"Desolation" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Officer of the leading Destroyer leaned across the bridge-rails and stared round at the ring of barren islands encircling the great expanse of water into which they had passed, the naked, snow-powdered hills in the background: at the greyness and desolation of earth and sky ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... looking, bearing his grief with Tagalog stoicism, greeted him with the finished courtesy of the Spanish tradition and led him up the precarious slatted steps into the house. It was a house of desolation. ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... was greatly injured, but the cathedral was not materially hurt. A German who had been in Hamburg during the time of the great fire, assured an English reporter that the scene of desolation in that city on the morning after the conflagration was less heart-rending than that presented by the ruined quarters of Strasburg when the Prussian conquerors marched in. And yet the inhabitants, had General Ulrich been willing, would have still ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... Es Shisban had changed his favour, for all the pride of his soul. Then came up Iblis (whom God curse!) and Tuhfeh rose to him and kissed his hands. He in turn kissed her hand and called down blessings on her and said, 'How deemest thou? Is [not] this place pleasant, for all its loneliness and desolation?' Quoth she, 'None may be desolate in this place;' and he said, 'Know that no mortal dare tread [the soil of] this place.' But she answered, 'I have dared and trodden it, and this is of the number of thy favours.' Then they brought tables and meats and viands ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... slowly by, he faced this desolation with extraordinary fortitude. It was part of that curious detachment, that strange gift of impersonal observation. Dickie bore no grudges against life. His spirit had a fashion of standing away, tiptoe, on wings. It stood so now like a presence above the miserable, half-starved ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... old that she cannot have many homesick years in store, while I—left alone in the world at seventeen, and maybe never to see dear old England again—" The thought brought such an overwhelming sense of desolation that she could not control her tears. Drawing her heavy black veil over her face, she hurriedly made her way to her deck-chair, and sank down to sob unseen, under cover of its ...
— Mildred's Inheritance - Just Her Way; Ann's Own Way • Annie Fellows Johnston
... sense of what marriage was, and I dare say I was not a cheerful companion on the tedious journey. At length, jealousy of my regret for my father and brother got the better of M. de la Tourelle, and he became so much displeased with me that I thought my heart would break with the sense of desolation. So it was in no cheerful frame of mind that we approached Les Rochers, and I thought that perhaps it was because I was so unhappy that the place looked so dreary. On one side, the chateau looked like a raw new building, hastily run up for some immediate purpose, ...
— The Grey Woman and other Tales • Mrs. (Elizabeth) Gaskell
... when glaciers were ploughing out its valleys, icebergs were breaking off the icy cliffs and floating out to sea; when not a bird, perhaps, was to be seen save sea-fowl, not a plant upon the rocks but a few lichens, and Alpine saxifrages, and such like—desolation and cold and lifeless everywhere. That ice-time went on for ages and for ages; and yet it did not go on in vain. Through it Madam How was ploughing down the mountains of Scotland to make all those rich farms which stretch from the north side of the Frith of Forth into Sutherlandshire. ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... The desolation of his outlook was appalling. And during his weary hours of solitude the hopelessness of it stirred him to a bitterness that at moments became almost insanely profane. Shadows, too, crept into his mind. ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... time, has gone along, many-streamed; indenting, quarrying, leaving lakelets, quagmires, miscellaneous sandy tumult, at a great rate, on that eastern shore. Making of it one of the unloveliest scenes of chaotic desolation anywhere to be met with;—fallen unlovelier than ever in our own ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XIX. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... anchor, and I was dimly conscious of a stooping person in uniform staring in at us through the cabin door. But I was far too weary to wake or take any notice. However, the sight must have worked a dream into my sleep, for I remember imagining that official's feelings when he gazed at the mildewed desolation of the ugly cutter's interior, when he contrasted her size with the infernal gale she must have been sailing through to make the harbour, and when he noted that her entire crew consisted of two persons very much out of ordinary yachtsmen's uniform. And then I had visions ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... soured and narrow, as to render him disobliging, suspicious, and equally an object of general dislike and neglect. His heart was a moral desert—no kind affection seemed to stir within it; and the bitter streams which it discharged had spread a moral desolation around him, and left him the solitary victim of his own ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 7, 1922 • Various
... had withered under the Harmattan breath of Doubt, or passed away in the conflagration of open Infidelity; and now, where the Tree of Life once bloomed and brought fruit of goodliest savour there was only barrenness and desolation. To such as could find sufficient interest in the day-labour and day-wages of earthly existence; in the resources of the five bodily Senses, and of Vanity, the only mental sense which yet flourished, which flourished indeed with ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... the professor gravely. "The land will soon be one wide desolation, for the smiling oases where irrigation could do its part will soon be gone back to ...
— In the Mahdi's Grasp • George Manville Fenn
... water. The great stretches of natural pasture are broken by gray sage-brush plains, and tracts of strangely shaped and colored Bad Lands; sun-scorched wastes in summer, and in winter arctic in their iron desolation. Beyond the plains rise the Rocky mountains, their flanks covered with coniferous woods; but the trees are small, and do not ordinarily grow very close together. Toward the north the forest becomes denser, and the peaks higher; and glaciers creep down toward the valleys from ...
— The Story of the Outlaw - A Study of the Western Desperado • Emerson Hough
... recalled herself. Mrs. Hanway-Harley scented nothing perilous in the situation. In any event, Dorothy would wed whomsoever she decreed; Mrs. Hanway-Harley was deservedly certain of that. While this came to her mind, Richard the enterprising went laying plans for the daily desolation of an ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... stone, when we left this province in the last century. On assuming it anew in the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six, the father provincial of the Recollects, Fray Blas de las Mercedes, attested that only ruins and desolation were found. Since that time they have labored without ceasing in the beautifying and adorning of the house of God, restoring the old ruins and building anew; until they have succeeded in making the churches worthy the majesty of the Catholic worship—already ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various
... encouraged her dear Hector in these projects with her sweetest smile; but a terrible accident, followed by a catastrophe no less horrible, destroyed these delightful dreams and brought desolation to this happy home. ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... in the furnaces have been extinguished; the incompleted iron work that lies about the ground has been given over to the ravages of rust; desolation is ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... inhabitant of that forsaken and dilapidated place offered us some fruit and I asked him the reason of the battered huts and general desolation. He told me with grief in his tones that the village had been devastated by armed enemies. "Many of my brethren were killed and many others were taken away as slaves and the rest have fled to safer and more inaccessible parts, but I could not find it in my heart to abandon this spot where I ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... thinking. Her very walking seemed to her mechanical; intensely alive as her senses were all the time. There was a transient relief at coming into the neighbourhood of a house, and a drear feeling of desolation and increased danger as she left it behind her; but her pace neither faltered nor flagged. She looked round sometimes, but never paused for that. Before the more thickly settled part of the village was reached her step ...
— Say and Seal, Volume I • Susan Warner
... settlers for the establishment and protection of the new Mission on San Francisco Bay. We have a full roster, in the handwriting of Padre Font, the Franciscan who accompanied the expedition, of those who composed it. Successfully they crossed the sandy wastes of Arizona and the barren desolation of the ...
— The Old Franciscan Missions Of California • George Wharton James
... greater God than He—greater, for the reason that we have become greater too. We no longer seek to find Him in our hours of happiness—the only hours when, long ago, we sought to feel His presence. We know that we shall only find Him in our hours of loneliness, in our hours of desolation, in our hours of black despair. Now at last we realise that God is not some Deity apart, but some spirit within us, within every man and woman whose "vision" is turned towards the stars. He is the "Dream" ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... analogous to certain phenomena of the order of grace. St. Ignatius almost invariably speaks, not, as we should, of thoughts that give rise to will-states of "consolation" or "desolation," but conversely, of these will-states giving rise to congruous thoughts. Indeed, nothing is more familiar to us than the way in which the mind is magnetized by even our physical states of elation or depression, to select the more cheerful or the gloomier ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... masses of metal projected dismally from the complex wreckage, vast masses of twisted cable dropped like tangled seaweed, and from its base came a tumult of innumerable voices, violent concussions, and the sound of trumpets. All about this great white pile was a ring of desolation; the smashed and blackened masses, the gaunt foundations and ruinous lumber of the fabric that had been destroyed by the Council's orders, skeletons of girders, Titanic masses of wall, forests of stout pillars. Amongst the sombre wreckage beneath, running water flashed and glistened, and far ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... the ruins of what are pronounced by all scholars to be the highest civilization, and the most ancient in time, of any in the New World. There it arose, flourished, and tottered to its fall. Its glory had departed, its cities were a desolation, before the coming of the Spaniards. The explorer who would visit them finds himself confronted with very great difficulties. Their location is in a section of the country away from the beaten track of travel. Their ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... desolation, As we might long have done On Sundays or on weekdays With love and exultation ...
— Late Lyrics and Earlier • Thomas Hardy
... Kings had an illustrious beginning in the glories of the kingdom of Israel when it was entirely under King David and in the beginning of the reign of Solomon; but the second book has a melancholy outlook in the desolation and division of the kingdom of Israel and of Judea. Then Elijah and Elisha, their prophets, instructed the princes and the people in all that would come to pass, the captivity of the ten tribes, the destruction of Jerusalem, and the good reigns ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... proceeded the sounds of music, and dancing, and merrymaking; the steward's house was lit up from basement to garret, and music and song were there too. All the more striking therefore was the inhospitable desolation into which we now drove. The sea-wind howled in sharp cutting dirges as it were about us, whilst the sombre firs, as if they had been roused by the wind from a deep magic trance, groaned hoarsely in a responsive ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... doubly hallowed to us by the blood of those who died hopeless, but undaunted, in defeat—sacred soil to all of us, rich with memories that make us purer and stronger and better, silent but stanch witnesses in its red desolation of the matchless valor of American hearts and the deathless glory of American arms—speaking in eloquent witness in its white peace and prosperity to the indissoluble union of American states and the imperishable brotherhood of the ...
— America First - Patriotic Readings • Various
... arid stretches of sand. When the sun has set and the full moon rising makes the silhouettes of the mountains look darker, a vague, indescribable sensation comes over one—an awe-inspiring feeling of insignificance and helplessness amidst scenes of majestic desolation. If religiously inclined, one is prone to utter the words of the wandering Arab of the Sahara, "Nothing exists here but Allah! Allah hu Akbar!—God is greater than all his created witnesses." In summer, the air being almost entirely destitute ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... incidents of alienation, which are too numerous, and too evanescent to admit of detail. But seasons and circumstances of great alarm are not readily forgotten. We have witnessed, and we have felt, my friends, a political convulsion, which seemed the harbinger of inevitable desolation. But it has passed by with a harmless explosion, and returning friends have paused in wonder, at a moment's suspension of friendship. Mingled with the factitious mass, there was a large spice of sincerity which sanctified the whole composition, ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... the world, Egypt doubtless was subdued, like the rest of the provinces, and Xenophon positively declares this in the beginning of his Cyropaedia, or institution of that prince. Probably, after that the forty years of desolation, which had been foretold by the prophet, were expired, Egypt beginning gradually to recover itself, Amasis shook off the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... glorious, madam, is most true. That this island is the sole refuge where liberty has been able to find a home, is also true. The tyranny and oppression of the Congress, which are grinding down the colonies to the powder of desolation and poverty, are not worthy the sacred name. Rebellion pollutes all that it touches, madam. Although it often commences under the sanction of holy liberty, it ever terminates in despotism. The annals of the world, from ...
— The Pilot • J. Fenimore Cooper
... turned his face. He would join the band, provoke a quarrel with the chief, kill him and be made chief in his stead. Then he would scour the country in a velvet mask and a peaked hat with a feather in it, carrying fire and desolation everywhere. A price would be set on his head, but he would snap his fingers in the face of the Prime Minister. He would rule his followers with an iron hand. But now he was in the midst of the mountains, and there were not the smallest signs of lawless folk, not even a gibbet ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... across the bridge. The year that had passed since Cardo had left her, with its varied experiences and trials, the bitter sense of loneliness and desertion, the pains and the delights of motherhood, the desolation and sorrow of bereavement, all had worked a change in the simple girl's character, that now surprised even herself, and she thankfully realised that her troubles had at all events generated a strength which enabled ...
— By Berwen Banks • Allen Raine
... to play; but with threats that to me were dreadful, and not without sundry nips and pinches, and sly clouts, I was bidden to be still, and stir not from a certain stool apportioned to me in the great Withdrawing-room. Not on this side of the tomb shall I forget the weary, dreary sense of desolation that came over me when, thus equipped, or rather swaddled and hampered in garments strange to me, and of which I scarcely knew the meaning, I was left alone for many hours in a dismal room, whose ancient splendour was now all under the eclipse ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... in sharp peaks and was of many colors, some of them so red that the mountain looked red hot, I imagined it to be a true volcanic point, and had never been so near one before, and the most wonderful picture of grand desolation ...
