"Desolate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the rich curtains showed it to be the room of a woman; the carelessly pushed open blinds proved that an anxious watcher had passed long hours of feverish expectation at the window. A desolate silence reigned around the house; this silence was fearful, and at an hour of the day when all is life and animation, in harmony with the singing birds and ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin
... of Nature, as distinct from the law of nations, forbade the barring of a navigable river to the commerce of aliens; and in this particular case the exclusive privileges retained by the Dutch had almost strangled the trade of Antwerp. Visitors describe the desolate aspect of the quays and streets in a city which was clearly designed to be one of the great marts of the world. Of this gospel of Nature, as set forth by Rousseau, the French were the interpreters; but they would have ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... father's cruel murder and my mother dying alone were one kind of grief. My fight with those deadly poison things to rescue little Bug was another kind. My days of hardship and poverty on the claim, with only Bug and me in that desolate loneliness, was still another. But none of these seem a sorrow beside what I must face henceforth. And yet I have one joy mine now. You did care down in the glen. May I keep that one ...
— A Master's Degree • Margaret Hill McCarter
... wilt not feel it an intrusion my expressing my sympathy with thee in the death of the Duke of Gloucester. To lose a dear and only brother is no small trial, and for a while makes the world appear very desolate. But I trust that having thy pleasant pictures marred in this life may be one means of opening brighter prospects in the life to come, and of having thy treasure increased in the heavenly inheritance. The Duchess of Gloucester kindly commissioned a lady to write to me, ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... De Voe. "But I should think with your liking for children, that you would have preferred that piece of Brown's, rather than this sad, desolate sand-dune." ...
— The Honorable Peter Stirling and What People Thought of Him • Paul Leicester Ford
... morning the squadron was off Gunnarshoug Point, and not more than four miles from the land. The shore was fringed with innumerable islands, which made the coast very picturesque, though it was exceedingly barren and desolate. Most of the islands were only bare rocks, the long swells rolling completely over some of the smaller ones. The students on deck watched the early sunrise, and studied the contour of the coast with deep interest, till ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... not the true spirit of prophecy in these words? Solomon has passed away, and all his magnificence; the pleasant land is to this day desolate under the power of the Turk; but the LORD has loved Israel for ever, and soon a King shall reign in Mount Zion "before His ancients gloriously." But meanwhile this KING, all unseen to human sense, is reigning, and to those who come to Him in no ...
— A Ribband of Blue - And Other Bible Studies • J. Hudson Taylor
... well," said Albert. The street in which they were standing was desolate, and the young man was able to assume a look of decided hostility without encountering any other eyes than those of his rival. "If you have anything to say to me, sir, I am quite prepared to listen to you—to listen to you, and to answer you. I have heard your name mentioned by Miss Snow." ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... at length. Captain Headland was really gone. Julia felt bewildered and desolate; it seemed as if she had received some heavy blow from which it was impossible to recover. Sir Ralph spoke to her in a more kind way than usual, and tried to joke with her, while he amused his guests with the numerous anecdotes which he knew well ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston
... I had full leisure to look around and note the desolate condition of Coote-down. The lawn—thickly overspread with rank grass—could scarcely be distinguished from the fishpond, which was completely covered with water-weeds. The shrubbery was choked and tangled, whilst a very wide rent in the wall laid open to view an enclosure ...
— Tales for Young and Old • Various
... Port Stanley for thirteen days before the necessary observations for determining the rates of the chronometers could be obtained. During this period a thaw occurred, followed by hard frost and another fall of snow, making the country as bleak and desolate as before. By all accounts the winter has been unusually severe. The ground had been covered with snow for four weeks previous to our arrival, and many cattle the horses had perished; I also observed at the head of the harbour some beds of mussels, most of which were dead, having doubtless ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray
... for I can repose myself very confidently upon your prudence, and hope we shall never have reason to love each other less. I shall take it very kindly if you make it a rule to write to me once at least every week, for I am now very desolate, and am loth ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... And then in a desolate place came the shock of an earthquake—a roaring and thundering—a mighty wind of cold air pouring through the city, the smash of glass, the slip and thud of falling masonry—a series of gigantic concussions. A mass of glass and ironwork ...
— The Sleeper Awakes - A Revised Edition of When the Sleeper Wakes • H.G. Wells
... alone in suffering," the countess told me, in the voice she kept for her little ones, how unwelcome she was as a girl when sons were wanted. She showed me how her troubles as a daughter bound to her mother's side differed from those of a boy cast out upon the world of school and college life. My desolate neglect seemed to me a paradise compared to that contact with a millstone under which her soul was ground until the day when her good aunt, her true mother, had saved her from this misery, the ever-recurring pain of which she now related to me; misery caused sometimes by incessant ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... peasants into the cities their lands and farms have been laid waste, their houses burned, their cattle stolen. They will be turned out of the cities penniless and homeless, and exchange the certainty of dying of hunger in the crowded city for the equal certainty of dying of hunger in the desolate wasted country. ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 54, November 18, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... different from any of the preceding. It contains, as its colour shows, a large quantity of combustible material (Chap. V.), which has a great power of holding water. These fens are therefore very wet; until they were drained they were desolate wastes: you may {114} read in Kingsley's Hereward the Wake what they used to be like in old days, and even as late as 1662 Dugdale writes that here "no element is good. The air cloudy, gross and full of rotten harrs[1]; water putrid ...
— Lessons on Soil • E. J. Russell
... you will understand that the better as this story unfolds. For eight long years before the crisis that culminated in her tragic death I never saw her; yet, quite apart from the shock and distresses of that time, it has left me extraordinarily lonely and desolate. ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... found. It had a garden enclosed by a hedge round it. The road to Bidston was a rough, rutted way, and the land was for the most part marshy between Woodside and Bidston, and the country looked very desolate, wild, and rugged. There were some pretty walks over the fields. There was one from Holt Hill to Oxton which I was very fond of. When the weather was fine I have had many and many a pleasant ramble over land where now houses show themselves in hundreds, ...
— Recollections of Old Liverpool • A Nonagenarian
... of winter. The inconveniences they suffered on this occasion are such as can scarcely be conceived to have happened in a civilized country. The perusal of the manuscript journal I have elsewhere noticed conveyed to my mind the idea of a country dreary and desolate, and of a people indigent and distressed; without humanity, and without hospitality. They travelled in little bamboo chairs, carried by four men, who were generally so weak and tottering that they could not go through the day's journey, but were obliged, frequently, in the middle of ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... back. The four Indians bearing the stretcher followed after Suma-theek and in a long single line the remaining Apaches followed, joining Suma-theek in the death chant which is the very soul cry of the desolate: ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... cold and desolate pass, crawling painfully across the wind-swept shoulders of the hills; down many a black mountain-gorge, where the river roared and raced before him like a savage guide; across many a smiling vale, with terraces of yellow ...
— The Story of the Other Wise Man • Henry Van Dyke
... of good to have set my manhood aside, to get into a corner and cry like a schoolboy. Every bit of furniture, now looking old and paltry, had some story and recollections about it, and the deserted gallery, which I have seen so happily filled, seemed waste and desolate like Moore's ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... bud of the wilderness! emblem of all That remains in this desolate heart! The fabric of bliss to its centre may fall, But patience shall never depart! Though the wilds of enchantment, all vernal and bright, In the days of delusion by fancy combined With the vanishing phantoms of love and delight, Abandon my soul, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 14, No. 407, December 24, 1829. • Various
... often afflicted the world? The Prince of Peace has been made to assume the port of a ferocious conqueror, and forgetting the message of good will to men, has issued forth like a second Scourge of the Earth[26], to plague and desolate the human species." ...
— A Practical View of the Prevailing Religious System of Professed Christians, in the Middle and Higher Classes in this Country, Contrasted with Real Christianity. • William Wilberforce
... mistress, I am abundantly yoked to misfortune, O my mistress, thou hast encompassed me, thou hast brought me into pain, The mighty foe has trodden me down as a reed, I have no judgment, I have no wisdom, Like a 'dry field' I am desolate night and day, I thy servant beseech thee, May thy heart be at rest, thy liver ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... was not there. Miss Rose, too, was gone, she found upon further search, and though she had not much difficulty in conjecturing why she had thus, for the first time, been left behind, she could not help feeling rather lonely and desolate. ...
— Elsie's Girlhood • Martha Finley
... a shudder of their desolate camping-ground. Time must pass before pleasant associations could be connected with it. The intense darkness, the rush and roar of the coming storm, the agony, the death that might have occurred there, were now uppermost in her mind. She ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... driven away these many months past. And the lighthouse keeper out there on the point; the old fru on the mountain farm, and the mountain peasant and his house-folk go their accustomed ways, and do not run about on the desolate heather-fields. ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... Vidame's desolate bachelorhood, the kindly custom long ago was established that he and all his household every year should eat their Great Supper with the farm family at the Mazet; an arrangement that did not work well until Mise Fougueiroun and Elizo (after some years of spirited squabbling) came to ...
— The Christmas Kalends of Provence - And Some Other Provencal Festivals • Thomas A. Janvier
... funeral; where, owing to the suddenness with which everything had happened, he was indeed the "chief mourner"—in touching emotion that bore witness to the depth and susceptibility of the man's noble nature. The other testimony, which kindled great comfort in the desolate household, came from the scene of McNair's latest exploit, far away, at and near Quetta, when his native companions and friends heard of his death. The grief felt was so profound, that it seemed irreparable to the men who mourned ...
— Memoir of William Watts McNair • J. E. Howard
... he, and had he lived longer would have been one of the best knights known, and of the great love she had in him made she his body be embalmed when the Knight of the Dragon had slain him, he that is so cruel and maketh desolate all the lands and all the islands. The Damsel of the Circlet of Gold hath he defied in such sort that already hath he slain great part of her knights, and she is held fast in her castle, so that she durst not issue forth, insomuch that all the knights that are there say, and the ...
— High History of the Holy Graal • Unknown
... proposing to turn the captain and some of the officers adrift, land the passengers on a desolate coast, and then to run off with the ship," I replied in a loud tone, so that the men ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the moment climbing a dreary, desolate ridge, where the road was a mere stony hollow, in winter a path for the rain rather than the feet of men. On each side of it lay a wild moor, covered with heather and low berry-bearing shrubs. Under a big bush Maggie saw something glimmer, and, flying to it, found a child. It might be a year ...
— Salted With Fire • George MacDonald
... accomplished by others, but to have gained gradually his own quiet way, or at least with his guide only a step in advance of him, and the lantern low on the difficult path. Better even, it has lately seemed, to be guideless and lightless; fortunate those who, by desolate effort, trying hither and thither, have groped their way to some independent power. So, from Cornish rock, from St. Giles's Lane, from Thames mudshore, you get your Prout, your Hunt, your Turner; not, indeed, ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... sunshine, but their hearts were set on something higher. That divine unrest, that old stinging trouble of humanity that makes all high achievements and all miserable failure, the same that spread wings with Icarus, the same that sent Columbus into the desolate Atlantic, inspired and supported these barbarians on their perilous march. There is one legend which profoundly represents their spirit, of how a flying party of these wanderers encountered a very old man shod ...
— The Merry Men - and Other Tales and Fables • Robert Louis Stevenson
... everything, everything, everything! I told her I should be thankful to come second. But why, when everything's turned out just as one always hoped it would turn out, why then can one do nothing but cry, nothing but feel a desolate old woman whose life's been a failure, and now is nearly over, and age is so cruel? But Katharine said to me, 'I am happy. I'm very happy.' And then I thought, though it all seemed so desperately dismal at the time, Katharine had said she was happy, and I should have a son, and it ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... well enough. But I deserve it, my poor girl. They would find me guilty and sentence me to a convict prison. I saw Dartmoor prison on my wedding journey with Felicita, Heaven help me! She liked the wild, solitary moor, with its great tors and its desolate stillness, and one day we went near to the prison. Those grim walls seemed to take possession of me; I felt oppressed and crushed by them. I could not forget them for days after, even with ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... lifeless at her side, the mother by her dead child's cradle, Eve at the gate of paradise, the miser who finds his buried treasure replaced by a stone, the poet whose greatest work has perished in the flames, have not a more desolate air. The blood left her countenance, and it became as of marble; her arms fell by her side, as if their muscles had become flaccid; and she leant against a pillar, for her limbs refused to support her. As for me, with a livid face bathed as if ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... outstretched Upon their faces: on their heads they cast Dust, and their wailing went up to the sky. As when men drive away the tender lambs Out of the fleecy flock, to feast thereon, And round the desolate pens the mothers leap Ceaselessly bleating, so o'er Aias rang That day a very great and bitter cry. Wild echoes pealed from Ida forest-palled, And from the plain, the ships, ...
— The Fall of Troy • Smyrnaeus Quintus
... Allah fall upon you!" the woman said. "Sidi is our only child. Had he been taken from us our lives would have been desolate indeed." ...
— At Aboukir and Acre - A Story of Napoleon's Invasion of Egypt • George Alfred Henty
... came out to superintend the closing of her house for the winter. He called at Southlook on the day of her arrival. He was struck at once by the curious change in her appearance and manner. There was something bleak and desolate in the vividly brilliant face: the tired, wistful, harassed look of one who has begun to ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... believe the doctor. His hunting is done for this year, and he will be very desolate. I shall go down again to him in a few days, and try to ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... affairs of Sicily—and the long list of robberies is commenced by which that province was made desolate. It seems that nothing gave so grand a scope to the greed of a public functionary who was at the same time governor and judge as disputed wills. It was not necessary that any of the persons concerned ...
— Life of Cicero - Volume One • Anthony Trollope
... The doctor, for instance, had shaken hands with him at parting; had shaken hands openly, in the presence of Duncan Farll: a flattering tribute to his personality. But the chief of Priam Farll's satisfactions in that desolate hour was that he had suppressed himself, that for the world he existed no more. I shall admit frankly that this satisfaction nearly outweighed his grief. He sighed—and it was a sigh of tremendous relief. For now, by a miracle, he would be free from the menace of Lady Sophia ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... around them. Her mouth was set as if she did not wish it to reveal what she had suffered and was suffering. She did not look in the least like the rose-colored butterfly child who had flown about from one of her treasures to the other in the decorated schoolroom. She looked instead a strange, desolate, ...
— A Little Princess • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... of my poor father. I persuaded myself that he had certainly remained with Mr Hilton, and that had we arrived in safety we should have had the happiness of seeing him. Now should he return to the settlement, what would be his feelings to find it desolate, and to suppose, as he must, that we had shared the fate of ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... not figure forth a happy fate, Even for this life from heaven so newly come; 370 The earth must needs be doubly desolate To him scarce parted from a fairer home: Such boding heavier on her bosom sate One night, as, standing in the twilight gloam, She strained her eyes beyond that dizzy verge At whose foot ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... directions to avoid boulders and stumps. Rising to a plateau where it wound back and forth through burnt lands it gave an occasional glimpse of steep hillside, of the rocks piled in the channel of the frozen rapid, the higher and precipitous opposing slope above the fall, and at the last resumed a desolate way amid fallen trees ...
— Maria Chapdelaine - A Tale of the Lake St. John Country • Louis Hemon
... the finery torn, the halls dismantled, and each pavement slippery with brothers' blood. And then, when the wine is gone out of them, the survivors come to their senses, and stare shamefully and sadly round. What an ugly, desolate, tottering ruin the fairy palace has become! Have they spoilt it themselves? or have the Trolls bewitched it? And all the fairy treasure—what has become of it? no man knows. Have they thrown it away in their quarrel? have the cunningest ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... of the drear, dread monotony of those miles of sand, the desolate barrenness of which extended about in every direction, and, at last, weighed heavily upon their spirits, found the ride anything but tedious. They had so much to be thankful for, hopeful over: so much to say to each other. She described ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... arrived, however, without hindrance, at the end of an unfinished provincial street, and at the last of its houses, a five-story building, which the street seemed to have sent out to reconnoitre and ascertain if it could safely continue in that direction, isolated as it was between desolate tracts of land awaiting prospective buildings or filled with the materials of demolished structures, with blocks of stone, old blinds with no rooms to shelter, boards with hanging hinges, a vast boneyard ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... had loved, but the melancholy of such forlorn beings as by their nature were shut out from the love that dwells about the firelit hearth and the old roofs of homesteads. It was the sadness of the wind that wails in desolate places, knowing that it is lonely, but not knowing what it desires; or the soft sighing of trees that murmur all together in a forest, dreaming each its own dream, but with no thought of comradeship ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... stood up now, a slender, swaying figure: white, desolate, with uplifted arms outstretched, she looked ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... ghost of a smile in answer, as we went in. He led me through several rooms into what had been a large dining hall—a chill, bare, desolate place. Cots were ranged up and down the room, cots across it, cots filled up the centre, and all, all filled with sick and wounded men. I thought if I was once in the room with my brother, some instinct would ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... denounced "a change in the whole nature and future conduct of the war," they have declared, "that the policy as well as the benevolence of Great Britain has thus far checked the extremes of war," when they tended "to distress the people and desolate the country;" that the whole contest is changed; that the laws of self-preservation must now direct the conduct of Great Britain; that these laws will direct her to render the United States of as little avail as possible ...
— The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, Vol. I • Various
... King met me at the depot and conveyed me to my home. It seemed sad and mournful. Dr. Nott's benevolent face, Lord Napier's complacent one, Jefferson's benignant one, and Lady Napier's loving one, seemed all like pictures of the dead. Even 'Napoleon at Fontainebleau' seemed more frightfully desolate than ever. At the Capitol the scene was entirely changed from my entrance into the chamber last winter. Cameron greeted me kindly; Wilkinson of Minnesota, and Sumner cordially and manfully. Other Republican senators came to me, but in a manner that showed ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... he was led to talk of the most hideous details with regard to my poor Berenice. The child had not, as had been insinuated, aided her own degradation, but had nobly sustained the dignity of her sex and her family. Such advantages as the monster pretended to have gained over her—sick, desolate, and latterly delirious—were, by his own confession, not obtained without violence. This was too much. Forty thousand lives, had he possessed them, could not have gratified my thirst for revenge. ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... exclaimed. "And over there—the one with the larger light is The Polka Saloon!" For even as he spoke the powerful kerosene lamp of The Polka Saloon, flanked by a composition metal reflector, flashed out its light into the gloom enveloping the desolate, ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... corner they were obliged to confess. For three hours that afternoon they had stood in a freezing wind on a desolate field, while King Albert of Belgium decorated for bravery various officers and—themselves. The jealously fastened coats were thrown open. Gleaming on the breast of each young woman was the star of ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... 'Ye desolate whirlwinds that rave, I charge you be good to my dear! She is all—she is all that I have, And the time of ...
— Rewards and Fairies • Rudyard Kipling
... an hour after that a certain animation had still reigned round the wharf, men crossing and going, one or two of the barges moving in or out alongside the quay. But for some time now darkness and silence had been the masters in this desolate spot, and that time had seemed to Sir Andrew an eternity. He had hobbled and tethered his horse, and stretched himself out at full length under the cart. Now and again he had crawled out from under this uncomfortable shelter and walked up and down in ankle-deep ...
— El Dorado • Baroness Orczy
... the next floor in a corridor similar to the one I had just left. Like it, it was desolate and dimly lit. Like it, it showed room after room silent and empty. Agitated as I was, the contrast with the bright and busy vestibule and the throng of uniformed servants below was so marked that it struck me with convincing force. Even the hotels, it seemed, were part and parcel ...
— The Man with the Clubfoot • Valentine Williams
... social and professional disgrace, but financial ruin which confronted the broken officer as he bade good-bye to his regiment at its desolate quarters in California, after fifteen years of service to the army. He was absolutely without money and, at the age of thirty-two, it was by no means easy for him to begin life all over again and earn his own living at a new calling. His fellow officers provided him with enough ...
— On the Trail of Grant and Lee • Frederick Trevor Hill
... hound varieties, have been brought in by Hudson Bay officers and others; but while they make very swift trains, they can only be used for short trips, as they are too tender to stand the bitter cold and exposure, or the long and difficult journeys, often of many days' duration, through the wild and desolate regions. ...
— Oowikapun - How the Gospel Reached the Nelson River Indians • Egerton Ryerson Young
... bath of blood. His eyes blazed terribly in his head, and his face was fearful to look upon. Like a reed in a river so he quaked and trembled, and there went out from him a moaning like the moaning of winds through deep woods or desolate glens, or over the waste places of the earth when darkness is abroad. For the war-fury which the Northmen named after the Barserkers enwrapped and inflamed him, body and spirit, owing to those strenuous ...
— The Coming of Cuculain • Standish O'Grady
... intense stillness. The street was deserted, the shop doors closed. There was a ghostlike, chilling effect that left him uneasy. He called upon himself to remember that he was not actually in a remote and desolate frontier town from which the inhabitants had fled; that back of him but a few steps was abounding life, that outside was the prosaic world passing and repassing a gate hard to enter. He whistled the fragment of a tune ...
— Merton of the Movies • Harry Leon Wilson
... Molly, significantly. And away rolled the coaches towards Bristol. Phoebe turned back into the house with a rather desolate feeling. For three days everybody would be gone. Those who were left behind were all strangers to her except Mr Edmundson, and she wanted to get as far from him as she could. True, there was Louise; but Louise could hardly ...
— The Maidens' Lodge - None of Self and All of Thee, (In the Reign of Queen Anne) • Emily Sarah Holt
... printing-press, waiting for the dawn and his bundle of newspapers. No change had come to soften the truth of the picture that a by-gone wretchedness threw upon his memory. The attractive fades, but how eternal is the desolate! Yonder he could see the damp wall where he used to hunt for snails, and farther down the narrow street was the house in which had lived the old Italian woman. "You think I'm a stranger," he mused, as he passed a ...
— The Colossus - A Novel • Opie Read
... and damp soil its growth is rapid; but the most valuable trees grow slowly among rocks on sterile soil, and seem to gather compactness and beauty from the very struggle which they make for an existence. In the Bahamas, in the most desolate regions, once flourished that curiously veined and much esteemed variety once known in Europe as "Madeira wood," but which has long since been exterminated. Jamaica, also, which used to be a fruitful source of mahogany, and whence ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... long since this island of Chusan began to be inhabited. Yet in the days of Father Martini, about fifty years ago, it was very populous for three or four years; at which time, in the fury of the Tartar conquest, it was laid entirely desolate, not even sparing the mulberry trees, which were then numerous, as they made a great deal of raw silk here. It continued in this desolate condition till about eighteen years ago, when the walls of the present town were built by the governor of Ting-hai, as a strong-hold for a garrison, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume IX. • Robert Kerr
... when Marian was among strangers and where no one knew of John Gilman's defection, that hers might be a very heavy heart, that hers might be a very sad face. Then she went to planning. She had been desolate, heart hungry, and isolated herself. First she had endured, then she had fought; the dawn of a new life was breaking over her hill. She had found work she was eager to do. She could put the best of her brain, the skill of her fingers, the creative impulse of ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... sun had once beat down on her so fiercely. At length an empty car appeared, its yellow flank emblazoned with the name of Mrs. Hochmuller's suburb, and Ann Eliza was presently jolting past the narrow brick houses islanded between vacant lots like giant piles in a desolate lagoon. When the car reached the end of its journey she got out and stood for some time trying to remember which turn Mr. Ramy had taken. She had just made up her mind to ask the car-driver when he shook the reins on the backs ...
— Bunner Sisters • Edith Wharton
... had no "knack with kids" either. She saw an ugly midget with a red, distorted little face, rolled up in a piece of dingy old flannel. She had never seen an uglier baby. Yet a feeling of pity for the desolate, orphaned mite which had "come out of the everywhere" into such a dubious "here", took sudden ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... favourable to writing, the climate has now changed. It is very near perfection in point of temperature. If we could only keep it so all the way! We expect to reach Malta this evening, and remain about four hours. Where are you now?... Have you returned to your desolate home? I think I see B. looking up to you with his thoughtful eyes, and dear little L. putting pointed questions, and, in her arch way, saying such kind and tender words!... You must continue to write, as you did last time, all you are doing and thinking, that I may reproduce, as faithfully ...
— Letters and Journals of James, Eighth Earl of Elgin • James, Eighth Earl of Elgin
... of granite rock and heather slopes upward across the prospect from south to north, a huge stone stands on it in a naturally impossible place, as if it had been tossed up there by a giant. Over the brow, in the desolate valley beyond, is a round tower. A lonely white high road trending away westward past the tower loses itself at the foot of the far mountains. It is evening; and there are great breadths of silken green in the Irish ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... Wheat-ear flits from stone to stone. The love of lucre has laid waste the land. Because wine paid handsomely, they pulled up the forest to plant the vine. Then came the Phylloxera, the vine-stocks perished and the once green table-land is now no more than a desolate stretch where a few tufts of hardy grasses sprout among the pebbles. This waste-land is the Lycosa's paradise: in an hour's time, if need were, I should discover a hundred ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... cottage, desolate, The children cowering 'round me, mute from fright, With tearless eyes and brooding heart, I wait, Watching through all the long, the weary night. God of the homeless, look from Heaven and see! Out of the deeps, a woman ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various
... very well satisfied with his present place of encampment. Although rain is unknown in this western portion of Peru, which is, therefore, in general desolate and barren, there are parts of the country that are irrigated by streams which flow from the snow-capped peaks of the Andes, and one of these fertile spots the captain seemed to have happened upon. On the ...
— The Adventures of Captain Horn • Frank Richard Stockton
... extraordinary and unusual. Wellington is trim and neat and English; it reminds you of a seaport town on the South Coast. And for three days afterwards the sea was stormy. Gray clouds chased one another across the sky. Then the wind dropped, and the sea was calm and blue. The Pacific is more desolate than other seas; its spaces seem more vast, and the most ordinary journey upon it has somehow the feeling of an adventure. The air you breathe is an elixir which prepares you for the unexpected. Nor is it vouchsafed to man in the flesh to know aught that more nearly suggests the approach ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation. "Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... mouth of this northern branch of the Beagle Channel, we sailed amongst many unknown desolate islands, and the weather was wretchedly bad. We met with no natives. The coast was almost everywhere so steep that we had several times to pull many miles before we could find space enough to pitch our two ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... I had eat and drunk again, I did look outward over the Night Land, and with particularness to that part that I did travel in, as it might be called, the yesterday. And I did observe it to be a very bleak and desolate Country, and not given over to fire, or other warmth, nor to sulphur-vapours; but to be very quiet, and with but a little light in all its breadth. And I could conceive that it was no place for anything ...
— The Night Land • William Hope Hodgson
... you do, Tony? Won't you marry me ever?" Alan's tone was helpless, desolate. He had run up against a power stronger than any he had ever wielded, a ...
— Wild Wings - A Romance of Youth • Margaret Rebecca Piper
... vulgarly the Grindles may put it, it is true that drunkenness is the agony of wives, the dread of mothers,—that it does destroy hopes, desolate hearths, break hearts,—that within the last two years it has added to its terrible deeds wide disasters to our arms, long sorrow to our country, and fruitless death in a thousand households,—we think it would have been well, if the discredit cast ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864 • Various
... of Olive's drawing-room, looking over the water, took in the red sunsets of winter; the long, low bridge that crawled, on its staggering posts, across the Charles; the casual patches of ice and snow; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour of the season; the general hard, cold void of the prospect; the extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples, straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... future. For what pleasure will there be left them after these men are buried, who from their belief in the importance of virtue before all else lose their lives, made their wives widows and their children orphans, and rendered desolate their brothers, fathers and mothers. 72. For their many sufferings, I envy the children who are too young to know of what sort of parents they are bereft, and I pity their parents who are too old to forget their trial. 73. For what could be more terrible than this, to have and bring up children, ...
— The Orations of Lysias • Lysias
... desolate grandeur of it—would have intoxicated Roy. But the stranger he was carrying about with him, and called by his own name, reacted in quite another fashion to the shadowed majesty of looming rocks and forest aisles. The immensity of it dwarfed one mere suffering man to the dimensions ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... obliged to eat their own horses. And though the distress of the Irish was not much inferior,[*] besides that they were more hardened against such extremities, it was but a melancholy reflection, that the two nations, while they continued their furious animosities, should make desolate that fertile island, which might serve to the ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part E. - From Charles I. to Cromwell • David Hume
... this place, the aspect of the changes man had wrought in it, was of a nature to produce a great effect upon a lively and delicate imagination like that of Athos. Athos looked at nothing but these desolate spots; Monk looked at nothing but Athos—at Athos, who, with his eyes sometimes directed towards heaven, and sometimes towards the ...
— Ten Years Later - Chapters 1-104 • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... was his custom to pass his time. This it was not difficult to do. The palace of the prince I found to occupy a square of the city not far from that of the king his father. It is of vast extent, but of a desolate aspect, from the fewness of its inhabitants and the jealousy with which the prince and all his movements are watched by the wicked and now superannuated Sapor. Every day I diligently paced the ...
— Zenobia - or, The Fall of Palmyra • William Ware
... there, the Abbe Faria. This prisoner was supposed to be mad, because he had offered to buy his liberty with millions. The Abbe imparted to Dantes the secret of the treasure concealed by the Spadas in the caverns of the island of Monte-Cristo, a desolate rock in the Mediterranean. And this was not all, the old man had also imparted other secrets to ...
— The Son of Monte Cristo • Jules Lermina
... his soul-devastating experience of war to find his life desolate and maimed in all that gave it value, he made the appalling discovery that he was left almost alone of all whom he had known and loved in past days. For of his close friends none were left as before. For the most part they were lying on one or other of the five battle ...
— To Him That Hath - A Novel Of The West Of Today • Ralph Connor
... care anything about your locker beer, Lina Rosenberg, nor your whiskey and tobacco pipes, either. Nor neither, nor nothing," added the desolate child, standing "stock still," with the back of her head against a pile of bricks, her eyes closed, and her hands folded ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... herself these questions in exactly these words, but she felt the desolate possibility that had been suggested to her; and it was so appalling that it quite overpowered her flare of temper, and stopped her sobs and cries as effectually as Jane could have desired. But Jane herself, busy with her darning, did not notice the expression of Polly's face, and had no idea how ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... monotonous hum filled the air as the motors of the tanks tuned up. Down through the black lines of waiting soldiers the gray monsters slowly made their way, passed through the gaps made in the defences and led the way into the desolate stretch ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... a single spot in the neighborhood, favorable to quiet study, without having it made desolate or turned into a thoroughfare. The loveliest place I found at all was a footpath passing for about fifty feet through a fringe of low cedar, sweet gum trees, and shrubs loaded with pink lily-of-the-valley shaped blossoms. Across the path ran ...
— In Nesting Time • Olive Thorne Miller
... Judge Markham," she said to the girl, and then resumed her bouquet-making, wondering if every bride-elect were as wretched as herself, or if to any other maiden of twenty the world had ever looked so desolate and dreary, as it did to ...
— Ethelyn's Mistake • Mary Jane Holmes
... crosses with which the life of man is surrounded in this vale of tears; but we think the condition of the orphan, deprived of both parents, and thrown for support or existence on a strange and selfish world, the most desolate of all. A policeman was the first who was attracted to the house of mourning by the wailing and cries of those whom this night saw alone and desolate. Mrs. Doherty, attended by an Irish servant maid from a neighboring house, were the next visitors; and, ...
— The Cross and the Shamrock • Hugh Quigley
... wisely, "I just think it was most extraordinary to see the heaps of siller come out of the very sands of the seashore, and in such a desolate place; and beyond that, it was a most providential thing that the dog ran after yon wee rat. What most gets over me, though, is to think of the rat making its nest in the dead man's skull. Man! what a fright I had when the beast jumped out! ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton
... writers. The whole matter is summed up in the phrase, written about 1170, "claustrum sine armario, castrum sine armamentario[150]," an epigram which I will not spoil by trying to translate it; and even more clearly in the passionate utterances of Thomas a Kempis on the desolate condition of priest and convent without books[151]. The "round of creation" is explored for similes to enforce this truth. A priest so situated is like a horse without bridle, a ship without oars, a writer without pens, a bird ...
— The Care of Books • John Willis Clark
... three years, and carried Cosgrave off with him to a rough shooting-box in the Highlands lent him by a grateful and sporting patient, and for a week they tramped the moors together and stalked deer and fished in the salmon river that ran in and out among the desolate hills. The place was little more than a shepherd's cottage, growing grey and stubborn as a rock out of the heather, and beyond that proffered them occasionally by a morose and distrustful gillie they had no help or other companionship. ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie |
