"Barren" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... battle-furnitures, pour over in two columns; the Cavalry, at the due point of time, riding by a ford short way to the right. And at four, in the gray of the August morning (Saturday, 11th August, 1759), all persons and things find themselves correctly across; ranked there, in those barren, much-indented "Pasture-grounds of Goritz" or of OEtscher; intending towards Kunersdorf; ready for unfolding into order of battle there. They leave their heavy baggage at Goritz, Wunsch to guard the Bridges and it; and, in succinct condition, are all under way. ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... blank; and yet we can scarcely hope to discover the central breeding-place of man in what is, geographically, little more than a blind alley. In the next place, Physical Anthropology, not only in respect to human palaeontology, but in general, is as barren of explanations as it is fertile in detailed observations. The systematic study of heredity as it bears on the history of the human organism has hardly begun. Hence, it would not befit one who is no expert in relation to such matters to anticipate the verdict of a science that needs only ...
— Progress and History • Various
... barren garden that we found, This was an empty house we came to meet, We, who for all our longing, hear no sound ...
— The Dreamers - And Other Poems • Theodosia Garrison
... his bread out of the sweat of his own brow or not at all. The history of the abolition of slavery in America could not be written with Massachusetts left out; the history of Massachusetts herself, since the Revolution, would be but a dreary, barren waste without the chapter of ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... of various singers and actors and painters and writers of his acquaintance, of studios and greenrooms, customs in European countries, famous friendships between royalty and artists; and she had her first glimpse of a world that made her own seem as barren and desolate as ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... conquest of knowledge, be totally arrested? Rome herself is nowadays a terrible example of such a disastrous experiment—Rome with her congealed soil, her dead sap, killed by centuries of papal government, Rome which has become so barren that not a man, not a work has sprung from her midst even after five and twenty years of awakening and liberty! And who would accept such a state of things, not among people of revolutionary mind, but among those of religious mind that might possess any culture ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... have all been canny enough to have means enough to balance all that barren moorland. You are a richer man ...
— The Clever Woman of the Family • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thought they had left behind. Napoleon, contrary to custom, dressed early and went upon deck: he went forward to the gangway to view the island. He beheld a kind of village surrounded by numerous barren hills towering to the clouds. Every platform, every aperture, the brow of every hill was planted with cannon. The Emperor viewed the prospect through his glass. His countenance underwent no change. ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne
... accord, and was most welcome, and we came here together a little more than a week ago, June declaring that she meant to stay all summer, and I nothing loth.' She stopped and smiled. 'This is all very barren,' she said. 'I think thee ...
— Against Odds - A Detective Story • Lawrence L. Lynch
... soothe and comfort, but nothing that she said went home—took hold. Between the feeling in her heart which might have reached and touched this despair, and the woman before her, there seemed to be a barrier she could not break. Or was it that she was really barren and poor in soul, and had never realised it before? A strange misery rose in her too, as she still knelt, tending and consoling, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... weakness, shame, and wrong Mutely the frozen features tell. Noiseless falls on it, the tears of dew, Over it softly the breezes blow; Wavelets, kissing the tangled hair, Murmur a requiem sad and low. Out to the barren, bleak hillside Rough hands bear it with scorn and jest. Cradled once in a mother's arms— Once by a mother's fond lips pressed— Under the clods of a new-made grave; A rough-hewn board at the foot and head, Where never ...
— Debris - Selections from Poems • Madge Morris
... "Alas; ah, me: Why should I live where none can see?" But He who made both field and flood, Hath formed that flower and called it good, And in His wisdom placed it there To make the desert seem more fair: And if He then hath need of flowers To deck this barren world of ours, He hath a use ...
— Life and Literature - Over two thousand extracts from ancient and modern writers, - and classified in alphabetical order • J. Purver Richardson
... all round; not a bush, not a blade, not a clinging moss such as elsewhere nature has lightly flung on the rocky surface of the heights, as if a breath of her creative life had softly touched the barren stone. Nothing but smooth granite, and above it a sky as bare of cloud as the rocks are of shrubs ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... your father and this Ralph Darrell, who was a banker in one of the New England cities—Boston, I believe. They christened it the 'Copper Princess,' invested nearly a million dollars in a complete mining-plant, and sank a shaft into barren rock. Not one cent did the mine ever yield, and the deeper they went the poorer became their prospects. Finally, Darrell, completely ruined financially, became crazed by his troubles and disappeared; nor has he ever been heard from since. Your father, having put half of his fortune ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... flower beds, with groves, with trim parterres, with the finest turf, to improve fruit trees, to seek out and perfect edible roots and herbs at once for man and cattle. We owe to the Dutch that scurvy and leprosy have been banished from England, that continuous crops have taken the place of barren fallows, that the true rotation of crops has been discovered and perfected, that the population of these islands has been increased and that the cattle and sheep in England are ten times what they were in numbers and three times ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato
... girl. "However, there is little chance of our encountering such a party. The soldiers are all coming up from the south and are bound to force Black Hawk's warriors to the other bank of the Rock. There will be nothing but barren country east of here. What do you say, ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... to do—for it was caused by home-sickness. He pined for his rude home in Siberia—for the ice-fields, the marshy meadows, and the barren steppes of his fatherland—he saw no beauty in the summer plains of the South, no charm in the cultivated fields, nor found pleasure in the society into which he was thrown. His sadness increased every day—he lost his flesh, and at length became ...
— Hair Breadth Escapes - Perilous incidents in the lives of sailors and travelers - in Japan, Cuba, East Indies, etc., etc. • T. S. Arthur
... after the woman was gone. Mrs. C. wore also a white bodice, cut bias, with Pompadour sleeves, flounced with ruches; low neck, with the inside handkerchief not visible, with white kid gloves. She had on a pearl necklace, which glinted lonely, high up the midst of that barren waste of neck and shoulders. Her hair was frizzled into a tangled chaparral, forward of her ears, aft it was drawn together, and compactly bound and plaited into a stump like a pony's tail, and furthermore was canted upward at a sharp angle, and ingeniously supported by a red ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... has been read largely even here; and no man, how prejudiced soever, can compare with the standing at a deer-path all day long waiting till a great timid beast is driven up within ten yards of your muzzle, with that extraordinary sport on bald and barren mountains, where nothing but vast and muscular exertion, the eye of the eagle, and the cunning of the serpent, can bring you within range of the wild ...
— Warwick Woodlands - Things as they Were There Twenty Years Ago • Henry William Herbert (AKA Frank Forester)
... when you have reached my years, and can look upon fields on which you have lavished your warmest hopes, your noblest aspirations, your tenderest affections, and see the soil all profitless and barren. 'Set not your heart on the things of earth,' saith ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book III • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... fortnight's time!" But the sneer in Lindley's voice was for Ashley, who had asked the impertinent question, not for Farquhart, whose honor he, apparently, doubted. "Lord Farquhart's not to blame, as you know well enough. The mess is of Lord Gordon's making, for Lord Gordon holds in trust even the barren lands that came to Percy with ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various
... peculiarities of this tree is its power of flourishing in almost any soil. It grows equally well on the mountain-side, in the rich valleys beside the streams, and on the barren sea-beach of the coral reefs, where its only soil is sand, and where its roots are watered by the waves of every rising tide. Another peculiarity is, that fruit in every stage may be seen on the same tree at one time—from the first formation, after the falling ...
— The Cannibal Islands - Captain Cook's Adventure in the South Seas • R.M. Ballantyne
... put in the spelling-books, Monsieur. Ah, bah! a far different path did Cesar Prevost pursue! He studied these phenomena, not to explain them,—being too wise to dream of living par amours with such barren virgins as are Whence and Why (your Bacon was very shrewd, Monsieur). What cared I about causes? Let Descartes, and Polignac, and Reid, and Cudworth, et id omne genus, famish themselves in this desert; but ask it not of Cesar ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... sitting in his litter as far as the entrance-hall, instead of dismounting at the usual place and proceeding on foot through several gates and courtyards. Nor were the privileges of the temple confined to barren honours, for it was endowed with lands of the value of five ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... brightest day a cloud, And after summer evermore succeeds Barren winter, with his wrathful nipping cold; So cares and joys abound, as seasons ...
— King Henry VI, Second Part • William Shakespeare [Rolfe edition]
... which Clive had been appointed, was, at this time, perhaps, the first in importance of the Company's settlements. In the preceding century Fort St. George had arisen on a barren spot beaten by a raging surf; and in the neighbourhood a town, inhabited by many thousands of natives, had sprung up, as towns spring up in the East, with the rapidity of the prophet's gourd. There were already in the suburbs many white villas, each surrounded by its garden, whither ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... that the country through which we passed to-day, was as fertile and much more picturesque than the Said. The reason for the latter part of this assertion is, that in the Said the view is limited by the ridges of barren and calcined mountains that bound it on both sides, whereas here the view ranges over plains bounded only by the horizon, and interspersed here and there with isolated mountains of most singular forms. Some of them might be mistaken for pyramids, they are so regular and ...
— A Narrative of the Expedition to Dongola and Sennaar • George Bethune English
... "),whereof he boasts in one of his inscriptions, was no doubt, as he states, "a blessing to the Babylonians"—it "changed desert plains into well-watered fields; it spread around fertility an abundance"—it brought a whole district, previously barren, into cultivation, and it set an example, which the best of the later monarchs followed, of a mode whereby the productiveness of the country might be increased ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... generally those who, from the standpoint of economic stability or solid moral quality, are the most variable. We staid and sober citizens are inclined to throw an aura of picturesqueness about such creatures as the Stuarts, the dissipated Virginian cavaliers, the happy-go-lucky barren artists of the Latin Quarter, the fiery touchiness of that so-called chivalry which was one of the least important features of Southern life, and so on. We staid and sober citizens generally object strenuously to living in actual contact with the unpunctuality, unreliability, unreasonableness, ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... the whites, they point to the barren hillside, as evincing the truth of the story, affirming that one day the forest trees stood thick upon it, but was stripped of them by the great serpent as he rolled down its declivity. The round stones found there in great abundance, resembling in size and ...
— An account of Sa-Go-Ye-Wat-Ha - Red Jacket and his people, 1750-1830 • John Niles Hubbard
... after leaving Val Cassione the wind shifted again and the weather improved as if by magic. The clouds gradually melted away, and the blue of the sky palpitated through the grey; the sun shone warm upon the barren, featureless coast, adding colour to the dispiriting grey of the limestone spotted with the dark green of shrubs, a characteristic of most of the Dalmatian islands, and the Velebit Mountains became clear, in some places to the summits, though the greater part of the chain was still ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... five weeks at sea when we dropped anchor in Porto Praya roads, the appearance of the land was by no means inviting to the eyes. A high and extremely barren hill, or large heap of dry earth, with a good many stones about it, seemed to compose the Island. Close to us was the town, a collection of white houses that looked very dazzling in the summer sun. Beside, and running ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... among the Hurons began in earnest. Missionary stations multiplied rapidly. The Christianized villages of St. Joseph, St. Louis, St. Ignatius, and St. John smiled in the desert like green spots amidst the barren sands. At the central station of St. Mary's alone, three thousand Indians received hospitality in the course of one year. Undeterred by the certainty of privation and suffering, new missioners continued to swell the ranks and aid the work. With indefatigable ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"
... is the barren and desolate country to the east of Lake Dambeling, doubtless a continuation of the same sterile country seen by Mr. Roe, the surveyor-General, east of York many years previously; and probably from Mr. Eyre's observation, extending quite ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... "in all this immense space between this large island and the American coast, there is only one solitary barren little island crossed ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... and of power; her pride of person and accomplishments; her desire for admiration; her violent passions, had made her a torment to others and to herself. She knew that no one loved her for anything good that she possessed, and knew that her own heart was barren of love for others. She felt that a little child who would call her "mother," clinging to her hand, or nestling in her bosom, could redeem her to her better self; and how could she help thinking of the true men who, with their hearts in their ...
— Sevenoaks • J. G. Holland
... Maria's name to her master, dated it ahead, and from Windsor, Canada West, and sent it enclosed in a letter to a friend at that place, with directions to mail it to the master at the date I had given. Maria informed her master Champlin that Canada was not the cold barren country he had always told her it was, for they raised great fields of corn, and potatoes, peas and beans, and everything she saw in Kentucky; and that she had found the best of friends ever since she left home, and signed ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... long, high ridge. On its crest Norton halted. Hollis likewise drew in his pony. From here they could see a great stretch of country, sweeping away into the basin beneath it, toward a mountain range whose peaks rose barren and smooth in ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... days writers conjured without a very precise consideration of its true significance. By Bacon's method we are to construct in time the 'noble science of politics,' which is equally removed from the barren theories of Utilitarian sophists and the petty craft of intriguing jobbers. The Utilitarians are schoolmen, while the Whigs are the true followers of Bacon and scientific induction. J. S. Mill admitted within certain limits the relevancy of this criticism, and ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... account of Count D'Estaing's abortive expeditions to America; the barren results of the first two years' alliance between Congress and the King of France, by Dr. ...
— The Loyalists of America and Their Times, Vol. 2 of 2 - From 1620-1816 • Edgerton Ryerson
... her resolution, Nattie sobbed herself to sleep. Not so easy is it to renounce love, and look forward to a life barren of its best ...
— Wired Love - A Romance of Dots and Dashes • Ella Cheever Thayer
... sought her employer in the studio. Daniel Burton spent all his waking hours in the studio now. The woods and fields were nothing but a barren desert of loneliness to Daniel Burton— ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... Lucille's happiness was at an end; her fairy palace was shattered in the dust; the magician's wand was broken up; the Ariel was given to the winds; and the bright enchantment no longer distinguished the land she lived in from the rest of the barren world. It is true that St. Amand's words were kind; it is true that he remembered with the deepest gratitude all she had done in his behalf; it is true that he forced himself again and again to say, "She is ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... world to-day is much concerned over the question of prostitution and its effect upon the coming race, through the transmission of syphilitic taint to an innocent wife, who is thereafter barren, or who bears syphilitic children. The folly of the double standard, purity insisted on for the wife, unchasity condoned in the husband; all these subjects are sure to be brought up, and the nurse who goes prepared on these and kindred topics can do an immense amount ...
— Making Good On Private Duty • Harriet Camp Lounsbery
... beautiful. While she deprecates harshness, she insists on a rigorous discipline. She would stimulate industry and the cultivation of moderate abilities, as more likely to win in the long race of life,—even as a barren soil and ungenial climate have generally produced the most thrifty people. She would banish frivolous books which give only superficial knowledge, and even those abridgments and compendiums which form too considerable ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... vale of infinite radius, methought, and shortly, I saw by a few bluish lights, like the flickering flame of a candle, countless, ah! countless shades of men, some afoot and some on horseback, rushing back and fro like the wind, in awful silence and solemnity; the land was barren, bleak and blasted, without either grass or hay, trees or animals, save deadly beasts and poisonous vermin of every kind—serpents, snakes, lice, frogs, worms, locusts, gids and all such that exist on man's corruption. Through a myriad shades and reptiles, graves, churchyards ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne
... look-out for an unsuspecting green one, or a wealthy pigeon, who, if once netted, seldom succeeds in quitting the trap without being plucked of a few of his feathers. The greatest improvement to a place barren of foliage and the agreeable retirement of overshadowed walks, is the Royal Gardens, on the level at the extremity of the town, in a line with the Steyne enclosures as you enter from the London ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... Mundi A Christmas Carol By the Waters of Babylon Paradise "I will lift up mine Eyes unto the Hills" Saints and Angels "When my Heart is Vexed, I will Complain" After Communion A Rose Plant in Jericho Who shall Deliver Me? Despised and Rejected Long Barren If Only Dost thou not Care? Weary in Well-Doing Martyrs' Song After this the Judgment ...
— Poems • Christina G. Rossetti
... length the progress of investigation led to the discarding of these monstrosities, and Miller's restorations were returned to, as, after all, the true ones. "The Old Red Sandstone" formed an era in the history of fossil geology. That formation had hitherto been regarded as well nigh barren of organic remains; but Mr. Miller demonstrated that it contains at least three successive stages, each characterized by a suite of uncouth and hitherto unknown fishes. A few years later he published his "Footprints of the ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... element of mystery each fact evolved. First, Captain Wegg must have been a rich man in order to build this house, maintain two servants and live for years in comfort without any income from his barren farm lands. What became of his money after his death? Why was his only son obliged to fly to the cities in order to obtain a livelihood? Secondly, the Captain, a surly and silent man, had brought hither—perhaps by force—a young woman as his wife who was so unhappy that she pined away and died. ...
— Aunt Jane's Nieces at Millville • Edith Van Dyne
... another striking illustration of the wonderful growth of American towns. Less than a year ago, a barren waste marked the spot where now was growing a thriving city. The railroad, as in other localities, had played an important part in awakening this uninhabited region to life and activity. The trackless, boundless prairie had been reclaimed, and was now a flourishing city, full ...
— The Burglar's Fate And The Detectives • Allan Pinkerton
... "If Albinus be criminal," exclaimed the orator, "the senate and myself are all guilty of the same crime. If we are innocent, Albinus is equally entitled to the protection of the laws." These laws might not have punished the simple and barren wish of an unattainable blessing; but they would have shown less indulgence to the rash confession of Boethius, that, had he known of a conspiracy, the tyrant never should. [94] The advocate of Albinus was soon involved in the danger and perhaps the guilt of his client; their signature ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... to the title of harbor pilot. And if certain perquisites went with an otherwise barren office, that was to be expected. Who worked for nothing, or for the empty honor ...
— Told in the East • Talbot Mundy
... but it did seem to me that, had the commander of the army been able to be present on the field, he could have taken advantage of Bragg's final repulse, and there would have remained in our hands more than the barren field. But no attempt was made to do anything more till next morning, and then we secured little except the enemy's killed and ...
— The Memoirs of General Philip H. Sheridan, Vol. I., Part 2 • P. H. Sheridan
... country have not looked forward" (his eyes twinkled almost wickedly) "with that pleasure you might expect in exiles, to the influx of people brought up here by the great Gold Discovery. We knew what that sort of craze leads to. We knew that in a barren land like this, more and more denuded of wild game every year, more and more the prey of epidemic disease—we knew that into this sorely tried and hungry world would come a horde of men, all of them ignorant of the conditions ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... difficulties and complications arose; for the new Earl of Murray, with his character, was not a man to content himself with a barren title, while the estates which were crown property since the extinction of the male branch of the old earls, had been gradually encroached upon by powerful neighbours, among whom was the famous Earl of Huntly, whom we have already ...
— CELEBRATED CRIMES, COMPLETE - MARY STUART—1587 • ALEXANDRE DUMAS, PERE
... stimulus given to railway construction by the establishment of the gold industry Mr. Worsfold speaks with authority. He says, "To-day, Johannesburg—built on land which in 1886 was part of an absolutely barren waste—is approached by three distinct lines, which connect it directly with the four chief ports of South Africa—Delagoa Bay, Durban, Port Elizabeth, and Cape Town. Of these lines the earliest, which traverses the Free State from end to end, and links the ...
— South Africa and the Transvaal War, Vol. 1 (of 6) - From the Foundation of Cape Colony to the Boer Ultimatum - of 9th Oct. 1899 • Louis Creswicke
... who, having once sold a few shares on commission, wrote for circulars of every stock company that was started, and tried to induce every one to invest who would listen to him? We looked around at those dull faces, the truthful indices of mean and barren minds, and decided that we would leave that morning. Then we ate Mrs. Jacobus's biscuit, light as Aurora's cloudlets, drank her honest coffee, inhaled the perfume of the late azaleas with which she decked her ...
— The Best American Humorous Short Stories • Various
... is visible a prehistoric habitation of the Picts and a cavern in which gypsy mothers are even now brought secretly to give birth to their offspring. On the other side are visible the slopes of a barren hill, inhabited till lately by a witch who gathered herbs by night under the influence of certain planets, and of whose powers even the doctor at Golspie went in half-acknowledged terror. At dinner two pipers played on a landing outside ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... dates, and, as far as possible, to associate them with each other, and thus assist the memory in their permanent retention; experience having proved the committing of many dates to be the most barren and profitless of ...
— A Brief History of the United States • Barnes & Co.
... The bright eyes, sweet, loving face, and happy voice of little Rachel, that was heard all day long, lightened the mother's toil, refreshed her spirits, and often made her forget the loneliness and seclusion in which they lived. She was like a cool spring in the desert, a bright flower in a barren waste, a ray of sunshine from ...
— Lizzy Glenn - or, The Trials of a Seamstress • T. S. Arthur
... colonel at the head of the regiment was much surprised at the commander in chief's order to throw out skirmishers. He had felt perfectly sure that there were other troops in front of him and that the enemy must be at least six miles away. There was really nothing to be seen in front except a barren descent hidden by dense mist. Having given orders in the commander in chief's name to rectify this omission, Prince Andrew galloped back. Kutuzov still in the same place, his stout body resting heavily in the saddle ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... watershed of a tortuous, low chain of mountains running, roughly, east and west. Their northern slope, which is occupied by the three Guianas first named, is saturated and river-torn; but their southern one, Brazilian Guiana, is in general thirsty and semi-barren, and the driest region of the Amazon valley. It is an area which has been left almost in the undisturbed possession of nomadic Indian tribes, whose scanty numbers find it difficult to solve the food problem. From the divortium aquarum between French Guiana and Brazil, known as the Tumuc-humac ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... ring. He was the real White Hope. He advised Kirk to direct William's education on the lines which would insure his being, when the time was ripe, undisputed heavy-weight champion of the world. To Steve life outside the ring was a poor affair, practically barren of prizes for ...
— The Coming of Bill • P. G. Wodehouse
... undying children, watching where absolute solitude was not, outside cloister walls, in the waste places of these peaks and gorges, and amid this race of stern and rugged peasants. Here were women who, without knowing it even, lived the contemplative life in union with God, while they dug the barren slopes of a little plot at some prodigious elevation. They were Leah and Rachel, Martha and Mary in one; and these women believed guilelessly, entirely, as man believed in the middle ages. These beings, with their rough-hewn feelings, their shapeless ideas, ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... no part of the world or state of society does it hold good. But our theorist, by laying down this double ratio as a law of nature, gains this advantage, that at all times it seems as if, whether in new or old-peopled countries, in fertile or barren soils, the population was pressing hard on the means of subsistence; and again, it seems as if the evil increased with the progress of improvement and civilization; for if you cast your eye at the scale which is supposed to be calculated upon true and infallible data, you find that when ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... correspondence for the rest of the year are singularly barren of interest. A troublesome attack of sciatica in the end of July led to Reeve's being advised to try Harrogate, whither he accordingly went in the beginning of August. He found the place—possibly also the water—disagreeable, and after a week's stay he went on to Bolton Abbey, to Minto, and to ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... the true cause of the despondency so prevalent in the latter poetry of "the melancholy Cowley." And hence the indiscretion of the muse, in a single flight, condemned her to a painful, rather than a voluntary solitude; and made the poet complain of "barren praise" ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... each new survey of the scene convinced him. "Here," he muttered, "everything has been steeping so long in the attenuated resolutions that drove us to come; everything is still conscientiously soaked—saturated—in the barren memory ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I've forgotten her," he replied; "she's the one bright spot I see in this barren hole. By the way, why do you think ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... rest was plainly under cultivation. There were large green areas, such as argued grain fields; elsewhere were what looked like orchards and vineyards, some of which were in full bloom—refuting the notion that the season was a late one. Nowhere was there a spot of land which might be called barren. ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... quarter of a mile wide and fronting the beach was barren of commercial timber. As grazing-land, Hector McKaye was enabled to file on a full section of this, and, with its acquisition, he owned the key to the outlet. While "proving up" his claim, he operated a general store for trading with the Indians and trappers, ...
— Kindred of the Dust • Peter B. Kyne
... resembled a mammoth, concave palette upon which nature had mixed her colors—yellow and gold and brown, with here and there a blotch of red and purple, a dash of green,—lingering over the season—and great, wide stretches of gray. The barren spots seemed to grow more barren—mocked by the scarlet blossoms of the cactus that seemed to be everlasting, and the fringing, yellow soap weed, hardy, defying the advancing winter. Razor-Back ridge was a desolate place. ...
— The Coming of the Law • Charles Alden Seltzer
... Thames; Throughout her shores commodious ports abound, Clear flow the waters of the varying ground; Cold nipping winds a lengthen'd winter bring, Late rise the products of the tardy spring. The broken soil a labouring race requires; Each barren hill its generous crops admires, Where nature meanly did her gifts impart, Yet, smiling, owns how much she owes ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 6: Literary Curiosities - Gleanings Chiefly from Old Newspapers of Boston and Salem, Massachusetts • Henry M. Brooks
... that of Hobhouse recording in his journal the bare and barren fact that outside the city wall in Persia they once saw two dogs gnawing a human body. Byron saw the sight, but made no mention of it at the time. He waited, the scene sealed up in his brain-cells. Years after ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... with either pure parent. The experiment was tried by M. Corbie "avec une espece d'obstination;" and likewise by M. Manduyt, and by M. Vieillot. Temminck also found the hybrids from these two species quite barren. Therefore, when Bechstein ('Naturgesch. Vogel. Deutschlands,' B. 4, s. 101) asserts that the hybrids from these two turtle-doves propagate inter se equally well with pure species, and when a writer in the 'Field' newspaper (in a letter dated Nov. 10th, ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by the sheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from barren and unpromising surroundings those rewards ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.
... and shone broad and full over the barren moorland; but it was several hours after sunrise before the man who took care of the ruins came ...
— Run to Earth - A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... his eyes toward a huge bluish bulk extending out into the sea and looking to the casual spectator like a great barren island. It was the promontory crowned by the Mongo, the great Ferrarian promontory of the ancient geographers, the furthest-reaching point of the peninsula in the lower Mediterranean that closes the Gulf ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... very low. "I feel as though I were looking into a beautiful garden from the top of an ugly, barren, cold mountain. I shall like to come down and go in among ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... masses of shade, the separating line between the land and water, or to distinguish the fading objects that seemed sinking into chaos. Now did the busy fancy supply the feebleness of vision, producing with industrious craft a fairy creation of her own. Under her plastic wand the barren rocks frowned upon the watery waste, in the semblance of lofty towers, and high embattled castles; trees assumed the direful forms of mighty giants, and the inaccessible summits of the mountains seemed peopled with ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... him. Certainly if fortune had again become favorable to him, as in the past, the King of Saxony would have found himself master of one of the most extensive kingdoms of Europe; but fortune was hereafter to be always adverse, and even our victories brought us only a barren glory. ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... this was Liskane—wonderful, marvellous, magical Liskane! To the bored and cynical adult Liskane may easily appear to be one of the ugliest, most deserted stations in the whole of Europe, having nothing on either side of it save barren grey fields that never grow grass but only stones and bottles, with its single decoration—a heavy iron bridge that crosses the rails and leads up to the higher road and the town of Liskane. Ugly enough, ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... and wife did not last long, the acte went on. Lacoste ardently desired a son and heir, and his wife appeared to be barren. He confided his grief to an old friend, one Lespere. Lespere pointed out that Euphemie was not only Lacoste's wife, but his kinswoman as well. To this Lacoste replied that the fact did not content him. "I tell you on the quiet,'' he said to his friend, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... towards the horizon, where golden clouds and air and sea appeared to mingle harmoniously, "I wonder that you, with good ships and many stout men and plenty of means, should choose to remain in this barren spot, instead of searching out the famous Vinland and making a ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the Touaricks, a people inhabiting the Desert of Sahara, a considerable degree of civilization. We are informed that in the Sahara, which, by the way, is far less a barren waste than we have been taught to suppose it, "the Touaricks have towns, cities, and an excellent condition of agriculture"; that with them fruit is cultivated with great success and skill. Their method of political organization is democratic and ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... coming of Grant, their record, in the main, was a series of bloody disasters, and their few victories, like Antietam and Gettysburg, were not properly and energetically followed up as they should have been, and hence were largely barren of adequate results. Considering these things, I have always somehow "felt it in my bones" that if Mr. Lincoln had not sent the brief telegram above mentioned, I would now be sleeping in some (probably) unmarked and unknown grave away ...
— The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War, 1861-1865 • Leander Stillwell
... Barren Keep Pure Solid Certain Liberal Rare Sorry Cold Light (adjective) Rich Spread Cool Light (noun) Right Straight Deep Long Rude Still Dry Low Short Sure Easy Mean Simple Thick Foul Narrow Slow Thin Full New Small Tender Gentle Obscure Smooth True Grand Odd Sober ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor
... more insignificant. The contemptuous eye of the world scarcely deigned to notice it. Yet the famous vessel that bore Caesar and his fortunes, carried but an ignoble freight compared with that of the Mayflower. Though landed by a treacherous pilot upon a barren and inhospitable coast, they sought neither richer fields nor a more congenial climate, but liberty ...
— How to Succeed - or, Stepping-Stones to Fame and Fortune • Orison Swett Marden
... apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information; but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to lack of matter. Speech is often barren, but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and, when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that ...
— Book of Wise Sayings - Selected Largely from Eastern Sources • W. A. Clouston
... to think it very silly of me to burden myself with extra food upon the march, though she was quite glad to eat it with me, if the way chanced to be barren of sustenance." ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... can he well imagined more uninteresting. On leaving Lower Bengal, even the luxuriant tropical vegetation which distinguishes that part of India disappears,—and the rest of the journey is performed through a country perfectly flat, and apparently barren; for notwithstanding occasional groups of trees, and good crops here and there, the wide-spreading dusty plains give but faint indications of the fertility which cultivation and irrigation can no doubt evolve ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... things: "It strikes me as almost incredible that the plan here advanced by Dr. Nansen should receive encouragement or support. It seems to me to be based on fallacious ideas as to physical conditions within the polar regions, and to foreshadow, if attempted, barren results, apart from the suffering and death among its members. Dr. Nansen, so far as I know, has had no Arctic service; his crossing of Greenland, however difficult, is no more polar work than the scaling of Mount St. Elias. It is doubtful if any hydrographer ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... and history of the town and port of Suakin might afford a useful instance to a cynical politician. Most of the houses stand on a small barren island which is connected with the mainland by a narrow causeway. At a distance the tall buildings of white coral, often five storeys high, present an imposing appearance, and the prominent chimneys of the condensing ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... barren of positive result; for it gave birth to that conception of a "Confederation of Europe," which, though never realised, has been one of the guiding ideas of nineteenth-century politics. As this solution of the world's problems is likely to be urged upon us with great insistency at the ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... lonely as now, for Christie had a social heart, and, having known the joy of a cordial friendship even for a little while, life seemed very barren to her when she lost it. No new friend took Rachel's place, for none came to her, and a feeling of loyalty kept her from seeking one. But she suffered for the want of genial society, for all the tenderness ...
— Work: A Story of Experience • Louisa May Alcott
... the tract of ordinary intention, give evidence of their truth; and I now called up a tradition, which I owed to my friend the maniac, respecting the manner in which the Mackenzies of Fairburn and the Chisholms of Strathglass had divided this barren tract between them. It had lain, from the first settlement of the country, an unappropriated waste, and neither proprietor could tell where his own lands terminated, or those of his neighbour began; but finding that the want of a proper line ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... intellect is enlightened, their influences become circumscribed, and must gradually almost entirely disappear. In the primitive state of the race, climate, soil, food, and scenery, are all-powerful; but among an enlightened people, the effects of heat and cold, of barren or exceedingly productive soils, etc., are entirely modified. This omission has given his enemies an excellent opportunity for a display of their refutory powers, of which they have not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... leaf, or sunshine, or song of bird and flutter of butterfly's wing; without anything sensuous, without advantage or gilding of summer—the power is ever there. Or shall we not say that the desire of the mind is ever there, and will satisfy itself, in a measure at least, even with the barren wild? The heart from the moment of its first beat instinctively longs for the beautiful; the means we possess to gratify it are limited—we are always trying to find the statue in the rude block. Out of the vast block ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... him?" It would take the wind out of my sails, when I came to preach about Redemption, because I should be tempted to believe that, after all, human beings were only in the world on sufferance, and that the aching, frozen, barren earth, so inimical to life, was in even more urgent need of redemption. Day by day, among the heights, I grew to feel that I wanted some explanation of why the strange panorama of splintered crag and ...
— The Altar Fire • Arthur Christopher Benson
... clutch and pushed down the accelerator—and the car would leap into space, three or four hundred feet over a mountain torrent. From this point the via dolorosa stretched away precariously, at first a winding path of ice and then a track across the snowdrifts of the barren uplands. The Serbian Government had offered to construct this very necessary road to Andrievica; the engineer, one Smodlaka, undertook to build it in three months, but Nikita's Minister replied that the Austrian prisoners, whom it was proposed to use, were mostly in the grip of ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... offensive alike to the aristocrat and the democrat. By the one he is denounced as a man who holds incendiary principles, by the other as a half-hearted "trimmer." He has no sympathy, as he says, with "that vague, barren pathos, that useless effervescence of enthusiasm, which plunges, with the spirit of a martyr, into an ocean of generalities, and which always reminds me of the American sailor, who had so fervent an enthusiasm for General Jackson, that he at last sprang from the top of a mast into ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... the sea with their blood. There might be inserted here a battle-piece worthy of the Drakes and Morgans of old, if the facts only bore us out. Instead of that, however, we are forced to say that the pirates proved sheer caitiffs when matched against honest men, and the battle was a barren farce. ...
— Historical Tales, Vol. 2 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... wood, and then saw what a delightful country this part of Scotland might be made by planting forest trees. The ground all over heaves and swells like a sea; but for miles there are neither trees nor hedgerows, only 'mound' fences and tracts; or slips of corn, potatoes, clover—with hay between, and barren land; but near the cottages many hills and hillocks covered with wood. We passed some fine trees, and paused under the shade of one close by an old mansion that seemed from its neglected state to be inhabited by farmers. ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... agreeable spectacle, so on the other hand it is not less true that its immediate tendency is, to clip the wings of the thinking principle within us, and plunge the members of the community in which we live into a barren and ungratifying mediocrity. Hence it should be the aim of those persons, who from their situation have more or less the means of looking through the vast assemblage of their countrymen, of penetrating "into the seeds" of character, and ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... on the sills of first floor windows. War's toll was being exacted daily, but the country had yet to pay the full price. It was going through that process of degeneration toward the stripped and barren but it still held much ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... to know how many women Romano loved in the twenty or more years since he grew to man's estate, and how many he seduced. It agitates and pains me to think of it, but all my questions are barren of results. ...
— Secret Memoirs: The Story of Louise, Crown Princess • Henry W. Fischer
... idea, came a delightful flow of happy converse. Though possessing so imperfectly the accomplishments ordinarily taught to young women, and which may be cultured to the utmost, and yet leave the thoughts so barren, and the talk so vapid, she had that accomplishment which most pleases the taste, and commands the love, of the man of talent; especially if his talent be not so actively employed as to make him desire only relaxation where he seeks companionship,—the accomplishment of facility in ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... her silver through that barren flower Of silver frost, until it filled and whitened A room where two small children waited, frightened At the pale ghost of light that hour by hour Stared at them till though fear slept not they slept. And when that white ghost from the window crept, ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... which begins the organization of that unwritten and only half spoken public opinion recognized by Mr. Cobden as a great underlying force even in England. It needs a little republican pollen-dust to cause the evolution of its else barren germs. The fruit of Mr. Beecher's visit will ripen in due time, not only in direct results, but in opening the way to future moral embassies, going forth unheralded, unsanctioned by State documents, in the simple strength of Christian manhood, on their ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... used gravidus,—a word we now apply only to animals, especially dogs and ants,—and enceinte, borrowed from French, and referring to the ancient custom of girding a woman who was with child. Similarly barren of direct reference to the child are accouchement, which we have borrowed from ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... first wife, or by the old men, and is divided equally among his wives and children, with perhaps a little extra added to the share of the first mate. The belongings of a free-born woman go to her children, or, in case she is barren, are given to her relatives. In cases where both the parents are dead, the children pass into the care of ...
— The Wild Tribes of Davao District, Mindanao - The R. F. Cummings Philippine Expedition • Fay-Cooper Cole
... Scotland, who are very numerous, were content to reside in their castles and houses, in that bleak and barren climate; and although some of them made frequent journeys to London, yet I do not remember any of their greatest families, till very lately, to have made England their constant habitation, before ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. VI; The Drapier's Letters • Jonathan Swift
... I went from that room like a man condemned to die. Fort Ungava in Labrador,—a thousand miles away, over a barren, savage country, and in winter too; for it would be winter there immediately! It was an exile to Siberia, and far worse than Siberia; for there are many there to share the fellowship of misery, and I was likely to be the only white man at Fort ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... requiring an oriental squat at which I am not adept. I compromised by stretching out along a hard couch raised some six inches above the floor. There were no gadgets to tinker with, the place was to me barren of necessary appurtenances ... strange ...
— Valley of the Croen • Lee Tarbell
... most unpromising; and fitter for geese than men. A vast sedgy swamp with water in the middle, thin fringes of great fern-trees, and here and there a disconsolate tree like a weeping-willow, and at the end of this lake and swamp, which all together formed a triangle, was a barren hill without a blade of vegetation on it, and a sort of jagged summit Hazel did not at all like the look ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... we awoke. We all felt ravenously hungry, and were burning with thirst. Our thirst we slightly quenched with another orange apiece; but as we gazed around the barren sand-bank, we had no hopes of satisfying our hunger. Unless we could quickly reach the land, we felt we must perish. Standing up, we looked eagerly towards the east; a mist, however, which the sun had not yet dispelled, hung over that part of the horizon. The sand-bank, ...
— Saved from the Sea - The Loss of the Viper, and her Crew's Saharan Adventures • W.H.G. Kingston
... make them accept present knowledge, and present things, as all that can be attained to. This is all— there is nothing more—is the iterated preaching of house-life. Remain; becontent; go round and round in one barren path, a little money, a little food and sleep, some ancient fables, old age and death. Of all the inventions of casuistry with man for ages has in various ways which manacled himself, and stayed his ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies |
