"Meagre" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a love of hasty generalization, but by a divine instinct, a dialectical enthusiasm, in which the human faculties seemed to yearn for enlargement. We know that 'being' is only the verb of existence, the copula, the most general symbol of relation, the first and most meagre of abstractions; but to some of the ancient philosophers this little word appeared to attain divine proportions, and to comprehend all truth. Being or essence, and similar words, represented to them a supreme or divine being, in which they thought that they ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... in the prison was a Frenchman, though probably the most remarkable. He was about sixty years of age, of the middle stature, but thin and meagre, like most of his countrymen; he had a villainously-formed head, according to all the rules of craniology, and his features were full of evil expression. He wore no hat, and his clothes, though in appearance nearly new, were of the coarsest description. He generally ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... considerable power. The shock of Frederic's military successes made him suddenly drop the pen with which he had been inditing Anacreontics, and weak, rhymeless Horatian moods. His grenadier-songs, though often meagre and inflated, and marked with the literary vices of the time, do still account for the great fame which they acquired, as they went marching with the finest army that Europe ever saw. Here is ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... all men, dying rich—actually rich. The professor pulls his beard, and involuntarily glances round the somewhat meagre apartment, that not all his learning, not all his success in the scientific world—and it has been not unnoteworthy, so far—has enabled him to improve upon. It has helped him to live, no doubt, ...
— A Little Rebel • Mrs. Hungerford
... Cases was busily employed, and obtained a sight of his journal, with which he was not displeased. He, however, noticed that some of the military details and anecdotes gave but a meagre idea of the subject of war: This first led to the proposal of his writing his own Memoirs. At length the Emperor came to a determination, and on Saturday, the 9th of September he called his secretary into his cabin and dictated to him some particulars of the siege of ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... hanging in clusters forty or fifty feet skyward. We had often read of the fan-palm, but they are much more curious to see than to read about, being here presented in their most thriving aspect. The California specimens are quite meagre and unsatisfactory in comparison with those grown so near the equator. Here the tree springs up in the exact shape of an outspread feather-fan, as though it were artificially trained, and reaches the height ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... any very great stretch of imagination we can picture to ourselves this man as belonging to one of the most primitive types of our race, having little occasion to use a vocabulary—save of a most meagre order; and indeed his language would embody only a supply of words just expressive of his few simple wants. Without daring to compare primitive culture with modern advancement, this prototype's appetites would have been possibly served for the greater part by sign-language, and the use of a ...
— A History of Nursery Rhymes • Percy B. Green
... not to inquire what is said of his performances in the coffee-houses, where the Wits gathered under the presidency of Addison or Swift. The professional critic has appeared who will make it his regular business to give an account of all new books, and though his reviews are still comparatively meagre and apt to be mere analyses, it is implied that a kind of public opinion is growing up which will decide upon his merits, and upon which his success or failure will depend. That means again that the readers to ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... and dark room, an old woman, ugly and dark too, sat listening to the wind and rain, and crouching over a meagre fire. More constant to the last-named occupation than the first, she never changed her attitude, unless, when any stray drops of rain fell hissing on the smouldering embers, to raise her head with an awakened attention ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... of Colenso Sir Redvers Buller's telegraphic despatch, though it probably does the commander less justice than he would have received at the hands of any other narrator, gives an authoritative if meagre account. The attack seems to have been planned rather as a reconnaissance in force, to be followed up in case it should reveal possibilities of victory, than as a determined effort on which everything ...
— Lessons of the War • Spenser Wilkinson
... spauld," (iron-plates on his shoulder,) his rusted spurs, and his long lance. An iron skull-cap, none of the brightest, bore for distinction a sprig of the holly, which was Avenel's badge. A long two-edged straight sword, having a handle made of polished oak, hung down by his side. The meagre condition of his horse, and the wild and emaciated look of the rider, showed their occupation could not be accounted an easy or a thriving one. He saluted Dame Glendinning with little courtesy, and the monk with less; for the growing, disrespect to ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... little after six o'clock—a fine morning—eight miles to Killin—the river Dochart always on our left. The face of the country not very interesting, though not unpleasing, reminding us of some of the vales of the north of England, though meagre, nipped-up, or shrivelled compared with them. There were rocks, and rocky knolls, as about Grasmere and Wytheburn, and copses, but of a starveling growth; the cultivated ground poor. Within a mile or two of Killin the land was better cultivated, and, looking down the vale, we had a view of Loch ...
— Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland A.D. 1803 • Dorothy Wordsworth
... Retrospect of the Past. Meagre it has necessarily been, though occupying more of your time than I could have wished, but the number of subjects demanding reference must be ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... is a bag of bones in a balloon; she can machine herself into a wasp; but a fine young woman like you, with flesh and muscle, must kill yourself three or four times before you can make your body as meagre, hideous, angular, and unnatural as Vivian's. But all you ladies are mono-maniacs; one might as well talk sense to a gorilla. It brought you to the edge of the grave. I saved you. Yet you could go and—God grant me patience. So I suppose these unprincipled ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... said Tommy, when one of the boys bewailed the meagre celebration, "never mind, shipmate. There's a good time coming when we can whoop 'er up for Old Glory as much as we please. Then we'll make up for to-day. We can't expect to do much ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... entire professional life, was at the capital of the State. He was, at the time mentioned, in general practice as a lawyer and a regular attendant upon the neighboring courts. His early opportunities for education were meagre indeed. He had been a student of men, rather than of books. He was, in the most expressive sense, "of the people,"—the people as they then ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson
... Farther on, again, you come on families, sometimes three generations huddling together on a six-foot straw mat. A mother trying to feed a child from her half-dry breasts tells you quietly that it is no use, since the meagre fare she is already getting does not make sustenance enough for her, let alone her child. Yet everything possible is being done to feed them. All the able-bodied converts have long ago been drafted off for barricade-building and loophole-making in the endless walls, and here the curious ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... all, are as fair as some Europeans. The men are in general tall, that is, about five feet ten inches, or six feet; but I saw none that were fat and lusty like the Earees of Otaheite; nor did I see any that could be called meagre. Their teeth are not so good, nor are their eyes so full and lively as those of many other nations. Their hair, like ours, is of many colours, except red, of which I saw none. Some have it long, but the most general custom is to wear it short, except a ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr
... been detailed. Roldan was eventually successful, and Ojeda, being obliged to leave Hispaniola, resumed his rambling voyage. He at length arrived at Cadiz, in June, 1500, his ships crowded with captives, whom he sold as slaves. So meagre, however, was the result of this expedition that we are told [by Vespucci] that when all the expenses were deducted but five hundred ducats remained to be divided between fifty-five adventurers. ...
— Amerigo Vespucci • Frederick A. Ober
... that the union of those who have loved here will in the next world amount to perfect identity, that they will look back on the expressions of affection here as mere meagre strugglings after and approximation to the union which then will ...
— Daily Thoughts - selected from the writings of Charles Kingsley by his wife • Charles Kingsley
... sleepless night he came down to report to the Chief Commissioner the next morning. The evening newspaper bills were filled with the "Chelsea Sensation" but the information given was of a meagre character. ...
— The Clue of the Twisted Candle • Edgar Wallace
... point. "Captain Bolton, we are confronted with a problem that must be solved at once. While our information is meagre, the Staff is convinced that a great danger menaces us. Of its precise nature, or how it is to be combatted, we are unaware. I am assigning you to secure the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... heard of Stuffer, but he played his meagre hand with a winning bluff. The boundary line between detectivism and poker ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... Fleetword,—"then go forth; why didst thou not confirm me that before? and I would have hastened, not retarded thee; for, of a verity, my outward man warreth with the inward, and these supporters of the flesh," pointing with his forefinger to the thin and meagre limbs that scarcely merited the compliment, "grow ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... to the influence of a spirit-lamp. He wore a black velvet cap, which contrasted forcibly with the fixed livid color of his face, and his person was enveloped in an ample dressing-gown of the same material, in which the shrivelled, meagre form seemed almost lost. It seemed incredible that a living frame should be so wasted and shrunken as his was—the skin had literally dried on his hands, till they were like those of a skeleton. There was nothing lifelike in his whole appearance, except the small, piercing eyes, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... but a meagre selection; all the wares had been bought, and a new cargo of these unfortunates was daily expected. I pretended that I wished to purchase a boy and a girl, in order to gain admittance into the private department. Here I saw a couple of negro girls of most uncommon beauty. ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... horse-grenadier of the Imperial Guard, had been nicknamed Dagobert. His grave, stern countenance was strongly marked; his long, gray, and thick moustache completely concealed his upper lip, and united with a large imperial, which almost covered his chin; his meagre cheeks, brick-colored, and tanned as parchment, were carefully shaven; thick eyebrows, still black, overhung and shaded his light blue eyes; gold ear-rings reached down to his white-edged military stock; his topcoat, of coarse gray cloth, was confined at the waist ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... Meagre and cold was the sympathy which a transgressor might expect from the assembly at the pond. The women mingled freely with the crowd and appeared to take a peculiar interest in the punishment about to be inflicted. ...
— The Real America in Romance, Volume 6; A Century Too Soon (A Story - of Bacon's Rebellion) • John R. Musick
... gone astray. "A good soldier never separates from his baggage," said the colonel, gruffly, on hearing the excuse. After various adventures, common to missing personal effects, the lieutenant's trunks turned up at Port Royal. He looked sympathetically at the colonel's shorn plumes and meagre array, and said, reproachfully, "Colonel, where are your trunks? A good soldier should never separate from his baggage." But, doubtless, to follow it to the bottom of the sea would be ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... spirituality of worship; and it is undeniable that some of the greatest reforms which have characterised the century recently closed have found their foremost advocates and apologists from their somewhat meagre ranks. Those who wait on God renew their strength. The world ignores them, scorning to reckon their tears and toils amid its renovating energies; but they refuse to abate their endeavours and sacrifices on its behalf. They repay its neglect by more assiduous exertions, its ingratitude ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... on seeing the house in such a crowded state, started, paused, and glanced with some terror at the persons assembled. Her dress was not altered since her last visit; but her countenance, though more meagre and emaciated, expressed but little of the unsettled energy which then flashed from her eyes, and distorted her features by the depth of that mysterious excitement by which she had been agitated. Her countenance was still muffled as ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various
... were allowed to remain in their homes, benefited. Omar, the second Caliph, broke the compact, but allowed them to settle at Kufa on the Euphrates. Although pilgrims pass annually up and down the caravan tracks to Mecca, the information respecting the old Jewish sites in the Harrah is most meagre. Edrisi and Abulfeda throw no light on Benjamin's account. In the year 1904 an able work by Mr. D.G. Hogarth appeared under the title of The Penetration of Arabia, being a record of the development of Western knowledge concerning ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... befallen his lord at the hands of Pharaoh; then, taking him, led him to the presence. But when Sankharib considered him, he found him as one clean wasted by want; his hair had grown long like the pelts of wild beasts and his nails were as vulture's claws and his members were meagre for the length of time spent by him in duresse and darkness, and the dust had settled upon him and changed his colour which had faded and waxed of ashen hue. So his lord mourned for his plight and, rising up in honour, kissed him and ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... quarrelled. They issued a Pastoral Letter which, as Bishop Tait said, was "the expression of essential agreement and a repudiation of Infidelity and Romanism." If this had been the sole result of the Conference, it would have been meagre enough; but under this official ineffectiveness there had been a real movement towards "Life and Liberty." The Conference taught the Established Bishops of England and Ireland that the Bishops of Free Churches—Scottish, American, Colonial—were ...
— Prime Ministers and Some Others - A Book of Reminiscences • George W. E. Russell
... and the reading chanced to be to-night from the book of Job. The words of the splendid poem mingled in the mind of Maurice with the most incongruous and unpriestly thoughts. He chafed at the routine into which he had fallen as into a pit from which he had once escaped; the meagre repast seemed to him pitifully poor; and most of all he was angry with himself that he could not feel joy at his return to the house which was the symbol of the consecrated work to which he had given his life. After dinner came an hour and a half ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... appalling and tropical luxuriance of these ornaments as to despair at last altogether of even a representative selection. "They do not curse," he says, "at door-handles, and shirt-studs, and such other trifles as will draw down the meagre discharge of an Occidental, but when they ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... time Thress had been subsisting on the meagre diet permitted to a man in his condition, but his stomach rebelled even at that. He had heard of the Dewey fasting cure and its boasted efficacy against all human ills, and, though he had little faith, death was already looming ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... loss of his faithful friend, Tchertop-hanov again took to drink, and this time far more seriously. Everything went utterly to the bad with him. He had no money left for sport; the last of his meagre fortune was spent; the last of his few servants ran away. Panteley Eremyitch's isolation became complete: he had no one to speak a word to even, far less to open his heart to. His pride alone had suffered no diminution. On the contrary, the worse ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... abundant harvest, daintily. lunching upon the fluffy seeds of thistle blossoms, pecking at the mullein-stalks, and swinging airily among the asters and Michaelmas daisies; or, when snow covers the same field with a glistening crust, above which the brown stalks offer only a meagre dinner, the same birds, now sombrely clad in winter feathers, cling to the swaying ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... Baccarat it was so crowded that he was unable to secure accommodations. He was having dinner in the cafe, but could get no bread because he had no bread tickets, The local K. of C. man, observing his difficulty, supplied tickets, and, finding that he had no place to sleep, offered to share his own meagre accommodations. For several nights he shared his bed with him and the Salvation Army officer was greatly assisted by him in many ways. The Salvation Army is popular not ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... in attitude toward his subject and in his understanding of it from that of the other Evangelists. The earlier Evangelists seem deliberately to keep all feeling out of their story, to tell the life of our Lord in the most meagre outline, confining themselves to the essential facts. Anything like interpretation they decline. In S. John all this is changed. The Jesus whom he presents is the same Jesus, but seen through what different eyes! The same life is presented, but with what changes in selection of material! The ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... abandoned, and would not mention it in my letters home, lest I should revive the mere idea of it. But in default of the "Literary Times" there did appear a new journal, a daily journal too,—a tall, slender, and meagre stripling, with a vast head, by way of prospectus, which protruded itself for three weeks successively at the top of the leading article, with a fine and subtle body of paragraphs, and the smallest legs, in the way of advertisements, that any poor newspaper ever stood ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Vanderpoel could not spell, the second could, the third was as well educated as a man could be whose sole profession is money-making. His children were taught all that expensive teachers and expensive opportunities could teach them. After the second generation the meagre and mercantile physical type of the Vanderpoels improved upon itself. Feminine good looks appeared and were made the most of. The Vanderpoel element invested even good looks to an advantage. The fourth Reuben Vanderpoel had no son and two daughters. They were ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... fullness must depend on the vigor and activity of thought, and the acquisition of general ideas. Language is thus the best index of intellectual progress, the best standard of the intellectual attainment of an age or nation. The language of barbaric tribes is exceedingly simple and meagre; the paucity of general terms clearly indicating the absence of all attempts at classification and all speculative thought. Whilst the language of educated peoples is characterized by great fullness and affluence of terms, especially such as are expressive of general notions and abstract ideas. ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... Pastor fido are admirably treated in the volumes dealing with the counter-reformation, but these are of the nature of an appendix, and formed no part of his original plan. Tiraboschi's account is also meagre. A long discussion of the subject will be found in the fifth volume of J. L. Klein's Geschichte des Dramas (Leipzig, 1867), but the bewildering irrelevancy of much of the matter introduced by that eccentric writer seriously ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... lieges of the war-lord. They are all the more loyal to the throne as they are poor, and therefore dependent on the King for their very subsistence. There are few large estates in Prussia, and they yield but a meagre revenue. The relations of the Junkers to the Hohenzollerns are the relations of William the Conqueror to his companions-in-arms. The Junkers originally held their broad acres, their Rittergut, by military tenure. Some of their feudal ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... and warm her fingers. Sister Scudder is a crispy little body, in spectacles. Her features are extremely sharp, and her countenance continually wears a wise expression. As for her knowledge of scripture, it is truly wonderful, and a decided improvement when contrasted with the meagre set-out of her table. Tea time having arrived, Lady Swiggs is invited down to a cup by a pert Irish servant, who accosts her with an independence she by no means approves. Entering the room with an air of stateliness she deems necessary to the position she desires to maintain, Sister ...
— Justice in the By-Ways - A Tale of Life • F. Colburn Adams
... to the uncertainty of its commander as to whether or not Cervera was in the latter port; nor was there then known reason to censure the decision of the officer on the spot, whose information, dependent upon despatch vessels, or upon local scouting, was necessarily, in some respects, more meagre than that of the Department, in cable communication with many quarters. Nevertheless, he was mistaken, and each succeeding hour made the mistake more palpable and more serious to those in Washington; not, indeed, that demonstrative proof had been received there—far from it—but ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan
... pathos of Meg herself—not the fact that she had to work—that appealed to Miles. That she should cheerfully earn her own living instead of grousing in idleness in a meagre home seemed to him merely a matter of common sense. He knew that if he had to do it he could earn his, and the one thing he could neither tolerate nor understand about a good many of his Keills relations was their ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... an attractive pair. The cobbler was a thin meagre little man, with a round back, bow-legs, a sharp pinched face, and pale blue eyes that seemed ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... centre and interpreter of the world. But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the quality of a pleasure ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... take it out of the boot, with religious care, and bring it piece by piece into the dining-room. We shall have plate at table! Darling, hasten and prepare this turtle; it will be a whet—it will be an addition to our meagre ordinary. I myself will proceed to the cellar. We shall have a bottle of that little Beaujolais you like, and finish with the Hermitage; there are still three bottles left. Worthy wine for a ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 6 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... an old patrician family, able, honest, but stubborn, a meagre, swarthy man, whom I never saw smile. The misfortune befell him that his only daughter was carried off by a friend of the family. He pursued his son-in-law with the most vehement prosecution: and because the tribunals, with their formality, were neither speedy nor sharp ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... atheist life; involves the heaven In tempests; quits his grasp upon the winds, And gives them all their fury; bids a plague Kindle a fiery boil upon the shin, And putrefy the breath of blooming health. He calls for famine, and the meagre fiend Blows mildew from between his shrivelled lips, And taints the golden ear. He springs his mines, And desolates ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan
... though carefully dusted, were never blacked. A most unpretending bow fastened his cravat of colored cambric. For many years his only outer garment was a brown camlet cloak, of very scanty proportions, thinly lined, and a meagre protection against winter. His hat was worn for years before being laid aside, and put you in mind of the prevailing mode by the law of contrast only. He was never seen with gloves, and rarely with an umbrella. The value of his entire wardrobe ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... request that she should thus aid me. She fears you may consider her action 'premature and officious.' Write to her at once, requesting her to do this sisterly favor for you, setting forth your distance from the city, the meagre assortment of the goods to be had in the Richmond stores, etc., and giving her carte blanche as to cost and style. It will be an inestimable advantage to your appearance on the occasions named should she oblige you in this particular. I earnestly ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... eagerness. Men shoved at one another, craning necks, to peer at the thing which Drennen so coolly had disclosed. Gold! Nuggets that were, in the parlance of the camp, "rotten" with gold. Drennen two weeks ago had left the Settlement with his last cent gone in a meagre grub stake; now he was back and he had made a strike. A strike such as no man here had ever dropped his pick into in all of the ragged years of adventuresome search; a strike which could not be a week's walk from MacLeod's, a strike which might ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... by Mr. Finlay are infinite; in that sense it is that he ascribes inexhaustibility to the trackless savannahs of history. These vast hunting-grounds for the imaginative understanding are in fact but charts and surveyors' outlines meagre and arid for the timid or uninspired student. To a grander intellect these historical delineations are not maps but pictures: they compose a forest wilderness, veined and threaded by sylvan lawns, 'dark with horrid shades,' like Milton's ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... sloping up, for a distance of nearly four hundred miles, to the Rocky Mountains. This desert, broken by precipitous ravines, canons, and gorges, at the bottom of which gurgles some insignificant stream, its banks clothed with stunted and meagre vegetation, produces nothing but cacti with ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... to rely solely upon their skill with their own primitive weapons. For months the doughty hunters had gathered but few supplies. The prospect of the coming winter was ominous indeed. Wandering up and down the coast in their migrating excursions the tribes had scoured land and sea with but meagre results. At the village from which they now heard the inspiring walrus calls, a dozen visiting tribesmen—most of them in search for wives as well as game—had gathered. Joy filled them in the prospect of securing supplies—and possible success ...
— The Eternal Maiden • T. Everett Harre
... all that measuring and all those notes, you might have arrived at something definite." Evidently he was disappointed in me; and I was somewhat disappointed in myself when I contrasted Thorndyke's elaborate instructions with the meagre result of my investigations. For what did my discoveries amount to? And how much was the inquiry advanced by the ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... Tompkins fourfold, and left the shrivelled dame with a large supply of one of the elements of her heaven—tea, and with the means of purchasing the other—tobacco, besides more substantial additions to the old woman's meagre larder. ...
— Opening a Chestnut Burr • Edward Payson Roe
... the landscape and other departments of art, we shall herein endeavour to point out their characteristics—more for the advantage of future purchasers than for the better and further edification of those whose meagre notions and tastes have already been shown. And as the Royal Academicians, par courtesy, demand our first notice, we shall, having wiped off D. M'Clise, R.A., now proceed, baton in hand, to make a few pokes at W.F. Witherington, R.A., upon his work entitled "Winchester ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 18, 1841 • Various
... his busy feet; after all his high hopes and splendid prophecies, the fates had turned their backs on him at last, and all in a moment his air-castles crumbled to ruins abort him. Hawkeye rose from her fright triumphant and rejoicing, and down went Stone's Landing! One by one its meagre parcel of inhabitants packed up and moved away, as the summer waned and fall approached. Town lots were no longer salable, traffic ceased, a deadly lethargy fell upon the place once more, the "Weekly Telegraph" ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... obstruction in it. For those that swim she has provided a more than imperial domain—a domain which is miles deep and covers four-fifths of the globe. But as for man, she has cut him off with the mere odds and ends of the creation. She has given him the thin skin, the meagre skin which is stretched over the remaining one-fifth—the naked bones stick up through it in most places. On the one-half of this domain he can raise snow, ice, sand, rocks, and nothing else. So the valuable part of his inheritance really consists of but a single fifth of the family estate; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... The travellers had but meagre fare, as no meat had as yet been obtained, but mealy cakes and bowls of tea were sufficient to satisfy their hunger for the present. Scarcely had they begun breakfast, however, when Umgolo, who had gone to the top of a slight elevation in the neighbourhood, ...
— Hendricks the Hunter - The Border Farm, a Tale of Zululand • W.H.G. Kingston
... that you are alluding to the labours of missionaries in foreign lands?" I observed. "But I have heard it said, that in spite of all the money expended, their preaching produces but meagre results. In India, for instance, the Company will not admit them. In Africa, the climate destroys them. The fanatical Turks and other Mohammedan nations will not listen to their message; and it would be but time lost and energies wasted were they to attempt to preach to ...
— The Cruise of the Mary Rose - Here and There in the Pacific • William H. G. Kingston
... lively, ingenious, abundant, and magnificent he would have been. The idea conceived by Rembrandt then is one of the most ordinary, and I would venture to say that the majority of his contemporaries considered it poor in resources; some because its abstract line is uncertain, scanty, symmetrical, meagre, and singularly incoherent; others, the colourists, because this composition, so full of gaps and ill-occupied spaces, did not lend itself to that broad and generous employment of colours which is ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... and female, are meagre-bodied birds, with slender legs, and beaks twelve inches long. They are an inseparable couple, and wander about our patio and rooms in a restless nervous fashion, rattling their chop-stick noses into everything. ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... recall the Melbourne of 1840, as it looked in that year, the year of my arrival. In the first place I must protest against the meagre view given some years ago in the "Illustrated London News", from a sketch by Mossman, an early colonist of my acquaintance, and copied into the lively and pleasant volume of my esteemed friend, Miss Isabella Bird (now Mrs. Bishop). It may be true as far as it goes, but it is only the Western Market ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... the Miss Mees were exactly alike, being meagre, dilapidated, white-haired old ladies, with the same beaked noses and receding chins; both wore rusty black frocks, each of which was decorated with a white cameo brooch; both walked with the same propitiatory ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... meagre: why not? He who lives with so good a mother, so healthy and so beauteous a sister, and who has such a good uncle, and a world-*full of girl cousins, wherefore should he leave off being lean? Though he touch naught save what is banned, thou canst find ample reason wherefore ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... spring dawn. And yet, when I had parted from him and was making my way somewhat wearily to my own quarters, my first dubious impression remained. My imagination was busy with the story I had heard, striving quite vainly to supply omissions, to fill in meagre outlines. Yes! quite vainly! the figure of the Romanoff was left, ambiguous and unexplained; hardly acquitted in my mind of a certain callousness, an ingratitude almost vulgar as it started out from time to time, in contraposition against that ...
— The Poems And Prose Of Ernest Dowson • Ernest Dowson et al
... comprised in this chapter, the materials which exist for delineating John and Martha Yeardley's history are meagre. Of the numerous journeys which they made in the course of this period, the record kept by the former frequently ...
— Memoir and Diary of John Yeardley, Minister of the Gospel • John Yeardley
... the right to call her by that pleasant title. He led her, by artful circumlocutions, always tending toward one object, to speak of her nieces and nephews, and when he succeeded in drawing from her certain all too meagre news of Roberta, he exulted in his ardent soul, though he did his best not to ...
— The Twenty-Fourth of June • Grace S. Richmond
... stated that the figures were approximate merely, it being impossible to secure full returns. It was found that three and a half per cent of the population of Massachusetts were in the factories, and nearly the same proportion in Connecticut and Rhode Island; but details were of the most meagre description, and conclusions based upon them were likely to err at every point. Its value was chiefly educative, since the failure it represents pointed to a change in methods, and more preparation than had at any time been ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... clauses of Bill. Just the same kind of pompous platitude conveyed in turgid phraseology, at which, in old times, Members used to laugh and run away. But CHAPLIN had them now. Like the wedding guest whom the Ancient Mariner button-holed—though as PLUNKET reminds me, the A.M. was meagre in frame, and CHAPLIN is not—the House could not help but hear. Once, when the orator dropped easily into autobiographical episode, described himself strolling about the fields of Lincolnshire, turning up a turnip here, drawing forth a casual carrot ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, March 5, 1892 • Various
... underfoot from what has gone before: scraps of Roman tile and stone chippings protrude through the grass in meagre quantity, but sufficient to suggest that masonry stood on the spot. Before the eye stretches under the moonlight the interior of the fort. So open and so large is it as to be practically an upland plateau, and yet its area lies wholly within the walls of what may be designated ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... of good; From thence the cup of mortal man he fills, Blessings to these, to those distributes ills, To most he mingles both: the wretch decreed To taste the bad, unmixed, is curst indeed; Pursued by wrongs, by meagre famine driven, He wanders, outcast both of ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... desire drove me. Any young man would have served for that Locarno adventure, and after that what had been a mystic and wonderful thing passed rapidly into a gross, manifestly misdirected and complicating one. I can count a meagre tale of five illicit loves in the days of my youth, to include that first experience, and of them all only two were sustained relationships. Besides these five "affairs," on one or two occasions I dipped ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... I was away there in Montreal waiting for the New Yorkers to take it—if they could. They were a sorry rabble, for they rushed on La Prairie, that meagre place,—massacred ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that only five or six bushels an acre, even in the better fields, was obtained, although when first ploughed twenty and twenty-five bushels was about the ordinary yield. More attention was then paid to corn, but without fertilizers the corn-crop also became very meagre. At last it was discovered that English clover would grow on even the exhausted fields, and that when ploughed under and planted with corn, or even wheat, wonderful crops were raised. This caused a complete change in farming methods; the farmers ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... brother from Edinburgh is more meagre even than his journal, being simply a catalogue of the places visited. 'Warm as I was from Ossian's country,' he remarks, 'what cared I for fishing towns or fertile carses?' Yet although the journal reads now and again like a railway time-table, ...
— Robert Burns - Famous Scots Series • Gabriel Setoun
... know the best that has been thought in the world." Definitions always appear to me in these things to be in the nature of vanity. I feel that the attempt to be compact in the definition of literature ends in something that is rather meagre, partial, starved, and unsatisfactory. I turn to the answer given by a great French writer to a question not quite the same, viz. "What is a classic?" Literature consists of a whole body of classics in the true sense of the word, and a classic, as Sainte-Beuve defines ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... to Florry was very meagre and very indefinite. She was a very beautiful young lady of eighteen; and it was not at all strange that a young Confederate officer should be attracted to her, though the thought of it was exceedingly disagreeable to her father, under ...
— Taken by the Enemy • Oliver Optic
... end; not once did she interrupt him, but as he proceeded to unfold the meagre details of the plot as presented to him by Isaac Stain, her brow darkened and her fingers began to work nervously, restlessly in her lap. His account of the frightening of Zachariah and its immediate results took up but little time. He ...
— Viola Gwyn • George Barr McCutcheon
... foliage of the olive thin and pale, the leaves of the fig broad and few, and the soil appearing everywhere at their roots, as well as between the rows of vines, the vegetation, when viewed from a little distance, has a meagre and ragged appearance. The whiteness of the hills, which the eye can hardly bear to rest upon at noon, the intense blue of the sea, the peculiar forms of the foliage, and the deficiency of shade and verdure, made me almost fancy ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... more for them. They looked at each other as with the feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land, hadn't been so stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of freshness, stupidities of ignorance, ...
— The Beast in the Jungle • Henry James
... out of the room, and out to the study. There sat the meagre charity-seekers, looking as if they ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... straighter he heads toward that ideal the happier and the more effective he is likely to be. When he thus follows his heart, he is working along the line of least resistance; and when his little work is done, however meagre {29} and unimportant it may be, he can at least give it back to God, who gave it to him to do, and say: "I was not disobedient unto ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... by no means despicable. We shall know now when that extraordinary bird the Emperor penguin lays its eggs, and under what conditions; but even if our information remains meagre concerning its embryology, our party has shown the nature of the conditions which exist on the Great Barrier in winter. Hitherto we have only imagined their severity; now we have proof, and a positive light is thrown on the local ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... shore of the sluggish and swamp-like stream where the big rowboat was moored, was a meagre meal, indeed. For after a moment of consideration it was decided not to use up all ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... Grammar School life are meagre, but we can readily understand that to a lad of Borrow's temperament the routine of a well-ordered school was naturally distasteful, though he loved to gain knowledge from any unconventional source open to him. So we find him studying ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper
... there must be an end. Lord Lyttelton had never the appearance of a strong or of a healthy man; he had a slender, uncompacted frame, and a meagre face; he lasted, however, sixty years, and was then seized with his last illness. Of his death a very affecting and instructive account has been given by his physician, which will spare me the task of his ...
— Lives of the Poets: Gay, Thomson, Young, and Others • Samuel Johnson
... Hignett, who added to the meagre salary allowed him by the bank by singing comic songs at the minor music halls. He confided to Mike his intention of leaving the bank as soon as he had made a name, and taking seriously to the business. He told him that he had knocked them ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... face, had not the master, according to a little affectation of the times, promoted him to be his game-keeper. Many a day did these two living magazines of wrath spend together in the dismal swamps and on the meagre intersecting ridges, making war upon deer and bear and wildcat; or on the Mississippi after wild goose and pelican; when even a word misplaced would have made either the slayer of the other. Yet the months ran smoothly round and the wedding ...
— The Grandissimes • George Washington Cable
... Youghal was presently succeeded by a smile of gratified achievement, as she encountered a bow of recognition and welcome from a portly middle-aged gentleman, who seemed genuinely anxious to include her in the rather meagre group that ...
— The Unbearable Bassington • Saki
... House almost daily; your name appeared at every great festival; and while his heart warmed at your brilliant success, he absolutely dreaded your coming home. 'Poor fellow,' he would say, 'what a change for him, to leave the splendor and magnificence of his Prince's board for our meagre fare and altered fortunes! And then,' he added, 'as for me—God forgive me!—I can go now; but how should I bear to part with him if he comes back to me.' And now," said the count, when he had concluded a detailed ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... manner. A pang of compassion for the dumb unfortunate stirred in my breast, but I sat still and watched. He tried to walk, but the effort was a failure, and again he sat down and howled, this time with his meagre face upturned to my window. The street was empty, as far as I could see, for twilight was almost come, and cheery firesides were more tempting than slippery pavements and stinging winds. The muffled tones of distress became weaker and more despairing, and I could endure them no longer. ...
— The Love Story of Abner Stone • Edwin Carlile Litsey
... couple of coarse articles of clothing, and uttered a grunt. His next grasp brought up a brilliant article of apparel. He raised it to examine it at the window. The garment shone even in the meagre light. It was a waistcoat of flowered silk, sown with seed-pearls. The ...
— The False Chevalier - or, The Lifeguard of Marie Antoinette • William Douw Lighthall
... taken Sylvia's advice. The tramp known to her by the name of Freeman—that in which he received his pension—lodged with her still, and paid his meagre shilling in advance, weekly. A shilling was meagre in those hard days of scarcity. A hungry man might easily eat the produce of a shilling ...
— Sylvia's Lovers — Complete • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... are half-starved. Their "kitchen" is a meagre ration of bruised beans, and their daily bread consists of the dry leaves of thorn trees, beaten down by the Makhbat, a flail-like staff, and caught in a large circle of matting (El-Khasaf). In Sinai the vegetation fares even worse: the branches are rudely lopped off to feed the flocks; only "holy ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... out into the winter fields and gathered the small white everlasting flowers that were still waving there, and twined them in the curls of the baby's hair, and strewed them upon the meagre gray ...
— The Mermaid - A Love Tale • Lily Dougall
... write it; for it is a thing most sorrowful, nay shocking, to expose the fall of valour in the soul. Men may seem detestable as joint stock-companies and nations; knaves, fools, and murderers there may be; men may have mean and meagre faces; but man, in the ideal, is so noble and so sparkling, such a grand and glowing creature, that over any ignominious blemish in him all his fellows should run to throw their costliest robes. That immaculate manliness we feel within ourselves, ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... as stealthily as possible, that he might not disturb his friend, and paused by the door. Mrs. Risdale sat by the bedside of Columbus, who was sleeping uneasily, his curious big head and long, thin hair making a strange picture against the pillow. His face looked more meagre and his eyes more sunken than ever before, but there was a feverish flush on his wan cheeks, and the slender hands moved uneasily on the outside of the blue coverlet, the puny arms were ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... goddess cries) Thy conduct ill-deserves the praise of wise: Is death thy choice, or misery thy boast, That here inglorious, on a barren coast, Thy brave associates droop, a meagre train, With famine pale, and ask thy care in vain?' "Struck with the loud reproach, I straight reply: 'Whate'er thy title in thy native sky, A goddess sure! for more than moral grace Speaks thee descendant of ethereal race; Deem not that here ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope |
