, The last of that waste of the mountains all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey, And bright with the dawn ...
— Poems By The Way & Love Is Enough • William Morris
... married by the Rev. Jesse Head, a Methodist minister located at Springfield, Washington County, Kentucky. They lived for a time in Elizabethtown, but after the birth of their first child, Sarah, they removed to Rock Spring farm, on Nolin Creek, in Hardin (afterward LaRue) County. In this desolate spot, a strange and unlikely place for the birth of one destined to play so memorable a part in the history of the world, on the twelfth day of February, 1809, Abraham ...
— The Every-day Life of Abraham Lincoln • Francis Fisher Browne
... mind of Turlington was far from feeling satisfied with the meager description of the stranger thus rendered. He could not be engaged in surveying in the dark. What could he want in the desolate neighborhood of the house and church-yard at ...
— Miss or Mrs.? • Wilkie Collins
... epithet to the semi-fabulous wars of Charlemagne and his Paladins, or even to the Crusaders. Here are no memorable contests of generosity; no triumphs glorified by mercy; no sacrifices of interest the most basely selfish to martial honor; no ear on either side for the pleadings of desolate affliction; no voice in any quarter of commanding justice; no acknowledgment of a common nature between the belligerents; nor sense of a participation in the same human infirmities, dangers, or necessities. To the ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... poor man's family was a serious subject: such was the hopeless condition of a useful mechanic ready for work even in the desolate forests skirting the haunts of the savage. So fares it with the DISJECTA MEMBRA of towns and villages, when such arrangements are left to the people themselves in a ...
— Journal of an Expedition into the Interior of Tropical Australia • Thomas Mitchell
... course the artists went to Rome, but they changed sky and not spirit. The pupils of the academy came back with their portfolios filled with sketches in which we see nothing of the "lone mother of dead empires," nothing of the vast ruins and the great sombre desolate Campagna, but only Rome turned into a decoration for the scenes of a theatre or the panels of a boudoir. The Olympus of Homer and of Virgil, as has been well said, becomes the Olympus of Ovid. Strength, sublimity, even stateliness disappeared, unless we ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... his recollections is of a family named Rawlings, tenants of Lower Pertwood Farm, near Hindon, a lonely, desolate-looking house hidden away in a deep hollow among the high downs. The Farmer Rawlings of seventy or eighty years ago was a man of singular ideas, and that he was permitted to put them in practice shows ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... again and I was back in my other world. I cannot tell you anything of the rest of the play—I remember nothing. Only I know that I was actually living over again those awful days in the forest—the heat, the flies, the smells, the glassy sheen of the trees, the perpetual rumble of the guns, the desolate whine of the shells—and then Marie's death, Trenchard's sorrow, Trenchard's death, that last view of Semyonov... and I felt that I was being made to remember it all for a purpose, as though my old friend, rich now with his wiser knowledge, was whispering to me, "All life is bound up. You ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... we suffered so much as from thirst. That was terrible. Hour after hour passed by. No relief appeared. I began almost to wish that I had laid my head down alongside my poor friend and old shipmate, Delisle, in the desolate savannah near Ou Trou. The thought was wrong—rank ingratitude to the merciful providence which had preserved me—but it was human, I fear. How admirably our gallant fellows behaved! Scarcely a murmur or a grumble was heard. Again the sun went down. That ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... This is a most desolate-looking place, flat and sandy, and covered with camps and storehouses for a mile along the river. A line of intrenchments encloses the whole, some seven miles long, resting on the river at each end. There is a long wharf just built out to deep water, at the end of which the Atlantic ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... body! And when I call to mind, O Varus, his craftiness upon every occasion, and his art of dissembling, I can hardly believe that I am still alive, and I wonder how I have escaped such a deep plotter of mischief. However, since some fate or other makes my house desolate, and perpetually raises up those that are dearest to me against me, I will, with tears, lament my hard fortune, and privately groan under my lonesome condition; yet am I resolved that no one who thirsts after my blood ...
— The Wars of the Jews or History of the Destruction of Jerusalem • Flavius Josephus
... about to write a very curious history, as the reader will agree with me when he has read this book. We have more than one narrative of people being cast away upon desolate islands, and being left to their own resources, and no works are perhaps read with more interest; but I believe I am the first instance of a boy being left alone upon an uninhabited island. Such was, however, the case; and now I ...
— The Little Savage • Captain Marryat
... wondering and increasing admiration. In securing a fire, they escaped all immediate danger, and she became as cheery as if the disaster, which had threatened even a fatal termination, were only an episode, and the long, wintry bivouac, in that desolate place, but ...
— From Jest to Earnest • E. P. Roe
... was but a repetition of that first day's staging—the sage-brush was scarcer, the mountains seemed as far off as ever, and the outlook was, if possible, more desolate. The entry in Miss Carmichael's diary, inscribed in malformed characters as the stage jolted over ruts and gullies, reads: "I do not mind telling you, in strictest confidence, 'Dere Diary'—as the little boy called you—that ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... Ferdinand, Ferdinand! to go now, when I have so learnt to love thee! now, when I looked to years of faithful devotion to prove how wholly the past was banished—how wholly I was thine alone! to atone for hours of suffering by years of love! Oh, how couldst thou leave me friendless—desolate?" ...
— The Vale of Cedars • Grace Aguilar
... loved her, and loved her desperately. How pathetic it is. One has little inclination to smile when one sees the depths of that desolate heart. Do you think he did not see, as clearly as you or I would see, the wrinkled old face, the indifference of age, the "triste raison," in her he idealised? Remember, he was the most ironical of men. But he did not wish to see these things, he wished to cling to a little love, which would ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... us a letter, that he would have done so; but I could not help fancying that he must have been made prisoner by some savages, or carried into slavery by some Malays or Malagash or other eastern people, or perhaps that he had been wrecked on some desolate island from which he had no means of escaping. I reasoned thus: Fond as he was of the sea, after he had left his ship and virtually quitted the navy, he was not at all likely to live a shore life. It was much more probable that he would engage in some trading voyage or other, and the more ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... unconcernedly on the miserable victim of vice, and that shattered wreck of a man may move the multitude to laughter or to scorn. But to the Mason, it is the form of sacred humanity that is before him; it is an erring fellow-being; a desolate, forlorn, forsaken soul; and his thoughts, enfolding the poor wretch, will be far deeper than those of indifference, ridicule, or contempt. All human offences, the whole system of dishonesty, evasion, circumventing, forbidden indulgence, and intriguing ambition, ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... Bannerman in "Basil," one of the striking (though, to rapid readers, somewhat unintelligible) metrical tales published early in this century, entitled "Tales of Superstition and Chivalry." Basil is a "rude sea boy," desolate and neglected from infancy, but with feelings profound from nature, and fed by solitude. He dwells alone in a rocky cave; but, in consequence of some supernatural terrors connected with a murder, arising in some ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... variously estimated as having been from twelve to thirty millions,—now it is only three! Is it impossible for us to suppose that it can be restored to its former prosperity? Immense tanks and irrigation works cover the entire country in tracts which are now unoccupied and desolate. Many of these have been restored by Government, and there are now 100,000 acres of irrigable land in that country, only waiting to be occupied and cultivated. Government is ready to give it on easy terms. Here, then, alone is a wide and hopeful field for Indian emigration, ...
— Darkest India - A Supplement to General Booth's "In Darkest England, and the Way Out" • Commissioner Booth-Tucker
... taken away from him. I think he says his prayers to the dear Lord for having spared him being taken home in seven basketsful to-night. It's a fool's game to risk your all that way and leave the nation desolate." ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield
... evidently been a manufactory; but the windows were broken; a door hung swinging upon its hinges; it was evident that this place was unused and deserted too. Upon the side where he stood were a couple of old houses, bare and desolate, with broken windows, broken railings—dark, silent—the most dismal houses the Doctor ...
— A Bachelor's Dream • Mrs. Hungerford
... ever sang its shrill and flute-like song; and the laurel-bush which shaded it, and the bitter box-plants and the orange-trees skirting the paths now formed but vague masses under the blue-black sky. Ah! how gay and sweet had that melancholy garden been in the morning, and what a desolate echo it retained of Benedetta's winsome laughter, all that fine delight in coming happiness which now lay prone upstairs, steeped in the nothingness of things and beings! So dolorous was the pang which came to Pierre's ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Hastings was burnt by the French, who also attempted to burn Winchelsea, but were foiled. They also attacked Rye, where they landed from five vessels. After plundering and setting it on fire they went away, leaving the town desolate. They landed at Rottingdean, advanced over the Downs with the design of laying waste Lewes, but in this were disappointed by the valour of John de Cariloce, Prior of Lewes, Sir Thomas Cheney, Constable of Dover Castle, Sir John Falsley, and others, ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... her save as a frank, generous, sunny-hearted girl. Now he began to recall words that she had spoken of which he had never before taken heed. The rippling laugh, half like the notes of a silver bell, and half like the trilling of a bob-o-link's song, came back like music now into his desolate soul, making him all the more disconsolate that he was never again to hear it. But had she not looked wistfully into his eyes when he took her hand in the garden to say good-bye? Was such a thought not comforting now? Ah no. Too truly has our poet ...
— The Four Canadian Highwaymen • Joseph Edmund Collins
... she was understood partly, and wished to be understood further; for, however old, plain, humble, desolate, afflicted we may be, so long as our hearts preserve the feeblest spark of life, they preserve also, shivering near that pale ember, a starved, ghostly longing for appreciation and affection. To this extenuated spectre, perhaps, a crumb is not thrown once a year, but when ahungered and athirst ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... from things that have fallen into disuse is infinite. In the attic of this house whose inhabitants I did not know, a little girl's dress and her doll lie desolate. And here is an iron-pointed staff which once bit into the earth of the green hills, and a sunbonnet now barely visible in the dim light from the garret-window. They have been abandoned since many ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... of ocean," forthwith he began, "A desolate country lies, which Crete is nam'd, Under whose monarch in old times the world Liv'd pure and chaste. A mountain rises there, Call'd Ida, joyous once with leaves and streams, Deserted now like a forbidden thing. It was the spot which Rhea, Saturn's spouse, Chose ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... turn into a desolate and dismal ravine, where the snow lay deep below them, deep above them, deep on every side. While speaking, Obenreizer stood pointing at the Bridge, and observing Vendale's face, with a very singular ...
— No Thoroughfare • Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins
... And they cast dust on their heads, and cried, weeping and wailing, saying, Alas, alas that great city, wherein were made rich all that had ships in the sea by reason of her costliness! for in one hour is she made desolate. ...
— The Revelation Explained • F. Smith
... home alone, though the road was long. It was a cold autumn day; the way looked jagged and bare, the meadow gray and yellow; while frost had begun to appear here and there on the roadside. Disappointment is a dreadful companion. He felt himself so small and desolate, walking there; but Lars was everywhere before him, like a giant, his head towering, in the dusk of evening, to the sky. It was his own fault that this had been the decisive battle, and the thought grieved him sorely: he had staked too much upon a single little ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors • Various
... window where, one day, I crouched to see him go, When all the world with wrath was gray And desolate with snow. ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... Comte de la Pena, whose escape having been prevented, he was also placed under arrest, and left until the following morning without clothes, food, or bed. On the morrow, however, the Comte de Fiesque,[293] touched by the extreme beauty and desolate condition of the child, and probably anxious to secure one friend to him in his necessity, became answerable for his safe keeping; and, wrapping him in the cloak of one of his lackeys, he carried him to the Louvre, and introduced him to the young Queen, ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 2 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... region as the piny-woods "Tackies." Within a stone's throw of Azalia there was a scattering settlement of these Tackies. They had settled there before the Revolution, and had remained there ever since, unchanged and unchangeable, steeped in poverty of the most desolate description, and living the narrowest lives possible in this great Republic. They had attracted the attention of the Rev. Arthur Hill, an Episcopalian minister, who conceived an idea that the squalid settlement near Azalia afforded a fine ...
— Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches • Joel Chandler Harris
... heart be troubled; ye believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house are many mansions." There is no parting there, thought little Ellen. She cried a long time; but she was comforted nevertheless. The heart that rests on the blessed One who said those words can never be quite desolate. ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Susan Warner
... were no cares in that life, no aches and pains, and not time enough in the day (and three-fourths of the night) to work off one's surplus vigor and energy. Of the mid-night highway robbery joke played upon me with revolvers at my head on the windswept and desolate Gold Hill Divide, no witness is left but me, the victim. All the friendly robbers are gone. These old fools last night laughed till they cried over the particulars ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... tears in her eyes, and in the eyes of the boy as they spoke about the one who was gone, and the kind dusk hid the sight so that neither knew, but each felt a subtle sympathy with the other, and before Hanford started upon his desolate way home under the burden of his first sorrow he took Mary Ann's slim bony hand in his and said quite stiffly: "Well, good night, Miss Mary Ann. I'm glad you told me," and Mary Ann responded, with a deep blush ...
— Marcia Schuyler • Grace Livingston Hill Lutz
... Zabulon and of Naphthali, Galilee of the Gentiles: could see even with His human sight, the gleam of that lake by Capernaum and Chorazin, and many a place loved by Him and vainly ministered to, whose house was now left unto them desolate: and, chief of all, far in the utmost blue, the hills above Nazareth, sloping down to His old home; hills on which the stones yet lay loose that had been taken up to cast at Him, when He left them for ever. 'And as He prayed two ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... us. When we afterwards landed the air had that peculiar Mediterranean translucency which Southern islands wear; and the plantation we visited had the loveliest tropical garden, though tangled and desolate, which I have ever seen in the South. The deserted house was embowered In great blossoming shrubs, and filled with hyacinthine odors, among which predominated that of the little Chickasaw roses which everywhere bloomed and trailed around. ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... round the coast on the Masbate. For days he and the ship-master alone battled with the stormy waves, a howling wind ahead, and a murderous rabble on the coast waiting for their blood. On the verge of death they reached a desolate spot whence the poor captain saved his body from destruction, but with prostrate nerves, rendering him quite unfit for further service. And the carnage in the Samar jungles, which has caused many a sorrow in the homeland, continues to the present day with unabated ferocity. By nature a lovely ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... killing the prophets, and stoning those sent to you, how often would I have gathered your children together, as a bird gathers her brood under her wings, but you would not! [23:38]Behold, your house is left to you desolate; [23:39]for I tell you that you shall not see me henceforth, till you say, Blessed is he that comes in the name ...
— The New Testament • Various
... was master of many slaves, a hard man of his hands; They built a tower about her in the desolate golden lands, Sealed as the tyrants sealed their tombs, planned with an ancient plan, And set two windows in the tower, like the ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... but it is difficult to see why, in the case of the following five piers, against which, as at Clairvaux, stood the stalls of the lay brothers, the level of the corbels should vary so much. Now all stalls are gone and the church is very bare and desolate, with nothing but the horrible reredos to detract from that severity and sternness which was what St. Bernard wished to see in all churches of the ...
— Portuguese Architecture • Walter Crum Watson
... cherished by those who were honoured with his friendship? Or in what language shall we speak of that house, once celebrated for its rare attractions to the furthest ends of the civilised world, and now silent and desolate as the grave? To that house, a hundred and twenty years ago, a poet addressed those tender and graceful lines, which have now acquired a new meaning not less sad than that which ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... means, Fred," said Mr. Stanley. "In the first place the treasure, if there is any, is in a desolate place, hard to get at, once you are in Alaska. Then Alaska is no easy place to reach, and it takes more money to get there than we shall ever have, I'm afraid. Another thing: you would have no right to go after the treasure. It belongs to ...
— The Young Treasure Hunter - or, Fred Stanley's Trip to Alaska • Frank V. Webster
... rocks above the shore Uplift their bleak and furrow'd aspect high! How proudly desolate their foreheads, hoar, That meet the earliest ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 390, September 19, 1829 • Various
... powerful conservative forces; the poison had descended to the extremities of the social system. A corrupt body must die when vitality has fled. The soul was gone; principle, patriotism, virtue, had all passed away. The barbarians were advancing to conquer and desolate; there was no power to resist them but enervated and timid legions, with the accumulated vices of all the nations of the earth, which they had been learning for four hundred years. Society must needs resolve itself into its original ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume III • John Lord
... capture of the two merchant-ships, continued to spare Victor Emmanuel unnecessary difficulties by avoiding the fleet which was supposed to be on the watch for him off Cagliari in Sardinia, and only interrupted his voyage by a landing at a desolate spot on the Tuscan coast in order to take up artillery and ammunition which were waiting for him there. On the 11th of May, having heard from some English merchantmen that there were no Neapolitan vessels of war at Marsala, he made for this harbour. The first of his two ships entered ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... turned vague thoughts, as it were, into sentences, printed in clear type. She often thought she was dead, and she favoured this idea, but she was never wholly dead. She was a lost soul wandering on those desolate hills, the gloom descending, and Brighton and Southwick and Shoreham and Worthing gleaming along the sea banks of a purple sea. There were phantoms—there were two phantoms. One turned to reality, and she walked by her ...
— A Mere Accident • George Moore
... restored; which when Deucalion beheld to be empty, and how the desolate Earth kept a profound silence, he thus addressed Pyrrha, with tears bursting forth:—"O sister, O wife, O thou, the only woman surviving, whom a common origin,[63] and a kindred descent, and afterwards the marriage tie has united to me, ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... strange dimness came o'er me; I lay down to sleep on the snow. 'Twas ill done, and with store of wolves hard by. Had I loved thee as thou dost deserve, I had shown more manhood. But oh, sweet love, the drowsiness that did crawl o'er me desolate, and benumb me, was more than nature. And so I slept; and but that God was better to us, than I to thee or to myself, from that sleep I ne'er had waked; so all do say. I had slept an hour or two, as I suppose, but no more, when a hand did ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade |
