"Dreariness" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... whirr and a jolt into the domain of the next borough council. There was a large public house at that point, with much brass work and mahogany about its swing doors, and he turned in, not so much because he wanted anything to drink, but because it seemed the obvious alternative to the dreariness of his own rooms or the boredom of ...
— People of Position • Stanley Portal Hyatt
... many kinds of pathological depression. Sometimes it is mere passive joylessness and dreariness. discouragement, dejection, lack of taste and zest and spring. {143} Professor Ribot has proposed the name anhedonia to ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... had sent a quick throb of joy to his heart. Her evident delight in his coming had filled him with rapture. He could not know that it was only the chill of the snowstorm that had given warmth to her handclasp, the dreariness of the day that had made her greeting so cordial, the loneliness of a maiden whose lover is away that had made his presence ...
— Miss Billy's Decision • Eleanor H. Porter
... adventure. Every now and then the realization of this feeling gave his conscience a twinge, and wrung out of it a rebuke. He was having the best of it in this business; he was the party in the quarrel who went away, who left the dreariness of the scene of battle with all its corpses of dead illusions, and got off to fresh places and people who had never heard of him. Just being in a train, he found, and rushing on to somewhere else was extraordinarily nerve-soothing. At Clark there would be gloom and stagnation, the heavy brooding ...
— Christopher and Columbus • Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim
... my place, staring idly before me, and reflecting that I should be so soon travelling due South over the broad, well-kept French roads, and out of the gloom and dreariness of the English winter, I suddenly became conscious of a familiar face in the ...
— The Count's Chauffeur • William Le Queux
... tho' the moon—the white moon Shed all the splendour of her noon, Her smile is chilly—and her beam, In that time of dreariness, will seem (So like you gather in your breath) A portrait taken after death. And boyhood is a summer sun Whose waning is the dreariest one— For all we live to know is known, And all we seek to keep hath flown— Let life, then, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the fact that the girl really meant to get away and at once, a wave of dreariness swept over him. He thought of the time on ahead when his last vital interest would be taken from him. Then he aroused from his stupor and brought his mind to bear upon the ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock
... comparative defeat with fashion in its most distinctive moments of pleasuring (for one thing I wished to see how the dreariness of Madrid gaiety in the Paseo de la Castellana would compare with that of Roman gaiety on the Pincian) which made us the more determined to see a bull-fight in the Spanish capital. We had vowed ...
— Familiar Spanish Travels • W. D. Howells
... with national pride, but too polite to dispute the previous toast, said: "France,—the moon whose mild, steady, and cheering rays are the delight of all nations, consoling them in darkness, and making their dreariness beautiful." ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... unction as to chill poor Reuben to the marrow of his bones. A week's experience only dispersed the chill when the tingle of the parson's big rod wrought a glow in him that was almost madness. Yet Reuben chafed not so much at the whippings—to which he was well used—as at the dreariness of the new home, the melancholy waste of common over which March winds blew all the year, the pinched faces that met him without other recognition than, "One o' Parson Brummem's b'ys." Nor indoors was the aspect more inviting: a big red ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... country changes, and from there to the Pas, and, I understand, for fully one hundred miles above it, nothing but marsh can be seen; so much so that it was difficult along the bank of the river to find a spot dry enough to camp upon, and I was, consequently, obliged to eat and sleep in my boat. The dreariness of this voyage can hardly be realized, and it was with feelings of delight that I landed at the Mission at the Pas where the Rev. ...
— The Treaties of Canada with The Indians of Manitoba - and the North-West Territories • Alexander Morris
... years," she repeated, and though she also smiled there was a note of unspeakable dreariness in her voice. "I was married on my ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... childhood. For yonder, northwards, one can almost see, on the flank of Hermon, Caesarea-Philippi, his farthest point of advance into the Gentile world; and to the south the less smiling aspect of these Samaritan hills foreshadows the dreariness of Judea beyond, parched as by a burning wind of desolation and death." In the midst of such scenes we are to understand that, with the physical growth, and opening of mind, and moral discipline which filled the early years of Jesus, there came also ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... derive from contemplating savage scenery was unknown to the Italians of the sixteenth century; the height and cold, the gloom and solitude of mountains struck them with a sense of terror or of dreariness. On the Lake of Wallenstadt Cellini met with a party of Germans, whom he hated as cordially as an Athenian of the age of Pericles might have loathed the Scythians for their barbarism.[372] The Italians embarked in one boat, the Germans in another; ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... When? The Futile Thought The London Season Christmas The New Year February Tub-thumpers I Wonder If . . . Types of Tub-thumpers If Age only Practised what it Preached! Beginnings Unlucky in Little Things Wallpapers Our Irritating Habits Away—Far Away! "Family Skeletons" The Dreariness of One Line of Conduct The Happy Discontent Book-borrowing Nearly Always Means Book-stealing Other People's Books The Road to Calvary Mountain Paths The Unholy Fear The Need to Remember Humanity Responsibility The Government ...
— Over the Fireside with Silent Friends • Richard King
... in under a week, and here there are elk, wild sheep, and other big game, but for the unfortunate fair sex life is one eternal round of hopeless monotony. There is not even a regiment to enliven the dreariness of existence, for the garrison consists of about one hundred and fifty Cossacks, with only a couple of officers in command. Nor is there a newspaper; only a dry official journal printed once a month, while the telegrams received ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... weather. Everybody was relieved when April opened with sunny showers and the long and severe winter seemed to be at an end. It had not made Bessie more in love with her life at Abbotsmead: there had, indeed, been times of inexpressible dreariness in it very trying to her fortitude. With the dawning of brighter days in spring she could not but think of the Forest with fresh longing, and she watched each morning's post for the arrival of ...
— The Vicissitudes of Bessie Fairfax • Harriet Parr
... in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller Burton says of it: "Your morale improves; you become frank and cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous liquors excite only ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... high flood of summer hours whose tide can rise no higher. A time to linger and dream under the beautiful breast of heaven, heaven brooding and descending in pure light upon man's handiwork. If the light shall thus come in, and of its mere loveliness overcome every aspect of dreariness, why shall not the light of thought, and hope—the light of the soul—overcome and sweep away the dust of ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... a cheery fire in the grate lighted up the little room brightly, casting a rich glow on the yellow-white table-cloth, which had been already spread, and creating a feeling of coziness in powerful contrast to the sensation of dreariness which had assailed him on his first entrance. When Mrs Butt had placed a paraffin lamp on the table, with a dark-brown teapot, a thick glass sugar-bowl, a cream-jug to match, and a plate of thick-buttered toast that scented the atmosphere deliciously, ...
— Charlie to the Rescue • R.M. Ballantyne
... violet nor a gaudy flower of summer gave to the air the perfume, or to the earth the colour of sweet life, to soothe and lighten the dreariness of the dead: such thoughts in the Middle Ages would have been almost pagan. Then the darkness of death was like the darkness of night here in this necropolis hewn in the side of the ancient rock, whose very substance ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... likely to spring from her lonely position in so large and empty a dwelling. Or rather, I should say, she did not foresee them; for she begged me not to stay with her, when I hinted at the darkness and dreariness of the place, saying that she was too jolly to feel fear or think of anything but the surprise my father and sisters would experience in discovering that their very agreeable young housekeeper was the woman they had ...
— That Affair Next Door • Anna Katharine Green
... she endeavor to wrap Clifford up in her great, warm love, and make it all the world to him, so that he should retain no torturing sense of the coldness and dreariness without! Her little efforts to amuse him! How pitiful, yet ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... their warming at Farmer Hare's were quite vanished. Watson, having showed by his mother-wit and presence of mind that he was a man to be relied upon, had now resumed his privilege of growling, and gave vent to many angry words at the roughness and unutterable dreariness of the way. ...
— Chasing an Iron Horse - Or, A Boy's Adventures in the Civil War • Edward Robins
... chill, gray lake. I shuddered. An indefinable apprehension possessed me, something like the vague discomfort of my dreams; then, almost instantly, it crystallized into the blood-curdling suggestion: What if this were divine chastisement? what if all the outer and inner dreariness that had so steadily enveloped me since I had witnessed the tragedy were punishment for my disbelief? what if this water were really holy, and my sacrilege had ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... come? How should she drag through a useless and monotonous existence in this dull place? Even now, earnestly as she sought to do good in her mission of mercy, there were hours and hours of wretched, unspeakable dreariness and desolation. When her work was ended, when the fever was over, what would become of her then? That dim vision of the cloister and veil was dim as ever in the far distance. No ardent glow, no holy longing filled her heart at the thought, to tell her she had ...
— Kate Danton, or, Captain Danton's Daughters - A Novel • May Agnes Fleming
... and in a place which was half in the sunshine and half in the shade, they sat down. In a little while the pleasant influence of the scene chased the dreariness from Christie's thoughts, and she looked about with eyes that did not seem able to satisfy themselves ...
— Christie Redfern's Troubles • Margaret Robertson
... bay- windows, hooded doorways, elegant proportions, a profusion of delicate ornament; but a good specimen of an old Italian palazzo has a nobleness that is all its own. We laugh at Italian "palaces," at their peeling paint, their nudity, their dreariness; but they have the great palatial quality—elevation and extent. They make of smaller things the apparent abode of pigmies; they round their great arches and interspace their huge windows with a proud indifference to the cost of materials. These grand proportions—the colossal basements, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... evolved out of the drifted accumulations of the place a wonderful romance. But that sort of eager freshness we most of us find to be impossible as we grow older; and we are confronted with the problem of how to keep care and dreariness away, how to avoid becoming mere trudging wayfarers, dully obsessed by all we have to do and bear. Can we not find some medicine to revive the fading emotion, to renew the same sort of delight in new thoughts and problems which we found in childhood in all unfamiliar things, ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... There they were now sitting at supper over a good fire, kindled in a deep sand, which would afford a warm and soft bed—they were at supper while the widow was waiting for them in pain and anxiety—and, at last, in cold and dreariness. ...
— The Billow and the Rock • Harriet Martineau
... it well; Do what right and reason tell; Do what wrong and sorrow claim: Conquer sin and cover shame. Do thy little, though it be Dreariness and drudgery; They whom Christ apostles made ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... chairs, and an entirely inadequate square of carpet upon the floor. I have already said that it was a large room, and when I add that it was lighted only by two candles, which stood upon the table in the centre, some idea will be afforded of its general dreariness. ...
— My Strangest Case • Guy Boothby
... where I was used to deposit it. This being secured, there was nothing to detain me; yet I stood and contemplated awhile the furniture and walls of my chamber. I remembered how long this apartment had been a sweet and tranquil asylum; I compared its former state with its present dreariness, and reflected that I now beheld it ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... to Edinburgh; and being as familiar with every cottage, tree, shrub, and whin-bush on the Dunbar and Lauder roads as with the face of an acquaintance, I made choice of the less-frequented path by Longformacus. I always took a secret pleasure in contemplating the dreariness of wild spreading desolation; and, next to looking on the sea when its waves dance to the music of a hurricane, I loved to gaze on the heath-covered wilderness, where the blue horizon only girded its ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume 2 - Historical, Traditional, and Imaginative • Alexander Leighton
... face of Nature in Labrador on a fine day, under date of July 2: "A beautiful day for Labrador. Drew another M. articus. Went on shore, and was most pleased with what I saw. The country, so wild and grand, is of itself enough to interest any one in its wonderful dreariness. Its mossy, grey-clothed rocks, heaped and thrown together as if by chance, in the most fantastical groups imaginable, huge masses hanging on minor ones as if about to roll themselves down from their doubtful-looking situations, into ...
— John James Audubon • John Burroughs
... loved, than continue in that dreadful isolation. He was thoroughly unmanned. "Oh, that Hardy or Ashton were here, or any friend, just to say, 'George Weston, old fellow,' once more; what a weight of dreariness it would remove!" Then he would wonder what was going on at home, whether his mother was plunged in grief, or whether she was saying, "He has brought it all on himself, let him bear it." But George could not reconcile this last thought; he tried hard to cherish it; he felt he ...
— Life in London • Edwin Hodder
... saturated as she still was with Catholic spirituality, into the love of Good, the infinite of heaven. She conceived of charity, service to others, as the true occupation of life; but she cowered in the gloomy dreariness of finding in it no food for the fancy that lay crouching in her heart like an insect at the bottom of a calyx. Meanwhile she sat tranquilly sewing garments for the children of the poor, and listening abstractedly to the grumblings of Monsieur Latournelle when Dumay held ...
— Modeste Mignon • Honore de Balzac
... and with one of his young acquaintances, an American—he called her Francesca—paid many calls. It took the dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way. With a list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel the social debt. They paid calls in every walk of life. His young companion was privileged to see ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... and worshipped as a totem or national deity—that is to say, as a divine being that has the welfare of the Kandh nation especially at heart. It is communed with at home, but more particularly in the wild dreariness of the jungle, where, on the condition that the prayers of its devotees are sufficiently concentrated and in earnest, it confers—as an honour and privilege—the power of transmutation into its own shape. Some idea of its appearance may perhaps be gathered from the following description ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... outbreak of the rebellion became, ere long, like one of those streams that, starting impetuously from its mountain source, flows on awhile clearly and rapidly, and then begins to wander and slacken its pace, till finally it is lost in the dreariness and desolation of some marshy wilderness, and so never reaches its destination, the open sea. There is no people in the world so abused and defrauded as the bulk of the Southern whites. If you pity the oppressed of another race, then pity ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the lieutenant, Fernando's rival, were rowing toward Duck Island fire or six miles away. The island was reached. It was a dismal affair little more than an elevated marsh. When the tide was out on Duck Island, its extended dreariness was potent. Its spongy, low-lying surface, sluggish, inky pools and tortuous sloughs, twisting their slimy way, eel-like, toward the open bay were all hard facts. Occasionally, here and there, could be seen a few green tussocks, with their scant blades, ...
— Sustained honor - The Age of Liberty Established • John R. Musick,
... furled. The jib was kept on, however, to hold us steady. We were now merely breasting the current, and driving on a little with the gusts. Soon it began to rain,—rain and snow together. The dreariness and uncertainty of our situation can hardly be imagined. We did not even know how near we were to the foot of the cliffs, and could merely keep the schooner headed as she had ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... the office of ruler, rather to lie on the grass beside the brook than to take part under the golden ceiling of the rich in emptying his countless dishes. This philosophico-practical tendency is the true ideal essence of the Lucretian poem and is only overlaid, not choked, by all the dreariness of its physical demonstrations. Essentially on this rests its comparative wisdom and truth. The man who with a reverence for his great predecessors and a vehement zeal, to which this century elsewhere knew no parallel, preached ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... where one is served by angels; the Enfer, where one is served by red devils in a Tartarean lighting; the Neant, where one has coffins for tables—than all of which vulgarity has imagined no more joy-killing dreariness, but which caused Fleurette to grip Aristide's hand tight in scared wonderment and Batterby to chuckle exceedingly. They went to the Bal Bullier and to various other balls undreamed of by the tourist, where Fleurette danced with Aristide, as light as an autumn leaf tossed by ...
— The Joyous Adventures of Aristide Pujol • William J. Locke
... through the body of the timid young novice—are surely very finely painted. "I rushed to the shutter, and flung it back: there was no one in the sacristy. I looked into the garden; it was deserted, and the mid-day wind was roaming among the flowers." The dreariness is wonderfully described: only the poor pale boy looking eagerly out from the window of the sacristy, and the hot mid-day wind walking in the solitary garden. How skilfully is each of these little strokes dashed in, and how well do all together combine ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... by a narrow path along the riverside and through a cleft in the rocks. The northern side of this narrow ravine, being in some measure exposed to the southern sun, is clothed with woods; the southern is a great wall of bare rock rising in terraces, or giant steps, that might well suggest the dreariness and desolation of a landscape in the moon. This barren expanse of naked rock is called the Szekler Stone, and was formerly surmounted by the castle of a Hungarian vice-voivode. Its ruins are still to be seen there. The lower ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai
... children should so vindictively hate her. She could not have seen it as anything but hatred, being entirely ignorant of children and the strange forces to whose power they are subject, and she must have shivered in her bedroom at the dreariness and terror of the prospect before her. Many, many times she must have resolved not to be beaten, and many, many times she must have admitted herself beaten as badly as any ...
— Jeremy • Hugh Walpole
... rulers and people—the mad caprices and horrid deeds of the Romanoffs, who, in centuries gone by, surpassed in restless melancholy and atrocity the insane Caesars, and were more to be pitied, as well as detested, than Tiberius or Nero—the nature of the landscape, the waste of steppes, the dreariness of winter, and the loneliness of summer—the barbaric extravagance of aristocratic life—the red tape, extortion, and cruelty of officers—the sublime patience of the common people—the devotion of the enduring, starving multitude to the Tsar—all ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... follow a circuitous route so as to throw possible pursuers off the scent. There was no disobeying the orders of the chief, so on he trudged, looking neither to right nor left, up one street, down another, now crossing an empty lot, now darting through a narrow alley, through the wastes and dreariness of Bronxville. ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... to whom the grief was more new, could not sleep. Every minute the pain of realization grew keener. Here she was in England once more, this was the journey she had so often thought of and planned. This was going home. Oh, the dreariness of the reality when compared with those bright expectations. And yet it was neither this thought nor the actual fact of her mother's death which first brought the tears ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... which the farmers received from the movement was probably even more important than any direct political or economic results. It is difficult for the present generation to form any conception of the dreariness and dullness of farm life half a century ago. Especially in the West, where farms were large, opportunities for social intercourse were few, and weeks might pass without the farmer seeing any but his nearest neighbors. For his wife existence was even more drear. She went to the market town ...
— The Agrarian Crusade - A Chronicle of the Farmer in Politics • Solon J. Buck
... disappeared, and waste places had become cultivated fields; and to complete the work of enchantment the very season itself seemed changed. In the rosy dawn of a summer's morning he had left the monastery of Innisfallen, and he now felt in every sight and sound the dreariness of winter; the hard ground was covered with withered leaves; icicles depended from leafless branches; he heard the sweet low note of the robin, who familiarly approached him; and he felt his fingers numbed by the nipping frost. Father Cuddy found it rather difficult ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... the tone of nature, after a time a new and relishful pleasure arises. The month formed by the last fortnight of November and the first two weeks of December, is, to me, the saddest of the year. It most nearly produces the sense of desolateness and dreariness of any portion ...
— Sanders' Union Fourth Reader • Charles W. Sanders
... to go without you. You do not understand—but trust me, Jacqueline; trust me, trust me!" He took her in his arms. "Come, now! It is twilight, and there's a dreariness in these fallen leaves. Come indoors to the fire and the light, and the books and the harp. Deb ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... rooms looked desolate. Even the carpets were gone, and the unstained boards in the middle seemed suggestive of peculiar dreariness. It was really very difficult to believe that these were the rooms where he and Frank had had such pleasant times—little friendly bridge-parties, and dinners, and absurd theatricals, in which Frank ...
— None Other Gods • Robert Hugh Benson
... and amused if not contemptuous. He was but a farmer—little more, indeed, than a shepherd, yet something in his air and all his speech showed him superior to his circumstances. He was a god-send to her dreariness in this place Edinburgh and the noisy world had made her fretful of, and she was in the ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... enjoyed the warmth of the southern latitudes through which our good ship ploughed her way, Mick and I could not help contrasting our surroundings with those of the poor folk at home shivering in all the dreariness of an English mid- winter, when, if it isn't freezing or snowing or hailing, it is bound to be raining—a cold, raw, nasty sort of rain—and damp and foggy and dirty, at all events, such being the pleasurable ...
— Young Tom Bowling - The Boys of the British Navy • J.C. Hutcheson
... The dreariness of these plains, an endless level without a mound, without a tree! And you felt that even beyond the horizon they still stretched away as flat as ever; only the monotony of the landscape was emphasized by the raging fury of the tempestuous winds, sweeping ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... I love lentils and cold water. At other times I must drink absinthe, and hang the night hours with scarlet embroideries. I must have music, and the sins that march to music. There are moments when I desire squalor, sinister, mean surroundings, dreariness, and misery. The great unwashed mood is upon me. Then I go out from luxury. The mind has its West End and its Whitechapel. The thoughts sit in the Park sometimes, but sometimes they go slumming. They enter ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... religious truth. The beauties and subtleties of artistic expression had little charm for him, nor did he set much store by the graces. The most conspicuous illustration of the absence of all idea of art in Comenius is to be found in his school drama. The unprofitable dreariness of that production would make a reader sick were he not relieved by a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... yet in the way of slums it was immemorially ancient at the same time, as if the members of old races that had come to fill it had brought with them all the grime, all the dreariness of generations of bitter living. And it was this, rather than the marvelous transformation of the sandy field which Adelle dimly remembered, that seized hold of her. How could people live so thickly together, swarm like flies in so many identical ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... should have seen nothing more; but we obtained, at last, all we wanted. We passed through the vault and passages I have described, and thoroughly examined the cell. No words can convey a sense of its dreariness. I have exaggerated nothing—the dim light, the rotten floor, shining like a pond, the drip of water, the falling flakes of ice, were all there. The stove was removed; but we ...
— The Hour and the Man - An Historical Romance • Harriet Martineau
... lie, willing to steal. What impression such a city as Chicago or Pittsburgh might have made upon some denizen of those cathedral-crowned feudal cities of the past we do not know. He would certainly have been amazed at its giant energy, and probably revolted at its grimy dreariness. We are wont to pity the mediaeval man for the dirt he lived in, even while smoke greys our sky and dirt permeates the very air we breathe: we think of castles as grim and cathedrals as dim, but they were beautiful and gay with color ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... now arrived at the most interesting point to an explorer. From Cairo to within a few miles south of Gozerajup stretched the unbroken desert through which we had toiled from Korosko, and which had so firmly impressed its dreariness upon the mind that nothing but desert had been expected: we had learned to be content in a world of hot sand, rocks, and pebbles; but we had arrived upon the limit; the curious landmark of Gozerajup was an everlasting beacon that marked the frontier ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... of the customs; their facetious tricks on the too vigilant among the magistrates; and the real luxury in which, with all their life of hardship, they found opportunities of indulging, would have edified a modern tour writer, and possibly relieved even the dreariness of a county historian. Among other matters too, he let out, that he paid me a prodigious compliment in accompanying me, as this night's smuggling was one of the grand exploits of the year; and casting a "longing, lingering look, behind," where a distant ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... language of the theatre as the "comic business." Perhaps experience proved that in point of fact "the fun" did not set in at the time stated; at any rate the appearance of harlequin and clown is now regarded by many of the spectators as a signal for the certain commencement of dreariness, and as a notice to quit their seats. The pantomime Kemble had in contemplation, however, was of the fashion Leigh Hunt looked back upon regretfully. Harlequin was to enter almost in the first scene. "I have hit on nothing I can think of better," writes ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... and no penance. She abandoned herself with a weak luxury to the respite from suffering and anxiety; she made herself the good comrade of the young man whom perhaps she even tempted to flatter her farther and farther out of the dreariness in which she had dwelt; and if any woful current of feeling swept beneath, she would not fathom it, but resolutely floated, as one may at such times, on the surface. They laughed together and jested; they talked in the gay idleness of such ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... hills, The beacon on the summit, and, more near, 250 A girl, who bore a pitcher on her head, And seemed with difficult steps to force her way Against the blowing wind. It was, in truth, An ordinary sight; but I should need Colours and words that are unknown to man, 255 To paint the visionary dreariness Which, while I looked all round for my lost guide, Invested moorland waste, and naked pool, The beacon crowning the lone eminence, The female and her garments vexed and tossed 260 By the strong wind. When, in the blessed hours Of early love, the loved one ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth
... stirred amongst the branches, and the moisture which hung upon them descended in little showers. From below, the dull roar of the sea came up to them in a muffled undertone, like a melancholy background to the slighter sound. There was an indescribable dreariness about it all which quickened the acute agony of ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... methods of daily living were too healthy and simple, and his conscience too clear;—but on this particular night he was visited by an impression rather than a dream,—the impression of a lonely, and terrifying dreariness, as though the whole world were suddenly emptied of life and left like a hollow shell on the shores of time. Gradually this first sense of utter and unspeakable loss changed into a startled consciousness of fear;—some awful transformation of things familiar was about to be consummated;—and ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... here give a little thought to the dark dreariness of their surroundings. This party was not so very far north of Cape Evans, and their winter was only about three weeks shorter if measured by the sun's absence below the horizon—the contrast between the "palace" ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... thousands come to Burcliff to enjoy a holiday which, whether of days or of weeks, had looked short to the labor weary when first they came, and was growing shorter and shorter, while the days that composed it grew longer and longer by the frightful vitality of dreariness. Especially to those of them who hated work, a day like this, wrapping them in a blanket of fog, whence the water was every now and then squeezed down upon them in the wettest of all rains, seemed a huge bite snatched by that vague enemy against whom the ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... servants to stay on for the death, in the hope of picking up something worth having in the general confusion. There was something strange in the way the pair lived, lonely and unloved in their ancient home, amidst a crowd of ever-changing attendants, who succumbed one by one to the awful dreariness of the isolated life, and went away to give place to others, who, in their turn would give it up after six months or a year. And yet neither Greifenstein nor Clara ...
— Greifenstein • F. Marion Crawford
... to say to any of them, 'Here, let us change places awhile. Here is my latch-key, my cheque-book, my joy and my leisure. Use them as long as you will. Quick, let us change clothes, and let me take my share of the world's dreariness and pain'! ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne
... adventurer. He is reluctant to go anywhere without a copy of the rules, a guarantee of support, and a regular pension. His outlook is as prosaic as General von Bernhardi's or General von der Golt's own, and that is saying a great deal. In all the German political treatises there is an immeasurable dreariness. They lay down rules for life, and if they be asked what makes such a life worth living they are without any hint of an answer. Their world is a workhouse, tyrannically ordered, ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... herself from Dora's hold, she turned on her side, put both her thin hands under her cheek, and lay staring at the window with a look which had a certain dreariness in it. ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... crow upon the stack, And other birds all black, While bleak November's frowning wearily; And the black cloud's dropping rain, Till the floods hide half the plain, And everything is dreariness to me. ...
— Life and Remains of John Clare - "The Northamptonshire Peasant Poet" • J. L. Cherry
... with young Anna Trevanion, the companion of her lessons and her sports. They could not have borne to see her, so lovely in outward form, and with a mind so full of intelligence, condemned either to the dreariness of a life without companionship, or to the degradation of association with the rude and uncultivated. That this feeling was wholly unconnected with any false views of their own position, or vain estimation ...
— Evenings at Donaldson Manor - Or, The Christmas Guest • Maria J. McIntosh
... furnished as a library. He glanced round it as he stood on the hearth-rug, awaiting his host, and was chiefly struck by the general atmosphere of dreariness that pervaded it. Its sombre oak furniture seemed to absorb instead of reflecting the light. There was a large oil-painting above the fireplace, and after a few seconds he turned his head and saw it. It was the portrait of ...
— The Tidal Wave and Other Stories • Ethel May Dell
... they halted at a lonely log-house which served as a sort of inn or resting-place, the proprietor finding compensation for the dreariness of his situation in the large profit derived from an illegal but thriving traffic in liquor. A more unkempt, unattractive establishment could hardly be imagined, and if rumour was to be relied upon, it had good reason to be haunted by more than one ...
— The Young Woodsman - Life in the Forests of Canada • J. McDonald Oxley
... a fidelity worthy of Holbein; the monkey profile of the witch crouching near the lantern, that repulsive creature in spectacles—Goya spectacles; the pattern hasn't varied since his days—these ladies and their companions, especially that anonymous one in a hood, coupled with the desperate dreariness of the background, a country dry and hard as a volcanic cinder, make a formidable ensemble. Zuloaga relates that the beldames screeched and fought in his studio when he posed them. You exclaim while ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... followed night, and night had followed day monotonously, without a change in the heartbreaking dreariness ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... of its own accord. Platt again growled, and clenched his fist at her. He probably thought that she had again broken a charm for which he had paid money. She spoke kindly and cheerfully, again and again; but he was either deaf or too ill to understand. To relieve the sense of dreariness, she went to work again. She thoroughly cleansed the pail, and filled it afresh from the brook, looking anxiously down the lane for the approach of some human creature, and then applied herself to rubbing the bedstead as dry and clean as she could, ...
— Deerbrook • Harriet Martineau
... realize that he was hungry. He went down into Fifty-second Street, where it was so cold that he could scarcely see; the moisture froze on his lashes and in the corners of his lips. Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north, settling upon the thin and cheerless street, where black bundled figures blacker still against the night, moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the shrieking wind, sliding ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... to emotional bias. The principle which she had demanded from her husband in their last conversation she put into practice. Hepsie ruled the house very much as if it were her own. Elizabeth knew from experience the dreariness of housework where all individuality is denied the worker. Hepsie came and went as the exigencies of the work permitted, and there was always a horse provided for her journeys away from the place; in fact, Hepsie was much ...
— The Wind Before the Dawn • Dell H. Munger
... now freed from all embarrassment, and being sought in marriage by many distinguished persons resolved to remain a widow no longer. The dreariness of her solitary life she might have borne, but her bodily infirmities had become intolerable. This chaste and saintly lady, after so many years of blameless widowhood, without even a breath of scandal, owing to ...
— The Apologia and Florida of Apuleius of Madaura • Lucius Apuleius
... I ever lost the smell of the damp straw in which I was packed—like game—and forwarded, carriage paid, to the Cross Keys, Wood-street, Cheapside, London? There was no other inside passenger, and I consumed my sandwiches in solitude and dreariness, and it rained hard all the way, and I thought life sloppier than I ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... he sprang up, and opened the door of his cell. A dim lamp faintly illuminated the long vaulted galleries, and the monks, like shadows, were gliding to midnight prayer. In the dreariness of the night, with the solemn words sounding in his ear like a warning knell, he came to the satisfactory conclusion that all was vanity, and to the determination that the very next day he would retire ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... an older face than last evening's on the pillow, with harder lines about the mouth, and with a wearier droop of the eyelids. The voice, too, that answered her good morning, had a kind of echoing dreariness in it. But such traces are not patent to many eyes or ears, and Nelly did not ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... By that time both of them would have grown old and set in their far separate ways, and even if he ever heard that she was free he would have become wiser and changed his mind. So there was no end to this thing, no awakening and disillusioning, none of the disappointment and dreariness which is likely to attend the translating of a dream into work-a-day life. For that reason it should have been possible to be content, even with the thing which stood between her and realisation—sometimes it almost was, at least she persuaded herself so. At others there ...
— The Good Comrade • Una L. Silberrad
... had left for the dull atmosphere and steaming fogs of the metropolis. They told a sad tale of old associations broken, and old loves forsworn; of days of comfort and prosperity exchanged for the dreariness of poverty; and freedom, love, and happiness, all snapped asunder for the leaden chain of suffering to be forged instead. One could not help thinking of all those two hapless people must have gone through before they could have summoned courage to leave their own dear ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 451 - Volume 18, New Series, August 21, 1852 • Various
... soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium: the bitter lapse into every-day life, the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart, an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.... It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... fortnight's uneventful dreariness with his platoon, Dunshie joined the machine-gunners, because he had heard rumours that these were conveyed to and from their labours in limbered waggons. But he had been misinformed. It was the guns ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... but lay all day long on his sofa, fidgeting his nurse extremely—while, in her intense terror lest he might die, she fidgeted him still more. At last, seeing he really was getting well, she left him to himself—which he was most glad of, in spite of his dullness and dreariness. There he ...
— The Little Lame Prince - And: The Invisible Prince; Prince Cherry; The Prince With The Nose - The Frog-Prince; Clever Alice • Miss Mulock—Pseudonym of Maria Dinah Craik
... of the first beams upon trees, hills, spires, and house-tops, to give it life and spirit. There is no scenery. But, although the actual rise of the sun at sea is not so beautiful, yet nothing will compare for melancholy and dreariness with the early breaking of day upon "Old Ocean's gray ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... be always gay;"[2256] and he remarks that he must be so because, in France, such is the tone of society and the only mode of pleasing the ladies, the sovereigns of society and the arbiters of good taste. Add to this the absence of the causes which produce modern dreariness, and which convert the sky above our heads into one of leaden gloom. There was no laborious, forced work in those days, no furious competition, no uncertain careers, no infinite perspectives. Ranks were clearly defined, ambitions ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... that!" she cried. "Don't say you are ashamed of it. Do you suppose I do not understand the dreariness it has been for you? Don't you know that I see it is a horror to you, that it brings back your struggle with those beasts in the dark, and revivifies all your suffering, merely to think of it?" Her turns and sudden contradictions left him tangled in a maze; he could not follow, ...
— The Gentleman From Indiana • Booth Tarkington
... Iphigenia; Athalie, as performed before Louis Quatorze, by the young ladies of St. Cyr, and so on. Well, I confess there are circumstances under which even Racine might become a bore; and Telemaque has long been a synonym for dreariness and dejection of mind. You have not seen Rachel? No, I suppose not. She was a great creature, and conjured the dry bones into living breathing flesh. And Madame Marot's establishment, where you were so hardly treated, is a school, ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... dissipated the clouds. The stars came out in all their glory, and the night was calm and bright, and all we had to try our patience was a little frost. And there I slept; and there I often awoke; and in my intervals of wakefulness I gazed on the magnificence of the outspread skies, and mused on the dreariness of the surrounding wilderness, and thought of the stirring scenes through which I had passed in days gone by, and of the strange and death-like silent one in which I then was placed. "And what will the future be?" said I. "And here is my son; in ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... the eldest of Cornelia's jewels, was sent in the year 137 to join the Roman army in Spain. As he went through Etruria, which, as every one knew, had been a thickly peopled, fertile country in old times, he was shocked to see its dreariness and desolation. Instead of farms and vineyards, there were great bare spaces of land, where sheep, kids, or goats were feeding. These vast tracts belonged to Romans, who kept slaves to attend to the flocks; while all the corn ...
— Young Folks' History of Rome • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... apparently existed. Fronting again to the north he looked upon the same grim barrenness, only that far off, against the lighter background of distant sky, there was visible a faint blur, a bluish haze, which he believed to be the distant sand dunes bordering the Arkansas. The intense dreariness of it all left a feeling of depression. His eyes turned and regarded the girl riding silently beside him. The same look of depression was visible upon her face, and she was gazing off into the dull distance with lack-lustre ...
— Keith of the Border • Randall Parrish
... storm-clouds, made the evening grow dark earlier than is usual in northern latitudes. The heavy rumbling of the wretched vehicle, the cramped position in which they were obliged to sit, the fatigue of a long day's walking without rest or refreshment, the dreariness of the road and chill aspect of the weather, combined to make this journey as miserable a one as it well could be. Yet it was only the very beginning of the troubles Elsie had brought upon ...
— Little Folks - A Magazine for the Young (Date of issue unknown) • Various
... Not for its dreariness, though it is very dreary. Not for its dampness, though it is very damp. Nor for its desolate condition, though it is as desolate and neglected as house can be. But chiefly for the unaccountable nightmares ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... in the heart or in the home. Nor was it found in these resources; if the wild elation might be mistaken for happiness while it lasted, it was brief in each instance, and it subsided in an aggravated dreariness ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster
... close affinity for horses and sawdust? I have attempted to account for it by an elaborate stretching of the theory of chemical affinities. People crack peanuts at the CIRCUS, because the cracking of peanuts in its prosaic dreariness is in harmony with the cracking of jokes by the dreary clown. The clown himself is always hoarse, obviously because of his intimate association with the feats of horsemanship. Here are two cases in which the theory of affinities clearly applies. Now, can we not go further, and find some connection ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various
... with his own old glorious faith, his Princess, dazzling meteor illuminating the murky streets—dear God! what would not have been the joy of battle during the past week, what would not have been the intense thrill, the living of a thousand lives in these few hours of suspense now so dull with dreariness and pain! He sat apart, his legs crossed, a hand over his eyes. Wilson and his men, puzzled by his apparent apathy, left him alone. It is not much use addressing a mute and wooden idol, no ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke
... our occupations, such the amusements, such the hopes and fears of our winter quarters off Griffith's Island; and looking back now at that period, we happily forget its dreariness, and recollect only its brighter moments—the fast friendship there formed for many, the respect ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... them by abstinence from all the joys of life? Ah! accursed be he who first had the had courage to attach ridicule to that name of "old maid," which recalls so many images of grievous deception, of dreariness, and of abandonment! Accursed be he who can find a subject for sarcasm in involuntary misfortune, and who can crown gray ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... ended. But oh, the emptiness of the morrow! Life without a crime, without a single noble sentiment to brighten it!—no comic uncles, no creamy angels! Oh, the barrenness and dreariness of life! Even my mother at moments ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... of the detectives, the "dope-fiends," the hard business men, the heroic boys and lovely girls that people most American short stories. As for variety,— the Russian does not handle numerous themes. He is obsessed with the dreariness of life, and his obsession is only occasionally lifted; he has no room to wander widely through human nature. And yet his work gives an impression of variety that the American magazine never attains. He is free to be various. When the mood of gloom is off him, he experiments at will, and often ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... sandbanks. 'Rottum—this queer little one—it has only one house on it—is the most easterly Dutch island, and the mainland of Holland ends here, opposite it, at the Ems River'—indicating a dismal cavity in the coast, sown with names suggestive of mud, and wrecks, and dreariness. ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... streets that night with a greater zest in life than he had ever known before. Some thing whispered insistently to his fancy that dreariness was a thing of the past; he did not have to whistle to keep up his spirits. They were soaring ...
— Truxton King - A Story of Graustark • George Barr McCutcheon
... laden with soot and redolent of many blended odors, but after the fusty smell of the shop it was almost health-giving. In the large public-house opposite, with its dirty windows and faded signboards, the gas was already being lit, which should change it from its daylight dreariness to a ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... where Montezuma Moggs resided with his family—Mrs. Moggs and five juveniles of that name and race—a shop of the miscellaneous order, in which was offered for sale a little, but a very little, of any thing, and every thing—one of those distressed looking shops which bring a sensation of dreariness over the mind, and which cause a sinking of the heart before you have time to ask why you are saddened—a frail and feeble barrier it seems against penury and famine, to yield at the first approach ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various
... of the Declaration the Under-secretary announced in the House that the Russians were moving down the Baltic, the French toward the Straits: and the next morning dawned with the dreariness of last mornings and days. However, soon after 1 P.M., the Lord of the Sea landed at Bristol, his yacht being one of the swiftest things afloat; there heard the known facts; and thence wired to Beech's London house, to the London Foreign Office, to Cadiz and to Frederikshavn, where he had wireless ...
— The Lord of the Sea • M. P. Shiel
... be drowned; neither assuredly did I. But it was not fear so much as a feeling of dreariness and disappointment that had come over me, the sudden feeling that I was going not to adventure, but to death; that here was not romance, but an end—a disenchanted surprise that it should soon be ...
— Romance • Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
... half an hour later, found Elfrida finishing her coffee. Out-of-doors the world was gray, the little square windows were beaten with rain. Inside the dreariness was redeemed to the extent of a breath, a suggestion. An essence came out of the pictures and the trappings, and blended itself with the lingering fragrance of the joss-sticks and the roses and the cigarettes in a delightful manner. The room was almost warm with it. It seemed ...
— A Daughter of To-Day • Sara Jeannette Duncan (aka Mrs. Everard Cotes)
... were induced to risk their money upon such representations?* Oh, the dreariness, the loneliness, of that first night at anchor in the Bay of Biscay! The misgivings that filled my heart! Who was right? What should I find over there? Surely these statesmen, capitalists, journalists, legislators, should know ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... out of my book all the things, so far as I can, which bring me mere trouble and heaviness; cares and anxieties and bodily pains and dreariness and unkind thoughts and anger, and all uncleanness. I cannot tell why our life should be so sadly bound up with these matters; the only comfort is that even out of this dark and heavy soil beautiful flowers sometimes spring. ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... discerned hills, shrubberies, and gardens in the vicinity of the town, the appearance of which is not calculated to delight the traveller, for a large desert region of sand girdles both city and gardens, giving an air of dreariness to the ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... it extends a desolate plain of lava that once must have boiled up red-hot from some distant gateway of hell, and fallen hissing into the sea. No tree or bush relieves the dreariness of the landscape, and the mountains are too distant to serve as a background to the buildings; but before the door of each merchant's house facing the sea, there flies a gay little pennon; and as you walk along the silent streets, ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)
... tried to spare her trouble and annoyance, how much irritability and peevishness, and sense of constant naughtiness, would have been prevented! And it was that feeling of being always naughty that was what had become the real dreariness of Kate's present home, and was far worse than the music, the battledore, or even ...
— Countess Kate • Charlotte M. Yonge
... answered. "Why should we? It's just the same being here as being anywhere else." He looked at me with an infinity of dreariness in his face. ...
— Nonsense Novels • Stephen Leacock
... October, the season when Cairnforth is least beautiful; for the thick woods about it make the always damp atmosphere heavy with "the moist, rich smell of the rotting leaves," and the roads lying deep in mud, and the low shore hung with constant mists, give a general impression of dreariness. The far-away hills vanish entirely for days together, and the loch itself takes a leaden hue, as if it never could be blue again. You can hardly believe that the sun will ever again shine out upon it; the white waves rise, the mountains reappear, and the whole ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... place and spent a great deal of the afternoon cleaning off the rust. Then he began work on a rough block of stone which lay near and was greatly gratified at the result of his labors. So the afternoon slipped away without the dreariness ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... turning-point in Oscar Wilde's career. So long as the sunny weather lasted and friends came to visit him from time to time Oscar was content to live in the Chalet Bourgeat; but when the days began to draw in and the weather became unsettled, the dreariness of a life passed in solitude, indoors, and without a library became insupportable. He was being drawn in two opposite directions. I did not know it at the time; indeed he only told me about it months later when ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris
... by name. At last Miss Leaf remembered one, which her father used to go to, on his frequent journeys to London, and whence, indeed, he had been brought home to die. And though all the recollections about it were sad enough, still it felt less strange than the rest, in this dreariness of London. So she proposed going ...
— Mistress and Maid • Dinah Craik (aka: Miss Mulock)
... on board, and various opinions pronounced. The determination of our captain had at least this good effect; it gave every one something to think and talk about, made a break in our life, and diverted our minds from the monotonous dreariness of the prospect before us. Having made a fair wind of it, we were going off at a good rate, and leaving the thickest of the ice behind us. This, at ...
— Two Years Before the Mast • Richard Henry Dana
... dullness, but take to it a little in the shooting season, when guns are heard in the plantations, and a few scattered beaters and keepers wait at the old places of appointment for low-spirited twos and threes of cousins. The debilitated cousin, more debilitated by the dreariness of the place, gets into a fearful state of depression, groaning under penitential sofa-pillows in his gunless hours and protesting that such fernal ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... And worst of all, it has not been a life used up in the service of some adored object, or sacrificed to any future hope. Its sufferings will have been vain, its renunciations useless, its sacrifices gratuitous, its dreariness without reward.... No, I am wrong; it will have had its secret treasure, its sweetness, its reward. It will have inspired a few affections of great price; it will have given joy to a few souls; its hidden existence will have had some value. Besides, if in itself ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... almost spent, we entered a wood, a dismal place where a mournful wind stirred, where trees dripped upon me and wet leaves brushed my face like ghostly fingers, while rain-sodden underbrush and bracken clung about my wearied limbs. Through this clammy dreariness I followed my tireless companion until suddenly his dim form vanished and I was groping amid damp leaves; but through this dense thicket came his hand to seize and drag me on until I found myself in ...
— Peregrine's Progress • Jeffery Farnol
... very cheerful, and seemed to enjoy everything; but a kind of dreariness came over me, and I began comparing the loveliness of the summer evening with the cold misty blank that seemed to make up my future. My wretchedness grew greater and greater. The very colours of the flowers, the blue of the sky, the sleep of the water, seemed to push us ...
— Adela Cathcart, Vol. 1 • George MacDonald
... "Yakonwita, Yakonwita!" Oh, the dreariness that strains Through the voice that calling, quivers, till a whisper but remains, "Yakonwita, Yakonwita, I am ...
— Flint and Feather • E. Pauline Johnson
... depressing, but it is very beautiful; at least if your taste includes an appreciation of what is wild, magnificent, and sombre. Oppressed you must be, even if you are an artist, by its bleakness and its dreariness, its lonely lakes reflecting a dull, grey sky, its desolate boglands, its solitary chapels, its wretched cabins perched on hillsides that are very wildernesses of rocks. But for cloud effects, for wonderful shadows, for fantastic and unbelievable sunsets, when the mountains are ...
— Penelope's Irish Experiences • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... rude and wild construction, its stone floor and vaulted roof, and even its yawning and dark recesses for the different operations which, in other days, had made it a scene of busy cheerfulness, now gave it a look of dreariness in the extreme. I could have easily imagined it to be a chamber of the Inquisition. But men in my circumstances have not much time for the work of fancy; and I was instantly called on for my name, and business in France. I had ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXLII. Vol. LV. April, 1844 • Various
... leafless trees in the avenues swayed and creaked dismally. The appearance of the streets was chill and depressing. Craven shivered. He thought of the warmth and sunshine that he had left in Japan. The dreariness of the present outlook contrasted sufficiently with the gay smiling landscape, the riotous wealth of colour, and the scent-laden air of the land of his recollections. A feeling almost of nostalgia came to him. But with the thought ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... English eye, wild and badly kept. The house had been built within the last seventy or eighty years. Outside, it was as bare of all ornament as a factory, and as gloomily heavy in effect as a prison. Inside, the deadly dreariness, the close, oppressive solitude of a deserted dwelling wearied the eye and weighed on the mind, from the roof to the basement. The house had been shut up since the time of the Trial. A lonely old couple, man and wife, had the keys and the charge of it. The man shook ...
— The Law and the Lady • Wilkie Collins
... been pitching like a ship at sea through the desert dreariness for about an hour, when Mary Carmichael suddenly became conscious that the prods she had been receiving from time to time in her back were not due either to their manner of locomotion or to the freight carried. Clinging to two barrels, she waited for the next lurch of the wagon to shake her ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... distance from Kant's; you must refute your rival's view by identifying it with Protagoras's. Thus does all spontaneity of thought, all freshness of conception, get destroyed. Everything you touch is shopworn. The over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is appalling. It comes from too much following of german models and manners. Let me fervently express the hope that in this country you will hark back to the more humane ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... have darkened man's history, a superstition which, though slowly dying, is not yet, owing to its joyless use as a "business asset," altogether dead, has, ever since it was spawned in Scotland and Geneva, made cruel war upon every childish instinct in us and oppressed with unspeakable dreariness the lives of generations of children, it must be regarded as one of the happiest signs of the times that the double renaissance of Catholic Faith and Pagan Freedom now abroad among us, has brought the "Child in the House" into the clear sunlight of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... immediately began to send him letters which brought home to him the extent of her passion; and she hinted at jealousy in the words, "If you are very happy, it is ill-natured of you not to tell me so, except 'tis what is inconsistent with my own." In his reply Swift dwelt upon the dreariness of his surroundings at Laracor, and reminded her that he had said he would endeavour to forget everything in England, and would write as ...
— The Journal to Stella • Jonathan Swift
... Barberini family, not French]) seems to be quartered, while no doubt princes have magnificent domiciles above. Be it palace or whatever other dwelling, the inmates climb through rubbish often to the comforts, such as they may be, that await them above. I vainly try to get down upon paper the dreariness, the ugliness, shabbiness, un-home-likeness of a Roman street. It is also to be said that you cannot go far in any direction without coming to a piazza, which is sometimes little more than a widening and enlarging of the dingy street, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... scenic inhospitality, the very magnitude of which overpowered me. I have said it was cold; but there hung over the estate of Eastover an iciness that brought with it a quickening, a sickening of the heart, and a dreariness that, whilst being depressing in the extreme, was, withal, sublime. Sublime and mysterious; mysterious and insoluble. A thousand fancies swarmed through my mind; yet I could grapple with none; and I was loth to acknowledge that, although there ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... were mothers, daughters, and wives of soldiers. Their former stately grace had vanished from the women; they were weather-worn and bowed with labour too heavy for their strength, too long for their endurance; they were weak from lack of fit human food, from lack of hope, and the dreariness of the outlook, the ever gray spiritual horizon; they were numbed with the cold that has ceased to be felt, the deadening sense of life as a weight to be borne, not a strength to rejoice in. But they were not abject yet; there was ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald |
