"Bleak" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the fine views of the sea, the mountain-heights, and the valley-reaches, obtainable from Morne Rouge, the place has a somewhat bleak look. Perhaps this is largely owing to the universal slate-gray tint of the buildings,—very melancholy by comparison with the apricot and banana yellows tinting the walls of St. Pierre. But this cheerless gray ...
— Two Years in the French West Indies • Lafcadio Hearn
... forest, the light had all gone except for some almost imperceptible touches of primrose on the eastern horns. It was a moonless night, but the sky was alive with stars, and now and then one fell. The last house in the valley was soon passed, and we entered those bleak gorges where the wind, fine, noiseless, penetrating like an edge of steel, poured slantwise on us from the north. As we rose, the stars to west seemed far beneath us, and the Great Bear sprawled upon the ridges of the lower hills outspread. We kept ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... blood. The goatsucker hath sung his song, the shades lower of eventide, So with the lotus hoe I return home and shut the double doors. Upon the wall the green lamp sheds its rays just as I go to sleep. The cover is yet cold; against the window patters the bleak rain. How strange! Why can it ever be that I feel so wounded at heart! Partly, because spring I regret; partly, because with spring I'm vexed! Regret for spring, because it sudden comes; vexed, ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... There were swarthy Queensland drovers who reckoned all land by miles, And farmers' sons from the Murray, where many a vineyard smiles. They started at telling stories when they wearied of cards and games, And to give these stories a flavour they threw in some local names, And a man from the bleak Monaro, away on the tableland, He fixed his eyes on the ceiling, and he ...
— The Man from Snowy River • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... Ferry, with my regiment, and the old familiar scenes were carefully revisited. The terrible destruction of fine public buildings, the wanton waste of private property, the deserted village instead of the thriving town, the utter ruin and wretchedness of the country all about, and the bleak waste of land from Harper's Ferry to Charlestown, are all set features in every picture of the war in Virginia. At my old head-quarters in Charlestown jail there was less change than I had expected; its sturdy walls had withstood attack and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... let me go, won't you?" Di pleaded, using her pet name for Father, which he likes because it sounds young and unparental. Then catching a bleak gleam in my eyes, she hastily added: "And afterward Peggy, if Captain March ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... than she had seen him, was waiting in the early dawn which struck out bleak lights from the dangling prisms of the big French chandeliers—the ugly chandeliers of which Lella Mabrouka was proud. He asked no questions; and somehow that seemed worse than the ordeal for which Sanda had braced herself. The Agha's ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... Cumshaw rather fancied he didn't. He was so sure of it that he decided that he would gain nothing by divulging the connection between himself and the late Mr. Bradby. So the mouth which was opening to speak shut up again like a steel trap, and the dark eyes turned bleak and cold. He looked Bryce steadily and calmly in ...
— The Lost Valley • J. M. Walsh
... courage when she entered Mrs. Lovejoy's house, and saw that lady sitting very erect on a sofa, with a bleak face, which looked somehow as if a north-east wind had blown over it, and ...
— Little Prudy's Sister Susy • Sophie May
... occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection; when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth, make a harmony, as if Nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives sign of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... that part of the earth from which it removes, in order to temper it, than that it approaches to favour it with its beams. Its kind, beneficent aspect fertilises all it shines upon. This change produces that of the seasons, whose variety is so agreeable. The spring silences bleak frosty winds, brings forth blossoms and flowers, and promises fruits. The summer yields rich harvests. The autumn bestows the fruits promised by the spring. The winter, which is a kind of night wherein man ...
— The Existence of God • Francois de Salignac de La Mothe- Fenelon
... he led the exiles to a dismal, swampy stretch of ground about a mile from the village; and told them for the present to rest their bones in an old unfinished farmhouse {June 8th, 1722.}. The spot itself was dreary and bleak, but the neighbouring woods of pines and beeches relieved the bareness of the scene. It was part of Zinzendorf's estate, and lay at the top of a gentle slope, up which a long avenue now leads. It was a piece of common pasture ground, and was therefore known as the Hutberg,73 or Watch-Hill. ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... buttons, so that Thackeray himself should hardly recognise him. And then of a sudden there came to me memories of a young Irishman, with whom I was once intimate, and had spent long nights walking and talking with, upon a very desolate coast in a bleak autumn: I recalled him as a youth of an extraordinary moral simplicity—almost vacancy; plastic to any influence, the creature of his admirations: and putting such a youth in fancy into the career of a soldier of fortune, it occurred to me that he would serve my turn as well as Mr. Lyndon, ...
— The Art of Writing and Other Essays • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to a considerable extent in its aspect, is yet universally shagged with forests, or deformed by marshes: moister on the side of Gaul, more bleak on the side of Norieum and Pannonia. [32] It is productive of grain, but unkindly to fruit-trees. [33] It abounds in flocks and herds, but in general of a small breed. Even the beeve kind are destitute of their usual stateliness and dignity ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... is pleasant to think, just under the snow, That stretches so bleak and blank and cold, Are beauty and warmth that we cannot know, Green fields and leaves ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Literature • Ontario Ministry of Education
... nation's seed! Frail shallop, quick with unborn states! Autumn was mellow in the fatherland when they set sail, And winter deepened as they neared the West. Out of the desert sea they came at last, And their hearts warmed to see that frozen land. O, first gray dawn that filtered through the dark! Bleak, glorious birth-hour of our northern states! They stood upon the shore like new created men; On barren solitudes of sand they stood, The conquered sea behind, the unconquered wilderness before. Some died that year beneath the cruel cold, And some for heartsick longing and the pang ...
— The Song of the Stone Wall • Helen Keller
... sink at the thought of her going away. She was the only amusing person I had met at Glenarm, and the idea of losing her gave a darker note to the bleak landscape. ...
— The House of a Thousand Candles • Meredith Nicholson
... skirted the Great Salt Lake with its bleak and desolate islands of rock rising in silhouette against the cold grey skies, Hattie compared the scene to the feeling of utter desolation ...
— Where Strongest Tide Winds Blew • Robert McReynolds
... took to studying the landscape, which had become a succession of sharp ridges and narrow coulees, water-worn and bleak, with a purplish line of mountains off to the left. After ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... hand on his horse's neck, and as she watched him at last ride down the village green and disappear round behind the church, half her sorrow at losing him was swallowed up in the practical certainty that they would meet again before Christmas in their old home, and not in a stranger's house in the bleak North country. ...
— By What Authority? • Robert Hugh Benson
... millinery way of life. And it wasn't enough that the tired genii had to gouge out the streets of Harvey; to fill in the gulleys and ravines; to dab in scores of new houses; to toil and moil over the new hotel, witching up four bleak stories upon the prairie. It wasn't enough that they had to cast a spell on people all over the earth, dragging strangers to Harvey by trainloads; it wasn't enough that the overworked genii should have to bring big George Brotherton to town with ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... the main streets of Sydney the other night—grotesque bundles of rags lying under the verandas of the old Fruit Markets and York Street shops, with their heads to the wall and their feet to the gutter. It was raining and cold that night, and the unemployed had been driven in from Hyde Park and the bleak Domain—from dripping trees, damp seats, and drenched grass—from the rain, and cold, and the wind. Some had sheets of old newspapers to cover them-and some hadn't. Two were mates, and they divided a Herald between ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... relief!) from the bleak coast that hears The German Ocean roar, deep-blooming, strong, And yellow hair'd, the ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... been her first blow, for she had long located her publishing house on that beautiful stretch of Michigan Avenue which overlooked the lake. But the real insult was that this publishing house, instead of having a building, or at least a floor, all to itself, simply had a place penned off in a bleak, dirty building such as one who had done work in sociological research instinctively associated with a box factory. And the thing which fairly trailed her visions in the dust was that the partition penning them off did not extend to the ceiling, and ...
— Lifted Masks - Stories • Susan Glaspell
... added Bernard, "that I should think it little short of murderous to take that unlucky child from the one woman who understands her up into the bleak north at this ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... earnest little girl held her vagrant big brother by the hand, not to let go till she had seen him in the bosom of his class-mates. There a sullen wild-eyed mite in petticoats was being dragged along, screaming, towards distasteful durance. It was a drab picture—the bleak, leaden sky above, the sloppy, miry stones below, the frowsy mothers ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... Heard Island - 80% ice-covered, bleak and mountainous, dominated by a large massif (Big Ben) and an active volcano (Mawson Peak); McDonald Islands ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... John Bleak—Jan. 26, 1899. Killed by Mexicans, near Hackberry, Mohave County. The body was found with many knife thrusts, with indications of a desperate ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... ago the day was cold and bleak. It drizzled through the dreary hours, freezing as it fell. But to many loving hearts, its sleet and rain were not its gloom. On this day was laid to rest in Mother Earth the loved remains of one numbered in the health-seeking trio ...
— Autobiography of Frank G. Allen, Minister of the Gospel - and Selections from his Writings • Frank G. Allen
... friends Sir William Napier (who first found a resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly as Leonard Boythom in "Bleak House". But his most constant companion was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life, right to ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas
... greatly delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we are ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... the country, but because no indication is given of the light in our newest Admiralty charts. Captain Runciman, however, had more confidence in the correctness of his own chart, and could hardly believe his eyes when he saw that the light really had no existence on the bare bleak headland. His faith was terribly shaken, and I hope he will not omit to call Messrs. Imray's attention to the matter on his return home; for the mistake is most serious, and one which might lead to the destruction of many a ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... disorder which was not fully known until after his departure from France. Then people saw, at last, where all the golden schemes that had flooded upon popular credulity had borne us;—not to the smiling and fertile shores of Prosperity and Confidence, as may be imagined; but to the bleak rocks and dangerous sands of Ruin and Mistrust, where dull clouds obscure the sky, and where there is ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... kneeling, far up toward the altar, his head in his hands. In all the big church, which was bleak and bare in the cold afternoon light, there was no one else. The red altar light flickered in its hanging glass cup; a dozen lighted candles, in a great frame that held sockets for five times as many, guttered and flared at ...
— The Story Of Julia Page - Works of Kathleen Norris, Volume V. • Kathleen Norris
... English troops pent up on a bleak promontory, sick and disheartened, with uncooked provisions, in the middle of winter. Of course they melted away even in the hospitals to which they were sent on the Levant. In those hospitals there was a terrible mortality. At Scutari alone nine thousand perished before ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... public bar of the Wagtail, in Wapping, four men and a woman were drinking beer and discussing diseases. It was not a pretty subject, and the company was certainly not a handsome one. It was a dark November evening, and the dingy lighting of the bar seemed but to emphasize the bleak exterior. Drifts of fog and damp from without mingled with the smoke of shag. The sanded floor was kicked into a muddy morass not unlike the surface of the pavement. An old lady down the street had died from pneumonia the previous evening, ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Various
... faculties were given us to put to use; to be passively obedient is really to evade probation—so with almost excessive emphasis Browning set forth a cardinal article of his creed; but Elizabeth Barrett was not, like him, "ever a fighter," and, after all, London in 1845 was not bleak and grey as it had been a year previously—"for reasons," to adopt a reiterated word of the correspondence, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... may be revived, especially if the British peasantry be re-created. A hundred years ago the great agricultural authority, Arthur Young, wrote: "The magic of property turns sand into gold. Give a man a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden. Give him a nine years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert." Since the time when these words were written most European countries have created ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... hot, dry grass. And through the branches of the trees on the lower terrace one could get frequent glimpses of the James River, thickly studded with black rocks and tiny green islands." No wonder that the girl from the bleak North found it in her heart to thrill at the beauty of such a gem from Nature's jewel-casket as was that garden ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... raw the north wind doth blow, Bleak in the morning early; All the hills are covered with snow, And ...
— The Real Mother Goose • (Illustrated by Blanche Fisher Wright)
... stone walls through which the gaping gateway led, three great cheerless brick buildings, so forbidding that even the yellow sunlight could not light them into brightness, looked down, with row upon row of windows, upon three sides of the bleak, stone courtyard. Back of and above them clustered a jumble of other buildings, tower and turret, one high-peaked ...
— Otto of the Silver Hand • Howard Pyle
... was detailed to a big prairie stretch of country where there was little to do but wait. On the first day of August he was at Hymers when the Limited plunged down the embankment into Blind Indian River. The first word of it came over the wire from Bleak House Station a little before midnight, while he and the agent were playing cribbage. Pink-cheeked little Gunn, agent, operator, and one-third of the total population of Hymers, had lifted a peg to make a count when his hand stopped in mid-air, and ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... between the rows for that purpose, while others were hauling the grain to their barns to store it away for the winter's use. The broad corn leaves rustling in the wind seemed to whisper, "Winter is coming with his cold, bleak storms to rob the earth of her summer splendor; but he will bring his beautiful coverlet of snow to protect her fields and to prepare them for ...
— How John Became a Man • Isabel C. Byrum
... "The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver; But not the dark arch, Or the black flowing river: Mad from life's history, Glad to death's mystery Swift to be hurled— Anywhere, anywhere Out ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... have been transformed. The "white line" was gone. So, too, was the ocean. Before them, as far as the eye could reach, lay a mass of yellow lights and purple shadows, ice-fields that had buried the sea. Only one object stood out, black, bleak and bare before them—the hull of the ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... more words and Glenister, accompanied by these two, slipped out into the whirling storm, and a half-hour later the rest followed. One by one the Vigilantes left, the blackness blotting them up an arm's-length from the door, till at last the big, bleak warehouse echoed hollowly to the voice of ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... or two afterwards, and we are surprised to find that the farmer is safely housed, and that he has not been robbed upon a bleak moor on a dark stage. But we soon feel a sensation of awe, when we learn that before us is the interior of the very farm-house that is going to be murdered. The farmer and his wife go through the long-standing dialogue ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 23, 1841 • Various
... show that a pawnbroker's business was carried on within. It was not the first visit she had made to this establishment, for the poor little household ornaments, the loss of which had left her home so bleak and bare, were now in the safekeeping of the proprietor; but still she shrank back as she approached a dim side entrance in a narrow street, and drawing her bonnet closer over her face, pushed open a baize door, and entered ...
— Miss Grantley's Girls - And the Stories She Told Them • Thomas Archer
... o' her carles teuch an' auld, Her carlines grim that flyte an' scauld, Her wabsters blithe, an' souters bauld, Her flocks an' herds sae fair to see. Sing o' her mountains bleak an high; Her fords, whare neigh'rin' kelpies ply; Her glens, the haunts o' rural joy; Her lasses lilting ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... autumn time. The neighbourhood of the Beacon was our favourite resort. Many a pleasant day we have spent at the top of it. The hill was covered with heather and gorse bushes. In winter it was as wild, bleak, and cold a place as any you could ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... so we could not get to Clark's "good camp," for with ten hours of utmost effort only about half a day's distance could be covered, when at last, finding the struggle useless, we were forced to halt for the night in a bleak bottom on the north bank of the river. But no one could sleep, for the wind swept over us with unobstructed fury, and the only fuel to be had was a few green bushes. As night fell a decided change of temperature added much to our misery, the mercury, which had risen when the "Norther" ...
— The Memoirs of General P. H. Sheridan, Complete • General Philip Henry Sheridan
... literature. I do not think that at this time I cared much for novel reading. Scott seemed to me on a par with Burke's speeches; that is to say, too impersonal for my very personal taste. Dickens I knew by heart, and "Bleak House" I thought his greatest achievement. Thackeray left no deep impression on my mind; in no way did he hold my thoughts. He was not picturesque like Dickens, and I was at that time curiously eager ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... been alive doubtless her lips would have remained sealed. But he was not there, and she knew not what had become of him. Then there was little Marcel, and she knew that when she left that bed it would be only for a cold grave on this bleak plateau of Unaga. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... where you will find a broken shrine, erected hundreds of years ago to the Blessed Virgin. The shrine is on the left side of the road as you travel west, one hundred paces back, on the top of a low hill surrounded by a bleak moor. The shrine has gone to decay, but it holds a sacred relic ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major
... bleak days and vernal, Lie I and lies she, This never-known lady, eternal Companion ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... landed by mischance in St. Antoine. Indeed, Le Petit Nord and Labrador are so much alike in climate, people, and conditions that this part of the island is often designated locally as Labrador (never has it been my lot to see a more desolate, bleak, and barren spot). The traveller who described Newfoundland as a country composed chiefly of ponds with a little land to divide them from the sea, at least cannot be impeached for unveracity. In this northern part even that little is rendered almost ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... the Anglo-Saxon poems is adapted to men of this stamp. Their souls delight in the bleak boreal climes, the north wind, frost, hail, ice, howling tempest and raging seas, recur as often in this literature as blue waves and sunlit blossoms in the writings of men to whom these exquisite marvels are familiar. Their descriptions are all short, save when ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... been long ago discarded. The creature did not look as if it had been ridden in any recent decade. It looked as if it had almost abandoned the hope of ever being ridden again. It was but hoping against hope now, as it stood rocking there in the bleak twilight. Bright warm nurseries were for younger, happier horses. Still it went on rocking, to show ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... Dore imagined. His toothless, thin-lipped mouth was a cruel and bitter slash under a great curved nose that almost met the chin and that was like a buzzard's beak. His one hand, lean and crooked, was a talon. The beady grey eyes, unblinking and unwavering, were bitter as death, as bleak as absolute zero and as merciless. His presence was a chill, and Whiskers and Fatty instinctively drew together for protection against the unguessed threat of him. Watching his chance, privily, Whiskers snuggled a chunk of rock several pounds in weigh close to his hand if need for action ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... Plymouth Company - also sent out an, expedition, and tried to found a colony at the mouth of the Kennebec River. But it was a failure. Some of the adventurers were so discouraged with the cold and bleak appearance of the land that they sailed home again in the ship which had brought them out. Only about forty-five or so stayed on. The winter was long and cold, and they were so weary of it, so homesick and miserable, ...
— This Country Of Ours • H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall
... were taken. Every corner is a gem; and Sir Lionel told us that the old rectangular part of the town was planned more or less at one time. Of course, the people who did the planning had plenty of time to think it all over, before moving down from Old Sarum, which was so high and bleak they couldn't hear the priest saying mass in the cathedral, because of the wind. Fancy! Salisbury used to be called the "Venice of England"; but I must say, if one can judge ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... of trees sweep the sky clean; Sweep the house fronts, And leave them bleak in sleep. High up the empty ...
— Precipitations • Evelyn Scott
... walked forward, hoping she wouldn't make him push around her. But apparently she read the determination in his face and stood aside, her expression bleak now. ...
— Ride Proud, Rebel! • Andre Alice Norton
... Alpine peak, Stands, when the sunrise lifts the East, And gilds the crown and lights the cheek Of largest monarch down to least, Of all the summits cold and bleak, ...
— The Mistress of the Manse • J. G. Holland
... once before saved the squire's life. But he was alive. It would not take much to kill him; a little pressure on his wounded throat would be enough. Even to leave him there, uncared for, till morning in the bleak wind, lying upon the cold ground, would be almost certain to put an end to his life. But to the honour of Charles James Juxon be it said that such thoughts never crossed his mind. He pulled off his heavy ulster greatcoat, wrapped it about the felon's insensible body, then, kneeling, raised ...
— A Tale of a Lonely Parish • F. Marion Crawford
... time—of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve—old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... better fitted for telling stories around a blazing fire than for playing ball, but orders were orders, and I obeyed them. I soon found that it was to test my qualities as a batsman that I had been ordered to report. A bleak March wind blew across the enclosure, and as I doffed my coat and took my stand at the plate I shivered as though suffering from the ague. This was partially from the effects of the cold and partially ...
— A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson • Adrian C. Anson
... lost the trail of the pneus, but as the country changed we picked it up again. We were among trees now, and the mountain sides were green with oak and poplar, though as we dropped the landscape darkened into desolation. The bleak corner of the world towards which we were speeding had that formless, featureless look which one sees on common faces, as if it had been shaken together carelessly by the great Creator ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... Night on bleak downs; a high grass-grown trench runs athwart the slope. The earthwork is manned by warriors clad in hides. Two warriors, BRYS and ...
— Emblems Of Love • Lascelles Abercrombie
... Don Jorge placed the body in one of the vacant vaults and filled the entrance with some loose bricks. Then they stood back expectantly. It was now the priest's turn. He had a part to perform, out there on the bleak hilltop in the ghostly light. But Jose remained motionless and silent, his head sunk upon ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... face confronted her. "No, it ain't much of a fire yet, but our hired girl she joined a movin'-picture outfit, so us two he-things are doin' the best we can chasin' a breakfast." And the tramp, Overland Red, ragged, unkempt, jocular, rose from his knees beside a tiny blaze. He pulled a bleak flop of felt from his tangled hair in an over-accentuated ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... the silent fields The natural heart is touched, and public way And crowded street resound with ballad strains, Inspired by one whose very name bespeaks Favor divine, exalting, human love; Whom, since her birth on bleak Northumbrian coast, Known unto few, but prized as far as known, A single act endears to high and low Through the whole land—to manhood, moved in spite Of the world's freezing cares; to generous youth; To infancy, that lisps her praise; to age, Whose eye reflects it, glistening ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... second day we crossed "Death Valley," so called because two men were once found frozen in it; a bleak, barren expanse, five or six miles across, with a great gale blowing right down it, charged not only with particles of hard snow but with spicules of ice and grains of sand. Our course was south and the gale blew from the northwest, and the right side of one's body and the right arm were ...
— Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled - A Narrative of Winter Travel in Interior Alaska • Hudson Stuck
... out, ah God! to roam Like some whipped dog among my kind. I have no friends, I have no home, Save these bleak walls I leave behind. How can I face the world of men, My comrades in the days of yore? Oh! hide me in my cell again, And, warden, ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... him. He went as often as he thought he could without attracting the attention of Mr. Shrank or eliciting ponderous jocosities from the other workers. After several visits, however, he did begin to question himself. What drew him to that bleak refuge again and again? He was not aware of bladder irritation. He had no infantile obsession about such facilities. Was he driven by an aggregation of petty forces, each too small to make sense by itself? ...
— In the Control Tower • Will Mohler
... go to prepare a place for you." Just as when a little child is born into the world it comes to a place made ready for it by the thousand little tendernesses of a mother's love, so does death lead us, not into the bleak, inhospitable night, but into the "Father's house," to a place which love has made ready for our coming. "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit." Into Thy hands—thither Jesus passed from the Cross and the cruel hands of men; thither have ...
— The Teaching of Jesus • George Jackson
... of autumn in the air At the bleak end of night; he shivered there In a dank, musty dug-out where he lay, Legs wrapped in sand-bags,—lumps of chalk and clay Spattering his face. Dry-mouthed, he thought, "To-day We start the damned attack; and, Lord knows ...
— The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon • Siegfried Sassoon
... rather in the direction of speaking, preaching, and writing, and resolved to establish himself in some quiet country retreat. One summer I visited several houses in Hertfordshire with him, but they proved unsuitable. One of these possessed an extraordinary attraction for him. It was in a bleak remote village, and it was a fine old house which had fallen from its high estate. It stood on the road and was used as a grocer's shop. It was much dilapidated, and there was little ground about it, but inside there were old frescoes and pictures, strange plaster ...
— Hugh - Memoirs of a Brother • Arthur Christopher Benson
... assistant were readily accepted. Lauzun gave his hand to Mary; Saint Victor wrapped up in his warm cloak the ill fated heir of so many Kings. The party stole down the back stairs, and embarked in an open skiff. It was a miserable voyage. The night was bleak: the rain fell: the wind roared: the waves were rough: at length the boat reached Lambeth; and the fugitives landed near an inn, where a coach and horses were in waiting. Some time elapsed before the horses could be harnessed. Mary, afraid that her face might be known, would not enter the ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... The bleak and almost barren lives of these isolated folk became illumined with a reminiscent glow as the tinkling notes of the guitar hushed to faint echoes of fairy bells hung on the silver boughs of starlit trees. "Adios, linda Rosa," ran the song. Then ...
— Sundown Slim • Henry Hubert Knibbs
... "I should think a little of that stuff would do neither of us any harm; the night is rather bleak." ...
— Snarley-yow - or The Dog Fiend • Frederick Marryat
... person was a lad a couple of years my senior, called always "Young Sam," apparently one of those unhappy waifs cast on the bleak world without relations or friends to care for him. He was a fine young fellow, with a blue laughing eye, dauntless and active, and promised to become a good seaman. In spite of the rough treatment he often received from his shipmates, he kept up his spirits, and as our ...
— Tales of the Sea - And of our Jack Tars • W.H.G. Kingston
... step banks, beautifully wooded, and in spring one mass of primroses, are crowned here and there with ruined Border towers—like Elibank, the houses of Muckle Mou'ed Meg; or with fair baronial houses like Fernilea. Meg made a bad exchange when she left Elibank with the salmon pool at its foot for bleak Harden, frowning over the narrow "den" where Harden kept the plundered cattle. There is no fishing in the tiny Harden burn, that joins ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang
... sun was low when he rode down the crest of the range. The mountains were devoid of vegetation, bleak and bare and black. The lava rock seemed to absorb the heat of the sun and throw it in the rider's face. But Rathburn didn't appear ...
— The Coyote - A Western Story • James Roberts
... streams! How burnt with hopeless, aimless fire, To mark thy giant strength aspire In patriot themes! and tun'd the while Thy "Bonny Doon," or "Balloch Mile." Spirit of BURNS! accept the tear That rapture gives thy mem'ry here On the bleak mountain top. Here thou Thyself had rais'd the gallant brow Of conscious intellect, to twine Th'imperishable verse of thine, That charm'st the world. Or can it be, That scenes like these were nought to ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield
... old town, with its red roofs, its quaint architecture, its crowded, narrow, picturesque streets. But this time they seemed almost deserted, and the whole effect of the place was bleak and dreary. The leaves had dropped from the trees, the flowers had faded, the vines that covered the cottage walls were brown and bare. He was pleasantly conscious of the warmth of a sable-lined coat he had brought from Russia two years ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... as Minnesota, he went down the Mississippi to a different kind of civilization in the quaint old cities. It was none the less heart-sickening. He found traces of the war, that we had almost forgotten, fresh at every step; still it seemed as if the hand of Nature was much more bounteous than at the bleak North. Yet Bishop Heber's old missionary hymn rang continually through his mind. Even amid the Florida orange-groves, and the great cotton-fields, some cause brought about baleful results, ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... bleak night, the stars were hid, In vain she wish'd him home; Her children cried, half cheer'd, half chid, "O when ...
— May Day With The Muses • Robert Bloomfield
... with a wet sheet and a flowing sail (as we say at sea when we are not sick), that I write. It is simply to say what follows, which I hope may save you some mental uneasiness. For I was stricken ill when I was doing "Bleak House," and I shall not easily forget what I suffered under the fear of not being able to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 2 (of 3), 1857-1870 • Charles Dickens
... opportunity of the first glimpse of sunshine to make a short excursion along the coast; I started early in the morning, and after a long stroll along the bold headlands of Kilkee, was returning late in the evening to my lodgings. My path lay across a wild, bleak moor, dotted with low clumps of furze, and not presenting on any side the least trace of habitation. In wading through the tangled bushes, my dog "Mouche" started a hare; and after a run "sharp, short, and ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... Willard had been in the habit of walking on Trunion Pike. He had been in the midst of the great open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only the moon looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when bleak winds blew and on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the April morning he wanted to go there again, to walk again in the silence. He did walk to where the road dipped down by a little ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... a fresh start. So Mrs. Alcott wrote to her brother in Boston for help, sold all the furniture they could spare, and went to Still River, the nearest village to Fruitlands, and engaged four rooms. "Then on a bleak December day the Alcott family emerged from the snowbank in which Fruitlands, now re-christened Apple Stump by Mrs. Alcott, lay hidden. Their worldly goods were piled on an ox-sled, the four girls on the top, while father and mother ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... extensive slope of cultivated country, about ten miles short of Milledgeville, and was deploying his troops for camp when I got up. There was a high, raw wind blowing, and I asked him why he had chosen so cold and bleak a position. He explained that he had accomplished his full distance for the day, and had there an abundance of wood and water. He explained further that his advance-guard was a mile or so ahead; so I rode on, asking him to let his ...
— Memoirs of Three Civil War Generals, Complete • U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, P. H. Sheridan
... grand thing if it cud be straightened out. Th' laws ought to be th' same ivrywhere. In anny part iv this fair land iv ours it shud be th' right iv anny man to get a divoorce, with alimony, simply be goin' befure a Justice iv th' Peace an' makin' an affydavit that th' lady's face had grown too bleak f'r his taste. Be Hivens, I'd go farther. Rather than have people endure this sarvichood I'd let anny man escape be jumpin' th' conthract. All he'd have to do if I was r-runnin' this Governmint wud be to put some clothes in th' grip, write a note to his ...
— Mr. Dooley Says • Finley Dunne
... (one of the ordinary winds of New England), from all points of the compass. The fine snow becomes rain; it becomes large snow; it melts as it falls; it freezes as it falls. At last a storm sets in, and night shuts down upon the bleak scene. ...
— Widger's Quotations of Charles D. Warner • David Widger
... never in reality the strong man he looked. At any rate, his fight for his life when it came was a singularly weak one. The second winter after Louise's death was bitterly cold; he was overworked, and often without sleep. One bleak east-wind day struck home. He took to his bed with a chill, which turned to peritonitis; the system showed no power of resistance, and ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... early in the crisis and eventually brokered a $42 billion bailout package; but Jakarta jeopardized the program by resisting strict IMF reforms, partly in response to the rupiah's collapse, which lost as much as 80% of its value at one point. Economic prospects look bleak for 1998: the economy probably will shrink between 4% to 10%, unemployment top historic highs-in excess of 15%-and inflation ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... beneath his feet. At God's bidding the avalanche fell. No precaution could save the traveler who was in its path. He was instantly borne to destruction, and buried where no voice but the archangel's trump could ever reach his ear. Terrific storms of wind and snow often swept through those bleak altitudes, blinding and smothering the traveler. Hundreds of bodies, like pillars of ice, embalmed in snow, are now sepulchred in those drifts, there to sleep till the fires of the last conflagration shall have consumed their winding ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... respecting his origin, his meaning, his Maker, and his destiny. That perpetual half-night of his planet-mind—that shadowed side of his orbit-life—forever attracted and held in place by the force of Deity, but destined never to receive its light. Yet from that chill, bleak side what things have not reached round and caught the sun! And as of the earth's plants, some grow best and are sweetest in darkness, what strange blossoms of faith open and are fragrant in that eternal umbra! Sacred, ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... "Mysterious Man of Meteighan," a wild and untoward storm swept down the North Atlantic and over the seaboard far and near. In the Bay of Fundy that night the elements met in their grandest extremes. Tide-rips and mountain waves opposed each other with titanic force. All along the bleak and rock-ribbed coast the boiling waters lay churned into foam. Over the breakwaters the giant combers crashed and soared far up into the troubled sky; while out under the black clouds of the night the whirlpools and the tempests met. Was ever a night like ...
— Great Pirate Stories • Various
... the ground rising gently but steadily, until we stopped at last on a high plateau, and gazed around us at the scene. A more bleak and desolate country it would be impossible to imagine. One vast and semi-desert plain, the eye relieved only by patches of algarrobo bushes, or little lakes of water. Far ahead of us the cone of a solitary mountain rose on the horizon, and towards this the sun was slowly ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... prothalamia chaunting enraptured things,— O sumptuous fables, why so prodigal Of masque and music, of dreams like foam-white swans On lakes of hyacinthus? Must Love seek Great allies, Beauty sound her arriere-bans That all her splendours betray us to this bleak Simplicity whereto blind satyrs run?"— The irony seems old, old ...
— The Hours of Fiammetta - A Sonnet Sequence • Rachel Annand Taylor
... because she enjoyed and benefited by the exercise, she was much away from home every day. Sometimes, attended only by a groom, she rode long distances north or south along the coast; or up over the ridge behind the castle and far inland along the shaded roads through the woods; or over bleak wind-swept stretches of moorland. Sometimes she would walk, all alone, far down to the sea-road, and would sit for hours on the shore or high up on some little rocky headland where she could enjoy the ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... large bosky hedges, pretty damp deep lanes, and roads with broad grass margins running along them. Such is the general nature of the county; but just up in its northern extremity this nature alters. There it is bleak and ugly, with low artificial hedges and without wood; not uncultivated, as it is all portioned out into new-looking large fields, bearing turnips, and wheat, and mangel, all in due course of agricultural ...
— Framley Parsonage • Anthony Trollope
... flowers has spangled all the ground, Or winter bleak the flickering hearth around Draws close the circling seat; The child still sheds a never-failing light; We call; Mamma with mingled joy and fright ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... a house on fire at any hour draws a crowd. At sea, in the bleak cold wastes of the water desert, even one other shipload of sympathizers is too often wished for vainly. Wind, cold, and breakdowns of machinery the sailor accepts with dull indifference; shipwrecks, strandings, and disease he looks forward to as part of an inevitable fate; but ...
— A Master of Fortune • Cutcliffe Hyne
... cliffs, stretched the Causses, vast, arid and barren plateaux, flat and featureless save for an occasional low, rounded mound, a menhir or a dolmen, and (if such may be termed features) great pits that opened in the earth like cold craters, which the countryfolk termed avens. A strange, bleak land, inhospitable, wind-harried, haunted, the home of seven ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... of 'Little Dorrit.' The elder Dickens had unquestionably some of the traits ascribed to the unpractical friend of Copperfield's youth, and something of the cruel self-indulgence and pompous deportment of the dancing-master in 'Bleak House.' And it was during his father's imprisonment for debt when the son was but a youth, that Dickens got his intimate knowledge of the Marshalsea, and of the heart-breaking existence of its inmates. Some years before 'Copperfield' was written, he ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... all pulled down to shut out the summer light and air. It was indeed a tribute to Society to find a room set apart for her behests out there on so apparently neighborless and remote an island. Afternoon visits and evening festivals must be few in such a bleak situation at certain seasons of the year, but Mrs. Blackett was of those who do not live to themselves, and who have long since passed the line that divides mere self-concern from a valued share in whatever Society can give and take. There were those of her neighbors who never ...
— The Country of the Pointed Firs • Sarah Orne Jewett
... stood in the midst of a bleak moor, in the North Country, a certain village. All its inhabitants were poor, for their fields were barren, and they had little trade; but the poorest of them all were two brothers called Scrub and Spare, who followed the cobbler's craft. Their hut ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... for an effect of opulent gorgeousness by every device of material, color and decoration, the heads of the Vedian family had expressed, in their atrium, their cult of primitive simplicity. Compared with others of the houses of senators their atrium appeared bare and bleak. ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... doubt; and the rich verdure, and the thorough finish added by human art, are perhaps as attractive to an American eye as any stronger feature could be. Our journey, however, between Manchester and Sheffield was not through a rich tract of country, but along a valley walled in by bleak, ridgy hills extending straight as a rampart, and across black moorlands with here and there a plantation of trees. Sometimes there were long and gradual ascents, bleak, windy, and desolate, conveying the very impression which the reader gets from many passages of Miss Bronte's novels, and still ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... without reason that we dreaded passing across this bleak region. The name of Paramo is given to those inhospitable desert-regions high up among the mountains, of which there are so many in the Andes. No human being can exist in them without keeping in incessant and violent motion. Artificial means are incapable ...
— In New Granada - Heroes and Patriots • W.H.G. Kingston
... northward cast his curious eyes On other cliffs of more exalted size. Where Maine's bleak breakers line the dangerous coast, And isles and shoals their latent horrors boast, High lantern'd in his heaven the cloudless White Heaves the glad sailor an eternal light; Who far thro troubled ocean greets the ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow
... the house, no flower-beds in the nooks and corners, no sweet shrubs peeping in at the square windows. Gardens there are, but they are away, half a mile off; and the great hall door opens out upon a flat, bleak park, with hardly a scrap around it which ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... second visit will reveal to me the blindness, the distortions, and the wrong-headedness of my first. But even as a Chinaman I did notice subtle differences between New York and Chicago. As one who was brought up in a bleak and uncanny climate, where soft coal is in universal use, I at once felt more at home in Chicago than I could ever do in New York. The old instinct to wash the hands and change the collar every couple of hours instantly returned to me in Chicago, together with the old comforting ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... cab into a street even more bleak and bedraggled than the one they had just traversed. He stopped and got out. Pauline followed him. A blear-eyed man, slouching on a stoop, looked up in faint curiosity ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... of the aurora, which went racing swiftly back and forth along the northern horizon. Even when the sun rose, huge and fiery, in a haze of frozen moisture at the south, it did not seem to infuse any warmth or life into the bleak wintry landscape. It only drowned, in a dull red glare, the blue, tremulous streamers of the aurora and the white radiance of the moon and stars, tinged the snow with a faint colour like a stormy sunset, and lighted up a splendid mirage ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... pleasure I heard this piece of news, and eagerly pressed forward, preferring the warm shelter and hospitable board the major was certain of possessing, to the cold blast and dripping grass of a bivouac. Night, however, fell fast; darkness, without an intervening twilight, set in, and we lost our way. A bleak table-land with here and there a stunted, leafless tree was all that we could discern by the pale light of a new moon. An apparently interminable heath uncrossed by path or foot-track was before us, and our jaded cattle seemed to feel ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... once woo'd a budding Rose, (Sing hey down ho, the bleak winds blow.) With fond delight his bosom glows, (How softly fall the flakes of snow.) Love watch'd the flower whose ruby tips Peep'd coyly forth, like pouting lips, Then nearer to the Rose he trips; (The stately oak ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... and River St. Lawrence and Canada, and W. by James' Bay and Hudson's Bay. Its area is estimated at 420,000 sq. miles. The vast interior, inhabited by a few wandering Nascopie Indians, is little known; the coast, mainly but sparsely peopled by Eskimoes, is rugged, bleak and desolate. Seals abound, and the sea is well stocked with cod and other fish. The wild animals include deer (caribou), bears, wolves, foxes, martens, and otters. The Eskimo dogs are trained to draw sledges, ...
— With the Harmony to Labrador - Notes Of A Visit To The Moravian Mission Stations On The North-East - Coast Of Labrador • Benjamin La Trobe
... doubt that Charles James Fox ..." Mr. Burley began; but here Mrs. Stretton told him that she knew his sister well; had stayed with her not six weeks ago; and thought the house charming, but bleak in winter. ...
— Jacob's Room • Virginia Woolf
... Waverley out by a passage different from that through which he had entered the apartment. At a distance he heard the hall of the Chief still resounding with the clang of bagpipes and the high applause of his guests. Having gained the open air by a postern door, they walked a little way up the wild, bleak, and narrow valley in which the house was situated, following the course of the stream that winded through it. In a spot, about a quarter of a mile from the castle, two brooks, which formed the little river, had their junction. The larger of the two came down the long bare valley, ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... deferential attention while Betty tried to tell him how lovely the snowy meadows and the bleak, ice-bound river looked on a bright June day, and carefully followed her lead as she turned the conversation from river scenery to skating and canoeing; so that they reached home without a second ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... these often occupied the mind of Mr. Grim. Such were his thoughts as he sat in his luxurious parlor, one bleak December evening, surrounded by every external comfort his heart could desire, when a child not over seven or eight years of age was brought into the room by a servant, ...
— The Lights and Shadows of Real Life • T.S. Arthur
... trapper and fur-trader. The fur trade became the accepted basis of colonial life; the voyageur and courier de bois, clad in skins, paddling up ice-rimmed streams in their birch-bark canoes, fraternizing with Indians who were their only companions in that bleak interior, and married often to dusky squaws, became assimilated to the savage life about them and reverted to the lower hunter ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... religion! But if it's thy blessed and holy will to let me do so, then it is my duty to submit! Give me strength, then, to bow to thy will, and to receive with faith and thanksgivin' whatever you choose to bestow upon me! And above all things O Lord, grant me a repentant heart, and that my bleak and lonely death-bad may have the light of glory upon it! Grant me this, O God, and I will die happy even here; for where your blessed presence is there ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton
... lightened the 'Dudley Docker' by placing some cases on an outer rock, where they were retrieved subsequently. Then he beached his boat, and with many hands at work we soon had our belongings ashore and our three craft above high-water mark. The spit was by no means an ideal camping-ground; it was rough, bleak, and inhospitable—just an acre or two of rock and shingle, with the sea foaming around it except where the snow-slope, running up to a glacier, formed the landward boundary. But some of the larger rocks provided a measure of shelter from the wind, and as we clustered round the blubber-stove, ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... She gave him a bleak little smile. "My dear boy, if I had left all the hard things to my manager to do, Storm to-day would be just where ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... their route, struck them as "one of the most appalling objects" which they had seen, being a bleak rock twelve hundred feet high above the level of the lake, with a perpendicular face of its full height. The Indians say, that any one who can scale it, and "turn three times on the brink of its fearful wall, will live for ever." We ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 380, June, 1847 • Various
... of Meldorf—once the capital of an ancient commonwealth—his earliest associations were connected. A kind of rude equality still reigned in the manners of the rustic population, which was not likely to be disturbed by the influx of the world into a bleak and gloomy district remote from the great roads. Here young Niebuhr grew up a studious and solitary boy; instructed by his father in French, the rudiments of Latin, and above all, in geography and history, which the old traveller taught him to illustrate by maps and plans, and by digging regular ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 453 - Volume 18, New Series, September 4, 1852 • Various
... three assembled in the bleak drawing-room of the hotel. Frohman ordered a little supper of ham sandwiches and sarsaparilla, after which he rehearsed the love scene, which simply consisted of a tender little parting in a doorway. It served to bring out the wistful and appealing tenderness ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... pitch their tents on the banks of a river, or, at least, in the neighborhood of a running stream. But in the winter, they return to the South, and shelter their camp, behind some convenient eminence, against the winds, which are chilled in their passage over the bleak and icy regions of Siberia. These manners are admirably adapted to diffuse, among the wandering tribes, the spirit of emigration and conquest. The connection between the people and their territory is of so frail a texture, that it may be broken ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... the sober dignity of dress, acquired from years of acute observation in the service of the nobility, were to be seen as, at the hour of five, in the twilight of this bleak autumn afternoon, Bude moved majestically into the lounge-hall of Harkings and leisurely pounded ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine
... side of the bar, where, amid the shelter of the coarse, tufted grass the delicate, graceful creatures will sit three months hence on their fragile white and purple-splashed eggs. The boobies are but visitors, for their breeding-places are on the bleak, savage islands far to the south, amid the snows and storms of black Antarctic seas. But here they dwell together, in unison with the gulls, and were the wind not westerly you could hear their shrill cries and ...
— By Rock and Pool on an Austral Shore, and Other Stories • Louis Becke
... cheered my recollection as I trod that sour moorland. I tried to remember her song, and hummed it assiduously till I got some kind of version, which I shouted in my tuneless voice. For I was only a young lad, and my life had been bleak and barren. Small wonder that the call of youth set every fibre of ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... than it now is, and that it gradually attained its present size. Where food was abundant and nutritious and the climate mild and healthful, the early horses developed large frames and heavy limbs and muscles; on the other hand, where food was scarce and the climate cold and bleak, the animals remained as dwarfed as the ...
— Agriculture for Beginners - Revised Edition • Charles William Burkett
... his brain a seething whirl of hate in which all thought of caution was gone as he tensed his muscles to hurl himself upon that grim monstrosity from the bleak ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... but men: no gods are we To sit in mid-heaven, cold and bleak, Each separate, on his painful peak, Thin-cloaked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... in a temper with which the weather harmonised. It was gusty, bleak, and wet. Great pools of water lay on the rough roads in the poor quarter of the town through which lay his route. In order to reach the works, he had to cross the river by means of a ferry-boat. When he reached the landing-stage on this particular morning, he could see the ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... operating expenses and public investment. In 2000-01, the World Bank approved a structural adjustment loan of $105 million to help support fiscal reforms. However, reforms could prove difficult given the government's bleak financial situation. The IMF approved a $73 million poverty reduction and growth facility for Niger in 2000 and announced $115 million in debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative. Further ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... about to suffer in the same cause—the cause of impartial and adequate representation—the cause of the Constitution. Pray to the best of Beings for Muir, Palmer, Skirving, Margarott and Gerald, who are now, or will shortly be crossing, like you, the bleak Ocean, to a barbarous land!—Pray that they may be animated with the same spirit, which in the days of their fathers, triumphed at the stake, and shone in the midst of flames. Melancholy indeed, it is that the mildest and most humane of all Religions should have been so perverted as ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith
... first time since yesterday we have an unobstructed view. I dismount and look round. Backward stretches an endless expanse of bleak and stormy-swept billowy mountains; before us looms, in serried phalanx, the western Cordillera, dazzling white, all save one black-throated colossus, who vomits skyward thick clouds of ashes and smoke, and down whose ragged flanks course streams of ...
— Mr. Fortescue • William Westall
... some people whom already we have met, and to others whom thus far we have not met, were transacted in a lofty and rather bleak looking room at Scotland Yard between the hours of nine and ten A. M.; that is, later in the morning of the fateful day whose advent we have heard acclaimed from the ...
— The Yellow Claw • Sax Rohmer
... unknown country, carried any freight but that of books. Book-makers were there in less proportion than on board the solitary vessel that, in 1620, took a more northerly course, and cast anchor at last off the bleak and sullen shore of Massachusetts; but for both alike the stress of those early years left small energy or time for any composition beyond the reports that, at stated intervals, went back to the mother country. The work of the pioneer is for muscles first, brain having small ...
— Anne Bradstreet and Her Time • Helen Campbell
... observer might have seen their striking dissimilarity, both in dress and manners. Truth was clad in garments of the plainest material and finish, while Error was decked in costly robes and jewels. The step of the former was firm and slow, while that of the latter was rapid and nervous. The bleak winds penetrated their forms as they turned a sharp angle in the road, when there was revealed to them, on an eminence, a costly and ...
— Allegories of Life • Mrs. J. S. Adams
... rather to compose it in type at the case, for that was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places. It was all very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I went on I began to find myself ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... once what many had been at pains to mention to me before—that my father was not a temperate man. Nor did our cellar seem wholly bleak. He pressed wine upon me, and soon had finished a bottle himself, only to gesture Brutus to uncork a second. And all the while he regaled me with anecdotes of the gaming table and the vices of a dozen seaports. With hardly ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... divinest part Ruled triumphant in the heart, And, with shrinking, sudden start, The bleak old world ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter. White men, with their dull scent, might never have divined them; the fragrance of the wood fire would have concealed from them these almost electrical hints of moss and bark and hardening ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... fowling- piece, a spade, a pipe, a dunghill, a crowing cock, the shining and the withdrawal of the sun. An occasional pathos of simple humanity, and frequent patches of big Biblical words, relieved the homely tissue. It was a poetry apart; bleak, austere, but genuine, and ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... been a bleak July day, and as night came on a bitter westerly howled through the trees. Cold! was n't it cold! The pigs in the sty, hungry and half-fed (we wanted for ourselves the few pumpkins that had survived the drought) fought savagely with each other for shelter, and squealed all ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... yards of Jan were groups of solid frame houses, with warm kitchens in them, and abundant food. But the tent, standing by itself, came first; and, though he could not know it, the tent was, on the whole, the very best of all the habitations in that bleak little town—for Jan. For this tent was the temporary home of an American named Willis—James Gurney Willis; as knowledgeable a man as Jean himself and, in addition, one known wherever he went into the northland as ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... been wet and stormy, and his shoes and stockings were covered with mud. The college gates, when he reached them, were still closed, an unusual thing at that hour; and he walked up and down under the walls in the bleak grey morning, till the clock struck seven, "much disquieted, his head full of forecasting cares," but resolved, like a brave man, that come what would, he would accuse no one, and declare nothing but what he saw was already known. ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude
... exclamation is as true now as it was when he sang the labours of Italian country-folk some nineteen centuries ago. To a traveller from the north there is a pathos even in the contrast between the country in which these children of a happier climate toil, and those bleak, winter-beaten fields where our own peasants pass their lives. The cold nights and warm days of Tuscan springtime are like a Swiss summer. They make rich pasture and a hardy race of men. Tracts of corn and oats and rye alternate with patches of flax in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... ten minutes was the landscape the same. From olive plantations we rushed into a bleak country of savage hills, where windmills planted upon rocks beckoned with slowly moving arms; so down into flowery valleys with a thread of silver river tangled in the grasses near a long white road. And always the horizon was broken with tumbled mountains, purple, gold, and rose, swimming ...
— The Car of Destiny • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... bitter year, by that couch of suffering in the heart of multitudinous Paris and London; hundreds of sympathizing friends, in both hemispheres, listened and prayed and hoped through a dreary twelvemonth. With the ripe autumn closed the quiet struggle; and "in the bleak December" the mortal remains were followed from the temple where his youth worshipped, to the snow-clad knoll at Greenwood; garlands and tears, the ritual and the requiem, eulogy and elegy, consecrated the final scene. By a singular ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... with the big, beautiful, unspoken thoughts in her head, the girl with the big, brave, undone deeds in her heart, the girl that stories are made of, the girl whom you call 'improbable'—is moping off alone in some dark, cold corner—or sitting forlornly partnerless against the bleak wall of the ballroom—or hiding shyly up in the dressing-room—waiting to be discovered! Little Miss Still-Waters, deeper than ten thousand seas! Little Miss Gunpowder, milder than the dusk before the moon ignites it! ...
— Little Eve Edgarton • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... dry desolation that yet somehow smiled and smiled, was part of the charm and the intimacy of the whole impression—the impression that culminated at last, before the great cloistered square, lonely, bleak and stricken, in the almost aching vision, more frequent in the Italy of to-day than anywhere in the world, of the uncalculated waste of a myriad forms of piety, forces of labour, beautiful fruits of genius. However, one gaped above all things for the impression, and what one ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... Boz," took so little interest in his great Book. It always seemed to me that he did not care for praise of it, or wish much that it should be alluded to. But he at once became interested, when you spoke of some of his artful plots, in Bleak House, or Little Dorrit—then his eye kindled. He may have fancied, as his friend Forster also did, that Pickwick was a rather jejune juvenile thing, inartistically planned, and thrown off, or rather rattled off. His penchant, as was the case ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald |
