"Cheerless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... bodily ailments, but they were nothing compared to my mental trials. Grief, hatred, jealousy, and revenge had well-nigh bereft me of reason. I had lost a home of plenty, been reduced to almost abject poverty, and had become a cheerless woman,—could not smile without feeling I ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Major-General Butler, first of all the generals in the army of the Republic, and anticipating even Republican statesmen, had clearly pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two accomplished women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two good men, one at the fort and the other at Norfolk, were distributing the laborers on farms in the vicinity, and providing them with implements and seeds which the benevolent ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and dangers of this service at best, even in peace times, seamanship is a comfortless and cheerless calling. But in war, to the ordinary perils of the sea are added unusual hardships which reach their maximum in the dangers and perils of the war zone—the attack without warning of the invisible foe whose presence is too frequently known only by a terrific explosion, which casts ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... solitary, baronet, and in some measure cheerless, but infinitely preferable to a marriage that may lead them astray from their duties, or give birth to a family which are to be turned on the world—without any religion but form—without any morals but truisms—or without ...
— Precaution • James Fenimore Cooper
... fate's evident will. So he sends imperial summons to [235-269]his high council, the foremost of his people, and gathers them within his lofty courts. They assemble, and stream up the crowded streets to the royal dwelling. Latinus, eldest in years and first in royalty, sits amid them with cheerless brow, and bids the envoys sent back from the Aetolian city tell the news they bring, and demands a full and ordered reply. Then tongues are hushed; and Venulus, obeying his word, thus begins ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... table had been hospitable, our doors open to many; but to part with our well-garnished dwelling had now become inevitable. We retired, with one servant, to a remote house of meaner dimensions, and were sought no longer by those who had come in our wealth. I looked earnestly around me; the present was cheerless, the future dark and fearful. My parents were dead, my few relatives in distant countries, where they thought perhaps but little of my happiness. Burleigh I had never loved other than as a father and protector; but he had been the benefactor of my fallen family, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 2 August 1848 • Various
... appailing. Nature in these wild regions assumes her most severe and sombre aspect. As one emerges from the precipitous and craggy ascent, upon this Valley of Desolation, as it is emphatically called, the Convent of St. Bernard presents itself to the view. This cheerless abode, the highest spot of inhabited ground in Europe, has been tenanted, for more than a thousand years, by a succession of joyless and self-denying monks, who, in that frigid retreat of granite and ice, endeavor to serve their Maker, by rescuing bewildered travelers from ...
— Napoleon Bonaparte • John S. C. Abbott
... wise Vidura serve thy mandate and behest, Let a father's pride and gladness fill this old and cheerless breast." ...
— Maha-bharata - The Epic of Ancient India Condensed into English Verse • Anonymous
... held in bondage by a Minotaur no bigger than your two fists. These good dames have a taste for travelling, but change of climate disagrees with their tyrant. They dislike house-keeping and, like good Americans, would prefer hotel life, nevertheless they keep up an establishment in a cheerless side street, with a retinue of servants, because, forsooth, their satrap exacts a back yard where he can walk of a morning. These spinsters, although loving sisters, no longer go about together, Caligula’s nerves being ...
— The Ways of Men • Eliot Gregory
... arm presaging throbs amain, My troubled heart is sick with pain, And cheerless omens ill portend Where'er my anxious eyes I bend. Dear brother, hear my words: advance Resolved and armed for every chance, For every sign I mark to-day Foretells a peril in the way. This bird of most ill-omened note, Loud screaming ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... speak. My heart was too full for many words, but when the invitation was given to seek our Savior, many hands went up for special prayer. The meeting soon closed. Then as those terrible but necessary iron doors again unlocked and the prisoners filed past us one by one to their lonely, cheerless quarters, I made up my mind to come whenever I could, and, whenever permitted, to do and say what I could to help he "whosoever wills," also to use my influence in certain quarters for the betterment of the ...
— Fifteen Years With The Outcast • Mrs. Florence (Mother) Roberts
... this distance being across elevated undulating sandy plains, covered with a thick prickly scrub, about two and a half feet high; these plains were however occasionally studded with a few Banksia trees, but anything more dark, cheerless, and barren than their general appearance ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... face in a frame of a downy black beard, set with large dark eyes—he raised his shoulders and confidently stepped forward through the parlour. Strange sounds of a string instrument were calmly floating to meet him; they seemed to burst into quiet, cheerless laughter, complaining of something, tenderly stirring the heart, as though imploring it for attention and having no hopes of getting it. Foma did not like to hear music—it always filled him with sadness. Even when the ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... every outlay, to ask herself whether she could not do without a thing, was a hard trial; but it had become so painful to her to ask the Captain for money that she preferred the novel pain of self-denial to that humiliation. And then there was the cheerless prospect of the future always staring her in the face, that dreary time after Violet's majority, when it would be a question whether she and her husband could afford to go on living at the ...
— Vixen, Volume III. • M. E. Braddon
... along the bank of the Arragon; and we did not reach our destination, at Casada, until near midnight, where, amid torrents of rain, and in the darkness of the night, we could find nothing but ploughed fields on which to repose our weary limbs, nor could we find a particle of fuel to illuminate the cheerless scene. ...
— Adventures in the Rifle Brigade, in the Peninsula, France, and the Netherlands - from 1809 to 1815 • Captain J. Kincaid
... the man That would over-live his span. Length of days brings many a moan When life's prime is past and gone; But of pleasures, never a one. Then all alike from dole to save, Comes the dark and cheerless grave. ...
— Specimens of Greek Tragedy - Aeschylus and Sophocles • Goldwin Smith
... even a little lonely. Once more Carlisle caught her mind at its retrospective misbehavior, and once more turned the key on it. Having laid out her dress on the bed, she stood and looked down into the cheerless light-well a minute, and then decided to wake up her mother. But she stopped on the way and turned back. Why wake up mamma half an hour too soon, just to hear the sound of ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... and Worthing is a lonely piece of road, long and dreary, through bleak and bare open country, where the snow lay knee-deep, sparkling in the moonlight. It was so cheerless that I turned round to speak to my dog, more for the sake of hearing the sound of a voice than anything else. "Good Bose," I said, patting him, "there's a good dog!" Then suddenly I noticed he shivered, and shrank underneath the wraps. Then the horse required my attention, for he gave a start, ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... not in the wilderness Thy fragrant virtues bloom, But in the city's crowded haunts, The alley's cheerless gloom. When hunger hid itself to die, Where guilt in darkness dwelt, Thy pleasant sunshine can by stealth Thy hand ...
— The St. Gregory Hymnal and Catholic Choir Book • Various
... must be taken into account in choosing a rug, and cold colors should not be used in north or cheerless rooms. The theory of color in regard to light has been explained in other chapters, very fully in the chapter on wallpapers, and its principles should be applied to all questions of furnishing, or ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... in the main Homeric, but one of his charms is the use of quaint allusive phrases derived, perhaps, from a pre-Hesiodic peasant poetry: thus the season when Boreas blows is the time when 'the Boneless One gnaws his foot by his fireless hearth in his cheerless house'; to cut one's nails is 'to sever the withered from the quick upon that which has five branches'; similarly the burglar is the 'day-sleeper', and the serpent is the 'hairless one'. Very similar is his reference to seasons through what happens or is done in that season: 'when ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod
... be in Wolverhampton, amidst grimy streets and dirty houses, in a leaden-hued atmosphere laden with damp and the fumes of chimneys, practically alone, with days of monotonous work before him, and solitary evenings to be spent in cheerless inns. What wonder if this seemed some brief vision of paradise—the golden light and glowing color, the soft strains of music, the ...
— Sunrise • William Black
... Herbert heard of his departure, and the letter containing the news arrived on a cheerless afternoon during which his doctor had visited him. After the doctor left, Herbert entered the room where his wife and Sylvia were, and took his place in an easy chair by a window. Outside, the lawn ...
— Ranching for Sylvia • Harold Bindloss
... How bare and cheerless appeared the Indian's life to Tom's sympathetic nature then! for an Indian, when sick, has few comforts. Solitary he sits wrapped in his blanket, or lies on the ground, with no one to nurse or care for him; no nice dishes to tempt his feeble appetite, no hand to bathe his fevered brow, no medicines ...
— The Cabin on the Prairie • C. H. (Charles Henry) Pearson
... December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And, darkly circled, gave at noon A sadder light than waning moon. Slow tracing down the thickening sky Its mute and ominous prophecy, A portent seeming less than threat, It sank from sight before it set. A chill no coat, however stout, ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... great. More than one of the Government officers sent there to explore were either swept away by some torrent or came back half-crippled by hunger and rheumatism. One surveyor who stuck to his work for months in the soaking, cheerless bush, existing on birds, bush-rats, and roots, was thought a hero, and with cause. Even Maoris dreaded parts of this wilderness, and believed it to be the abode of dragons and a lost tribe of their own race. They valued it chiefly as the home of their ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... people who could employ a firm of solicitors which in its turn was served by the man who had received her. Romance and the clerk could never, she thought, meet under one roof. And such a roof! The room in which she sat was so dark, so gloomy, so bare and cheerless, that Juliet began to wonder whether she would not have been wiser not to have come. This was not a place, surely, which fond parents would choose for a long-deferred meeting with their child, after years of separation. She walked to the window, but the only view was of a blank wall, and that ...
— The Ashiel mystery - A Detective Story • Mrs. Charles Bryce
... we did not start again until the evening, husbanding our strength for the worst part of the way, which was yet to come. From this point the water-holes became less frequent, and the landscape particularly cheerless—monotonous stony expanses alternating with hideous thorn-thickets. Yet both men and beasts held out bravely through those three miserable days, and on the 12th of May we reached in good condition, though wetted to the skin by ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... Washington that the Tuskegee village was the place for her to begin a work which should eventually include all the women of the county and of the neighboring counties. The country colored women crowd into the villages of the South on Saturday, seeking to vary the monotony of their hard and cheerless lives. Mrs. Washington determined to get hold of these women and utilize the time spent in town to some good purpose. Accordingly, the first mothers' meeting was organized in the upper story of an old store which then stood on the main street of the village. ...
— Booker T. Washington - Builder of a Civilization • Emmett J. Scott and Lyman Beecher Stowe
... Yudhishthira answered, saying 'Be not cheerless, O king; let joy fill thy heart! The desire cherished by thee hath certainly been accomplished. We are Kshatriyas, O king, and sons of the illustrious Pandu. Know me to be the eldest of the sons of Kunti and these to be Bhima and Arjuna. By ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... sort o' chap can whistle when his work is mostly fun; A hundred want the pleasant jobs to every sturdy one That'll grab the dreary duty an' the mean an' lowly task, Or the drab an' cheerless service that life often has to ask; But somebody has to do it, an' the test of me an' you Is the way we face the labor that we do ...
— Over Here • Edgar A. Guest
... whom he appeared strongly attached), Mr. Dallas and his solicitor seemed to be the only persons whom, even in their very questionable degree, he could boast of as friends. Though too proud to complain of this loneliness, it was evident that he felt it; and that the state of cheerless isolation, "unguided and unfriended," to which, on entering into manhood, he had found himself abandoned, was one of the chief sources of that resentful disdain of mankind, which even their subsequent worship of him came too late to remove. The effect, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. II - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... frame of mind, Desmond turned into the library. As he crossed the hall, he noticed how cheerless the house was. Again there came to him that odor of mustiness—of all smells the most eerie and drear—which he had noticed on his arrival. Somehow, as long as Nur-el-Din had been there, he had not remarked the ...
— Okewood of the Secret Service • Valentine Williams
... going away, but you are cheerless, charmless, returning. What has happened to you, Gelban? But have you seen her, and are Deirdre's hue and ...
— Celtic Fairy Tales • Joseph Jacobs (coll. & ed.)
... Nielsen found a poor, miserable, little fox in a trap, where it had been for days, and was nearly dead. Edd found a dead skunk in another. He had to call the hounds in. We returned to camp. That night was really the only cheerless one the men spent around the fire. They did not know what to do. Manifestly with trappers in a locality there could be no more bear chasing. Disappointment perched upon the countenances of the Haughts and Copple and Nielsen. I let them all have their ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... if he was tired. Darkness crept over the intense moonlight like a veil, and Bill realized that the moon was gone. He kept his course, however, with the aid of his indicator and the air compass and at last a new light commenced to show, the cold, cheerless, dun light of early dawn. As yet there was no ...
— Battling the Clouds - or, For a Comrade's Honor • Captain Frank Cobb
... increasing numbers, in the growing generations; deafening their ears by its irrational clamor to the voice of the Living God which whispers in these pages, through the holy men who spake as they were moved of the Holy Ghost. It has fathered the doubt which to-day sits, cheerless and chill, within the hearts and homes of thousands who once rejoiced in the warmth and light of God, but who now accept the alternative their teachers thrust upon them—"all or none"—and throw away the Blessed Book wherein God of old revealed ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... night. The moon shines and the stars glimmer in the midst of a serene but cheerless sky; the sharp whistlings of the north wind, that fatal, dry, and icy breeze, ever and anon burst forth in violent gusts. With its harsh and cutting breath, it sweeps Montmartre's Heights. On the highest point of the hills, a man is standing. His long shadow ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... I walk the cheerless shore. The cutting blast, the hurl of biting brine May freeze, and still, and bind the waves at war, Ere you will ever know, O! Heart of mine, That I have sought, reflected in the blue Of these sea depths, some shadow of your eyes; Have hoped ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... through the cheerless, mist-laden skies, the engine well throttled back and running as smoothly as any engine could. To make sure that all was in perfect working order, they circled for ten minutes over the town, trying the different controls, then turned ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser
... home, she says, "Even in this giddy place my heart is full to bursting; should I allow myself more time for meditation it would surely break, and pour forth its lava streams on the thirsty dust of human pride. In the dark, cheerless hour of midnight, my burning, throbbing brain still keeps its restless beating, scarce bestowing the poor refreshment of a feverish dream to strengthen the earthly tenement. My health is failing; there will soon ...
— Graham's Magazine, Vol. XXXII No. 4, April 1848 • Various
... staircases, which ascend from a ground-floor of cook shops, cobblers' stalls, stables, and regiments of cavalry, to a middle region of princes, cardinals, and ambassadors, and an upper tier of artists, just beneath the unattainable sky,—left her, worn out with shivering at the cheerless and smoky fireside by day, and feasting with our own substance the ravenous little populace of a Roman bed at night,—left her, sick at heart of Italian trickery, which has uprooted whatever faith in man's integrity had endured till now, and sick at stomach of ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... wandered along, A cheerless and comfortless elf, He sought for relief in a song, Or complainingly ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IV. (of X.) • Various
... am myself stranded on a cheerless island where, against my will, I am kept captive—for how long a time I cannot guess. I was brought here at night, only forty-eight hours ago, and landed from a vessel which almost immediately departed whence it had come, into the darkness. My captors ...
— Us and the Bottleman • Edith Ballinger Price
... paused on the threshold and took in the picture. He could see the low-lying, sunless afternoon sky, all gray and cheerless; the gray, complaining sea creeping up on the greasy shingle; the desolate expanse of road; the tongue of marshland; the strip of black pine woods—all that could be seen from the window. The prison-room looked ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... about all is silent and cheerless, Like a lonesome and desert-like plain. If but one were courageous and fearless And would cry out aloud in his pain! Neither storm-wind nor starshine by night, And the days neither cloudy nor bright: O my people, how sad is thy state, How gray and ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... and growing in the truth; but sometimes, through unwatchfulness, such a withering comes upon me, I lose all sense of good for days together, and this nether world is all I seek pleasure in. Then there is but a cold, cheerless, condemning feeling, when I look towards my Father's house; but when all life seems gone, and I am ready to conclude that I have suffered so many things in vain, how often does the gentle stirring of life bring my soul into contrition, into stillness! and He, who upbraideth not ...
— A Brief Memoir with Portions of the Diary, Letters, and Other Remains, - of Eliza Southall, Late of Birmingham, England • Eliza Southall
... It was a cheerless journey through the forest and down the lake, and the element of the grotesque did nothing to relieve it. Betty, distracted at first, soon realized that upon her lay the responsibility of averting a tragedy, ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... drowsy traveller by rail how space and time are annihilated! He is barely conscious of progress, only when the brakeman with measured tone shouts the name of the station; he looks up from his paper or rouses from his doze, looks out at the cheerless prospect, and then settles himself for another thirty miles. Time passes as unobserved as the meadows or bushy pastures that flit by the jarring window at his ear. But with Greenleaf, the reader will believe, the case was far different. He had never noticed before ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... as I mused, the naked room, The alien fire-light died away; And from the midst of cheerless gloom I ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... freezing as they fell, rattled harshly upon the bark roof over our heads; and the whole aspect of nature, as I caught a momentary glimpse of it when I went out to gather our evening's supply of fire-wood, was cheerless and desolate in the extreme. Our party consisted of three (or I should say four, for the Elam Storm whose name has so often been mentioned was to have shown up two days before)—Uncle Ezra Norton, who was a sheep-herder in a small way during the summer, and an untiring hunter and trapper in ...
— Elam Storm, The Wolfer - The Lost Nugget • Harry Castlemon
... top is painted bright green; the stones on the posts are green also, and there is the prettiest possible garden, with nicely cut borders of box. In fine, if ever there was a cheery place to look at, Sarsfield Cottage is that one; and if ever there was a cheerless gentleman, it is Mr. Jordan, who dwells there. Mrs. Wogan Odevaine commended him to us as the man of all others with whom to discuss Irish questions, if we wanted, for once in a way, to hear a thoroughly disaffected, outraged, wrong-headed, ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... seemed that so withered and shrunken a life as his could hardly be susceptible of a bruise, could hardly endure any subtraction but such as would put an end to it altogether. But in reality it had been an eager life, filled with immediate purpose which fenced him in from the wide, cheerless unknown. It had been a clinging life; and though the object round which its fibres had clung was a dead disrupted thing, it satisfied the need for clinging. But now the fence was broken down—the ...
— Silas Marner - The Weaver of Raveloe • George Eliot
... ere I could embark for my destined port, it became a matter of concernment where I was to eat and sleep meanwhile. It was a very dubious-looking, nay, a very dark and dismal night, bitingly cold and cheerless. I knew no one in the place. With anxious grapnels I had sounded my pocket, and only brought up a few pieces of silver,—So, wherever you go, Ishmael, said I to myself, as I stood in the middle of a dreary street shouldering my bag, and comparing the gloom towards the north ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... his home, and her absence was probably felt by the old gentleman with more keenness than he had anticipated at the outset. His large and beautifully furnished mansion needed the presence of just such a person of vivacious and cheery character as Clara, to prevent it from becoming cheerless in its grandeur. He intimated as much, and appeared unusually restless and low-spirited for him. He sought to make up for the absence of the sunshine and joyousness that "Miss Van" had taken away with her, by applying himself with especial diligence ...
— That Mother-in-Law of Mine • Anonymous
... and green For a coarse merino gown, And see her upon the scene Of her home, when coaxing down Her drunken father's frown, In his squalid cheerless den: She's a ...
— The Bab Ballads • W. S. Gilbert
... around me as they did before, and I got on with the lesson very badly. I am sure Maria Perry has no gift at teaching little children, and I feel quite vexed and disappointed. This has not been a profitable Sunday, and I and now going to bed, cheerless and uneasy. ...
— Stepping Heavenward • Mrs. E. Prentiss
... over the lifeless scene without as he ceased to speak. I could see a crimson beam glowing upon a crucifix that stood on the wayside by the hill-foot yonder; but the cheerless monotony of plough land and of pasture, stretching away leafless, treeless, without bud or flower, herd or herdsman, church or cottage, to the shadowed horizon, looming dark as the twilight deepened, was in sympathy with the gloom which had come upon me as Martin Hall ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... This was his starting-point in life. Never had any boy a smaller capital on which to build his fortune. He went out from his unhappy home, ignorant, poor, unfriended, and unknown. That from such a cheerless beginning he should rise to the rank of a merchant prince must be accounted one of ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... cheerless blaze of the drawing-room chandelier—Mrs. Peniston never lit the lamps unless there was "company"—Lily seemed to watch her own figure retreating down vistas of neutral-tinted dulness to a middle age like Grace Stepney's. When ...
— House of Mirth • Edith Wharton
... lead me, queen sublime, to solemn glooms Congenial with my soul; to cheerless shades, To ruined seats, to twilight cells and bowers, Where thoughtful Melancholy loves to muse, Her favorite midnight haunts. . . Beneath yon ruined abbey's moss-grown piles Oft let me sit, at twilight hour of eve, When through some western window the pale moon Pours ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... impression of ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr. Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old acquaintance ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... their pleasures rather sadly and sternly,—not like the light-hearted Florentines in song and laughter, or with the joyous abandon of the Neapolitans,—so there was no special manifestation on the part of the populace, and the day, cold, gloomy, and cheerless, did ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... was at Gravesend. The Londoners assembled in crowds to see the last of their Princess on her route to the coast by the Strand, Cheap, and London Bridge. Many persons recall to this day the sorrowful scene in the cheerless snowy weather. This was the reverse side of all the splendid wedding festivities-the bride of seventeen quitting family, home, and native country, sitting grave and sad beside her equally pale, and silent father—the couple so tenderly attached, on the eve of ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II • Sarah Tytler
... When the day's nearly done, Looks in on the cheerless floor; And falleth the rain Through the broken pane— Shrill whistles the wind at ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... Criminal Investigation Department, stood before the empty grate of his cheerless office in New Scotland Yard, one hand thrust into the pocket of his blue reefer jacket and the other twirling a malacca cane, which was heavily silver-mounted and which must have excited the envy of every sergeant-major ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... Darkness to me is fair, and light is cheerless. But are not you afraid in yonder walls Where the lamp's ...
— Love's Comedy • Henrik Ibsen
... which I had been so long was slowly passing away, now that the scene by the little grave that raw, cheerless morning had brought home remorselessly the truth that Marjory was indeed gone—lost ...
— The Talking Horse - And Other Tales • F. Anstey
... Upon the dewy window-sill, and perks His restless black eye here and there, in search Of crumbs, or shelter from the icy breath Of wild winds rushing from the Polar sea: For now November, with a brumal robe, Mantles the moist and desolated earth; Dim sullen clouds hang o'er the cheerless sky, And yellow leaves bestrew ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 385. November, 1847. • Various
... ready-to-hand food gave him leisure. His days were all dreams. Weary of crouching over the fire before the opening of his humpy, he began to wander in the flesh as he was wont to wander in mind. He was seen a mile away from the cheerless camp, where his companions, with smoke-dried ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... blossom, the whole would present a harmonious effect. It would be hard to conceive of a more attractive sight than that presented by all those bulbs in full bloom in early April, when every thing else looked barren and cheerless. They were admired by every one who saw them. Bulbs of this character bloom and pass away in season to allow room for other plants to be set out. These may be set between the rows of bulbs, and not disturb ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... it looked to the eastward! Did ever evening close in so fast? And how black and cold the river looked! She never remembered to have seen it quite so cheerless and gloomy before. A thick white fog was rising from the marshy lands, and she could not see the friendly twinkling lights upon the bridge. Despite her exertions, which were great, she felt chill and shivery; and when at ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... Ellen, at my feeling particularly cheerless, seated in worse than solitude on that inhospitable hearth, and remembering that four miles distant lay my delightful home, containing the only people I loved on earth; and there might as well be the Atlantic to part us, instead of those four miles: I could not ...
— Wuthering Heights • Emily Bronte
... out of which my chamber opened. I had a dreamy recollection of the vast apartment. But how pleasantly it was changed! There was the bare half of the room, it is true, looking as it had done on that first afternoon, sunless and cheerless, with the long, unoccupied table, and the necessary chairs for the possible visitors; but round the windows that opened on the garden a part of the room was enclosed by the household clothes'-horses hung with great pieces of ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... the welcome shone. Its gleams and sparkles positively pursued him as he turned his face towards the road and his own dark, cheerless house. Perhaps he had better, on the whole, keep one lamp burning in the lower part after this, to show that the place ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... own, Which gives its cheer to midnight and to me. And now with noiseless step sweet Memory comes, And leads me gently through her twilight realms. What poet's tuneful lyre has ever sung, Or delicatest pencil e'er portrayed The enchanted, shadowy land where Memory dwells? It has its valleys, cheerless, lone, and drear, Dark-shaded by the lonely cypress tree. And yet its sunlit mountain tops are bathed In heaven's own blue. Upon its craggy cliffs, Robed in the dreamy light of distant years, Are clustered joys serene of other days; Upon its gently sloping hillside's bank The weeping-willows ...
— From Canal Boy to President - Or The Boyhood and Manhood of James A. Garfield • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... to see Signor "Lib" hiding from the Captain when the weather was not all it might be, and he in consequence felt anything but well. One mate after another would be despatched with the strictest orders from the Captain to search for the cheerless chessite; but after a time the Captain's patience would be exhausted, his strident voice could be heard calling upon the caricaturist to come forth and show himself, and eventually he might be seen en route to his cabin with the box of chessmen under ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... day was no more than an easy space for the fleet Pegasus to pass over. Bellerophon was delighted with this kind of life, and would have liked nothing better than to live always in the same way, aloft in the clear atmosphere; for it was always sunny weather up there, however cheerless and rainy it might be in the lower region. But he could not forget the horrible Chimera which he had promised King Iobates to slay. So at last, when he had become well accustomed to feats of horsemanship in the air, and could manage ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... company to Virginia; and in the subsequent year, they were followed by sixty of the same description. They were received by the young planters as a blessing which substituted domestic happiness for the cheerless gloom of solitude; and the face of the country was essentially changed.[34] The prospect of becoming parents was accompanied with the anxieties for the welfare of their children; and the education of youth ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 1 (of 5) • John Marshall
... England. Notwithstanding this change in him the Colonel insisted that he was perfectly happy and contented, but the truth was, his heart was aching with the knowledge that Clive had occupations, ideas, associates, in which the elder could take no interest. Sitting in his blank, cheerless bedroom, Newcome could hear the lad and his friends making merry and breaking out in roars of laughter from time to time. The Colonel longed to share in the merriment, but he knew that the party would ...
— Boys and girls from Thackeray • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... It was a drizzling, cheerless afternoon towards the end of summer that a hack drew up at the door of the Nutter House. The Captain and Miss Abigail hastened into the hall on hearing the carriage stop. In a moment more Miss Nelly Glentworth was seated in our sitting-room undergoing ...
— The Story of a Bad Boy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... held in store for him. He was fitted for no calling. Ever since his aunt had adopted him in far-away Scotland, where he was born of obscure parentage in 1833, he had led a life of complete dependence, not altogether cheerless but deadening to initiative and handicapping him terribly for the task of making his way in the world. His health was broken, his pockets were empty, he was without friends. Cast upon his own resources under such conditions, it seemed but too probable that ...
— Historic Ghosts and Ghost Hunters • H. Addington Bruce
... looked cold and cheerless. It was lighted by a single lamp in the middle of the table. They took their seats at opposite sides. The statesman's thin hair shone on his head like streaks of silver. John exercised a strong physical influence upon him, and all through the dinner ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... by a sunny window, and a father's chair by the wide, cheerful chimney-piece, and a place for the children to play, with plenty of room to get about. Apples and nuts always taste so good in such a place! Instead, we have a stuffy little kitchen and a cheerless dining-room, that no one wants to sit in, and every member of the family goes to his or her room, and sociability is at an end. Then we must go to theatres, lectures, and concerts, just to catch a glimpse of the members of ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... village, with guns booming in the distance and the nearer sound of water running through tall reeds and over green stones and between great mossy trees. Indeed, my life would now be, comparatively speaking, a cheerless desert, because I should never have met the most beautiful—Well, all clouds have silver linings; some have golden ones with rainbow edges. No; I am not sorry I stopped at the St. ...
— The Firefly Of France • Marion Polk Angellotti
... often would indulge in a morbid sentimental humor, dreaming over some "rare old poet" or blessed romance, to the exceeding great detriment of my household affairs, making my poor father sigh over a tough, badly cooked stake, and cheerless, dusty house; but these moods, to my credit be it told, were of rare occurrence; and I say now the best school for a dreaming, enthusiastic girl, who sighs for the realization of her fancy visions, is to place her in charge of some active duty—to make her feel it is exacted from ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... chairs, tables and couch, of the little flat had been all that was necessary to make it habitable and pleasant. A brisk fire burned on the wide hearth, of itself a furnishing without which many a sumptuous room may seem cheerless and in-hospitable. The walls were covered with a quaint old paper of white, with gold stripes about which green ivy leaves wound conventionally. This might have given the room a cold aspect, but Sally had hung curtains of Turkey-red print at the windows, and had covered the couch ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... their side seemed cheerless, what of the land on the left bank? A swamp stretching endlessly on either hand, and back from the icy flood as far as eye could see, broken only by sloughs and an occasional ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... caught him. They were in the corridor again—cold, cheerless, full of December murk and shadows—and the secretary was leaning against the clergyman's shoulder breathless and trembling as though he ...
— The Human Chord • Algernon Blackwood
... getting her off. He then turned to where the Admiral's ship lay aground, and found that, to all appearance, she was in even a worse plight, as the rocks to leeward of her were above the water, and she was much more exposed, should bad weather come on. Never, perhaps, was there a scene more cheerless and appalling: a dark wintry sky—a sky loaded with heavy clouds—the wind cold and piercing—the whole line of the coast one mass of barren rocks, without the slightest appearance of vegetation; the inland part of the country presented an equally sombre appearance, and the higher points were capped ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat
... laid a red-hot iron on her palm, it would scarcely have been more scorching than the touch of his gold, and only the vision of a wan and woeful face in that far off cheerless attic room, restrained her impulse to throw it ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... bungalow episode is pretty cheerless for the heroine. She accepts an apparently harmless invitation to spend a week-end with friends in the country. When she arrives at the station there is no one to meet her. After a course of desert islands this ought to arouse her suspicions, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, August 25th, 1920 • Various
... and cheerless is the morn Unaccompanied by thee: Joyless is the day's return Till thy mercy's beams I see: Till thou inward light impart, Glad my eyes and warm ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... cheerless night. Larcher had been to a dinner in Madison Avenue, and he thus found himself not far from Davenport's abode. Going thither upon an impulse, he beheld the artist seated at the table, leaning forward over a confusion of old books, some of them open. ...
— The Mystery of Murray Davenport - A Story of New York at the Present Day • Robert Neilson Stephens
... before dawn sounds to a landsman! The hated early call; the hasty breakfast with coffee-cup in one hand and time-table in the other; the dismal drive through dull, sleeping streets; the cheerless station; the gloomy train-shed with its lines of coaches wrapped in acrid ...
— Virginia: The Old Dominion • Frank W. Hutchins and Cortelle Hutchins
... me down gently, Honor," he said, with a rather cheerless smile. "And you may as well save yourself the trouble. Only—this is where you must not misunderstand me, please,—no shadow of blame attaches to Ladybird if she isn't happy. I had no right to bring her up to this part of the world, knowing it as I did; and I've no right ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... and bonfires fallen to cheerless, charred embers and ashes gone gray; warm sunlight, and eyes grown heavy with the weariness of surfeited pleasure. Bullock carts creaked again, their squealing growing gradually fainter as the fat-jowled senoras lurched home to the monotony of life, while the senoritas drowsed and dreamed, ...
— The Gringos • B. M. Bower
... sink, that her crew, only six in number, had barely time to save themselves. They escaped to the jolly boat, saving nothing but their lives. They took with them neither water nor provisions; and for six days, hopeless of succor, they lay tossing to and fro, upon the bald and cheerless ocean. A dog, which swam to them from the sinking vessel, was sacrificed to their hunger. His raw flesh was their only food, his blood their only drink, during this distressing period. Two of their number perished miserably.* The survivors, on the ...
— The Life of Francis Marion • William Gilmore Simms
... they drove up to the prison gate; and a mist beginning to gather above North Hessary, as at this time of year it often does after a clear morning. My grandfather, looking out from under the tilt of the cart, felt as he'd never felt before what a cheerless place it must seem to a new-comer, and his heart melted a little bit further towards the lad he was ...
— Corporal Sam and Other Stories • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... pass, joy is out of fashion, Honest fun that fooled a dog or knew a friendly gate, Now the craft are vagabonds, sick with modern passion, Riding up and down the shore, on an aching freight; Sullen are the battered looks, cheerless talk or tipsy, Sickly in the smoky air, starving in the day, Pining for a city's noise at Kingston or Po'keepsie, Eager more for Gotham and a great ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... formless, sad, I floated through dark space,—a conscious blank! No breath of air my spirit moved; I sank I knew not where, till motionless I ceased At last to move, and yet I could not rest, Around me spread the Limitless, and Vast. My cheerless, conscious spirit,—fixed and fast In some lone spot in space was moveless, stark! An atom chained by forces stern and dark, With naught around me. Comfortless I lived In my dread loneliness! Oh, how I grieved! And thus, man's fate ...
— Babylonian and Assyrian Literature • Anonymous
... He observed with sickening distinctness that the night had begun to fall, the river's silver ribbon had become a black snake, and that the mountain range beyond loomed chill and dark and cheerless. "I guess I ought to be getting into my things," he said, moving ...
— The Rejuvenation of Aunt Mary • Anne Warner
... factories for the production of sugar and oil, and warehouses for the importation of European fabrics. They found a ready market for their wares, and an aspect of thrift and comfort began to enliven the once neglected and cheerless land. ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... slipped one arm about her waist beneath it; but she was conscious that she rather suffered this than derived any satisfaction from it. She strove to assure herself that she was jaded with the journey, which was, in fact, the case, and that the lowering sky, and the cheerless waste they were crossing, had occasioned the dejection she felt, which was also possible. There was not a tree upon the vast sweep of bleached grass which ran all round her to the horizon. It was inexpressibly lonely, a lifeless desolation, with only the ploughed-up ...
— Hawtrey's Deputy • Harold Bindloss
... some suspicious den. Flashing through the shadow of the police lamp, in "Cow Bay," a forlorn female is seen, a bottle held tightly under her shawl. Sailing as it were into the bottomless pit of the house of the Nine Nations, then suddenly returning with the drug, seeking the cheerless garret of her dissolute partner, and there striving to blunt her feelings ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... Joan's brother's room—a cheerless place of hewn stone. What kind of a man could he have been? What were his reflections as he went about his farm-work and thought of his sister at the head of armies? Was he merely a lout or something worse—the prototype of our Conscientious ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... way, his apathy began to fail and his nervous excitement returned. He began to realize everything, this hideous end to his failure of a life which was so rapidly approaching. He realized that he was walking alone to his deserted home, cold and cheerless, dark and silent. It was already dusk, the days were short and the sky heavily clouded. The raw wind from the northeast smote him hard in the face like a diffused flail of wrath. He thought of his wife and children and sister speeding along to their old home ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... will never become too dry for the health of the vine. It is a sad spectacle to see the hopes of a whole summer frustrated by one cold night; to see the vines which promised an abundant crop but the day before, browned and wilted beyond all hopes of recovery, and the cheerless prospect before you, that it may occur every spring; or to see the finest crop of grapes, when just ripening, scorched and wilted by just one night's frost, fit for nothing but vinegar. Therefore, look well to this, when you choose the site of your vineyard, and rather pay five ...
— The Cultivation of The Native Grape, and Manufacture of American Wines • George Husmann
... himself, and gave up the distant voyages, confining himself to the long-shore fishing, and disposing of his oysters, crayfish and prawns as best he could in the more remote villages. Meanwhile, old Aimee, getting older and more feeble, would sit knitting in the cottage by a cheerless hearth, and as the supply of potatoes, chestnuts and black bread grew scantier and scantier, would furtively watch Antoine, with anxious, awe-struck glances, and then would sometimes cross herself, and wipe ...
— A Loose End and Other Stories • S. Elizabeth Hall
... suggest the full and passionate life which is the theme and the background of the play. Nor is this strange. A Midsummer Night's Dream is plainly beyond the powers of our theatre. Individual scenes were well done, but the whole was a cheerless ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... poor creatures have a respite, and may clothe ourselves in white garments; loose, soft, and in some degree shapely; but in the winter—the sombre winter, the depressing winter, the cheerless winter, when white clothes and bright colors are especially needed to brighten our spirits and lift them up—we all conform to the prevailing insanity, and go about in dreary black, each man doing it because the others ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... their commander. They rose together in rebellion: deprived him of his authority, and took the control of the ship into their own hands. They then placed their captain in an open boat, and throwing in to him a few articles of provision, they turned him adrift upon that wide and cheerless ocean, and he never was heard of more. Appointing one of their number as commander, they turned the ship in a different direction, and regulated all their movements by their own pleasure. After this revolt, things went on pretty ...
— The Child at Home - The Principles of Filial Duty, Familiarly Illustrated • John S.C. Abbott
... simple wants. Robert was right in calling him a miser, but he had not always deserved the name. The time was when he had been happily married to a good wife, and was blessed with two young children. But they were all taken from him in one week by an epidemic, and his life was made solitary and cheerless. This bereavement completely revolutionized his life. Up to this time he had been a good and respected citizen, with an interest in public affairs. Now be became morose and misanthropic, and his heart, ...
— Brave and Bold • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... or engineer who stood there at bay those three invincible days, Bolsheozerki means deep snow, bitter cold, cheerless tents, whiz-bangs, high explosive, shrap, rat-tat-tat interminable, roar and crash, and zipp and pop of explosive bullet, with catch-as-catch-can at eats, arms lugged off with cases of ammunition, constant tension, that all ended up with luck to ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... with broken hearts. But even of that poor, melancholy, cheerless home they were denied the consolation. There was a month's rent overdue for their little home, and when Nello had paid the last sad service to the dead he had not a coin left. He went and begged grace of the owner of the hut, a cobbler who ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... there the light was of the dim and melancholy hue that instinctively gives the impression of the sick-chamber. Was Clotilde still there, feebly counting the hours of pain, while all within her hearing was festivity? The answers which I had received to my daily enquiries were cheerless. "She had not quitted the apartment where she had been first conveyed."—"The duchess insisted on her not being removed."—"Madame was inconsolable, but the doctor had hopes." Those, and other commonplaces ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... Alppain only on a part. The broad crescent that reflected Branchspell's rays alone was white and brilliant; but the part that was illuminated by both suns shone with a greenish radiance that had almost solar power, and yet was cold and cheerless. On gazing at that combined light, he felt the same sense of disintegration that the afterglow of Alppain had always caused in him; but now the feeling was not physical, but merely aesthetic. The moon did not appear romantic to ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... sorrow than laughter; For a cheerless face makes a blithesome heart. 4. The heart of the wise is in the mourning-house; The heart of fools in the house ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... perseverance than did Ellen's eyes, till the lamplighter gradually disappeared from view, and the last lamp she could see was lit; and not till then did it occur to her that there was such a place as indoors. She took her face from the window. The room was dark and cheerless, and Ellen felt stiff and chilly. However, she made her way to the fire, and having found the poker, she applied it gently to the Liverpool coal with such good effect, that a bright ruddy blaze sprang up, and lighted the whole ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... the town is a small gathering of sod-covered huts, where the fishermen and their families live like rabbits in a burrow. That these poor people are not all devoured by snails or crippled with rheumatism is a marvel to any stranger who takes a peep into their filthy and cheerless little cabins. The oozy slime of fish and smoke mingles with the green mould of the rocks; barnacles cover the walls, and puddles make a soft carpeting for the floors. The earth is overhead, and their heads are under the earth, and the light of day has no light ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the vicious to ensnare her, she resolutely avoided. In one of her tours, Providence favored her with a friend who, pity- ing her cheerless lot, kindly provided her with a valuable recipe, from which she might herself manufacture a useful article for her maintenance. This proved a more agreeable, and an easier way ...
— Our Nig • Harriet E. Wilson
... attitude was what his own had been before the iron of fact had entered into his flesh and spirit. Yet somehow he had hoped that his Master's large and keen perception of human things, his judicial mind, would have lifted him above the prejudices of Reason. He sat there cheerless, his college cap between his knees; and was seeking the moment to say good-bye when the Master suddenly sat down beside him. To any one looking in at the window, the two seated side by side on the hard sofa would ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... functionaries of Nant had not existed in the same world with her. And in that tedious and constrained time of formalities he had learned much about her, but first of all, thanks to the uncompromising light of day that filled the cheerless room, that moonlight had not enhanced but rather tempered the charms of person which had the night before so ...
— Alias The Lone Wolf • Louis Joseph Vance
... cover their eyes to regain their sight. A shrill wind pierced the slight covering of the litter, and blowing it aside, discovered the mist; or the gleaming of some wandering water, as it glided away over the cheerless waste. ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... sent back to life to find Him, and sent back to life to do honor to His death. Not by ointments and spices, however precious, nor at the rock-hewn tomb, could they best remember their Lord; but out in the world, which that morning had seemed so cold and cheerless, and in their lives, which then had ...
— Friendship • Hugh Black
... over the cosy dressing room which Anne occupied. As is the case in most of the recently built theatres, the star's dressing room had been comfortably furnished and was in direct comparison to the cheerless, barn-like rooms that make life on the road ...
— Grace Harlowe's Senior Year at High School - or The Parting of the Ways • Jessie Graham Flower
... her petitions. This time she persuaded Frances D. Gage of Ohio, a temperance worker and popular author of children's stories, to join her. An easy extemporaneous speaker, Mrs. Gage was an attraction to offer audiences, who drove eight or more miles to hear her; and in the cheerless hotels at night and on the long cold sleigh rides from town to town, ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... In "Daniel Deronda" the cheerless philosophy of George Eliot is fully brought out. Mordecai, in his obscure and humble life, is a good representative of a patient sufferer, but "in his views and aspirations is a sort of Jewish Mazzini." The hero of the story is Mordecai's disciple, who has discovered his Hebrew ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... he got some coco-nuts, which were first-rate. With coco-nuts and an occasional ray, he ekes out an existence, hungry, cheerless, without light, without tobacco. A copy of "Barnaby Rudge" and a few old papers represent his reading matter. He is glad ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... to take better care of his health. On the 26th of the same month Benvenuto della Volpaia wrote, repeating what the Pope had written in his brief, and adding that his Holiness desired him to select some workshop more convenient for his health than the cold and cheerless sacristy. ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... one of the two or three men who were watching the athletes, and whispered his message in the other's ear. Then he went back with Father Anthony. "You have seen him," he repeated, when they sat once more in the cheerless room. "Now ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... more than sixteen, sitting on a stool by the open window, looking out listlessly on the stretch of dreary fenland, shrouded in the cold and heavy mist. It was a day on which the scenery of the fen country looked desolate, cheerless, and chill. These green meadows and flat stretches have need of the sunshine to warm them always. Sitting there in the soft grey light, Gladys Graham looked more of a woman than a child, though her gown did not reach her ankles, and her hair hung in a thick golden plait down her back. ...
— The Guinea Stamp - A Tale of Modern Glasgow • Annie S. Swan
... gentle, fleeting, wav'ring sprite! Friend and associate of this clay, To what unknown region borne, Wilt thou now wing thy distant flight? No more with wonted humour gay, But pallid, cheerless, and forlorn. ...
— Fugitive Pieces • George Gordon Noel Byron
... sickness to my heart. For me there was no more freedom, no more of hilarity, of thoughtlessness, or of youth. Was this the life upon which I had entered with such warm and sanguine expectation? Were my days to be wasted in this cheerless gloom; a galley-slave in the hands of the system of nature, whom death only, the death of myself or ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... to the cold, perished by hundreds. As the Spaniards huddled round their wretched bivouacs, with such scanty fuel as they could glean, and almost without food, they waited in gloomy silence the approach of morning. Yet the morning light, which gleamed coldly on the cheerless waste, brought no joy to them. It only revealed more clearly the extent of their wretchedness. Still struggling on through the winding Puertos Nevados, or Snowy Passes, their track was dismally marked by ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... own command and Willich's division were still three miles from Strawberry Plains, though Sheridan's division and part of the wagon train had reached that place and crossed the Holston. We halted the men here and went into bivouac for the night. It had been a wretchedly cheerless and uncomfortable march, but the increasing cold and flying snow made the camp scarcely less inclement. The officers were, as was frequently the case, worse off than the men, for they could not carry their rations in haversacks, and the separation ...
— Military Reminiscences of the Civil War V2 • Jacob Dolson Cox
... put out both her hands to him, with an eagerness that entirely reassured him even before she added: "I cannot tell you how glad, how restful, how content I am since your coming to-night. I was so lonely and sorrowful, the future looked so dark and cheerless because I feared I had lost you; ...
— Mona • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... She and Alfieri were both growing elderly, and the hearth by which they were seated, alone, childless, with nothing but the ghost of their former passion, the ghost of their former ideal, to keep them company, was on the whole very bleak and cheerless. Alfieri, working off his over-excitement in a system of tremendous self-education, sitting for the greater part of the day poring over Latin and Greek and Hebrew grammars, and exercises and annotated editions, till he was ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... and cheerless—on Tetley Moor. Another engine had come up from behind to take what was left of the train back to the Junction. Seven coaches, including the lordly sleeping saloon, stood intact; four, with the engine and tender, lay where they ...
— Scally - The Story of a Perfect Gentleman • Ian Hay
... motionless as death. The strange confused and animated murmurs, which seemed born of, and to exist by the sun, that respiration of nature which is unceasingly heard amid all other sounds, could not be heard now, and never had the silence been so profound. The king had noticed the cheerless aspect of the heavens as he approached the window immediately after rising. But as all the necessary directions had been given respecting the promenade, and every preparation had been made accordingly, and as, which was far more imperious than everything else, Louis relied upon this ...
— The Vicomte de Bragelonne - Or Ten Years Later being the completion of "The Three - Musketeers" And "Twenty Years After" • Alexandre Dumas
... argument deserves always to be treated with respect. It is the oldest and clearest of all proofs, and best adapted to convince the reason of the mass of mankind. It animates us in our study of nature. And it were not only a cheerless, but an altogether vain task to attempt to detract from the persuasive authority of this proof. There is nought to urge against its rationality and ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various |