— Death Valley in '49 • William Lewis Manly
... and some terrific encounters have been had. Is this conflict of opinion to become more and more consolidated and defined, and finally embodied in two great hostile camps, covering the whole earth with an actual war, replete with desolation and carnage—not a war of distinct nationalities, but of the partisans of the two great antagonistic drifts of human development? Is there to be literally the great battle of Armageddon in the world before the incoming of a better age? or has the ignorant wrath of man sufficiently ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... rubbish that life, like the leader in a paper-chase, strews in its trail; all valueless, yet all steeped in the precious scent of past happiness, of good times that were over and done with. She spent those short, dark days in desolation and destruction, and Rinka trotted after her, up and downstairs, in and out of the shuttered bedrooms, and the gaunt, curtainless, carpetless rooms downstairs, wondering what it all portended, vowing, in her little faithful, cunning heart, not to let Christian out of ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the eye a flow'ret 'mid the desolation drear, Or a spray of pleasant verdure which the gloomy scene might cheer; Nought but frowning crags and boulders, and long sea-weeds, ghastly, dank, With the mosses and pale lichens, to the ...
— The Poetical Works of Mrs. Leprohon (Mrs. R.E. Mullins) • Rosanna Eleanor Leprohon
... useful purpose for themselves, to burn the town itself, and then to march on, leaving in the place only a smoking heap of ruins, with the miserable remnant of the population which they had spared wandering about the scene of desolation ...
— Genghis Khan, Makers of History Series • Jacob Abbott
... sat down on a piece of cornice which was imbedded in the rubbish. She seemed pleased in the midst of this desolation. Her father and the nurse joined her with terror depicted on their countenances; they had heard the noise of footsteps in the chapel; more, Juana had seen a shadow glide away; how or where she did not know, but she was sure that ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various
... Taka, pointing, And there, the last home of a chief, it lay. White shells and snowy pebbles girt him round In his great mould of clay, and all his spears And clubs of war kept vigil, showing still His might in battle. Shrill the parrot's scream Rang on the desolation, and the trees Seemed to withdraw their shadows from the place Sacred to death, the violent crime of war. A little shadow darkened Taka's heart, Could this sweet world contain both death and love? She sought Malua's eyes to be ...
— The Rose of Dawn - A Tale of the South Sea • Helen Hay
... were blazing like huge beacon-fires, and an oppressive silence settled down upon the army as it pursued its march across the wide, solitary plain at sight of that dusky, eddying column that rose from behind the distant hills, filling the heavens with desolation. All that was to be heard in the bright sunlight was the measured tramp of many feet upon the hollow ground, while involuntarily the eyes of all were turned on that livid cloud whose baleful shadows rested on their ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... of a wolf on a near by eminence sounded like a voice to him, mocking, taunting, fiendish. Never, it seemed to him, had any man been thus unhappy. Even the wilderness had failed him! In a land of desolation he sat, ...
— The Magnificent Adventure - Being the Story of the World's Greatest Exploration and - the Romance of a Very Gallant Gentleman • Emerson Hough
... produce a bold and free exercise of thought, without kindling the passions to fierce excitement. The storm which burst with all its fury on the Continent, wrapping nations in the flames of civil war, prostrating, withering, and overwhelming civil institutions, and marking its path with desolation did but exert a salutary influence in England. The lightning was seen flashing in the distant horizon, the rolling thunder could be heard afar off, but the fury of the storm fell at a distance; the atmosphere was purified ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various
... explanation; she had received him as if he had been there the day before, with the addition of a spice of mysterious melancholy. She might have made up her mind that she had lost him as what she had hoped, but that it was better than desolation to try and keep him as a friend. It was as if she wished him to see now how she tried. She was subdued and consolatory, she waited upon him, moved away a screen that intercepted the fire, remarked that he looked very tired, and rang for some tea. ...
— The Bostonians, Vol. I (of II) • Henry James
... the cold, bleak upper rooms of the house, looking out of the windows upon the wide desolation of winter, the waste of snow, the bare forest, the cold, dark waters of the bay—listening to the driving tempest, and singing, full of glee as she always was when the elements were ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... the great empty hall with an involuntary quickening of the breath. How desolate it was, but how beautiful in its desolation! What strange revels had taken place there to the notes of wild music, what girls had danced, what voices had shouted, what moods had been indulged! She thought of the men who had made merry there ... and then ...
— The Palace of Darkened Windows • Mary Hastings Bradley
... of the west, chilling the two children to the bone; and Stonecrop turning his head to the wind broke out into a long wailing whinny, which brought home to the children such a sense of their loneliness and desolation that Elsie looked blankly at Dick and Dick as blankly at Elsie, and neither found ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... went down into that Place of Desolation which some call hell and some the bitter school of sorrow—that place in which each soul is alone with its agony and its sin, that place where no light shines and no voice is heard, where, groping along the edge of destruction, the wanderer ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... imported from the north, but to limit their buildings to native materials of stone or brick and their elevation to two or, at most, three storeys. The skyscraper is at home in New York or Chicago; in Mexico (or in London) it is the abomination of desolation. In San Francisco the outraged earth endeavoured to shake them off a year or so ago in an earthquake! An attractive feature of Mexican houses is the flat roofs, or azoteas. These are often made accessible from the interior and adorned with plants and flowers, and even the heavy rain-storms ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock
... rights of either prince or people, and lays the foundation for overturning the constitution and frame of any just government, is highly guilty of the greatest crime, I think, a man is capable of, being to answer for all those mischiefs of blood, rapine, and desolation, which the breaking to pieces of governments bring on a country. And he who does it, is justly to be esteemed the common enemy and pest of mankind, and is to be treated accordingly. Sec. 231. That subjects or foreigners, attempting by force on the properties ...
— Two Treatises of Government • John Locke
... bitter cry, since to her after the death of her first mistress, this woman had been all her life. As a child she had nursed her; as a maiden shared her joys and sorrows; as a wife and widow toiled day and night fiercely and faithfully to console her in her desolation and to protect her in the dreadful dangers through which she had passed. Now, to end it all, it was her lot to receive her last breath and to take into her ...
— Pearl-Maiden • H. Rider Haggard
... whispered, and began to cry,—not with the passion of her first sorrow, but piteously and low, with a sense of desolation. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... devastation; the ground for more than sixty miles, totally uncultivated and unproductive, remains bare to the present day." This is believed to have been written about 1135, and would give us grounds for believing that the desolation continued for over sixty years. A vivid light is thrown on the destruction wrought at Pickering by the record in the Domesday Book, ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... was melting to nothing, and the fair woman herself was standing on Rainbarrow, her soul in an abyss of desolation seldom plumbed by one so young, Yeobright sat lonely at Blooms-End. He had fulfilled his word to Thomasin by sending off Fairway with the letter to his wife, and now waited with increased impatience for some sound or signal of her return. Were Eustacia still at Mistover the very least ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... each other's arms they admitted the extent of their desolation. Life had been robbed of a magic,—a mystery. The solid friendship of years of mutual trust and understanding was the background of so much lovely folly, so many unrealized possibilities, so many nebulous desires and dreams that the sudden ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... descend amongst the Apis. The whitewashed room in which he receives us is encumbered with the age-old debris which he is continually bringing to light. The parting rays of the sun, which shines low down from between two clouds, enter through a window opening on to the surrounding desolation; and the light comes mournfully, yellowed by the sand and ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... most humane man cannot emancipate himself from the law of his nature, according to which he is more affected by some tragic circumstance which has taken place in his own house or in his own street than by a catastrophe which has carried anguish and desolation over enormous areas in a distant continent. In history, too, there are vast tracts which are almost necessarily unrealised. We judge a period mainly by its great men, by its brilliant or salient ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... was paid to his father's burial mound, where, plunged in melancholy at the desolation around, he poured out his soul to the outraged god. He reminded him that it was the custom of the Northmen to exact blood-fines for kinsmen slain, and surely the blessed gods would not be less forgiving than the earth-born. Passionately he adjured Balder to show ...
— Myths of the Norsemen - From the Eddas and Sagas • H. A. Guerber
... protect him from the overpowering beams. Once more he anxiously studied the country, but it gave him little hope. The green of the grass was gone, and most of the grass with it. The brown undulations swept away from horizon to horizon, treeless, waterless, and bare. In all that vast desolation there was nothing save the tired and dusty train at the very ...
— The Last of the Chiefs - A Story of the Great Sioux War • Joseph Altsheler
... the only true Church? Or did he assert both claimants to be of the same Church, and it the only true one, then why the refusal to partake of the Sacraments? Why a division amongst them at all? Have you not heard the aforetime saying, 'Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation'? ...
— The Prince of India - Or - Why Constantinople Fell - Volume 2 • Lew. Wallace
... should forget it, let me now tell you that I am received with the warmest hospitality. Notwithstanding the desolation occasioned by the hurricane (and it is truly distressing), I have invitations which it would require weeks to satisfy. These attentions are almost ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... nor knew any one who did; yet the lad, when he acknowledged this, stood within a stone's throw of the site where milleniums ago was one of the greatest universities of the ancient world and where still, amid the desolation, one could dig and find the old clay tablets on which the children of that ancient time had learned to write. Progress? Regress! While history as a whole, from the Cro-Magnon man to the twentieth century, does certainly ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... occupation; and while thus she continued to "scold and grow fat," her inn, once a popular and frequented one, became gradually less and less frequented, and the dragon of the Rhine-fells did not more effectually lay waste the territory about him, than did the evil influence of her tongue spread desolation and ruin around her. Her inn, at the time of my visit, had not been troubled with even a passing traveller for many months; and, indeed, if I had any, even the least foreknowledge of the character of my hostess, its privacy should ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Vol. 1 • Charles James Lever
... of the King's yards, sent up by Sir W. Pen, there is a good stop given to it, as well at Marke-lane end, as ours; it having only burned the dyall of Barking Church, and part of the porch, and was there quenched. I up to the top of Barking steeple, and there saw the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw; every where great fires, oyle-cellars, and brimstone, and other things burning. I became afraid to stay there long, and therefore down again as fast as I could, the fire being spread as far as I could see it; and to Sir W. Pen's, and there ...
— The Diary of Samuel Pepys • Samuel Pepys
... of partings, brief and sad probation— When all is brightest, then farewell must come! And the lone mourner weeps in desolation, Earth's fairest seeping in ...
— Lays from the West • M. A. Nicholl
... contain more than five millions of inhabitants; but his surprise was decreased when their journey occasionally lay through tracts of streets, consisting often of capacious mansions entirely tenantless. On seeking an explanation of this seeming desolation, he was told that the Hubbabubians were possessed by a frenzy of always moving on, westward; and that consequently great quarters of the city are perpetually deserted. Even as Skindeep was speaking their passage was ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... that, too, without mercy and without compassion, as the sworn and implacable enemy both of God and man. Otherwise this glorious country, which has so long worn the garland and surging robe of liberty, will become a dungeon of desolation from the Atlantic to the Pacific, resounding only with the shrieks of mandrakes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... whom by watchfulness and care we have saved from the fate of his father, his mother, and his uncles, to place him safe and sound on the throne of his ancestors; this child falls back again into the hands of those whom an adulterous law boldly calls to succeed him; thus, on all sides, murder, desolation, ruin, civil and foreign wars. And why? because it pleases Monsieur Philippe d'Orleans to think himself still major of the king's troops, or commandant of the army in Spain, and to forget that he ceased to be so from the moment he became ...
— The Regent's Daughter • Alexandre Dumas (Pere)
... shoulders; others with nursing infants in their arms, all escorted by a company of heavy-armed troopers, left forever their native city. All made the dismal journey upon foot, save that carts were allowed to transport the children between the ages of two and six years. The desolation and depopulation were now complete. "I wandered through the place, gazing at all this," says a Spanish soldier who was present, and kept a diary of all which occurred, "and it seemed to me that it ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... after all was done that hand could do, She rested, and her desolation came Upon her, and she wept beside ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... village, loveliest of the lawn, 35 Thy sports are fled, and all thy charms withdrawn; Amidst thy bowers the tyrant's hand is seen, And desolation saddens all thy green: One only master grasps the whole domain, And half a tillage stints thy smiling plain: 40 No more thy glassy brook reflects the day, But chok'd with sedges, works its weedy way. Along thy glades, a solitary guest, The hollow-sounding bittern guards ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith
... feet That round our corporal walls unheeded beat; Till, all containing, he exalt His stature to the stars, or stars Narrow their heaven to his fleshly vault: When, like a city under ocean, To human things he grows a desolation, And is made a habitation For the fluctuous universe To lave with unimpeded motion. He scarcely frets the atmosphere With breathing, and his body shares The immobility of rocks; His heart's a drop-well of tranquillity; His mind more still is than the limbs ...
— New Poems • Francis Thompson
... in order to ward off a multitude of vexations. Your Excellency must also have observed how quickly they laid down their arms at your summons, of which circumstance the party of the President availed themselves to sack and plunder the towns and villages everywhere in the country; the tears, desolation, and misery of so many villages and estates, accompanied by the blood of the murdered and wounded, remaining eternal monuments ...
— Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chili, Peru and Brazil, - from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, Volume 2 • Thomas Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald
... bull sprang, as it were, from the soil, and the whole site called forth a superstitious awe. It was left severely alone by the new-comers. Another Knossos grew up on the lower slopes of the hill to the north, and the old Palace site became "a desolation and hissing." Gradually earth's mantle covered the ruined heaps, and by the time of the Romans the Labyrinth had become nothing more than a ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... of something like a year at Lyons (April, 1740—spring of 1741), he made his way back to his old haunts. The first half-hour with Madame de Warens persuaded him that happiness here was really at an end. After a stay of a few months, his desolation again overcame him. It was agreed that he should go to Paris to make his fortune by a new method of musical notation which he had invented, and after a short stay at Lyons, he found himself for the second time in the famous city which in the eighteenth century had become ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of, he began to experience great changes in his soul. At one time he was deprived of all consolation, so that he found no pleasure in vocal prayer, in hearing Mass, or in any spiritual exercise. At another, on the contrary, he suddenly felt as if all sorrow and desolation were taken from him, experiencing the relief of one from whose shoulders a heavy cloak had suddenly been lifted. On noticing all this, he was surprised, wondering what could be the import of these changes which he had never before experienced, and ...
— The Autobiography of St. Ignatius • Saint Ignatius Loyola
... it ever, when freemen shall stand Between their loved home and the war's desolation; Blessed with victory and peace, may the Heaven-rescued land Praise the Power that hath made and preserved us a nation. Then conquer we must, for our cause it is just, And this be our motto, "In God is our trust": And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave ...
— Poems of American Patriotism • Brander Matthews (Editor)
... I approve altogether of your abandoning what you justly call vanities. I look upon you as a man, called by sorrow and anguish and a strange desolation of hopes into quietness, and a soul set apart and made peculiar to God; we cannot arrive at any portion of heavenly bliss without in some measure imitating Christ. And they arrive at the largest inheritance who imitate the most difficult parts ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... and paleness of the sweet-smelling foliage you might have guessed it was not far from the middle of April, one way or another; and, by certain allusions to Pittsburg Landing as a place of conspicuous note, you might have known that Shiloh had been fought. There was that feeling of desolation in the land that remains after armies have passed over, let ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... tree, she set out in a southerly direction, toward the point where she believed the plains of Waziri lay, and though she knew that only ruin and desolation marked the spot where once her happy home had stood, she hoped that by coming to the broad plain she might eventually reach one of the numerous Waziri villages that were scattered over the surrounding country, or chance upon a roving band of ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... know—I don't care. What's the difference? any place'd be better than this." For awhile she continued to cry on a ridiculously high, though subdued, whining note, her breath catching at intervals. A feeling of helplessness, of utter desolation crept over Janet; powerless to comfort herself, how could she comfort her sister? She glanced around the familiar, sordid room, at the magazine pages against the faded wall-paper, at the littered bureau and the littered bed, over which Lise's clothes were flung. It was hot and close even now, in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... of the dance had come, than which Wellington could produce no more momentous occasion. For days the students had been decorating Old Warburton Hall, stripping their own rooms to the point of desolation to pile their banners, their flags, and even their mandolins around the big hall, in artistic and effective settings from ceiling to the smallest nook around the chimney corner windows. Judith and Jane were responsible for the "Bosky Dell" created ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... wordless acts began which he knew to be the very heart of prayer. The eyes of his soul flew hither and thither, from Calvary to heaven and back again to the tossing troubled earth. He saw Christ dying of desolation while the earth rocked and groaned; Christ reigning as a priest upon His Throne in robes of light, Christ patient and inexorably silent within the Sacramental species; and to each in turn he directed the eyes of the ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... of desolation for Honora, when George Hanbury and Algernon Cartwright and other young gentlemen were at the seashore learning to sail boats and to play tennis, Peter Erwin came to his own. Nearly every evening after dinner, while the light ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... love of men may replace the sacrifices." He would have preferred his brethren to submit to Rome, and his political foresight was justified when the war of independence closed in disaster. As Graetz has well said, like Jeremiah Jochanan wept over the desolation of Zion, but like Zerubbabel he created a new sanctuary. Jochanan's new sanctuary was ...
— Chapters on Jewish Literature • Israel Abrahams
... surging From sea to land, from land to sea. A chain of deepest action forging Round all, in wrathful energy. There flames a desolation, blazing Before the Thunder's crashing way: Yet, Lord, Thy messengers are praising The gentle movement ...
— Faust • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... as often a symbol of malevolence and enmity. It appears among the emblems of Siva-Roudra, the power of desolation and death: it is the bane of Aëpytus, Idom, Archemorus, and Philoctetes: it gnaws the roots of the tree of life in the Eddas, and bites the heel of unfortunate Eurydice. In Hebrew writers it is generally ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... ephemeral French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance, eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice—thanks to the inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost its cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollow with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger of Roman resurrection here! The illusion is completely broken, and we turn to gather ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... time, a fair and goodly structure was quite stript of all its ornamental beauty, and made a ruthful spectacle, a very chaos of desolation and confusion, nothing scarce remaining but only bare walls, broken seats, and shatter'd windows ...
— The New Guide to Peterborough Cathedral • George S. Phillips
... can take a cab across Liverpool without having a quite complete and unified impression that the pathos is not a pathos of individual cases, but a pathos in bulk. People talk of the Celtic sadness; but there are very few things in Ireland that look so sad as the Irishman in Liverpool. The desolation of Tara is cheery compared with the desolation of Belfast. I recommend Mr. Yeats and his mournful friends to turn their attention to the pathos of Belfast. I think if they hung up the harp that once in Lord Furness's ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton
... could not help starting up, as a more fearful crash than usual sounded in our ears. Still the wished-for daylight did not appear. The truth was, that since the commencement of the storm but a short time only had elapsed, though in our desolation and solitude it had appeared ...
— Mary Liddiard - The Missionary's Daughter • W.H.G. Kingston
... the window of the cabin to look out he uttered a cry of surprise. The sun was shining and all around could be seen immense stretches of ice and snow. It looked as if they were in the midst of desolation. ...
— The Rover Boys in Alaska - or Lost in the Fields of Ice • Arthur M. Winfield
... marriage, when the Stanifords, upon their arrival home from Europe, paid a visit to South Bradfield. It was in the depths of the winter following their union, and the hill country, stern and wild even in midsummer, wore an aspect of savage desolation. It was sheeted in heavy snow, through which here and there in the pastures, a craggy bowlder lifted its face and frowned, and along the woods the stunted pines and hemlocks blackened against a background of leafless oaks and birches. A northwest wind cut ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... mysterious close relation to infinite love as a stimulus of the most refined sensual excitement, which I then extinguisht in a rapture of tears. I was appalled by this lie in my soul, when I detected and could no more deny it; and the fearfullest desolation of despair, the dismallest solitude of death closed round me again, when the deception had been broken, and the vision would no more descend among the apish toys of my imagination. When after this I wisht to pursue my inquiries beneath the light of truth, ...
— The Old Man of the Mountain, The Lovecharm and Pietro of Abano - Tales from the German of Tieck • Ludwig Tieck
... For you, of course, DESOLATION, and, for me, consolation. I do not know on what our destinies depend; you see them pass, you criticise them, you abstain from a literary appreciation of them, you limit yourself to depicting them, ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... petition of her heart. I saw in profile a girl's troubled face charged with mystery, a slim, tall, weary figure all in white against the flame, a cheek's pure oval, the tense curve of a proud neck, a mass of severely snodded russet hair. So I recalled her afterward, picture of desolation seeking comfort, but at the moment when I blundered on her my presence seemed profanity and no time was found for appraisement. Abashed I came to a halt, and was for tiptoeing back to the door; but hearing me ...
— A Daughter of Raasay - A Tale of the '45 • William MacLeod Raine
... her head, after each slow repetition of the word, with an air of quiet desolation that he remembered long afterwards. The time came when he remembered it well, long afterwards, within those prison walls; ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... It might have brought to all the world good-will and happiness, and to the men who made it much glory and the great regard of their fellows. Instead, it has wrought havoc and desolation, and its Apache-like trail is strewn with the scalped and mutilated corpses of its victims. The very name Amalgamated conjures up visions of hatred and betrayal, of ambush, pitfalls, and assassination. It stands forth the Judas of corporations, a monument to greed and a ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson |
