"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the extensive planting of pine trees for food purposes will have to wait until we have advanced to the point of putting other kinds of nut trees upon good ground first. Pines will be employed for the more barren hillsides when the folks of three hundred years from now begin to complain of the high cost ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... extensive coal-mining operations were carried on. At the latter, the Dragon took in a fresh supply of coal, which would carry her, if properly husbanded, across the Pacific. Steaming northward, she entered the bay of Valparaiso, which Tom, as he looked at the barren, red, and bare hills surrounding it, with scarce a bush except the cactus to be seen, pronounced a very odd sort of Paradise. The town stands partly on the shores of the bay, and chiefly on a number of hills separated by valleys, with the mighty Cordilleras rising beyond, giving the scenery, ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... past. Long before your race knew this continent existed, my people were in the vigor and glory of national prosperity. From the extreme north, where the icebergs never yield to the sun, through the variations of temperature to the barren rocks in the farthest south, were ours, all, from ocean ...
— The American Family Robinson - or, The Adventures of a Family lost in the Great Desert of the West • D. W. Belisle
... way diminished the disgust which filled his soul. What quality was there lacking in the Latin races which rendered them so untrustworthy? His crew had mutinied, de Poincilit was ready to consign his companions in misfortune to a most frightful death on the barren island, and here was Suarez hugging to his breast a ghastly secret which chance alone had brought to light. He strove hard to repress the contempt which rose in his gorge, as it was essential that ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... priori, but they are valid for objects of experience alone. The conflict concerns, secondly, the use of the deductive (syllogistic) or the inductive method. Empiricism, through its founder Bacon, had recommended induction in place of the barren syllogistic method, as the only method which would lead to new discoveries. It demands, above all things, the extension of knowledge. Rationalism, on the contrary, held fast to the deductive method, because ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... contradict Himself. To this it may be answered that apart from any question of miracles, there are already flaws in this chain of causation, or rather, powers from without that can shake it, as, for instance, the outbreak of a war rendering a country, which should have been fertile, barren and wasted. Holy Scripture is not responsible for the phrase, "suspension of the laws of nature." Theologians do not dogmatise about the nature of miracles, and it would be well if science were less zealous for the inviolability of laws, the outside limits of which ...
— The Church Handy Dictionary • Anonymous
... off. The road wound through the valley, across the low hills that encircled it, sometimes spanning or running parallel to the bright stream that had been the delight of Eric's innocent childhood. There was something enjoyable at first to the poor boy's eyes, so long accustomed to the barren sea, in resting once more on the soft undulating green of the summer fields, which were intertissued with white and yellow flowers, like a broidery of pearls and gold. The whole scene was bathed in the exquisite light, and rich with the delicate perfumes of a glorious evening, which filled ...
— Eric, or Little by Little • Frederic W. Farrar
... Where are your children?" I demanded. They pointed to the high and barren hills looming against the ...
— Korea's Fight for Freedom • F.A. McKenzie
... too much and acts too little," he said to the Duke of Chevreuse; "his most solid occupations are confined to vague applications of his mind and barren resolutions; he must see society, study it, mix in it, without becoming a slave to it, learn to express himself forcibly, and acquire a gentle authority. If he do not feel the need of possessing firmness and nerve, he will not make any real progress; it is time for him to be a ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... yes) the warrior muttered, and went his way. He had climbed the top of his favorite barren hill to survey the surrounding prairies, when he spied my chase after the coyote. His keen eyes recognized the pony and driver. At once uneasy for my safety, he had come running to my mother's cabin to give her warning. I did not appreciate ...
— American Indian stories • Zitkala-Sa
... been followed with great success by many men of enterprise in those regions; and there is no doubt, we think, that if such dams were multiplied, Artesian wells sunk, and railways run into the karroos, those fine, though comparatively barren regions of South Africa, would soon begin to blossom ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... covered with those low vines which, trampled upon by the coronation army, bloomed again into leaves and fruit, says the legend, and by St. Martin's Day yielded a late but rich vintage.[142] I have lingered in barren Picardy, along the Bay of the Somme so sad and bare beneath the flight of its birds of passage. I have wandered through the fat meadows of Normandy to Rouen with its steeples and towers, its ancient charnel houses, its damp streets, its last remaining timbered houses with ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France
... U. S. Grant. So, up to the coming of Grant, their record, in the main, was a series of bloody disasters, and their few victories, like Antietam and Gettysburg, were not properly and energetically followed up as they should have been, and hence were largely barren of adequate results. Considering these things, I have always somehow "felt it in my bones" that if Mr. Lincoln had not sent the brief telegram above mentioned, I would now be sleeping in some (probably) unmarked and unknown grave away ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... sufficient to raise my spirits, and I had left Bois le Duc a good way in arrears before I was thoroughly convinced of my existence; when I looked through the blinds of the carriage, and saw nothing but barren plains and mournful willows, banks clad with rushes, and heifers so black and dismal that Proserpine herself would have given them up to Hecate. I was near believing myself in the neighbourhood of a ...
— Dreams, Waking Thoughts, and Incidents • William Beckford
... the country where the Celts had once lived, and whence their civilised descendants had been driven by the English, had become a barren moorland. Scarce a tree grew on the heights, but a wild common, with valley and hill alternating, much as on Dartmoor at the present day, stretched before the travellers, and was traversed by the old Roman trackway. Dreary indeed it looked in the darkening twilight; here ...
— Edwy the Fair or the First Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake
... all stages of preparation for rafting down the Moratsha. This was succeeded by a forest entirely of firs, also splendid trees, and then we came into a region which was beyond all my experience or imagination,—a wide and barren waste of rock, gray, glistening in the now burning sun, and without a trace of vegetation that could be recognized by the casual vision. There was no soil, and apparently never had been any, and the silvery-gray of the lichenous ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman
... one accuse the critic of irreverence, who doubts the wisdom of universities, and of pedantic scholars who burrow like moles in the mouldering remnants of antiquity, but see nothing of the glorious sky overhead. While I have no reverence for barren or wasted intellect, I have the profoundest respect for the fruitful intellect which produces valuable results—for the vast energy of the lower class of intellectual powers, which have developed our immense ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, September 1887 - Volume 1, Number 8 • Various
... their property must both be produced together—not one to the loss of the other. Property must not be created in lands desolate by exile of their people, nor multiplied and depraved humanity, in lands barren of bread. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... expended seven millions in experiments, leaving his wife to die of neglect. From 1820 to 1825* he was a tax-collector in Brittany—duties performed by his elder daughter who had secured the position for him in order to divert him from his barren labors. During this time she rehabilitated the family fortunes. Balthazar died, almost insane, crying "Eureka!" [The ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... children. But when they reached a land where the Rogi dwelt of old, a people who had joined the Gothic host and gone to Italy, they settled in that place. But since they were pressed by famine, because they were in a barren land, they removed from there not long afterward, and came to a place close to the country of the Gepaedes.[190] And at first the Gepaedes permitted them to dwell there and be neighbours to them, since they came as suppliants. But afterwards for no good ...
— Procopius - History of the Wars, Books V. and VI. • Procopius
... pass grew vegetation, while here and there, along the side, some tree managed to obtain a precarious foothold, and sprouted forth toward the sun. The floor of the canon was of a varied nature—rocks, boulders, grass, streams of water, gravel, sand, and barren soil, alternating with each other and preventing anything like an accurate description of any particular section. A survey of this curious specimen of nature's highway suggested the idea that the solid mountain had been rent for many leagues by an earthquake, ...
— The Cave in the Mountain • Lieut. R. H. Jayne
... fed, so as to make strong and prosperous stocks; whereas if the bees are wanting, every thing else will be in vain: just as a land where there are many stout hands and courageous hearts, although comparatively barren, will in due time, be made to "bud and blossom as the rose," while a second Eden, if inhabited by a scanty and discouraged population, must speedily be overgrown ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... have merely come to make your fortune; that is to say, I offer you a superb opportunity of making your entry into the artistic world. Art, you know, is a barren route, of which glory is ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... but the greater part of this third subscription the Jesuits had spent upon their schools, so the fate of St. Joseph's seemed to be to remain, as someone had said, an unfinished ruin. Their resources were exhausted, and they surveyed the barren aisles, dreaming of the painting and mosaics they would put up when the promises of Father Gordon were realised. For it was understood that their fortunes should be retrieved by his musical abilities, and his competence ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... you shall not sow your seed in barren ground, for I hope to return you an increase answerable to your hopes; but however, you shal find me obedient, and thankful, and serviceable to ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton
... stallions I can pay, Do I not own their strength and speed? A proper man I dash away, As their two dozen legs were mine indeed. Up then, from idle pondering free, And forth into the world with me! I tell you what;—your speculative churl Is like a beast which some ill spirit leads, On barren wilderness, in ceaseless whirl, While all around ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... probable that we shall finish our work in a much shorter period than was anticipated; very likely in ten or twelve months. The country up here is beautiful; everything green and pleasant; and if you saw it now, you would not believe that in two months' time it could have such a parched and barren appearance as it will then assume. I hope to be able, either from the Darling or from Cooper's Creek, to send you some details of our proceedings. Please to remember me ...
— Successful Exploration Through the Interior of Australia • William John Wills
... a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it—a noble wreck on a barren, social shore. For the Signal House was once a family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as a quaint and interesting demesne. Finally its price fell with a crash, and an elderly lady of weak intellect was ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman
... her mind, in spite of her, would go back to happier days. It was not often that Martha allowed herself to indulge in self-pity; but to-night, as she looked squarely into the future and saw it stretching away before her, barren and gray, it seemed hard to keep back the tears. It was not like Martha to give way to her emotions; perhaps it was the Christmas feel in the air that gripped ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... Amory started on his walk to Princeton the sky was a colorless vault, cool, high and barren of the threat of rain. It was a gray day, that least fleshly of all weathers; a day of dreams and far hopes and clear visions. It was a day easily associated with those abstract truths and purities that dissolve in the sunshine or ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... Long ago this mysterious colony quitted Spain, and settled on the tongue of land on which it is to this day. Whence it came no one knew, and it spoke an unknown tongue. One of its chiefs, who understood Provencal, begged the commune of Marseilles to give them this bare and barren promontory, where, like the sailors of old, they had run their boats ashore. The request was granted; and three months afterwards, around the twelve or fifteen small vessels which had brought these gypsies of the sea, a small village sprang up. This village, constructed in ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... genius, or beauty. We may be told that it has always been so in every country, and that the fine society of all lands is as profuse and flashy as our own. We deny it, flatly. Neither English, nor French, nor Italian, nor German society, is so unspeakably barren as that which is technically called "society" here. In London, and Paris, and Vienna, and Rome, all the really eminent men and women help make up the mass of society. A party is not a mere ball, but it is a congress ...
— The Potiphar Papers • George William Curtis
... lava flow had stopped and the lower valley began, came vegetation. Sparse at first, then springing to luxuriant growth, it contrasted strongly with the barren wall beside it and the equally barren waste of high ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... with it, then it becomes great and worthy at once, for it is part of the giver's very self. It is not what a man gives, but how he gives it, that matters. Gold and silver coming from a full purse and a cold heart, is a barren gift compared to the widow's mite, ...
— Susan - A Story for Children • Amy Walton
... they had got into one of those deep, hollow lanes, from which it is impossible to catch a glimpse of the surrounding country: those lanes so still, and so beautiful, with their broken sandy banks, covered with tufts of feathering grass, with peeping primroses and violets, and barren strawberries between; the beech and ash of the copses casting their slender branches across, and checkering the way with innumerable broken lights! While, may be, as was here the case, a long pebbly stream runs sparkling and shining ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... which I cannot resist, which I glory in not resisting; for you have been my guide, my morning star, which has awakened me to new life. If I have a noble purpose upon earth, if I have roused myself from that conceited dream of self-culture which now looks to me so cold, and barren, and tawdry, into the hope of becoming useful, beneficent—to whom do I owe it but to you, Marie? No; there is no gulf, Marie! You are my wife, and you alone!" And he held her so firmly, and gazed down upon her with such strong manhood, ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume I • Charles Kingsley
... aspect of its tombs. The king of birds never hovers over the deserted waste. A blade of grass or an insect finds no existence there. The shrivelled lichen alone, clinging to the weathered surface of the broken brick, seems to glory in its universal dominion over those barren walls. Of all the desolate pictures I have ever seen that of Warka incomparably surpasses all." Surely in this case it cannot be said that appearances are deceitful; for all that space, and much more, is a cemetery, and what a cemetery! "It is difficult," again says Loftus, "to convey anything ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... and measured voice, "I have to thank you for one very happy minute; the sight of a heart so fresh in the limpid purity of goodness is a luxury you cannot comprehend till you have come to my age; journeyed, like me, from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren. Heed me: if you had been half-a-dozen years older, and this child for whom you plead had been a fair young woman, perhaps just as innocent, just as charming,—more in peril,—my benevolence would have lain as dormant as a stone. A young man's foolish ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... It was a queer moment, though not an unprecedented one in the stormy history of their relations together. A queer, strange, comforting, healing moment, the fleeting shadow of a great rock in a barren land; a strayed fragment of something which should have been between them always but was ...
— Dangerous Ages • Rose Macaulay
... incident is that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. Years after he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... not proposed to enter into the Rationalism of the last century, therefore; or to inquire into the causes of the barren lifeless shape into which Theology then, for the most part, threw itself. I have never made that department of Ecclesiastical History my study: and who does not turn away from what is joyless and ...
— Inspiration and Interpretation - Seven Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford • John Burgon
... apothegms, as keen as sharpened swords. And Halfdan, too, from off of royal seat Arose, with pleading words and pleading looks,— But it was all in vain; each prayer was wasted,— Like sunshine lavished on a barren rock, No growth alluring from his stony heart. King Helge's sullen countenance was like His heart,—a pale-faced "No" to human prayers. "A peasant's son," said he, contemptuously, "Could Ing'borg gain, but who profanes the temple Ill-suited ...
— Fridthjof's Saga • Esaias Tegner
... own much longer in face of the ever increasing demand for their pelts and the more systematic invasion of their range. The opening up of the country in the north will mean the extinction of the great migrating herd of barren-ground caribou, unless protection is enforced. The coast birds are going fast. Some very old men can still remember the great auk, which is now as extinct as the dodo. Elderly men have eaten the Labrador duck, ...
— Draft of a Plan for Beginning Animal Sanctuaries in Labrador • William Wood
... House, never beautiful, and barren in its immediate surroundings, was entirely deserted. The Hive was my home; and when the warm sun, looking through the barren grape vine into the dining room window, melted the light snow of early spring, and awoke ...
— Brook Farm • John Thomas Codman
... wonders of the extent, power, riches, and splendour of the kingdom of Bisnagar, bent his course towards the Indian coast; and after three months' travelling, joining himself to different caravans, sometimes over deserts and barren mountains, and sometimes through populous and fertile countries, arrived at Bisnagar, the capital of the kingdom of that name, and the residence of its maharajah. He lodged at a khan appointed for foreign merchants; and having learnt that there ...
— The Arabian Nights Entertainments vol. 4 • Anon.
... a distance of some five or six miles out at sea, there was visible a small, bleak-looking island; or, more properly, its position was discernible through the wilderness of surge in which it was enveloped. About two miles nearer the land, arose another of smaller size, hideously craggy and barren, and encompassed at various intervals by ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... Golden cross, and rings, and jewels, Fitting ornaments to beauty. Now she leaves her many treasures, Leaves the store-house on the mountain, Filled with gold and silver trinkets, Wanders over field and meadow, Over stone-fields waste and barren, Wanders on through fen and forest, Through the forest vast and cheerless, Wanders hither, wanders thither, Singing careless as she wanders, This her mournful song and echo: "Woe is me, my life hard-fated! Woe to Aino, broken-hearted! ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... Quito, which the Spaniards call the Arcabucos, being thickly covered with brushwood, but over which the road is tolerably easy and only moderately steep, being almost under the equator. In this march his men suffered extremely from hunger and thirst, as the country through which they went was very barren, and had neither springs nor rivulets. The only relief they could procure was from certain large canes as thick as a mans leg, in each of the joints of which they usually found rather more than a quart of excellent water. They were so much distressed by famine on this march as to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. IV. • Robert Kerr
... from corn and cattle and wheat-field countries the canyon at first sight seems as uninhabitable as a glacier crevasse, utterly silent and barren. Nevertheless it is the home of the multitude of our fellow-mortals, men as well as animals and plants. Centuries ago it was inhabited by tribes of Indians, who, long before Columbus saw America, built thousands of stone houses in its crags, and large ones, some of them several stories ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir
... clear, an ideal one for a ride, and mile after mile was passed, between the now almost barren fields, and through long groves of leafless trees. The horses from Riverlawn had always been boasted of as being the best in that section of the country, and now they were proving ...
— An Undivided Union • Oliver Optic
... evidence that the disease had originated. It was plain enough that it used to be known in many localities where it has long ceased to be feared. Still it was and is remarkable to see what a clean bill of health in this particular respect our barren soil inherited with its sterility. There are some malarious spots on the edge of Lake Champlain, and there have been some temporary centres of malaria, within the memory of man, on one or more of our Massachusetts rivers, but these are harmless enough, ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of Burke's journey had to be made through rugged and barren regions, destitute of water, and with nothing that could serve as food for man or beast. Driven to extremities by hunger, the pioneers devoured the venomous reptiles they killed, and on one occasion Burke came near ...
— St. Nicholas, Vol. 5, No. 5, March, 1878 • Various
... the ground is covered with low stunted shrubs, which serve as landmarks for the caravans, and furnish the camels with a scanty forage. In other parts the disconsolate wanderer, wherever he turns, sees nothing around him but a vast interminable expanse of sand and sky—a gloomy and barren void, where the eye finds no particular object to rest upon, and the mind is filled with painful apprehensions of perishing ...
— Travels in the Interior of Africa - Volume 1 • Mungo Park
... Glazier soon found himself again on the barren desert. A side track of the railroad, named White Plains, gave him rest for the night. The spot is surrounded by a white alkali desert, covered in places with salt and alkali deposits. Hot Springs is another ...
— Sword and Pen - Ventures and Adventures of Willard Glazier • John Algernon Owens
... bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all. For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband. Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise." (Galatians 4:22-28) Isaac pictures the entire Christ, head and body—Jesus ...
— The Harp of God • J. F. Rutherford
... was a very old man when we first met him. He died before we left that part of the country. His last illness was preceded by a drunken spree, during which some rougish boys painted a barren fig-tree on his bald head. He died soon afterward. Notwithstanding the efforts of those who prepared the body for burial, his head went to its last resting-place still marked by some of the paint that portrayed him as a ...
— Trials and Triumphs of Faith • Mary Cole
... of artist must rise to that vision of a loftier reality—a more true because a more beautiful world—which only imagination can reveal. A truer world, —for the world of facts is not and cannot be true. It is barren, incoherent, misleading. But behind every fact there is a truth: and these truths are enlightening, unifying, creative. Fasten your hold upon them, and facts will become your servants instead of your tyrants. No charm of detail ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... journeyed was barren; the plants were dried up by the frost and were all faded. Snow lay on the summits of Lebanon, which the travellers now saw from afar, away in their native land, and pale gleams fell on to the lowlands of Judaea through the cloudy atmosphere, so that stones and grass were white. When ...
— I.N.R.I. - A prisoner's Story of the Cross • Peter Rosegger
... a barren union. No child followed, with God's grace in its little hands, to create a mother's feelings and soften the callous heart of La Corriveau. She cursed her lot that it was so, and her dry bosom became an arid spot of desert, tenanted by satyrs ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... light ferruginous dust that is distributed over the county of Cumberland, and which annoys the traveller by its extreme minuteness, to the eastward of the Blue Mountains, is as different from the coarse gravelly soil on the secondary ranges to the westward of them, as the barren scrubs and thickly-wooded tracts of the former district are to the grassy and ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... as distinguished from the sky—the earth with its continents, its seas, its alternation of barren deserts and fertile lands—was represented as a man: Phtah at Memphis, Amon at Thebes, Minu at Coptos and at Panopolis. Amon seems rather to have symbolized the productive soil, while Minu reigned over the desert. But ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... began to arise. If the Many were not, if all things were names of the One, and nothing could be predicated of any other thing, how could truth be distinguished from falsehood? The Eleatic philosopher would have replied that Being is alone true. But mankind had got beyond his barren abstractions: they were beginning to analyze, to classify, to define, to ask what is the nature of knowledge, opinion, sensation. Still less could they be content with the description which Achilles gives in Homer of the man whom ...
— Sophist • Plato
... twelve days Beth was on that barren, sandy island entirely alone. The natives were, at this time of the year, off fishing up one of the rivers of the mainland. She did not have as much as a match to light a fire. She had no sort of notion as to how or when her brother would return. The fact of the matter was that had not her brother ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... the great wild cock, and that upon an oath that he return it to him again." Whereupon Solomon asked, "And what does the wild cock do with the Shameer?" To which the demon replied, "He takes it to a barren rocky mountain, and by means of it he cleaves the mountain asunder, into the cleft of which, formed into a valley, he drops the seeds of various plants and trees, and thus the place becomes clothed with verdure and fit for habitation." ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... drowsy soul, it shocks the pious soul, it frightens the timid soul, but it lifts them all, as it were, by main force, out of themselves, and makes healthful breezes blow, and refreshing showers fall upon what was formerly a barren waste. This is Bjoernson's mission; this is, during the second period of his career, his greatness ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... I was very careful not to ask questions that would have enabled him to gauge the profundity of misunderstanding into which he dropped his daily exposition. But no one reading the story of it here will sympathise fully, because from my barren narrative it will be impossible to gather the strength of my conviction that this astonishing substance was ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... task for engineers; it essentially depends upon the discovery and the application of natural laws, including the laws of human nature. It is, therefore, not a task for old fashioned philosophical speculation nor for barren metaphysical reasoning in vacuo; it is a scientific task and involves the coordination and cooperation of all the sciences. This is why it is an ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... for all after times. The epochs in which unbelief, in whatever form it may be, prevails, even when for the moment they put on the semblance of glory and success, inevitably sink into insignificance in the eyes of posterity, which will not waste its thoughts on things barren and unfruitful.' ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... down-dale course the battalions of royal troops marched and counter-marched to the call of bugles that have gone silent these hundred years and more. It is a road of varied fortunes, like many of those who have passed over it; it is sometimes rich in all manner of priceless possessions, and again it is barren, poverty-stricken, and desolate. It climbs long hills, sometimes in a roundabout, hesitating, half-hearted way, and sometimes with an abrupt and breathless ascent; at the summit it seems to pause a moment as if to invite the traveller ...
— Under the Trees and Elsewhere • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... sheaves, Smiling at tint and shape, thy smile of peace, But whispering of the next sweet year's increase,— O tender Love, thy loving hope but grieves My heart! I rue my harvest, if it leaves Thee vainly waiting after harvests cease, Like one who has been mocked by title lease To barren fields. ...
— Saxe Holm's Stories • Helen Hunt Jackson
... four principal castles in Norfolk. It is built of brick, and is one of the earliest edifices in England constructed of that material after its rediscovery as suitable for building purposes. It stands with its strong defences not far from the sea on the barren coast. It was built by Sir John Fastolfe, who fought with great distinction in the French wars of Henry V and Henry VI, and was the hero of the Battle of the Herrings in 1428, when he defeated the French ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... old footing, without comprehensive plan, developing only the same spasmodic encounters, barren of strategic result, that had marked the course of the earlier ten years' rebellion as well as the present insurrection from its start. No alternative save physical exhaustion of either combatant, and therewithal the practical ruin of the island, lay in sight, but how ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... the help offered was even more deserving of praise. The French are not an adventurous nation: they are not fond of travelling. Hugo says Paris is the world, and to the average Frenchman it embodies the world it comprises: it is the world. Expatriated, he would rather dwell, like the poet, on a barren island within sight of the shores of France than seek or find new worlds to conquer. It must therefore be conceded that the sentiment which brought us our allies in 1780 was a hearty one, nor had they encouragement from ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... gushes, then stopped, then disappeared under the earth. Christophe had paid no heed to it: what did it matter to him? His grief and his budding passion had absorbed his mind.—But after the storm had passed, when once more he, turned to the fountain to drink, he could find no trace of it. All was barren. Not a trickle of water. His soul was dried up. In vain did he try to dig down into the sand, and force the water up from the subterranean wells, and create at all costs: the machine of his mind refused to obey. He could not invoke the aid of habit, ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... of these adverse opinions Sir Felix managed to get his dinner-table close to theirs and to tell them at dinner something of his future prospects. He was going to travel and see the world. He had, according to his own account, completely run through London life and found that it was all barren. ...
— The Way We Live Now • Anthony Trollope
... about ten miles north-west. Box-tree flats, of more or less extent, were intercepted by abrupt barren craggy hills composed of sandstone, which seemed to rest on layers of argillaceous rock. The latter was generally observed at the foot of the hills and in the bed of the river; it had in most places been worn by ...
— Journal of an Overland Expedition in Australia • Ludwig Leichhardt
... the attitude of both farmer and tramp, that the misguided vagrant who wandered that way was the object of distinct, if not distinguished, curiosity. In the country roads he was stared at with a malevolence that chilled his appetite, no matter how long he had been cultivating it on barren soil. In the streets of Tinkletown, and even at the county seat, he was an object of such amazing concern that he slunk away in pure distress. It was indeed an unsophisticated tramp who thought to thrive ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... the trip in the heart of the Creek Nation, commenced to make a fortune. He found on a small creek of beautiful water a little bay land, and made his little field for corn and pumpkins upon that spot: all around was poor, barren pine woods, but he said it was a good range for stock; but he had not an ox or cow on the face of the earth. The truth is, it looked like Emanuel County. The turpentine smell, the moan of the winds through the pine-trees, and ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... well-manured soil. Karna overstrained herself and died and left me.... And we went so well in harness together. Her thousand kroner went into it, too ... and now I'm a poor wreck. All that was put into the barren, rocky soil, so that it became good and generous soil. And then the farmer buys it, and now he wants to live there—we poor lice have prepared the way for him! What else were we there for? Fools we are to excite ourselves so over such ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... adequate idea of the intense, the appalling loneliness of the spot. It really seemed to me as if our voices and laughter, so far from breaking the deep eternal silence, only brought it out into stronger relief. On either hand rose up, shear from the waters edge, a great, barren, shingly mountain; before us loomed a dark pine forest, whose black shadows crept up until they merged in the deep crevasses and fissures of the Snowy Range. Behind us stretched the winding gullies by which we had climbed to ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... redundancy than the Greek. The simplicity of the Attic writers would make Latin composition bold and tame. To be perspicuous, the Latin must be full. Thus Arnold thinks that what Tacitus gained in energy he lost in elegance and perspicuity. But Cicero, dealing with a barren and unphilosophical language, enriched it with circumlocutions and metaphors, while he formed it of harsh and uncouth expressions, and thus became the greatest master of composition the world has seen. He was a great artist, making use of his scanty materials ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... not much news from the field to dispel the gloom in the South. The great battle of Chickamauga had been won not long before, but it was a barren victory. There were no more Fredericksburgs nor Chancellorsvilles to rejoice over. Gettysburg had come; the genius of Lee himself had failed; Jackson was dead and no one had arisen ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... the days that followed, he thought of what she had said about the anemones and applied it to herself. She, too, had grown up among the rocks spiritually. He could see the effect of the barren soil in her suspicious and unfriendly attitude toward life. There was in her manner a resentment at fate, a bitterness that no girl of her years should have felt. In her wary eyes he read distrust ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... wagons were so nearly gone that, by spring, they were living partly on roots, dug from the ground. All their lives now depended on the crops of grain and vegetables which they could raise in the valley. They made the barren land fertile by spreading water from the little streams over it,—what we call "irrigating"; and they planted enough corn and grain and vegetables for all the people. Every one helped, and every one watched for the sprouting, with hopes, and ...
— Stories to Tell Children - Fifty-Four Stories With Some Suggestions For Telling • Sara Cone Bryant
... was the real White Hope. He advised Kirk to direct William's education on the lines which would insure his being, when the time was ripe, undisputed heavy-weight champion of the world. To Steve life outside the ring was a poor affair, practically barren of prizes ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... It tore the barren atmosphere of the office to rags; it made the place august and awful. Rufin bent to her and took her clasped hands in one of his to ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... rightful owner. The demesne around the castle contained some well-grown and handsome timber, and as the soil was undulating and fertile, presented many features of beauty; beyond it, all was sterile, bleak, and barren. Long tracts of brown heath-clad mountain or not less unprofitable valleys of tall and waving fern were all that the eye could discern, except where the broad Shannon, expanding into a tranquil and glassy lake, lay still and motionless beneath the dark ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... exercised by De Foe, whose Robinson Crusoe, he maintains, completely alters the mental physiognomy of his model. Robinson is not a man in a state of entire isolation, but is, in fact, a European developing the resources of his industry, while contending with a barren soil and ferocious enemies. Without comparing the present work with the immortal production of De Foe, which regards the history in another point of view, we must allow it the merit of a rich poetical fancy, ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 3, July, 1851 • Various
... with unfailing regularity. The abuse he heaped on Satan must have added largely to the burden of sorrows under which we are assured the fallen angel carries out his appointed work. He had been profuse in his prayers and curses when we entered the barren pathway of the Little Hills behind the plains of Hillreeli, and there were times when I had felt quite sorry for Satan. Oblation offered to the house spirits, the Maalem asked for his money, the half due at the journey's end, sober enough, despite the kief, ...
— Morocco • S.L. Bensusan
... A barren and sterile country was soon spread before them, the sun was oppressively hot, and not a sign of water was to be observed in any direction. At last they arrived at a muddy pool, in which elephants ...
— The Mission • Frederick Marryat
... friendly, almost paternal, but it held an insidious challenge, too, and for one betraying moment all the native antagonism that was really there flashed in the Colonel's eyes. Few enemies of his had been permitted to see it so clearly. It was a triumph for Neil, if a barren one. "Be very sure." ...
— The Wishing Moon • Louise Elizabeth Dutton
... arrangement in the midst of which we exist, to a certain degree a soothing and agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... along. Button-Bright gave a deep sigh and said he was hungry. Indeed, all were hungry, and thirsty, too; for they had eaten nothing but the apples since breakfast; so their steps lagged and they grew silent and weary. At last they slowly passed over the crest of a barren hill and saw before them a line of green trees with a strip of grass at their feet. An agreeable fragrance ...
— The Road to Oz • L. Frank Baum
... camels, because they are sustained with little meat, and bear great burdens. They must purvey victuals for a month to cross it only, for to go through it lengthways would require a year's time. They go through the sands and barren mountains, and daily find water; yet at times it is so little that it will hardly suffice fifty or a hundred men with their beasts; and in three or four places the water is salt and bitter. The rest of the road, for eight-and-twenty days, is very good. In it there are not either beasts or ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... such white sand before. One had to misquote: "Come unto these SILVER sands." It glittered white in a great horse-shoe round the bay, and the bed of the Salt Lake (which is really an overflow from the sea) was a barren patch of this silver-sand, with here and there a dead mule or a sniper's body lying out, a little black blot, ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... of the merchant prince who owned our ships, played cock-o'-the-walk, took rank next to M. Radisson, and called himself deputy-governor. Foret, whose father had a stretch of barren shingle on The Labrador, and who had himself received letters patent from His Most Christian Majesty for a marquisate, swore he would be cursed if he gave the pas to La Chesnaye, or any other commoner. And M. de Radisson was as great ...
— Heralds of Empire - Being the Story of One Ramsay Stanhope, Lieutenant to Pierre Radisson in the Northern Fur Trade • Agnes C. Laut
... New England, on whose barren musical soil we have already descanted, and who has not hitherto disputed to the Old World her privilege of pouring out on our untutored continent the accumulated wealth of years of musical study and training, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... no means barren. The soil is fertile, the rains plentiful, and a considerable proportion of ground is occupied by cultivation, and amply supplies ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... Changchau. Along this route in many parts, more especially in that part lying between Tang-oa and Changchau, very large camphor-trees are met with. I have frequently travelled over this road. The road from Fuchau to Chinchew, which also takes five days to travel over, is bleak and barren, lying chiefly along the sea-coast, and in winter a most uncomfortable journey. But few trees are met with; a banyan here and there, but no camphor-trees along this route; but there is one extremely interesting feature on it that would strike the most ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... moor is inexhaustible—why let others grow rich in your stead, sir? On through darkness to light; that's my device. I will strive and fight to the last breath; it is not my own interest which is at stake. It seems to me to be a question for the welfare of humanity. The aim is to win this barren soil for cultivation, to give new life-blood to this whole district, to change the poverty of this country into prosperity—to be a benefactor to ...
— Dame Care • Hermann Sudermann
... there: I see them flourish as I see them fall! But he, who once was growing with the grass, And blooming with the flowers, my little son, Fell, withered—dead, nor has revived again! Perfect and lovely, needful to my sight, Why comes he not to ornament my days? The barren fields forget their barrenness, The soulless earth mates with these soulless things, Why should I not obtain my recompense? The budding spring should bring, or summer's prime, At least a vision of the vanished child, And let his heart commune with mine ...
— Poems • Elizabeth Stoddard
... tie the ewe's clits together to make her a handier load, I looked round me at the cold bare trees, asleep till the spring would waken them with sap. The hills were bleak and barren, the rocks harsh and cold with no warm crotal on them, and just the reek from the houses rising into ...
— The McBrides - A Romance of Arran • John Sillars
... street. The roof, looking as if it were only the dirty eaves hanging from its more aspiring neighbour on the right, supports itself against the cabin on the left, about three feet above the ground. Can that be the habitation of any of the human race? Few but such as those whose lot has fallen on such barren places would venture in; but for a moment let us see what ...
— The Macdermots of Ballycloran • Anthony Trollope
... inseparable companions) ceased for many years, and my aunt began her new life with a bitter bankruptcy of love and friendship, happiness and hope, that would have dried the sap of every sweet affection, and made even goodness barren, in many a ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... confused beneath the wrappings of metaphor, so that we who read can glimpse scarce a hint of its original shape and likeness. We see, also, that the very philosophers who caricatured their own eidolon, became intrigued with the logical abstraction of words and were led away into a wilderness of barren deduction—their one inspired vision of a stable premiss ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... malice had done its worst, invisible goodness had lent its aid. In the poor fallen one, suddenly raised up, by the side of the repulsive, it had placed the attractive; on the barren shoal it had set the loadstone; it had caused a soul to fly with swift wings towards the deserted one; it had sent the dove to console the creature whom the thunderbolt had overwhelmed, and had made beauty adore deformity. For this to be possible it was necessary that ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... from this city. She came of her own accord, and was most welcome, and we came here together a little more than a week ago, June declaring that she meant to stay all summer, and I nothing loth.' She stopped and smiled. 'This is all very barren,' she said. 'I think thee will ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... slaves debate. But did not chance, at length, her errour mend? Did no subverted empire mark his end? Did rival monarchs give the fatal wound? Or hostile millions press him to the ground? His fall was destin'd to a barren strand, A petty fortress, and a dubious hand; He left the name, at which the world grew pale, To point a moral, or adorn a tale. [y]All times their scenes of pompous woes afford, From Persia's tyrant to Bavaria's lord. In gay hostility and barb'rous ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... were unfavourable to the schemes of Humayun. All his plans miscarried, and, in the spring of 1542, he and his young wife had to flee for safety to the barren deserts of Marwar. In August they reached Jaisalmer, but, repulsed by its Raja, they had to cross the great desert, suffering terribly during the journey from want of water. Struggling bravely, however, ...
— Rulers of India: Akbar • George Bruce Malleson
... the sooner we get away from this barren spot the better," observed Harry. "If the fine weather continues, as I hope it may, we can expect to reach the Auckland Islands in three or ...
— The Voyages of the Ranger and Crusader - And what befell their Passengers and Crews. • W.H.G. Kingston
... Great Ancoats Street, lies a great, straggling, working- men's quarter, a hilly, barren stretch of land, occupied by detached, irregularly built rows of houses or squares, between these, empty building lots, uneven, clayey, without grass and scarcely passable in wet weather. The cottages are all filthy and old, and recall the New Town to ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... last drawn breath Leaves such long silence; but let not thy faith Fail for a moment in God's boundless grace. But know, oh know, He has prepared a place Fairer for our dear dead than worlds beneath, Yet not beneath; for those entrancing spheres Surround our earth as seas a barren isle. Ours is the region of eternal fears; Theirs is the region where God's radiant smile Shines outward from the centre, and gives hope Even to those who in the shadows grope. They are not far from us. At first though long And lone may seem the paths that intervene, If ever ...
— Hello, Boys! • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... Davis went to Vera Cruz for a newspaper syndicate, and after the first sharp engagement in the Mexican seaport there was nothing for the correspondent to do but kill time on that barren, low lying strip of Gulf coast, hemmed in on all sides by Mexicans and the sea, and time is hard to kill there. Yet there was a story to be got, but it required ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... range of enclosures, yet no two soils can be more different; for the Holt consists of a strong loam, of a miry nature, carrying a good turf, and abounding with oaks that grow to be large timber; while Wolmer is nothing but a hungry, sandy, barren waste. The former being all in the parish of Binsted, is about two miles in extent from north to south, and near as much from east to west, and contains within it many woodlands and lawns, and the great lodge where the grantees reside, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... summits form themselves into a wild, dreary region, sown with sterile mountain-tops, and torn to pieces by wind and storm; the only glimpse of peace is derived from the view on either side of the sea, which sometimes shows itself on the horizon, a misty line, half silver, half ether. This barren wilderness again softens into gracefully-swelling hills turned towards Florence. The fair olive tree and the dark cypress mingle their foliage with the luxuriant chestnut boughs, and the frequent marble villa flashes a white gleam from amid ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 394, October 17, 1829 • Various
... in a rosier temper, listened with great satisfaction to my Jeremiads, and ironically concurred. He instanced, as a cognate matter, the action of the tides, "which," said he, "was altogether designed for the confusion of canoeists, except in so far as it was calculated to minister to a barren vanity on the part ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... aqueducts. Mr. Dinwiddie made us remark the pavement of the road leading up to the Kelt, the old road to Jerusalem, the road by which Jesus went when the blind men called him, and over which, somewhere on its way, stretched the sycamore tree into which Zaccheus climbed. Ah how barren and empty the way looked now! - with Him no longer here. For a moment, so looked my own path before me, - the dusty, hot road; the desolate pass; the barren mountain top. It was only a freak of fancy; I do not know what ...
— Daisy in the Field • Elizabeth Wetherell
... have a pale and unlovely hue. An English view would have been incomparably richer in its never-fading green; and in my own country, the wooded hills would have been more delightful than these peaks and ridges of dreary and barren sunshine; and there would have been the bright eyes of half a dozen little lakes, looking heavenward, within an extent like that of the ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of Hudson's Straits, which he traversed a distance of sixty miles. He succeeded at length in retracing his course, and anchored on the southern shore of Frobisher's Bay, in the Countess of Warwick's Sound. But the desire for gold, the bleak winds, barren shores, and drifting icebergs, all combined to dispel the hopes of making a successful settlement, and the adventurers turned their faces homeward, carrying once more a cargo of ore, which proved, like the first, to be ...
— History of the United States, Vol. I (of VI) • E. Benjamin Andrews
... What, was to be done? for a knife was an article of indispensable necessity: it belonged to Spencer, and it would have been madness in the owner of such an article to part with it. He resolved to accompany Holiday part of the way on his journey, and went as far as Big Barren River. When about to turn back, Spencer's heart relented: he broke the blade of his knife in two, gave half to his friend, and with a light heart returned to his hollow tree. Not long after his gallant rescue of Mrs. Bledsoe, he was killed by a party ...
— Godey's Lady's Book, Vol. 42, January, 1851 • Various
... been told by some persons from the islands that I must not expect to find every where a green and tropical verdure; for much of the country was barren, unfruitful lava. I was up on deck bright and early, to see this far-off part of the world. There was "Diamond Head" before me, an extinct volcanic mountain, of a sort of reddish dust-color, with its top fallen in, and without a tree or spear of ...
— Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California • Mary Evarts Anderson
... opening gates were of iron, and were adorned with sharp spikes on the top, so as to make climbing over impossible; a sentry, too, stood at the entrance. The gates opened on to a spacious courtyard surrounded by buildings. Not a green thing was to be seen, and the gravelled yard was as naked and barren as the buildings themselves, whose blank windows suggested deserted rooms. Only a few were graced with white curtains, which gave promise of habitation. Even the young chestnut-trees that had been planted round the borders of the courtyard throve but poorly; now and then a yellow leaf ...
— 'Jena' or 'Sedan'? • Franz Beyerlein
... her trees and gardens, which attract a visitor, especially one from the more barren north, Oxford must yield the palm of natural beauty to many English towns, not to mention those ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... Dementia Praecox out of a total of five cases treated; curing six cases of Locomotor Ataxia out of six cases treated; curing two cases of Paralysis Agitans out of two cases treated; restoring normal conditions in one hundred cases of Psychopathia Sexualis; bringing about the parenthood of barren women and impotent men not yet past middle-age; restoring the function of menstruation or regular periodicity to women who have passed through the change of life; and, in a word, making good in the cure of so-called incurables, and doing something that was never done before, to our knowledge, ...
— The Goat-gland Transplantation • Sydney B. Flower
... over the walls before me in a vague hope of reproducing, in my mind, the ideas which must have passed through his before he rose and thrust those papers into their place of concealment. Alas! those walls were barren of all suggestion, and my eyes went wandering through the window before me in a vague appeal, when a sudden remembrance of his last moments struck me sharply and I bounded up with a new thought, a new idea, which sent me in haste to my room and brought me down again in hat and jacket. ...
— The Mayor's Wife • Anna Katharine Green
... on Elbow Barren's took," Allen told him suddenly—"the one just off the road. I saw smoke in the chimney ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... Herchenberg, an extinct volcano. As we climb its sides we see traces of the former devastation. Loose ashes cover the ground, bits of mica glittering in the sun, and on the summit we find enormous masses of stone which were melted and then baked together. In the center lies the old crater, a quiet, barren place bearing very little vegetation, but from its wall an excellent view of the surrounding country can be obtained. Not far from this mountain lies the mighty Bausenberg, with its immense, well preserved crater, only one side of which has been ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 611, September 17, 1887 • Various
... There he was, tearing over the grass towards the lake. Then she turned to Mr. Gifford and resumed the discussion of Morte, with a warning of the terrible responsibility he incurred by maintaining that nest of vice and fever; but as it was barren of results it need not ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... and other sorts in less abundance. These are scattered over the country more or less thickly, but, never so as to deserve the name of a forest. Coarse and scanty grasses grow beneath them on the more barren hills, and a luxuriant herbage in the moister localities. In the islands between Timor and Java there is often a more thickly wooded country abounding in thorny and prickly trees. These seldom reach any great height, and during the force of the dry season they almost ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... see we were getting along very well, steadily collecting those things which were necessary as well for our comfort as our safety. If the island on which we had been cast away was barren and inhospitable, it was none the less capable, like almost every other land, in whatever region of the earth, of ...
— Cast Away in the Cold - An Old Man's Story of a Young Man's Adventures, as Related by Captain John Hardy, Mariner • Isaac I. Hayes
... utterly discouraged. In his soul he was asking bitterly what good had come of all his prayerful labours among the people of this pinched, narrow world, as rugged and unbeautiful in form and life as the barren hills ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Corps of Engineers, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Agriculture, and the International Boundary and Water Commission, United States and Mexico. A number of these projects are multiple-purpose projects, providing not only for reclamation and irrigation of barren land and flood control, but also for the production of power needed for industrial development of ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... idea of the desolate and love-lorn Ariadne writing a letter from the barren isle of Naxos is in itself ridiculous, nor can all the pathos of her grief redeem the irony. Helen wishes she had had more practice in correspondence, so that she might perhaps touch her lover's chilly heart. Ovid using the language of mythology, reminds us of those heroes ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... the modern Pict's ignoble boast,[dy][122] To rive what Goth, and Turk, and Time hath spared:[6.B.] Cold as the crags upon his native coast, His mind as barren and his heart as hard, Is he whose head conceived, whose hand prepared. Aught to displace Athenae's poor remains: Her Sons too weak the sacred shrine to guard, Yet felt some portion of their Mother's pains,[7.B.] ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 2 • George Gordon Byron
... which wind through it by a serpentine course, and dotted with innumerable little forts and villages, he will have before him one of the meadows of Cabul." To complete the picture the reader must conceive the grey barren hills, which, contrasting strongly with the fertility of the plains they encompass, are themselves overlooked by the eternal snows of the Indian Caucasus. To the English exile these valleys have another attraction, ...
— A Peep into Toorkisthhan • Rollo Burslem
... a proposal to sell to the firm for the sum of one million dinars a barren rock in the Indian Sea, which was not even theirs, and on which indeed not one of them had ever set eyes. Their claim to advance so original a proposal was that to their certain knowledge two thousand of the wealthiest citizens of ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... early days of his reign he had indulged himself in visions of empire, and of repeating the old glories of the Plantagenet kings. But in the peace which was concluded after the defeat of Pavia, he showed that he had resigned himself to a wiser policy,[417] and the surrender of a barren designation would cost him little. In his quarrel with the pope, also, he had professed an extreme reluctance to impair the unity of the church; and the sacrifices which he had made, and the years ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... letter we see the first germ of an idea afterwards developed in the letter to Barren Field of August 31, 1817, and again, more fully, in the Elia essay ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... fertile, but much of it has become exhausted by reason of improper tillage. The forests which were once a vast extent of stately pines, and from which great quantities of turpentine and tar were for a century and a half exported, are now little better than barren fields. Pine lumber and staves have long been a large article of export, which with corn and cotton make up nearly all the articles sent abroad. But the pines are now nearly exhausted, the trade in naval ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. II. July, 1862. No. 1. • Various
... the other to disturb nothing, so that careful examination might, if necessary, be made when daylight returned. The path elbowed to right and left sharply, ever ascending, and it was not too steep to prevent steady progress. It ended at last on the summit of the cliffs, where, after a barren space of fifty yards, a low wall ran separating ploughed lands from the precipices. But no sight of any human being awaited them and, on the close sward of the summit, footsteps would ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... impart to it that graceful linear effect which we see brought out in tasteful pencil sketches and good line engravings. We approached it this day from the shore in the direction in which the eminence it stands upon assumes the pyramidal form, and itself the tower-like outline. The acclivity is barren and stony,—a true desert foreground, like those of Thebes and Palmyra; and the huge square shadow of the tower stretched dark and cold athwart it. The sun shone out clearly. One half the immense bulk before us, with its delicate ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... could not help himself, he thought bitterly. And yet how dreary the prospect seemed. He had given up the first young love of his life, and now the barren splendors of Belgrave House seemed to oppress him—the walls closed round him like the walls ...
— Wee Wifie • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... waves dashing against the iron-bound line of northern cliffs. Inland, the country was more cultivated, but hilly and broken up with masses of lichen-covered rock, and little clumps of thin fir trees. He knew the scenery so well. The rugged, barren country, with its great stretches of moorland and little patches of cultivated land, with its silent tarns, its desolation, and the ever-varying music of the sea, they all meant home to him, and he loved them. It had always been so, and yet ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... be real so long as leagues of barren, unbroken wilderness separated the maritime from the central provinces. Free intercourse, ties of trade, knowledge which would sweep away prejudice, could not come until a railway had spanned this wilderness. In the fifties plans had been made for a main trunk line to run from ...
— The Canadian Dominion - A Chronicle of our Northern Neighbor • Oscar D. Skelton
... has been disputed, and his works have been declared to be an ingenious compilation, drawn from the productions of a multitude of singers. It is not my intention here to enter into the endless and barren controversy which has raged round this question. It will be more to the purpose to try and form some general idea of the characteristics of the Greek Epic; and to do this it is necessary to give a brief review of the political and ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... from the well with its loud-rattling chain and clumsy, water-sodden bucket, but no one called. At the door of the house he whistled, stamped, pounded, and at last flung it open with all the noise he could make. Still his hungry ears fed on nothing but sinister echoes, the barren husks of his own clamour. There was no curt voice of a man, no quick, questioning tread of a woman. There were dead white ashes on the hearth, and the silence was grimly kept by ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... thy heart with all diligence, for out of it are the issues of life." A heart and mind full of sympathy and fellow-feeling is the secret of a loving life; and an idle mind and an empty heart, to which no thrill of sympathy with others is ever admitted, is the barren and desolate region from which loveless looks and cruel words and selfish ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... individual. The natural pride, however, of his parents, did not blind them to the uncertainty that belongs to all premature efforts of the mind; and they so carefully avoided everything like a boastful display of blossoms which, in many cases, have withered away in barren luxuriance, that the circumstance of these compositions was hardly ever mentioned ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... a good crop from English wheat.[770] In these cases varieties have been carried from a warmer to a cooler climate; in the reverse case, as "when wheat was imported directly from France into the West Indian Islands, it produced either wholly barren spikes or furnished with only two or three miserable seeds, while West Indian seed by its side yielded an enormous harvest."[771] Here is another case of close adaptation to a slightly cooler climate; a kind of wheat which in England ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... gun had gone re-echoing through the Highlands of the Hudson. The great garrison flag was still slowly fluttering earthward, veiled partially from the view of the throng of spectators by the snowy cloud of sulphur smoke drifting lazily away upon the wing of the breeze. Afar over beyond the barren level of the cavalry plain the gilded hands of the tower-clock on "the old Academic" were blended into one in proclaiming to all whom it might concern that it was five minutes past the half-hour 'twixt seven and eight, and there were girls in every group, and ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King |
